by Peter Selgin
Mr. Peck pursed his toadstool lip.
You watched as they went on talking. You didn’t pay attention to what they said so much as to the expressions on their faces, how they looked at each other and smiled and listened with mutual interest and pleasure. It delighted you. The two men who meant the most to you – your father and the teacher – getting along like … not like brothers (they were too far apart in age for that). More like father and son.
The discussion turned to books.
Have you read Proust? your father asked.
Yes, have you?
Your father shook his head. I never finished it. I’m afraid I can’t stomach his precious affectations. His metaphors are all wrong. I’ll give you an example. At one point Proust writes something to the effect that the leaves of a tree give off a scent when “allowed to” by the rain, “la parfum que les feuilles laissent s’échapper avec les dernières gouttes de pluie,” something like that. It makes no sense. Not if you think about it. The rain doesn’t “allow” or “permit” the leaves to emit anything. That sort of language just doesn’t work, not for me, anyway.
You’re being awfully hard on Proust, the teacher said.
Well – why shouldn’t I be?
A novel isn’t an electronic instrument. It’s a work of art. Poetic language doesn’t have to answer to logic, at least not always.
Why shouldn’t it have to? If I wire a circuit incorrectly, if I replace a capacitor with a resistor, it simply doesn’t work. There’s no two ways about it. Proust’s writing doesn’t work for me. But then what do I know? I’m an engineer.
Am I dreaming, said Mr. Peck, turning to you and your brother, or did your father just utter something relatively modest?
Che cosa succede? Nonnie said.
Stronzo, your father said under his breath.
Paolo! your mother scolded him.
What’s that? asked the teacher.
Niente, Nonna, your mother said. Non succede niente.
Mr. Peck snorted.
IN THE DINING room you pulled back your grandmother’s chair. Your mother sat – when she sat at all – by the swinging door to the kitchen. Your father sat at the far end of the table by the window. Mr. Peck carved the turkey, sharpening the knife flamboyantly on the steel first, then noting as he carved (his lower lip quivering along with the knife in his hand) that the drippings were still pink.
You’ve undercooked the damn bird, he said.
(When displeased your mother made puffing sounds. She made one now.)
You poured eggnog into your wine glass. As Mr. Peck went on carving, your father recited a limerick – the one about the epicurean dining at Crewe who found a mouse in his stew, or the Lady from Trent whose nose was so horribly bent, or the one from Ride who ate too many apples and died. When you begged him to stop he broke into titters.
With everyone’s plate filled your mother drank her wine and sat back and told stories about her Italian childhood, including the one about the time Mussolini kissed her. She’d been captain of her school district’s volleyball team, which had won first place in the Pala al Volo Campionana Nationale. Having draped the medal over her, when she faced him, Il Duce (“allowasan” – “all of a sudden”) kissed her.
On de cheek, de lef one, your mother said. Three years later, presented with the opportunity to throw stones at the fascist leader’s corpse, she refused.
How dey expek me to trow stone at him when ee kiss me? I say to dem, Ma va al diavolo!
THE SUBJECT OF war having thus been broached, Mr. Peck asked the teacher his views on Vietnam.
Please, no let talk politic, said your mother.
You knew this moment was coming. You’d predicted it, had even looked forward to it with a mixture of curiosity and fear. You’d heard Mr. Peck and your pacifist father argue enough to know where Mr. Peck stood on the subject. And though he hadn’t said it in so many words, you knew the teacher was against the war. You’d known it since the day he brought a stack of New York Times to class.
I assume you’ve all heard of the war, he said, handing a copy to each student. Well, now you can read about it. One day you may be doing a lot more than reading.
Days later, the teacher showed the class a short, black-and-white movie. It showed a lone soldier walking along a deserted beach. He stops to feed a gull a piece of chocolate from his mess kit. A shot rings out. The rest of the film shows the soldier falling in slow motion to the ground. His helmet rolls away in the sand. A student informed his parents, who complained to the administration (so the teacher, who kept nothing from you, told you during one of your visits).
