Old School (3 page)

Dean Makepeace laid the file on the desk. Explain yourself, he said.

Well, sir, I was pretty far behind when I got here.

What?

Not to make excuses. I know I need to work harder.

Don’t change the subject. Do you have any idea what that man has been through?

Sir?

You heard me. I am unable to understand how anyone could behave like this to a man in Gershon’s position. Please explain.

Dean Makepeace said all this calmly enough, but I wilted under his gaze. He wasn’t angry. Anger, which I knew to be transient and generally at least part theater, I was used to and could easily bear. What I saw was dislike, which can’t be shrugged off, which abides.

I didn’t mean to hurry Gershon, I said. I’m sorry if he got that impression.

Oh, was
that
it? He wasn’t moving fast enough, so you thought you’d give him a little marching music. Why don’t you strike up the band for me?

Sir?

I want you to sing me what you sang to Gershon.

Well, I was whistling a song. I don’t know the words.

Whistle away, then.

My mouth was so dry I couldn’t get a note out. I made a few false starts and gave up.

Come on. Let’s have it.

I can’t.

You were doing okay this morning, weren’t you? All right—hum the damned thing.

I did. It sounded different, hummed, but I could tell Dean Makepeace recognized it and that this wasn’t helping matters. I stopped and said, Sir, what is this song?

Don’t play dumb with me, boy.

I’m not! I’m not playing dumb. What did I do wrong? The self-pity of this question brought me close to tears.

You say you don’t know what this song is?

I shook my head furiously.

Where did you learn it, then?

A man I worked with. Hartmut. I picked it up from him. The tune.

You must know other songs.

Yes sir.

Many other songs. Yet of all the songs you know, you just happened to whistle this one to Gershon. To
Gershon,
of all people!

I wasn’t whistling
to
him. I was just whistling. And Gershon was there.

Was there some occasion for this outbreak of melody?

Nothing special. I was feeling happy, that’s all.

Dean Makepeace leaned back in his chair. Happy. What were you happy about?

Being here.

He stroked his moustache. You’ll want to be somewhat discreet about that, he said. Honestly, boy, what have you heard about Gershon?

Nothing. I see him around, that’s all.

So you don’t know anything about him?

No sir.

Have you ever heard of the “Horst Wessel Song”?

You mean the Christmas carol?

No, no. The “Horst Wessel Song” is a Nazi marching song, and a very ugly piece of work it is, too. That’s what you were singing. Whistling.

Then it all came home. As a child of the superior, disgusted, victorious nation I had the usual store of images to go with the words Nazi and Jew, and I was putting Gershon’s face to them even before Dean Makepeace began to tell me what had befallen Gershon and his family, of whom none had survived but a daughter who was now in a French mental hospital. As he spoke I felt my eyes tearing up, partly from pity and also because the sadness of the story gave me cover to mourn my own plight, unjustly accused and humiliated by a great man of the school only a few weeks into my first term—a man I’d hoped to study with one day, who might even befriend me.

It was too much. I started to weep—to blubber. My lack of control mortified me and I turned in my chair, hunched away from him. I tried to stop but couldn’t. I felt a hand on my back. Dean Makepeace kept it there for a moment, then gave my shoulder a squeeze and left the room.

By the time he came back I had exhausted myself. He offered me a glass of water and waited beside my chair. The water was cold. I drank most of it in a gulp, then finished it off and handed Dean Makepeace the glass. Though he didn’t say anything, I understood that our meeting was over. I got up and told him I was sorry about Gershon, that I’d had no idea . . .

I know. I know you didn’t.

But
how
did he know? How could he, in the face of such an inconceivable coincidence? Surely some doubt remained. I had the means to prove myself, but already knew I’d never make use of it.

Dean Makepeace walked me to the door. He shook my hand and said, If you’ll be good enough to clear things up with Gershon, we can put this to rest. The sooner the better. Tonight, say. After dinner.

And get those grades up.

Gershon lived in the basement of Holmes, the sixth-form dormitory, just off the boiler room. Even down there I could hear the boys upstairs, blustering and braying, full of the knowledge that at last the school was theirs. Gershon let me inside the door but no farther, and waited while I began to explain myself.

