by Lorin Stein
My classroom was in fact a tribute to the lofty ideals of man, which I hoped would inspire my boys, and at the same time to the fleeting nature of human accomplishment, which I hoped would temper their ambition with humility. It was a dual tactic, with which Mr. Woodbridge heartily agreed. Above the doorframe hung a tablet, made as a term project by Henry L. Stimson when he was a boy here, that I hoped would teach my students of the irony that history bestows upon ambition. In clay relief, it said:
I am Shutruk-Nahhunte, King of Anshan and Susa,
sovereign of the land of Elam.
By the command of Inshushinak,
I destroyed Sippar, took the stele of Naram-Sin,
and brought it back to Elam,
where I erected it as an offering to my god,
Inshushinak.
—Shutruk-Nahhunte, 1158 B.C.
I always noted this tablet to the boys on their first day in my classroom, partly to inform them of their predecessors at St. Benedict’s, and partly to remind them of the great ambition and conquest that had been utterly forgotten centuries before they were born. Afterward I had one of them recite, from the wall where it hung above my desk, Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” It is critical for any man of import to understand his own insignificance before the sands of time, and this is what my classroom always showed my boys.
As young Sedgewick Bell stood in the doorway of that classroom his first day at St. Benedict’s, however, it was apparent that such efforts would be lost on him. I could see that not only was he a dullard but a roustabout. The boys happened to be wearing the togas they had made from sheets and safety pins the day before, spreading their knees like magistrates in the wooden desk chairs and I was taking them through the recitation of the emperors when Mr. Woodbridge entered alongside the stout, red-faced Sedgewick and introduced him to the class. I had taught for five years, as I have said, and I knew the frightened, desperate bravura of a new boy. Sedgewick Bell did not wear this look.
Rather, he wore one of disdain. The boys, fifteen in all, were instantly intimidated into sensing the foolishness of their improvised cloaks, and one of them, Clay Walter, the leader of the dullards—though far from a dullard himself—said, to mild laughter, “Where’s your toga, kid?”
Sedgewick Bell answered, “Your mother must be wearing your pants today.”
It took me a moment to regain the attention of the class, and when Sedgewick was seated I had him go to the board and copy out the Emperors. Of course, he did not know the names of any of them, and my boys had to call them out, repeatedly correcting his spelling as he wrote out in a sloppy hand:
Augustus
Tiberius
Caligula
Claudius
Nero
Galba
Otho
all the while lifting and resettling the legs of his short pants in mockery of what his new classmates were wearing. “Young man,” I said, “this is a serious class, and I expect that you will take it seriously.”
“If it’s such a serious class, then why’re they all wearing dresses?” he responded, again to laughter, although by now Clay Walter had loosened the rope belt at his waist, and the boys around him were shifting uncomfortably in their togas.
From that first day, Sedgewick Bell became a boor and a bully, a damper to the illumination of the eager minds of my boys and a purveyor of the mean-spirited humor that is like kerosene in a school such as ours. What I asked of my boys that semester was simple, that they learn the facts I presented to them in an “Outline of Ancient Roman History,” which I had whittled, through my years of teaching, to exactly four closely typed pages; yet Sedgewick Bell was unwilling to do so. He was a poor student, and on his first exam could not even tell me who it was that Mark Antony and Octavian had routed at Philippi, nor who Octavian later became, although an average wood beetle in the floor of my classroom could have done so with ease.
Furthermore, as soon as he arrived he began a stream of capers using spitballs, wads of gum and thumbtacks. Of course it was common for a new boy to engage his comrades thusly, but Sedgewick Bell then began to add the dangerous element of natural leadership—which was based on the physical strength of his features—to his otherwise puerile antics. He organized the boys. At exactly fifteen minutes to the hour, they would all drop their pencils at once or cough or slap closed their books so that writing at the blackboard my hands would jump in the air.
At a boys’ school, of course, punishment is a cultivated art. Whenever one of these antics occurred I simply made a point of calling on Sedgewick Bell to answer a question. General laughter usually followed his stabs at answers, and although Sedgewick himself usually laughed along with everyone else, it did not require a great deal of insight to know that the tactic would work. The organized events began to occur less frequently.
In retrospect, however, perhaps my strategy was a mistake, for to convince a boy of his own stupidity is to shoot a poisonous arrow indeed. Perhaps Sedgewick Bell’s life would have turned out more nobly if I had understood his motivations right away and treated him differently at the start. But such are the pointless speculations of a teacher. What was irrefutably true was that he was performing poorly on his quizzes, even if his behavior had improved somewhat, and therefore I called him to my office.
In those days, I lived in small quarters off the rear of the main hall, in what had been a slave’s room when the grounds of St. Benedict’s had been the estate of the philanthropist and horse breeder, Cyrus Beck. Having been at school as long as I had, I no longer lived in the first-form dormitory that stood behind my room, but supervised it, so that I saw most of the boys only in matters of urgency. They came sheepishly before me.
With my bed folded into the wall, the room became my office, and shortly after supper one day that winter of his first-form year, Sedgewick Bell knocked and entered. Immediately he began to inspect the premises, casting his eyes, which had the patrician set of his father’s, from the desk, to the shelves, to the bed folded into the wall.
