Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story

by Lorin Stein

  After a second-form boy had brought a glass of water to each of the contestants, I moved on to the next level of questions. These had been chosen for their difficulty, and on the first round Clay Walter fell out, not knowing the names of Augustus’s children. He left the stage and moved back among his dim-witted pals in the audience. By the rule of clockwise progression the same question then went to Deepak Mehta, who answered it correctly, followed by the next one, which concerned King Jugurtha of Numidia. Then, because I had no choice, I had to ask Sedgewick Bell something difficult: “Which General had the support of the aristocrats in the civil war of 88 B.C.?”

  To the side, I could see several parents pursing their lips and furrowing their brows, but Sedgewick Bell appeared to not even notice the greater difficulty of the query. Again he dropped his head into his hands. By now the audience expected his period of deliberation, and they sat quietly. One could hear the hum of the ventilation system and the dripping of the icicles outside. Sedgewick Bell cast his eyes downward, and it was at this moment that I realized he was cheating.

  I had come to this job straight from my degree at Carleton College, at the age of twenty-one, having missed enlistment due to myopia, and carrying with me the hope that I could give to my boys the more important vision that my classical studies had given to me. I knew that they responded best to challenge. I knew that a teacher who coddled them at that age would only hold them back, would keep them in the bosoms of their mothers so long that they would remain weak-minded through preparatory school and inevitably then through college. The best of my own teachers had been tyrants. I well remembered this. Yet at that moment I felt an inexplicable pity for the boy. Was it simply the humiliation we had both suffered at the hands of his father? I peered through my glasses at the stage and knew at once that he had attached the “Outline of Ancient Roman History” to the inside of his toga.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, between the school assembled behind me and the two boys seated in front, but after a period of internal deliberation, during which time I could hear the rising murmurs of the audience, I decided that in the long run it was best for Sedgewick Bell to be caught. Oh, how the battle is lost for want of a horse! I leaned to Mr. Woodbridge next to me and whispered, “I believe Sedgewick Bell is cheating.”

  “Ignore it,” he whispered back.

  “What?”

  Of course, I have great respect for what Mr. Woodbridge did for St. Benedict’s in the years he was among us. A headmaster’s world is far more complex than a teacher’s, and it is historically inopportune to blame a life gone afoul on a single incident in childhood. However, I myself would have stood up for our principles had Mr. Woodbridge not at that point said, “Ignore it, Hundert, or look for another job.”

  Naturally, my headmaster’s words startled me for a moment; but being familiar with the necessities of a boy’s school, and having recently entertained my first thoughts about one day becoming a headmaster myself, I simply nodded when Sedgewick Bell produced the correct answer, Lucius Cornelius Sulla. Then I went on to the next question, which concerned Scipio Africanus Major. Deepak Mehta answered it correctly, and I turned once again to Sedgewick Bell.

  In a position of moral leadership, of course, compromise begets only more compromise, and although I know this now from my own experience, at the time I did so only from my study of history. Perhaps that is why I again found an untenable compassion muddying my thoughts. What kind of desperation would lead a boy to cheat on a public stage? His father and mother were well back in the crowded theater, but when I glanced behind me my eye went instantly to them, as though they were indeed my own parents, out from Kansas City. “Who were the first emperors to reign over the divided Empire?” I asked Sedgewick Bell.

  When one knows the magician’s trick, the only wonder is in its obviousness, and as Sedgewick Bell lowered his head this time I clearly saw the nervous flutter of his gaze directed into the toga. Indeed I imagined him scanning the entire “Outline,” from Augustus to Jovian, pasted inside the twill, before coming to the answer, which, pretending to ponder, he then spoke aloud: “Valentinian the First, and Valens.”

  Suddenly Senator Bell called out, “That’s my boy!”

