Remembering the beauties and joys of life at a Rhode Island school

BY ALIX OHLIN

I'm a wanderer from a family of wanderers. My parents left the countries they grew up in, as did most of my grandparents, and even relatives from the generation before that. I myself have lived in at least 20 different houses since I left home at the age of 16. So when I think about the places I love, they are all, inevitably, places I have left behind. I guess it's not surprising, then, that my favorite place of all is one built with temporary residents in mind: a boarding school in Rhode Island.

Several years ago, fresh out of graduate school and struggling to finish my first novel, I applied for the position of writer-in-residence at Portsmouth Abbey, a Catholic high school located just north of Newport. The position offered room and board, a stipend, and time to write. It was, by definition, temporary: New writers-in-residence were brought in every year. I knew nothing about boarding schools, Catholic or otherwise, and had never been to Rhode Island. The dean who gave me directions to the interview told me to drive south from Providence onto Aquidneck, "the island part of Rhode Island." It had never before occurred to me that most of the state was not an island. I realized that I had no idea what to expect.

It was a hot June day when I turned onto the country lane that leads off Route 114 to the Abbey, and I rolled down the windows as I slowed down. I drove through stone gates onto a curved road that skirted a wide lawn before wending toward the school buildings. I noticed hydrangeas blooming, big, sloppy blue flowers dropping their petals casually to the ground, and then I saw the water.

I grew up in the suburbs, in a neighborhood that could be described as well kept and comfortable but not, I can safely say, gorgeous, and there are times when seeing an area of intense natural beauty causes me physical pleasure that is startlingly close to pain, yet not any less pleasurable for that. This is how I felt when I first saw Narragansett Bay spreading out below the campus, and I'll never forget the starkly graceful curve of its rocky beach. In the distance, I could make out sailboats, and the strands of the Mount Hope suspension bridge lifting over the water.

The campus itself didn't look the way I'd imagined a New England boarding school would. The buildings were dark brown and modernist, with an air of restraint that seemed almost Japanese. I would later learn they were the work of Pietro Belluschi, the Italian-born architect who also designed the Juilliard School at Lincoln Center and, with Walter Gropius, the Pan Am Building. Built of redwood and fieldstone, with weathered copper roofs, Belluschi's 11 low-slung buildings stood grouped around a rectangle of manicured grass—not a quadrangle but a holy lawn. Belluschi wanted to create a sense that the buildings were "hugging the ground," growing out of the surrounding landscape rather than dominating it. At the heart of the campus was the Church of St. Greg­ory the Great, a bold, octagonal, virtually windowless structure. The fact that I could not see inside it seemed to me emblematic, that first day, of how little I knew of the place as a whole. As I got out of my car, I saw a man crossing the campus in a long black robe. I understood, then, that the ground markers I was walking past were the tombstones of Abbey monks.

Strangely enough, though the environment was exotic to me, though I was an outsider to everything it represented, I felt immediately drawn to the place. Maybe it was the swoop of the bay and the smell of the breeze. Maybe it was that I was out of school and unemployed, and every other job I'd applied for had fallen through. When I was offered the job at the Abbey, I accepted right away.

Portsmouth Abbey was founded in 1926 by Rev. Hugh Diman, who had earlier, as an Episcopalian, established St. George's School in Newport before converting to Catholicism and setting up a new school to showcase his new faith. Portsmouth was first a priory, then expanded to an abbey—the distinction has to do with the number of resident monks and their governance—in 1969. Notable students have included Robert and Edward Kennedy, John Gregory Dunne, and Christopher Buckley. At one time, the monks made up the majority of the faculty, but now there are many lay teachers as well as lay coaches and administrators, and assorted other hangers-on.

Raised as I was among wanderers who had left behind, in their travels, any sense of formal religion, I found the Catholic environment puzzling. I was taken aback, but also touched, the first time people shook my hand in church and said, "Peace be with you." I was perplexed by terms like Ordinary Time, which appeared on the weekly academic calendar. What on earth was Ordinary Time? Would somebody tell me when the time was no longer ordinary? For some reason I was afraid to ask, and I never did learn what it meant.

Most fascinating of all was meeting the Benedictine monks. Written in the sixth century, the rule of St. Benedict sets out guidelines for monastic life, based on principles of work, prayer, study, obedience, and community. These weren't cheese-making or wine-producing monks, nor were they silent. They struck me as an intellectual group, enthusiastic and beloved teachers. In some ways, they were more worldly than I expected. The youngest monk, known to be a fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, would sometimes watch that show on the communal television in the boys' dorm lounge. Another wore a football jacket over his habit and smoked like a fiend, hacking wetly between puffs. 

