Old School (19 page)
In early August Arch got a letter from the headmaster’s secretary saying that his apartment was ready. He’d had enough of Margaret and Syracuse, but the thought of returning to the school made him skittish. He put it off until the last possible day, when the faculty was due to assemble for their traditional pre-term conference at the headmaster’s house. Though he’d given himself enough time for the drive, he took a wrong turn outside Worcester on a route he’d travelled for years, then got lost again while backtracking and arrived at the school nearly an hour late. No time for a change of clothes, let alone a shower and shave. He fished a tie from one of the boxes on the backseat, but his fingers were stiff and he kept flubbing the knot. Finally he stopped and looked down the tunnel of leafy trees overhanging the lane. He did not drive away. He adjusted the rearview mirror and coaxed his tie into a perfect knot, then eased himself out of the car. Standing up after all these hours of driving made him lightheaded, and he steadied himself against the roof of the car. It was late afternoon, the air heavy and fragrant with the smell of cut grass. He took his stick out of the back and started up the lane.
Arch heard them well before he got to the house. They were in the headmaster’s garden. Of course—they always gathered for drinks there before getting down to business. It sounded as if they’d been drinking, their voices loud, hilarious. A blue haze of smoke hung over the garden. As he came in under the rose-covered trellis someone yelled Arch!
Ecce homo!
and every head turned.
Arch stopped and looked down the garden to where the headmaster stood by the drinks table with another master. The headmaster said, Late for his own funeral! and everyone laughed, then he put his glass down and came toward Arch with both hands outstretched. Though the headmaster was the younger man, and much shorter, and though Arch was lame and had white hairs coming out of his ears and white stubble all over his face, he felt no more than a boy again—but a very well-versed boy who couldn’t help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words ever written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him.
I cannot begin to thank Catherine Wolff and Gary Fisketjon for the incalculable help they gave me in their many readings of this book; my particular thanks as well to Amanda Urban for her help, and for all her encouragement and support over the years.
Tobias Wolff
OLD SCHOOL
Tobias Wolff lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University. He has received the Rea Award for excellence in the short story, the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize, and the PEN/ Faulkner Award.
His memoir
In Pharaoh’s Army
and his story collections
Back in the World
and
The Night in Question
are available in Vintage paperback, as is
The Vintage Book of American Short Stories
, which he edited.
ALSO BY TOBIAS WOLFF
The Night in Question
In Pharaoh’s Army
This Boy’s Life
Back in the World
The Barracks Thief
In the Garden of the North American Martyrs
ACCLAIM FOR TOBIAS WOLFF’S
OLD SCHOOL
Winner of the Northern California Book Award in Fiction
“Bottomlessly provocative. . . . Wolff has been writing so well for so long that, in a single paragraph, he’ll toss off sketches that a less gifted storyteller might prefer to husband against a rainy day.” —
San Francisco Chronicle
“Wolff’s new novel [is] a compact, beguiling meditation on lost youth and artistic aspiration. . . . His prose, as usual, is beautifully restrained, allowing the narrative to glide along as it celebrates the art of storytelling.” —
The Miami Herald
“It is interesting that so modest, so resolutely un-self-aggrandizing a writer as Wolff should be so adept at capturing the nuances of authorial vanity. . . . [The novel’s] point, which is that telling the truth in fiction—or, more generally, in writing—is both logically impossible and morally essential . . . mirrors Wolff’s own passionate ambivalence about the craft he has practiced so long and so well.” —
The New York Times Book Review
“
An elegant ode to writers, and to writing, from one of our most exquisite storytellers.” —
Esquire
“A compact marvel of a book, with its tale of a paradise gained and lost, its study of a young man’s emerging character and mind, and its look at the subtlest workings of class-consciousness and prejudice in an idyllic, ideal-driven setting. . . .
Old School
. . . takes as its subject the slippery nature of truth and fiction, honesty and seductive delusion. As such, it couldn’t be bettered.” —
The Seattle Times
“Tobias Wolff has made this story about shame and self-discovery come so potently alive on the page; here is writing of the highest caliber, and it fairly takes the breath away.” —
The Sunday Telegraph
“Acute, graceful. . . . Writing, Wolff suggests, can teach you not only a measure of self-knowledge but also the ability to open yourself to an imperfect world.” —
Time
“This slender, exquisitely written novel marries the virtues of the two genres for which Wolff has become famous:
Old School
boasts both the economy and intensity of a great short story and the strong point of view of a memoir. . . . In this stylistically restrained but emotionally devastating book, every sentence is nailed down with rare and terrific precision.” —
Entertainment Weekly
“If you’re a lover of literature and dedicated to the principle of ‘know thyself,’ you cannot help but be changed by this book.” —
Santa Cruz Sentinel
“Rendered with vivid sympathy . . . charm and astuteness. . . . Wolff displays exceptional skill in capturing the small sights and sensations that evoke the whole rarefied world he’s taking us back to.” —
The Atlantic Monthly
“Engrossing and enjoyable from the first page. . . . A complex masterpiece.” —
LA Weekly
“Excellent. . . . Wolff masterfully exhibits not only the literary but also the political atmosphere of the early ’60s through the eyes of a boy who is isolated from it but whose generation will soon inherit it.” —
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“A swift and tender novel.” —
Newsday
“
Old School
has the sweet intricacy of short fiction at the same time that it reads like a memoir. . . . It’s a novel whose brevity is deceptive. It has more thematic richness and emotional complexity than many big fat novels.” —
San Jose Mercury News
“Wolff’s writing is carefully weighted and sparely vivid. . . . [A] superb novel.” —
Financial Times
“Wolff has deftly created a treasure trove of self-reflexive insight about creativity, wrapped into a lyrical, humorous story.” —
The Christian Science Monitor
“Engaging, often hilarious. . . . Wolff is so vivid and loving in his evocation of this lost world that the book feels not like a eulogy but a resuscitation. . . . The real satisfaction in this deeply satisfying book, however, comes from its main character, literature.” —
The New York Sun
“Not a word is wasted in this spare, brilliant novel about the way that reading challenges and forms our lives, and about how one learns to become a writer—and a conscious human being.” —
People
“Painstakingly constructed, beautifully expressed.” —
Portland Tribune
“
[Wolff] has created a world whose reality is so vivid, it will break your heart.” —
The Baltimore Sun
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2004
Copyright
©
2003 by Tobias Wolff
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2003.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Henry Holt and Company, LLC, for permission to reprint an excerpt from the poem “Mending Wall” from
The Poetry of Robert Frost
, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1930, 1939, copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Co., copyright © 1967 by Lesley Frost Ballantine, copyright © 1958 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
“Class Picture,” “On Fire,” and “Frost” previously appeared in slightly different form in
The New Yorker.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Wolff, Tobias, [date]
Old school: a novel / by Tobias Wolff.
p. cm.
1. Preparatory school students—Fiction. 2. Preparatory schools—Fiction. 3. Creative writing—Fiction. 4. Teenage boys—Fiction. 5. New England—Fiction. 6. Authors—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3573.O558O43 2003
813′.54—dc21
2003052930
eISBN: 978-1-4000-9525-4
v3.0
