Teacher (15 page)

Here, when he had laid these things out, Lears, it seems to me, took a step into becoming the kind of teacher that would change me, and some of the other people in the room, around. Don’t forget, we had been busy driving him crazy. We had imitated him, teased him, in the case of Buller had insulted him; he’d thrown his most valuable pearls in front of us, and we’d coughed dismissively a few times and fallen back to the familiar swinish drowse.

With this narrative, and after the routine with Rick, he had us cornered. He could have gone at us full tilt. Why didn’t he just command us to look at our dull religious lives—most of us went to church the way we went to school; it was a place to snore and make an occasional social linkup. But more than that, he could have assaulted us for the herd behavior that made us as wearisome to teach as we were. Who is the boss on the football team, who sets the tone? And in the sororities that dominate the school, who are the alpha girls? How do they enforce their petty tyrannies?

And as to the government—this was 1969, remember—how do they enforce such idiot acquiescence from you? How have they talked you into waging an unjust, useless war in Vietnam? How did they perpetrate the Red scare on your moms and dads? How did they get them into nine degrees of paranoid ecstasy about the Communist threat?

But he never posed these questions. He never ranted, never got in our faces. He controlled what must have been his utter angry humiliation at the way his class had been going. He laid off. He trusted us. For the first time, he put us in a position to examine ourselves. It was a chance to become explorers in our own lives. We could raise the spyglass and see ourselves as from a distance. But we could reject the invitation, too.

You could imagine how great the temptation to grab the helm and steer us where he needed us to go might have been. There sitting in front of Lears was Cap, who was his bane. Much more than Buller, who was just a mobile annoyance, Cap must have come across to him as something of a spiritual enemy, to use Blake’s language. Cap, with his beard, heavier than most men’s, the ropey muscles up and down his arms, and his handsome face, with his slight underbite and dramatic jawline. His teeth were carnivorously white, the white you saw on tigers; he had lovely hazel eyes that only came into certain focus when he was pinpointing a pass or laying up a basketball.

Lears must have looked at him and seen what the magisterial historian Henry Adams saw when he encountered Ulysses Simpson Grant in the president’s office. To Adams, Grant seemed a crude throwback to some other, primitive time. Could civilization be spinning in reverse?

But what Lears didn’t do was foist his view on us. He didn’t address the whole bit about alpha males to Cap the way he might have, or torment him with a sequence of questions that Cap never could have answered about the place of the authoritative other in his own life. No, he put that sort of thing aside. He erased himself from the exchange as much as he could, and in doing so started to become the teacher he was destined, however briefly, to be.

Frank Lears seemed to be in the process of stepping over and becoming something of a Socratic figure. Socrates, as opposed to his disciple Plato, does not teach a system. He has no portable wisdom. What he offers instead is simply freedom from illusion. He will turn and criticize anything, no matter how exalted. Socrates is a questioner, who leaves no belief untouched. Family, religion, state—whatever it is, he asks you to consider what you owe it and what, if anything, it might owe you. He asks what evidence you have that the esteemed thing is good. He is relentless, and he never stops talking, won’t stop asking. As Kierkegaard says, “His irony was not the instrument he used in the service of an idea—irony was his position, more he did not have.” Lears had more—he had his beliefs, his ideas—but for the most part he held them in abeyance and simply asked us to take a first stab at knowing ourselves.

Lears asked us to consider whether the groups we had listed had leaders and whether they led by delivering us from doubt and bringing us back to the old certainties. He gave us thirty full minutes to do this, and we all sat silently and pondered, or at least I did. It was the first time I had ever actually sat and
thought,
at least insofar as I can recall. It was a first, a quiet enough one, one hard to render dramatic in the way a football game, a whipping laid on Somerville by the mighty Mustangs, can be. But it was a major moment for me nonetheless.

WHAT I thought about when he gave us our half-hour or so of silence was religion.

It started with a memory. When I was a boy, eight or nine years old, I was praying one day at the altar at the Sacred Heart church. It must have been after confession. When I went outside, a kid was waiting. He was a grade or two behind me, gawky, big-eared, wearing ripped corduroy pants and standing beside a rusted bike. He came up to me diffidently and asked, with no perceptible irony or anything even mildly toxic in his voice, if I was going to become a saint. Why did he ask? “Because you prayed so beautiful.”

