Old School

by Tobias Wolff

  So did Jeff Purcell, known as Little Jeff because we had another Jeff Purcell in our class, his cousin—Big Jeff. In fact Little Jeff wasn’t little and Big Jeff wasn’t big, just bigger than Little Jeff, who resented Big Jeff, partly no doubt for inadvertently imposing this odious nickname on him. Little Jeff was a friend of mine, so like his other friends I called him Purcell.

  Purcell habitually kept his arms folded across his chest like a Civil War general in a daguerrotype. This bellicose pose suited him. Under his bristling crew cut he cultivated a sulfurous gift for invective and contempt. He was the Herod of our editorial sessions, poised to strike down every innocent who presumed to offer us a manuscript. He had exacting standards: moral, political, aesthetic. Purcell even flouted the timeless protocol of pretending to admire the work of his fellow editors. At one of our meetings he declared that a story of mine called “Suicide Note” read as if it’d been written after the narrator blew his brains out.

  Purcell came from a rich, social family, but you wouldn’t have guessed it from his stories and poems; or maybe you would. His subject was the injustice of relations between high and low. He had written a ballad about a miner being sent deep into the earth to perish in a cave-in while the mine owner hand-feeds filet mignon to his hunting dogs, cooing to them in baby talk; and his last Troubadour piece was an epistolary story in which a general writes congratulatory letters to various grieving women after getting their husbands and sons slaughtered.

  You may rejoice for your fallen hero, knowing that his heart was perforated for our glorious cause, and you and your little ones can rest assured that his missing head, wherever it may be, is filled with the pride of sacrifice and radiant memories of the homeland for which he died so eagerly.

  This story was, I felt sure, inspired by a certain passage in A Farewell to Arms, but when it came up for consideration I bit my tongue and let it go. It wasn’t bad. Cartoonish, of course, like all of Purcell’s work, lurid and overwrought, to be sure, but venomously alive. Anyway, I myself was in debt to Hemingway—up to my ears. So was Bill. We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.

  All of us owed someone, Hemingway or cummings or Kerouac—or all of them, and more. We wouldn’t have admitted to it but the knowledge was surely there, because imitation was the only charge we never brought against the submissions we mocked so cruelly. There was no profit in it. Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own. Even Purcell kept mum on that subject.

  He was a threat. His attack was broad, even crude, but you could feel his discomfort with the cushion he’d been born on, and his fear that it would turn him into one of the fatuous bloodsuckers he wrote about. If he humanized his targets, muted his voice, used a knife instead of a cudgel . . . Yet he didn’t necessarily have to do any of that. In a field of stiffs, one of his cartoons could win for simply being alive.

  These, then, were the boys who stood between me and Robert Frost. Of course there were other self-confessed writers in my form, but I’d read their English papers and Troubadour submissions and seen nothing to worry me except their desire. So much desire! Why did so many of us want to be writers? It seemed unreasonable. But there were reasons.

  The atmosphere of our school crackled with sexual static. We had the occasional dance with Miss Cobb’s Academy and a few other girls’ schools, but these brief affairs only cranked up the charge; and though from day to day we saw the master’s wives, Roberta Ramsey alone had the goods to enter our dreams. The absence of an actual girl to compete for meant that every other prize became feminized. For honors in sport, scholarship, music, and writing we cracked our heads together like mountain rams, and to make your mark as a writer was equal as proof of puissance to a brilliant season on the gridiron.

  This aspect of my ambition was obscure to me at the time. But there was another that I did recognize, though vaguely, and almost in spite of myself: the problem of class.

  Our school was proud of its hierarchy of character and deeds. It believed that this system was superior to the one at work outside, and that it would wean us from habits of undue pride and deference. It was a good dream and we tried to live it out, even while knowing that we were actors in a play, and that outside the theater was a world we would have to reckon with when the curtain closed and the doors were flung open.

