Minisinoo Let us begin with the house.
Finished in 1789, upcountry of a slowly expanding New York, it became the retreat of a sour, die-hard Tory after the victory of the Colonies against Mother England. Five subsequent generations of Xaviers have lived there, and ivy has crept all the way to the third story and over the eaves in places. The entryway stones grow dangerously slick in wet weather due to buffing from the passage of many feet, and the main banister is sanded smooth from the slide of countless hands. Lead-glass panes in older windows have settled from the pull of gravity across two hundred years, the stables were built as an add-on to the main house in an age when no one dreamed of the automobile, and the current garage was once the carriage house. Aside from the main residence, there are servants' quarters, a gatekeeper's shack, and a boathouse.
The last Xavier to occupy the house -- the last Xavier who ever would -- had a British accent and British education that would have made his five-times-removed ancestor proud. But the plebian uses to which he put his venerable family mansion would have sent the poor man spinning in his grave.
It was one more private school in a county full of them: boarding schools where the offspring of upper-class American families received (or perhaps suffered) the same sort of education offered in similar boarding schools in Merry Ol' England. Literature, math, Latin, French, history, a little dance, a little music, riding lessons, and -- most of all -- training in the fine art of social snobbery and emotional cruelty.
But this particular school was not of that stripe. Beyond the iron gate and nondescript sign, up the gravel lane, past the trimmed hedges and carefully cleaned reflecting pool, lay a school for a very particular kind of student. "Gifted Youngsters" the sign advertised, and the neighbors took that for mere flattery: select parents with the right number of digits in their bank account could have a "gifted" child if they paid the yearly tuition. And the headmaster, the last Xavier, was content to let them think so.
Yet his students were gifted, and a quirk of DNA had bestowed upon them abilities that respected neither bank account nor the purity of a WASP parentage. They were few in number, but that -- the headmaster hoped -- would change. Initially, only five young people lived there, and two were enrolled at nearby universities, coming to the house only on weekends. Of the younger three, the eldest could have graced any of the other local boarding schools without raising an eyebrow. He had the fine profile, sandy hair, narrow nose and height of his British cousins in the House of Lords across the great Atlantic lake, and a private jet that could fly him there in ten hours or less. His surname said old money, American royalty like the Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Roosevelts -- Warren Worthington, III. His family owned a penthouse overlooking Central Park, and a private residence larger than Xavier's out on Long Island. That he also possessed a pair of perfectly functional feathered white wings -- spanning sixteen feet at full extension -- and the proportional strength and fine eyesight of a bird of prey was an ill-kept secret that made him popular at the right kind of society parties among his bored and jaded contemporaries. Wealth excused, even encouraged, a multitude of eccentricities.
Of the elder two students, one was also a member of New York society, if from a few rungs down the class ladder. Her shoes were imported leather from Italy and her dresses had designer names on the label, but she bought them at Bergdorf Goodman; they weren't tailor-made. Nonetheless, her mother held membership in the Annandale-on-Hudson chapter of DAR, and her pedigree had names that boasted a noble title in front, as well as a British spelling: Grey. The dark auburn hair, however, came from a Scottish girl, one Mary Jane Duncan, collateral descendant of Shakespeare's king in MacBeth -- albeit a good deal more historical than the bard's characters. It was that ancestor's son whom this young woman admired most, and in fact, whose profession she had chosen to pursue: the healing arts. Dr. Nathaniel Grey would have been pleased, if perhaps somewhat perplexed to see his granddaughter reading a copy of Cecil's Essentials suspended in midair while she took notes with her right hand and held a sandwich in the left. For the hopeful Doctor-to-be Jean Grey, the power of mind over matter meant more than willing herself to stay awake for an all-night study session.
The other three students at Xavier's school were irredeemably middle or working class. The second of the elder two was the son of a nuclear physicist who'd fallen head-over-heels for a tree-hugging environmentalist and given up his research to run an organic farm outside Deerfield, Illinois. Too much radiation, perhaps, had altered the father's genes, producing a child with a bestial physique but a brilliant mind, and Henry McCoy could be found climbing the mansion walls at odd hours while muttering select quotes of Donne or Hawking, depending on his mood. One of the three younger boys wasn't American at all, but an Southern Italian whose father had moved to Genoa to work the docks, and died there in an industrial accident. The child had gone insane as a result of foreseeing the event -- and not being able to stop it. He'd been graced (or cursed) to see past, present, and future in infinite variation, like a modern-day Nostradamus. It might have earned him a Special Study assignment from the Vatican, had Xavier not found him first. But Francesco Placido wasn't a prophet. He was a mutant.
