The high school

RICHARD SHERMAN

It was the snowstorm, probably; the sudden, pre-spring snowstorm coming down in thick, wet blohs and melting the instant it touched the pavement hut nevertheless during its descent having the appearance of snowstorms back home. Or it might have been the sight of an electric sign, brilliant and wasteful in the mid-afternoon, reading, "Do-Nuts lake MOTHER Used to Make. Anyway something reminded him of small towns and small towns reminded him of high schools and high schools reminded him of the fact that it had been years since he had seen one. He had watched thug-faced, hoarse-voiced adolescents brawling noisily over their books in the subway or singing close harmony on subway platforms; yet he always thought of them as either part-time or night school students. Nor did the neat coveys of young girls with braids and a shepherding chaperone whom he was always encountering in the park qualify, for they undoubtedly attended Miss This's or Miss That's. What he wanted to find, and the moment he thought of it he knew he must find it. was a regular high school. There should he one around somewhere; a city as big as New York ought to he crammed with them. He wanted to find one and just stand quietly in its corridors watching the pupils come and go.

The desire, the strange and impelling desire, occurred to him at Broadway and Forty-third Street, but he knew there was no use looking there. He would head uptown and eastward; and he did. walking rapidly and with an eagerness that was like the eagerness he had fell when, as a hoy, he would he hurrying toward the movies or a particularly important basketball game. It had been a long time since he had wanted anything as much as he wanted to see a high school; anything intangible, that is, anything that couldn't he had by paying a certain amount of money.

At a drug store he sought a telephone directory, but all it yielded were "High School Advtg Service" and "High School of Commerce" (which wouldn't do: he was looking for the kind of high school that taught "Silas Mainer" and Cicero and Wentworth's Geometry) and something listed as "High School Home Stud) Bureau." What names did they give high schools now? Lincoln? None was listed. Roosevelt? I here was everything from a Roosevelt Apparel Shop, Inc., to a Roosevelt's Log Cabin, but there was no Roosevelt High School. The only thing left was to ask a policeman. He could have phoned Davison, whose daughter was about high school age; 1ml the daughter attended a seminary and anyway Davison would probably he inquisitive and slightly leering and would make sly references to cradle-snatching and the Mann Act.

The policeman looked al him casually: he didn't seem to be at all surprised at the question. "What kinda high school do on want? he said. "Junior high or what?"

In his day there hadn't been any nonsense about junior high schools: eighth grade had meant eighth grade then, and after that you were a Freshman and could walk with kings. He cleared his throat vaguely. "Well, it doesn't matter,' he said. It did. though; he could have located am number of grammar schools; in fact, there was one just down the street from his own apartment house.

"Saint Agnes's—one block up." said the policeman, and turned to beckon to oncoming traffic.

He didn't want a parochial school either. Parochial schools were all right, but they weren't the same thing. In the first place, the) probably segregated the hoys from the girls. He wanted them all together, lie wanted to see them walking along tin* halls in pairs, or to watch the girls clustering around the radiators and pretending not to notice the boys at all. There ought to he the scent of sen-sen and brilliantine and, if you bent close enough, a whiff of cubebs or Violel Milos: there should he tinkling sound of flapping galosh buckles, and in the study hall there should be abortive demonstrations of the Camel Walk.

There wouldn't he any of those things now, naturally, but to make it perfect there ought to he.

He continued uptown for twenty blocks, passing thirteen delicatessens, six chain groceries, and four theatres all of which advertised the same picture, and finally came to a building labeled "High School." It didn't resemble one: it looked like a hospital or the residence of a Vanderbilt but it didn't look like his idea of a high school, which was a two-storied pink-bricked edifice with tall, white pillars and wide windows. Nevertheless, he entered it. climbed the flight of steps that faced him inside the door, and paused at their top. There was a hall, almost like the hall he remembered but much darker, and there was a woman coming up the hall, a grey-haired woman with spectacles and the first unrouged lips he had seen since August. When she was near him she stopped.

Continued on page 56

Continued from page 27

"May I help you?" she asked. "Did you wish to find someone?"

Suddenly he was sixteen and she was Miss Carteret, who taught English VIII and coached the declam contests. "Ah—" he would have to get over that habit of saying "Ah"—"no. thank you. I was just looking around."

"Perhaps you'd he interested in visiting one of the classrooms?" She was very nice, very' courteous, and she made him feel like a taxpayer. "Or we have a rather well-equipped chemistry laboratory, if you'd care to see that."

"No, no thank you very much. I'll just stand here, if you don't mind. Will the students he coming out soon?"

She regarded him over her spectacles: it was obvious she thought he was a kidnaper, or worse. "In a short while," she said, and her tone had changed. She walked on, turning once to stare suspiciously at him over her shoulder.

It was very quiet there in that hall; the only noises were the faint worryings of automobile horns in the street outside and the droning, monotonous hum of a dynamo somewhere above his head. Leaning against the wall, with an envelope and a pencil in his hand (he would pretend to he an artist), though it was really too dark to sketch and there was no reason why anyone should want to sketch a vacant and not especially attractive corridor anyway), he looked at the series of closed doors before him. For several minutes he stood there, tenderly nostalgic not for this hall hut for another one. And then a hell rang, a hell like a fire alarm, and after it stopped he was alone with a collection of metallic echoes and the distant sound of shuffling feet, and suddenly all the doors opened simultaneously and hoys and girls flooded around him. He heard them as they passed, and one girl was saying, "The feature goes on at 5:02" and another was saying, "Bloomingdale's, but they don't wear," and a sweatered boy was pushing another sweatered hoy and shouting, "Yeah, I bet you did, I just bet you did!" and three girls were walking arm in arm and softly chanting ". . . you're tha Loov Mew-see-um."

He stood there, an island in their midst, and to him they were so many waves washing over the mossy rock of his youth. And all al once, realizing that he had never before been overwhelmed by the upsurge of the universally young, he felt frightened; not tenderly nostalgic any more hut frightened with the fear that makes the heart quicken and the limbs tremble, and he put on his hat and hurried down the steps into the street, where the snow was falling as white and evanescent as the years that lay behind him.