Mr. Peck looked at the teacher, who chewed his food for a while before responding quietly: We shouldn’t be there.
Why not?
Your mother changed the subject. What you tink of de new bool? she said.
Papa: Bool? What’s a bool?
Mom: De one de town want to build.
George: The indoor pool.
Papa: Oh, a pool.
Mr. Peck: It’s a boondoggle. We’ve already got a pool.
George: He means the town park.
You: Meckhauer.
George: That mud hole!
Mr. Peck: This town needs an indoor pool like it needs a canal.
Papa: A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.
Nonnie: Che cosa succede?
Papa: Personally, I’d vote for a trolley system. Wouldn’t that be a good thing? A system of little yellow streetcars that could take people back and forth into town.
George: We could also build an Eiffel Tower. Or a landing field for a dirigible.
Mr. Peck: Makes as much sense as an indoor pool.
You: You say so cuz you don’t like to swim!
George: Mr. Peck doesn’t know how to swim.
Papa: No wonder he doesn’t like it!
Nonnie: Che cosa succede?
Mom: Niente, Nonna, niente.
Mr. Peck: Nor do I have any inclination to learn.
George: It beats drowning.
Mr. Peck: From my perspective the difference is purely semantic. If people want to swim let them do it on their own dime.
You: Mr. Peck hates anything to do with water. He doesn’t even take baths.
Mr. Peck: I prefer to shower. Saves water.
Teacher: Is it true, Mrs. Selgin?
Mom: Please, call me Pinuccia. Is what true?
Teacher: Did you really kiss Mussolini?
Mom: No, ee kiss me!
Mr. Peck: And a couple years later they strung him and his wife up in the plaza and threw stones at them. See what kissing Pinuccia will get you?
Mom: Ma va – cretino!
AS YOUR MOTHER poured the coffee and served the zabaglione, your father launched into his usual tirade about the failure of American industrial designers to arrive at an intelligent design for a creamer that wouldn’t spill like the one from the silver service, which dribbled all over the table when your father put cream in his coffee, how such vessels with their enormous but purposeless (if not altogether contraindicated) spouts were not only a nuisance but contemptible, especially when one considered how simple it would be to design a vessel that would pour properly, how all that would be required is a simple notch, that’s all, a notch such as could be made with the tip of a round file on the lip of the vessel, a simple unelaborated notch on top of an enclosed cylinder, nothing more, and voila, you would have a vessel that would pour perfectly every time, without spilling a drop. Instead they had to contrive some inefficient monstrosity with an enormous useless spout, these bloody morons, something that looks as if it will pour, that has all the characteristics of something suggestive of the act of pouring, but which in point of fact does not, cannot pour, is incapable of if not antithetical to pouring.
Mr. Peck (to the teacher): Why are you against the war?
Why are you for it?
I think it’s in my country’s best interest.
Well, I don’t.
Why?
&n
bsp; Mom: Please, no argue!
I’m an English teacher, not a politician or a general, the teacher said, but if I had to give an answer I’d say because it’s an ideological war being fought under extremely bad conditions by obsolete means with unspecific goals on behalf of a repressive regime in response to an amorphous threat in a country very far away. Call me a pessimist, but if you ask me the signs don’t bode well.
Thanks to attitudes such as yours I too have my doubts.
Please – is Christmas! Who care about war? I no give a goop!
I agree, your father said. Let’s talk about something else.
This country is on the brink of insurrection.
If it’s dissent against the state you’re worried about, you seem to be all for it when it comes to swimming pools.
A swimming pool isn’t a matter of national security.
But your right to object to it is. You don’t want the government building swimming pools, I don’t want it fighting a war in Vietnam. You stand for your democratic rights as you see fit. So do I. In that sense we don’t disagree.
