Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  “I beg your pardon?”

  It was one of their running jokes. They had met three summers ago, when Warden was teaching a graduate seminar on poetry for the summer session at the University of Virginia and Cynthia enrolled in his class. She had read every one of his books before the course started, and she had startled him by using two lines of his poetry as epigraph to her own work. At first he had been suspicious, but when she had told him that she was merely auditing the course for no credit, he had invited her for dinner, despite his self-consciousness at dating a woman twelve years younger. By the end of the summer, they were married. And they had lived here in their dormitory at Montpelier School since.

  He poured hot water over the tea bag in the mug, let it brew for fifteen seconds, and then shifted the tea bag to another mug, which he also filled with water. He took the cups to the table. Cynthia groped for hers and grasped it with both hands.

  “You’re shaking again,” said Warden.

  “Yes,” said Cynthia.

  “Do you really feel all right?” said Warden.

  “No,” said Cynthia.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m scared, Ben,” she said. “I’m scared of what this is.”

  “What’s the matter?” asked Warden.

  “Ever since yesterday afternoon, my left foot has been numb.”

  Warden heard her as though she were speaking a line in one of his dreams-where a character could surprise him and yet confirm his most dreaded expectations all at once.

  He asked her why she hadn’t told him earlier. “Because,” she said, “I knew we’d spend the rest of the morning talking about me.”

  She held her mug in front of her with both hands, as though she were carrying a chalice. He cupped her hands, mug and all, within his large palms.

  Her skin felt so cold.

  SCENE 2

  Thomas Boatwright was sitting in English class and dying. He knew this must be what it felt like to die of boredom, because he was doing it. He looked at his watch again: 8:17. Whoopee-do, an entire minute had passed since his last look. They’d been back exactly seventeen minutes from Thanksgiving vacation, seventeen minutes of class for the first time since last Wednesday, and he was dying, dying of boredom, wondering why in the hell he’d ever agreed to attend boarding school, wishing that something would happen to make Mr. Farnham shut up and leave the room.

  There were eleven other boys in the class. Their desks were arranged in a semicircle around Mr. Farnham’s old wooden desk with GRATEFUL DEAD carved in little tiny letters on the front. Thomas had been staring at the GRATEFUL DEAD for months—it seemed more like years—ever since he’d started school in September and had entered Mr. Farnham’s class in fourth-form English. They wouldn’t call it sophomore English here at the Montpelier School for Boys; that sounded too American, even though the school was American and everybody sitting here was American and they were, in fact, about two hours away by car from the American capital city, which was where Thomas’s family lived and where he’d spent his Thanksgiving vacation and where he ought to be right now, going to Cathedral Academy and getting home at night and away, away, away from this unbelievably boring class.

  8:19. His watch had to be broken. Time could not possibly move this slowly of its own volition. They were smart not to put clocks in these classrooms. Sometimes if you didn’t look at a watch, you could go into a sort of hypnotic trance and the time would slip away from you. Thomas promised himself that he wouldn’t look at his watch for at least another twenty minutes. How would he know when twenty minutes had passed? He would be dead, that’s how. He would be dead of boredom. Just before he keeled over, he would look at his watch to see what time he’d expired.

  “. . . two kinds of love,” Mr. Farnham was saying. He was writing on the board. “Cupiditas is the bad kind of love, what we would call today ‘cupidity’ or ‘lust.’” He wrote CUPIDITAS=CUPIDITY (LUST) on the board in his usual block letters. “And the good kind of love is caritas, what we would call ‘charity’ or ‘unselfish love’ today.” He wrote another little equation up on the board: CARITAS=UNSELFISH LOVE.

  In his notebook Thomas wrote LOVE-2 KINDS. CUPIDITAS BAD, CARITAS GOOD.

