But fate had begun its cascade. Kept from the ice, Alex lost his courage in classes. He started papers and could not finish them. Teachers gave him the highest grades on the first eight pages but had to fail him anyway. I spent hours in the library, finding books for him. When he told me, stricken, that this didn’t help, I’d clean his room for him while he worked alone somewhere else. It was a poor instinct, to mother him. But neither of us knew what demon this was or what it could do.
Alex began an unraveling. I’ve wondered since if it was that only one of us could survive, as if we were in a lifeboat too small for two. Or was it a snakebite, and he took from me the poison? Or something other—some biological force as powerful as his intelligence but latent, that would, before he finished college, undo his academic gifts, and that had nothing to do with me?
How he shook my grandfather’s hand, when Big Jim and Ginny arrived in Concord, looking awkward as shell-less snails, to sit in the gymnasium for my interminable graduation ceremony on a day of relentless rain. How he tousled and thumped my little brother, who could be observed dropping back to hold his breath and peer down at his own chest, trying to isolate his muscles, to find the strength in himself that was so clear in Alex. How Alex, his own athletic career stalling, cheered for me when I, having played in the top singles spot all spring, won the tennis prize. How he laughed with my mother about electoral politics and the church. How my father nodded and inquired about Mr. Ault’s Rhodes—maybe they had friends in common?
I have no idea how Alex tolerated any of this. How he took up my shame and magicked it away. Somewhere between rescue and self-sacrifice is simple accompaniment, of sufficient force to bring a person back into her life.
I graduated from St. Paul’s. Alex did not. He has made his way, but he is lost to me now. Still, there is a light at the cold door to Foster House, in the St. Paul’s map of my mind, where I arrived at a dead run with my Princeton acceptance letter clutched in my hand so Alex could be the first to know. He held me hard and his eyes shone. For Christmas, because I’d wanted it, he gave me a little silver ring.
11Alumna, SPS Form of 1992
For the next twenty-four years, I paid no attention to St. Paul’s School, with the rare exceptions of tragedies that shook me into communion. The summer before our senior year in college, Sarah Devens, the superstar athlete who had comforted me that cold hockey afternoon in 1991, shot herself at her father’s house. She’d been a rising senior at Dartmouth, captain of everything. I was a student at a writers’ conference in upstate New York when I heard this news, and I went out for a very long run, through rolling horse pastures and past sunset, as though in extremis I might meet up with Sarah’s spirit and understand why.
Later that summer I received a form letter from her closest St. Paul’s friends inviting donations toward a girls’ hockey changing room to be dedicated in her honor. I remembered the rink, I remembered Royce’s ice-skating drill, Categories. That moment with Sarah was as clear in my mind as the day it happened: we had just left the drafty trailer where we changed when Sarah broke from the pack and jogged up to embrace me. I didn’t want to put her back in that locker room any more than I wanted to go back myself. I wrote to her friends somewhat haughtily that I would have preferred to give money toward something that was a more human honor—a scholarship, or a fund to endow a school counselor. I meant to celebrate Sarah, but my intentions were not pure. I had begun to hate what seemed to me another expression of almost unbelievable privilege: an uncomplicated relationship to institutions. These girls and their guileless trust. That trust had once been mine. Who wouldn’t want to write a check to St. Paul’s? Who wouldn’t want a new locker room for girls? What could be wrong with that?
Sarah’s friends replied that her family had made their decision to honor Sarah in a certain way and I could participate or not. I sent a check.
After college, another form-mate, a brilliant and wry writer, finished up his master’s at Stanford and died in a car being driven by his best friend from St. Paul’s. A third classmate barely cleared forty before dying of chronic disease. The Jesus painter’s redheaded brother drowned. A student who had been a year ahead of me died of cancer. Stewart, the son of the scion, who had teased me in his limousine, choked at a restaurant and left behind two little girls. A student who had been a year behind me, a wide-smiling classics scholar, killed herself.
I considered each tragedy an education in perspective, and told myself I had nothing to begrudge the school, or fate. I had made my choices.
Occasional reports of turmoil at the school rose to national media prominence, but I hardly registered that Bishop Craig Anderson, the eleventh rector, was forced out amid investigations into the misuse of school funds. Bill Matthews succeeded him as the twelfth. While Matthews was sitting rector, he oversaw the construction of a new hockey center. The trustees of the school decided that it should be named after him. The Sarah Devens Locker Room, I supposed, would sit inside the Bill Matthews Hockey Center. Two gorgeous new rinks. New stands. I pictured the spot back in the pines, behind the dining hall and Kittredge House, over an icy bridge: the enshrinement in physical space of the man who had said, to my father, She’s not a good girl, Jim, and
