The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

2 THE NEW SCHOOL OPENED on schedule, although the building wasn’t finished. On the first day, in the middle of the morning, all of us were herded into the auditorium to hear the principal, Mr. Simon, explain the rules that we would have to follow. It was with nervous anticipation that we shuffled through the hallways to the auditorium, because all of us assumed that once Mr. Simon had finished exp...

     “Did you see this?” I shouted when I arrived at Raskol’s with the paper.      “Yeah,” said Raskol. “Margot and Martha burst in here with it in the middle of breakfast. My father was just slipping a soft-boiled egg into his mouth with his soup spoon when they flew into the house, wham, bam, no knocking, no hellos, all squeals and excitement. God, his face got so red and swollen I thought his h...

1 THIS IS THE STORY of two contests in which I competed in the fifth grade. One, probably the more important, was a competition for the love of Veronica McCall. This was a competition that I sponsored, but I was never a serious contender in it myself at all, which is probably as it should have been, since I didn’t really understand what prize was at stake, did not, to tell a truth that I would hav...

     Well, when Mitgang’s book appeared, it gave the clam culture reason to think of itself as far sexier than the chicken culture. One might expect that the animosity would, as a result, have disappeared, but any good psychohistorian would be quick to point out that things are rarely as simple as that. The anti-chicken attitude in Babbington might eventually have disappeared if Seafood and Sex ha...

     It happened like this:     Before I was born, Babbington was a stable little community, dependent on—and redolent of—the clamming industry, with some small appeal for tourists. No one living in Babbington then would have predicted that within five years a period of rapid growth would begin that would last throughout my childhood. The effects of this growth were broad and deep, both on Babbing...

Preface To be in any form, what is that?(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither)If nothing lay more develop’d the quahaug in its callous shell were enough. Mine is no callous shell,I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,To touch my person t...

28 LESS THAN A MONTH LATER, Mrs. Graham announced one day that Clarissa was going to be leaving Babbington and moving to Sioux City, Iowa, where her father would be devising new uses for setae, snouts, and trotters at Pickled Pork Products, a large and nationally famous company. While Spike was at the front of the room trying to find Iowa on the map of the United States, I looked at Clarissa. She...

26 I GOT AROUND on crutches fairly well, but it wasn’t really any fun. Most of the kids in Mrs. Graham’s class signed my cast. Spike wrote, “You had it coming to you.” Veronica wrote, “Thanks for everything.” Clarissa signed several times. Each time she wrote, “Can you ever forgive me?”     The play was quite a success. Veronica did a creditable job as Cordelia, Spike was an excellent Regan, and C...

25 AS SOON AS I had made my decision, everything else looked easy. I read through Mrs. Graham’s notes again and assigned all the other parts. I sat back and took a deep breath. For the first time since I had entered the fourth grade I felt just fine. I needed someone to share this feeling with, and I had someone: Clarissa.     I telephoned her and told her that I had assigned all the parts and tha...

24 I WOKE EARLY on Sunday morning and sat upright in my bed thinking the situation over. My two biggest problems were Spike and Veronica. Until I chose one of them to play the part of Cordelia, I wasn’t going to be able to think about the other roles. Thank goodness I didn’t have to worry about Clarissa, too. Several times during my deliberations I felt a sudden rush of affection for her.     Spik...

     Clarissa’s father asked me what I would like to drink. Everything seemed so urbane that I thought he was actually asking me what kind of cocktail I would like. “Oh, nothing for me, thank you,” I said, not so much because I thought that I shouldn’t drink a cocktail, but because I was trying to be polite, and I knew that one of the rules of polite behavior was to refuse everything the first tim...

23 WHEN MY MOTHER AND FATHER and I sat down that night to eat our own dinner, I told them about Clarissa’s invitation. My mother was enchanted. She acquired a rosy glow, and she hugged me several times when she had gotten up to serve a dish or clear the table. My father made several remarks that made him chuckle and made my mother giggle and blush and say, “Oh, stop it, Bert.”     While my mother...

22 I WALKED HOME QUICKLY, through back yards and along lightly traveled streets. The sky was dark, and the wind had begun to rise. If it had been a summer afternoon, I would have said that the rumble in the distance was thunder. When I got home, I dashed inside and went directly to my room, where I sat on my bed holding my camera and wondering what to do.     I heard the phone ring downstairs, but...

