Old School (11 page)

George Kellogg decided to submit a new version of a story we’d run in
Troubadour
that winter, an account of a man bullying his wife at the dinner table while their son eats his veal cutlet and doesn’t say a word. No boy had ever won two audiences. There wasn’t any rule against it, but I thought it was pretty damned piggish of George to try to snag Hemingway after landing Frost. Just knowing he was in the race became a vexation, and it got worse when I went to his room to ask about the manuscripts for the next issue of the review. George hadn’t been passing them around.

He answered when I knocked, though for once his good manners deserted him and he kept typing away on his massive old black Underwood while I stood just inside the door. The machine looked as big as an organ. It made a deep, emphatic, methodical sound. The blinds were drawn, the windows closed, and the air felt swampy. I could hear the muffled plock of a tennis ball somewhere outside. Finally George stopped, but remained hunched over the keys.

I asked him about the manuscripts.

Oh,
them,
he said. They’re over there. He jerked his head at a stack of papers on his dresser. Take ’em.

Have you read them yet?

What? I don’t know. A few. A couple. He kept his back to me as I crossed the room and picked up the manuscripts.

I hear you’re working on that last
Troubadour
story.

That’s all of them, he said. Okay?

When I closed the door he started typing again.

All through my dorm I heard typewriters. Maybe it was nothing new, maybe I’d just lost my filter, the way every voice around you will suddenly flood into your head, each with its own rhythm and tone. One machine went off in high crackling bursts like strings of cheap firecrackers. Another, even lower than George’s, grumbled and surged like the engines of a ship. I tried not to listen for them.

With our editor playing the possessed artist, I had to play the burgher—had to act like the director of publication whose title I bore—and make sure
Troubadour
got to the printer in time. The deadline for presenting our last issue to Mr. Rice, the faculty adviser, was just days away, the same Monday our Hemingway stories were due. I gave myself up to reading submissions and forcing them on my fellow editors, and tried not to listen to other boys’ typewriters, and typed nothing myself.

We scheduled the final editorial meeting for Sunday night. I’d lobbied for Friday but got voted down because Miss Cobb’s graduating class was joining ours that night for the traditional Farewell Assembly. These assemblies were said to be Neronic in their carnality, like the fabled last night of an ocean crossing, and none of us questioned the truth of the stories we’d heard. Since the girls weren’t going to see us again and we weren’t going to see them again, why be coy? Our regular dances were licentious enough, within the limits set by the vigilant, and of course envious, spinsters who rode shotgun at these affairs. But it was a truth repeated by all of us, and made ever truer by repetition, that at the Farewell Assembly no amount of jealous virginal watchdogging would prove equal to the girls’ desire to be alone with us in broom closets and steam tunnels.

Nobody wanted to miss out. I didn’t either, especially after I got a letter from Rain. This took me by surprise. We’d had our brief grapple at the Halloween dance, but I hadn’t seen her since she tried to make off with my
Fountainhead
on the train, and she’d certainly never sent me a letter before. It was a perfumed, chatty little piece with no purpose except the unstated but obvious one of nailing down a partner for the Assembly. She must’ve figured she could do worse than me, and probably would do worse if she left it to chance, as the desirables of each school had already begun pairing off through just such letters as this. I had not forgotten how it felt to dance with Rain, how she returned the pressure of my thighs and played her fingers over the back of my neck. And the then-painful fact that she had immediately taken up with another boy (Jack Broome of sacred memory!) after being pried away from me, the sheer impersonality of her ardor, snuffed any scruples I might’ve felt and gave the lurid tint of revenge to my anticipations.

Yet I had tried to set the editorial meeting for that night. Time was running out, and I wanted to put
Troubadour
to bed so I’d have the weekend to finish the story I hadn’t even begun. There were other Rains in the world, but only one Ernest Hemingway.

