The Early Stories (30 page)

Gloria shook her head. “Another thing I worry about—isn't it silly for Macbeth to be talking to himself right in the middle of this war, with his wife just dead, and all?”

“I don't think so, Gloria. No matter how fast events happen, thought is faster.”

His answer was weak; everyone knew it, even if Gloria hadn't mused, supposedly to herself, but in a voice the entire class could hear, “It seems so
stupid
.”

Mark winced, pierced by the awful clarity with which his students saw him. Through their eyes, how queer he looked, with his soft hands, and his horn-rimmed glasses, and his hair never slicked down, all wrapped up in “literature,” where, when things get rough, the king mumbles a poem nobody understands. The delight Mr. Prosser took in such crazy junk
made not only his good sense but his masculinity a matter of doubt. It was gentle of them not to laugh him out of the room. He looked down and rubbed his fingertips together, trying to erase the chalk dust. The class noise sifted into unnatural quiet. “It's getting late,” he said finally. “Let's start the recitations of the memorized passage. Bernard Amilson, you begin.”

Bernard had trouble enunciating, and his rendition began, “ ‘T'mau 'n' t'mau 'n' t'mau.' ” Mr. Prosser admired the extent to which the class tried to repress its amusement, and wrote “A” in his marking book opposite Bernard's name. He always gave Bernard A on recitations, despite the school nurse, who claimed there was nothing organically wrong with the boy's mouth.

It was the custom, cruel but traditional, to deliver recitations from the front of the room. Alice, when her turn came, was reduced to a helpless state by the first funny face Peter Forry made at her. Mark let her hang up there a good minute while her face ripened to cherry redness, and at last relented: “Very well, Alice—you may try again later.”

Many of the youngsters knew the passage gratifyingly well, though there was a tendency to leave out the line “To the last syllable of recorded time” and to turn “struts and frets” into “frets and struts” or simply “struts and struts.” Even Sejak, who couldn't have looked at the passage before he came to class, got through it as far as “And then is heard no more.”

Geoffrey Langer showed off, as he always did, by interrupting his own recitation with bright questions. “ ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,' ” he said, “ ‘creeps in'—shouldn't that be ‘
creep
in,' Mr. Prosser?”

“It is ‘creep
s
.' The trio is in effect singular. Go on.” Mr. Prosser was tired of coddling Langer. If you let them, these smart students will run away with the class. “Without the footnotes.”

“ ‘Creep
sss
in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time; / And all our yesterdays have lighted fools / The way to dusty death. Out, out—' ”

“No, no!” Mr. Prosser jumped out of his chair. “This is poetry. Don't mushmouth it! Pause a little after ‘fools.' ” Geoffrey looked genuinely startled this time, and Mark himself did not quite understand his annoyance and, mentally turning to see what was behind him, seemed to glimpse in the humid undergrowth the two stern eyes of the indignant look Gloria had thrown Geoffrey. He glimpsed himself in the absurd position of acting as Gloria's champion in her inscrutable private war
with this intelligent boy. He sighed apologetically. “Poetry is made up of
lines
,” he began, turning to the class. Gloria was passing a note to Peter Forry.

The rudeness of it! To pass notes during a scolding that she herself had caused! Mark caged in his hand the girl's wrist—how small and frail it was!—and ripped the note from her fingers. He read it to himself, letting the class see he was reading it, though he despised such methods of discipline. The note went:

Mr. Prosser folded the note once and slipped it into his side coat pocket. “See me after class, Gloria,” he said. Then, to Geoffrey, “Let's try it again. Begin at the beginning. Let the
words
talk, Geoffrey.”

While the boy was reciting the passage, the buzzer sounded the end of the period. It was the last class of the day. The room quickly emptied, except for Gloria. The noise of lockers slamming open and books being thrown against metal and shouts drifted in:

“Who has a car?”

“Lend me a cig, pig.”

“We can't have practice in this slop.”

Mark hadn't noticed exactly when the rain started, but it was coming down hard now. He moved around the room with the window pole, closing windows and pulling down shades. Spray bounced in on his hands. He began to talk to Gloria in a crisp voice that, like his device of shutting the windows, was intended to protect them both from embarrassment.

“About note passing.” She sat motionless at her desk in the front of the room, her short, brushed-up hair like a cool torch. From the way she sat, her naked arms folded at her breasts and her shoulders hunched, he felt she was chilly. “It is not only rude to scribble when a teacher is talking, it is stupid to put one's words down on paper, where they look much more foolish than they might have sounded if spoken.” He leaned the window pole in its corner and walked toward his desk.

“And about love. ‘Love' is one of those words that illustrate what happens to an old, overworked language. These days, with movie stars and crooners and preachers and psychiatrists all pronouncing the word, it's come to mean nothing but a vague fondness for something. In this sense, I love the rain, this blackboard, these desks, you. It means nothing, you
see, whereas once the word signified a quite explicit thing—a desire to share all you own and are with someone else. It is time we coined a new word to mean that, and when you think up the word
you
want to use, I suggest that you be economical with it. Treat it as something you can spend only once—if not for your own sake, for the good of the language.” He walked over to his own desk and dropped two pencils on it, as if to say, “That's all.”

“I'm sorry,” Gloria said.

Rather surprised, Mr. Prosser said, “Don't be.”

“But you don't understand.”

“Of course I don't. I probably never did. At your age, I was like Geoffrey Langer.”

“I bet you weren't.” The girl was almost crying; he was sure of that.