  “Are those words capitalized?” asked Landon Hopkins, who sat in the middle of the semicircle and was undoubtedly writing down every word Farnham said. Thomas sat on one end of the semicircle, to the teacher’s left, because he had read somewhere that teachers don’t tend to call on the person situated to one side, that the teacher’s attention spreads out in an arc and often misses the people in the front side seats. He looked across the room at Richard Blackburn, his best friend, who rolled his eyes and pretended to draw a gun and shoot Landon under the desk. Richard just killed Thomas. He was the funniest guy ever, starting with his looks. His black hair was shaved close to his temples but was long and floppy on top, and he wore big round wire-rimmed glasses that somehow made him look like Tweety-Bird in those old cartoons. Over the holidays he’d had his ear pierced, but Mr. Grayson, the disciplinarian, had spotted the earring at breakfast and had made him take it out. The dress code at Montpelier banned earrings and bracelets and required ties for class. Richard was the best at short-circuiting the rules. Today he was wearing this terrible looking red-white-and-blue tie with Barbara Bush’s face in spangles on it. He’d bought it last summer when he was visiting Thomas over the July 4th weekend, when the city just about sank under the weight of the tourists.

  “Not necessary,” said Mr. Farnham. Boy, had Thomas been wrong about this teacher. Usually when you get a young one, he’s pretty cool about getting off the subject and taking the class to the audiovisual center a lot, but not Farnham. He was like Mister Pedagogical Methods, always coming to class with these long lesson plans, which he followed strictly, and never talking about anything but English all day long. He’d taught in some school in Alabama for two years before coming here to Virginia. Thomas guessed it was one of those military training schools where everything had to be just perfect all the time. Farnham wore perfectly ironed clothes, perfectly polished loafers, a perfectly knotted tie, and a perfectly nauseating little mustache the size of a centipede. He was actually pretty nice, Thomas supposed, if he wouldn’t lose his temper so much. You do one little thing wrong, like show up without your book or something, and he would spaz for ten minutes.

  “One of the great tensions in English literature from the very beginning,” Mr. Farnham was saying, “was the tension between cupiditas and caritas. Everyone knew that caritas was the kind of love that God felt for mankind, and that it was the kind of love that we were supposed to feel for each other. But God had also made us as sexual creatures, and so man had to come to terms with the fact that sexuality was, in itself, a good thing.”

  Now you’re talking, thought Thomas.

  “Sexuality was good,” said Mr. Farnham, “because it tricked us into reproducing our species. We’d be very unlikely to engage in that particular act if we derived no pleasure from doing so. Think about it.”

  Thomas thought about it all the time. He was just a couple of weeks away from turning sixteen. Over the holidays he’d met a girl, Hesta McCorkindale, who was a tenth-grader at Mason School and who lived in McLean. She was really nice, he liked her a lot, and when he kissed her it seemed as though somebody had attached a jumper cable to his crotch. He thought about Hesta now, sitting across from him, the school had gone coed or something, and so she could be in the class, only she hadn’t worn any underwear and he could see—

  “Mr. Boatwright,” said Farnham. “Near what planet are you orbiting?”

  “Sorry,” said Thomas.

  “Can you tell me what I was just saying?”

  Thomas looked at his notes. “Sex is good,” he said. The rest of the class started to snicker.

  “And why is sex good?” said Mr. Farnham.

  “Because,” said Thomas. He was nailed. “I’m not sure.”

  Landon Hopkins raised his hand. “It’s good because i
t encourages us to reproduce our species,” he said. “That’s what the pope says, isn’t it?”

  “Exactly,” said Mr. Farnham. “The pope also says what these old medievalists would say; that is, that when sex becomes the ultimate goal or source of pleasure for mankind, then it has become a form of idolatry. Consider this.” He started to draw another diagram on the board. Across the room, Richard mimed laughing at Thomas. Thomas mimed vomiting in response.

  “The human soul has three parts to it,” said Mr. Farnham, “and the three parts dwell in the liver, the heart, and the brain.” Dying, thought Thomas. I am absolutely dying, but he wrote down LIVER, HEART, and BRAIN just in case Farnham called on him again.

  He wondered how much Farnham knew about sex. He wasn’t a geek or anything. He wore glasses, but a lot of neat people wore glasses. Thomas had worn them himself until he’d gotten contacts two years ago. Hesta wore glasses, in fact, but she wore these really cool wire-rimmed glasses that her aunt had worn during the 1960s.