In that sense you’re right, said Mr. Peck.
Pa’al climbed onto the dining room table.
That’s my cue, said Mr. Peck, rising, turning to the teacher. Can I offer you a lift home, or are you planning another Polar expedition?
I’ll walk, thanks, said the teacher.
WITH MR. PECK gone, you showed the teacher the Building. George went with you. You took a flashlight and used your father’s key. The front room was empty and smelled of dust. You passed through a second door into the main part of the laboratory, where the fluorescent lights flickered to life.
Watch out for holes in the floor, you cautioned.
You led the teacher to your father’s latest invention, a machine for measuring the thickness of shoe soles. It took up the better part of the main room. You showed him your father’s typewriter, his oscilloscope, his basket of oranges, the shelf that sagged under the weight of his notebooks crammed with drawings, notes, and diagrams.
The teacher stepped up to a small crude painting on the wall of the Spanish Steps.
One of your father’s?
You nodded.
He writes books, too, said George. Science fiction, philosophy, psychology, etymology. He even wrote a book about grammar.
A polymath.
What’s that?
Someone who does many things well.
You showed the teacher the electric motor you’d built.
Interesting. Does it work?
You shook your head.
Peter’s inventions only work on paper, said your brother.
BACK AT THE house you heard the sound of water running in the downstairs bathroom as your father flossed his teeth. Your mother washed and put away dishes. George said goodnight and went to bed.
The teacher said:
I should be heading off.
Wait! your mother said. Please – stay a little more long. Have some liqueur. Una goccietta di Strega. Peter, go upstair wid you brother.
I’m not tired!
Den go do you omework.
It’s Christmas, Mom! I don’t have any homework!
Give Peter some omework so we can talk in private.
YOU TOOK THE hint and went downstairs to your new bedroom in what had been the playroom and that you’d adorned with scented candles and blue glass telegraph line insulators, and equipped with a two-burner electric stove to boil water for smoky-tasting tea that you served (to yourself, having no one else to serve it to) in a small pottery mug with no handle. In the middle of the floor you built your own Japanese style table from a slab of unvarnished wood, with cushions around it and a chess set – nice but not as fancy as the teacher’s – at its center.
Having made a point of walking loudly down the stairs you waited a few moments before you crept back up them again and sat there, with your ear pressed to the door, imagining your mother and the teacher sitting across from each other in the breakfast nook holding little glasses of yellow liquor. You heard her ask him some questions of which you understood only every third or fourth word, enough to gather that she had concerns. Among other things she had trouble understanding what interest a twenty-four year-old man had in a boy half his age. It wasn’t that she did not trust him, so you understood your mother to say.
I’m sure you a good man, she said. Still, I his madder. I need to be sure.
It was the teacher’s turn to speak then. His voice was clearer. He told your mother that he would never, ever hurt you or want to see you hurt. Furthermore he said that he cared about you, that you were important to him, very important. He went on to explain that he’d made very few friends in Bethel, that when he wasn’t at school or with you he spent most of his time alone, that without you he would have been extremely lonesome, unbearably lonesome.
Honestly, he said. I don’t know what I’d do if not for Peter. He’s the best if not the only real friend I have around here. If not for him I’d be gone by now. As it stands, I’m not sure how long I’ll be staying here. But I will tell you this much: I’d never, ever do anything to hurt him. Ever.
Your mother made the teacher give her his word. He did.
You’d heard enough. You crept back down the stairs and went to bed.
AS A CHILD I SUFFERED TERRIBLY FROM BOREDOM, FROM the sense that life was hidden away from me somewhere, always a street or a neighborhood or a park or a town removed from wherever I happened to be.
There are three kinds of children: bored, dull, and curious. The curious are the lucky ones. They’ll become scientists, engineers, historians. The dull fair well, too; their paths through life will be relatively smooth and painless, getting along, asking few questions, rarely troubled by existential doubts. The dull make faithful employees and good providers.
