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

by Lorin Stein

  When I rose to defend my calling, however, I also sensed that victory was not beyond my reach. I am not a particularly eloquent orator, but as I took my place at the chancel rail in the amber glow of the small rose window above us, I was braced by the sudden conviction that the great men of history had sent me forward to preserve their deeds. Charles Ellerby looked up at me biting his lip, and suddenly I remembered the answer I had written long ago in The Crier. Its words flowed as though unbidden from my tongue, and when I had finished I knew that we had won. It was my proudest moment at St. Benedict’s.

  Although the resultant split among the faculty was an egregious one, Charles Ellerby secured the appointment, and together we were able to do what I had always dreamed of doing: we redoubled our commitment to classical education. In times of upheaval, of course, adherence to tradition is all the more important, and perhaps this was why St. Benedict’s was brought intact through that decade and the one that followed. Our fortunes lifted and dipped with the gentle rhythm to which I had long ago grown accustomed. Our boys won sporting events and prizes, endured minor scandals and occasional tragedies and then passed on to good colleges. Our endowment rose when the government was in the hands of Republicans, as did the caliber of our boys when it was in the hands of Democrats. Senator Bell declined from prominence, and within a few years I read that he had passed away. In time, I was made assistant headmaster. Indeed it was not until a few years ago that anything out of the ordinary happened at all, for it was then, in the late 1980s, that some ill-advised investments were made and our endowment suffered a decline.

  Mr. Woodbridge had by this time reached the age of seventy-four, and although he was a vigorous man, one Sunday morning in May while the school waited for him in Chapel he died open-eyed in his bed. Immediately there occurred a Byzantine struggle for succession. There is nothing wrong with admitting that by then I myself coveted the job of headmaster, for one does not remain four decades at a school without becoming deeply attached to its fate; but Mr. Woodbridge’s death had come suddenly and I had not yet begun the preparations for my bid. I was, of course, no longer a young man. I suppose, in fact, that I lost my advantage here by underestimating my opponents who indeed were younger, as Caesar had done with Brutus and Cassius.

  I should not have been surprised, then, when after several days of maneuvering, my principal rival turned out to be Charles Ellerby. For several years, I discovered, he had been conducting his own, internecine campaign for the position, and although I had always counted him as my ally and my friend, in the first meeting of the board he rose and spoke accusations against me. He said that I was too old, that I had failed to change with the times, that my method of pedagogy might have been relevant forty years ago but that it was not today. He stood and said that a headmaster needed vigor and that I did not have it. Although I watched him the entire time he spoke, he did not once look back at me.

  I was wounded, of course, both professionally and in the hidden part of my heart in which I had always counted Charles Ellerby as a companion in my lifelong search for the magnificence of the past. When several of the older teachers booed him, I felt cheered. At this point I saw that I was not alone in my bid, merely behind, and so I left the meeting without coming to my own defense. Evening had come, and I walked to the dining commons in the company of allies.

  How it is, when fighting for one’s life, to eat among children! As the boys in their school blazers passed around the platters of fishsticks and the bowls of sliced bread, my heart was pierced with their guileless grace. How soon, I wondered, would they see the truth of the world? How long before they would understand that it was not dates and names that I had always meant to teach them? Not one of them seemed to notice what had descended like thunderheads above their faculty. Not one of them seemed unable to eat.

  After dinner, I returned to the Assistant Headmaster’s House in order to plot my course and confer with those I still considered allies, but before I could begin my preparations there was a knock at the door. Charles Ellerby stood there, red in the cheeks. “May I ask you some questions?” he said breathlessly.

  “It is I who ought to ask them of you,” was my answer.

  He came in without being asked and took a seat at my table. “You’ve never been married, am I correct, Hundert?”