And there was another reason I had tried for Friday night. Saturday was Purcell’s day of reckoning. If he didn’t show up for chapel that afternoon, he’d be long gone after dinner, when we gathered to make our picks. I wanted him there, I needed him to help me sort through this pile of submissions in which only two poems and one story stood out as clear choices. Purcell was brutal in his judgments but he was also shrewd, and finally willing to allow that he despised this or that manuscript rather less than the rest.

The other two would be no help at all, George in favor of everything and Bill cryptic and elusive.
There are a lot of cats in this story,
he’d say, or
I didn’t know it rained that hard in Athens,
then shrug and fall silent. Though never overtly so, his responses were much more destructive than Purcell’s. They left you feeling dazed, flatfooted. It was exactly the way he played squash—never slamming the ball head-on, like I did, but breezily tapping it through some sly angle so it died in the corner.

On Friday Big Jeff made it known that if his cousin got kicked out for cutting next afternoon’s chapel, he was leaving with him. I heard this at lunch and wouldn’t have believed it except that our table master refused to contradict it. It made no sense. Big Jeff loved the school—anybody could see that. He was an odd duck, and in a place less sure of itself and therefore harder on its eccentrics he would’ve had some rough sledding. Here he received the protections of a holy fool, and he sensed these indulgences if not their reason, and basked in them. It was already plain that he would become one of those alums who return constantly to the Alma Mater, and fatten her with bon-bons from his swelling portfolio, and one day leave her so much of what his own children have been anticipating, and even budgeting into their current expenses, that the disappointed heirs seriously consider paupering themselves further in attempts to break a will that the Old Boys’ office would already have bound in legal iron.

So why would Big Jeff let his cousin’s obstinacy and pride come between him and the school he loved? He certainly couldn’t help Purcell by threatening to leave—that was ridiculous. The school was no less hostage to its rules than we were, and he knew it.

Why, then? Love.
Worship.
This was a curious and agreeable twist, Big Jeff spanieling after his cousin with his tongue out, barking at phantoms as he followed him into martyrdom. It somehow put the whole thing in a farcical light, as Purcell must have understood, because he was furious. First he collared Big Jeff in Blaine Hall after lunch and made some kind of scene. I wasn’t there, but word got around. Then, that afternoon, he came to Big Jeff’s room, just down from mine, and gave him another browbeating.
This has nothing to do with you! You have no right! No right!

I listened to Purcell yell and Big Jeff murmur indiscernibly in reply, then the door slammed and I went back to my story. So far I’d been unable to complete even a paragraph without yanking the paper out of the machine.

I was still at my post when the bell rang for dinner, and when everyone came back from dinner. All up and down the hall I heard my classmates preparing for the Farewell Assembly, roaring in the showers, going from room to room to be admired in their tuxes under the pretext of having a tie adjusted, a cummerbund cinched tight. Strange how our voices deepened and slowed when we dressed up like this. It was a kind of hysteria that made us not giddy but deliberate. The air was festively steamy from everyone showering, and smelled of Old Spice.

My tux, delivered with the others that morning, hung in the closet with a stiff pleated shirt of brilliant whiteness. I laid them out on my bed with the patent leather shoes, then went back to my desk. All I needed was a good beginning, something to give me a start in the morning.

The hall grew quiet as the others left. I watched them cross the quad in a long dark line. In the ashen dusk, their shirt collars seemed to float like lights on a hazy sea. Their deep voices still reached me from the far side of the quad, carried on a breeze that smelled of mown grass and rustled in the creeper outside my window, and later brought me the sounds of Lester Lanin’s orchestra and the laughter of girls.

All this was a distraction at first, then faded behind a waking dream. Hemingway had chosen my story and taken a shine to me and hired me to work on the
Pilar.
We were cruising one afternoon with his wife, Mary, and a couple of their friends. The friendship seemed unaccountable. The woman was catty and the man treated the crew rudely and boasted of his skill at fishing, all of which Hemingway endured patiently though not without giving me a resigned look as I served yet another round of drinks. Finally the man’s wife told him to
please
go catch himself a fish and shut the hell
up
about it. He could catch a fish here, couldn’t he, Ernest? They
were
in the middle of the goddamned ocean, weren’t they? Hemingway allowed that in fact they were in very good fishing grounds. You would have to be cursed, he said, not to catch a fish here.

