Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

  But ultimately, though they spent a night together in bed, nothing worth reporting came to pass. It was Socrates who held back. Why? Because he believed that erotic enchantment is a wonderful thing but that what we truly want when we fall in love with beauty isn’t sex, isn’t carnal consummation, but rather knowledge of the beautiful, which leads then to knowledge of the good, itself beautiful in its perfection. When we become obsessed with a beautiful face and body, we’re getting stuck on the way to a better knowledge about how to live. Socrates didn’t want to get stuck there himself. And he didn’t want Alcibiades, whom he truly cared for, to get stuck either. (Would Frank Lears have shown a similar restraint if one of the beauties who found him so “cute” had come on to him? I suspect he would have, and probably for good Socratic reasons too.)

  Alcibiades admits that the only person who can get him to stop and examine his life is Socrates. If they became lovers, Socrates would be disenchanted; he’d sacrifice his sway. So Socrates couldn’t let Alcibiades lose his last chance for wisdom by burning up that questing energy in a night of sex.

  To which the Walrus says what? The Walrus really hasn’t thought all that far into these matters. Pretty quickly, he runs up against the thick abutment that is the border of his own active, intense, sex-drugged brain. So the Walrus, never wholly at a loss, simply rears back in his overloaded driver’s seat and begins to spin another sexual fantasia, or, in a less obliging mood, decides that Dubby or Fat or Pooch would profit from a quick rank-out session. “Fat!” he bellows. (Seated on his stack of circulars, Johnny Edsel begins to twist and squirm.) “What’s this I hear about how you . . .” And the good times begin again.

  Chapter Eight

  SDS COMES TO CALL

  Communists, or something like them, were due to show up in Franklin Lears’ class the next day. He told us as much as we were walking out the door on a chilly Thursday afternoon in winter. Word spread around the school. Everyone wanted to hear more. This was a first: Something was happening at Medford High that was not a projected one-on-one brawl or an all-in rumble, a football game, or a dance, and we were looking forward to it.

  The first person I ever heard say a word on behalf of communism—and it was an extended word, a rhetorical aria that took place over the period of about half an hour—was my father, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson. This was in 1962. I was ten years old. The second Eisenhower installment had closed out and Kennedy, Black Jack to my father, was in the White House. Everyone then knew—just as everyone knew that there was a God who reigned above and intervened on America’s behalf in all significant matters—that communism was a horrible thing. Communists were godless fanatics who created earthly hell wherever they went. Where I grew up, to speak even a neutral word about communism was considered a sign of insanity.

  In New York in 1962, the Partisan Review intellectuals were still tussling about when it had been appropriate to turn against the Party. Intellectuals everywhere were having their ambivalent, splintering sentiments about the god that might or might not ultimately fail. But in Medford and neighboring Malden, where we lived at the time, the case was closed before it could be opened. Communism was death. We ducked under our desks at lunchtime drills to practice protecting ourselves from its oncoming missiles, Red death from Cuba.

  In grade five, I was a rabid Cold Warrior. I inveighed against the Berlin Wall and the evils of totalitarian life. The adults thought I was something of a prodigy, a Metternich in the making. Everyone seemed to agree with me on this matter, and of course all I was doing was repeating the views of my father. I wore his brown-rimmed no-nonsense glasses, sported the same stylish buzz cut (he called it a whiffle), and said and thought pretty much what he did. Until the night my father began orating on the subject, I was sure—based in large measure on his edicts—that anyone who was at all sympathetic to communism could simply be written off as a rabid moron or geek.

  The oration came one night, late, when our car was broken down. This is not quite as determinate a designation as it might seem. Our car (always at least a decade old) was perpetually breaking down. To be fair, cars, even new ones, broke down with regularity then. We were parked at the curb, waiting for one of my father’s pals to show up and charge the battery or remesh the gears or yank the distributor or do whatever needed to be done. Then, in the era of major automotive dysfunction, men spent about 10 percent of their lives administering to the broken-down cars of their buddies or giving their careless friends rides, often to eccentric destinations.

