My Mistake

by Daniel Menaker

  It’s the spring of my senior year and I am taking Honors exams—eight three-hour written exams and eight oral exams, all administered by professors from other colleges. I have studied for these tests for three months in the spring, according to a lunatic-obsessive schedule I made for myself. The exams seem to be going well for me. During my oral exam in Baroque Painting, a stout, tweed-jacketed, thick-and-glossy-bearded professor from the University of Pennsylvania takes a copy of Rembrandt’s late painting The Descent from the Cross from his small pile of such reproductions. He asks me to talk about it. I say what I know, including the comment from a recent article in a scholarly journal about the artist’s use of “irrational” light sources in his late work.

  “You read that piece?” the examiner says, smiling. “I’m impressed.” Then he goes on. “But the thesis about light sources is wrong. Look.” We look at the reproduction together, and he shows me that the lighting of the scene, though extremely dramatic, isn’t, strictly speaking, irrational. He takes other late Rembrandt paintings from his little stack, and we discuss their brooding, luminous use of light and the possibility that the artist’s failing vision may have affected this aspect of his painting. I mention that I’ve read that El Greco may have had astigmatism, which could account for the elongation of figures in his late paintings. The examiner says, “Also wrong, in my opinion, but arguable. Just because a professor or a scholarly journal says something doesn’t make it right.” He smiles a merry and mischievous smile. “Now,” he says, “here’s another Rembrandt, this one with some of the background painted by his apprentices.”

  “No,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  Rembrandt didn’t have any apprentices.

  When the Honors-exams results are posted in the spring of my senior year, Mr. Hynes invites me and my friend Leo Braudy to have drinks and dinner with him and his wife. Leo gets Highest Honors, I get High Honors, and by God I will take it. When we arrive at his house, Mr. Hynes comes out and greets us. He puts his arms around our shoulders and says, “My boys!” I get so drunk that evening that I pass out on the couch in Mr. Hynes’s study. The next morning, I get up with the worst hangover ever, and Mr. Hynes offers me a glass of orange juice. “This will cut the phlegm,” he says.

  Twenty-one to twenty-three

  I go to graduate school in English at Johns Hopkins on a teaching fellowship for two years and get a Master’s degree. The first year, I rent a room on the top floor of a tidy marble-step row house near the Hopkins Homewood campus in Baltimore. A country-club bandleader named Billy owns the house and lives there with his mother and his girlfriend. He has an organ on which he practices and rearranges in the least imaginative way possible the least interesting big-band tunes and pop-song adaptations imaginable. He seems addicted to the Serendipity Singers’ “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down,” a pabulum crime committed against the words of the nursery rhyme that starts “There was a crooked man.” Billy attacks this song organistically again and again, late into the night, the “melody” to the refrain—“Ah ah, oh no, don’t let the rain come down”—repeated with minuscule changes to rhythm and phrasing and “improvisation.” It is maddening. He keeps practicing this song even through the trauma of President Kennedy’s assassination. His girlfriend, a blowzy woman with the daffy-lipstick look, weeps uncontrollably over this event. Billy takes a little time off from “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” to invite me to watch the funeral on his television. His girlfriend sobs on the couch. “You know, Audrey knew the Kennedys,” Billy says to me.

  The American Literature guy at Hopkins, Professor Charles Anderson, requires us to buy his anthologies. J. Hillis Miller, a nice man who teaches Victorian fiction and is apparently a genius of literary theory, talks about Derrida’s writing and other abstruse critical doctrines of the moment. I haven’t got the faintest idea what he’s talking about. I am deemed a good Freshman Composition teacher because on the day I’m “observed,” I answer a student’s question with “It’s a noun clause.” There are a couple of serene young Jesuit scholars in the graduate program who appear to know everything. An inch and a half of snow falls and hysterical Baltimore drivers abandon their cars in the middle of main thoroughfares. At least beer is cheap. I see women in bars giving their babies bottles with a little beer in them, as if out of a cautionary nineteenth-century temperance pamphlet. The second place I live, during the second year, features a Havishamian landlady the door to whose ground-floor apartment opens a crack whenever one of her boarders comes or goes.

