Conner's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 1: The Road Down from Saint-Aubin
The bell in the chapel tower at the Institut Saint-Aubin had rung at six o’clock every morning for eight years, and on the first morning it did not ring for him, Conner Morris woke at a quarter to six anyway.
He lay still and listened for what was missing. No doors banging along the corridor. No Herr Brandt’s shrill whistle sounding outside the dormitory. No boys cursing in five languages as they fumbled for socks. Just a thrush somewhere in the linden trees and the faint sound of fisherman’s boat motor on Lac Léman.
Graduation had been the day before. Most of the others had been collected Mercedes sedans and a Rolls with Saudi flags on the fenders and even a helicopter for Marc boy whose father owned a steel foundry. Mothers in Hermès scarves had cried into the shoulders of sons who were taller than them now. Fathers had shaken Brandt’s hand and looked relieved.
No one had come for Conner. He had not expected anyone.
He got up, stripped the bed and remade it with clean bedding. Tight hospital corners as he had done every morning since he was ten years old. He did this without thinking, which was the whole point. Eight and a half years of discipline by masters who believed that a boy who did not make a bed correctly could not be trusted to do anything important correctly.
Somewhere along the way the discipline had stopped being something required and had become what he simply was; the way a river follows the shape of its banks.
He had turned nineteen in April, the same week the telegram came from New York.
REGRET INFORM WALTER MORRIS DECEASED 11 APRIL STOP PEACEFUL STOP LETTER FOLLOWS STOP HOLLIS
The letter that followed ran to four pages and had been written by Mr. Arthur Hollis of Hollis, Wren & Batterman, who had managed the Morris family’s affairs since before Conner was born. It explained that the funeral had been held quickly in accordance with his grandfather’s wishes. That it had been judged better for Conner to complete his final term. That upon his graduation several trusts would come under his direction, subject to certain advisory provisions which Mr. Hollis would be pleased to explain at his convenience.
He was wealthy.
Conner did not really understand the wealth. Oh, he understood the arithmetic very well; he had taken advanced mathematics up to differential equations from Monsieur Delacroix. What he did not understand was what the money was for. For almost nine years his life had been bells and studies and examinations. Money had been something that arrived like the weather, and was spent by other people on his behalf.
Time, he had finally decided. For him, the money was time.
Other kids his age, in Ohio and in Marseille and in Hamburg, would spend the next fifty years selling their time to someone else so that they could eat. They would sell eight hours to purchase food and shelter and Ford sedans. His grandfather and great grandfather had sold their hours a long time ago so a kid they didn’t even care to have around could sit on a stone wall in Switzerland and wonder what next.
The bed made, he packed the Swiss army surplus ruck he bought two summers ago on a rare outing in Zürich. Into it went: three shirts, two pairs of trousers, underwear, a heavy wool sweater his grandfather (probably his secretary) had sent last Christmas along with his passport and an American Express credit card, a shaving kit, a pocket knife, a leather notebook with two hundred blank pages, two fountain pens, a bottle of ink wrapped in a sock, a paperback Montaigne in French with the spine broken in four places, a German road atlas of Europe.
The guitar required some thought. It was a Spanish classical guitar, a good one, made in Granada. He had learned on it under Señor Albéniz who had taught him that the fingers must be made intelligent through repetition and that the brain was a busybody and must kept away from the music.
He carried it down to the kitchens.
Old Matthieu was already at work, as he had been every morning since the late 1950s. Matthieu had taught Conner to cook. He had been a boy who amassed historic amounts of demerits. The kitchen was punishment. He had learned because he was endlessly curious about everything. He learned about baking and simmering, poaching and braising when the other boys were out in the commons playing football. Old Matthiew had taught him that a good omelet is a matter of heat and that you salt the water for pasta until it tastes of the sea, and that you never, ever apologize for food you cook.
“You are leaving,” Matthieu said, in French, not turning around.
“Yes, sir.”
“No car.”
“I’m walking.”
Matthieu grunted his disapproval.
Conner held out the guitar case. “For your granddaughter, sir. She liked it at the fête.”
The old man turned and looked at him for a long moment. He wiped his hands on his apron and gently took the guitar...
“Wait,” he said. He disappeared into the pantry and came back with a paper parcel tied with string. Bread, still warm. A wedge of Gruyère. Two apples. A small, flat bottle with no label.
“For the train. The bottle is for when you are sad.”
“I’m never sad.”
“You will be. It’s the way of the world.” Matthie hugged him hard, and turned back to the ovens, and that was that.
The headmaster was waiting at the front gate.
Herr Brant was spare man, devoid of humor, who also taught Latin and Greek and deportment to generations of the sons of the wealthy. It had taken Conner three years to realize that Brandt did not hate him. It took another two to realize that the cold, relentless correction Brandt applied to him, every demerit given, every misspoken accent corrected, was the only form of love the man knew how to give.