Many of the monks were artistic. Some wrote poetry; others played music. Some had been out in the world, working as parish priests, and were very sociable. One monk, a painter, had joined the local arts guild and took me to a monthly meeting as his guest. After the meeting, some female guild members invited us out for a drink. To my surprise, the monk wanted to go. So I found myself at the bar of a seafood restaurant with the monk and two leather-skinned, hard-drinking smokers who were making wry jokes about being recovering Catholics. If the monk was offended, he didn't show it. He ordered a Virgin Mary. I went to get it for him—monks don't carry cash—and a guy at the bar hit on me.

"I'm with the monk," I said, scandalized. He shrugged, seemingly undeterred. Eventually I had to get the monk home for Vespers, and he reluctantly said his goodbyes. Then I drove him out of the bar parking lot, past the strip mall with the grocery store and the bank, down the quiet, dark lane to the Abbey.

What the monks made of me, I have no idea. And I was not, at the time, quite sure what to make of myself. Soon after my arrival, the dean who'd interviewed me recommended Thornton Wilder's ridiculous, charming novel Theophilus North, in which a young, disaffected teacher meanders onto Aquidneck Island and spends the summer in Newport. (It was made into an equally silly movie, Mr. North, in the 1980s, starring future ER-doctor Anthony Edwards, Robert Mitchum, and Lauren Bacall.) Despite the silliness, I found a great deal of resonance between my life and this book. Theophilus North is a wanderer like me, a temporary sojourner. Like Theophilus, I was at a strange juncture in my life. A lot of things were up in the air: my professional future, my personal life, my supposed book that kept refusing to take form.

Amid all this uncertainty, the structured environment of the boarding school appealed to me greatly. Walking to class six days a week in their blazers and cable-knit sweaters, through the early-morning chill, the students struck me as quaintly, almost impossibly wholesome. (I know they weren't all completely wholesome—the infractions for which they were sternly punished witnessed to that—but they were miles away from any high school students I'd encountered before, including myself.) After school, they headed to lacrosse practice or drama rehearsal, then to dinner, then did their homework and went to bed. They were so disciplined. The first day I taught my creative writing class, the students stood up when I entered the room. That freaked me out. I thought they were going to riot, or maybe sing.

"What's going on?" I said.

They all looked a little embarrassed and muttered things like, "We do it for the monks" and "I guess it's kind of old-fashioned," before sitting quietly down and waiting for me to teach them something.

I'm not sure what, if anything, I did teach them (they breezed, undaunted, through assignments that I now realize ranged from ambitious to harebrained, from constructing impromptu sestinas to writing a festival of 10-minute plays in two weeks), but I learned a great deal, as they explained the school to me. In so doing, they allowed me to be part of it, just as they were, even though we were all just passing through. Alteration is in the nature of a school, as its population constantly turns over, and yet continuity prevails. Everyone's transient, and everyone's permanent, too. A traditional school like Portsmouth Abbey, where students wear blazers to class and attend mass, probably looks, of a Monday morning, very much the way it did 20 or 50 years ago, though the students themselves are different.

Which is probably why I would see, in my walks around campus, so many former students returning. They were always coming for reunions or getting married in the church or even just showing up because they were in the neighborhood. When these alumni came back, they could actually see their younger selves in a way that most of us can't. Look at those students, they'd say to their families. They might as well have been saying, Look at me, look at my former self. Their memories were made concrete, embodied. A school creates this sense of time that doesn't pass, or time that moves but also stays in place, like river water. It isn't ordinary time at all.

I'm sure that part of the Abbey's charm for me came from participating in it as an outsider. I didn't have what those women at the seafood restaurant bar called "Catholic baggage," and I didn't have all the duties of a regular teacher, either. I was an observer, and that's a comfortable position for me, as it is for most writers.

And as appealing as it all was, my love of the place didn't result in my having a religious conversion, or even a conversion to boarding school life. Nor did it resolve all the uncertainties of my future, though I did, in my time there, finish my book. But I found myself experiencing great joy in my temporary life at the Abbey: the beauty of the campus, the kindness of the people, the steady, structured erosion of the school days, terms, and year. Rather than representing an end to my wandering, this period helped me to feel rooted in that wandering—to feel at home in my ever-changing existence, as all the moments in our lives can have value, despite how quickly they pass by us.

When Theophilus North first arrives on Aquidneck, he gets out of his car and starts quoting Goethe to the locals. (It really is a peculiar book.) One person he talks to asks him if he's all right. He answers, "It's a beautiful day. It's a beautiful place. I'm a little light-headed. Sadness is just around the corner from happiness." So too, at times, can skepticism be just around the corner from belief, and exile from belonging, and transience from permanence. I lived around the corner from all these things when I was at the Abbey. I would never belong to that place, but I loved it, and though I always knew that I would leave, I was very sad, in the end, to go.

Alix Ohlin is the author of The Missing Person, a novel, and Babylon and Other Stories.

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