All of them were mutants, including the headmaster himself. Charles Francis Xavier had been born with the ability to pick up the thoughts of those around him, even to control them. He was, arguably, the most powerful mutant on the planet.
But this isn't a tale about Charles Xavier. It's a tale about the third of those middle-class students -- the one who'd been enrolled first of all. Son of an Air Force pilot and a second-generation Irish-Italian immigrant, he had, at seventeen, blasted a hole through the bathroom wall of his gym on prom night, and thus blasted his way into national attention and a blurb on the cover of The National Enquirer, right next to "Don Juan-Son: making love keeps me young says Nash Bridges hunk." Thankfully, he never saw that copy.
But Charles Xavier saw it.
It was carried into him by his maid on his breakfast tray, right along
with his morning grapefruit, toast, tea, and The New York Times.
Twelve hours later, Xavier was knocking on the front door to a little
ranch-style house in the San Diego burbs, 1569 Maple Lane. Thus,
it was chance, yellow journalism, and a bored maid in the grocery
checkout line that made Scott Summers the first student at Xavier's
School for Gifted Youngsters.
Jean Grey finally spoke more than three words to the future Cyclops on the day he hit her car.
With his racing bike.
Of the pedal-variety.
He was coming down the hill towards the mansion after his morning five-mile-ride, while Jean was headed out to Columbia's teaching hospital to do more lab research for her dissertation. It was an overcast Wednesday morning, not raining yet but looking to start soon, the air moist and heavy with a fine mist that had covered the windshield. Jean glanced down to hit the wiper blades once, to clear the glass. She looked at the wrong time. And he wasn't looking where he was going, and going far faster than he'd needed to be, caught up in the thrill of wind and speed. He saw her car too late.
He tried to stop but the momentum was too much, and it had rained all the previous day. Thin racing wheels slid in black New York mud. At least he had the presence of mind to get his feet out of the pedal clips and leap off before the bike smashed into the front of Jean's car. Thus, he didn't smash into the front of Jean's car with the bike. Instead, he landed on the hood and rolled over the top to smash into the ground on the other side. The impact knocked off his visor.
Jean Grey leapt out to kneel in the gravel and mud beside him, shouting, "Oh, my God!" over and over, even as he said, "Christ, I'm so sorry! I didn't even see you! Are you all right?" He winced in evident pain, but kept his eyes shut.
Jean was fine but her car's front end wasn't. And neither was Scott. His arm was bent at an angle that could only indicate it was broken, there were scratches all over him, and a tell-tale dribble of impact blood, forced out of nose and ears and even tear ducts. She could actually see his eyes as his visor was lying about five feet away, covered in muck. He tried to feel around for it with the arm that wasn't broken.
She grabbed it and said, "Don't move!" checking him to be sure nothing else had broken (his back, for instance). Nothing had. She forgot and asked him to open his eyes so she could check the pupils for concussion. Even lying on the muddy ground, hurt and suffering, he managed to laugh. "I don't really think you want me to do that."
It made her smile, but he couldn't see that with his eyes screwed up tighter than an old maid's disapproving mouth, so she said, "I think you're right. Here's your visor. Well, maybe you don't want it. It's kind of a mess."
He took it anyway, but didn't put it on, and she helped him to sit up. She knew who he was even if she'd never talked to him at length before. It would be hard to live at Xavier's new-born institute for 'gifted youngsters' (did she still qualify as a 'youngster' at almost twenty-six?) and not know Scott Summers, even if she'd only been there two months. It was even harder not to notice him, especially now, with a bare face.
It should be illegal for a boy to be that pretty.
Down, Jean, she told herself. He's a kid. And the closest thing the professor would ever have to a son. Definitely off limits.
So Jean Grey bundled Scott Summers into her Toyota, and his mangled bike into her trunk, then pointed the vehicle back towards the mansion and the infirmary in the sub-basement. She and Hank McCoy set the arm and cleaned him up while he apologized (profusely) all over again for wrecking her car and making her late. Once they got past the apologies and the setting of the arm, they laughed about the whole thing. There was a certain irony, Scott said, in managing to get into the first car wreck of his life (on a bike no less) by hitting a medical doctor, even if only one in training. At least he'd had instant first aid.
Jean never did make it to the hospital that day.
And five years later, Scott Summers would hit her car again -- but that time on purpose, from behind, on a bike of a different variety, and without leaving a human-sized dent in it. In both cases, he got her attention.
Jean Grey referred to their love affair as an accidental interception of fate.
Go on to Chapter 1: Phantoms in Westchester