“Sit down, boy.”
“You’re not married, are you, sir?”
“No, Sedgewick, I am not. However, we are here to talk about you.”
“That’s why you like puttin’ us in togas, right?”
I had, frankly, never encountered a boy like him before, who at the age of thirteen would affront his schoolmaster without other boys in audience. He gazed at me flatly, his chin in hand.
“Young man,” I said, sensing his motivations with sudden clarity, “we are concerned about your performance here, and I have made an appointment to see your father.”
In fact, I had made no appointments with Senator Bell, but at that moment I understood that I would have to. “What would you like me to tell the senator?” I said.
His gaze faltered. “I’m to try harder, Sir, from now on.”
“Good, Sedgewick. Good.”
Indeed, that week the boys reenacted the pivotal scenes from Julius Caesar, and Sedgewick read his lines quite passably and contributed little that I could see to the occasional fits of giggles that circulated among the slower boys. The next week, I gave a quiz on the Triumvirate of Crassus, Pompey and Caesar, and he passed for the first time yet, with a C+.
Nonetheless, I had told him that I was going to speak with his father, and this is what I was determined to do. At the time, Senator Sedgewick Hyram Bell was appearing regularly in the newspapers and on the radio in his stand against Truman’s plan for national health insurance, and I was loathe to call upon such a well-known man concerning the behavior of his son. On the radio his voice was a tobacco drawl that had won him populist appeal throughout West Virginia, although his policies alone would certainly not have done so. I was at the time in my late twenties, and although I was armed with scruples and an education, my hands trembled as I dialed his office. To my surprise, I was put through, and the senator, in the drawl I recognized instantly, agreed to meet me one afternoon the following week. The man already enjoyed national statu
re, of course, and although any other father would no doubt have made the journey to St. Benedict’s himself, I admit that the prospect of seeing the man in his own office intrigued me. Thus I journeyed to the capital.
St. Benedict’s lies in the bucolic, equine expanse of rural Virginia, nearer in spirit to the Carolinas than to Maryland, although the drive to Washington requires little more than an hour. The bus followed the misty, serpentine course of the Passamic, then entered the marshlands that are now the false-brick suburbs of Washington and at last left me downtown in the capital, where I proceeded the rest of the way on foot. I arrived at the Senate office building as the sun moved low against the bare-limbed cherries among the grounds. I was frightened but determined, and I reminded myself that Sedgewick Hyram Bell was a senator but also a father, and I was here on business that concerned his son. The office was as grand as a duke’s.
I had not waited long in the anteroom when the man himself appeared, feisty as a game hen, bursting through a side door and clapping me on the shoulder as he urged me before him into his office. Of course I was a novice then in the world of politics and had not yet realized that such men are, above all, likable. He put me in a leather seat, offered a cigar, which I refused, and then with real or contrived wonder—perhaps he did something like this with all his visitors—he proceeded to show me an antique sidearm that had been sent to him that morning by a constituent and that had once belonged, he said, to the coachman of Robert E. Lee. “You’re a history buff,” he said, “right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then take it. It’s yours.”
“No, sir. I couldn’t.”
“Take the damn thing.”
“All right, I will.”
“Now, what brings you to this dreary little office?”
“Your son, sir.”
“What the devil has he done now?”
“Very little, sir. We’re concerned that he isn’t learning the material.”
“What material is that?”
“We’re studying the Romans now, sir. We’ve left the Republic and entered the Empire.”
“Ah,” he said. “Be careful with that, by the way. It still fires.”
“Your son seems not to be paying attention, sir.”
He again offered me the box of cigars across the desk and then bit off the end of his own. “Tell me,” he said, puffing the thing until it flamed suddenly, “what’s the good of what you’re teaching them boys?”
This was a question for which I was well prepared, fortunately, having recently written a short piece in The St. Benedict’s Crier answering the same challenge put forth there by an anonymous boy. “When they read of the reign of Augustus Caesar,” I said without hesitation, “when they learn that his rule was bolstered by commerce, a postal system and the arts, by the reformation of the senate and by the righting of an inequitable system of taxation, when they see the effect of scientific progress through the census and the enviable network of Roman roads, how these advances led mankind away from the brutish rivalries of potentates into the two centuries of pax romana, then they understand the importance of character and high ideals.”
He puffed at his cigar. “Now, that’s a horse who can talk,” he said. “And you’re telling me my son Sedgewick has his head in the clouds.”
“It’s my job, sir, to mold your son’s character.”
He thought for a moment, idly fingering a match. Then his look turned stern. “I’m sorry, young man,” he said slowly, “but you will not mold him. I will mold him. You will merely teach him.”
That was the end of my interview, and I was politely shown the door. I was bewildered, naturally, and found myself in the elevator before I could even take account of what had happened. Senator Bell was quite likable, as I have noted, but he had without doubt cut me, and as I made my way back to the bus station, the gun stowed deep in my briefcase, I considered what it must have been like to have been raised under such a tyrant. My heart warmed somewhat toward young Sedgewick.
