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

by Lorin Stein

  Oh, but what it was to see the boys! After a time, I made my way back out to the airstrip, and whenever the craft touched down on the landing platform and one or another of my old students ducked out, clutching his suit lapel as he ran clear of the snapping rotors, I was struck anew with how great a privilege my profession had been.

  That evening all of us ate together in the lodge, and the boys toasted me and took turns coming to my table, where several times one or another of them had to remind me to continue eating my food. Sedgewick Bell ambled over and with a charming air of modesty showed me the flashcards of Roman history that he’d been keeping in his desk at EastAmerica. Then, shedding his modesty, he went to the podium and produced a long and raucous toast referring to any number of pranks and misdeeds at St. Benedict’s that I had never even heard of but that the chorus of boys greeted with stamps and whistles. At a quarter to nine, they all dropped their forks onto the floor, and I fear that tears came to my eyes.

  The most poignant part of all, however, was how plainly the faces of the men still showed the eager expressiveness of the first-form boys of forty years ago. Martin Blythe had lost half his leg as an officer in Korea, and now, among his classmates, he tried to hide his lurching stride, but he wore the same knitted brow that he used to wear in my classroom; Deepak Mehta, who had become a professor of Asian history, walked with a slight stoop, yet he still turned his eyes downward when spoken to; Clay Walter seemed to have fared physically better than his mates, bouncing about in the Italian suit and alligator shoes of the advertising industry, yet he was still drawn immediately to the other do-nothings from his class.

  But of course it was Sedgewick Bell who commanded everyone’s attention. He had grown stout across the middle and bald over the crown of his head, and I saw in his ear, although it was artfully concealed, the flesh-colored bulb of a hearing aid; yet he walked among the men like a prophet. Their faces grew animated when he approached, and at the tables I could see them competing for his attention. He patted one on the back, whispered in the ear of another, gripped hands and grasped shoulders and kissed the wives on the lips. His walk was firm and imbued not with the seriousness of his post, it seemed to me, but with the ease of it, so that his stride among the tables was jocular. He was the host and clearly in his element. His laugh was voluble.

  I went to sleep early that evening so that the boys could enjoy themselves downstairs in the saloon, and as I lay in bed I listened to their songs and revelry. It had not escaped my attention, of course, that they no doubt spent some time mocking me, but this is what one grows to expect in my post, and indeed it was part of the reason I left them alone. Although I was tempted to walk down and listen from outside the theater, I did not.

  The next day was spent walking the island’s serpentine spread of coves and beaches, playing tennis on the grass court, and paddling in wooden boats on the small, inland lake behind the lodge. How quickly one grows accustomed to luxury! Men and women lounged on the decks and beaches and patios, sunning like seals, gorging themselves on the largess of their host.

  As for me, I barely had a moment to myself, for the boys took turns at my entertainment. I walked with Deepak Mehta along the beach and succeeded in getting him to tell me the tale of his rise through academia to a post at Columbia University. Evidently his rise had taken a toll, for although he looked healthy enough to me he told me that he had recently had a small heart attack. It was not the type of thing one talked about with a student, however, so I let this revelation pass without comment. Later, Clay Walter brought me onto the tennis court and tried to teach me to hit a ball, an activity that drew a crowd of boisterous guests to the stands. They roared at Clay’s theatrical antics and cheered and stomped their feet whenever I sent one back across the net. In the afternoon, Martin Blythe took me out in a rowboat.

  St. Benedict’s, of course, has always had a more profound effect than most schools on the lives of its students, yet nonetheless it was strange that once in the center of the pond, where he had rowed us with his lurching stroke, Martin Blythe set down the oars in their locks and told me he had something he’d always meant to ask me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He brushed back his hair with his hand. “I was supposed to be the one up there with Deepak and Clay, wasn’t I, sir?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re still thinking about that.”

  “It’s just that I’ve sometimes wondered what happened.”

  “Yes, you should have been,” I said.

  Oh, how little we understand of men if we think that their childhood slights are forgotten! He smiled. He did not press the subject further, and while I myself debated the merits of explaining why I had passed him over for Sedgewick Bell four decades before, he pivoted the boat around and brought us back to shore. The confirmation of his suspicions was enough to satisfy him, it seemed, so I said nothing more. He had been an Air Force major in our country’s endeavors on the Korean peninsula, yet as he pulled the boat onto the beach I had the clear feeling of having saved him from some torment.