  I recall my father hopping out of bed at two o’clock one morning to ferry someone from Malden to Providence, Rhode Island, a place forty-five minutes away, where my father had never been in his life. You never refused a friend help fixing his car—or help standing around in wonderment at what could be wrong this time—and never denied a buddy a ride. Anywhere. Of course once you were out of the house and had discharged the favor, there might be other things to attend to, bars that needed to be shut down or opened, dog tracks to inspect, poker games to look in on.

  Anyway, we were parked on the side of the road this time, and for some reason the designated buddy didn’t arrive in the usual nine minutes flat. So when the subject of Vietnam came up, there was opportunity for expansion. America, then under Kennedy, was sending troops. You had to fight communism where it cropped up (“anytime, anyplace, anywhere,” as the local redundant phrasing went)—that was the general consensus in Malden and environs, and I was saying as much in the backseat of the car, sitting beside my sleeping brother.

  Fathers then were often like small-scale thunder gods, Joves in miniature. Usually you could predict their tendencies, often you could placate them with entreaty, with sacrifice, and through the simple expedient of staying out of their way at the right times. But not always. Sometimes they detonated out of the blue.

  From nowhere, my father was off and running with a highly informed and madly emphatic account of how well collective life could be grafted onto the kind of village life that the people in Vietnam and most of the rest of Asia lived. “They’re very nearly Communist anyway,” my father said. “What’s the big deal if they go all the way?”

  He also talked a little about Buddhism, the predominant religion in Vietnam. (How did he know anything about Buddhism? Had the Globe run a “Religions of the World” feature twenty or so years before, for him to commit to memory?) He said that Buddhism was a philosophy of renunciation. You accepted the idea that life was pain, and tolerated whatever came along. What you desired as a Buddhist was peace, and anything that roiled that peace was bad news. Right now we, America, were roilers of Vietnam’s Buddhist calm. Much more along these lines followed. Had the Viet Cong needed an American lobbyist, my father, at that moment, would not have been a half-bad candidate.

  Then, dropping from the skies of religious anthropology, he issued a shocker. “Besides”—a blast from the grand, badly wrought nose—“what business is it of ours anyway?”

  “We promised them,” I averred.

  “Malarkey,” came the response. “We promised their leaders, who are nothing but a bunch of crooks.”

  I sat in the back of the car speechless, in a state of shock. Then—in 1962 and thereabouts—no one we knew said such things, ever. The mental grooves down which such a line of thinking could flow hardly existed, except in my father, where such grooves could appear, then disappear with lightning speed.

  The next time the matter came up, it was as though our conversation in the car had never taken place. My father was a tried-and-true patriot then, though it couldn’t have been more than three months after our talk. My country right or wrong. We needed to keep our promises, damnit. We needed to show our allies what we were made of. To a child, it often looks as if the world is terminally mad, but the less said about it the better.

  THE COMMUNISTS, if that’s what they were, who were to descend on our classroom were coming from Harvard. They were going to talk to us about Vietnam. They were, Lears said with the Socratic grin, coming
to try to “radicalize” us. Did Lears agree with them? Sandra was the first to ask. Were they going to come and lay out ideas too hot for Lears to own to without putting himself and his job at risk?

  But it was foolish to ask Lears that sort of a question. He just shook his head, did the wrist business, and told us that we’d see, we’d see.

  Three people, guys probably, coming from Harvard to radicalize us. I didn’t say a word to anyone in authority (if you could really call what Fran Todesco and Jingles possessed authority, a word that has some dignified connotations) at the high school. I knew what would happen. They would intervene in some way, stop the whole business. I couldn’t resist informing my parents, though. There was a collective shaking of heads at the dinner table as my family—my mother, father, brother, and I—gazed down mentally on our images of the interlopers. Harvard types, we could take them in stride. We knew all about them.

