Passion Play

by W. Edward Blain

  “I don’t know, Mr. Farnham,” he said, as he backed toward the door.

  “Just come by anyway,” said Mr. Farnham. He smiled. “We can just talk. You can tell me about your Thanksgiving holiday.”

  “Yes sir,” said Thomas. Dammit to hell, can’t he understand when somebody says no? Be polite anyway, he thought. “Did you have a good holiday?”

  “I had an excellent holiday,” said Mr. Farnham. “I went to New York.”

  But Thomas did not have time to hear about some boring trip to New York.

  SCENE 3

  Benjamin Warden looked down at the papers in front of him. It had been a cheap trick to assign some writing in class on the first day back from vacation, but it had kept him from having to run the class. Now, however, he had to grade the results.

  It was 10:15 in the morning. Three class periods had already met, and now it was recess, a half hour for the boys to clean their dormitory rooms for inspection. Warden was trying to keep his mind off Cynthia and on schoolwork, but his thoughts refused to be so tractable.

  As department chairman, Warden taught three sections, two of which were electives in creative writing, where he worked with the most gifted seniors. These papers, however, were from his class of sophomores, his only section that happened to meet on Monday mornings—and his only problem class. They were the remedial section of fourth-form English, still working on grammar and the most elementary principles of composition, though Warden was eager to get them into writing poetry and spending more time on literature. Today he had forgone grammar and had given the class six words, all six of which they were to use in a poem. He had allowed them forty-five minutes—the entire period—to work.

  The six words, which embraced at least four parts of speech and three of the five senses, were “muffin,” “licorice,” “blithely,” “strummed,” “squeaky,” and “moist.” Robert Staines had written the poem on the top of the pile:

  My Mother baked, A licorice muffin,

  It tasted like turkey, Without any stuffin:

  The inside was moist,

  The outside was squeaky,

  I strummed when I ate it, Delicious and blithely.

  Warden had watched Staines work. The boy had taken five minutes to dash off the writing, and then he had doodled until the end of the period when his classmates turned in their papers. What annoyed Warden was that Staines’s poem was actually all right, if only by accident. He had produced some startling images—“the outside was squeaky” and “I strummed when I ate it”—but Warden knew the boy was unappreciative of his own inadvertent imagery. It was the old dilemma of the English teacher: to praise work for what he saw in it or to nail the student for not taking the assignment seriously.

  Warden knew that he was supposed to be objective about all his students, and he could usually find something likeable about everyone in a class. Not Staines. There was something shifty and arrogant about Staines. He was a good athlete, but he was absolutely uninterested in anything academic. In his poem, for instance, he hadn’t even tried to find out what the words meant. “Delicious and blithely”: that was an accidentally interesting line. Warden supposed that he should give the boy some credit for the clever feminine rhyme of “muffin” with “stuffin’.”

  Why hadn’t anybody called from the doctor’s?

  Warden had wanted to summon an ambulance this morning, but Cynthia had stopped him. She had already arranged transportation with Kathleen Somerville last night, and she had told the doctor she was coming. She had also accused Warden of missing too many classes with his readings anyway. He had allowed her to prevail, and now he felt guilty and frustrated for doing so.

  What was the diagnosis?

  He hunted through the pile of papers until he found the Lipscomb boy’s work. This one was likely to be quite good. The boy had no business being in a remedial English class; he was there only because he was a sophomore newboy, and Sam Kaufman had insisted idiotically that all new sophomores take remedial English until they pass a grammar competency exam. In October he had told Kaufman, the academic dean, that Lipscomb was far too bright to be in a remedial section, but Kaufman had refused to budge until he’d seen the results of the exams in January. Warden wondered whether Kaufman was prejudiced. The Lipscomb boy was black, one of only a handful of minority students at Montpelier.

