I was ten years old when my father died. Eight months later my mother, believing I needed more structure and male role models, enrolled me in the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania.
A knot in my stomach grew tighter as our car approached the school that February day in 1964. I told myself over and over, Be brave. Be the man you’re supposed to be now that your father is dead. Actually, I had little idea how to be a man, except to act stoically. So I never uttered a word of protest, though every fiber of my body resisted the trip.
When we arrived, my mother and I were given a tour of the spotless ranch-style house, which accommodated the 16 boys in my unit, with an apartment for our houseparents. My mother remained behind while I was shown the bedroom I would share with another boy.
I returned to an empty living room. “Where’s my mom?” I asked.
“Oh, she left,” someone said.
Left? My legs went limp. The school’s counselor, I learned later, had urged my mother to slip away without saying good-bye so as to avoid a scene.
I spent the afternoon sitting in my new bedroom. When the boys returned from school at four o’clock, they came to look at me. “Boy, you’re short,” said one kid.
“Lee, he’s not short. He’s tiny.”
“Let’s call him ‘Ant,’” Lee said.
“No, ‘Bug’ is better.”
“I like those extra eyes he’s got,” said another, pointing to my glasses. “Maybe we should call him ‘Bug Eyes.’”
With that, they went about their after-school chores.
After dinner, we were allowed an hour of free time until study period. I picked up a book and started reading, but my roommate, Jim, interrupted: “There’s some things you should know if you don’t want to be laughed at. Somebody might ask you to go get a bucket of steam or a left-handed wrench. Your toothbrush will sometimes disappear. Oh, and you’d better keep those glasses in sight all the time.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
He shrugged. “You’ll also probably have to fight somebody soon if you don’t want to be treated like dirt.”
I sat quietly for a while, absorbing what Jim had told me. Suddenly he asked, “If was your father who died, right?”
“Yes.”
He looked into his book. “Nobody’s going to want to hear about that.”
That night I did my best not to cry. I failed.
Jim’s predictions turned out to be true. I got into a fight after two boys played catch with my glasses. Angry, I rammed my head into the stomach of one and we began to slug each other.
I never mentioned my father to anyone, and no one mentioned their lost parents to me. The unspoken code that Hershey boys held was not just the denial of feeling, but the denial that our dead parents had existed at all.
One of the favorite games among the boys was tackle. A football was thrown into the air, and whoever caught it tried to run directly through the rest without being brought down. Tackle was less of a game than an excuse to deliberately smash our bodies into each other for the main purpose, I realized later, of dissipating our frustration and anger.
Late that first spring, Mr. and Mrs. Carney became our new houseparents, and loosened the reins on us. Soon, however, chores were not being done well, and some boys spoke to the Carneys rudely.
Mr.Carney's reponse was to hold a meeting in which the boys could air their beefs and the Carneys could express their expectations of us To me, the Carneys were not the "enemy" but surrogate parents who genuinely cared about us. During the meeting I pointed out, "If anything, the Carneys are too nice. Some of you guys are taking advantage of that."
Cold shoulders promptly turned my way. As if to relieve me from the others, the Carneys took me that Friday evening to their weekend house, where I spent most of the time fishing.
When I returned to the unit, Jim notified me, "Everybody thinks you kissed up to the Carneys. You have a lot of guys mad at you."
Great. I had spent months trying to fit in, and in a minute I had ostracized myself. I was not surprised to find my toothbrush in the toilet the next morning.
Two months later I overheard Lee, Bruce and Jim trying to decide how to pass a long August afternoon. "Let's go down to the pond," Jim sugested.
"Isay we go to the hide-out," said Lee, referring to a mysterious place I had not yet seen.
"Why don't we just hike," Bruce offered, "and see where we wind up?"
"I' ll go for that," Jim said.
"Me too, " I added.
"Who invited you, twerep?" Lee said to me.
"Don' t call me that."
"Okay, Four Eyes."
Wanting to avoid another fight, I swallowed my anger. "I 'm heading that-a-way," Bruce said, motioning to the open spaces. "If anybody wants to come, fine. If not - adios." He started off, and Jim and Lee followed. I lingered briefly, then joined the gruoup.
After crossing meadows dotted with wildflowers, we found a thin stream. Jumping over it we soon came to a cornfield that stretched as far as we could see." "Let' s go in," Lee said, and without hesitation we did.
We quickly becam hidden, but pushed deeper into the field. The broad leaves slashed at our faces, and the ears of corn clunked us inthe head. We crossed perhaps 30 rows before we halted and sat on the ground.
"Is this the hide-ot?" I asked.
"Hardly," Lee said, removing cigarettes from his pants.
"I don' t think you should smoke in here," Jim said.
"Me neither," Bruce added.
Lee shrugged. "All right, no sweat. This surprised me, but I soon learned there was something about the cornfield that changed our usual behavior. It was a place that melted inhibitions and tough-guy exteriors.
Bruce was the first to talk. "My father was a salesman," he said, "and one day a truck ran a stoplight and smashed into his car. He died right there. I was in school, and they called me home. I knew something big had happened but I never thought it was that."
"Mine died of a heart attack," Jim said. "But I hardly knew him. I was four. He was a schoolteacher."
After a pause Lee said, "My old man was a carpenter. He made me a boxcar one summer. He took me to a couple of yankees games, and once we went to the circus. Then he got bone cancer. He was a big man, but by the time he died, he was like a string bean. " Lee's eyes had become wet. He looked away into the depths of the cornfield.
The others did too. They were wearing expressions I had never seen before. No one spoke for a long time. All I heard was the rustling of the cornstalks and the cry of a distant crow.
Bruce broke our silence. "You didn' t tell us about you father," he said to me.
I wasn' t sure I wanted to. I had survived Hershey by remaining "strong," and I now felt reluctant to allow myself to weaken. But like them, I was eager t unburden myself of something I simply couldn' t keep bottled up any longer.
"Mine had diabeted for a long time," I said haltingly, "but it was his kidneys that went bad, and that's what killed him. My mother was called away by the hospital one night. I was in bed when I heard the door open and her footsteps coming up the stairs. They sounded....sad, so I knew before she said, 'Your father passede away.' "
We didn't talk much about how we felt when our fathers died; we could tell from our faces. Instead we talked about our fathers' lives. What they were like. Who they were. If we'd had pictures, we would have shared them. But nont of us had a photo, not even in our rooms, it being generally accepted that such a thing was too much of a reminder of a life more bright and normal than the one we now lived.
The talk about our fathers gave way to other, less weighty matters, and soon we were back to a lighter mood. But when we stepped out in the sunlight, we did so with a common understanding - that life handed out its losses, but we did not have to suffer them alone. For the first time we realized that we held in common not only parental loss but also the need to release the sorrow that came with it.
As we made our way home, we stopped to drink at the stream. Jim was next to me, and I watched him remove his baseball hat, splash his face and rub his wet fingers through his hair. Then instead of putting the cap back on his own head, he reached over and placed it on mine. The others gathered around, and together we jumped over the stream. And I knew as we returned to the unit that we walked as brothers.
