Old School (2 page)

I shan’t forget it, Montague repeated. I’m forever in your debt, he added coldly.

Aren’t we all, said Ashley, pouring herself another scotch. She stared at the falling snow. Whatever would we do without the good doctor’s services?

You bitch, said Montague. You perfectly beautiful bitch.

Though Bill hadn’t let me read the rest of his novel—he was letting it settle before the final polish—I doubted that the hunting party’s meticulously described rifles would stay locked in their cases for long.

Bill’s people weren’t only genteel, they were gentile. So, I assumed, was Bill. He had bright green eyes and pale skin that flushed easily in heat or cold. His manner was courtly, amused, and for some reason he seemed especially amused by me, which I liked and also didn’t like. He played varsity squash. It had never occurred to me that he might be Jewish until his father came to visit, the spring of the previous year. Mr. White was a widower and lived in Peru, where he owned a textile company. He had Bill invite me for dinner at the village inn, and seeing the two together produced a certain shock: both of them tall and fair and green-eyed, Mr. White an older version of his son in every respect save the Brooklyn in his voice and an almost eager warmth. He referred often to their family, and it soon became obvious that they were Jewish. I had roomed with Bill for two years by then and he’d never given me the slightest hint. Though I practiced some serious dissembling of my own, I’d never suspected it of Bill. I thought of him as honest, if aloof. Who was he, really? All that time together, and it turned out I didn’t know him any better than he knew me.

Mr. White gave us a good feed that night. He was a friendly, comfortable man, but I was still trying to catch up and I’m sure I looked at him with more than polite curiosity. If Bill noticed, he didn’t let on and afterward gave no sign of feeling compromised by my knowledge that he was not who he seemed to be. That made me wonder if maybe he’d never meant to seem not Jewish—if my surprise was simply the effect of my own narrowness and anxiety.

I didn’t really believe that, of course. I believed that Bill had meant to deceive, and that his aplomb in the face of discovery was not innocence but a further artifice by which he masked his disquiet and, intentionally or not, forced me to probe my own response. Why not? That’s how I would’ve carried it off. We never talked about any of this, naturally. For a while I worried that Bill might hold what I knew against me, but he didn’t seem to. Maybe he was relieved to have someone know. That I could understand, very well.

When the time came to choose roommates for our final year we didn’t even bother to discuss it. Of course we would room together. Nobody got along better, even if real friendship eluded us.

Bill was a contender. His characters were stilted but he had confidence and his stories were eventful and closely detailed. Most of the work in
Troubadour
suffered from generality. The more general, the more universal—that seemed to be the guiding principle. Bill’s talent was particularity. How the snow creaked underfoot on a very cold clear day, or what the low white sun looked like through a tangle of black branches. The tackiness of a just-oiled rifle stock, the tearing sound of a bored woman brushing out her long hair in front of a fire. Everything in his work was particular and true except the people. That hurt the longer pieces, but in Bill’s shortest, most implicit stories, and in his occasional poems, the exactitude and poise of his writing could carry you away. He had me worried.

So did Jeff Purcell, known as Little Jeff because we had another Jeff Purcell in our class, his cousin—Big Jeff. In fact Little Jeff wasn’t little and Big Jeff wasn’t big, just bigger than Little Jeff, who resented Big Jeff, partly no doubt for inadvertently imposing this odious nickname on him. Little Jeff was a friend of mine, so like his other friends I called him Purcell.

Purcell habitually kept his arms folded across his chest like a Civil War general in a daguerrotype. This bellicose pose suited him. Under his bristling crew cut he cultivated a sulfurous gift for invective and contempt. He was the Herod of our editorial sessions, poised to strike down every innocent who presumed to offer us a manuscript. He had exacting standards: moral, political, aesthetic. Purcell even flouted the timeless protocol of pretending to admire the work of his fellow editors. At one of our meetings he declared that a story of mine called “Suicide Note” read as if it’d been written
after
the narrator blew his brains out.