  Living in the 1960s would have been so cool if he could have been fifteen, his age now, back then. He would have dropped out of school to hassle the establishment. He and Hesta would have hung around on the Washington Ellipse in buckskin jackets and stuff, smoked dope all the time, and then every night they would have taken off all their clothes and done everything sexual you could do to each other. Make love, not war. Richard had told Thomas that some people do it in the morning instead of at night. In the morning, that would be wild. Sometimes he was horny in the morning, he had to admit. But he’d always thought that sex was something you did at night. He’d never actually gotten laid himself, but he had consulted many, many pictures and had heard the older guys on the dorm talk about it a lot.

  “The heart,” said Mr. Farnham, “is the seat of our sensible souls. Now don’t get confused when I say ‘sensible.’”

  Don’t worry, thought Thomas.

  “I don’t mean ‘sensible’ as in ‘showing good sense,’ the way we might say that Ford made a sensible decision in pardoning Nixon. I mean ‘sensible’ in a more literal meaning; that is, in referring to the five senses. The sensible soul is the soul that gives us our feeling, our emotions. There’s no logical reason to draw hearts all over the place on Valentine’s Day. The heart is just an organ of the body that pumps blood. But when we give each other heart-shaped boxes of candy for Valentine’s Day, we are acknowledging a very old tradition that places the sensible soul—that is, the emotions—in the heart.”

  Landon Hopkins raised his hand for another question. I really am not going to live through this class, thought Thomas. His sister, Barbara, claimed that she had never been bored in an English class. Barbara was a senior at Mason School. She was the one, in fact, whose friends had had the party in McLean where he’d met Hesta. He wondered if Barbara had lost her virginity. That was a pretty nasty thought. You don’t usually think of your sister as actually being a girl, or rather as being like a regular girl whose panties you’d want to grab. It made him mad to think of Ned Wood or some other guy she’d been out with trying to grab Barbara’s panties. On the other hand, was anybody up in McLean getting mad at Thomas now for trying to grab Hesta’s panties? Not that he had done so. Hesta didn’t have any brothers, only this one sister who was twelve years older and already married now. What if Hesta did have a brother, though? Would he get mad at Thomas for trying to grab Hesta’s panties, which he hadn’t even tried to grab yet? They’d only been out twice, after all, but he thought about her anatomy almost constantly.

  Thomas had a brother, Jeff, who was two years younger. Somehow it wasn’t so bad to think of your brother getting laid someday, as long as it happened when Jeff was older than Thomas was whenever Thomas lost his own virginity. Across the room Richard pretended to be picking his nose.

  “That brings us to the rational soul,” said Mr. Farnham, who was drawing arrows like crazy all over the board. “It’s the rational soul, seated in the mind, that is superior to the sensible soul in the heart”—he pointed—“and to the animal soul in the liver”—he pointed again. “The rational soul is, of course, the source of our power to reason, and it is reason that keeps humanity from simply behaving like one of the lesser beasts. We do have urges and emotions, but we are blessed with reason so that we may keep those urges under control. We may feel lust for a woman, for example, but we must resist the temptation to indulge that lust. Otherwise, we have committed the sin “—he pointed again—” of cupiditas, of letting our natural concupiscence and our God-given sexual desire become a form of idolatry. Any questions?”

  Go ahead, Landon, thought Thomas. Ask him a question. Thomas felt an overpowering urge to look at his watch. Is it too early? Should I or shouldn’t I? This conflict would be a good example for Mr. Farnham to spaz about in class, with Thomas’s heart telling him to go ahead and look at the damn watch while his brain was telling him to wait, to be cautious.

  “All of this,” said Mr. Farnham, pulling out his chair and sitting down at the tidy desk, “is by way of introduction to the next play we’re going to read—”

  Here it comes, thought Thomas, the bad news. Richard was sitting across from him with his fingers crossed and his eyes closed.

