The Lost Story

I spent my K-12 years in diocesan catholic schools. Though there was nothing posh or ultra privileged about my education I have a certain affinity to stories about private schools. Private school literature can be separated into two distinct groups. The first is about Catholics being brought up in strict middle class Catholic schools where the clergy mocked and beat you. The second is about America’s thriving post WWII Northeast boarding school culture. The boarding school genre is by far the most popular and every couple of years another movie or book revisits this familiar battleground (Dead Poets Society, Catcher in the Rye, Old School).

Yet, the best story ever written about private schools, and in this case private boarding schools is a story that I read numerous times in grade school but have never been able to locate again. When I was in 7th and 8th grade at Aquinas School, late 1980s, there was a cart full of paperbacks that students were encouraged to pick off of for silent reading periods. On this cart was an anthology of American contemporary short stories. The word contemporary is a bit misleading here because like most things at Aquinas School (and most catholic schools) the library and most material was donated. Thus the “contemporary” title was probably describing a book written in the 1960s.

In this particular anthology was a story about a young man attending a boarding school north of Richmond, Virginia. The crux of the story revolved around a student who cheats during a translation portion of a Latin examination. I remember that the translation dealt with Roman engineers building temporary bridges so troops could cross rivers and streams. The story had wonderful inner dialogue and may have been narrated in the first person. After the exam releases the suspense and tension rise to a fever pitch as the student is called to the headmaster’s office to be discovered and then sent back to his room as his father is sought. The climax of the story is the father confronting the son, clearing out his room and the long, silent ride back home.

There are a thousand more details that I remember about this story but I won’t belabor the reader with a story I couldn’t tell you the title of or the author. The fact is that I loved this story. I'm not going to psychoanalyze why, but it really moved me. For whatever reason it has been on my mind lately and I thought I would share this memory in the off chance that one of you might help me figure it out. I have tried a million different ways to Google the plot in hopes of finding the story, but to no avail.