  “Look, Ellerby, I’ve been at St. Benedict’s since you were in prep school yourself.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, in an exaggeration of boredom. Of course, he knew as well as I that I had never married, nor started a family, because history itself had always been enough for me. He rubbed his head and appeared to be thinking. To this day, I wonder how he knew about what he said next, unless Sedgewick Bell had somehow told him the story of my visit to the senator. “Look,” he said. “There’s a rumor you keep a pistol in your desk drawer.”

  “Hogwash.”

  “Will you open it for me,” he said, pointing there.

  “No, I will not. I have been a dean here for twenty years.”

  “Are you telling me there is no pistol in this house?”

  He then attempted to stare me down. He was a man with little character, however, and the bid withered. At that point, in fact, as his eyes fell in submission to my determined gaze, I believe the headmastership became mine. It is a largely unexplored element of history, of course, and one that has long fascinated me, that a great deal of political power and thus a great deal of the arc of nations arises not from intellectual advancements nor social imperatives but from the simple battle of wills among men at tables, such as had just occurred between Charles Ellerby and me.

  Instead of opening the desk and brandishing the weapon, however, which of course meant nothing to me but no doubt would have seized the initiative from Ellerby, I denied to him its existence. Why, I do not know; for I was a teacher of history, and was not the firearm its greatest engine? Ellerby, on the other hand, was simply a gadfly to the passing morals of the time. He gathered his things and left my house.

  That evening I took the pistol from my drawer. A margin of rust had appeared along the filigreed handle, and despite the ornate workmanship I saw clearly now that in its essence the weapon was ill-proportioned and blunt, the crude instrument of a violent, historically meager man. I had not even wanted it when the irascible demagogue Bell had foisted it upon me, and I had only taken it out of some vague sentiment that a pistol might eventually prove decisive. I suppose I had always imagined firing it someday in a moment of drama. Yet now, here it stood before me in a moment of torpor. I turned it over and cursed it.

  That night I took it from the drawer again, hid it in the pocket of my overcoat and walked to the far end of the campus, where I crossed the marsh a good mile from my house, removed my shoes and stepped into the babbling shadows of the Passamic. The die is cast, I said and I threw it twenty yards out into the water. The last impediment to my headmastership had been hurdled, and by the time I came ashore, walked back whistling to my front door, and changed for bed, I was ecstatic.

  Yet that night I slept poorly, and in the morning when I rose and went to our faculty meeting, I felt that the mantle of my fortitude had slipped somehow from my shoulders. How hushed is demise! In the hall outside the faculty room, most of the teachers filed by without speaking to me, and once inside I became obsessed with the idea that I had missed the most basic lesson of the past, that conviction is the alpha and the omega of authority. Now I see that I was doomed the moment I threw that pistol in the water, for that is when I lost my conviction. It was as though Sedgewick Bell had risen, all these years later, to drag me down again. Indeed, once the meeting had begun, the older faculty members shrunk back from their previous support of my bid, and the younger ones encircled me as though I were a limping animal. There might as well have been a dagger among the cloaks. By four o’clock that afternoon, Charles Ellerby, a fellow antiquarian whose job I had once helped secure, had been named headmaster, and by the end of that month he had asked me to retire.

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  And so I was preparing to end my days at St. Benedict’s when I received Sedgewick Bell’s response to my letter. It was well-written, which I noted with pleasure, and contained no trace of rancor, which is what every teacher hopes to see in the maturation of his disagreeable students. In closing he asked me to call him at EastAmerica Steel, and I did so that afternoon. When I gave my name first to one secretary and then to a second, and after that, moments later, heard Sedgewick’s artfully guileless greeting, I instantly recalled speaking to his father forty years before.

  After small talk, including my condolences about his father, he told me that the reason he had returned my letter was that he had often dreamed of holding a rematch of Mister Julius Caesar, and that he was now willing to donate a large sum of money to St. Benedict’s if I would agree to administer the event. Naturally, I assumed he was joking and passed off the idea with a comment about how funny it was, but Sedgewick Bell repeated the invitation. He wanted very much to be on stage again with Deepak Mehta and Clay Walter. I suppose I should not have been surprised, for it is precisely this sort of childhood slight that will drive a great figure. I told him that I was about to retire. He expressed sympathy but then suggested that the arrangement could be ideal, as now I would no doubt have time to prepare. Then he said that at this station in his life he could afford whatever he wanted materially—with all that this implied, of course, concerning his donation to the Annual Fund—but that more than anything else, he desired the chance to reclaim his intellectual honor. I suppose I was flattered.