The room was close and smelled of onions. Gershon had been sewing something, and the table was strewn with scraps of cloth. No books in sight. No pictures. Insulated pipes ran across the ceiling.

As I talked he kept his face averted, his mouth set in a puckered line; he wasn’t wearing his teeth. He would neither speak to me nor give any sign that he was listening. It was obvious that he regarded my visit as a galling evolution of the ugliness I’d already dealt him, and that he’d agreed to it only because he thought he had no choice. I tried to keep my explanation simple and slow. I couldn’t be sure he understood me, though I had the feeling he did and that he didn’t believe a word I was saying.

The story sounded incredible even to me, and its grotesque, improbable accidents—that song, of all songs; Gershon, of all people—robbed my voice of conviction and, finally, of sense. I started to tell him about learning the song from Hartmut, then got lost in describing what a nice guy Hartmut was and how he must not have known what the song was about, or maybe he’d forgotten and just remembered the tune . . . Gershon stared into the corner, sucking his cheeks, enduring me, waiting for the lies to stop and for me to leave him in peace. And still I pushed on. I wanted him to believe me, for my own sake of course, but also for his, so he’d know there weren’t any Nazis here.

Again it occurred to me that I could prove my case: I could tell him that my own father was Jewish. This was true, though he himself never mentioned the fact, not even to me, his only child. My mother had told me only a year before, not long before she died, and I had no idea what it should mean to me. I had been raised Catholic; up to now my teachers had been nuns and the occasional priest, my social world entirely gentile. I knew nothing about Jews except some of their recent history. If I’d learned that my father was descended from Southern Baptists, would that make me a Southern Baptist? No. I would still be the boy I’d been the day before I came into this knowledge. The same with his Jewish ancestry. It was a fact but not a defining fact, neither to be asserted nor denied.

But it had come to a kind of question twice that day, and both times I’d chosen to deny it. Telling Dean Makepeace or Gershon about my father might not have cleared me; Jews can be savage Jew-baiters, as everyone knows, but
I
didn’t know. I thought I held a trump card, and my refusal to play it amounted to a deception.

The scene with Gershon could be spun into a certain kind of story. The new boy comes to clear things up with the cranky handyman he’s unwittingly affronted and ends up confiding his own Jewish blood, whereupon the handyman melts and a friendship ensues. In time the man who has lost his sons becomes a true father to the boy, enfolding him in the tradition his own false father has denied him. And what irony: the ambitious, upward-striving boy must descend to a basement room to learn the wisdom not being taught in the snob factory upstairs.

Fat chance. I wanted out of there, and I was confiding nothing. I’d let Gershon think the worst of me before I would claim any connection to him, or implicate myself in the fate that had beached him in this room. Why would I want to talk my way into his unlucky tribe? All this came over me as a gathering sense of suffocation. I stammered out a final apology and left, taking the stairs at a run as soon as the door clicked shut behind me.

It had been different that morning with Dean Makepeace, calmer and clearer. I simply decided that it would be better not to use the Jewish defense. There was no obvious reason for being cagey. In my short time at the school I’d seen no bullying or manifest contempt of that kind, and never did. Yet it seemed to me that the Jewish boys, even the popular ones, even the athletes, had a subtly charged field around them, an air of apartness. And somehow the feeling must have settled in me that this apartness did not emanate from the boys themselves, from any quality or wish of their own, but from the school—as if some guardian spirit, indifferent to their personal worth, had risen from the fields and walkways and weathered stone to breathe that apartness upon them.

This was no more than a tremor of apprehension, and though I acted on it I did not allow it to occupy my thoughts. But it never really deserted me. It became a shadow on my faith in the school. Much as I wanted to believe in its egalitarian vision of itself, I never dared put it to the test.

Other boys must have felt the same intimations. Maybe that was why so many of them wanted to become writers. Maybe it seemed to them, as it did to me, that to be a writer was to escape the problems of blood and class. Writers formed a society of their own outside the common hierarchy. This gave them a power not conferred by privilege—the power to create images of the system they stood apart from, and thereby to judge it.