  It isn’t for me. The Lucky Jim–ish Best Toady contest for thesis advisers, the danger of saddling up on a hobbyhorse like “subject-object relations” and riding it for the rest of my life, the booing of the Yankees when they play at Memorial Stadium—not for me. But I do read and study an enormous amount at Hopkins, especially about one of the literary-theory fashions of the time, point of view, which will serve me well in my professional life. And once again, I have some very good teachers, and German semi-learned, and a degree and two years’ teaching experience that will guarantee me a job in a private school and another Vietnam War draft deferment.

  Earl Wasserman alone is worth the price of admission, pursuing the Romantics like an eager tailor and jamming them into a one-size-fits-all theory with remarkable success.

  Twenty-two

  It’s summertime and I’m home from graduate school. Pete Seeger gives a concert in Nyack, at the Tappan Zee Playhouse. My uncle Enge is visiting us, and he and I decide to go to the performance. Afterward we go backstage to say hello to Seeger—Enge says he knows him—but he doesn’t recognize my uncle at all. Enge is humiliated and insists that they have met, that they called square dances together at the Henry Street Settlement, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This incident will have a surprising epilogue thirty-five years later.

  Another summer weekend, Mike comes home to Nyack. My girlfriend is there, too. Mike and “Precious”—my mother gave her that nickname when she heard her use the word, with her Southern accent and all—want to go to Jones Beach, on Long Island. It’s a long drive and I don’t feel like going. I tell the two of them to go ahead.

  They go, and they come back. Later, my girlfriend says to me, “Why did you let me go with him alone?”

  “Why not?” I say. “I didn’t want to go and the two of you did.”

  “Don’t you know anything? Didn’t it occur to you that I might begin to fall in love with him if we spent that kind of time together?”

  Twenty-three

  Earl Wasserman, at Johns Hopkins, reads a paper on Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, explicating its (pretty obvious) allegorical details. After the reading is over, one of my fellow–graduate students presents him with a baseball signed by various Baltimore Orioles. Embarrassingly close to an apple for the teacher, given by a grown man (a hefty grown man at that, and a Rhodes Scholar).

  I go to Memorial Stadium, near the Homewood campus, when the Yankees play the Orioles there. In the bleachers, I keep my Yankee fandom to myself. Whitey Ford, the Yankee ace, is pitching one day, and the Orioles knock him out of the game in the third or fourth inning. A delighted guy sitting next to me takes a white handkerchief out of his pocket and waves it mockingly. “Goodbye, Mr. Edward Whitey Ford,” he calls out as Ford walks off the mound. “Goodbye, Mr. Edward Whitey Ford,” he shouts again, and claps me on the back.

  These two years spent in Baltimore make me realize that, one way or another, I am eventually going to end up back in New York.

  The “new journalist” Tom Wolfe publishes a piece in New York magazine called “Tiny Mummies,” a funny, caricatured picture of The New Yorker in all its crazy cultishness, and a close portrait of its editor, William Shawn. In the piece, Wolfe conveys the hermetic, self-involved, highly ritualized life of the magazine’s staff in telling detail. And he distills his whole experience there when he describes what happened when he asked Shawn, in Shawn’s office, if he could smoke. Shawn was apparently nonplused by the request a
nd responded with a kind of frantic over-obligingness. He scrambled around looking for an ashtray, and when he couldn’t find one, he offered Wolfe an empty soda bottle. Anyone who has smoked and tried to tap his ashes into a soda bottle knows that it doesn’t work well, so Wolfe found himself trying with manual subtlety to get the ashes from his cigarette into this undersized aperture and watching as a kind of tutu of errant ashes formed around the base of the bottle—which he and Shawn pretended not to notice.

  I happen to read this piece, and I think, “It sounds like graduate school!” I know my mother and father look forward to reading The New Yorker every week. My mother subscribed to the magazine from its very start, in 1925. I know all the famous pieces that have been published there. There’s a kind of call-and-response I’ve noticed among my elders: When adults say “The New Yorker,” other adults say “Hiroshima” or “Silent Spring” or “The Fire Next Time.” But still, in the piece by Wolfe, it’s a madhouse of genteel repression, a mild Maoism. Who would want to work there? Me.