And, truth be told, I was a pious little boy. I loved church; though the sainthood business hadn’t occurred to me, I was more than interested in becoming a priest. The life of renunciation looked very good to me. I could enter the rectory and be left alone. I could get rid of school, family, friends, the whole works, and just lower myself into a completely protecting, completely prescribing environment. And then too, I loved God a great deal and Jesus, if possible, more. I also feared hell.

For a long time, I wore faith like a deep coat. I worshiped the Christian doctrine, believed fervently in angels and the Blessed Virgin, who would intercede for us at the throne of the almighty, and fiercely retributive, Father. My initiation scene was in the Sacred Heart church, Malden, Massachusetts. There in the lower chapel, dank and frightening as any catacomb where the first Christians practiced their outlaw faith, I listened to Father O’Hara, known to us boys as the Fat Father—awful, gregarious, bluff, and sly—intone his favorite Bible passage, the one where the sinner in hell, burning, begs to be permitted to lick water from the finger of Lazarus, a poor, righteous man who is with Abraham in heaven. “Never,” cries the Fat Father, becoming for a moment a burning pillar of wrath and thus temporarily losing his resemblance to the fat sergeant, Sergeant Garcia, the buffoon on the TV show
Zorro,
from whom he has acquired his nickname. The sinner was left to roar in everlasting fires.

Daily I felt hell’s breath. I confessed my sins, did penance, made good acts of contrition, as the priest told me to do after confession, when I read out my partly fabricated list of transgressions. I disobeyed my parents four times, lied six times. I teased Joey Merrill, our neighbor, four years younger than myself. The Joey Merrill teasing was always last on my list: I phrased it ambiguously—so it could have meant either that I had done it just once or that it was perpetual—hoping the priest would imagine option A. B was closer to the truth.

Obsessively, I imagined eternal punishment, conceiving of eternity not unlike the way Joyce rendered it in
Portrait of the Artist:
A bird comes every million years to lift a grain of sand from an endless mountain. In many eons the mountain will disappear. And that whole time will be but one instant, a flashing evanescent tick, in the course of the eternal. Late on summer nights, as fireflies popped their spooky, subaqueous green, my friends and I envisioned heaven and hell, impressed on each other the facts of eternal damnation and everlasting bliss.

I remembered the nuns who taught me at Sunday school as humours out of Ben Jonson: There were the crones, crabbed, thin, and zealous; and the stalwarts, grand battleships alight with rectitude; and then the seemingly benevolent ones, portly and content. Yet even the most kindly could break into furious rants. Sister Eulalie, with her benevolent, moony face gently framed by her wimple, and her sweet milk-white hands, once told us that when a girl dyed her hair, the poison from the dye seeped through the roots and slowly, slowly built up in her brain. Then one day the fragile organ would start to decompose into polluted gobs, until the brain-pan itself became a horrible vat, bubbling and spitting.

Over time I moved in and out of churchgoing, pulled from the church’s orbit by the likes of Johnny Kavanaugh, who became, when I was eleven years old, Father O’Hara’s replacement. Johnny was the way, the truth, and the life. He owned a doughnut and sub shop, where he also took, or pretended to take, numbers over the phone. (In my Malden neighborhood, being a bookie was high-prestige work.) Johnny screened stag movies for us, told us about oral sex, and claimed to have gotten it on with one of the Supremes (not Diana Ross, he added with some humility, but a backup singer, backup). Johnny’s friend Durante, an ambulance driver about whose sanity even Johnny had doubts, demonstrated basic fornication for us using an empty juice bottle and his semi-erect item. Johnny—apprehended by all sane adults as a yammering buffoon—was practiced in the ways of the world.

But despite my waywardness, I knew for a long time that there was a God. I knew it in part because of my horrendous sense of guilt. Whenever I did something wrong—terrorized a younger cousin, spoke harshly to a teacher, lied, or cheated—I quivered under the flying lash of my conscience. I became physically ill at the thought of my sins. And where could this guilt and suffering come from if not from the Lord on high?

