Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

  It was a hot autumn day, and Lears, as I recall, was wearing an off-off-white rumpled suit, a size or two large as usual, and looking, particularly if you could have added a Panama hat, like a planter who had recently lost the plantation. He told us, wearily, to form a circle. Most of us sat still. We generally wanted to compel teachers to use the maximum force to get us to do anything, no matter how minor. But to Dubby and to John Vincents—a soccer and track star whom Dubby had nicknamed the Navajo, because his family once turned up at a soccer game wrapped in blankets—this was an opportunity. They began sliding their desks into each other, banging and ricocheting away so as to approximate the pleasures of a well-loved Revere Beach attraction, the bumper cars. Donald Bellmer, the reedy, pale kid Dubby had bopped with spitballs on the first day, joined tentatively in, and the Doober, seeing an opportunity, slammed him as hard as possible.

  “Owwwww!” Bellmer cries, his blanched face going into a pained mask. We all watch and giggle. No one else moves.

  So Lears, in a rare burst of physical action, a rare burst of motion that does not savor of the workings of a man in his fifth decade rather than at the start of his third, takes action. He delivers himself to the back of my chair, grasps it from behind, and leans away, so that he looks like a driver pulling back to balance a team of sled dogs. Then he gets his feet—the Monitor and the Merrimack—moving sloppily, haphazardly, and the chair begins to slide backward. I weigh about 190 pounds. On the football program, I’m listed at two hundred, having included the weight of my pads (wrongly, Jackie Lane, the only black kid on the team, has told me; we’ve argued the point no end, like a couple of Aquinian scholastics). Lears puffs and huffs theatrically.

  “That’s a lot of weight you’re pulling there,” says Rick Cirone. “He plays defensive tackle. Very hard to move.”

  I mumble something about playing lately with singular lack of success. It’s true. Despite the pronouncements about all my promise made at the end of last year by Mace Johnson—and even, with some equivocation thrown in, by Rourke, who perhaps comes to think I have better genes than were initially apparent—and despite a murderous program of summer weight lifting, I’ve been relegated to the position of all-purpose backup lineman, popping in and out (much more out than in) of the games. I’m enraged. How could this be?

  Without my glasses, I could discern only glowing blurs flying here and there on the field. Every play, I would fire forward and smack one of these blurs. Sometimes the blur would prove to have the ball, sometimes not. My drawback had come clear to the coaches one day in practice when, in a tackling drill, one on one, I rampaged completely past the guy with the ball. Manly chuckles all around. The next play, I locked the ballcarrier in the radar and hit him so hard that it was truly surprising to see him rise again. He walked around for five minutes like a man feeling out the effects of his new frontal lobotomy. But the damage was done. Football is not blindman’s buff, or shouldn’t be. One kid on the team, Pooch, dubbed me a future all-pro blindbacker. My career was finished unless I could somehow afford contact lenses, to say nothing of figuring out that I needed those rare and pricey objects.

  On being told that my football hopes were in a state of ruin, Lears simply said: “Still, I wouldn’t want to run into you in a dark alley.” This was mockery. At least I was pretty sure it was. He had been no less dismissive on seeing my copy of Instant Replay: The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer, by the Packers’ formidable offensive guard. I had gotten the book free with a razor and shaving cream. The most affecting passage in the book, at least as I saw it, was the one where Kramer described himself as having lost a little of his stature, maybe as much as an inch, from the beginning of his pro career to the end. The shrinkage was the result of his neck being slammed back into his shoulders with repeated hits, so that his vertebrae contracted. I found the dedication that would result in this kind of thing very moving.

  When Lears saw Green Bay Diary on top of my copy of Will Durant, instead of praising me for reading something, anything, he had simply said, “Are there pictures? I’m sure there are some pictures.”

  This was ridicule, to be sure. Had Lears aimed with a degree or two more subtlety, he would have missed me entirely. Henry James would have had no hope with us. We would have flummoxed the Master entirely. But to be chided in terms even as subtle as Lears’ was a great novelty to me, who was accustomed to imprecations out of Bedlam from coaches and friends’ fathers and neighborhood bullies and from other demented males of every description.