  Of course, he also offered a good sum of money to me personally. Although I had until then led a life in which finances were never more than a distant concern, I was keenly aware that my time in the school’s houses and dining halls was coming to an end. On the one hand, it was not my burning aspiration to secure an endowment for the reign of Charles Ellerby; on the other hand, I needed the money, and I felt a deep loyalty to the school regarding the Annual Fund. That evening, I began to prepare my test.

  As assistant headmaster, I had not taught my beloved Roman history in many years, so that poring through my reams of notes was like returning at last to my childhood home. I stopped here and there among the files. I reread the term paper of young Derek Bok on “The Search of Diogenes,” and the scrawled one of James Watson on “Archimedes’s Method.” Among the art projects, I found John Updike’s reproduction of the Obelisk of Cleopatra, and a charcoal drawing of the baths of Caracalla by the abstract expressionist, Robert Motherwell, unfortunately torn in two and no longer worth anything.

  I had always been a diligent notetaker, furthermore, and I believe that what I came up with was a surprisingly accurate reproduction of the subjects on which I had once quizzed Clay Walter, Deepak Mehta and Sedgewick Bell, nearly half a century before. It took me only two evenings to gather enough material for the task, although in order not to appear eager I waited several days before sending off another letter to Sedgewick Bell. He called me soon after.

  It is indeed a surprise to one who toils for his own keep to see the formidable strokes with which our captains of industry demolish the tasks before them. The morning after talking to Sedgewick Bell I received calls from two of his secretaries, a social assistant and a woman at a New York travel agency, who confirmed the arrangements for late July, two months hence. The event was to take place on an island off the Outer Banks of Carolina that belonged to EastAmerica Steel, and I sent along a list from the St. Benedict’s archives so that everyone in Sedgewick Bell’s class would be invited.

  I was not prepared, however, for the days of retirement that intervened. What little remained of that school year passed speedily in my preoccupation, and before I knew it the boys were taking their final exams. I tried not to think about my future. At the commencement exercises in June, a small section of the ceremony was spent in my honor, but it was presided over by Charles Ellerby and gave rise to a taste of copper in my throat. “And thus we bid adieu,” he began, “to our beloved Mr. Hundert.” He gazed out over the lectern, extended his arm in my direction, and proceeded to give a nostalgic rendering of my years at the school to the audience of jacketed businessmen, parasoled ladies, students in St. Benedict’s blazers and children in church suits, who, like me, were squirming at the meretriciousness of the man.

  Yet how quickly it was over! Awards were presented, “Hail Fair Benedict’s” was sung, and as the birches began to lean their narrow shadows against the distant edge of the marsh, the seniors came forward to receive their diplomas. The mothers wept, the alumni stood misty-eyed, and the graduates threw their hats into the air. Afterward, everyone dispersed for the headmaster’s reception.

  I wish now that I had made an appearance there, for to have missed it, the very last one of my career, was a far more grievous blow to me than to Charles Ellerby. Furthermore, the handful of senior boys who over their tenure had been pierced by the bee-sting of history no doubt missed my presence or at least wondered at its lack. I spent the remnants of the afternoon in my house, and the evening walking out along the marsh, where the smell of woodsmoke from a farmer’s bonfire and the distant sounds of the gathered celebrants filled me with the great, sad pride of teaching. My boys were passing once again into the world without me.