Purcell came from a rich, social family, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his stories and poems; or maybe you would. His subject was the injustice of relations between high and low. He had written a ballad about a miner being sent deep into the earth to perish in a cave-in while the mine owner hand-feeds filet mignon to his hunting dogs, cooing to them in baby talk; and his last
Troubadour
piece was an epistolary story in which a general writes congratulatory letters to various grieving women after getting their husbands and sons slaughtered.

You may rejoice for your fallen hero, knowing that his heart was perforated for our glorious cause, and you and your little ones can rest assured that his missing head, wherever it may be, is filled with the pride of sacrifice and radiant memories of the homeland for which he died so eagerly.

This story was, I felt sure, inspired by a certain passage in
A Farewell to Arms,
but when it came up for consideration I bit my tongue and let it go. It wasn’t bad. Cartoonish, of course, like all of Purcell’s work, lurid and overwrought, to be sure, but venomously alive. Anyway, I myself was in debt to Hemingway—up to my ears. So was Bill. We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

All of us owed someone, Hemingway or cummings or Kerouac—or all of them, and more. We wouldn’t have admitted to it but the knowledge was surely there, because imitation was the only charge we never brought against the submissions we mocked so cruelly. There was no profit in it. Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own. Even Purcell kept mum on that subject.

He was a threat. His attack was broad, even crude, but you could feel his discomfort with the cushion he’d been born on, and his fear that it would turn him into one of the fatuous bloodsuckers he wrote about. If he humanized his targets, muted his voice, used a knife instead of a cudgel . . . Yet he didn’t necessarily have to do any of that. In a field of stiffs, one of his cartoons could win for simply being alive.

These, then, were the boys who stood between me and Robert Frost. Of course there were other self-confessed writers in my form, but I’d read their English papers and
Troubadour
submissions and seen nothing to worry me except their desire. So much desire! Why did so many of us want to be writers? It seemed unreasonable. But there were reasons.

The atmosphere of our school crackled with sexual static. We had the occasional dance with Miss Cobb’s Academy and a few other girls’ schools, but these brief affairs only cranked up the charge; and though from day to day we saw the master’s wives, Roberta Ramsey alone had the goods to enter our dreams. The absence of an actual girl to compete for meant that every other prize became feminized. For honors in sport, scholarship, music, and writing we cracked our heads together like mountain rams, and to make your mark as a writer was equal as proof of puissance to a brilliant season on the gridiron.

This aspect of my ambition was obscure to me at the time. But there was another that I did recognize, though vaguely, and almost in spite of myself: the problem of class.

Our school was proud of its hierarchy of character and deeds. It believed that this system was superior to the one at work outside, and that it would wean us from habits of undue pride and deference. It was a good dream and we tried to live it out, even while knowing that we were actors in a play, and that outside the theater was a world we would have to reckon with when the curtain closed and the doors were flung open.

Class was a fact. Not just the clothes a boy wore, but how he wore them. How he spent his summers. The sports he knew how to play. His way of turning cold at the mention of money, or at the spectacle of ambition too nakedly revealed. You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world, that it had already been reserved for them; a depth of ease or, in the case of Purcell and a few others, a sullen antipathy toward the padding that hemmed them in and muffled the edges of life. Yet even in the act of kicking against it they were defined by it, and protected by it, and to some extent unconscious of it. Purcell himself had a collection of first editions you’d almost have to own a mine to pay for.

These things I understood instinctively. I never gave them voice, not even within the privacy of my thoughts, precisely because the school’s self-conception was itself unspoken and thus inarguable. From my first days there I grasped and gratefully entered the dream but at the same time behaved as if I knew better, as in the following instance.

The summer before entering the school I’d worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen crew at a YMCA camp outside Seattle. I was the youngest, and the other guys rode me pretty hard until Hartmut, the chef, saw what was going on and headed them off. He did this obliquely, never defending me directly but bearing down on the hardest kidders by giving them the shit work, the grease trap or the fryolator. Eventually some subliminal sense of cause and effect must have taken hold, because they eased up and then we all got along fine. After dinner, when the kitchen was polished to his satisfaction, Hartmut let us play Tom Lehrer albums on his old portable. Though he didn’t get the jokes, he enjoyed our hilarity. Ah! You boys! You crazy crazy boys!

