Old School (12 page)

Oh . . . same here. Like a house afire. Like crazy. Like nobody’s business.

When Purcell showed up for chapel on Saturday afternoon he took his place on the steps and waited in line for the processional to begin, eyes dead ahead, the fierce helpless blush on his pale, freckled neck his only response to the looks he was drawing from the younger boys and the studious inattention of the older. But as the organ sounded the first notes he raised his voice with the rest of us—
For all the saints, who from their labors rest
—and marched up the aisle to his seat in the second row without letting the words trail off as most of us did. He sang every verse and then sat straight and intent through the chaplain’s readings and remarks, and when we were left in silence he bowed his head and did not stir.

At the end of the service the headmaster got up to congratulate the sixth-form dance committee on a successful Assembly, and we all applauded, and then kept on, decorously but persistently, beyond any conceivable gratitude to the dance committee, and Purcell must have known it was for him—in celebration that he was still with us, and in tribute to his selflessness in yielding dear principle for his cousin’s sake. Though he was clapping too and looking up at the headmaster, his neck had again turned scarlet.

I had my own idea about his change of heart; that it had less to do with sparing Big Jeff a painful separation from the school than with sparing himself the absurd, humiliating spectacle of Big Jeff throwing himself on Purcell’s very own funeral pyre. But I applauded him with the rest, for the dignity of his surrender; no winking or mugging, no holding back, no hamming it up to signal derisory assent. He had something, Purcell. Sand. Backbone.
Class,
I guess you could say.

At the editorial meeting that night we made our decisions without serious disagreement until we came to the last manuscript, a story by a classmate named Buckles who’d been submitting work all year to no effect. This story did not seem to me any better than the ones we’d rejected, and I said so.

What’s it
about
? George said. I can’t even tell what it’s
about.
He said this with such violence that Purcell and Bill and I were made shy for a moment. George usually took his post at the editor’s desk, but tonight he was sitting by the door, cross and itchy.

Still, this is his last shot, Bill said. Graduation issue.

That’s true, Purcell said. It’s now or never for Buckles.

The story’s not
that
bad, Bill said.

It’s not that good, I said.

Bulldog Buckles, Bill said. Never say die. Remember that story about Geronimo?

We laughed, all but George. “The Forked Tongue,” he said sullenly.

What? Purcell said.

It was called “The Forked Tongue.” Let me see this one again.

We watched George glance over the first page. Just listen to this, he said. He read a few lines aloud.

That’s not so bad, Purcell said.

There’s something there, Bill said.

Come on, I said.

Oh for Christ’s sake, run the stupid thing! George said. Who cares? It’s not like the rest of this crap’s about to set the world on fire. When we looked at him he bristled and said, Well? Is it?

Of course the answer was no. Our schoolboy journal was not going to set the world on fire. But for the past year we’d been acting on the faith that it might, choosing and shaping every issue with the solemnity of Big Jeff designing a spaceship. So, the game was over—that’s what George was telling us, the prick, the spoiler. He’d somehow lost his innocence and now he couldn’t rest until we too had seen that our sanctum sanctorum was only a storage room, our high purposes not worth a fart in a gale of wind.

But George, of all people—what had worked this change in him? What had he been writing up in that airless room, what vein of acid knowledge had he struck?

Okay, I said. What the hell. Let’s run it.

So we’d come to the end; our last issue laid to rest, albeit with a bullet in its head. The others fled the room, leaving me to order and stack the manuscripts and hand them off to the incoming editor, a fifth former who’d been sitting in on the meeting to see how it was done. He looked pretty disappointed.

Mr. Rice’ll need those first thing tomorrow, I told him.

I know.

It was late, past midnight, but I was too jumpy to make another start at the story that was due later that morning, so I figured I’d warm up with a few rejection notes. Usually George took care of that but he had apparently abandoned his duties.