  The little metaphysician took his seat and began to work away at the resisting stuff in front of him. He read aloud from the Durant script, he paraphrased, he tried to provoke. But nothing happened. Sandra was sleepy that day. The only one awake on the scene was Buller, who raised his hand and tried to get Lears to recognize him. But Lears, no doubt wanting to avoid a Buller collision, looked away. Finally Buller dissolved the protocols and began to harangue Lears. It was nonsense, idiocy, crap. He, Tommy Buller, had had enough.

  “Ah, Thomas,” said Lears, hand-swinging, head-nodding. “That doesn’t seem at all germane to the question at hand.” Germane! What the hell was Germane? A form of German? German as pronounced at Harvard?

  As Lears talked, Dubby and Rick began routines, hand-swinging, head-wagging, tongue-tsking in Lears’ peculiar way, and laughing at themselves, and at Lears, who was invited, of course, to look over and to observe, then to make of it what he would. If he saw, Lears was too shrewd to take the bait.

  But this began the period of intense Franklin Lears imitations. I had one, Dubby and Rick did, John Vincents would do it, and so, ineptly, humanely, would Cap, who hadn’t enough meanness in him to mock anyone with much success. A couple of modes of imitation were ascendant. In one of them, we would kick off with a Lears standard (“What do people think?” being the most common), and then go stumbling into Lears-like polysyllabics, as though we were learning incantations from a wizard: “Oh, Thomas, you have to consider the prosaic, propinquitous passions of Plato.” And, to be fair, Lears was singularly attracted to enormous words. He remains the only human being I have heard use the word propinquitous in conversation. Rick wanted to buy him a pair of propinquities for Christmas.

  But we had another mode of imitation, too, and this one at first seems weird beyond explanation. What we would do was to locate a subtext in Lears’ polished, detached utterances. “Thomas, I think you ought to reconsider some of the premises of your argument” would become “Buller, you moron, why don’t you go home and suck on the tailpipe of your old man’s car until you perish, you piece of shit.” That sort of thing. Or, from Dubby, doing Lears addressing the whole class: “You idiotic brutes, why don’t you all just go screw yourself rectally right now?” All performed in the soft, lilting Learsese.

  What were we doing? Maybe we were bringing him down to our level. Perhaps we needed to believe that this person, who seemed so markedly odd, was in no way different from us. We thought and spoke in the most vulgar ways—and perhaps underneath that’s what Lears truly wanted to do. Maybe it was only his repressed high-class manners that inhibited him. Accordingly, we were better than he was, more honest, truer to the brutish human base.

  But there was another possibility, too. Perhaps we were, in our bent way, identifying something we all felt but could not have expressed. We were conveying a simple fact: Lears obviously had a healthy dose of confidence. On some level, we sensed, he held us in contempt. There was a measure of derision there. He must have thought we were minor-league fools for not using this, our last chance before we were thrust live and whole into what was waiting for us. We had a final opportunity to think a little, to stand back and make assessments, before the powers in charge peeled back the lid of our tiny tin box of a school to pluck some for the factory, some for the office, some for the army, some for booze, some for dope. So with this odd mockery, odd imitation, we brought forward that part of Lears that was quietly at war with us.

  This sort of derision was not abse
nt from Socrates, either. Socrates “asked [his pupils] to open their souls to him,” says the philosopher Alexander Nehamas, “and let them know he did not like what he saw. He did not so much reveal to them their dark, shameful underside as refuse to accept their surface as his own, as a mode of life he could follow. He needed courage not only because he made his contemporaries face some difficult truths but mostly because he displayed his own disdain toward them.”

  We were used to encountering teachers so shelled-out that they did not care one way or another how it went, or teachers who terrified us or whom we terrified. But to find someone who was actually engaged but wasn’t there to curry our favor, who felt himself to be better than we were, or at least further along the road, and believed that we were lucky to have him—this was strange.

  Surely, too, our imitations, which we began to perform everywhere—on the bus, in other classes, even a few times at football practice—meant that we wanted Lears to be present even when he wasn’t physically on the scene. We wanted him on hand, to scrutinize and ponder. Somehow he’d colonized us, gotten inside our heads, and we didn’t even realize it.

