Old School (18 page)

Arch read the page and slipped it back into the envelope. I can’t throw him out, he said.

Of course you can throw him out. We
have
to throw him out.

You can. I can’t.

Arch, come on. You bounced Tompkins fast enough for swiping those shirts—pretty small beer compared to stealing someone’s story.

I understand, Arch said.

Not to mention bamboozling Ernest Hemingway. For Pete’s sake, we throw them out for cutting
chapel.
I had hopes for this boy, but we can’t start playing favorites. You have what you need right there. The headmaster put his hands on his knees and leaned forward as if to push himself up.

I have to resign, Arch said.

The hell you say! Do your job.

From the school, Arch said. He hadn’t known he would say this, but there it was.

What is this? Does the boy have something on you?

No.

Well?

Arch began to explain. He wasn’t used to talking about himself, and did it clumsily, but he tried to make the headmaster understand. This boy had laid false claim to a story, whereas he himself had laid false claim to much more—to a kind of importance, to a life not his own. He had been in violation of the Honor Code for many years now and had no right to punish lesser offenders, especially this one, who’d been caught up in a hysteria for which Arch held himself partly responsible.

I’m kicking myself out, he said. That’s my last act as dean.

The headmaster had listened closely to all of this. He said, So you don’t know Hemingway.

Never laid eyes on the man.

Well, I for one never heard you say you did. Have you?

No. But I had a good idea what people thought.

You never once mentioned Hemingway in a personal connection?

Arch saw the emerging outline of an argument by which he could squirm off the hook, and he was touched and saddened that for his sake the headmaster would involve himself in cunning stratagems.

Thank you, John, he said. Bless your heart. I really do have to go.

Arch went to live with his older sister Margaret in Syracuse. They were close, he and Margaret, and had been since childhood when their father, a doctor, died of TB and their mother fell into the hands of one Madame von Ranke and her son Hermann. The von Rankes were spiritualists. They conducted grief-shocked Miriam to the very portals of the Higher Realm, where her departed husband issued pledges of abiding love and some very pointed business tips. Arch could still smell the licorice scent of Hermann’s pomade; he could close his eyes anywhere and smell it. They robbed Miriam blind, until finally she had to sell the Ward Wellington Ward house on Euclid Avenue and move in with her old parents, children in tow. In their mother’s cause Arch and Margaret became friends, but Margaret was a whiner and a crab and nowadays Arch couldn’t last more than a couple of weeks at a time with her.

So he took trips. He passed part of the fall at Saranac Lake, not far from the sanitorium where his father had died. He drove up to Toronto and Montreal and down to New York, and that winter he spent some time with a Cornell classmate in Phoenix. The day after he arrived Arch visited the columbarium where Helen’s ashes were buried.
Columbarium
was the word the funeral home had used in its letter, but it was no more than a small cinderblock courtyard in a windblown cemetery where the city gave out into hardpan and scrub.

Arch found the granite plaque with Helen’s name on it and laid some flowers across it and stood there a while. They had met when he rented horses at the stable she ran in Brooklyn. She started riding with him, and invited him along on a few jaunts with the Lower Hudson Hunt Club. Arch had taken up riding only after his leg got bunged up, but he cut a fine figure on a horse and drove at a fence as hard as she did, and maybe this had misled her, because off a horse he was not the same man. On the ground he could neither lead nor follow her.

He wandered the cemetery, reading inscriptions. On his way back to the parking lot he saw a coyote trot across the grounds, and felt better about leaving Helen there.

He lived with Margaret, took his trips, and checked the mail for an expression of interest from one of the many schools he’d written to. He didn’t really expect any result. As dean he had vetted such inquiries himself and shaken his head at their implausibility. Why would a man with thirty years and a position of respect in a good school suddenly throw it over to start again? He was too old. It didn’t make sense. You just knew there was a story behind it, and one best not repeated in your own school.