I hadn’t heard anyone speak of a writer as having power. Truth, yes. Wit, understanding, even courage—but never power. We had talked in class about Pasternak and his troubles, and the long history of Russian writers being imprisoned and killed for not writing as the Party wished. Augustus Caesar had sent our Latin master’s beloved Ovid into exile. And when the progressive Mr. Ramsey—himself a gift from England—wanted to show us what mushrooms we all were, he recalled our nation’s inhospitality to
Lolita,
which he considered the century’s greatest novel since
Ulysses
—another victim of churlish American censors!

Yet the effect of all these stories was to make me feel not Caesar’s power, but his fear of Ovid. And why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.

ON FIRE

The day before our Frost poems were due we had a fire at the school. Fire was the great nightmare. Early in the century a residential house had burned to the ground with thirteen boys inside, and the shock of those deaths could still be felt in my day. They were known as the Blaine Boys, after the house they lived in. Their group photo, taken for the yearbook they never saw, hung in Blaine Memorial Hall, where we sixth formers gathered for talk and singing after dinner. I was drawn to the picture. I studied their serious faces (no clowning for the camera in those days), their way of sprawling against one another, leaning back to back, one boy resting his head on another’s shoulder. The sense of loss I felt wasn’t just for their lives: how artlessly tender, how easy they were together.

Their housemaster had been drinking in the village when it happened. He left for another boys’ school the next year and then, the story went, drifted to another, and another, never to find rest.

The fire was said to have been started by a cigarette. How anyone could know that, we didn’t ask. It was revealed truth. And it led to a commandment: Thou shalt not smoke. Get caught and you were out; no discussion, no exceptions. Even the softest masters were without mercy on this point. Two or three smokers a year got the boot, given just enough time to pack and call their parents. A boy would return from swimming practice and find his roommate gone, hangers tinkling in an empty closet, the other mattress stripped and doubled over. No announcements were made and no lessons preached. This swift and silent erasure of smokers from the school served grim notice on the rest of us. It was the same fate suffered by thieves and violators of the Honor Code, and smoking was meant to be seen in that light, as a betrayal of us all.

So we had fair warning and plenty of it—in spite of which an unteachable cadre of resolutes, including me, kept smoking anyway. I’d sneaked the occasional gasper since eighth grade but at school it became an obsession. Crazy as I was for cigarettes, my true addiction was to the desperate, all-or-nothing struggle to maintain a habit in the face of unceasing official vigilance. Always on the scout for new venues, I smoked in freezers and storage lockers and steam tunnels. I joined the Classical Music Club so I could smoke in the bathrooms of the concert halls we visited, and went out for cross-country so I could smoke while running in the woods. I kept a store of spearmint Life Savers to mask my breath and used a holder so my fingers wouldn’t stain. It was fretful, laborious work, but when I took that first deep drag I went dizzy with pleasure, not least the pleasure of getting away with it one more time.

Then I almost got caught. I’d been smoking in the basement of the chapel with a boy who was discovered there by the chaplain just minutes after I left. I was putting music in the choir stalls—my chore that week, and my excuse for being there—when the two of them came upstairs and walked down the aisle, the chaplain sad but decided, holding the boy by the elbow, and the boy . . . I could only glance at him and then I looked away, but I saw enough. For the rest of the afternoon my gut clenched at the approach of any master. I was afraid the other boy had given me away, not to save himself—no chance of that—but in a fit of clear-cutting confession, or resentment at my escape. He didn’t, though. He went out the gates alone.