  The crowd thundered, and I had the sudden, indefensible urge to steer the contest in young Sedgewick Bell’s direction. In a few moments, however, from within the subsiding din, I heard the thin, accented voice of a woman speaking Deepak Mehta’s name; and it was the presence of his mother, I suppose, that finally brought me to my senses. Deepak answered the next question correctly, about Diocletian, and then I turned to Sedgewick Bell and asked him, “Who was Hamilcar Barca?”

  Of course, it was only Deepak who knew that this answer was not on the “Outline,” because Hamilcar Barca was a Phoenician general eventually routed by the Romans; it was only Deepak, as I have noted, who had bothered to study the conquered peoples. He briefly widened his eyes at me—in recognition? in gratitude? in disapproval?—while, beside him, Sedgewick Bell again lowered his head into his hands. After a long pause, Sedgewick asked me to repeat the question.

  I did so, and after another, long pause, he scratched his head. Finally, he said, “Jeez.”

  The boys in the audience laughed, but I turned and silenced them. Then I put the same question to Deepak Mehta, who answered it correctly, of course, and then received a round of applause that was polite but not sustained.

  It was only as I mounted the stage to present Deepak with the garland of laurel, however, that I glanced at Mr. Woodbridge and realized that he too had wanted me to steer the contest toward Sedgewick Bell. At the same moment, I saw Senator Bell making his way to the rear door of the hall. Young Sedgewick stood limply to the side of me, and I believe I had my first inkling then of the mighty forces that would twist the life of that boy. I could only imagine his thoughts as he stood there on stage while his mother, struggling to catch up with the senator, vanished through the fire door at the back. The next morning, our calligraphers would add Deepak Mehta’s name to the plaque outside Mr. Woodbridge’s office, and young Sedgewick Bell would begin his lifelong pursuit of missed glory.

  Yet perhaps because of the disappointment I could see in Mr. Woodbridge’s eyes, it somehow seemed that I was the one who had failed the boy, and as soon as the auditorium was empty I left for his room. There I found him seated on the bed, still in his toga, gazing out the small window to the lacrosse fields. I could see the sheets of my “Outline” pressed against the inside of his garment.

  “Well, young man,” I said, knocking on the doorframe, “that certainly was an interesting performance.”

  He turned around from the window and looked at me coldly. What he did next I have thought about many times over the years, the labyrinthine wiliness of it, and I can only attribute the precociousness of his maneuvering to the bitter education he must have received at home. As I stood before him in the doorway, Sedgewick Bell reached inside his cloak and one at a time lifted out the pages of my “Outline.”

  I stepped inside and closed the door. Every teacher knows a score of boys who do their best to be expelled; this is a cliché in a school like ours, but as soon as I closed the door to his room and he acknowledged the act with a feline smile, I knew that this was not Sedgewick Bell’s intention at all.

  “I knew you saw,” he said.

  “Yes, you are correct.”

  “How come you didn’t say anything, eh, Mr. Hundert?”

  “It’s a complicated matter, Sedgewick.”

  “It’s because my pop was there.”

  “It had nothing to do with your father.”

  “Sure, Mr. Hundert.”

  Frankly, I was at my wit’s end, first from what Mr. Woodbridge had said to me in the theater and now from the audacity of the boy’s accusation. I myself went to the window then and let my eyes wander over the campus so that they would not have to engage the dark, accusatory gaze of Sedgewick Bell. What transpires in an act of omission like the one I had com
mitted? I do not blame Mr. Woodbridge, of course, any more than a soldier can blame his captain. What had happened was that instead of enforcing my own code of morals, I had allowed Sedgewick Bell to sweep me summarily into his. I did not know at the time what an act of corruption I had committed, although what is especially chilling to me is that I believe that Sedgewick Bell, even at the age of thirteen, did.

  He knew also, of course, that I would not pursue the matter, although I spent the ensuing several days contemplating a disciplinary action. Each time I summoned my resolve to submit the boy’s name to the honor committee, however, my conviction waned, for at these times I seemed to myself to be nothing more than one criminal turning in another. I fought this battle constantly, in my simple rooms, at the long, chipped table I governed in the dining hall and at the dusty chalkboard before my classes. I felt like an exhausted swimmer trying to climb a slippery wall out of the sea.