The man demurred. He was particular about his gear and hadn’t thought to bring it along today. When his wife said he could surely use Ernest’s, the man said he wouldn’t hear of it, thanks anyway.

Now darling, don’t be such a
stick,
his wife said.

So he was buckled into the hot seat with a pole in his hands and sure enough he had a strike within the first few minutes. The pole bent and the line sang out. Oh Jesus, the man said, then grunted as the pole somehow jumped its holster and yanked him forward. A great marlin leaped high off the port side, shook itself, crashed back into the water. I’m sick, the man said, I’m going to be sick.

Take the pole! Hemingway told me, then helped the man out of the seat and strapped me in. I played the fish while the man puked over the side of the boat. He refused all invitations to return to the chair, so I worked the big fellow for a couple of hours while Hemingway stood behind me and offered counsel now and then but mostly left the job to me. Once the marlin was played out Mary took the pole to reel him alongside while Hemingway and I waited to set the grapple hook and winch him up.

This is an unhappy case, Hemingway said. He is a good man who married badly and should not drink. He was very brave in the war.

We pulled up to the dock at sunset. A bunch of gawkers came over. That’s some kind of monster you’ve got there, one of them said. Who hooked him?

He did, I said, and nodded at the man.

Hemingway stood beside me. You have done well today, he said. You have done very well today.

When Bill White came back from the library at midnight I still hadn’t written a word. Didn’t you go to the dance? he said.

I was working.

Bill sat on his bed and slowly unlaced his shoes. He fell back and stared up at the ceiling. You could still go, he said.

No point. They’ll be shutting down pretty soon.

Working on your story?

Working on my story. You?

Yeah, sure. Bill rolled onto his side and watched as I pulled the empty page from my typewriter and slipped it into my desk drawer, under the full pages I’d copied from “Soldier’s Home.” He said, I saw George coming back from the dance.

George went? No kidding. I’ve never seen him in a tux. How’d he look?

Was he in a tux? I suppose he must’ve been. I didn’t really notice.

Can’t blame you, I said, then added—meanly, helplessly—George makes everything look like tweed.

Bill didn’t answer.

I guess he finished his story, I said.

I guess so, Bill said. How’s yours going?

He said this in a worn, tender way that surprised me. We were almost at the end of our years together, and without ever fighting or deviling each other as most other roommates did, we were farther from being friends than on our first day. We had made ourselves unknowable behind our airs and sardonic courtesies, and the one important truth I’d discovered about him we’d silently agreed never to acknowledge. Many such agreements had evolved between us. No acknowledgment of who we really were—of trouble, weakness, or doubt—of our worries about the life ahead and the sort of men we were becoming. Never; not a word. We’d kept everything witty and cool, until the air between us was so ironized that to say anything in earnest would have been a breach of manners, even of trust.

But as young boys here we had marked each other for friendship. I still felt the possibility, and it troubled me that we had always let it slip. Mostly I blamed Bill, for not coming out from behind his polish. He’d been in the dumps for weeks yet he wouldn’t break cover and talk straight to me, though we surely had things to talk about, more than he knew. The sadder he got, the more remote. Until now.

How’s yours going?

His question was serious, the interest behind it wearily intimate, undefended, as if he had lost whatever push it took to support his urbanity. I was so wrung out myself, so tired of all this beggarly waiting for words, that I actually felt tempted to tell him the truth—that I hadn’t written anything, and couldn’t. Poised right on the brink, I still held back, perhaps sensing that the moment it started, once I allowed myself the comfort of his interest, I wouldn’t be able to stop; that the relief of confessing this paralysis might betray me into other confessions. In some murky way I recognized my own impatience to tear off the mask, and it spooked me.

Lester Lanin’s orchestra was playing “Auld Lang Syne.” A few voices sang raggedly along, boys and girls together.

It’s going fine, I said. Like gangbusters. Yours?