Old School

by Tobias Wolff

  Forty.

  Forty? After the windfall he had? The old man left him everything! Forty? That dress of hers cost forty.

  With a promise to reconsider if the market improves.

  We should’ve given him the boot that time. You remember—him down on his warty little knees blubbering for a second chance. Tear up the check. Forty is an insult.

  I will bear it.

  What about Melissa Didget?

  On and on they went. I didn’t feel slighted by their inattention, not at all. It left me free to contemplate the story I’d just been told; and anyway, I liked listening in, feeling the same illicit pleasure I’d known as a boy when the masters forgot my presence and unsheathed their tongues. It was a kind of music they made, and it carried me back to those Sunday teas in the headmaster’s parlor, red leaves or snow or whirling maple seeds falling past the tall windows. The great Persian rug is covered with cookie crumbs. The air smells of the Greek master’s cigar. In the far corner someone plays “Beautiful Dreamer” on the tinkly upright, fragments of the melody floating just above our voices. We boys stand in circles and trade witty remarks, all the while straining to catch what the masters are saying that makes them laugh so easily, so unguardedly. The boy closest to them smiles into his punch glass. He can hear them; he has slipped into their camp and can hear the secret music of these sure and finished men, our masters.

  MASTER

  The problem started at one of the headmaster’s teas, when a boy asked Arch if he had known Ernest Hemingway during World War I. The room was crowded and noisy, and Arch distracted, so later he couldn’t recall exactly how he’d answered but came to accept that he had not been clear in his denial.

  He understood how the question arose. Hemingway had driven an ambulance in Italy, as he had, and both had suffered leg injuries. But they’d never met. Hemingway served with the Red Cross, Arch with the Army Ambulance Service. And they got hurt in very different circumstances—Hemingway while carrying a wounded man under fire, Arch in a stupid accident. The fuel line of his ambulance fed off a gravity tank. The engine tended to stall out on steep grades unless you drove backward uphill, and that’s what Arch was doing in late October of 1918, driving backward over a mountain pass near Cima Grappa, when a staff car surprised him in a tight corner and he jerked the wheel too hard and backed right off the road. His partner was thrown out immediately and walked away with a few bruises, but Arch got caught inside and rolled down into the trees like a pea in a can and ended up with a broken arm, a broken collarbone, two broken wrists, a badly sprained neck, and a shattered knee. Those were the serious injuries. The others looked worse, but within a few weeks he could face a mirror without despair. The medicos did a good job on him. Everything healed up except the knee, which never worked right again and gave him more and more trouble as time went on, until he finally gave in and got himself a cane whose evident cheapness inspired the graduating class of 1939 to present him with a fine blackthorn stick, silver-handled.

  He knew that his limp interested the boys, but he didn’t talk about it because he disliked recalling his panic and incompetence. Arch Makepeace was not a man to tell stories on himself. Though he hadn’t intended his silence to mean anything, from his first days at the school people drew certain conclusions from it that gave him an authority he wouldn’t otherwise have enjoyed.

  It proved useful. Willful boys who would’ve felt obliged to test another master gave Arch a pass. The masters themselves—none of whom actually made it to Europe during the war, though some had been in uniform—treated him from the beginning with a respect it would have taken anyone else years to squeeze out of them. Arch didn’t like to think that this consideration depended on a misunderstanding, but that was no fault of his. He had never lied about his experience. If the speculations of others brought out the best in them, let them speculate.

  The business about Hemingway was different. One night a boy at his table asked him if Hemingway had gone over to the Bolshies in Spain. Arch just stared at him, trying to understand the reason for this question. It was 1947. The Spanish civil war had ended eight years ago and since then another world war had been fought. Arch was thinking: Why this question, now? The boy flushed and looked down as if he’d been judged impertinent. Over dinner the awkwardness passed, but Arch found the moment troubling. Why would the boy ask him about Ernest Hemingway’s beliefs? And why would he then feel, as he so obviously did, that he had presumed on Arch by asking, as though the question were somehow too personal? Then Arch remembered the other boy’s question at the headmaster’s tea some weeks back and wondered if he had made himself clear, and knew that he had not.