  The next day, of course, parents began arriving to claim their children; jitney buses ferried students to airports and train stations; the groundsman went around pulling up lacrosse goals and baseball bleachers, hauling the long black sprinkler hoses behind his tractor into the fields. I spent most of that day and the next one sitting at the desk in my study, watching through the window as the school wound down like a clockspring toward the strange, bird-filled calm of that second afternoon of my retirement, when all the boys had left and I was alone, once again, in the eerie quiet of summer. I own few things besides my files and books; I packed them, and the next day the groundsman drove me into Woodmere.

  There I found lodging in a splendid Victorian rooming house run by a descendant of Nat Turner who joked, when I told her that I was a newly retired teacher, about how the house had always welcomed escaped slaves. I was surprised at how heartily I laughed at this, which had the benefit of putting me instantly on good terms with the landlady. We negotiated a monthly rent, and I went upstairs to set about charting a new life for myself. I was seventy-one years old—yes, perhaps, too old to be headmaster—but I could still walk three miles before dinner and did so the first afternoon of my freedom. However, by evening my spirits had taken a beating.

  Fortunately, there was the event to prepare for, as I fear that without it, those first days and nights would have been unbearable. I pored again and again over my old notes, extracting devilish questions from the material. But this only occupied a few hours of the day, and by late morning my eyes would grow weary. Objectively speaking, the start of that summer should have been no different from the start of any other; yet it was. Passing my reflection in the hallway mirror at the head of the stairs on my way down to dinner I would think to myself, is that you? and on the way back up to my room, what now? I wrote letters to my brothers and sister, and to several of my former boys. The days crawled by. I introduced myself to the town librarian. I made the acquaintance of a retired railroad man who liked as much as I did to sit on the grand, screened porch of that house. I took the bus into Washington a few times to spend the day in museums.

  But as the summer progressed, a certain dread began to form in my mind, which I tried through the diligence of walking, museum-going and reading, to ignore; that is, I began to fear that Sedgewick Bell had forgotten about the event. The thought would occur to me in the midst of the long path along the outskirts of town; and as I reached the Passamic, took my break and then started back again toward home, I would battle with my urge to contact the man. Several times I went to the telephone downstairs in the rooming house and twice I wrote out letters that I did not send. Why would he go through all the trouble just to mock me? I thought; but then I would recall the circumsta
nces of his tenure at St. Benedict’s and a darker gloom would descend upon me. I began to have second thoughts about events that occurred half a century before: should I have confronted him in the midst of the original contest? Should I never have leap-frogged another boy to get him there? Should I have spoken up to the senator?

  In early July, however, Sedgewick Bell’s secretary finally did call, and I felt that I had been given a reprieve. She apologized for her tardiness, asked me more questions about my taste in food and lodging, and then informed me of the date, three weeks later, when a car would call to take me to the airport in Williamsburg. An EastAmerica jet would fly me up from there to Charlotte, from whence I was to be picked up by helicopter.

  Helicopter! Less than a month later I stood before the craft, which was painted head to tail in EastAmerica’s green and gold insignia, polished to a shine, with a six-man passenger bay and red, white and blue sponsons over the wheels. One does not remain at St. Benedict’s for five decades without gaining a certain familiarity with privilege, yet as it lifted me off the pad in Charlotte, hovered for a moment, then lowered its nose and turned eastward over the gentle hills and then the chopping slate of the sea channel, I felt a headiness that I had never known before; it was what Augustus Caesar must have felt millennia ago, carried head-high on a litter past the Tiber. I clutched my notes to my chest. Indeed I wondered what my life might have been like if I had felt this just once in my youth. The rotors buzzed like a beehive. On the island I was shown to a suite of rooms in a high corner of the lodge, with windows and balconies overlooking the sea.

  For a conference on the future of childhood education or the plight of America’s elderly, of course, you could not get one tenth of these men to attend, but for a privileged romp on a private island it had merely been a matter of making the arrangements. I stood at the window of my room and watched the helicopter ferry back and forth across the channel, disgorging on the island a Who’s Who of America’s largest corporations, universities and organs of policy.