Nyack Boys School

Until I was six I had my brother Michael. He was two and a half years older but it felt like we were the same age and I was just shorter.

We had our own language, our own sense of geography, and a mutual appreciation of the absurd. We were, as they say, inseparable until Michael was sent to Green Chimneys, a boarding school in Brewster, New York. After that we were kept separated.

We maintained our closeness for years but circumstances continued to make our separation more complete. At first I saw him on visits to his school or when he was allowed home for a weekend. But the following year I too was sent to boarding school. It was not the same school and our visits home rarely overlapped.

At some point between sending Michael away and sending me, I was brought to see a therapist. It happened once or twice and seemed banal. Some man I sat with for an hour. There was talk of my being an underachiever. Maybe that was the issue. Maybe there needed to be one. Did Michael see someone before Green Chimneys? He’s gone now so I can’t ask.

New clothes appeared along with a trunk to put them in. I had to wear a uniform. The day of my departure I put on the gray flannel slacks, the light blue Oxford shirt, and the navy wool blazer with the patch on the breast pocket. It itched even before we left the house. Down the L.I.E., up through the Bronx and across the Tappan Zee Bridge. There, just north of the bridge along the river sat Nyack Boys School, where I was deposited.

Prior to Nyack my world was split-levels and picture windows, wall to wall carpet, a big patio out back with a swing set and the woods where Michael and I played fort. At night we slept in our own room and fell asleep to the sound of mom’s piano floating up the stairs and down the hallway.

Now we were parked before a Tudor manor. I stood in my uniform, my belongings next to me, dwarfed by an assembly of steep gables, leaded glass windows, dark stone and heavy timbering. I don’t quite remember how my father handed me off, but I entered the building through a side door and was led to its upper reaches. There I would sleep in a dorm with two other boys, each of us trying not to be the one to cry.

Our room was up among the gables. It was a strange geometry among even stranger dormmates. I roomed with two boys. Their Christian names I never knew and their surnames have long faded from memory. One was small and thin and sucked his thumb constantly. The other was chubby and brash. I got the sense his single parent father was well off. He had arranged for some additional roommates in the form of large exotic fish. A large tank had been installed in our room. It occupied a fair quarter of it.

I can picture the two fish that lived in that tank. One was a Discus fish, tall and flat, the other was pure white with a catfish like head and a long soft eel like body. They shared that tank, odd bedfellows, the one along the bottom, the other slowly patrolling the confines of its exile from the place of its origin.

Nyack Boys School was, by its own account, a place where young minds flourished. Neither the fish nor I did much flourishing. That first year I merely survived. The fish did not. Before the semester was out the Discus had turned nearly as white as the albino and was covered with some parasitic infection. We found it floating like a plate on its side one morning and buried it just outside among some hedges. Its odd mate followed perhaps a week later.

During the day we were lorded over by our teachers, whom we referred to as masters. Evenings and nights we were under the purview of our dorm mother, though that title would have been ironic. She was, at least to a seven-year-old, ancient, watchful and severe, and only marginally maternal. I think her name was Masterman, which just added to the irony.

It was a strict environment. The mandate was supposed to be about moral and social rectitude, turning out gentlemen of etiquette, neatness, and respect for institutional hierarchy. None of that took for me, though I paid the price of resistance. Each master had their own repertoire of corporal punishment. This was before the age of seat belts and soccer moms.

Even Masterman had her favorites. An unmade bed could earn you a half hour standing with your arms straight out, palms up. She would place a heavy tome on each hand. If a hand lost altitude she’d give the ribs below it a sharp thwack with a long stout ruler. Too much talking after lights out and you might be made to roll up your pajama legs and crawl back and forth along the hallway. It had this hard plastic carpet with little round nubs that would turn your knees raw and purple.

There was also the dorm master. He came off as a good sport. But if some infraction was egregious enough Masterman would send you to him. Then the sport would involve a cricket bat applied liberally to your backside and upper thighs. I managed to avoid that particular honor, but I did see the deep crescent bruises that resulted.

Our days were regulated. Meals in the dining hall, classes, sports, and study hall after dinner. The headmaster presided from a platform at the back of the hall. We all sat at our desks facing forward. He would do the roll call, a long list of names, surnames only, never first names. Me, being Weinstein, would come second to last, ahead of only Zimmerman. He was a boy even more out of place and shunned than I was.

Often I sat inventing names I’d rather have. For a while it was Alexander Woodruff, and I would practice writing it in my notebook. But there was little time for that or even schoolwork. The headmaster seemed to have other ideas about our educational priorities.

Mr. Flick. He was an imposing man, always dressed smartly, every hair in place. If you viewed him from the right side you’d be struck by how handsome he was. But face on you’d see the cross he bore. The left side of his face was discolored and pockmarked. It struck me as the result of being punished by his mother with the stippled end of a meat tenderizer.