  AT MY house, too, Lears was becoming a presence. My father began taking an interest. I believe it was the business about TV that got him going.

  This interest of my father’s in what was happening at school was, to put it mildly, unusual. My father was capable of driving his car, always a large one, a heavy-deco American whale, at least ten years beyond its Detroit vintage, past a scowling brick structure, constructed firm and fast lest the British make one more attempt on the old colony, and asking, in all innocence, what that particular building might be. On being told that the place was my school, or my brother Philip’s, he would grunt, inhale noisily through the resounding caves of his crooked nostrils (he had a radically deviated septum), puff on his omnipresent Camel (his “coffin nail”/ “coughin’ nail”), and file the information distantly away.

  The only pre-Lears exception to this policy of school nonawareness came when I was in the eighth grade and struggling to learn French. Things got so bad that my father was summoned on the scene to talk. My teacher was named Miss Finkelman. Miss Finkelman was an enormous young woman who came at you like a large, heavily turned out vacation liner, someplace where they serve lunch nine times a day and irony is forbidden. She had yelping dyed-blond hair, great painted lips that bespoke prodigious oral interests, bulging eyes, de Gaulle’s Gallic honker, and a gregarious, good-humored way of taking up the room.

  We had nicknamed her Skater. Why? Because Finkelman gives you fink, which gives you rink, which yields skater. Get it? That we had done no worse suggests in what general affection, or at least in what absence of blood hatred, she was held. And the temptation to flay her was considerable: This was during the time when Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the dragster impresario, was making automotive hay with a car called the Rat Fink.

  Anyhow, Miss Finkelman relayed to my parents the not inaccurate view that I was failing French because I never did any of the assignments and spent all of my time in class dreaming of she knew not what. My father was generally a proponent of fate: You got what you got in life, and that was that. One of his pet sayings was “You can never win,” often said with considerable relish, as though he were secretly aligned with the forces in the universe that kept everyone, himself included, separate from victory. But this time, he claimed, he helped me out. He persuaded Miss Finkelman to relent and give me a D, a stigma, a sign of possible stupidity, but not a hold-’im-back-till-he-towers-like-Gulliver-over-the-class F.

  My father was somehow charmed by Miss Finkelman, who was not the dully throat-sticking sort of pill the rest of my teachers seemed to him to be. He asked about Miss Finkelman from time to time, even when I was years beyond her class, had quit French, and had gone on to study Latin, a subject in which I could sustain consistent mediocrity without doing the homework.

  (When I was in graduate school at Yale, I, braced by two years of college French and a visceral terror of having to pass the language requirement by studying Beowulf in Old English, signed up for a French literary theory course with the formidable Paul de Man. De Man was at the height of his reputation at the time. He and Jacques Derrida were the godfathers of deconstruction, which few academics could readily explain but was burning a hot path through American-literature departments nonetheless. De Man’s early Nazi affiliations had yet to be revealed. When my father heard that I was taking French again, he slapped himself on the forehead and sighed. “Am I going to have to come down to New Haven and talk to this de Man guy the way I did Miss Finkelman?” An encounter I would like to have caught.)

  Anyway, Miss Finkelman aside, my father generally took about as much interest in my education as he did in avant-garde painting and Husserlian phenomenology. But then Frank Lears came along and about his tendencies, tastes, and quirks my father, who was usually curious about nothing—for to be curious indicated that one was not omniscient, and every adult male of my father’s generation seems at least to have toyed with the omniscience possibility—couldn’t hear enough. The business about television started things off.

  One day in class, Lears suggested to us, smoothly, in an indirect kind of way, a conversational wrist shot, that he had no television. We had become, without quite knowing it, students of Lears’ personality, if only (we imagined) to use the information we collected the better to mock him. And, strategically or not, he was chary of giving out much by way of personal data. You had to keep your ears open, because a good deal was to be found in the intonation. This intonation business was very non-Medford. Medford spoke in one tone of voice—loud, assertive, fragrant, obscene. The intonation thing, the irony thing, suggested a combination of worldliness and modesty, and would eventually make the Medford yawp sound almost frightened, a way of worrying about what might be said in reply and an effort to shut off all replies, or rebuttals, including your own.