Arch knew all the arguments against him, but he’d sent the letters anyway. He regretted quitting his job. He had regretted it that very morning, but didn’t know how to undo what he’d done. Up to the moment he resigned he must have imagined that teaching was a distraction from some greater destiny still his for the taking. Of course he hadn’t said this to himself, but he’d surely felt it, he later decided, because how else could he not have known how useless he would be thereafter? For thirty years he had lived in conversation with boys, answerable to their own sense of how things worked, to their skepticism, and, most gravely, to their trust. Even when alone he had read and thought in their imagined presence, made responsible by it, enlivened and honed by it. Now he read in solitude and thought in solitude and hardly felt himself to be alive.

But toward the end of winter Arch was invited to discuss an opening at St. John’s Military Academy in Manlius, just a few miles up the road from Syracuse. He knew this had been arranged at the urging of Cal Meigs, a former student who now taught at St. John’s, because Cal had called a few days before the official letter arrived to ask if Arch was still looking. Cal said that he’d become an English teacher because of Arch and couldn’t imagine anything better than being on the same faculty with him.

I’m sure you had a good reason for leaving the sacred grove, Cal said.

I thought so, Arch said.

He drove to Manlius on a day of rare brilliant light and found Cal waiting at the gate, stamping his feet against the cold. Arch had no clear memory of him as a boy and certainly did not recognize this hollow-cheeked, mournful-looking man with the droopy red moustache, though he pretended to. Cal led him up a path between stone buildings barricaded by high walls of snow. Icicles glittered along the eaves. He slowed his pace for Arch and pointed things out, but Arch was watching the boys walk past him on their way to class. They wore handsome military greatcoats and caps with gleaming bills, and their breath came out in white puffs as they talked and laughed.

The interview didn’t last long. After a few questions about Arch’s availability and what courses he might teach, the department chairman asked him why he’d left his old school.

That’s a private matter, Arch said. He saw Cal look down at the table and was sorry to have put him in this spot.

We’re going to need something more than that, the chairman said. He gazed around the table at his four colleagues, all of them looking anywhere but at Arch. Frankly, Mr. Makepeace, some of us have questions about your application.
I
have questions.

Certainly, Arch said, but it was a private decision and it will remain private.

The chairman looked around the table. That’s it for me, he said. Any other questions? There were no other questions. Then he pushed his chair back and everyone stood. He shook hands with Arch. I understand you were a friend of Ernest Hemingway. My condolences, sir. And thank you for coming out today, he said. Thank you for your interest in St. John’s.

Margaret had been sure Arch would get the job, and did not hide her bitter suspicion that he had spoiled the interview deliberately. I thought you wanted to teach, she said.

Yes, he wanted to teach, but that wasn’t all Arch wanted, as he’d understood when the boys he’d seen that morning gazed past him without a flicker of interest. What more could he expect? Nothing, of course, yet his disappointment told him that he
had
expected more, being among schoolboys again, as if they would recognize him just because they were schoolboys. But if they saw anything at all it was just a standard-issue old fart tapping along the path, watching out for ice.

In former times Arch had supposed that his sense of being a distinctive and valuable man proceeded from his own qualities, and that they would sustain him in that confidence wherever he happened to be. He’d never imagined that this surety was conferred on him by others, by their knowing and cherishing him. But so it was. Unrecognized, he had become a ghost, even to himself.

He distilled no general rule from this understanding. Maybe a man of lordly self-conviction and detachment could forsake the place that knew him and not become a ghost. Arch could say only that he was not that man. He was attached. How could he have thought that he was free to leave his school?