  Furthermore, I was alone in my predicament, for among a boarding school faculty, which is as perilous as a medieval court, one does not publicly discuss a boy’s misdeeds. This is even true if the boy is not the son of a senator. In fact, the only teacher I decided to trust with my situation was Charles Ellerby, our new Latin instructor and a kindred lover of antiquity. I had likes Charles Ellerby as soon as we had met because he was a moralist of no uncertain terms, and indeed when I confided in him about Sedgewick Bell’s behavior and Mr. Woodbridge’s response, he suggested that it was my duty to circumvent our headmaster and speak to Senator Bell again.

  Less than a week after I had begun to marshall my resolve, however, the senator himself called me. He proffered a few moments of small talk, asked after the gun he had given me, and then said gruffly, “Young man, my son tells me the Hannibal Barca question was not on the list he had to know.”

  Now, indeed, I was shocked. Even from young Sedgewick Bell I had not expected this audacity. “How deeply the viper is a viper,” I said, before I could help myself.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Phoenician General was Hamilcar Barca, Sir, not Hannibal.”

  The senator paused. “My son tells me you asked him a question that was not on the list, which the Oriental fellow knew the answer to in advance. He feels you’ve been unfair, is all.”

  “It’s a complex situation, sir,” I said. I marshalled my will again by imagining what Charles Ellerby would do in the situation. However, no sooner had I resolved to confront the senator than it became perfectly clear to me that I lacked the character to do so. I believe this had long been clear to Sedgewick Bell.

  “I’m sure it is complex,” Senator Bell said. “But I assure you, there are situations more complex. Now, I’m not asking you to correct anything this time, you understand. My son has told me a great deal about you, Mr. Hundert. If I were you, I’d remember that.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, although by then I realized he had hung up.

  And thus young Sedgewick Bell and I began an uneasy compact that lasted out his days at St. Benedict’s. He was a dismal student from that day forward, scratching at the very bottom of a class that was itself a far cry from the glorious, yesteryear classes of John Dulles and Henry Stimson. His quizzes were abominations and his essays were pathetic digestions of those of the boys sitting next to him. He chatted amiably in study hall, smoked cigarettes in the third-form linen room, and when called upon in class could be counted on to blink and stutter as if called upon from sleep.

  But perhaps the glory days of St. Benedict’s had already begun their wane, for even then, well before the large problems that beset us, no action was taken against the boy. He became a symbol for Charles Ellerby and me, evidence of the first tendrils of moral rot that seemed to be twining among the posts and timbers of our school. Although we told nobody else of his secret, the boy’s dim-witted recalcitrance soon succeeded in alienating all but the other students. His second-and third-form years passed as ingloriously as his first, and by the outset of his last with us he had grown to mythic infamy among the faculty members who had known the school in its days of glory.

  He had grown physically larger as well, and now when I chanced upon him on the campus he held his ground against my disapproving stare with a dark one of his own. To complicate matters, he had cultivated, despite his boorish character, an impressive popularity among his schoolmates, and it was only through the subtle intervention of several of his teachers that he had failed on two occasions to win the presidency of the student body. His stride had become a strut. His favor among the other boys, of course, had its origin in the strength of his physical features, in the precocious evil of his manner, and in the bellowing timbre of his voice, but unfortunately such crudities are all the more impressive to a group of boys living out of sight of their parents.

  That is not to say that the faculty of St. Benedict’s had given up hope for Sedgewick Bell. Indeed, a teacher’s career is punctuated with difficult students like him, and despite the odds one could not help but hope for his eventual rehabilitation. As did all the other teachers, I held out promise for Sedgewick Bell. In his fits of depravity and intellectual feebleness I continued to look for glimpses of discipline and progress.