  Greg Lipscomb had written the following:

  I fear the white folk

  Who want to nibble my skin like licorice;

  Peel my ebony armor down

  To where it’s squeaky white bone;

  Cook my heritage until it’s as tame as a muffin

  They can dip moist in their milk

  And blithely swallow in torn pieces; Boil my muscle into ukulele strings

  To play my life like a jingle

  Strummed on a cooking show

  On color TV.

  It was an astonishing piece of work, an angry voice of black indignation, fright, and cynicism. Warden said so in a comment on the paper and hoped that perhaps with enough encouragement the boy would start to believe in his own capabilities. So far Warden had not been able to establish any rapport with him. He did his work faithfully and beautifully, but he seemed to mistrust Warden’s praise of his accomplishments.

  Warden was alone in his classroom on the third and top floor of Fleming Hall, the academic building. Daylight from the large arched windows helped the overhead neon lamps to brighten and cheer up the place, despite the gloom of the winter clouds outside. Cynthia’s touches were everywhere in this room—in the geraniums by the windows, in the neatly tacked posters of the English Lake District on the bulletin board, in the postcards of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters she had taped to a couple of windowpanes. Through those high windows in his corner room, he could survey the elliptical lawn around which the school was built, the lawn known on campus as the Quad, even though it was more rounded than quadrangular. He had brought her to this room on her first visit to Montpelier in June two years ago. She had laughed aloud with the delight of seeing the place, and she had made him laugh, had made him see the school afresh.

  Ostensibly, he had been the one giving her the tour of the campus, but it had been she, not he, who had led them from building to building. His classroom in Fleming Hall was in the lower southeast corner, at five o’clock if the Quad were a clock face. Next door, sprawling from five to six o’clock was Stringfellow Hall, the main building that housed a bit of everything—the headmaster’s office, admissions, alumni relations, the dining hall, the student activities rooms, the post office, the laundry rooms, the school store, and, upstairs, even some dormitories. They had walked clockwise around the campus: at seven o’clock, Lee House, the infirmary; at eight o’clock, the headmaster’s residence; at nine o’clock, the chapel; at ten and eleven o’clock, because it was so big, the gym and its various appendages; at twelve o’clock, the Homestead, the squat frame house remaining from Montpelier Plantation, where the Stringfellow family had lived when the school was born, and where Warden’s friends the Somervilles lived now.

  Cynthia had stood on the white-painted wooden steps of the Homestead in the summer humidity and had seen everything, had admired the flowers bordering the sidewalks, as well as the Blue Ridge Mountains on the western horizon, had noticed the symmetry of the trees on the Quad and the evenness of the roof lines and the way the brick on all the buildings, new or old, matched up perfectly with that of Stringfellow. She had insisted upon visiting every building on the Quad, even the dormitories: Clifton House and Kean House, back to back at one o’clock on the imaginary dial; Stratford House and Siddons House at two o’clock; Dupont House at three o’clock, and behind it, Bradley Hall, the large arts center built in the late 1960s. At four o’clock Hathaway Library and, directly behind it, providing a jowl or sideburn to the oval face of the campus, Reid Hall, the science building. Then they had walked the entire course again, this time on the outside of the Quad. She had held his hand and tugged him along the vaguely cir
cular road that divided the central campus from the playing fields, tennis courts, maintenance buildings, faculty houses, parking lots, and woodlands that constituted the rest of the school grounds. They had finished their tour at his home, which then happened to be the smaller of the two apartments in the gym.

  It was quiet here in Fleming during recess. He could hear noise from the English office down the hall, where somebody was using the loud clackety printer for their computer. The term “word processing” sounded dreadful to Warden, who refused to use anything but his electric typewriter. Cynthia had bought a computer with some money they had received as a wedding gift. Cynthia. He could not help worrying over her, and yet he felt foolish for not using the time she had given him more productively. He was impressed with how easily he could sit here at his desk and at least appear, despite his distracting anxiety, to be following his normal routine. It was remarkable that the human soul continued to function even in the face of despair.

  Now he sounded like an English teacher, a trite one.