  I’ve just gotten my Master’s degree in English from Hopkins and have decided not to go back to graduate school. Instead, I’ll teach English at the George School, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, come September. But for the summer I’m living in Nyack and working nearby as a toll taker on the New York State Thruway, at the Spring Valley toll barrier. I with my Master’s and its focus on Romantic Poetry. The regular toll takers are mostly retired cops, on half-pay pensions for life and supplementing that income. The contempt they have for the public, especially the Jews who drive up by the vanful from the Bronx and Brooklyn every Friday before sunset to go to their resorts and bungalows in the Catskills, is impressive. “Here come the Bronx Indians!” they yell to each other starting around 4 p.m. “Vitch vay to deh mountings?” they ask each other. “Same vay last veek,” they answer. “No, no—kveek-vay, kveek-vay!” (There is some kind of shortcut off the Thruway farther north.) “Kveek-vay also same vay last veek.”

  The work is so boring, especially when I’m on the side that just gives out the tickets rather than receiving tolls and making change, that I start handing the tickets out by reaching around behind my back. Most of the “patrons” seem to enjoy this tiny variation. Some express annoyance. Men in a hurry.

  Speaking of which, it is my sexist observation/conclusion that men have their tolls ready and women do not. Many females root around in their purses, which are often lying on the passenger seat beside them. One of the other toll takers says that they are rummaging around in there looking for the male private parts they don’t have. He doesn’t put it exactly that way.

  Some patrons don’t bother with tolls at all: Every now and then over the summer, gypsies arrive at the barrier and make up complicated stories about having lost their toll coupons or whatever. It’s not worth pulling over a caravan of four or five trailers and old-fashioned wagons, so they are generally allowed to go on through.

  One toll taker’s nickname is Vampira. Nobody knows anything about her. She always takes the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift, is skeletally thin, chalk pale, and hardly ever says a word to anyone.

  As I’ve said, it will occur to me when I’m seventy, as I sit waiting for yet more medical tests—a PET scan and a simulation for some high-tech radiation treatments—that inhaling all that car exhaust may not have caused me to get lung cancer but it wasn’t exactly preventive, either. Especially as emissions standards were a thing of the distant future. On a hot, still July day at the Spring Valley toll plaza, the air felt, smelled, and tasted like vaporized, rancid butter infused with gasoline fumes.

  Sometimes the endless procession of automobiles strikes me as a march of monsters along a wide swath of flat, man-made insult to nature. Cars begin to take on a surreal implausibility—tons of metal often, usually, carrying a single human being oblivious of the peculiarity of the dreadful mechanical complexities his species’ overgrown frontal lobe has wrought. The traffic parade also reminds me of my time as a waiter at the Guest Camp, with the guests sitting and eating all at the same time—seventy, eighty, a hundred of them at long tables of ten, working their jaws, spooning up soup, forking London broil. I would sit on the porch rail and watch, and the scene would turn into a Boschian nightmare. To this day, I sometimes divide people psychologically into those who have waited on tables and those who haven’t.

  Twenty-three to twenty-six

  The kids—boys and girls—who go to the George School, in Bucks County, sometimes seem radically bereft to me. No matter how you try to dress it up in the garments of a good Quaker education, an idyllic campus, good athletic facilities, and so on, these kids have been sent away to school. I swear you can see sadness in their faces when they don’t know you’re looking. And you know how lucky you were to have stayed home—even a home with Problems—in a home worth staying home in.

  But that may just be me, projecting like a modern-day Imax my own separation anxiety of such long duration. I will never be close to completely rid of it. And many if not most of the kids are no doubt better off away from home. Every now and then I get a small hint of real trouble in their families.

  Teaching composition to undergraduates at Hopkins was one thing—basically technical, well suited to my nearly inborn deep grammatical structure, no in-loco-parentis expectations—and teaching fourteen-year-olds is another. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m boring. As I write this, I can’t remember what books we read, what kinds of papers I assigned, or very much about the individual students, although a few non-academic moments have stayed with me.