  Class was a fact. Not just the clothes a boy wore, but how he wore them. How he spent his summers. The sports he knew how to play. His way of turning cold at the mention of money, or at the spectacle of ambition too nakedly revealed. You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world, that it had already been reserved for them; a depth of ease or, in the case of Purcell and a few others, a sullen antipathy toward the padding that hemmed them in and muffled the edges of life. Yet even in the act of kicking against it they were defined by it, and protected by it, and to some extent unconscious of it. Purcell himself had a collection of first editions you’d almost have to own a mine to pay for.

  These things I understood instinctively. I never gave them voice, not even within the privacy of my thoughts, precisely because the school’s self-conception was itself unspoken and thus inarguable. From my first days there I grasped and gratefully entered the dream but at the same time behaved as if I knew better, as in the following instance.

  The summer before entering the school I’d worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen crew at a YMCA camp outside Seattle. I was the youngest, and the other guys rode me pretty hard until Hartmut, the chef, saw what was going on and headed them off. He did this obliquely, never defending me directly but bearing down on the hardest kidders by giving them the shit work, the grease trap or the fryolator. Eventually some subliminal sense of cause and effect must have taken hold, because they eased up and then we all got along fine. After dinner, when the kitchen was polished to his satisfaction, Hartmut let us play Tom Lehrer albums on his old portable. Though he didn’t get the jokes, he enjoyed our hilarity. Ah! You boys! You crazy crazy boys!

  Hartmut was from Austria. He’d been in the States for many years but his English was eccentric and often ludicrous. He wore an actual chef’s hat and a white uniform that he changed every day. He cooked for those hot-dog-loving kids as if they were royalty—soufflés, pastries of airy lightness, quiches, many-layered tortes. He had great pride and didn’t allow himself to notice when the little pagans made gagging noises over their eggs Benedict.

  Pink and thick and strong, Hartmut ran his kitchen like a ship, everything in its place, all orders to be obeyed on the instant. Though he appeared not to have a family, his love for children was obvious and utterly benevolent. He also loved music. When the record player wasn’t blasting out waltzes and light opera, he whistled and sang. Some of his melodies were catchy and stuck in my head. And that’s what landed me in trouble.

  I’d been at the school for five or six weeks, no more. I was struggling in my classes but every morning I felt a rush of joy to wake to the bells ringing in the clock tower and go to my window and think, My God! I’m really here! In my pleasure I was whistling a tune of Hartmut’s as I climbed the dormitory stairs after breakfast. Gershon, one of the school handymen, was a few steps ahead of me, carrying a laundry bag on his narrow shoulders. He had a plodding gait even on the level; here on the stairs he barely moved at all. I was afraid I’d bump into him if I tried to pass, so I kept pace a few steps behind, whistling all the while. Gershon gave off a stale smell that I’d whiffed before but never so strongly as in this tight passage.

  He slowed even more. I hung back obligingly and continued to whistle, my song resounding pleasant
ly in the stone stairwell. Then Gershon stopped and turned his long gray face, the laundry bag slumped on his shoulders like a lamb in a Bible illustration. I could hear him breathe, fast and shallow. He said something in what I thought was another language—I knew he was a foreigner of some kind. His too-white teeth clicked as he talked; I watched them with helpless fascination. Then he stopped. He appeared to be waiting for an answer.

  Name! he said. Vat your name!

  I told him.

  Go den! Go! Go!

  I nudged past him and went to my room, and by the time classes started I’d written it off as a misunderstanding: the old crab must’ve thought I’d been trying to hurry him. When a prefect called me out of Latin during second period and sent me to the dean’s office, I assumed it was to receive a lecture about my abysmal grades. I was on scholarship, and had been nervously fearing a summons.

  I hadn’t met Dean Makepeace yet but I knew who he was: he was Ernest Hemingway’s friend. He closed the door behind me and looked me over without a word of greeting, then motioned me toward the hot seat. He let himself down in the chair behind the desk and began to leaf through a file. Mine, I supposed.