  He experienced kindred moments in the following years, though not many and never of a kind that gave him license to say, What the deuce are you talking about? I’ve never laid eyes on Ernest Hemingway! Word had probably gone out that he could not be approached on the subject of Hemingway the man, though Hemingway the writer had an important place in his honors seminar on contemporary literature. The boys were politic. They had been bred to conceal their interest in famous names, but by an elusive, delicately shaded remark they might still hint at some privileged awareness, and Arch caught enough of these—just a hint here and there, never an opening for decisive refutation—to recognize that the boys believed that he and Hemingway were friends.

  Arch had left room for doubt that day at the headmaster’s tea, and he knew why, or thought he did: some hidden yearning to be part of the great world. To be important, even by association.

  He didn’t see this as a lie so much as a kind of dozing off in his attention to the truth. And he was attentive to the truth. The truth wanted to be sought after but it would let itself be seen now and then, and this happened to Arch most often while he was teaching. He’d been a reader since childhood, and the habit had deepened during his years of travel for the Forbes-Farragut shipping line, but until he began teaching he’d rarely had occasion to talk about what he read. He could read a story like “The Minister’s Black Veil” and both shrink from and relish the soul-chill it worked on him without having to fix that response in words, or explain how Hawthorne had produced it. Teaching made him accountable for his thoughts, and as he became accountable for them he had more of them, and they became sharper and deeper. It was the nature of literature to behave like the fallen world it contemplated, this dusky ground where subterfuge reigns and certainty is folly, and Arch felt like some master of hounds as he led the boys deep into a story or poem, driving them on with questions, forcing them to test cadence, gesture, and inflection for feint and doubletalk until at last the truth showed its face for an instant before vanishing into some new possibility of meaning. He sometimes arrived at the end of a class dripping with sweat, hardly knowing where he was or how long he’d been there, all his damned dignity gone.

  Arch hadn’t meant to teach. In fact he used to wonder with a stern kind of pity how his own teachers, especially the ones he looked up to, had allowed themselves to become schoolbound. But just three years after he got married his wife failed to return from a trip to California, and then Forbes-Farragut went under in the general havoc, and he couldn’t for the life of him find work until his old roommate from Cornell invited Arch to apply for the job he planned to vacate—teaching America’s heirs presumptive what the tempus fugit on their grandfather clocks meant. Although Arch had taken his degree in classics he didn’t get that job, but just before school started they offered him another, teaching English. He came with the intention of leaving at the end of the year but stayed on for another, and then another. This seemed to happen naturally, without any effort of decision, but of course Arch had his reasons, and he knew that comfort and habit were among them, and probably counted for more than they should. But he also believed that his teaching was good—good for the boys and good for him, making him more alert and self-forgetful and more truthful.

  So he hunched up a little when something reminded him of this myth about Makepeace and Hemingway
. But it didn’t happen very often, and God knows he had other things to think about. Arch taught a full schedule of classes and because he had no family at school he volunteered for more than his share of committee work. His wife, Helen, lived out west, but they had never divorced and in her many troubles she did not hesitate to call on him for help. Sometimes it was just his sympathy she wanted, for bad health or bad luck or mistreatment by one of her friends, as she called them. She took small loans from Arch and usually paid them back. Helen wasn’t a mean or scheming person but things tended to get away from her. When the riding stable she managed in Palm Springs threatened her with charges over a problem in their accounts, Arch helped defray the shortfall and obtain mercy from the owner. Later on he performed the same office with a stable in Tucson. She moved often. He lost track of her for longer and longer periods, and these silences worried him more than her recurrent needs and complaints. The beautiful, lippy, headlong Kentucky girl Arch had married became a woman of no fixed address. She was killed in Phoenix early one morning in 1953 while walking across an intersection against the light. Her friend of the moment didn’t tell Arch for two months, and then only because he needed the money he’d spent on her cremation to pay off a pressing debt. Arch hoped it was a hustle, but the funeral home confirmed the man’s story and sent along a copy of Helen’s death certificate.