  Indeed, that evening when the guests had gathered in the lodge’s small theater, and Deepak Mehta, Clay Walter and Sedgewick Bell had taken their seats for the reenactment of Mister Julius Caesar, I noticed an ease in Martin Blythe’s face that I believe I had never seen in it before. His brow was not knit, and he had crossed his legs so that above one sock we could clearly see the painted wooden calf.

  It was then that I noticed that the boys who had paid the most attention to me that day were in fact the ones sitting before me on the stage. How dreadful a thought this was—that they had indulged me to gain advantage—but I put it from my mind and stepped to the microphone. I had spent the late afternoon reviewing my notes, and the first rounds of questions were called from memory.

  The crowd did not fail to notice the feat. There were whistles and stomps when I named fifteen of the first sixteen emperors in order and asked Clay Walter to produce the one I had left out. There was applause when I spoke Caesar’s words, “Iacta alea est,” and then, continuing in carefully pronounced Latin, asked Sedgewick Bell to recall the circumstance of their utterance. He had told me that afternoon of the months he had spent preparing, and as I was asking the question, he smiled. The boys had not worn togas, of course—although I personally feel they might have—yet the situation was familiar enough that I felt a rush of unease as Sedgewick Bell’s smile then waned and he hesitated several moments before answering. But this time, all these years later, he looked straight out into the audience and spoke his answers with the air of a scholar.

  It was not long before Clay Walter had dropped out, of course, but then, as it had before, the contest proceeded neck and neck between Sedgewick Bell and Deepak Mehta. I asked Sedgewick Bell about Caesar’s battles at Pharsalus and Thapsus, about the shift of power to Constantinople and about the war between the patricians and the plebeians; I asked Deepak Mehta about the Punic Wars, the conquest of Italy and the fall of the republic. Deepak, of course, had an advantage, for certainly he had studied this material at university, but I must say that the straightforward determination of Sedgewick Bell had begun to win my heart. I recalled the bashful manner in which he had shown me his flashcards at dinner the night before, and as I stood now before the microphone I seemed to be in the throes of an affection for him that had long been under wraps.

  “What year were the Romans routed at Lake Trasimene?” I asked him.

  He paused. “217 B.C., I believe.”

  “Which general later became Scipio Africanus Major?”

  “Publius Cornelius Scipio, sir.” Deepak Mehta answered softly.

  It does not happen as often as one might think that an unintelligent boy becomes an intelligent man, for in my own experience the love of thought is rooted in an age long before adolescence; yet Sedgewick Bell now seemed to have done just that. His answers were spoken with the composed demeanor of a scholar. There is no one I like more, of course, than the man who is moved by the mere fact of hi
story, and as I contemplated the next question to him I wondered if I had indeed exaggerated the indolence of his boyhood. Was it true, perhaps, that he had simply not come into his element yet while at St. Benedict’s? He peered intently at me from the stage, his elbows on his knees. I decided to ask him a difficult question. “Chairman Bell,” I said, “which tribes invaded Rome in 102 B.C.?”

  His eyes went blank and he curled his shoulders in his suit. Although he was by then one of the most powerful men in America, and although moments before that I had been rejoicing in his discipline, suddenly I saw him on that stage once again as a frightened boy. How powerful is memory! And once again, I feared that it was I who had betrayed him. He brought his hand to his head to think.

  “Take your time, sir,” I offered.

  There were murmurs in the audience. He distractedly touched the side of his head. A man’s character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and at that moment, as he brushed his hand down over his temple, I realized that the flesh-colored device in his ear was not a hearing aid but a transmitter through which he was receiving the answers to my questions. Nausea rose in me. Of course I had no proof, but was it not exactly what I should have expected? He touched his head once again and appeared to be deep in thought, and I knew it as certainly as if he had shown me. “The Teutons,” he said, haltingly, “and—I’ll take a stab here—the Cimbri?”

  I looked for a long time at him. Did he know at that point what I was thinking? I cannot say, but after I had paused as long as I could bear to in front of that crowd, I cleared my throat and granted that he was right. Applause erupted. He shook it off with a wave of his hand. I knew that it was my duty to speak up. I knew it was my duty as a teacher to bring him clear of the moral dereliction in which I myself had been his partner, yet at the same time I felt myself adrift in the tide of my own vacillation and failure. The boy had somehow got hold of me again. He tried to quiet the applause with a wave of his hand, but this gesture only caused the clapping to increase, and I am afraid to say that it was merely the sound of a throng of boisterous men that finally prevented me from making my stand. Quite suddenly I was aware that this was not the situation I had known at St. Benedict’s School. We were guests now of a significant man on his splendid estate, and to expose him would be a serious act indeed. I turned and quieted the crowd.