  He reeked of tobacco. Most of the masters did. It usually seemed a pleasant, paternal smell, though in my worried state I was nearly sickened by it. Before now I had seen Dean Makepeace only from a distance, at his table in the dining hall or tapping his way across campus, often conducted by an escort of older boys. With his height and his nose and his long black cane he’d appeared regal but benign. At this range he seemed neither. Dense white hairs bristled from his ears and nostrils. Cigarette smoke had tinged his white moustache with yellow, and his suit jacket was smudged with ash. I had the impression that he wasn’t actually reading the file, just occupying himself with it while he decided how to carve me up, or maybe to give me time to feel the full weight of my laziness and ingratitude and the complete disappointment of everyone with hopes for me.

  My chair had a high ladder-back that held me bolt upright. Shelves of dark, uniformly bound books rose up on either side, floor to high ceiling. Much as I loved books, there was something unfriendly about these; when I came across Meredith’s poem “Lucifer in Starlight” later that year and read the line The army of unalterable law, I thought not of the stars but of those looming tomes. Behind his desk the leaded window was open to the breeze. I heard a burst of laughter from one of the classrooms on the quad. It stopped suddenly.

  Dean Makepeace laid the file on the desk. Explain yourself, he said.

  Well, sir, I was pretty far behind when I got here.

  What?

  Not to make excuses. I know I need to work harder.

  Don’t change the subject. Do you have any idea what that man has been through?

  Sir?

  You heard me. I am unable to understand how anyone could behave like this to a man in Gershon’s position. Please explain.

  Dean Makepeace said all this calmly enough, but I wilted under his gaze. He wasn’t angry. Anger, which I knew to be transient and generally at least part theater, I was used to and could easily bear. What I saw was dislike, which can’t be shrugged off, which abides.

  I didn’t mean to hurry Gershon, I said. I’m sorry if he got that impression.

  Oh, was that it? He wasn’t moving fast enough, so you thought you’d give him a little marching music. Why don’t you strike up the band for me?

  Sir?

  I want you to sing me what you sang to Gershon.

  Well, I was whistling a song. I don’t know the words.

  Whistle away, then.

  My mouth was so dry I couldn’t get a note out. I made a few false starts and gave up.

  Come on. Let’s have it.

  I can’t.

  You were doing okay this morning, weren’t you? All right—hum the damned thing.

  I did. It sounded different, hummed, but I could tell Dean Makepeace recognized it and that this wasn’t helping matters. I stopped and said, Sir, what is this song?

  Don’t play dumb with me, boy.

  I’m not! I’m not playing dumb. What did I do wrong? The self-pity of this question brought me close to tears.

  You say you don’t know what this song is?

  I shook my head furiously.

  Where did you learn it, then?

  A man I worked with. Hartmut. I picked it up from him. The tune.

  You must know other songs.

  Yes sir.

  Many other songs. Yet of all the songs you know, you just happened to whistle this one to Gershon. To Gershon, of all people!

  I wasn’t whistling to him. I was just whistling. And Gershon was there.

  Was there some occasion for this outbreak of melody?

  Nothing special. I was feeling happy, that’s all.

  Dean Makepeace leaned back in his chair. Happy. What were you happy about?

  Being here.

  He stroked his moustache. You’ll want to be somewhat discreet about that, he said. Honestly, boy, what have you heard about Gershon?

  Nothing. I see him around, that’s all.

  So you don’t know anything about him?

  No sir.

  Have you ever heard of the “Horst Wessel Song”?

  You mean the Christmas carol?

  No, no. The “Horst Wessel Song” is a Nazi marching song, and a very ugly piece of work it is, too. That’s what you were singing. Whistling.

  Then it all came home. As a child of the superior, disgusted, victorious nation I had the usual store of images to go with the words Nazi and Jew, and I was putting Gershon’s face to them even before Dean Makepeace began to tell me what had befallen Gershon and his family, of whom none had survived but a daughter who was now in a French mental hospital. As he spoke I felt my eyes tearing up, partly from pity and also because the sadness of the story gave me cover to mourn my own plight, unjustly accused and humiliated by a great man of the school only a few weeks into my first term—a man I’d hoped to study with one day, who might even befriend me.