  That was the same year he became dean. The new headmaster had some changes in mind and relied on Arch, his former colleague in the English faculty, to back him up in contests with recalcitrant masters and alumni. Moneychangers called Arch straight from their tables in the Temple to protest the end of compulsory religious education. When the headmaster moved to divert more of the endowment into scholarship funds, two trustees resigned and sent out a letter arguing that if this sort of thing kept up, the school they knew and loved—which wasn’t, after all, a public school—would be altered beyond recognition. The headmaster prevailed, but just barely, and Arch knew that his support had made the difference. At crucial moments, strong, difficult men had deferred to him.

  And why did he have that power? Being dean cut no ice; deans came and went. Arch considered himself a good teacher, yet so were other masters who wouldn’t have carried the day. He suspected that it had something to do with this Hemingway business. The school had its names, to be sure, its giants of commerce, its cabinet officers, ambassadors and generals, even a long-dead president, but none of these names had real magic. Arch sensed that through him the school felt itself connected to a greatness radiant with glamour, as if he were at once their own Archibald Makepeace, master and dean, and also Frederick Henry and Nick Adams and Robert Jordan and Jake Barnes and Ernest Hemingway himself, all mystically present in him and adding their consequence to his. He hoped he had this wrong, but thought he probably had it right.

  Arch dropped A Farewell to Arms from his honors seminar because he feared that all this wounded-ambulance-driver stuff might encourage the confusion, but he always kept something by Hemingway on his reading list. Though he didn’t love Hemingway as he loved Hawthorne and Melville and Edith Wharton and F. Scott Fitzgerald, he admired him and understood how others could love him. Love him as a writer, that is. Arch had lost interest in Hemingway himself long ago, and wished everyone else would lose interest too, as in the normal course of things one would.

  This was not to be. Other reputations bloomed and faded, but not this one. Every year it grew brighter, and the man himself more of a figure, and harder to separate from the work. He loomed over it; Arch could almost feel him drawing up into himself the love and honor he demanded for his characters. Who could not think of Hemingway when reading about Colonel Cantwell pissing on the Italian battleground where he’d been wounded, or Santiago pursuing his big fish? This deliberate blurring had always been in play, but now it seemed anxious, greedy. Or maybe not. Arch distrusted his growing aversion to both the man and the work. It might well be a dishonest form of chagrin at his own false position, or simply resentment at looking so small beside the giant to whom he’d let himself be linked.

  But he was busy, and had greater cares than this. Helen. The various stages in his mother’s long decline, and his sister’s breakdown after her husband of thirty years discovered true love. A boy caught stealing. Papers to correct. A long miserable intrigue, never quite an affair, with the mother of a day boy from the village. Arch had little inclination to brood over this old foolishness about Hemingway, and indeed he hardly thought of it until some boy stared at him in a certain way, or stammered over a slight criticism of something in a Hemingway story as if afraid of offending him. Then he remembered. Such moments came and went, but never more than he could endure—not until the spring of 1961, when the headmaster announced that year’s final visiting writer.

  If Arch deserved punishment for this ludicrous myth of friendship, and he supposed he did, it began in earnest at that moment. He hadn’t even known that Hemingway had been invited; he thought they were talking to John Steinbeck. They’d kept the news from him as a surprise, a treat. He soon learned that some anonymous alum had ponied up a small fortune to close the deal, but of course the boys assumed that Arch himself had swung it on pure goodwill. He could see them grinning at him even as the headmaster made the announcement. And it kept getting worse. That terrible, ubiquitous poster, all whiskers and teeth. The way the boys looked at him—their knowingness. And when they weren’t impersonating Nick Adams they were pummelling their typewriters—it seemed that half the graduating class had a story in the works.