I had seen his face. I knew what was happening to him. He was in free fall, and still trying to believe he was only in a dream of falling. He lived in New York. It would be a long night’s ride for him, on the train, by himself. I could easily see myself on that train. My journey wouldn’t stop in New York, though. I’d have to catch the gritty Century to Chicago, then change to the Great Northern—day after day of rolling past factories and fields and deserts and mountains but seeing none of it, gazing at my own stunned reflection in the glass as every click of the wheels took me farther from school. Lying sleepless in bed that night, I saw my school as if from an impossible distance, heading across the plains in a darkened railway car, back to the melancholy and muddle of life with my father. I pictured the black-beamed dining hall loud with voices. The chapel windows blazing red on winter afternoons. The comradely sound of the glee club practicing, the scrape of skates on the outdoor rink, a certain chair in the library, the deep peace of the library, the faces of my friends. I saw the school as if I’d left it forever, and the thought made me sick at heart. I got up and collected my suicide kit of cigarettes and lighter and holder from their hiding places and went to the bathroom at the end of the hall and stuffed it all into the trash can. I never smoked at school again.

But the temptation was persistent, and sometimes I could almost hear the old crew puffing away in the basements and attics. So my first thought when the sirens came wailing up the drive that Sunday afternoon was that one of those poor fiends had started a fire somewhere, and would pay the price that very hour. Who would it be?

I was coming out of the library. From the top of the steps I could see a thick braid of smoke twisting up over the old field house. Thrill-starved boys poured out of the dorms and halls, with a few masters trying to form them into groups or at least slow them down, all to no effect. I followed, my notebook under my arm.

I had been holed up most of the weekend, trying to finish my poem for the competition. What I’d been working on was a hunter’s elegiac meditation over the body of an elk he’s killed after tracking it for days through the mountains. This wasn’t typical of my poems, abstract and void of narrative as they tended to be. It fell into the pattern of a group of my stories in which a young fellow named Sam evaded the civilizing demands of his socialite mother and logger-baron father by fleeing into the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where he did much hunting and fishing and laconic romancing with free-spirited women he met on the trail. I had begun this series innocently enough, in unconscious tribute to the Nick Adams stories, but over time it had evolved into something less honest. I wanted to be taken for Sam by my schoolmates, who knew nothing of my life back in Seattle.

But this poem was giving me a headache. For one thing, how was the hunter, having trailed the elk so far into the woods, going to get it out? How big was an elk, anyway? Really big, I guessed—so after offering thanks to the spirit of the elk for giving him all that meat, the hunter was going to look ridiculous walking away with one lousy haunch over his shoulder. Maybe I should’ve made it a regular deer. But
deer
didn’t have the majesty of
elk.
There was a lot to fix, and the poem was due the next morning.

The day had turned cold. A storm had blown off the last of the leaves a few nights earlier, and the bare black trees made it seem even colder. I fell in with a younger boy, a fourth former whose recent submission to
Troubadour
we had not yet rejected, though we probably would. I kept waiting for him to ask about it, but as we approached the fire he got excited and ran ahead without a word on the subject.

The crowd had gathered around the old field house at the near end of the football field. The firemen stood by their truck drinking coffee and taking turns with the hose. No flames were visible, though I could hear the water seethe as it hit the roof. The shingles had burned through here and there, exposing a sheet of charred subroofing that sent up a greasy hiss of smoke as the firemen played the hose over it.

I asked the boy next to me how the fire had started, and without taking his eyes off the field house he mumbled something about Jeff Purcell.

Purcell. The news rattled me because this was my friend, and because he’d invited me to spend Thanksgiving vacation with his family in Boston, and now I could look forward to nothing better than another stretch with my boring grandfather and his boring wife in a housing development outside Baltimore.

False alarm! It wasn’t my Purcell, Little Jeff, who’d started the fire, it was his cousin. Big Jeff was a vegetarian, the only one in our class, whose love of animals extended to an ugly black rat he somehow kept hidden in his room and carried around at night in a pocket of his dressing gown. Big Jeff would’ve been a figure of fun among us if not for his great friendliness and his trust in everyone else’s goodwill. When you did tease him he didn’t get it, he just looked at you like a puppy wondering why in God’s name you’d tied a can to his tail. Big Jeff was devoted to Purcell. He haunted his room and patiently endured his abuse just to sit in the corner and watch him shave or do push-ups or dress for dinner, and listen to him pronounce his opinions and anathemas. He wasn’t stupid, Big Jeff. He did well in his science classes, and what he cared about, he knew about. He’d made himself an authority on how animals were raised and slaughtered, and as we tucked into our roast beef he spared us no detail as to how it got from the pasture to the plate.