The office machine was a tinny portable that jumped a little every time you struck a key. I wrote three or four letters and took a break. It was tomb-quiet in there, the walls soundproofed by bookcases crammed with student lit mags, the overflow stacked in precarious towers on the two file cabinets and the editor’s desk. Here were the
Troubadour
s of Andover, Milton, Dobbs Ferry, Taft, St. Timothy’s and St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s, Nottingham, Hill, Woodberry Forest, Madeira, Portsmouth Priory, Foxcroft, Kent, Emma Willard, Culver, Thacher, Roxbury Latin, Baldwin and Lawrenceville, Miss Cobb’s and Miss Fine’s and Miss Porter’s, Peddie, Hotchkiss, Pomfret, Choate, on and on and on . . .

As director of publication I sometimes came here to file the new arrivals, though mostly I just sat at George’s desk and gloated at being in the middle of all this writing. But what sort of writing was it, really? I took down a review from Andover and flipped through the stories, then looked at one from Deerfield and another from Hill. Within a few sentences every story seemed familiar, the same stuff we ran—mannered experiment, disillusioned portrait of family or school, all designed to show what a superior person the writer was.

Were the girls any better? I picked up a copy of
Cantiamo,
the review from Miss Cobb’s; it was a back issue, five years old. The first story concerned the superficiality of a woman prepping her house for a bridge party. I skipped to the next, called “Summer Dance,” and the smirk this title provoked died on my lips after the first line.

I hope nobody saw me pick up the cigarette butt off the sidewalk, but I’m all out and getting shaky and it’s a nice long one, with just a smudge of lipstick from the old bird who dropped it when her bus pulled up.

I kept reading. The narrator is at a bus stop, heading home after a typing class at the Y. She smokes the butt while she waits, even when it becomes apparent that another girl has caught her in the act and is completely grossed out.
I don’t really care,
the narrator says,
because I don’t know her. If I knew her, or if she was a boy, that would be different.
As she smokes she thinks up a lie to scare up some cigarette money from her mother; another fee for supplies in the typing class.

She rides the bus across the city—Columbus—and walks home through a neighborhood of brick apartment buildings. Her mother’s apartment is on the third floor. It’s sweltering inside. The narrator’s little sister is watching TV, her mother’s in her bedroom with a headache. She calls out to the narrator—Ruth, it turns out her name is—and Ruth puts some ice in a dishtowel and carries it into the darkened room. She sits on the edge of the bed, holding the icepack to her mother’s forehead, and after making some tender inquiries slips in the lie about the typing supplies. Her mother sighs and says,
Okay, of course, take what you need.
She tells Ruth that two of her friends called, but asks her please not to make any plans as she feels really awful and needs help with Naomi.

Ruth goes into the kitchen and looks at the notepad by the phone. The first message is from a girl she grew up with. It’s the second time she’s called since Ruth got home for the summer and though Ruth feels guilty for not calling her back she knows she won’t do it this time either. The other message is from Caroline Fallon, a classmate at the boarding school Ruth attends on scholarship. She dials the number immediately.

The two girls make clever talk about how bored they are. Ruth calls her mother
Maman,
and describes her indisposition in terms that make Caroline laugh. Then Caroline asks if she’d like to go to a dance at the country club that night. When Ruth hesitates, she apologizes for the late notice and says, by way of explanation,
They need girls.

Okay,
Ruth says.
I need boys.

There’s just one thing,
Caroline says.
It’s so ridiculous, but anyway—can I give your name as Lewis instead of Levine?

Lewis?

You know, Lewis, Logan, something like that. I’m sorry, Ruthie. Club rules.

I see.

It’s disgusting. I probably shouldn’t have called you.

No, that’s all right. That’s fine. Tell them Windsor.

Windsor! You are a stitch! I mean, Ruthie Windsor!

Ruth Anne Windsor.

Ruth and her mother argue over her plans for the night, and Ruth handles it so deftly that her mother gets out of bed to coax her back from desolation and take in the waist of a smart old evening gown of her own that Ruth’s been coveting. When she leaves the apartment she has to stop and catch her breath, she’s so heady with the relief of escape,
like getting out of granny’s hospital room.