  Arch was sick of these competitions. The headmaster had launched them years ago to encourage more boys to try their hand at writing, and at the time Arch had seen merit in the idea, but it soon palled on him. The scramble to win a private audience set them against one another and sanctioned the idea of writing as warfare by other means, with a handful of champions waving the bloody shirt over a mob of failed pretenders.

  The other contests had been bad enough, but this one took on a frenzied, even delirious tone. So many boys tried to get Arch to read their stories that he posted a notice on his office door explaining that any help he gave would disqualify a manuscript from consideration. So it came as a relief when Hemingway chose a story—Arch had wondered if the great man would really go to the trouble—and brought the thing to an end.

  The story itself surprised him. He’d read a few other pieces by the boy who wrote it, one of that ponderous Troubadour crowd, and found them predictably competent and labored. Standard schoolboy fare. Ramsey had told him this one was different, and it was. More Fitzgerald in it than Hemingway. Arch read it at breakfast the day it came out and again that night. He admired its art but was most affected, and in fact discomfited, by its unblinking inventory of self-seeking and duplicity. It was hard to tell the truth like that.

  Arch was scolding a sixth former for cutting classes when the headmaster came to his office door and asked for a word. He looked tired. Arch sent the boy away and dismissed the evildoers waiting in the hall. He closed the office door and took the envelope the headmaster held out to him. The headmaster sat in one of the chairs facing the desk, and Arch was aware of his gaze as he went to his own chair and opened the envelope. It contained a page from an old number of the literary review of Miss Cobb’s Academy.

  Arch read the page and slipped it back into the envelope. I can’t throw him out, he said.

  Of course you can throw him out. We have to throw him out.

  You can. I can’t.

  Arch, come on. You bounced Tompkins fast enough for swiping those shirts—pretty small beer compared to stealing someone’s story.

  I understand, Arch said.

  Not to mention bamboozling Ernest Hemingway. For Pete’s sake, we throw them out for cutting chapel. I had hopes for this boy, but we can’t start playing favorites. You have what you need right there. The headmaster put his hands on his knees and leaned forward as if to push himself up.

  I have to resign, Arch said.

  The he
ll you say! Do your job.

  From the school, Arch said. He hadn’t known he would say this, but there it was.

  What is this? Does the boy have something on you?

  No.

  Well?

  Arch began to explain. He wasn’t used to talking about himself, and did it clumsily, but he tried to make the headmaster understand. This boy had laid false claim to a story, whereas he himself had laid false claim to much more—to a kind of importance, to a life not his own. He had been in violation of the Honor Code for many years now and had no right to punish lesser offenders, especially this one, who’d been caught up in a hysteria for which Arch held himself partly responsible.

  I’m kicking myself out, he said. That’s my last act as dean.

  The headmaster had listened closely to all of this. He said, So you don’t know Hemingway.

  Never laid eyes on the man.

  Well, I for one never heard you say you did. Have you?

  No. But I had a good idea what people thought.

  You never once mentioned Hemingway in a personal connection?

  Arch saw the emerging outline of an argument by which he could squirm off the hook, and he was touched and saddened that for his sake the headmaster would involve himself in cunning stratagems.

  Thank you, John, he said. Bless your heart. I really do have to go.

  Arch went to live with his older sister Margaret in Syracuse. They were close, he and Margaret, and had been since childhood when their father, a doctor, died of TB and their mother fell into the hands of one Madame von Ranke and her son Hermann. The von Rankes were spiritualists. They conducted grief-shocked Miriam to the very portals of the Higher Realm, where her departed husband issued pledges of abiding love and some very pointed business tips. Arch could still smell the licorice scent of Hermann’s pomade; he could close his eyes anywhere and smell it. They robbed Miriam blind, until finally she had to sell the Ward Wellington Ward house on Euclid Avenue and move in with her old parents, children in tow. In their mother’s cause Arch and Margaret became friends, but Margaret was a whiner and a crab and nowadays Arch couldn’t last more than a couple of weeks at a time with her.