Opening the Coat
When I was 13, I had a life-changing phone call I didn’t understand at the time. All these years later, I understand that it was an example of my Dad discharging his duty as a Christian father as the epistles of the Bible described it.
Call this a short story. Yeah that’s the ticket. From the guy who’s on record saying all writing is fiction. All writing is fiction. Here goes…
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There’s no caption in the picture above. I’m not trying to do in his reputation from this cancel-culture perspective. But he lived, he had an enormous impact on my life, and I met him face to face only one time.
Here’s the picture that rattles around in my head…
Still no caption. His name was Forman Acton. He has his own Wikipedia page. He’s dead. And he put me through holy hell. NOT saying he ruined my life, or did anything untoward to me personally, put that right out of your heads. What was he then? He was proof of my Dad’s determination to do his Christian duty of raising a son who was not a danger to the community of Christians,
That phone call. My Dad and I already had a complicated relationship. I never had any choice about going to Mercersburg. That was a Dad decision, cooked in the book before I had any say. The call was the one time I had a say.
I was on the phone after my first week at the Mercersburg Academy, a little known prep school in the middle of Pennsylvania. I had just turned 13, and the world I met in prep school had almost nothing to do with what I had lived before my arrival in Swank Hall, the freshman dorm. Words I’d never heard, “douchebag,” “pissed off,” “motherfucker,” and “pussy.” I was a pussy because I was five feet tall, had no pubic hair, and a squeaky voice sitting on top of size 10 shoes. I wanted in the worst way to come home. Desperately.
Calling home was an event. Only a few places on campus where you could do it. A phone booth in the basement. Generally with other boys waiting. I got my Dad on the phone to tell him I couldn’t do it, but I couldn’t even tell him the new words I’d heard. And then he said the magic thing that I referred to at the beginning. “Would you rather be at Exeter?” I caved. I would stick it out. Coming home was not an option. Exeter would be worse.
Exeter. So many things I didn’t know back then, but I knew about Exeter. We had a house in the country, in Greenwich Township, and we had a beautiful screened-in porch, with willows to one side and mulberry wildness on the other side, next to an 18th century ice house. I came to dread the porch, because after every social encounter, I was sat down in a chair and told for hours what I had done wrong, what was impolite, what was rude, what made my Dad ashamed of me. And all those sins came back to comparisons with a man named Forman Acton, whom I’d never met, and who I reminded my father of, somehow. And Forman had gone to Exeter. Valedictorian at Exeter and Princeton.
Now, you see, I can understand what my Dad was doing, even if I think he erred. My Boppa was concerned about exactly the same thing, but going about raising me in a different way. They both knew I was a truly extraordinary mind in the making. They were exercising their duty as Christian fathers to protect the community from me. Every time I knew better than the adults I had to be roped in. Boppa taught me how to lose at chess gracefully. In fact, he didn’t want me to learn how to play chess. Danger danger. Dad was concerned about a different danger, the becoming of me as Forman Acton, a man so smart he was an obnoxious and disgraceful human being. He was obsessed with preventing that outcome.
What my Dad knew no one else did. I thought he only knew about two prep schools, Mercersburg and Exeter. Wrong. My first week at a Mercersburg I learned about Lawrenceville, Hill School, and Woodberry Forest, the Virginia elite school with an unbeatable football team. No. Dad knew about Groton and Choate too, the schools of Roosevelt’s and Kennedy’s. He didn’t want me to be those people. He also knew Exeter was a brain lab. Lots of nasty know-it-all boys, whom I didn’t meet until I got to Harvard.
At the time of the phone call, I hadn’t had a marking period. Weeks later, I made the High Honor Roll with a 90 General Average, below which I never dipped until the last marking period senior year. You got your name up in lights at Mercersburg for 90+ grades, in the basement of the dining/store/post office/vending machine hall. Everybody knew as soon as you were a fucking brain. So the bullying threat went away. In fact, my grades kept getting better. I don’t think my Dad disliked that. By the time I was contending to be Editor-in-Chief of the Mercersburg News, he must have known that I had access to his own grades when he was enrolled. Never did better than middling eighties in the GA department. He knew I was hot stuff and would find out eventually. Why he accepted, in another phone call years later, my decision to go to Harvard. He had either created the Anti-Forman by then, or he hadn’t.
But I was still carrying the ghost of Forman Acton around. The man I should never be. He was right to trust me then. He just never reckoned on the immense pain it would cause me and, ultimately, him.
So. I did finally meet Forman. I’ve written about it elsewhere. Kind of anticlimactic in that telling. Predictably, he came at me. Surprisingly so to my mind. Why did he know of me? He was interrogatory. What are you studying at Harvard? Dickens? Bleak House? What do you know of Bleak House? I just fobbed him off. I wasn’t paying too much attention to Dickens. I was the President of a Harvard Final Club, and I’d get around to the reading later. Because when I saw he knew I was loafing I knew he was a phony. How and why? He was looking for another pretty phony. I’d been watching him for weeks swimming around the dock at Woodmere with his young lover. He was looking for an angle to seduce me, because I was as handsome as he was, even then.
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