Big Jeff had another passion, and in pursuit of this he almost burned down the old field house. He believed that our destiny was to leave Earth behind and colonize other planets. In our fifth-form year he’d started the Rocket Club, and though he couldn’t find any members in our class—we were too busy licking our chops for a great big bite of
this
planet—he did manage to recruit a few younger boys out of the Science Fiction Club. On Sunday afternoons the Rocket Club met at the football field under the eye of the chemistry master and shot off whatever they’d cooked up in the lab that week. Big Jeff had been experimenting with a two-stage rocket, but instead of going straight up his missile cut a few loops and crashed into the field house roof, where the explosive booster detonated in a clump of old pine needles and leaves.
Whoosh!

I wish they’d kicked him out, Purcell told me that night.

I laughed. I thought he was joking.

We were walking back to our dorm after an editorial meeting. We left the brick path and cut across the grass, which was stiff with frost and rustled under our feet.

I know it sounds terrible, Purcell said, but I do. I wish they’d kicked him out.

Why would they do that? He didn’t break any rules.

Did you see him at dinner tonight? He was doing everything but taking bows, like some kind of celebrity.

He
is
some kind of celebrity, actually.

Big Jeff. Big Jeff. When I was a baby they actually stuck him in the same crib with me. It’s true. They say you can’t remember that far back but
I
do. That hound-dog face staring at me, you think I could forget that? Kindergarten—the desk in front of mine. Always fidgeting, always looking for something, always with his hand up. I can still see the light shining through his ears. Grade school, camp, vacations—man, you don’t know what it’s like. Big Jeff and Little Jeff. Whatever college I end up at, he’ll be there, waiting in my room. We’ll probably get buried in the same coffin. Me and Big Jeff. Big Jeff and Little Jeff,
ad
fucking
aeternum.

I started a new poem that night. It was the fire that got me going, that and the firemen in their open rubber coats and high gaping boots, the looks they sneaked at us and the masters and the school itself, pretending to let their glances skate over us but taking it all in. Their curiosity had made me look around too. For a moment I saw this place as I had first seen it: how beautiful it was, and how odd. I felt its seclusion and how we’d come to resemble each other in that seclusion. We dressed so much alike that the inflections we did allow ourselves—tasseled loafers for the playboy, a black turtleneck for the rebel—were probably invisible to an outsider. Our clothes, the way we wore our hair, the very set of our mouths, all this marked us like tribal tattoos.

The firemen looked us over, and we looked them over. Visitors snapped us to attention. There was one fireman in particular I found myself watching. He had tired-looking eyes, and held himself a little apart. He was less covert than the others in sizing us up. I thought about him after they finished and drove away.

That was how I came to write my new poem, a narrative in which I described a fireman the morning after a big blaze. He’s been the hero that night, braving walls of flame to rescue a little girl. Now it’s over. He goes home and it’s Saturday morning and his son is watching TV. He fries himself some eggs but doesn’t eat them. He’s oppressed by the crumbs on the kitchen table, the dirty cereal bowls, the smell of burnt toast and last night’s fish. The television is too loud. Then he’s on his feet and in the living room and he’s just yelled something, he doesn’t know what, and his boy is looking at him with coldness and disdain.

I thought writing should give me pleasure, and generally it did. But I didn’t enjoy writing this poem. I did it almost grudgingly, yet in a kind of heat too. Maybe it was good, maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even a poem, only a fragment of a story in broken lines. I couldn’t tell. It was too close to home. It
was
home: my mother gone; my father, though no fireman, wounded by my disregard as I was appalled by his need; the mess, the noise, the smells, all of it just like our place on a Saturday morning; the sense of time dying drop by drop, of stalled purpose and the close, aquarium atmosphere of confinement and repetition. I could hear and see everything in that apartment, right down to the pattern in the Formica tabletop. I could see myself there, and didn’t want to. Even more, I didn’t want anyone else to.

I submitted the elk-hunter poem. “Red Snow,” I called it.