Soldan High School

Soldan High School is the remembered setting of Laura and Jim’s earlier acquaintance and the school where Jim’s brilliance once seemed to promise an extraordinary future. Recalled years later, it holds two sharply different experiences: Jim’s public, energetic prominence and Laura’s anxious sense of being noticed for the brace on her leg. The school thus supplies both the history behind their meeting and the contrast that makes their adult lives feel so different from their adolescent promise.

Identity and Setting

Soldan High School enters the play chiefly through memory rather than as a present-day setting. Tom introduces it while recounting how he came to bring Jim home to dinner; Laura and Jim later piece together their shared past through a class they took there. Its importance lies less in a detailed portrait of the building than in what each character remembers experiencing within it: achievement and recognition for Jim, and physical difficulty and self-consciousness for Laura.

The school also establishes a common history that Jim and Laura had not carried into their adult acquaintance. Tom knew they had attended Soldan together, but did not know whether Jim remembered his sister. Jim’s joking response to the dinner invitation—that he had never thought of Tom as having a family—underscores how little he understood the private life behind his warehouse friendship with Tom. The school’s shared past is therefore present but initially unrecognized, waiting to surface when Jim meets Laura again.

Jim’s High-School Reputation

In Tom’s recollection, Jim was a conspicuous figure at Soldan, remembered as a basketball star, captain of the debating club, president of the senior class and glee club, and male lead in the annual light operas. Tom describes him as possessing Irish good nature and vitality, with a polished appearance, and as seeming to move in a continual spotlight. Even his movement becomes part of the portrait: Jim ran or bounded rather than simply walked, as if he were continually about to defy gravity.

The list of offices, performances, and athletic distinction gives Jim a public identity built from repeated forms of recognition. Tom’s image of him shooting through adolescence at such speed that one might expect him to reach the White House by thirty makes the later outcome more pointed. Six years after leaving Soldan, Jim’s momentum has slowed; he holds a warehouse job not much better than Tom’s. The school memory does not merely establish Jim as a former hero. It sets his youthful promise against the more ordinary position he occupies as an adult.

Laura’s Experience and the Reunion

Laura’s memories of Soldan are quieter and more difficult. She recalls that she and Jim shared a class, and that she came in late on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays because climbing the stairs was hard. She wore a brace on her leg, which clumped so loudly to her that it sounded like thunder. Jim says he never heard it. The exchange brings their memories into direct contrast: what was overwhelming and exposed to Laura barely registered with Jim.

The nickname Blue Roses also comes from their school-era acquaintance. When Laura returned after an attack of pleurosis, she used the medical word to explain what was wrong; Jim mistook it for Blue Roses and continued to call her that whenever he saw her. Laura remembers disliking the girl Jim dated, Emily Meisenbach, whom she regarded as the best-dressed girl at Soldan but not sincere. By the time Laura speaks of her, a personal-section notice says Emily and Jim are engaged, and Laura assumes they must already be married. Soldan’s past therefore contains not only Jim’s public achievements but also Laura’s private admiration, jealousy, and recollection of a name that turned a painful illness into an enduring point of connection.

Narrative Significance

Soldan High School acts as a measuring ground for change. Jim’s remembered prominence supplies the standard against which Tom measures his slowed progress after graduation; Laura’s recollection of the stairs shows how the same school could be experienced not as a stage for achievement but as a place where ordinary movement became a source of embarrassment. The contrast is not simply between a successful boy and an overlooked girl: their exchange reveals a difference between what Laura felt intensely and what Jim did not notice.

When the former classmates meet again through Jim’s dinner visit, Soldan gives the encounter a history that Tom cannot fully anticipate. Jim’s old nickname, their shared class, and Laura’s recollection of Emily make the visit more than a first introduction. The school connects adolescent memory to adult circumstance, bringing Jim’s former heroic image into contact with his present life and allowing Laura to revisit a relationship whose meaning remained with her long after their school days ended.