Hartmut was from Austria. He’d been in the States for many years but his English was eccentric and often ludicrous. He wore an actual chef’s hat and a white uniform that he changed every day. He cooked for those hot-dog-loving kids as if they were royalty—soufflés, pastries of airy lightness, quiches, many-layered tortes. He had great pride and didn’t allow himself to notice when the little pagans made gagging noises over their eggs Benedict.

Pink and thick and strong, Hartmut ran his kitchen like a ship, everything in its place, all orders to be obeyed on the instant. Though he appeared not to have a family, his love for children was obvious and utterly benevolent. He also loved music. When the record player wasn’t blasting out waltzes and light opera, he whistled and sang. Some of his melodies were catchy and stuck in my head. And that’s what landed me in trouble.

I’d been at the school for five or six weeks, no more. I was struggling in my classes but every morning I felt a rush of joy to wake to the bells ringing in the clock tower and go to my window and think, My God! I’m really here! In my pleasure I was whistling a tune of Hartmut’s as I climbed the dormitory stairs after breakfast. Gershon, one of the school handymen, was a few steps ahead of me, carrying a laundry bag on his narrow shoulders. He had a plodding gait even on the level; here on the stairs he barely moved at all. I was afraid I’d bump into him if I tried to pass, so I kept pace a few steps behind, whistling all the while. Gershon gave off a stale smell that I’d whiffed before but never so strongly as in this tight passage.

He slowed even more. I hung back obligingly and continued to whistle, my song resounding pleasantly in the stone stairwell. Then Gershon stopped and turned his long gray face, the laundry bag slumped on his shoulders like a lamb in a Bible illustration. I could hear him breathe, fast and shallow. He said something in what I thought was another language—I knew he was a foreigner of some kind. His too-white teeth clicked as he talked; I watched them with helpless fascination. Then he stopped. He appeared to be waiting for an answer.

Name! he said. Vat your name!

I told him.

Go den! Go! Go!

I nudged past him and went to my room, and by the time classes started I’d written it off as a misunderstanding: the old crab must’ve thought I’d been trying to hurry him. When a prefect called me out of Latin during second period and sent me to the dean’s office, I assumed it was to receive a lecture about my abysmal grades. I was on scholarship, and had been nervously fearing a summons.

I hadn’t met Dean Makepeace yet but I knew who he was: he was Ernest Hemingway’s friend. He closed the door behind me and looked me over without a word of greeting, then motioned me toward the hot seat. He let himself down in the chair behind the desk and began to leaf through a file. Mine, I supposed.

He reeked of tobacco. Most of the masters did. It usually seemed a pleasant, paternal smell, though in my worried state I was nearly sickened by it. Before now I had seen Dean Makepeace only from a distance, at his table in the dining hall or tapping his way across campus, often conducted by an escort of older boys. With his height and his nose and his long black cane he’d appeared regal but benign. At this range he seemed neither. Dense white hairs bristled from his ears and nostrils. Cigarette smoke had tinged his white moustache with yellow, and his suit jacket was smudged with ash. I had the impression that he wasn’t actually reading the file, just occupying himself with it while he decided how to carve me up, or maybe to give me time to feel the full weight of my laziness and ingratitude and the complete disappointment of everyone with hopes for me.

My chair had a high ladder-back that held me bolt upright. Shelves of dark, uniformly bound books rose up on either side, floor to high ceiling. Much as I loved books, there was something unfriendly about these; when I came across Meredith’s poem “Lucifer in Starlight” later that year and read the line
The army of unalterable law,
I thought not of the stars but of those looming tomes. Behind his desk the leaded window was open to the breeze. I heard a burst of laughter from one of the classrooms on the quad. It stopped suddenly.