Arrival at Cranbrook School for Boys

September, 1959.

My mother looked at me from the driver’s seat, her hands gripping the wheel.  I was looking ahead. 

“I know you’re going to like it,” she said.

My stomach was knots. 

She guided the vast Plymouth Fury, with its cabin cruiser dashboard, down the expressway.

“You’ll like it, Honey.  It’s one of the best schools in Michigan.”

“Why can’t I stay in St. Clair?” I looked ahead.  “Why can’t I?”

St. Clair was the small town in Michigan where we lived. 

My mother sighed.  She was forty years old, but she looked older.  She had looked old since my parents had divorced two years earlier.  Before, she was beautiful.  That thick, lush hair, so soft to the touch, was lifeless now, nearly colorless.  Her face was puffy.  Where had she gone? 

We drove in silence for a while.

“Oh, Honey, you were so unhappy at school there.  You need a better school.  You’d be bored to tears if you stayed.”      

That was true.  But it was more true that I didn’t want to leave another place again. Two years earlier, I was seated in an automobile in Virginia Beach, Virginia, where I had grown up, driving away from my home for good, the gravel spitting out from the tires.   

We were going to Cranbrook School for Boys in Bloomfield Hills, about two hours from St. Clair.  I was entering eighth grade, or Second Form as they called it after the English system.  I would be a boarding student.  I would live there. 

Despite my protests, here we were.  We turned down the dappled Lone Pine Road and into the school parking lot.  I was fiercely embarrassed by my mother, by her open practical Midwestern way of confronting people.  She had grown up in Dayton, Ohio.  She was an Ohio girl to the core. Later, when I was grown and talked to her as an adult about these things, I found out that she hadn’t been happy in Virginia Beach and in the South and felt alien to many of the people she met and knew there.  We moved to St. Clair in Michigan, because her sister, her only sibling, lived there with her family. 

Now I was horrified she would speak to someone and identify herself as my mother.  Which of course she did.  An older student in a coat and tie walked by us.  My mother accosted him.  He had an ID badge with his name printed on it and, below it, “Senior Prefect.” 

“I’m Marianna Goodman,” she said to him, one hand blindly trying to find me and urge me forward, “and this—come here, Honeybunch—this is my son, Richie.”

I smiled in anger.

“He’s starting school here this year.”

“Oh really?” the boy said.  “Welcome to Cranbrook."         

“He’s a little anxious,” my mother said.

“Well, he doesn’t have to be,” the boy said.

“We’re from St. Clair,” my mother said.  “It’s a small town.  Have you ever heard of it?”

“No, Ma’am” the boy said.

“Well, if you’re ever there, you can look us up.”

The boy nodded.  I was near tears.

“Now, we’re looking for...”  My mother opened her purse and searched for a paper.  She found it and read, “We’re looking for Marquee Hall.”

“Marquis,” the boy said.

“Marquis?” my mother said.  “Okey dokey.  Do you know where it is?”

“Yes, ma’am.  I’ll take you there.  Just follow me.”

“What about Richie’s clothes and things?”

“I can get someone to help you with that later,” he said.

We followed him to the dormitory.  I had never been to the school before.  My memory is that I must have filled out an application to the school from home and never actually visited the place.  This was long before applying to these kinds of schools took on the formulized rigor that it has now.  It was all so casual back then.  So I was looking at this school in a state of stupefied wonder.

The boy led us to Marquis, then departed.   We walked into the chaos of boys arriving with lockers and suitcases and parents.  Each was assisted by an older boy standing there with a clipboard.  I didn’t want anyone to know my mother was my mother, but she made that clear.

“I’m Richie Goodman’s mother,” she said brightly, approaching a boy not attached to an arriving family.  “He’s new here.  What—where....”

“Goodman, Goodman,” the boy’s eye went down the list.  “Richard Goodman.  Here it is.  Room 316, third floor.”

“Third floor?   Well, we need to have his trunk...”

“I’ll get some boys to help.  Where’s your car?  If you give me the keys....”

My mother explained where the car was and handed the boy her keys.

“That’s so nice of you.  We’ll just go up this stairway?”

“Yes.”

“361?”

“316.”

“Okey dokey.  Thank you, young man.”

We climbed the stairs three flights and turned into a hallway.  It was long and shadowy. The polished waxed floor shone like dark ice.  We walked down the hall carefully, past doors that were open, with families settling their sons in, past doors that were shut, until we came to 316.  My mother opened the door.  The room was small and simple, with a bed, desk and chair and a larger cushioned chair.  There was a closet with a curtain as a door.  The walls were empty.  The mattress on the bed was naked.  That was all.

“Well, here we are!” my mother said.  “Let me sit down and rest my weary bones.”

“Don’t say weary bones, Mother.”

“Well, they are.”  She sat down on the chair in front of the desk. “Well, I wonder how long it will take for that trunk to come.” My mother looked at her watch.

“You don’t have to stay,” I said.

“Oh, well, I....”

“Honest.  It may be a long time before they come.”

“Well are you sure?  It is a long drive home. I hate to drive in the dark.”

“No, go ahead.  It’s ok.”

“Well then, all right.”  She got up and gathered all her things.  Then she looked at me.  Tears came to her eyes.  “Oh, Honeybunch, I’m going to miss you so much.”

“Awww, Mom.”

“Give me a hug.  Just one.”

I hugged her half-heartedly.

It was only years later that I would begin to comprehend the burden of sadness she carried around each day.  That she would return to an empty house.  To an empty house in a bleak town with no husband and few friends.  That she would live with the dull constant ache of my absence.  That she would walk through the small house alone, not able to see me, or to speak to me, to praise or scold me, to gaze at me for a few stolen seconds.  She would carry that ache with her when she went to the store and passed by cereal she didn’t need to buy anymore.  She might pass by a father holding his son’s hand on the way to school.  She might be doing the laundry without the chaos of my clothes.  She wouldn’t say goodnight to me. 

There were endless ways for her to hurt by my absence.  I learned them only later, when I was a grown man, when I had married and had a daughter and then divorced and left the household as my mother had left ours.  Only then, when I would wake up in the morning without my wife and daughter, alone, to an empty house, without sounds, without a family and begin to understand.

Now, though, I was young and angry and knew nothing of pity or forgiveness or compassion.

My mother started to leave, and then turned back in sadness.

“Bye bye, Honeybunch,” she said.

“Bye, Mom.”

She disappeared into the hallway, and I could hear her footsteps echo on the hard floor, one after the other.