At breakfast the boys were dull and bleary, and he missed the pleasure of needling them with his own morning crispness and cheer, asking bright questions, urging prunes on picky fellows who could barely stomach a piece of dry toast. The dorms gave forth a singular din at night—fifty different records playing at once, doors slamming, loud voices in long hallways, the faint hiss of many showers all running together. Arch always stopped to listen when he crossed the quad, as another man might linger on the call of a distant owl. He missed the tumult in the hallways between classes, and how the boys parted to make a path for him. He missed their noise and their woolly smell and their deep silence in chapel. He missed their good manners. He missed bucking them up when they got homesick or discouraged, and surprising them with his forbearance when they ran aground—hadn’t they figured him out yet, after all these years? He missed how the boys went crazy in the first snowfall, and broke into song at any excuse, and forgot themselves in the excitement of finding something interesting in a poem, especially if Arch hadn’t seen it. He missed all of that, and knowing the people around him, and being known. He missed a certain shy glance in which he saw respect and warmth and even some wonder. Arch wanted that back, as much as the rest. He wanted it all back.

In his next letter to his friend Ramsey, he said that he’d made a terrible mistake in leaving and would come back if given the chance. Ramsey would understand that this message was intended for the headmaster, to whom Arch could not write directly for fear of official rejection and the loss of all hope of return. Neither could he play the beggar after the noble pose he’d struck during their last meeting, when he’d brushed aside the headmaster’s attempts to rethink the problem as if his old friend were trying to steal his soul, like some phantasm of moral paranoia in a Hawthorne story.

And as for that, had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity—its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering in condemnation and violence against others and oneself. For years Arch had traced this vision of the evil done through intolerance of the flawed and ambiguous, but he had not taken the lesson to heart. He had given up the good in his life because a fault ran through it. He was no better than Aylmer, murdering his beautiful wife to rid her of a birthmark.

Ramsey wrote back to say the headmaster would not respond unless he heard from Arch himself, and that it was impossible to know just what his thoughts were. He’d given nothing away. Write to him, please, Ramsey said. What can you lose?

Before he could stop himself Arch took a sheet of stationery from the drawer and drafted his plea. He apologized to the headmaster for deserting his post and asked to be taken back on whatever terms were possible. He knew that a man had been hired to replace him, so he did not expect to resume his former schedule of classes or to reoccupy his old digs. He would be happy to teach remedial classes and do some tutoring. As for lodgings, he could take a room in the village. He would certainly understand if nothing could be found for him, and sent his best wishes to everyone.

The headmaster replied by registered mail. He’d hoped Arch would decide to come back, he said, and for that reason had carried him as absent-on-leave. The new man had been hired for the year only. Arch would teach his usual classes and the apartment would be available on his return.

He did have two provisions for Arch to consider. The first was that he would no longer serve as dean. The second, that he would let sleeping dogs lie where Hemingway was concerned and make no attempt to set the record straight. At this late date it would only confuse the boys, to no purpose. If Arch was in accord, the headmaster, along with the masters and boys of the school, looked forward with enthusiasm to his return. He’d sent two copies of the letter. In earnest of his agreement, Arch was to sign and mail back the original in the enclosed envelope. The other he should keep for his own records.

Arch wouldn’t have expected to go back as dean, or to use the boys as his confessors, but that there should be conditions of any kind, and stipulated in so cool a tone, made him know how far he had fallen in his friend’s regard. The headmaster could not feign warmth when he didn’t feel it, and Arch had watched other men writhe under that stony gaze for months and even years. Now it would be his turn. This was the only condition he hesitated to accept, but he accepted it.

Margaret gave him the silent treatment for a while when she heard the news, then relented and coddled him like a child about to leave home for the first time. They drove over to Saratoga for a weekend at the races and won almost three hundred dollars, which they parlayed into a series of long, sodden dinners at the only French restaurant in town. One night Margaret let it drop that Hermann von Ranke had been their mother’s lover. Arch stared down at his plate.

You really didn’t know? Margaret said. Well, what did you think? Lonely, foolish woman. Stupid. She was, Arch, she was! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Margaret burst into tears, and he had to take her hand and soothe her while the people around them tried to carry on as if nothing had happened.