  One: An Ethiopian exchange student, brand new to this school and this country, reports for outdoor phys ed in a ribbed white undershirt and white Jockey briefs.

  Another: A wily kid offers to exchange a pretty good tape recorder for the prized ’52 Series Fender Telecaster I got for my sixteenth birthday. I don’t realize the inequity of this swap, but it doesn’t matter, because I wasn’t ever going to play the electric guitar anyway. It was a momentary passion that my indulgent parents indulged. The kid apologizes to me later, and I tell him to forget about it.

  Another: A young teacher friend of mine gets a senior girl in trouble and marries her.

  Another: A smart and lovely senior girl gets what I call now a “structural crush” on me and looks me up in New York after she graduates and turns eighteen.

  Another: I launch a literary magazine, and we announce it at a school-wide assembly by means of a funny and iconoclastic skit I write, involving students standing up in the audience and proclaiming their authorial genius, or denouncing the whole project as propaganda, or reading awful poetry.

  Another: I take one of the poems I’ve been writing and submitting in vain to The New Yorker and copy it and give it, without a byline, to one of my classes to criticize and analyze—this occurs when the head of the English Department happens to be attending the class. Observation. The students pick it apart, and I join in the general disparagement, pointing out affectations and lame tropes and sentimentality. When I tell them, at the end of the class, that I wrote it, they—and my boss—are delighted.

  But I find the sequestered and bucolic life of a boarding-school teacher stifling. I eat all my meals with students, I am the resident in a small dorm, and I can’t see the girl I’m going out with as much as I’d like; she’s taking acting classes in Manhattan. After four years at Swarthmore and two at Hopkins, I keenly miss New York and Nyack. So I apply for and get a job teaching at the Collegiate School, on the Upper West Side.

  Collegiate, the oldest private school in America, differs as much from the George School as public school in Nyack did from the Little Red School House. And there are no girls. The students are more worldly and streetwise. They go home at night after carousing through the bars with fake IDs. Many are the sons of rich people and professors and attorneys. There is a Bronfman there, an Ausubel, a Dupee, a Kristol, a Bartos. A contingent of black and Hispanic kids descend from Manhattan’s upper, poorer reaches and attend Collegiate on scholar
ship, under a program called ABC—A Better Chance. They’re usually among the best athletes in the school, and they sometimes manage to form friendships with the privileged boys, but more often don’t. The Castilian-speaking Spanish teacher flunks a Puerto Rican kid in Spanish I.

  The students have to wear jackets and ties. The ties grow very wide and floral. This is 1966, 1967, 1968, after all. The pupils (the parts of the eye, I mean) are often similarly wide. When I first arrive, I laugh when the students in my classes call me “Sir”—as they are required to do. After a while I come to like it. On my third day, I hear a usage of the word that I like even more and that contains an inadvertent compliment, about my work and about my looks. A kid says to me in passing, in the hall, “Are you in that new Sir’s class? He teaches English. I hear he’s going to be pretty good.” I say, “I am in one of the new Sir’s classes. I’m in all of them, because I’m the new Sir. So thank you.” The kid says, “Wow! You look too young to be a Sir, Sir.”

  The smarter students feel free to argue with teachers about anything. In a doctrinaire way—I should know better but am feeling my authority more confidently at this point—I talk about Macduff’s sterling character in Macbeth, and one of the boys is able to fluster me by citing a far more negative interpretation of his motives from a respected critic. My second year at the school, I teach an Advanced Placement course in American Literature and assign readings from the Puritans, especially Jonathan Edwards, to Hawthorne to Melville to Poe to James to Hemingway, with some stops in between. The students complain about the workload and the tediousness of the Puritan material, and the Headmaster, Carl Andrews, talks to me about it, and I feel a little abashed, as if I have somehow been showing off with this ambitious curriculum. But I keep on with it, too embarrassed to stop. Not knowing exactly how to stop. But also how much I myself have learned out of doggedness.