The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “And how are we doing?” Louis asked.

  “Okay,” Christian told him. He sat with his legs crossed at the knee, his dangling foot shaking with what Louis hoped was nervous energy and not nerves. Though he tried hard to be approachable, he knew that some of the boys found him—his manner, his age—intimidating.

  “The room situation is better?” he asked gently.

  “Much better.”

  “And the other boys on the hall?”

  Christian merely shrugged. There was an odd distance inside him, as if he were undertaking some calculated withdrawal from the world, shrinking into a protective space he had discovered inside himself. Louis wondered if this withdrawal would grow more pronounced with time. He’s not sick yet, Christian’s father had assured the headmaster. It may be years before he actually takes a hit from an opportunistic infection.

  The question Louis had asked himself innumerable times was this: what would Jack Emmerich have done with a boy who tested positive for HIV? But his mentor’s guiding light, usually so steady, on this occasion proved too faint to steer by. He was on his own.

  The case had unfolded over the summer. Some routine blood work had revealed certain anomalies in the boy’s white-cell count, which had led to further tests, and eventually to the shocking diagnosis. He was only sixteen. Louis had not pressed for the details, God forbid. But he had found himself unexpectedly moved by the long and surprisingly honest letter Christian sent him in which he expressed a wish to return to the Forge School in the fall. He detailed the intensive therapy he had been in, the rather daunting regimen of medicines his doctor had put him on. “All I want is to try to pursue a normal life,” he’d written. “Whatever that might be for somebody like me with a death sentence.” His father had concurred, making a special, unaccompanied trip to the Forge School to argue his son’s case, and though Louis had hesitated—he had any number of concerns, obviously—the tall, dapper man in an expensive Italian suit seemed, as he sat in Louis’s office on a thundery summer afternoon, so devastated by recent events that it was scarcely possible to deny either him or his son their wish.

  To be honest, Louis had had some difficulty remembering Christian Tyler exactly. Neither physically nor mentally outstanding, he was one of those students who tended to blend in. Reid had taught him, however, and without knowing all the details of the case, which Louis had promised to keep confidential, vouched for Christian as “the great unremarkable middle ground.”

  Louis was thus shocked, when the first of September came around, and before classes had even commenced, to see striding across campus a Forge School student he had never to his knowledge laid eyes on before. In regulation jacket and tie, the boy sported a yellow flip of dyed hair so defiantly unnatural-looking that it could only be intended as an affront to the world at large. Having learned on previous occasions that certain rebellious fads had a way of spreading like a contagion through the student body and thinking to nip this particular one in the bud, Louis charged over to the young man with a stern “Excuse me.”

  “Dr. Tremper,” said the offending student. “I’ve been meaning to come by your office.” He enunciated the words carefully, as if already fairly certain of their effect. It had been such a peculiar moment. Louis had never, to his knowledge, known anyone with HIV, and this encounter, happening so unexpectedly, stopped him dead in his tracks.

  The boy was no beauty. Acne marred his cheekbones. Up close he had that teased, artificial, effeminate look one used to associate, when Louis was growing up, with obvious pansies. In ordinary circumstances Louis would have been revolted, and yet he found himself, standing face to face with Christian, instead inexplicably touched by something he could not, at the moment, quite pin down; for the rest of the afternoon that unnameable sensation nagged at him, and it was not until sometime later that he realized what a strange chain of association had been triggered by the encounter: how, in the elevator of the hotel on the Lido, Gustav Aschenbach, cast by chance into a close encounter with Tadzio, notices that the Polish boy’s teeth are brittle, unhealthy looking. In a passage Louis had often perused with curiosity, Aschenbach thinks, “He is very frail, he is sickly. In all probability he will not grow old.” And then Mann adds something strange and imponderable: that Aschenbach finds himself reassured, even gratified by that thought.

