Shadowland Read Free Page B

wood. Wish I weren't so blamed old.'
     
         He seemed to fall asleep for a moment. The pipe drooped in his mouth and his hands trembled in his lap. Then his watery eyes opened. 'No brothers or sisters, correct?'
     
         The boy nodded.
     
         The wizard smiled. 'You can leave, son. He's gone. Fight the good fight, now.'
     
         The boy has been dismissed; the logic of the dream compels him outside; the wizard's eyes are closing again. But he does not wish to leave — he does not want to wake up just yet. He looks out the windows and sees forest, not his backyard. Thick cobwebs blanket several trees in dark grayness.
     
         The wizard stirs, opens his eyes, and looks at the reluctant boy. 'Oh, you'll have your heart broken,' hesays. 'Is that what you're waiting to hear? It'll be broken, all right. But you'll never get anything done if you walk around with an unchipped heart. That's the way of it, boy.'
     
         'Thanks,' he says, and backs toward the door.
     
         'That's the way, and there isn't any other way.'
     
         'Okay.'
     
         'Keep your eyes peeled for wolves, now.'
     
         'Right,' the boy says, and goes outside. He thinks the wizard is already asleep. After he goes past the trees which are not there, he sees his own body asleep on the grass, lying on its side near a lolling dandelion.
     
       
     
       
     
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      For various reasons the Carson School is now no longer the school it was, and it has a new name. Carson was a boys' school, old-fashioned and quirky and sometimes so stern it could turn your bowels to ice water. Later we who had been students there understood that all of the rather menacing discipline was meant to disguise the fact that Carson was at best second-rate. Only a school of that kind would have hired Laker Broome as headmaster; perhaps only a third-rate school would have kept him.
     
         Years ago, when John Kennedy was still a senator from Massachusetts and Steve McQueen was Josh Randall on television and McDonald's had sold only two million hamburgers and narrow ties and tab collars were coming in for the first time, Carson was Spartan and tweedy and a bit desperate and self-conscious about its status; now it is a place where rich boys and girls go if they have trouble in the public schools. Tuition was seven hundred and fifty dollars a year; now it is just under four thousand.
     
         It has even changed sites. When I was there with Tom Flanagan and Del Nightingale and the others, the school was chiefly situated in an old Gothic mansion on the top of a hill, to which had been added a modern wing-steel beams and big plates of glass. The old section of the school somehow shrank the modern addition, subsumed it into itself, and all of it looked cold and haunting.
     
         This original building, along with the vast old gymnasium (the field house) behind it, was built mainly of wood. Parts of the original building — the headmaster's office, the library, the corridors and staircases — resembled the Garrick Club. Old wood polished and gleaming, oak bookshelves and handrails, beautiful slippery wooden floors. This part of the school always seduced prospective parents, who had the closet anglophilia of their class. Some of the rooms were jewel-box tiny, with mullioned windows, paneled walls, and ugly radiators that gave off little heat. If Carson had been the manor house some of its aspects suggested, it would have been not only haunting but also haunted.
     
         Once every two or three years when I go back and drive past the school's new Quantum Hills site, I see a long neo-Georgian facade of reddish brick, long green lawns, and a soccer field far off — all of it fresh green and warm brick, so like a campus, so generalized that it seems a mirage. This cozy imitation of a university seems distant, remote, sealed within its illusions about itself. I know looking at it that the lives of its