He did not offer his hand. He looked Conner up and down: the leather jacket, the backpack, the hiking boots.
“You are walking to Geneva.”
“Yes, sir.”
“It is twenty-two kilometers.”
“Yes, sir.”
“We could have driven you in the school car.”
“Walking is more fun.”
Brandt frowned at that. Behind his spectacles, his eyes were the color of old dishwater and very sharp.
“You have been given a very dangerous thing, young Morris. Not the money. Money is only money. You have been given choice. Most men never have to choose what their life is for. Hunger chooses for them. Their children choose for them.” He tapped the air the way he tapped the blackboard. “You get to choose for you now. That is the whole of your inheritance. Do not waste it being comfortable.”
Conner did not know what to say to that, so he said, “Thank you, sir.”
Brandt nodded once. Then he did something he had never done. He reached up, because Conner was a full head taller, and straightened his collar.
“Go,” he said. “Before I become sentimental. It is unbecoming at my age.”
The road down from Saint-Aubin wound through the vineyards in long, lazy switchbacks, and Conner took it at the steady pace he had learned from the mountain runs, the pace you could hold all day.
Conner’s mind stayed on the school:
He was eleven. The young lawyer had brought him across the Atlantic in a plane, then on a train from Le Havre to Paris and another to Geneva, and a big black car had brought them up the switchback road through the vineyards to gray stone buildings that stood on a hill above the lake. The lawyer had shaken his hand in the front hall, as though Conner was a business associate, and said, “Be good, Conner. Work hard. They’ll make something of you,” and got back into the black car and gone down the hill, and he stood in the doorway and watched it go.
He did his best not to cry. He had been told it was unbecoming.
The next afternoon there was the first meeting of the new boys in the Latin room, a cold, high-ceilinged classroom with the lake glittering far below its tall windows. There were eleven of them, all aged eleven or twelve, dressed in brand-new navy blazers that were slightly too big for them. At the front of the room, behind a high wooden lectern, stood a man with steel spectacles. He introduced himself as Herr Doktor Brandt, headmaster and master of Latin, Greek. He started by going around the room asking each boy, in turn, to stand and state his name, his country, and his father’s profession in English.
“Albrecht von Hessler. Germany. My father is a banker.”
“Sit.”
“Pierre-Henri Dufour. France. My father is in the Assembly.”
“Sit.”
“Faisal bin Khalid. Saudi Arabia. My father is a minister.”
“Sit.”
“Morris.”
Conner stood.
He had been dreading this moment from the start, dreading it because the true answer to the third question was that his father had taken his mother sailing off the Mystic one July afternoon and they had not come back. That was all. It was the most unspeakable thing in his world and he could not say it now, in a cold room, to a man with hard gray eyes, in front of ten boys whose fathers were bankers and ministers and still alive.
He opened and what came out was:
“My name is Conner Morris. America. My father is a lighthouse keeper.”
The room went quiet.
“A lighthouse keeper,” said Herr Brandt.
“Yes, sir.” He could not stop now. The whimsy had broken the surface and the rest came unstoppable. “In Patagonia. At the very bottom of the world. It’s the loneliest lighthouse on earth. There’s no one else on the island but him and a colony of penguins and a sea lion called Admiral Horatio. My father talks to the sea lion in the evenings. He says it’s the only one who understands him. He sent me here because he says there are no schools in Patagonia, only penguins, and penguins can’t teach Latin.” He paused. “They can’t hold the chalk.”
One of the boys in the back row made a smothered noise.
Herr Brandt looked at him for a very long time over the top of his steel spectacles. Conner stood by his scarred oak desk with his hands trembling at his sides and his face burning, waiting to be destroyed.
“Sit down, Morris,” said Herr Brandt at last, very quietly.
Conner sat.
Brandt moved on to the next boy. He said nothing more about it. The lesson went on: the first declension, puella, puellae, puellae, puellam, puellā. And at the end of it, as the boys filed out into the corridor, Brandt said, without looking up from his lectern:
“Morris. A moment.”
The others went. Conner stood in front of the lectern. Brandt finished writing something in a small black notebook, closed it, and put down his pen.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “you will bring me a single sentence, in Latin, on a sheet of paper. It will be the true answer to my question.” He looked up. “You will not say it aloud. You will not show it to anyone else. You will give it to me and I will read it and that will be the end of it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It will take you most of the evening. Your Latin is very poor. Use the dictionary.”
It took him until eleven o’clock that night, by torchlight under the blanket in the new-boys’ dormitory, with the dictionary propped on his knees. He wrote it out six times before he had it right. In the morning he handed it to Herr Brandt at the lectern, folded in half, and did not wait to see him read it.
Pater meus et mater mea in mari mortui sunt, cum duos annos natus essem.
My father and my mother died in the sea, when I was nine years old.