  But of course, Christian Tyler was hardly anything like a Tadzio, and Louis certainly was no Aschenbach. Nevertheless, call it pity, or tenderness, or perhaps even awe, some completely unexpected emotion had been awakened in Louis. There was no evading it. This boy would not grow old. He would die before his time. That fact held the normal rules in abeyance. And as the semester progressed, Louis discovered that it gave him a not entirely virtuous sense of pleasure to bend or even ignore certain regulations for Christian. It was, of course, perfectly within his jurisdiction to make any arrangements he wanted, though Doug Brill did grumble a bit, and Louis suspected him of occasionally turning a blind or at least myopic eye toward some of the mischievous goings-on in his dorm, pranks that under other circumstances might not appear particularly egregious, but that seemed to Louis, bound to his silent knowledge, inordinately cruel.

  Louis knew Christian could get sick at any moment. And then what? With relative certainty he told himself, He’s only got two years left here; he’ll live to finish his time at the Forge School.

  But then what? He tried to imagine the unimaginable prospect of life ending so soon.

  “Look,” he said, “if there’s anything you need—anything I can do—please don’t hesitate to be in touch with me. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” Christian told him. “Like I said, I’m doing okay. I’m just trying to focus on my schoolwork. I get a little depressed, but I have my medicine.” He forced a smile. Unlike Tadzio’s, his teeth were quite perfect. “Thank God for Xanax,” he said.

  “Sigmund Freud,” said Reid, leaning back in his chair and placing his hands over his capacious belly, “makes a really marvelous claim somewhere. According to the master—and who are we to doubt him?—children’s curiosity about sex is really nothing less than their sexuality itself. That’s how integral it is to their very being. And furthermore, sex-curiosity is the basis for the curiosity children show about everything else. It’s the root of everything.”

  Having just joined the conversation already in progress between Reid and Tracy at the faculty table in the cafeteria, Louis fastidiously unfolded his napkin and waited for whatever bombast was to follow.

  “But now here’s something interesting,” Reid went on, undeterred by his friend’s arrival. “As Freud sees it, this overwhelming sex-curiosity is fundamentally at odds with the social ideals of education, because if children are curious to know all about sex, adults, on the other hand, insist that children need to know about something else—namely, what Freud calls Higher Culture. And why is that? Why, in order to distract them from what they are really interested in. Namely, sex. In other words, education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them. In order to make curiosity acceptable, something else has to be added to it, and that something is what we call education.”

  “That’s fascinating,” Tracy said gamely, and Louis thought, as he prodded with his fork the rather sorry-looking lump of salisbury steak on the plate before him: why on earth has Reid been reading Freud? But then he was like that, an omnivorous reader. One never knew what he was going to dredge up next.

  “For Freud,” Reid summed up grandly, “the search for knowledge, even in its purest, most disinterested form, is at base what you might call sexually inspired.”

  “Oh please,” Louis said testily, accustomed as he was to these pronouncements lobbed his way, like ineffectual missiles, in a years-long campaign to sow doubts. Nevertheless, that distasteful newspaper article from earlier in the morning intruded into his thoughts in a most annoying way.

  Reid laughed his obscene belly laugh. “Louis resents my intellectual promiscuity,” he expla
ined to Tracy.

  “I resent your tossing around scurrilous half-truths. Thank God we’ve gotten out from under Freud’s shadow, and not a moment too soon.”

  “Freud, my dear friend, still has much to teach us. The poet Auden called him the dark healer.”

  Why, Louis wondered, did Reid always feel he had to identify his references for the unwashed masses?

  “The dark healer,” Tracy mused. “That’s very good.” Louis noticed that his wise young colleague had packed his own lunch—cheese, an apple, a wedge of dark bread—rather than submit to the cafeteria’s regime. As headmaster, he doubted he had that option. It would set a bad precedent. With fortitude, he plunged into a meal that, he reminded himself, never tasted quite as dreary as it looked.

  “And some truly frightening lessons they are,” Reid added. “But now I must go and educate the little darlings. Get their minds off sex and on to the truly important things, like religion and grammar and the attractions of wayward molecules for one another. Oh, there I go again. Never mind.”

