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trained to believe he wasn’t of much use to the world. Dr. Boyden described the child’s semester at Deerfield offhandedly: “He was a well-meaning boy who had practically no preparation. Also, he had never done any real work.”
    So he was sent along to the Eaglebrook Lodge School for younger boys, also in Deerfield and established coincidentally with my father’s entrance in 1922 by Howard B. Gibbs, who had taught for Dr. Boyden. The main building was set high up on Mount Pocumtuck, beside a brook. It had been built as a private retreat in the 1890s, and during a stay there of several weeks Rudyard Kipling wrote
Captains Courageous
, a circumstance retailed to the boys to inspire them.
    My father was one of twenty-six students, and happy, at first. The inaugural year was easygoing, and the school nurse remembers that “if Mr. Gibbs decided he wanted to eat dinner in town we all went to eat dinner in town.” Gibbs knew boys to be savage as well as noble, and for all that managed to love them. He obliged them to shake hands firmly, to speak audibly and with candor. A graduate recollects that Gibbs was “of the old school. If someone did something wrong, he would haul off and bang him one.”
    My father once ran away from school with another boy, probably from motives other than homesickness, and the matter was reduced to a boy’s scale, with a boy’s punishment given for a boy’scrime. Mr. Gibbs collected the pair by car and brought them back to the Lodge, and remarked that as they seemed to enjoy long distance hikes, they could hike five hours, nonstop, around the school’s circular driveway.
    Very early each morning, fall and winter and spring, the boys were led in sets of exercises. At night ghost stories were told beside the fireplace. In the spring there were hikes to the summit of Mount Pocumtuck, and in the winter the children descended iced chutes on toboggans, and skied downhill and cross-country and off jumps.
    The children came from families of all qualities and conditions (many with old New England surnames), who had in common mostly their ability to pay the tuition. (This was evidently a hardship for The Doctor, who sold the Collins Street house in 1922, and built a smaller place at 217 North Beacon Street that nevertheless had a huge workshop out back.) Eaglebrook boys were wealthy orphans, children of divorce, children of Americans abroad. The son of a Boston mortician arrived for the first time at Eaglebrook in the back of a hearse, asleep, and a fourteen-year-old Japanese boy with an allowance of twenty thousand a year always took an instructor with him to Bermuda during the holidays.
    Before my father went home for his first Christmas break the boys and their masters walked to Deerfield, the paradigm of New England villages. They walked on snowshoes, carrying lit candles, and stopped at each house to sing carols. When I think of my father, an old man in a California prison, I sometimes think of him too as a young boy singing a celebration in the snow.
    His grades at Eaglebrook were for the first and almost last time almost respectable: he flunked math, which would plague him from then on, whether he was pretending to draft an airfoil for Lockheed or listing his assets and liabilities; he got a 65 in French. But his 78 in Latin was fine, and his grade in English was the highest in his class.
    But something happened; I don’t know what, and Eaglebrook either can’t or won’t tell. My father was sent home to his father, who sent him away to St. John’s School, a military academy in Manlius, New York, near Syracuse. This was the kind of placethat advertises in the back pages of
The New York Times Magazine
, showing a stiff-backed adolescent cadet with his chin jammed against his chest. Duke was sent there by the intercession of his uncle Lambert Cain, the husband of one of The Doctor’s sisters, a West Point graduate and career Army officer. My father appeared at St. John’s in the autumn of