Back at St. Benedict’s, furthermore, I saw that my words had evidently had some effect on the boy, for in the weeks that followed he continued on his struggling, uphill course. He passed two more quizzes, receiving an A– on one of them. For his midterm project he produced an adequate papier-mâché rendering of Hadrian’s gate, and in class he was less disruptive to the group of do-nothings among whom he sat, if indeed he was not in fact attentive.
Such, of course, are the honeyed morsels of a teacher’s existence, those students who come, under one’s own direction, from darkness into the light, and I admit that I might have taken a special interest that term in Sedgewick Bell. If I gave him the benefit of the doubt on his quizzes when he straddled two grades, if I began to call on him in class only for those questions I had reason to believe he could answer, then I was merely trying to encourage the nascent curiosity of a boy who, to all appearances, was struggling gamely from beneath the formidable umbra of his father.
The fall term was by then drawing to a close, and the boys had begun the frenzy of preliminary quizzes for the annual Mister Julius Caesar competition. Here again, I suppose I was in my own way rooting for Sedgewick. Mister Julius Caesar is a St. Benedict’s tradition, held in reverence among the boys, the kind of mythic ritual that is the currency of a school like ours. It is a contest, held in two phases. The first is a narrowing maneuver, by means of a dozen written quizzes, from which three boys from the first form emerge victorious. The second is a public tournament, in which these three take the stage before the assembled student body and answer questions about ancient Rome until one alone emerges triumphant, as had Caesar himself from among Crassus and Pompey. Parents and graduates fill out the audience. Out front of Mr. Woodbridge’s office, a plaque attests to the Misters Julius Caesar of the previous half-century—a list that begins with John F. Dulles in 1901—and although the ritual might seem quaint to those who have not attended St. Benedict’s, I can only say that, in a school just like ours, one cannot overstate the importance of a public joust.
That year I had three obvious contenders: Clay Walter, who, as I intimated, was a somewhat gifted boy; Martin Blythe, a studious type; and Deepak Mehta, the son of a Bombay mathematician, who was dreadfully quiet but clearly my best student. It was Deepak, in fact, who on his own and entirely separate from the class had studied the disparate peoples, from the Carthaginians to the Egyptians, whom the Romans had conquered.
By the end of the narrowing quizzes, however, a surprising configuration had emerged: Sedgewick Bell had pulled himself to within a few points of third place in my class. This was when I made my first mistake. Although I should certainly have known better, I was impressed enough by his efforts that I broke one of the cardinal rules of teaching: I gave him an A on a quiz on which he had earned only a B, and in so doing, I leap-frogged him over Martin Blythe. On March 15th, when the three finalists took their seats on stage in front of the assembled population of the school, Sedgewick Bell was among them, and his father was among the audience.
The three boys had donned their togas for the event and were arranged around the dais on which a pewter platter held the green, silk garland that, at the end of the morning, I would place upon the brow of the winner. As the interrogator, I stood front row, center, next to Mr. Woodbridge.
“Which language was spoken by the Sabines?”
“Oscan,” answered Clay Walter without hesitation.
“Who composed the Second Triumvirate?”
“Mark Antony, Octavian and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, Sir,” answered Deepak Mehta.
“Who was routed at Philippi?”
Sedgewick Bell’s eyes showed no recognition. He lowered his head in his hands as though pushing himself to the limit of his intellect, and in the front row my heart dropped. Several boys in the audience began to twitter. Sedgewick’s own leg began to shake inside his toga. When I looked up again I felt that it was I who had put him in this untenable position, I who brought a tender bud too soon into the
heat, and I wondered if he would ever forgive me; but then, without warning, he smiled slightly, folded his hands and said, “Brutus and Cassius.”
“Good,” I said, instinctively. Then I gathered my poise. “Who deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Emperor of the Western Empire?”
“Odoacer,” Clay Walter answered, then added, “in A.D. 476.”
“Who introduced the professional army to Rome?”
“Gaius Marius, Sir,” answered Deepak Mehta, then himself added, “in 104 B.C.”
When I asked Sedgewick his next question—Who was the leading Carthaginian General of the Second Punic War?—I felt some unease because the boys in the audience seemed to sense that I was favoring him with an easier examination. Nonetheless, his head sank into his hands, and he appeared once again to be straining the limits of his memory before he looked up and produced the obvious answer, “Hannibal.”
I was delighted. Not only was he proving my gamble worthwhile but he was showing the twittering boys in the audience that, under fire, discipline produces accurate thought. By now they had quieted, and I had the sudden, heartening premonition that Sedgewick Bell was going to surprise us after all, that his tortoiselike deliberation would win him, by morning’s end, the garland of laurel.
The next several rounds of questions proceeded much in the same manner as had the previous two. Deepak Mehta and Clay Walter answered without hesitation, and Sedgewick Bell did so only after a tedious and deliberate period of thought. What I realized, in fact, was that his style made for excellent theater. The parents, I could see, were impressed, and Mr. Woodbridge next to me, no doubt thinking about the next annual drive, was smiling broadly.