  And taking up his tray, its heavy plate licked clean, he was off. Tracy laughed and shook his head. “What a trip,” he said. “I’m really starting to like Reid.”

  “He’s got a brilliant mind, no doubt about it,” Louis said tersely, “but frightfully undisciplined.”

  “You two’ve known each other for years, haven’t you?” Tracy asked, picking up his apple and examining, as if for blemishes, its shiny skin. “The other day he was telling me some story about how both of you came to the Forge School at the same time.”

  Louis felt that twinge of anxious embarrassment he often felt whenever he learned that someone had been talking about him. What had Reid been saying anyway?

  “You actually met on the train, is that right?” Tracy went on eagerly. “And you didn’t have any idea you were going to the same place till you actually got there….”

  “Is that what Reid told you?” Louis asked. He watched, a little squeamishly, as Tracy sank his teeth into his apple and chewed loudly. It was certainly true after a fashion, Louis thought. He had been so young then, so full of high foolish hopes, and he had felt liberated by his decision to take time off from the rigors of his dissertation, all his prodigious mental efforts having failed to yield any more than a scant few pages. Even his dissertation adviser had noticed, with some concern, the mental strain he had been under. A year’s teaching job would provide a salutary break, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he would return with renewed vigor and enthusiasm. Taken in perspective, the prospect of teaching a lively handful of prepschool boys for a year qualified as something very like a lark.

  There are a few scattered moments in one’s life when everything seems possible. Perhaps that is why he struck up a conversation with the stranger seated across the aisle from him on the train to Middle Forge that morning. Talking to strangers was not something he normally indulged in, but there was something about his traveling companion that appealed to him, some sense that this was hardly a person to spend his time in fusty libraries, and yet Louis could tell, just by chatting with him about the weather, the scenery along the Hudson that passed by their windows, that he was educated, knowledgeable about a wide array of subjects. His profile was noble, there was a quiet fervor in his eyes. Louis was charmed; he was, as he said to himself at the time, quite taken.

  “Quite a coincidence, really,” Louis told Tracy.

  Perhaps, had he known they were both bound for the same destination, he would have acted differently, been more circumspect. But that had been part of the marvelous sense of freedom he had felt that particular morning, suspended between the old, hemmed-in certainties of Cornell University and the new, uncharted possibilities of the Forge School. Though he seldom rode that train anymore—whenever they went down to the opera, Claire drove, her foot heavy on the gas, her hand steady on the wheel—Louis still retained a romantic fondness for that stretch of river and shore, associated as it was with some ineffable sense that life could be lived after all.

  “Reid said you were great buddies from the word go,” Tracy prompted him. “‘Bosom buddies’ is the phrase he used.”

  “Well,” Louis said, surprised and not a little touched. “I’m not sure I’d go that far.” What with one thing and another, it felt like they had been estranged for so many years. But it was undoubtedly true that he and Reid had almost instantly managed to strike a chord with one another, though its precise key, and whether it was major or minor, remained subject to debate. And it was entirely to Reid’s credit that he had shunted aside, with great gentleness, those youthful enthusiasms when it became awkwardly clear, for the sake of everyone concerned, that they must necessarily remain without issue.

  “He thinks the world of you,” Tracy said. “He credits you with keeping this place running.”

  “I met my wife through Reid’s good offices,” Louis said, realizing that it might very well sound like a complete non sequitur. “For which I am eternally grateful,” he added. And wondered: did the phrase “youthful indiscretion” mean anything these days? He had been no older than Tracy at the time, though he couldn’t imagine he had ever felt so young as Tracy seemed to him now.

  He tried to think what young men did these days, left to their own devices as they were. He knew next to nothing about Tracy’s life—his friendships, his loves, whatever they might be. Did he know what it was like to have a bosom buddy, as Reid so quaintly called what had been, at the time, a friendship very serious and, to be truthful, not a little frightening?