  Warden stood up and walked down the hall toward Horace Somerville’s classroom. Horace was Warden’s best friend in the world, though Horace was a generation older and had once terrified Warden as his European history teacher. Warden had been Horace’s student in this very building, back when the floors were of dark tile rather than brown carpeting, when the hall lights were white globes suspended on black cords rather than these banks of fluorescent lamps stuck into the ceilings like inverted ice cube trays.

  Still, despite its renovations, Fleming Hall remained for its inhabitants in the English, history, and foreign language departments the more distinguished of the school’s two academic buildings. Reid Hall, home of the math and science departments, was built only three years ago to provide modern laboratories and antiseptic classrooms, but already the building required major structural repairs. It was sliding down the hill that Montpelier School was built upon. That was the way Warden felt this morning: as though the ground beneath him had started to slide away.

  A boy passed him in the hallway and greeted him by name, a nice-looking boy with longish-blond hair and an armful of books.

  “Now your name is—” Warden said. He did not know the boy.

  “Russell Phillips.” A thin boy, but looking fit.

  Warden asked why he wasn’t on dorm.

  “I cleaned my room before breakfast,” said Russell Phillips. “Too cold to walk back to Kean House.”

  Warden teased him by pointing out the healthful benefits of a brisk walk in chilly weather.

  “I’d rather die,” said Russell Phillips. Then he continued on his way to the stairs.

  The words startled Warden so much that he forgot momentarily where he was going.

  SCENE 4

  Although Horace Somerville had happily occupied the same classroom in Fleming Hall for all thirty-eight of his teaching years at Montpelier, this morning he felt the sameness wearing him out. He was tired of looking at that same map of the ancient world he’d brought down with him from Boston in 1952, those same portraits of the Civil War generals he had put up in 1960, the same cracked old blackboard where he continued to scrawl his assignments. All the fresh paint and the new carpeting (never mind that the carpet was new ten years ago; a decade was still new for Montpelier and for Somerville) and these fancy metal desks that slid around the room instead of remaining firmly planted like the old benches: all this modernism was just superficial cosmetic change. Somerville was having the same damnable conversation he’d had with slovenly students every week of his life since the year Eisenhower was elected president. He was tired of these lazy little ignoramuses who refused to listen to his advice, which at the moment he was dispensing with increasing asperity.

  “Learn the dates!” he said for the several dozenth time to the boy in front of him. “Learn the dates! Then you can get to the fun part of history.” Little bastard was practically yawning in his face. Somerville would wake him up with a cattle prod.

  “Yes sir,” said the boy. He was a third-former named Wallace, with straight brown hair cut as though someone had put a bowl over his head and a necktie carelessly tied with the knot too big, the back strand longer than the front. Somerville himself was wearing a starched white shirt and a knit tie. For a while in the 1960s, he had gone through a bow tie phase because he’d hated the paisley alternatives. Now he was happy to see the world returning to something resembling sartorial common sense, though this boy had obviously never shined his shoes since the day his extravagantly indulgent mother had bought them for him.

  “We offer a fine version of this course in summer school,” said Somerville.

  “Yes sir.”

  He was glad to see Wallace squirm a bit, but then the boy astonished him by picking up his books as if their conference were over. Somerville impounded the books and placed them on his desktop, then stared at his student as if the boy were some particularly grotesque piece of unidentifiable offal dragged home by a hunting dog.

  “Don’t ‘yes sir’ me. Just learn the dates.”

  “Yes sir.”