  “—William Shakespeare’s Othello—”

  Oh, well. Could be worse. He knew everybody else in the class would be going berserk. They hated Shakespeare worse than anything because he was so hard to read. Thomas kept it to himself that he sort of liked Shakespeare. You don’t go telling people that, unless you’re some total reptile like Landon Hopkins. Thomas groaned along with the rest of the class, but only so that they wouldn’t think he was a nerd.

  “—for which you are expected to read and outline—did you hear that, Richard Blackburn?—and outline the first two scenes for tomorrow. Landon?”

  Landon’s hand was up. Landon had a complexion like tomato soup before all the soup mix has dissolved and a skinny neck and an Adam’s apple that stuck out and bobbed whenever he talked. He was also unbelievably smart because he was unbelievably geeky enough to study all the damn time. “Is that the same kind of outline we did for Oedipus Rex?” asked Landon. Mr. Farnham said yes.

  “I think you’ll enjoy Othello,” said Mr. Farnham. “It features one of the most evil characters in all of literature, a man named Iago. He looks normal to everybody else, but he turns out to be a sex pervert.”

  Now he’s exaggerating to get us interested, thought Thomas.

  “Imagine the tension,” said Mr. Farnham. “The audience knows, but the characters don’t, that one of them is a dangerously corrupt villain. Only he appears perfectly normal to all the others on stage.”

  The bell rang.

  I do believe in miracles, I do, I do, thought Thomas. He’d been right not to look at his watch. He’d have to remember that in Heilman’s religion class, which was even more boring than Farnham’s English class. He began to scoop up his other books and notebooks from under the desk.

  “Mr. Boatwright, could I speak to you before you leave?” said Mr. Farnham.

  Damn. You can’t get away with a thing in here. Mr. Farnham would be all right if he’d just loosen up once in a while. So a guy daydreams for a minute or two during a lecture. So what? Nobody pays perfect attention to everything.

  He approached Farnham’s desk with books in hand and coat on. Richard bumped him on the way out the door, and Thomas responded with an elbow. Farnham waited until everyone was out of the room before he spoke.

  “Do you have a class next period?”

  “Geometry.”

  “I won’t keep you long. Did you know that I’m directing Othello as the winter play? We go up in early March.”

  “Yes sir.” How the hell could he not know? Farnham had been advertising auditions for a week before Thanksgiving.

  “Have you given any thought to trying out for a part?”

  No, he hadn’t. “I just made the basketball team,” said Thomas. “JV, I mean.”

  Farnham nodded. It s
eemed as though he’d rehearsed every gesture. “You’d be good at basketball, I imagine,” he said. “You’re tall, well built.”

  This was a little embarrassing.

  “What about doing both?” said Farnham. “You could take a small part in the play, something like Desdemona’s father, and only rehearse once a week.”

  “I don’t know,” said Thomas. He really didn’t know. He did like to act; he and Barbara and Jeff had been doing their own shows at home in the living room ever since they were little kids. But the guys who did theater here were sort of on the fringe of things. Thomas wanted to fit in.

  “Your father was excited about the idea of our doing Shakespeare when I spoke with him over Parents’ Weekend,” said Mr. Farnham.

  “Oh,” said Thomas. So that was it. He wanted Thomas in the play because he happened to be the son of Preston Boatwright, who happened to be the drama critic for the biggest newspaper in Washington.

  “Don’t get all down in the mouth,” said Mr. Farnham. “What did I say?”

  “You’re just asking me to be in the play because my dad was pushing you to.”

  “That’s not true.” He pulled his chin up a notch. Farnham was a small man, 5'6", 130 pounds. He looked like he shaved around that mustache maybe once a week, and with his short brown hair and his tortoiseshells, he could pass for a sixth-former.

  “He’s always prodding me to be in the plays here,” said Thomas. “What did he say, that he’d give you publicity in the Post if you gave me a part?”

  Mr. Farnharn’s face flashed red as though a spotlight had hit it. “What he said,” said Mr. Farnham, “was that you were good.”

  Thomas was surprised, then pleased. It was pretty neat to hear even a secondhand compliment from his dad.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Coach McPhee says we’ll be pretty busy.”

  “Come by the theater after basketball practice this afternoon. We can talk about a part then.”

  Thomas had to go to class.