I loved playing with the team, working out in the cool fall afternoons, completing a perfect series of passes with the forward line. Hockey was about the only thing that made boarding at Huntington Hill bearable. Actually, center forward had been my position until Maddy had decided she wanted it, and beat me out. Scandal or not, Maddy’s sudden departure made me very happy because they played me in her old position. Nonetheless, for that very rich woman Randolph Nicholson, the new headmaster, waived a rule that had never been broken during the tranquil thirty-five-year reign of Miss Dunning and Miss Kroll. Maddy’s leaving had been something of a scandal because of a strictly enforced Huntington Hill rule prohibiting parents from withdrawing their children after term began. They put me back on because Maddy Hansen’s mother married an Englishman and sailed off to England on a honeymoon, taking Maddy with her.
But at Huntington Hill, it was the day before the second hockey game of the season, and they had put me back on the team. And in a few weeks, the names Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Baines Johnson would be posted in every polling booth in America. In Jackson, Mississippi, the public schools were integrated without violence.
The Warren Commission had just announced that a single gunman, not a conspiracy, had assassinated John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Our friendship began on a clear, crisp October after- noon one month after the start of senior year.
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