  It was too much. I started to weep—to blubber. My lack of control mortified me and I turned in my chair, hunched away from him. I tried to stop but couldn’t. I felt a hand on my back. Dean Makepeace kept it there for a moment, then gave my shoulder a squeeze and left the room.

  By the time he came back I had exhausted myself. He offered me a glass of water and waited beside my chair. The water was cold. I drank most of it in a gulp, then finished it off and handed Dean Makepeace the glass. Though he didn’t say anything, I understood that our meeting was over. I got up and told him I was sorry about Gershon, that I’d had no idea . . .

  I know. I know you didn’t.

  But how did he know? How could he, in the face of such an inconceivable coincidence? Surely some doubt remained. I had the means to prove myself, but already knew I’d never make use of it.

  Dean Makepeace walked me to the door. He shook my hand and said, If you’ll be good enough to clear things up with Gershon, we can put this to rest. The sooner the better. Tonight, say. After dinner.

  And get those grades up.

  Gershon lived in the basement of Holmes, the sixth-form dormitory, just off the boiler room. Even down there I could hear the boys upstairs, blustering and braying, full of the knowledge that at last the school was theirs. Gershon let me inside the door but no farther, and waited while I began to explain myself.

  The room was close and smelled of onions. Gershon had been sewing something, and the table was strewn with scraps of cloth. No books in sight. No pictures. Insulated pipes ran across the ceiling.

  As I talked he kept his face averted, his mouth set in a puckered line; he wasn’t wearing his teeth. He would neither speak to me nor give any sign that he was listening. It was obvious that he regarded my visit as a galling evolution of the ugliness I’d already dealt him, and that he’d agreed to it only because he thought he had no choice. I tried to keep my explanation simple and slow. I couldn’t be sure he understood me, though I
had the feeling he did and that he didn’t believe a word I was saying.

  The story sounded incredible even to me, and its grotesque, improbable accidents—that song, of all songs; Gershon, of all people—robbed my voice of conviction and, finally, of sense. I started to tell him about learning the song from Hartmut, then got lost in describing what a nice guy Hartmut was and how he must not have known what the song was about, or maybe he’d forgotten and just remembered the tune . . . Gershon stared into the corner, sucking his cheeks, enduring me, waiting for the lies to stop and for me to leave him in peace. And still I pushed on. I wanted him to believe me, for my own sake of course, but also for his, so he’d know there weren’t any Nazis here.

  Again it occurred to me that I could prove my case: I could tell him that my own father was Jewish. This was true, though he himself never mentioned the fact, not even to me, his only child. My mother had told me only a year before, not long before she died, and I had no idea what it should mean to me. I had been raised Catholic; up to now my teachers had been nuns and the occasional priest, my social world entirely gentile. I knew nothing about Jews except some of their recent history. If I’d learned that my father was descended from Southern Baptists, would that make me a Southern Baptist? No. I would still be the boy I’d been the day before I came into this knowledge. The same with his Jewish ancestry. It was a fact but not a defining fact, neither to be asserted nor denied.

  But it had come to a kind of question twice that day, and both times I’d chosen to deny it. Telling Dean Makepeace or Gershon about my father might not have cleared me; Jews can be savage Jew-baiters, as everyone knows, but I didn’t know. I thought I held a trump card, and my refusal to play it amounted to a deception.

  The scene with Gershon could be spun into a certain kind of story. The new boy comes to clear things up with the cranky handyman he’s unwittingly affronted and ends up confiding his own Jewish blood, whereupon the handyman melts and a friendship ensues. In time the man who has lost his sons becomes a true father to the boy, enfolding him in the tradition his own false father has denied him. And what irony: the ambitious, upward-striving boy must descend to a basement room to learn the wisdom not being taught in the snob factory upstairs.