  It was 10:25, ten minutes into the mid-morning recess. Somerville knew what a charming sight they must make for the random observer: the mop-headed little ninth-grader slouching a bit (“Sit up, boy!”) in the straight wooden chair beside Somerville’s desk, and the experienced old instructor—bright eyes, thick-lensed reading glasses, thinning white hair, basset hound jowls, and overgrown ears-patiently working him through his lessons. Those officious imbeciles in the development office were frequently sneaking photographers over here to catch him in a Norman Rockwell pose, the archetype of the gruff but loving grandfather. Hogwash. Somerville had kept Wallace after class for failing to do his homework assignment over the Thanksgiving holiday. There was nothing wrong with this boy that a little grit and motivation and intellectual awakening couldn’t fix, but the child seemed perfectly content to accept Somerville’s finest invective with only a token bit of cringing. Somerville wondered whether he was losing his touch.

  “You’re probably ready to go now, aren’t you?” he said to Wallace.

  “Yes sir.”

  “You’d like to get to your room before it’s inspected.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Before somebody sticks you for demerits.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “1485.”

  Somerville noted with pleasure that the boy seemed to lose some height as he realized that he was not yet free.

  “Well?” said Somerville.

  The boy hesitated. “The Battle of Hastings?” he said.

  “That was 1066. 1485.”

  “The end of the Wars of the Roses?”

  “Correct. What was the battle?”

  Ben Warden interrupted by knocking on the open door. The boy looked to the doorway at Warden and grinned.

  Damn, what a time for Ben to appear. “Answer the question,” said Somerville.

  “Shrewsbury?”

  “That was 1403! Learn the dates!” said Somerville. “Now get along off to your dormitory. You’re lucky I need to see Mr. Warden.”

  The boy picked up his books and passed Warden in the doorway. On the threshold he paused and turned back to Somerville. “Well, what was the battle?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you!” said Somerville. “Learn the dates!”

  Unfazed, the boy turned and asked Warden.

  “I believe it was the Battle of Bosworth Field,” said Warden. “That’s what Shakespeare tells me, anyway.”

  Somerville rewarded both his auditors with a miniature explosion.

  “It wasn’t Shakespeare who taught you that date,” he said. “I did.” He told Wallace that Warden had been his history student in this very course twenty years earlier. “And he was just as miserable at history as you are until I shook some sense into him.”

  “Neat,” said the boy.

  “What was that?” said Somerville.

  “Yes,” said the boy. “Yes sir.”

>   “Get out of here, Wallace, before I tie you up and horsewhip you.”

  “Yes sir.” The boy skidded down the stairs. Likeable little kid, Somerville had to admit, despite the vacuity of his cranium.

  He turned his attention to Warden, who indeed had stood many a day in that same doorway. He knew why Warden was there; this morning Kathleen, Somerville’s wife, had driven Cynthia Warden—with what sounded like a potentially dangerous neural disorder—to see a doctor in Charlottesville. Warden was a model of disorder himself, looking as unraveled as the threads on his old corduroy trousers and as ragged as the collar on his shirt. Somerville had always admired Warden’s well-preserved youth, down to the carelessness of his attire. Despite fourteen years of boarding school life, Warden had retained his trim undergraduate figure and his thick black hair; it was as though the birthmark on his face had absorbed all the other ravages that time might inflict on a human body. But this morning he looked as tired of life as Somerville was of adolescent lassitude.

  Warden sat in the chair recently vacated by Wallace. Somerville sat beside him and waited. They had shared this routine many times over the years. One of them would seek counsel, and the other would provide it.

  “They’re on to you,” said Warden. “Everybody knows you’re all bark.”

  “I’ve got a few teeth left,” said Somerville. He had liked Warden from the moment he’d met him all those history lessons ago.

  Warden asked if Kathleen had called.

  Somerville shook his head. He said he would not expect them to call, but simply to drive back to the campus when the examination concluded.

  “Unless they send her to the hospital,” said Warden.

  Somerville sat with a hand on each of his knees. His gray flannel trousers were perfectly pressed. He reminded Warden that waiting rooms were notoriously slow. All of them on the faculty had taken turns over the years at driving injured boys to doctors’ offices and emergency rooms in Charlottesville, forty miles away. With 360 boys enrolled, and all of them required to participate in athletics, one was always requiring X-rays or stitches or plaster.