  To Medford, Harvard meant unkempt, crinkly-haired professors who closed their umbrellas in the rain or attempted to use their walking sticks, Moses-like, to part the baying traffic in Harvard Square so that they could make their way across the street. These were people aptly fixed by a standard grammar school insight: He’s so smart he’s stupid. They were school-smart, in other words, the Harvard types, but in terms of worldly intelligence, Medford had them beaten hands down.

  The actual fact of Harvard’s enormous power, we chose never to contemplate. We preferred to think of the place in terms of a daft, Anglophilic, who-snatched-my-trousers silliness, a warren of bumbling physical incompetence that, as can-do Americans, we disdained.

  We did not wish to know, or to recall, that from the spartan privilege of the brick barracks on the Charles there issued the socially, then educationally, advantaged young men—predominantly men at the time—who would rule the world in general and our own tiny domain in particular. They would preside over our factories, represent us—or pretend to—in the state legislature. When we broke the law, they would sit on the judge’s bench and mete out our punishment; if we were lucky and mortgaged everything we had, we could retain one of them as a lawyer to represent our interests to his classmate. And that was just the local division, the preserve of the small-time Harvard types. Operating in the greater world, they would send us off to war when the fancy took them, cut us loose from unemployment comp or carry us for a few more necessary weeks or months; they would rule like lords from the White House, surrounding their sun-loving, smiling president, around whose manifold flaws they flocked like protective retainers. It was easier to joke about such people when the alternative was to admit what they were and what place we, accordingly, maintained in the overall scheme.

  Recently, I had made my own breakthrough on the subject of Harvard. I discovered that I was doubly connected to the place. There was the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow business, but there was another, more immediate tie as well. For a few years, when I was five, six, seven, my grandmother used to talk about her sojourns at a place called Cumlaude. Cumlaude was the source of quite a bit of women’s clothing that worked its way through my family. The stuff was very elegant; some had a bohemian air—do I recall a few all-black outfits, maybe a beret?—and it was all treasured. So naturally I took Cumlaude, pronounced Cum Lawdie, as in praise the Lawd(ie), to be a big-time Boston department store akin to Filene’s and Jordan Marsh but much more pricey, a major in-town establishment, purveyor of the finest.

  I was both right and wrong on this matter. Cumlaude was a big-scale in-town operation and much, much more venerable than Filene’s or Jordan Marsh. For it turned out, as I learned ten or so years after my family’s commerce with it had ended, that Cumlaude was nothing other than Radcliffe College, Harvard’s sister institution. Cumlaude was cum laude, the designation from the diploma, “with honors.” My grandmother and her sisters, Rose and Alice and Cathy, had been chambermaids at Radcliffe. Sometimes the young women gave them their castaway clothes rather than sending them off to the local Goodwill.

  This had been a family secret for some time, from me and my brother, who might have been ashamed that our dear grandmother was a servant to the quality, and even maybe from my grandmother’s husband, Phil, a stone Yankee, who worked maintaining the engines at General Electric and who might not have been pleased by the notion of his wife picking up a few extra dollars tucking in the corners of rich girls’ beds. (The word on the intimate habits of the Radcliffe girls? Sloppy, very sloppy. “Slobovian,” my great-aunt Rose said.) For my grandfather was, after all, Philip Wadsworth Benton, direct lineal descendant (as I was, my grandfather often reminded me—but not my father, no, not Wright) of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, renowned fireside poet, author of “Evangeline” and “Paul Revere’s Ride” and—not least of his achievements—professor of modern languages at Harvard. Supposedly somewhere up in New Hampshire there was a book at the Longfellow family estate. Supposedly my grandfather’s name was recorded in this book. Mine too might be added. We were perpetually making plans to head up there and claim our place, but somehow we never made the trip.