In better moods, on better days, I knew God through the magnificence of his creation—not its beauty or its goodness or pleasure but the overpowering presence of what
was,
the massive thereness of the world. How could all this grandeur be, I asked myself, if there was no God to send it into light? I acknowledged the God of creation but I believed, tremblingly, in the God of pain.

Almost everyone I knew believed in God, or professed to. There were atheists in existence, I knew. But they were damaged individuals, like my childhood friend DeFazio, who would walk down the street hollering out to God to prove his existence by striking him, DeFazio, down with a bolt of lightning from the sky. I recall debating with Fran and Mikey O’Rourke whether we ought to scatter when DeFazio issued such Homeric dares, lest the Almighty cast general death in DeFazio’s direction. A lot of talk ensued. Eventually we agreed that anyone who could create the world in six days had enough fine-motor skill to take DeFazio out with a precise stroke while leaving the rest of us standing by unscathed, if maybe a little smoke-stained.

But then my sister, Barbara Anne, died an excruciating death, after half a dozen strokes that befell her over a period of two years. She was a sweet, pale, beautiful child, with soft blue eyes. At three, she could barely talk, though all else was normal. Soon afterward, she had her first stroke—so rare in children that a number of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital had never seen it happen—and came home dragging one foot when she walked, her face drooping on the left side. Then another stroke came, and another, and another.

I recall that when she was in the hospital for the last time—I must have been in the ninth grade—I prayed incessantly to the Lord above to spare her. I made lists of all the things I would do, the pleasures I would surrender: no more TV, no more desserts—and I would follow through on these things for weeks on end. Nothing would change. Then I would go back to my past harmless habits. Nothing would change for her. Or she would get worse. And I would blame my own waywardness, my own lack of faith. I blamed myself but never the God above, who, despite all of His claims for being merciful and good and His need to be worshiped slavishly for those things, could preside so serenely over Barbara’s slow, horrible death.

On the day she died it was black outside and poured rain, and I pretended that this was heaven’s acknowledgment of our grief. The sky weeps for you, a friend said. And I took this temporarily to heart with remarkable, foolish tenacity. I listened to other stories, too, like the one that held that the soul of a sinless child like Barbara would flare straight to heaven and abide there in glory, waiting for us to join her when the time came. But I could not fully believe any of it. Could a God who looked down upon the agony and death of a child be a God worth worshiping?

Yet I clung to the outward forms. I went to church, attended confession, made good acts of contrition. And the habit of hypocrisy grew in me. In church I felt voided, as though I were an empty thing, hollow, my heart and lungs and inner organs removed in some horrid trick. I was a shadow walking and kneeling and mumbling prayers and observing the rites. I didn’t have the simple courage of my conviction to turn and say that whatever the truth might be about God and faith, it was not to be found here.

Lears’ implication—and of course, being who he was, he did no more than imply—that religion, like every activity that involved a Big Other, an ultimate power, was bogus, a lie, shocked me. It was such a blow that I could barely absorb it. Here was someone, fully grown and mature, not a skittery whelp like DeFazio, who could suggest that we might laugh in the face of belief.

Yet I was also tempted by the possibility that Lears (and Freud) held out. That my sister had suffered and died and that there was no explanation for it but bad luck, horrible chance—that was an insult. But then to cover that horror over with pious stories that I could not honestly believe—and that no one, from what I could see, did—that was too much.

I’m not sure I went this far in the thirty minutes of silence that Lears gave us, though in days to come I would. But as freeing as what Lears said might be—for exploding an illusion, or what’s taken for one, is always initially liberating—another question obtruded. What were you left with once you stopped taking anything on faith? What did you have once the illusions were cleansed? I couldn’t answer the question at all clearly then; I only know that it scared me. What you got was freedom, of course—you reclaimed your own mind. But you cut yourself off from all the forms—churches and schools and governments—that made it their business to dispense the truth and, with it, some measured comfort. You became, in short, something like Franklin Lears—and like Socrates, that other eternal questioner and annoyance: an orphan adrift in the world.