     Biff jumped up, ran to the stage, and began auditioning for the part of Lear, too.     “‘O, let me be not mad, not mad, sweet heaven!’” he bellowed, tearing at his hair and stumbling around the stage. He lurched downstage toward me and delivered the next line right in my face: “‘Keep me in temper; I would not be mad!’”     “Never, never, never, never, never,” muttered Matthew.     Clarissa wa...

21 MRS. GRAHAM and I walked down the hall together. The line of boys and girls waiting for the auditions stretched from the auditorium doors down the hall nearly all the way to the cafeteria. As we walked past, I tried not to look anyone in the eye.     We passed Veronica. She was wearing the sort of thing that she usually wore, one of those clingy knit dresses, but she had added a wide black pate...

20 BY LUNCH TIME I was a nervous wreck. The entire fourth grade was abuzz about the auditions. It seemed to me that everybody wanted one part or another. Even one of the boys who had already taken a job as a stagehand buttonholed me to explain that he was sure he could play Edmund the B*****d and still work the curtain if I could just rewrite the script so that Edmund didn’t have to be onstage at...

19 MANY, MANY of my fourth-grade classmates had signed up to try out for parts, and I was going to have to choose among them. When I announced which ones I had chosen, I might make a few friends, but I was likely to make lots of enemies.     The auditions were held on a Friday. I didn’t sleep well the night before, and I didn’t have much appetite at breakfast. My uneasiness had no real focus; it w...

18 IN THE MORNING, Veronica called. “Peter,” she said, giggling, “I think you have something of mine.”     “Yes,” I said. “I do. They’re in my sock drawer. Do you have mine?”     “Yes,” she said. “I’m wearing them.”     “What!” I exclaimed. In a hoarse and trembling whisper, I went on: “Veronica, are you crazy? What if somebody sees them?”     “Who’s going to see them?” she asked. Then there passe...

17 WHEN MY MOTHER came to pick me up, she was excited and talkative. She had been shopping for Christmas, and among other things she had bought me a new outfit to wear during the holidays: new pants, shirt, socks, and sweater. She insisted that I try everything on as soon as we got home. She followed me upstairs to my bedroom in the attic, talking happily about how cute I was going to look and how...

16 THE SKY WAS QUITE DARK on the day that Veronica invited me to her house to play. It was a Saturday. Veronica called at noon. My mother drove me to her house and said that she would be back to pick me up before dinner. After I had taken my hat and coat and gloves off and said hello to Mrs. McCall, Veronica led me to the playroom in the basement.      “This is the playroom,” she said.     “It’s n...

     “The story’s pretty much the same,” she said. “Except it hasn’t got such a happy ending.” She pulled a battered blue-covered paperback book from her back pocket and looked around to see if she might get caught with it. “That part at the end where they all get together for dinner and everybody’s happy again isn’t in here at all.” She gave me a big wink, tapped the book with her index finger, a...

15 ALTHOUGH work on the play seemed to go along pretty well, I couldn’t shake the conviction that King Lear was going to get me into some kind of trouble. I had the kind of indistinct foreboding that, on a sunny day, warns a clamdigger on Bolotomy Bay that a storm is approaching.     It was a gloriously sunny day, an unseasonably warm day for December, almost a balmy day, when Spike walked home fr...

14 CLARISSA took to her work with wholehearted determination, though she seemed to have no confidence in her abilities at all. Whenever I gave her a job to do, she would begin stroking her muff and looking at the floor. She’d tell me that it sounded much too hard for her, but that she knew how much I was counting on her, and so she’d try, so long as I’d agree not to be angry with her if she couldn...

13 I ALSO ENGAGED the help of Matthew Barber. Matthew wasn’t enthusiastic at first. In fact, he was convinced that the production was going to be a farce.     “Peter,” he said, “all of you are going to look like a bunch of idiots when this hits the boards.”     “‘Hits the boards’?” I asked.     “That’s theater talk,” he said. “You’re not very familiar with the theater, are you?” he asked.     I th...

12 MRS. GRAHAM’S FIRST SUGGESTION was that I read King Lear . I did. The school used a simplified, abbreviated, optimistic adaptation called The Story of King Lear and His Daughters , published as part of a series called Classics Made Suitable for Boys and Girls. I read and reread the play, and I tortured my parents with recitations from it at the dinner table, at bedtime, first thing in the morni...