  This time, Lears’ intonation gave us to understand that he suspected that anyone who enjoyed watching the tube probably had suffered a touch of early brain damage, a quick drop and pickup from off the gray kitchen linoleum.

  “Don’t you even watch it for the news?” Nora Balakian had asked.

  “You can read the newspaper,” Lears said. “You can read the Times.” We were encountering someone, maybe for the first time, who was not immersed in the world of TV.

  To all of us, TV was something like a third parent. We had grown up with it. At my house, the first person up on any given morning flipped on the set, which stood dead-center in our upstairs-apartment living room, and the magic box hummed, hollered, sang, wept, flattered, and cajoled all day and well into the night, often with one or two or three or four of us there gazing, but often not. Often the TV sounded and flashed away to an audience of no one in particular. Did the cave dwellers extinguish their communal fire when they weren’t actually warming their hands in front of it? Then why should we flip off the box when we weren’t actually watching?

  “Mr. Lears hasn’t got a TV,” I announced one night to my father, pretty much out of the blue.

  “Why not?” Then, adding a kick, because my father usually adds a kick when he can, even if it isn’t well aimed or adroitly delivered: “Can’t he afford one?”

  Was this a probe on my part? Was it an unguided missile of resentment sent off toward my father to see what would happen? For my father loved TV. He also hated it, dearly.

  I can see him still, standing in front of the television set, fresh from his shower, with a threadbare red bath towel cinched around his waist, his belly distended, statesman-style. Though his waist is thick, the rest of his body is very thin—sticklike, birdy legs; small, delicately boned arms. I have been able to beat him at arm wrestling since the sixth grade, but from the night when I defeated him at the kitchen table—slamming his fist against the wood, with a noise like a gun blast—he has never been willing to give it another go. The veins in his feet are a striking, almost frightening blue. He has a gi
ant hawk nose—he calls it noble, aristocratic, Roman. His glasses are only half a generation removed in style from the heavy, black-rimmed GI specs that were standard issue in the army and maybe too in the National Guard unit where my father did his bit.

  Wright Aukenhead Edmundson: forty years old, overweight, on the way to being worn to death from incessant work and from yet more devoted—and to him restorative—carousing (also known as galavantin’ and calupin’). He’s got his cigarette, the Camel straight, with which he is committing a pinch of suicide—self-destruction on the installment plan, for those who, for various reasons, can’t manage to do it all at once—stuck in his mouth and he’s puffing away, letting the ash extend itself to French-café length, then ordering me to procure an ashtray (children are servants in their parents’ houses during this period; he has once clouted me so hard that I saw the galaxies born, expand, explode, and die for not hustling off to Charlie DeLuca’s to get him a pack of his smokes) so he can tap the butt before the carpet is scattered with ash.

  The TV is on, it’s the news, and Wright—Wrightie, as he’s called at Raytheon, at work—is denouncing virtually everyone bold enough to push his face into our living room. The sportscasters—in particular Curt Gowdy, the genial voice of the Red Sox, whom everyone else dotes on—the news anchors, the weatherman, the pundits, the guests: all are rounded up in a human clump, belted together, knotted tight, and cast away into the infernal pit as a plague of morons, and geeks. (Later, after All in the Family becomes popular, he’ll insert meatheads into the repertoire.) And should a woman, any woman, hold forth knowingly on a subject unrelated to cooking, gardening, or the higher arts of gabbing the day away on the telephone, the roof is likely to lift from the eaves of 58 Clewley Road, Medford, Massachusetts. The DeMarias, who live downstairs and who own the house, loopy as they seem, while we, fraught with intelligence (maybe), pay ignominious rent, punch our floor, their ceiling, with a broomstick when my father launches stratospheric, powered by the highly combustible fuel of a pontificating TV presence. My father ignores the pop-pop-pops, the civil artillery barrage. For here, in his living room-den-dining room (his meals are often taken in front of the tube so that the morons will not be able to pull off anything egregious on the sly), my father is a lion of displeasure.