  He might have been on the verge of asking, only Tracy, stashing his apple core inside the brown bag he’d brought his lunch in, said, “Well, I suppose I too should be off to educate the little darlings.”

  It made Louis wince; he didn’t like that phrase the impressionable Tracy had picked up from Reid one bit.

  Not until late in the day, after missing him in the cafeteria, then later at the copy machine, did Louis succeed in catching up with Doug Brill. He was skulking about in the faculty lounge, New York Giants mug in hand. Louis had never known anyone to skulk so; he imagined how even in church—that depressing little red-brick building on the outskirts of Middle Forge that Doug attended with fellow enthusiasts, as Reid mockingly called them—whether standing to sing a hymn or on his knees in prayer, he probably still skulked. For a single irreverent moment Louis saw God—Doug Brill’s white-bearded Father in Heaven, not his own considerably more complicated and amorphous deity—looking down from on high and commanding, in a deep and resonant voice, “Thou shalt not skulk in the house of the Lord thy God!” He wondered about that word, skulk. A bit of Viking argot lodged in the language, relic of old coastal raids?

  It was his worst fault, and again he caught himself red-handed—not wondering about words, but judging others. But then Doug Brill had asked to be judged. Without a second thought he’d hurt Eleanor Osterhoudt’s feelings; there were some transgressions, in Louis’s book, that could not be overlooked.

  “May I have a word with you?” he asked curtly.

  “By all means,” Doug told him confidently, helping himself to that pungent brew that passed for coffee, courtesy of Eleanor’s ministrations. The audacity, Louis thought.

  “Then let’s step in my office,” he said. “Please, after you.”

  Settling into the seat Christian Tyler had occupied hours earlier—would he sit there if he knew?—Doug Brill looked at him with exasperating seriousness.

  Without pausing for second thoughts, Louis plunged in directly. “I’ll not have this,” he said, handing the petition to Doug. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  With an expression of mild interest, Doug Brill scrutinized the document.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You’re not familiar with this little masterpiece of student prose?”

  Doug, still skulking, moved uncomfortably in his chair.

  “Well,” he said. “I may have seen it. I certainly had nothing to do wit
h it.”

  “Meaning?”

  Brill looked at him innocently. Louis thought about the man’s mouselike wife, his brood of sickly-looking children.

  Perhaps Brill was thinking of them too. “With all due respect, sir,” he said cautiously—it infuriated Louis to be called sir—“and this is not to cast any kind of aspersions at all, but some of us believe the headmaster’s office is not setting a good example for the rest of the school with regard to the smoking issue.”

  Louis felt certain: were Doug ever to discover Christian Tyler’s secret, the stalwart man would go ballistic, as the curious saying went. Louis imagined the young man’s head splitting apart to reveal an armed warhead where his brain should be. Nothing proved more clearly that he’d made the right decisions regarding the boy.

  “Talk straight to me here,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  Doug set his coffee mug carefully on the desk and clasped his hands together in a show of thoughtfulness. “Some of my athletes were talking,” he said. “We’ve got a discussion group, sort of a Christian support group, and they were talking about ways to make life better on campus. It concerns them—frankly, it disheartens them—to see some of the kids going over to the other side—the other side of the lake, I mean—to sneak a smoke in plain view of everybody else. It’s like they’re flaunting it. And then to see an administrator…well, it’s just that we’ve got to be role models for these kids, not confuse them.”

  “So you encouraged them to put together this little petition.” Louis was dying to call attention to the acronym, but thought better of it. Perhaps things weren’t so serious after all; some kids having a bit of fun at the coach’s expense.

  “I thought it might be good for the students,” Doug said. “Educational.”

  Louis had learned to be suspicious of the word educational. It covered, after all, a multitude of sins. “And for Eleanor?” he asked. Then, since Doug seemed to have no answer for that, he continued: “The Forge School is a community. And one of the compacts by which any successful community endures—any organism, for that matter—is its ability to live at peace with itself. For the greater good, we’ve all got to learn to live with each other’s personal foibles.”