And yet for how frightening a visage and imposing a frame, the man seemed to have a tender side to him. He had a passion for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Evidently he felt compelled to ingrain us with a similar love, because most study hall sessions were devoted to memorizing HMS Pinafore in its entirety. His favored instrument of compliance was a curved piece of oak from the back of a chair. As we all sang together he would keep time with it on the palm of his hand. But woe to anyone who forgot the lyric. Even the lightest of taps on the back of the skull from that chunk of oak was a painful incentive to know the words. And I do to this day.

And so there I was, poor little Buttercup, though no one knows why.

Nyack had a secondary mandate, perhaps less advertised, the “second chance” mandate. The primary reasons for being sent to boarding school so young are perhaps easy to imagine: death and/or divorce. I was a rarity in that my parents were both alive and very much still married.

Most of the boys had issues, crosses of their own. For some it was the place itself and what it did to them. But others came already damaged. I was in the first category, in spite of the narrative my parents tried to maintain. I was no black sheep or bad seed. I was not, at least not yet, much of a troublemaker.

But troublemakers we had more than a few of. The school sat just above the Hudson. We would take day trips down past an abandoned swimming pool to the river and up along its bank to Hook Mountain. On this particular day there was large earth-moving machinery along the path up the cliff. Just after arriving we split into smaller groups. There was a loud explosion. Shortly after we were hustled back to school. We learned that one of the students had lit a rag on fire and stuffed it into the gas tank of one of the machines. And that was the end of his “second chance” at Nyack Boys School.

Generally I was miserable, as if living under heavy dark clouds. I did kind of like the Gilbert and Sullivan, if not the conditions of my exposure to it. I even liked Mr. Flick once I got used to his resemblance to Two-Face. I loved finding refuge in the bizarre area around that abandoned swimming pool, which seemed almost like ruins in some overgrown jungle. And the sun might shine on those trips along the Hudson. I found that if you dug along the tree line there was a layer of clay just below the gritty sand. You could even use it to mold figures. As for being molded by the place… well, not so much molded as deformed.

The other students were not my friends and I remember very few of them. There was one boy in my first year named Hans. Very quiet, very smart. I wanted to be him, silently confident, not needing or even seeming to care what anyone thought of him. But I was mostly silent and kept my thoughts, my loneliness, and my growing resentment to myself.

I did make my unhappiness known at home. Countless times I begged to stay. It was not often I was there. Every other month there was a visiting day, and most of those it was just my father who came. On alternate weekends I could come home. Sunday night I would have to go back. I tried to resist. I’m not going, you can’t make me. I’d wrap my arms around the bedpost and refuse to move. But to no avail. They could and did make me go back.

But I found ways to make things somewhat more tolerable. In a pattern that would repeat itself over the years I would befriend an adult. In this case that was a teacher who had his room at the top of some narrow stairs. He allowed me to visit him there. He was not like my other teachers, who were mostly like the students in that they seemed to be there on “second chances.” Like Mr. Flick they each had very odd notions of how the molding of young minds should proceed. There was a history teacher who taught laissez-faire by demonstration. He barely paid attention to us, giving me ample time to practice my handwriting. And there was an English teacher whose entire lesson plan was to read aloud The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

This teacher was, at least to me, more cultivated, more of an intellectual. He was the kind of person I thought I wanted to be. He had stacks of Playboy nearly as tall as I was. He let me peruse them at will though he insisted I pay attention to the articles. I was happy to do so. Not that the photographs were any less appealing.

He wasn’t given to personal conversation. He seemed more bemused than interested in me. When we did talk it was about other things. The Playboy interviews for instance. I recall ones with Nabokov, Henry Miller, and Sartre. Hard to say what I could make of it at that age, but it pushed my reading past the Leon Uris I’d been passing the time with. His room was a sanctuary and perhaps the place where my real education began.

I managed to survive. I told my parents it was a dumping ground for misfits and referred to it as a gothic nightmare. They took it as hyperbole and my exile continued. But one night I was sleeping in the top bunk. In my sleep I slipped off and fell to the floor, landing on my mouth and splitting my lower lip. I woozily made my way out of the dorm to where the master on duty was watching television. What are you doing up. I’m cupping my hand under my lip, which is bleeding profusely. I hurt myself. He barely glanced over. Go clean yourself up and get back into bed.

Was this the time I saw a gigantic centipede in the shower stall? I’m not sure. I washed my lip and grabbed a handful of toilet paper to hold against it until the bleeding abated and returned to bed. The lip didn’t heal well and became very chapped. The cuts would reopen if I smiled too widely. It was, if anything, worse by the next time I had a weekend at home.

When my father saw my lip he asked what happened. I told him about falling out of the bunk. He put a hand under my chin and turned my head from side to side, pushed his glasses up on his forehead to get a better look. Didn’t you tell them you needed medical attention? Yes, I said. They told me to go back to bed.

I could see it dawning on him. This was not the safe place he thought he had me sequestered in. The following year I was allowed to stay home, though not in the school my younger siblings attended. Another private school, as a day student. Home, but not quite at home. The year after that, boarding school again.