“Come on, Gloria. Run along. Forget it.” She slowly cradled her books between her bare arm and her sweater, and left the room with that melancholy teen-age shuffle, so that her body above her hips seemed to float over the desks.

What was it, Mark asked himself, these young people were after? What did they want?
Glide
, he decided, the quality of
glide
. To slip along, always in rhythm, always cool, the little wheels humming under you, going nowhere special. If Heaven existed, that's the way it would be there. “He's heavenly with poetry.” They loved the word. Heaven was in half their songs.

“Christ, he's humming.” Strunk, the phys-ed teacher, had come into the room without Prosser's noticing. Gloria had left the door ajar.

“Ah,” Mark said, “a fallen angel, full of grit.”

“What the hell makes you so happy?”

“I'm not happy, I'm just serene. Now the day is over, et cetera.”

“Say.” Strunk came up an aisle with a disagreeably effeminate waddle, pregnant with gossip. “Did you hear about Murchison?”

“No.” Mark mimicked Strunk's whisper.

“He got the pants kidded off him today.”

“Oh dear.”

Strunk started to laugh, as he often did before beginning a story. “You know what a goddamn ladies' man he thinks he is?”

“You bet,” Mark said, although Strunk said that about every male member of the faculty.

“You have Gloria Andrews, don't you?”

“You bet.”

“Well, this morning Murky intercepts a note she was writing, and the
note says what a damn neat guy she thinks Murchison is and how she
loves
him!” Strunk waited for Mark to say something, and then, when he didn't, continued, “You could see he was tickled pink. But—get this—it turns out at lunch that the same damn thing happened to Fryeburg in history yesterday!” Strunk laughed and, still getting no response, gave Mark a little push—a schoolyard push. “The girl's too dumb to have thought it up herself. We all think it was Peter Forry's idea.”

“Probably was,” Mark agreed. Strunk followed him out to his locker, describing Murchison's expression when Fryeburg (in all innocence, mind you) told what had happened to him.

Mark turned the combination of his locker: 18, 24, 3. “Would you excuse me, Dave?” he said. “My wife may be out front waiting. She picks me up when it rains.”

Strunk was too thick to catch Mark's anger. “Help yourself,” he said. “I got to get over to the gym. Can't take the little darlings outside in the rain; their mommies'll write notes to Teacher.” He clattered down the hall and wheeled at the far end, shouting, “Now, don't tell You-know-who! The ladies' man!”

Mr. Prosser took his coat from the locker and shrugged it on. He placed his hat upon his head. He fitted his rubbers over his shoes, pinching his fingers painfully, and lifted his umbrella off the hook. He thought of opening it right there in the vacant hall, as a kind of joke on himself, and decided not to. The girl had been almost crying; he was sure of that.

The Christian Roommates
 

Orson Ziegler came straight to Harvard from the small South Dakota town where his father was the doctor. Orson, at eighteen, was half an inch under six feet tall, with a weight of 164 and an IQ of 155. His eczematous cheeks and vaguely irritated squint—as if his face had been for too long transected by the sight of a level horizon—masked a definite self-confidence. As the doctor's son, he had always mattered in the town. In his high school he had been class president, valedictorian, and captain of the football and baseball teams. (The captain of the basketball team had been Lester Spotted Elk, a full-blooded Chippewa with dirty fingernails and brilliant teeth, a smoker, a drinker, a discipline problem, and the only boy Orson ever had met who was better than he at anything that mattered.) Orson was the first native of his town to go to Harvard, and would probably be the last, at least until his son was of age. His future was firm in his mind: the pre-med course here, medical school either at Harvard, Penn, or Yale, and then back to South Dakota, where he had his wife already selected and claimed and primed to wait. Two nights before he left for Harvard, he had taken her virginity. She had cried, and he had felt foolish, having, somehow, failed. It had been his virginity, too. Orson was sane, sane enough to know that he had lots to learn, and to be, within limits, willing. Harvard processes thousands of such boys and restores them to the world with little apparent damage. Presumably because he was from west of the Mississippi and a Protestant Christian (Methodist), the authorities had given him as a freshman roommate a self-converted Episcopalian from Oregon.

When Orson arrived at Harvard on the morning of Registration Day, bleary and stiff from the series of airplane rides that had begun fourteen hours before, his roommate was already installed. “H. Palamountain” was floridly inscribed in the upper of the two name slots on the door of
Room 14. The bed by the window had been slept in, and the desk by the window was neatly loaded with books. Standing sleepless inside the door, inertly clinging to his two heavy suitcases, Orson was conscious of another presence in the room without being able to locate it; optically and mentally, he focused with a slight slowness.

The roommate was sitting on the floor, barefoot, before a small spinning wheel. He jumped up nimbly. Orson's first impression was of the wiry quickness that almost magically brought close to his face the thick-lipped, pop-eyed face of the other boy. He was a head shorter than Orson, and wore, above his bare feet, pegged sky-blue slacks, a lumberjack shirt whose throat was dashingly stuffed with a silk foulard, and a white cap such as Orson had seen before only in photographs of Pandit Nehru. Dropping a suitcase, Orson offered his hand. Instead of taking it, the roommate touched his palms together, bowed his head, and murmured something Orson didn't catch. Then he gracefully swept off the white cap, revealing a narrow crest of curly blond hair that stood up like a rooster's comb. “I am Henry Palamountain.” His voice, clear and colorless in the way of West Coast voices, suggested a radio announcer. His handshake was metallically firm and seemed to have a pinch of malice in it. Like Orson, he wore glasses. The thick lenses emphasized the hyperthyroid bulge of his eyes and their fishy, searching expression.