In The Garden Of The North American Martyrs by Tobias Wolff Page A

an enormous poster of Adolph Hitler tacked above his desk until a Jewish boy on our hall complained and the dean made him take it down. Jaime kept a copy of Mein Kampf beside his bed like a Gideons Bible and was fond of reading aloud from it in a German accent. He enjoyed practical jokes. Our room overlooked the entrance to the headmaster’s house and Jaime always whistled at the headmaster’s ancient secretary as she went home from work at night. On Alumni Day he sneaked into the kitchen and spiced up the visitors’ mock turtle soup with a number of condoms, unrolled and obscenely knotted. The next day at chapel the headmaster stammered out a sermon about the incident, but he referred to it in terms so coy and oblique that nobody knew what he was talking about. Ultimately the matter was dropped without another word. Just before Christmas Jaime’s mother was killed in a plane crash, and he left school and never returned. For the rest of the year I roomed alone.
    Eugene drew as his roommate Talbot Nevin. Talbot’s family had donated the Andrew Nevin Memorial Hockey Rink and the Andrew Nevin Memorial Library to the school, and endowed the Andrew Nevin Memorial Lecture Series. Talbot Nevin’s father had driven his car to second place in the Monaco Grand Prix two years earlier, and celebrity magazines often featured a picture of him with someone like Jill St. John and a caption underneath quoting one of them as saying, “We’re just good friends.” I wanted to know Talbot Nevin.
    So one day I visited their room. Eugene met me at the doorand pumped my hand. “Well, what do you know,” he said. “Tab, this here’s a buddy of mine from Oregon. You don’t get any farther up in the boondocks than that.”
    Talbot Nevin sat on the edge of his bed, threading snow-white laces through the eyes of a pair of dirty sneakers. He nodded without raising his head.
    â€œTab’s father won some big race last year,” Eugene went on, to my discomfort. I didn’t want Talbot to know that I had heard anything about him. I wanted to come to him fresh, with no possibility of his suspecting that I liked him for anything but himself.
    â€œHe didn’t win. He came in second.” Talbot threw down the sneakers and looked up at me for the first time. He had china-blue eyes under lashes and brows so light you could hardly see them. His hair too was shock-white and lank on his forehead. His face had a molded look, like a doll’s face, delicate and unhealthy.
    â€œWhat kind of race?” I asked.
    â€œGrand Prix,” he said, taking off his shoes.
    â€œThat’s a car race,” Eugene said.
    Not to have heard of the Grand Prix seemed to me evidence of too great ignorance. “I know. I’ve heard of it.”
    â€œThe guys down the hall were talking about it and they said he won.” Eugene winked at me as he spoke; he winked continuously as if everything he said was part of a ritual joke and he didn’t want a tenderfoot like me to take it too seriously.
    â€œWell, I say he came in second and I damn well ought to know.” By now Talbot had changed to his tennis shoes. He stood. “Let’s go have a weed.”
    Smoking at Choate was forbidden. “The use of tobacco in any form,” said the student handbook, “carries with it the penalty of immediate expulsion.” Up to this moment the rule against smoking had not been a problem for me because I did not smoke. Now it was a problem, because I did not want Eugene to have abond with Talbot that I did not share. So I followed them downstairs to the music room, where the choir practiced. Behind the conductor’s platform was a long, narrow closet where the robes were kept. We huddled in the far end of this closet and Talbot passed out cigarettes. The risk was great and the activity silly, and we started to giggle.
    â€œWelcome to Marlboro Country,” I said.
    â€œIt’s