Of the three dispositions, boredom is the most troubling. The bored child is both dissatisfied with his environment and unwilling to probe its depths in search of hidden pleasures. Instead of digging into the world, he refutes its surfaces. He craves something “more” but lacks the initiative to obtain it. Like curious children, bored children are inwardly driven, only instead of being benign or beneficent, the forces that drive them are demonic and despotic; they feel tyrannized by boredom. The curious child looks around and wonders how the world works, what is it made of, how did it get here? The bored child looks around at the same world and says, “Where is it? And why am I here and not there?” He doesn’t see it as part of himself, something he belongs to that isn’t separate and distinct from him.
Having a twin brother didn’t help. Rather than solve the problem of boredom, it compounded it, the way a mirror on the wall of a room doubles its size. This may be one reason why I fought so much with George, my twin. I wanted to smash the mirror that doubled my boredom.
It also helps explain my attraction to the new teacher. In him I saw a means of escape from my own sense of boredom, from the limitations of my own existence, a means to redefine myself as my father had redefined himself, and so did the teacher.
* * *
IT GETS LONELY HERE.
The days aren’t so bad. I fill them with teaching, swimming, writing. Evenings can be a challenge: exercises in solitude arranged around one-pot meals and disappointing books. Nights are often equally challenging exercises in insomnia.
The town where I live is too small to fuel a decent social life, and so I’ve taken to inviting my graduate students over regularly to swim off my dock and cook meals together with me. Some may wonder if they’re taking advantage of their kindly, middle-aged professor, but I know the opposite to be the case.
It could be worse, I could not have this A-frame on a lake, the dock, the view of water through majestic pines. I live in a beautiful place, everyone says so. Those sunsets across the water – aren’t they some sort of victory? Do they not signify, at some level, the approval of – if not a sentient creator – of nature? At such moments, my solitude doesn’t seem so bad; I al
most forget that my daughter lives a thousand miles away. Otherwise, except when absorbed by my work, I miss Audrey terribly.
I remember our last visit together, her walking over and climbing on my bed with the sun barely risen, saying, “Daddy – it’s morning!” She’s heavenly, an angel. That all fathers think so of their daughters makes no difference. She is a miraculous creature.
Audrey loves playing this game with me in the morning. I tell her to get up and she says, “No!” Again I command her, and again she disobeys, and so on, until it’s time for the Wake-Up Machine, the soft pillow with which I strike her – not really hard, but hard enough to have her ducking under the sheets, giggling. When I stop she says, “Do it again!” and I hit her a few more times with the harmless pillow. “Again, Daddy, again!” Then I drop the pillow and tickle her until she falls off the bed, and keep tickling her as she squirms in delightful agony across the bedroom floor. At such times being a father is great good fun.
Those are the kinds of things I think about lying in bed alone or sitting on my dock once the sun has set, or after an evening spent with my students, when they’ve driven home, leaving me to my sunset, a shot of cheap scotch, this pen and this notebook.
U.S. Patent No. 3,730,633: “PHOTOMETRIC DETECTOR AND MEASURING SYSTEM.”
IX.
Self-Actualization
Bethel, Connecticut, 1970
THOUGH YOU SPENT A LOT OF TIME TOGETHER, YOU knew very little about the teacher. He rarely spoke of his family. He kept no mementos in his cottage, no photographs, albums, or objects supplying clues to his past.
He told you that he’d been adopted, that he never knew his real parents. His adoptive mother lived on Lake Lillinonah – or was it Lake Zoar? – in a town less than twenty miles away from Bethel. He had three adoptive siblings, two brothers and a sister, all of them older than he. His oldest brother served as an army first lieutenant in Vietnam. The other brother was a quadriplegic. His name was Frank. In his senior year of high school, he broke his neck while diving into the lake off the top of a steel bridge. Before that, he’d abused the teacher constantly. Now he lived with his mother.