  By his fourth-form year, however, when I had become dean of seniors, it was clear that Sedgewick Bell would not change, at least not while he was at St. Benedict’s. Even with his powerful station, he had not even managed to gain admission to the state university, and it was with a sense of failure then, finally, that I handed him his diploma in the spring of 1949, on an erected stage at the north end of the great field, on which he came forward, met my disapproving gaze with his own flat one and trundled off to sit among his friends.

  *

  It was with some surprise then that I learned in The Richmond Gazette, thirty-seven years later, of Sedgewick Bell’s ascension to the chairmanship of EastAmerica Steel, at that time the second largest corporation in America. I chanced upon the news one morning in the winter of 1987, the year of my great problems with St. Benedict’s, while reading the newspaper in the east-lighted breakfast room of the Assistant Headmaster’s House. St. Benedict’s, as everyone knows, had fallen upon difficult times by then, and an unseemly aspect of my job was that I had to maintain a lookout for possible donors to the school. Forthwith, I sent a letter to Sedgewick Bell.

  Apart from the five or six years in which a classmate had written to The Benedictine of his whereabouts, I had heard almost nothing about the boy since the year of his graduation. This was unusual, of course, as St. Benedict’s makes a point of keeping abreast of its graduates, and I can only assume that his absence in the yearly alumni notes was due to an act of will on his own part. One wonders how much of the boy remained in the man. It is indeed a rare vantage that a St. Benedict’s teacher holds, to have known our statesmen, our policy-makers, and our captains of industry in their days of short pants and classroom pranks, and I admit that it was with some nostalgia that I composed the letter.

  Since his graduation, of course, my career had proceeded with the steady ascension that the great schools have always afforded their dedicated teachers. Ten years after Sedgewick Bell’s departure, I had moved from dean of seniors to dean of the upper school, and after a decade there to dean of academics, a post that some would consider a demotion but that I seized with reverence because it afforded me the chance to make inroads on the minds of a generation. At the time, of course, the country was in the throes of a violent, peristaltic rejection of tradition, and I felt a particular urgency to my mission of staying a course that had led a century of boys through the rise and fall of ancient civilizations.

  In those days, our meetings of the faculty and trustees were rancorous affairs in which great pressure was exerted in attempts to alter the time-tested curriculum of the school. Planning a course was like going into battle, and hiring a new teacher was like crowning a king. Whenever one of our ranks retired or left for another school, the different factions fought tooth-and-nail to influence the appointment. I was the dean of a
cademics, as I have noted, and these skirmishes naturally waged around my foxhole. For the lesser appointments I often feinted to gather leverage for the greater ones, whose campaigns I fought with abandon.

  At one point especially, midway through that decade in which our country had lost its way, St. Benedict’s arrived at a crossroads. The chair of humanities had retired, and a pitched battle over his replacement developed between Charles Ellerby and a candidate from outside. A meeting ensued in which my friend and this other man spoke to the assembled faculty and trustees, and though I will not go into detail, I will say that the outside candidate felt that, because of the advances in our society, history had become little more than a relic.

  Oh, what dim-sighted times those were! The two camps sat on opposite sides of the chapel as speakers took the podium one after another to wage war. The controversy quickly became a forum concerning the relevance of the past. Teacher after teacher debated the import of what we in history had taught for generations, and assertion after assertion was met with boos and applause. Tempers blazed. One powerful member of the board had come to the meeting in blue jeans and a tie-dyed shirt, and after we had been arguing for several hours and all of us were exhausted he took the podium and challenged me personally, right then and there, to debate with him the merits of Roman history.

  He was not an ineloquent man, and he chose to speak his plea first, so that by the time he had finished his attack against antiquity I sensed that my battle on behalf of Charles Ellerby, and of history itself, was near to lost. My heart was gravely burdened, for if we could not win our point here among teachers, then among whom indeed could we win it? The room was silent, and on the other side of the chapel our opponents were gathering nearer to one another in the pews.