Tom Robbins - Tibetan Peach Pie - A True Account of an Imaginative Life

Let me emphasize that there was nothing the least bit sexual, nothing untoward at all about the incident, yet it was definitely, in its odd way, romantic. It was tender. It was intimate. It was sweet. It was a mingling, however subtle, however cross-generational, of male/female energies. And whatever its intent, if any, it was effective, because for the rest of that school year the angels’ own butter would not have melted in my mouth, so quiet was I in Miss Snowden’s class, so respectful, so appropriately appropriate.

News of my slapped face failed to reach Mother and Daddy, and I never told a single soul, not even my best friend, about the poignant, dreamlike hall-walk with Miss Snowden (it would have felt like a betrayal). However, the negative reviews of my deportment on monthly report cards (a foreshadowing of critiques from the more small-minded members of the literary establishment?), along with the glad tidings (delivered at a PTA meeting) that in the annual popularity poll my schoolmates had voted me “Most Mischievous Boy,” caused the parental unit to wonder if a “talking stick” mightn’t be the least of reasons for concern about the future of Tommy Rotten. Then, there was the great academic flip-flop of 1948.

At the end of the first semester of my junior year, I bore home a report card resplendent with straight A’s: an A (a vowel black in color, according to Arthur Rimbaud) in every subject including algebra. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the report card to its destination without word of its contents being leaked to the crowd of townies in whose company I walked home every day. With scummy Reggie Sulley and tough Lester Scott leading the Greek chorus, I was mocked all the way down the street. They literally jeered me. Even inside the B&B poolroom (an obligatory stop, boys only, after school), the ridicule continued. I was made to feel a sissy, a sycophant, a sellout, an outsider unfit for the company of my proudly anti-intellectual pals.

In truth, I hadn’t even studied particularly hard to earn those A’s. Well, never mind, I’d show them! I’d set new standards for goofing off. And second semester I flunked every subject including English. Straight F’s. For the year, this averaged out to an aggregate C, which meant that I’d passed the grade and hadn’t completely torpedoed any chance of college admission, but finding a minimum of cheer in that, and even less in my having regained my status as a good ol’ Warsaw boy, Mother and Daddy began to think seriously about military school.

“The men in the Robbins family mature slowly,” my mother said once, referring not only to me but my father and his father — and she did not mean it as a compliment. Personally, I’ve found maturity an overrated quality except in wine, for both creative artists and lively people in general have much to gain from facing the world with the unsullied vision, flexible responses, and playful sensibilities of a child. That said, considering Mother’s views on the subject, considering her critique of the Robbins male, her choice of Hargrave Military Academy as a suitable repository for yours truly made perfect sense. Hargrave’s motto (in those more innocent times) was “Making Men Not Money.”

I’d graduated from Warsaw High at age sixteen, looking — and at times acting — several years younger. I was a virgin, my success with girls having peaked about a decade earlier back in Blowing Rock; but was no stranger to alcohol, having already discovered the joys, though not yet the perils, of frescoing one’s tonsils with the cardinal brush. For some time, I’d been writing a fairly mature sports column for The Northern Neck News, a weekly paper serving four Virginia counties, but my abilities as a scribe could not conceal the fact that overall, I presented a measure of challenging grist for the Hargrave Military Academy man-making mill.

Hargrave sat on a hill overlooking the pretty little town of Chatham, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, about a hundred miles from Warsaw. Across a valley, on the other side of Chatham, atop a hill directly opposite Hargrave, sat Chatham Hall, a high-toned private school for “problem girls” (or so it was alleged) from privileged families. Equally keen on deportment, the two schools were separated by more than terrain. Fraternization of any kind between Hargrave and Chatham Hall students was strictly, absolutely forbidden.

Cadets presumed to know the nature of the girls’ “problem” and fantasized endlessly about exploiting and contributing to it. For their part, the girls surely thought the cadets romantic figures in their dashing uniforms, with their military bearing (so unlike the slouching slobs back home), and air of prospective danger (this even though the rifles we carried, each and every one, had had their firing pins securely removed). The vectors of adolescent sexual longing that crisscrossed that valley must have been so strong, so thick that it’s a wonder any bird could fly through it.

The rule was unwritten, unspoken, yet every cadet was aware that to be caught on the Chatham Hall campus was grounds for immediate expulsion. Hormones are stronger than rules, however, and the powerful allure of forbidden fruit has been documented everywhere from Greek myth to hillbilly jukebox, from grand opera to soap opera, from romance comic books to the Book of Genesis. So, each spring, when the sweet silky air was practically a-wiggle with pheromones, when a young man’s fancies turn to thoughts of stolen kisses and damp panties, a couple of cadets would sneak onto the greening lawns of that quasi-convent across the valley. Most of the time they escaped detection and retribution, though their forays predictably produced no verifiably amorous results. Then there was the case of Stu Seaworth.

Stu (not his real name) had begun to percolate with joy and promise when his presence in the shadows of a Chatham Hall dormitory was acknowledged by a resident of said dorm. The girl waved to him from a lighted third-story window. Stu waved back. Then the unthinkable happened, the stuff of dreams. As Stu stood there gaping, the girl pulled her sweater over her head. Next, she unhooked her bra and tossed it aside. She allowed Stu a good long look at her little moons before beckoning him to come orbit them. He shrugged, threw up his hands, became almost frantic with frustration, there being under the circumstances no way to reach her except by rocket, a moon landing logistically impossible.

Ah, but what was this? The bare-breasted schoolgirl was pointing to a narrow fire escape that ran down the side of the dorm. Stu was a tall lad, yet he could not reach even the bottom rung of that ladder. Not to worry. The siren had disappeared and with her Stu’s hopes, but just then the fire escape began to lower. The girl was operating some kind of lever mechanism. When the rungs were low enough, he climbed aboard, shaking with excitement. He was going to heaven on a creaky steel ladder! However, just out of reach of the third floor, the ascent abruptly aborted. In midair now, and at a forty-five-degree angle, the ladder remained — and remained — immobile. The lights went off in the siren’s room. Stu was stranded. He thought he heard giggles. A chorus of them.

In the desperate jump that followed, Stu shattered his ankle and cracked his femur. He was on crutches when his folks arrived to fetch him home in disgrace one month before he was to graduate.

I never met Stu Seaworth, he’d come and gone the previous year, and for all I know his story could have been embellished or even wholly apocryphal. Still, firmly embedded in Hargrave mythology, it was not without value. It suggested, in an oblique, potentially painful way, a way fraught with consequences, that girlie Chatham Hall — its mystique, its challenge, its looming presence, its moth-to-candle-flame allure — might contribute as much as the military school itself when it came to making boys into men.