Whipping Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

four or five years after I’d left the school. But the surviving correspondence does capture my loneliness, as well as some pretty shaky spelling:
    Dear Mom,
    How are you? I am fine. I have recieved only one letter from you!
    Dear Tante Martha,
    I am feeling hungry at the moment . . . I have found out that people are aloud to have some of chocolate so you can send me a bar or two.
    Dear Mom,
    I am a little homesick . . . I haven’t been hearing from you resently.
    Dear Mom,
    Mark reading is soon. (Gulp!)
    Mark reading was yet another source of stress. Every two weeks the Belvedere housemaster assembled his boys in the dining hall and, while consulting color-coded report cards that distinguished “effort” from “achievement,” he would, with the tenderness of a drill sergeant, issue public appraisals of our intellectual and moral worth. One of his early assessments of my scholarship began with a single word.
    “CARSWHEEL!” he bellowed.
    Sniggers spread through the hall.
    “CARSWHEEL!”
    After a lengthy scolding for grades that put me at the very bottom of the first form, the British equivalent of sixth grade, the housemaster informed me (and everyone else) that my report card—he held the damning evidence high in the air—compelled him to compose a lengthy indictment, which he planned to send to “any school stupid enough to consider taking on Carswheel once we give him the boot!”
    The longest of the seven letters my mother preserved is easier for me to quote than to analyze:
    Dear Mom,
    How are you? I am fine. When I look at the size of your letter and compare them with mine I feel very inferior, so today I plan to write a long letter. Last night I did not sleep well. I bet if I didn’t have my Aiglon blankets (little that I get) I am sure my toes would have gotten frost-bitten and would have fallen off! Everything is O.K. on the Aiglon Campus (except for a little student unrest). Some one ran away from school and was found with his father in London ! I went on my second expedition with my warm sleeping bag. I went to Solalaix and farther. I am sorry I didn’t write earlier. I supose my inferiority will last . . .
    Love, Allen xxxxxxxxxxxx . . .
    “Found with his father in London !” I underlined the name of the city, but the word I should have highlighted is father . That was the source of my awe, and behind the awe, the source of my unacknowledged longing.
T EMPUS F UGIT
    When I was seven or eight, I found a box of Dad’s stuff in the back of a dresser drawer. The keepsakes included a slipcased slide rule, aleather billfold, two pairs of silver cuff links, an ivory-handled shaving brush, and a wristwatch. The wristwatch. The one my father was wearing when he was wheeled out of my life. Except for the watch, none of the uncovered personal effects had much personal effect on me. But, man oh man, how I loved the watch! Whenever Mom let me wind it up—it was an “automatic,” so all one had to do was give the thing a few shakes—the ticking set in motion memories of Villars.

    {Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}
    The long-lost Omega on the wrist of its original owner—my father.
    As soon as I learned I’d be attending Aiglon, I began pestering my mother to allow me to take the watch to school. She said absolutely not. It was way too precious. A huge fight ensued. In the end, my mother caved, and a good thing, too, I thought. Dad’s watch, a stainless steel Omega Seamaster, became my talisman, my pacifier, my shield. Staring at its luminescent dial tempered homesickness, deferred bad dreams, and offset humiliation.
    You’d think a watch bearing the name Seamaster would be waterproof. It wasn’t. Steam had a way of fogging up the crystal. So to play it safe, when taking a shower, I would unstrap the watch from my wrist and hide it under my pillow.
    A few months into the school year, I returned one day from the shower room, lifted my pillow, and discovered that Dad’s watch was gone. My first