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Mountainview School / 97 table with the boys while being interviewed by them at Rod’s house, the applicant is soon taken back to the president’s study. There he is once more greeted with familiar smells and is exposed to shelves with dog-eared copies of Plutarch, Homer, Shakespeare, and Camus. An unpretentious filing cabinet adjoins Rod’s huge, dark, oak desk where forms are filled out and the inductee signatures his fealty to Mountainview’s statement of purpose: “I will enter upon this program with sincere intent not only to gain added academic strength, but also to cooperate fully with the aim and spirit of the [Mountainview] School.” The Currency of Behavior The new student’s introduction to Mountainview’s intimate educational setting is deepened in the weeks after arrival by exposure to the school’s academic schedule and living routines. Initial conscientious performance of household chores and adherence to school regulations and staff directives prevail in what is considered a “honeymoon” period during which the neophyte observes the staff and student prevarications and alliances that the more experienced boys utilize in their avoidance of and confrontation with the Mountainview program. On his best behavior, the new boy watches veteran students pushing the limits of study hall and bedtime curfews, arguing for use of the kitchen television in daylight hours, and bickering with the housemaster over whether the toilet or fireplace has been cleaned well enough. He also observes the class-ambiguous housemaster consorting with Buck in his working-class-cum-new-middle-class demeanor and with Rod in occasional boozy, predinner cocktail chats at the president’s house. As the school term progresses, the student may realize in ever-deeper ways that while the housemaster can mix with both Buck and Rod on their own terms, Rod sustains a distance from both of his underlings and, in the process, demonstrates to students that while one can consort with social inferiors of use to institutional life, ultimately these creatures dwell below oneself on the social order and may be treated as such. Apparently coming to terms with the complexities of this staff hierarchy, one new boy, emerging from this period of observation, confronted the housemaster with the seeming contradiction that while claiming to have no money, he somehow managed to drive a new car and often travel to Vermont, New York City, and the Florida Keys. Faced with the housemaster’s financial claims contrasted with his jaunts to coastal meccas of urban, tropic, and bucolic exoticism, this student was perhaps grappling with the class-blurred ambiguities that Rod infers through the social portrait that he assembles for his students. Braced with their variously ironic, anxious, and steadfast postures that anticipate the amiable inductee’s fall from grace, staff wait for the inevitable 98 / Part II appearance of resistance, avoidance, sabotage, and rebellion routinely characteristic of the more acclimated students’ relationship to the school. Woven through the workaday world of meals, classes, study hall, chores, games, and trips, this underworld status pecking order with its pattern of jockeying for and trading on “seniority” creates a context through which students can assess their rebellion against and compliance with the educational system they despise. By locating themselves and being located within these contradictory standards of adequacy, students and staff can at any given time assess the degree to which a wayward youth is embracing or resisting rehabilitation.21 Seniority over other students can be determined by a matter of years, months, or weeks (and, occasionally, hours), but while length of matriculation increases a boy’s status, it also affects the tumult of daily life. Periods of high enrollment make a reduction in chores for senior students possible, and those at the pinnacle of seniority can be released altogether. Exempted from such drudgery, senior boys linger at the breakfast table watching the Today Show, play video games, or slip outside for a cigarette while others do chores. These few are served at mealtime right after Rod and the housemaster, occupy the prized front seat on trips in the school’s lumbering “Suburban” (often referred to as the “bourbon”), and are privy to the one single room in the Big House. Only during occasional rides in the housemaster’s car when preferred seats are doled out on a rotating basis does the law of seniority become temporarily defunct. Aside from this one rare exception, issues of seniority are unambiguous and nonnegotiable. If a student is dismissed from Mountainview, though, his seniority is lost; if...

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