  My grandfather was also purportedly the descendant of Horace Greeley, or, as he was called in our house, Horace-Greeley-Go-West-Young-Man-Go-West. Greeley, a nineteenth-century newspaper editor, who seems to have been on the right side of every pertinent question of his day, eventually ran for president, lost, and went mad.

  Look how far my family had fallen in the world. During the Depression, my grandfather, carrier of the Longfellow and Greeley heritage (“and someone else famous too,” my grandmother used to say, “but I can’t remember who it is”), was compelled to catch fish with a couple of poles off a bridge in Lynn. He did this for a living, literally. No fish, no dinner. Or so my grandmother once confided to me.

  My grandmother was, or should have been, an education in herself. She was a woman who flourished in her fifties—flourished as a grandmother. Her generosity was infinite. When she came to our house, she emptied her pocketbook of all monetary contents, coins and bills, so that my brother and I could scamper off to the local drugstore and buy whatever toys we might have our eyes on. She had to be cautioned to do her grocery shopping before she arrived. She told three stories about Ireland, where her parents had grown up, but told them so well that we never ceased wanting to hear them. One, the one I remember best, culminated in a dialogue between two cats, one of which, at the close, heatedly ordered the other to “go tell Paulro that Maulro’s dead.” We puzzled over this tale for hours running.

  At my grandmother’s house, we were surfeited with ginger-ale floats, with bread, butter, and sugar, and with French toast, cooked to a perfection unreachable even by my mother, who was no slouch in the art. My grandmother had no training at all, but she was quite a good draftsman, able to render freehand anything she looked at, though she refused, as she often said, “to draw things out of my head.” She could play the piano, by ear, and sang many songs, some composed by others, some by herself, extemporaneously. She sang and drew with a high good humor and with the fondest wish that we would follow her and take pleasures akin to hers. She lived for benevolent pleasures, and for seeing others she cared for enjoy their lives as well. She had only one major grief—the endless travails of the Boston Red Sox, who could never win a World Series. Her last sentences to me on her deathbed involved the afterlife, in which, despite being a lifetime practicing Catholic, she expressed rank disbelief, and the local team. “It’s too bad about the Red Sox,” she sighed, “but I think you may live to see them win the World Series.” (I abide in hope.)

  Searching for a guide to life, I could have done worse. In fact, I probably could have done no better than have tried to emulate my grandmother in most everything. She was an artist of generous and vital pleasures, a free artist of herself, without the angst or Sturm und Drang. But as Wilde says in The Importance of Being Ernest, nearly all women take after their mothers, and that is their tragedy; men never do, and that, alas, is theirs. The same, I suppose, goes for one’s grandmother. Perhaps in some better day
s to come men will have the option of learning life from wise women, but in this world, despite whatever advances humanity’s advocates claim to have seen and wrought, I do not think that is how things generally go. Young men learn from, and struggle with, older, more potent and adept ones. In this, they seem to have little choice.

  SO, ARMED with this double-barreled Harvard lineage—my grandmother the chambermaid and Longfellow the distinguished professor—I hurried to get to Frank Lears’ classroom to see what Harvard, this time, would produce.

  There were three of them there, representatives invited by Lears from Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. Two have faded from my memory, but one, the preeminent member of the group, remains. I recall him as a sharp-featured, predatory-looking guy with an aggressive nose and large, arching brows. He wore a paisley shirt with a swooping collar, blue jeans, and boots. The other two guys, white, intelligent-looking, recessive, were clearly second-tier. Hawk was the boss, the propaganda minister out from the center of wisdom to illumine the hinterlands, eight or so miles away.

  Lears had already told us something about SDS. He’d let us know how the group was founded in 1960 but really came to life a couple of years later, when it put out something called the Port Huron Statement. The SDSers had called America to account for being conformist and bland, for putting more emphasis on prosperity than on freedom and self-cultivation, and most of all—this part of the indictment caught my attention—for being far too boring a place to live. The statement came out against excessive conditioning, institutionalizing, the folding, spindling, and mutilating of persons.