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turnaround that Belvedere’s ill-tempered housemaster was forced to announce before a dining hall full of boys. I was repromoted to the rank of red badge. I learned to “wedel,” a difficult and outmoded downhill maneuver requiring one to wiggle one’s butt side to side while barreling down the slope. (Think Chubby Checker doing the Twist—on skis.) My exes grewincreasingly audacious. One hike included a near-vertical climb up a succession of iron ladders bolted to a rock face, followed by a ten-kilometer ridge walk to a stone hut perched some ten thousand feet above sea level. Derek Berry, a mountain climber allergic to hype, called the trek “fearsome” in his year-end expeditionary review.
    By May 1972, the puncture wound on my left foot had closed, and my verrucas had been eradicated. A star was added to my red badge. My sleep improved, as did my bank shot, and thanks in large part to Woody, I learned to slide down the full length of the Belvedere banister hands-free (though my dismount remained unsteady).
    Graduation took place on the Fourth of July. The commencement speaker, the widow of a distinguished American ambassador, offered her audience some reflections on the nature of courage.
    “Say NO to self-pity,” she urged in a speech that drew a distinction between anxiety and fear. “Fear has an object,” she declared. “Anxiety does not.”
    That difference was lost on me back then, and even now I’m not sure I buy it. Cesar had done a first-rate job fusing those two emotions into a general sense of dread. But where the widow’s talk did hit home was in its closing quotation, an apt, if now overused, line from Nietzsche recently sampled in a ballad by pop singer Kelly Clarkson: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”
    I declared my independence from Aiglon by tearing my school blazer to shreds. It turned out that the gesture of subversion was both ineffectual and misdirected.
R EMISSION
    The same month I said my good-byes to Aiglon, my mother said hers to the Marxist. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had secretly married the man six months before, in the kitchen of Emily Dickinson’s house. (This was before the homestead was turned into a museum.)Exchanging vows in the home of America’s most celebrated spinster? What the hell was she thinking?
    Mom must have had her doubts. She didn’t tell me about the ill-fated union until after she had it annulled. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one inclined to hide roommate problems.
    In August 1972, the two of us returned to New York, where the plimsolls, anoraks, and rucksacks I wore at Aiglon reverted to sneakers, parkas, and backpacks. I no longer had to address my teachers as sir and ma’am . The crossbars disappeared from my sevens and I scuttled my schooner-sail fours, but memories of Cesar persisted.
    He visited at night, in dreams of burning tree limbs and endless free falls, and by day, as well. A few months after leaving Aiglon, I had to sketch a map of Europe, circa 1648, for seventh-grade social studies. (We were finishing up a unit on the Thirty Years War.) To accommodate my completionist tendencies, and with an eye toward extra credit, I crammed as many territories as I could onto my map, no matter how small or remote: Iceland, Cherkassy, the Khanate of the Crimea. So it’s curious that I left a penny-size area at the center of my map untouched and unlabeled. The very spot where I had been teased, burned, whipped, and robbed remained blank, an omission that expressed graphically what I refused to say out loud. I wanted to wipe Cesar off the face of the earth. Hardly a practical solution. I ended up dealing with the lingering rage by transforming my memories into a series of amusing narratives.

    {Courtesy of Edith Kurzweil}
    Me, the year after my year at Aiglon.
    I recounted the whipping as if it were a comic pantomime and told tales of madcap expeditions free of adult supervision. When I revealed to my mother the stuffCesar did to me,