In Love with Defeat. H. Brandt Ayers
as he trudged remorsefully around town, bent under the weight of Cain’s crimes.
Sweeter memories of Woodstock begin at the beginning, when I fell in love with my first-grade teacher, Margaret Griffis. Miss Griffis was also our “Miss Manners,” teaching children the distinction between “excuse me” and “I beg your pardon.” “Excuse me,” is appropriate for a trivial offense such as brushing against someone. But for serious breaches of etiquette (her example, knocking a lady’s sable coat to the floor) “I beg your pardon,” is required—as in begging clemency from a king. She was not out of touch with the seamier side of life, but viewed it with droll worldliness. When a prostitute claimed a candidate for lieutenant governor had tied her up and done unspeakable things with her, Miss Griffis observed, “If that gul did all of the things she is supposed to have done, Ah think she sold herself too cheaply.”
My feelings for her didn’t achieve closure until the fall of 1998, when the still-slim and still-beautiful Margaret, in a white silk dress and spiked heels, had a birthday party. For herself. To celebrate her ninetieth birthday. In my toast, I invited the guests to go back with me fifty years and look in on Miss Griffis’s first grade class. The children were bent to their task—copying the alphabet, making vowels with great oval swoops—all but one boy. So smitten was he by the beauty of his teacher, he could do little but stare. That Christmas, his mother suggested cologne for the teacher. The boy protested, “Mother, that’s not good enough for Miss Griffis. We should give her an evening dress.” The mother prevailed, of course. I was that little boy, and the oversight so many Christmases ago had been a burden on my conscience—until her party—where, to her delighted astonishment, I whipped out a fire-engine-red sequined number. With tassels. Would she wear it? A friend asked her that and she gave a revealing reply, “Oh, it’s much too tight.”
She died in 2006, an original and, in our informal, unceremonial contemporary society, an unrepeatable heirloom—with just a dash of flirtatious devilment.
Inevitably, the day came when all twelve-year-old boys and girls were launched from their grammar schools and met in a war of the planets: eastside vs. westside, Venus vs. Mars. We were all white, but we had been formed by life into two separate and incompatible worlds. We eastsiders had been coddled and sheltered by the more spacious incomes of our parents. The westside kids had been toughened, made streetwise by growing up in blue-collar neighborhoods. One of the friendlier westside girls shocked me with an admission that seemed commonplace to her. The family would take Sunday sightseeing drives to Glenwood Terrace and other neighborhoods on my side of town: to see how the “rich” people lived.
Not all the westside boys were friendly. One of the tough ones roared back to life for me in the summer of 2000 when the Atlanta Braves’ ace reliever, John Rocker, launched some wild verbal pitches, sounding off about New York’s “foreigners,” “queers,” and welfare mothers. Rocker was for me a junior-high terror come to life. I recognized in him the feral breed. He drove a battered pickup on reckless Saturday nights up to and over the edge of danger. In his blood, a six-pack mingled with the genes of wild Celtic ancestors. He was a descendant of fearless Highland warriors, Irish rebels, Viking plunderers and lonely Southern pioneers pushing back the wilderness in solitary sorties—a familiar Southern type, a redneck. Anybody who grew up in the small-town South knows a John Rocker. I first met him in junior high school where boys from the “right” side of the tracks merged with their scary classmates from the “other” side. He was the tallest, most muscular, and scariest of them all. He knew the unprintable names of certain parts of the female anatomy and spoke them in a way that suggested he might actually have explored those secret, unattainable kingdoms. He was an object of fear and admiration.
In the universe of junior high and high school, he was Braveheart, with a mean streak, whom no paddling principal could tame and bring to heel. His independence was crafted by earlier generations that, in contrast with the westward exploration of Easterners in communal wagon trains, wrested the land from the wilderness as lonely, single pioneers. W. J. Cash in his classic Mind of the South wrote, “He had much in common with the half-wild Scotch and Irish clansmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whose blood he so often shared . . .” A history he didn’t know or understand formed the John Rocker of my junior high: athlete, lover, king of his adolescent universe.
From an unlikely source, former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, came a tolerant understanding of how a small-town Southern tough felt on being stranded in an alien land—the sophisticated, urban, multi-ethnic planet upon which he had landed. When the two met, Young knew what it was like for Rocker to have exploded from a Macon neighborhood onto the national stage. In so many words, Young said that Rocker was an innocent country boy who had never been anywhere or met anybody who was different. A baffling world came at him, and he balked. “Besides,” Ambassador Young added, “Yankees are different.” True enough, as he illustrated with an ironic anecdote: years ago, a rude New York merchant had sent his wife from a store in tears when, in the segregated South, Young said, a shop owner would have treated her with courtesy.
The year, 1949, was a kind of educational “phony war” for me. It was to be my freshman year at Anniston High School, but the day for registration, buying schoolbooks, and the first day of classes all passed without any command from Mother and Dad about school. What I didn’t know, and only vaguely suspected from taking a battery of tests none of my friends did, was that a decision had been taken from on high—long before family conferences came into vogue. I was being sent away, to a small Episcopal boarding school near the then-grimy manufacturing town of Danbury, Connecticut. Mother and Dad decided on the Wooster School, because the “name” schools such as Andover and Lawrenceville would have to put me back a year or two. Anniston schools evidently weren’t up to speed. Wooster would take a chance, because I had a detectable IQ pulse and because my family liked the values Wooster put up front in its catalogue: “Religion, Simplicity, Intellectual Excellence and Hard Work.”
The announcement of my fate was duly made and I awaited banishment with trepidation. Elise tried to calm my fears, without success. Finally, the day came for Dad and me to board the train for New York. In Manhattan, dressed in my favorite powder blue suit and whitebuck loafers, we went to Brooks Brothers to buy weird, pinched, dull, gray and blue suits and a gray jacket made of little Vs. I was outfitted as a proper preppie, and I hated the look. Dad took me to school, where we met the friendly headmaster, the Reverend John D. Verdery, and finally the dreaded moment came when Dad left me alone on the stone walk leading up to the New Building. It was a gray, cold September day in the foothills of the Berkshires—just right for a sense of desolate abandonment.
Before the mood could overtake me, however, a couple of older boys greeted me, one wearing a white sweater with a maroon “W”—a figure of awe to a third former. The older boys were kind, and I soon discovered that Wooster was a friendly, special place, a formative experience in my life. The student pool was not as old-money, first-family New England as Groton under its fabled Rector, Endicott Peabody, but it bore a resemblance to the model he cast. “If some Groton boys do not enter public life and do something for our land,” intoned the Rector, “it will not be because they have not been urged.” The handsome young headmaster of Wooster, John Verdery, was not so formidable as Peabody and his masters did not preach public service so didactically. Wooster did not hide its values, but it wasn’t grim about them. Without trivializing either school, Wooster was Groton Lite. The style of the place and what I took from it are summarized in the citation that was given to me as the Alumnus of the Year for 1998 [see Appendix].
The citation’s style fit the place: just short of jaunty, no strained praise or funereal solemnity, an honest, not terribly impressed salute to a life that, on balance, had been above-average okay. It was read in the school’s spare, old chapel where, in my speech I acknowledged the presence of so many friendly ghosts . . .
One was John Verdery, who preached there every Sunday, but whose manly, understated grace was a more lasting model than any of his sermons. His wife, Sue, whose slightly scatter-brained charm, good looks, and mastery of French cooking made their house a warm haven as a student and for years afterward. Babysitting their children gave me a feeling of family far from my real home. In my senior year it also got me close to their nurse, the full-lipped, shapely Mitzi Henz, the only girl our age on campus,