Late Bloomer a Memoir of School Days

Half a century on, Nat Bickford revisits the predatory advances of two boarding school masters, one at Phillips Exeter, the other at Williston Academy, whose provocative behavior-sadistic in one case; tragic in the other-violated the genteel codes of prep school life in the late 1950's. Less cynical than Catcher in the Rye and more disturbing than A Separate Peace, the narrative benefits from the distance. A distinguished New York lawyer buoyed by the sustaining warmth of a forty-six year marriage, Nat Bickford explores two bewildering relationships that marked his adolescent life. Chilson Leonard-temperamental, demanding and a player of favorites-at Exeter and G. McCall Maxwell-gentle, refined, encouraging and repressed-at Williston powerfully influenced, and nearly ruined Nat's late adolescence. Nat went on to Harvard College and Columbia Law School, a successful career and a rich family life bearing no obvious teenage scars. Yet, the memories remained-unrevealed, unexamined and unresolved until he began sharing them with his wife who encouraged him to explore the separate invasions of Leonard and Maxwell, so at variance with the imagined sanctity of prep school life in the quiet years before the fractious exuberance of the 1960's. Written with restraint and grace, Late Bloomer reflects a time and place long gone, while exploring a theme that is as resonant as ever: the power of teachers to shape, inspire and, occasionally, disturb impressionable minds.