Then the dance—the convertibles in the parking lot, the Japanese lanterns along the path to the ballroom, the music, the boys. Ruth sees that the boys have noticed her, but the one who catches her notice happens also to be the boy Caroline has in her sights. His name is Colson. He and his friend Gary sit down at Ruth and Caroline’s table. They’re both handsome, but Gary’s sort of bland and Colson’s broody and smart—too smart really for Caroline—and just as Ruth feels his interest shift toward her she senses a growing restlessness in Caroline, a watchful formless unease. Something’s wrong and Caroline doesn’t yet know what it is, but she’ll know soon enough if things follow their present course, and she will hate Ruth for it and drop her like a toad.

Normally that wouldn’t bother her. Ruth likes to compete with other girls, and she fancies this Colson with his rumbly voice and hooded eyes. At any other time she would encourage his attentions.

But this isn’t any other time. She’s at the beginning of a long summer. One of the convertibles in the parking lot belongs to Caroline, and already Ruth has gotten used to being rescued from her hot apartment for breezy drives to movie theaters and the pool at Caroline’s house. This is only the first of many dances at the club, and she wants to be invited to the rest. Caroline won’t just drop her if she feels betrayed, she will make sure Colson knows that Ruth is here tonight under false pretenses, and exactly what those pretenses are. How interested will he be then?

Lousy odds,
Ruth thinks. She fastens her attention on Gary. He warms to it, and Colson withdraws moodily before resuming his languid banter with Caroline, who comes brightly to life. But Ruth is still aware of Colson and knows that he’s aware of her. Something may yet come of it before this summer is over, something secret where Ruth can get her own back. Even now the current between them is so obvious to her that she can hardly believe Caroline doesn’t feel it. Ruth stands and takes Gary’s hand to lead him toward the dance floor. Caroline smiles up at Ruth and lifts her glass.
Good—she doesn’t know. Everything’s okay.

Everything’s okay.
That was the last line in the story, this story where nothing was okay. I went back to the beginning and read it again, slowly this time, feeling all the while as if my inmost vault had been smashed open and looted and every hidden thing spread out across these pages. From the very first sentence I was looking myself right in the face.

It went beyond the obvious parallels. Where I really recognized myself was in the momentary, undramatic details of Ruth’s life and habits of thought. The typing class, say. What could be more ordinary than spending your summer days in a typing class at the Y? That was exactly what I’d done for part of the previous summer, yet I’d never once mentioned it to my schoolmates just
because
it was so completely ordinary, and uncool. And taking a bus to get there! No character in my stories ever rode a bus.

The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing-over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.

How do you begin to write truly? I went back to that first sentence.
I hope nobody saw me pick up the cigarette butt off the sidewalk . . .
It made me cringe. This was not how I would ever want to be seen, though in my own cigarette-craving I had done that very thing, and more than once.

What the hell—let’s see how it felt to write it. I rolled a fresh sheet into the typewriter and started pecking it out:
I hope nobody saw me . . .
Then the keys jammed. I separated them and they jammed again. That sentence did not want to be written, but I wrote it still. And there I was, winner of the Cassidy English Prize, future protégé of Lionel Trilling, bending to the sidewalk for a lipsticked butt.

I had stopped going to confession right after my mother died. Even as a young boy I’d performed it grudgingly and with no payoff I was ever aware of. But in writing those words I felt at least an intuition of gracious release. To strip yourself of pretense is to overthrow a hard master, the fear of giving yourself away, and in that one sentence I gave myself away beyond all recall. Now there was nothing to do but go on.

Word by word I gave it all away. I changed Ruth’s first name to mine, in order to place myself unmistakably in the frame of these acts and designs, but kept Levine, because it made unmistakable what my own last name did not. I changed the city to Seattle, Caroline to James, and brought other particulars into line. I didn’t have a lot of adjusting to do. These thoughts were my thoughts, this life my own.