  From the chair next to Sedgewick Bell, Deepak Mehta merely looked at me, his eyes dark and resigned. Perhaps he too had just realized, or perhaps in fact he had long known, but in any case I simply asked him the next question; after he answered it, I could do nothing but put another before Sedgewick Bell. Then Deepak again, then Sedgewick, and again to Deepak, and it was only then, on the third round after I had discovered the ploy, that an idea came to me. When I returned to Sedgewick Bell I asked him, “Who was Shutruk-Nahhunte?”

  A few boys in the crowd began to laugh, and when Sedgewick Bell took his time thinking about the answer, more in the audience joined in. Whoever was the mercenary professor talking in his ear, it was clear to me that he would not know the answer to this one, for if he had not gone to St. Benedict’s School he would never have heard of Shutruk-Nahhunte; and in a few moments, sure enough, I saw Sedgewick Bell begin to grow uncomfortable. He lifted his pant leg and scratched at his sock. The laughter increased, and then I heard the wives, who had obviously never lived in a predatory pack, trying to stifle their husbands. “Come on, Bell!” someone shouted, “Look at the damn door!” Laughter erupted again.

  How can it be that for a moment my heart bled for him? He, too, tried to laugh, but only half-heartedly. He shifted in his seat, shook his arms loose in his suit, looked uncomprehendingly out at the snickering crowd, then braced his chin and said, “Well, I guess if Deepak knows the answer to this one, then it’s his ballgame.”

  Deepak’s response was nearly lost in the boisterous stamps and whistles that followed, for I am sure that every boy but Sedgewick recalled Henry Stimson’s tablet above the door of my classroom. Yet what was strange was that I felt disappointment. As Deepak Mehta smiled, spoke the answer, and stood from his chair, I watched confusion and then a flicker of panic cross the face of Sedgewick Bell. He stood haltingly. How clear it was to me then that the corruption in his character had always arisen from fear, and I could not help remembering that as his teacher I had once tried to convince him of his stupidity. I cursed that day. But then in a moment he summoned a smile, called me up to the stage, and crossed theatrically to congratulate the victor.

  How can I describe the scene that took place next? I suppose I was naïve to think that this was the end of the evening—or even the point of it—for after Sedgewick Bell had brought forth a trophy for Deepak Mehta, and then one for me as well, an entirely different cast came across his features. He strode once again to the podium and asked for the attention of the guests. He tapped sharply on the microphone. Then he leaned his head forward, and in a voice that I recognized from long ago on the radio, a voice in whose deft leaps from boom to whisper I heard the willow-tree drawl of his father, he launched into an address about the problems of our country. He had an orator’s gift of dropping his volume at the moment when a less gifted man would have raised it. We have opened our doors to all the world, he said, his voice thundering, then pausing, then plunging nearly to a murmur, and now the world has stripped us bare. He gestured with his hands. The men in the audience, first laughing, now turned serious. We have given away too much for too long, he said. We have handed our fiscal leadership to men who don’t care about the taxpayers of our country, and our moral course to those who no longer understand our role in history. Although he gestured to me there, I could not return his gaze. We have abandoned the moral education of our families. Scattered applause drifted up from his classmates, and here, of course, I almost spoke. We have left our country adrift on dangerous seas. Now the applause was more hearty. Then he quieted his voice again, dropped his head as though in supplication and announced that he was running for the United States Senate.

  Why was I surprised? I should not have been, for since childhood the boy had stood so near to the mantle of power that its shadow must have been as familiar to him as his boyhood home. Virtue had no place in the palaces he had known. I was ashamed when I realized he had contrived the entire rematch of Mister Julius Caesar for no reason other than to gather his classmates for donations, yet still I chastened myself for not realizing his ambition before. In his oratory, in his physical presence, in his conviction, he had always possessed the gifts of a leader, and now he was using them. I should have expected this from the first day he stood in his short-pants suit in the doorway of my classroom and silenced my students. He already wielded a potent role in the affairs of our country; he enjoyed the presumption of his family name; he was blindly ignorant of history and therefore did not fear his role in it. Of course it was exactly the culmination I should long ago have seen. The crowd stood cheering.

  As soon as the clapping abated a curtain was lifted behind him, and a band struck up “Dixie.” Waiters appeared at the side doors, a dance platform was unfolded in the orchestra pit, and Sedgewick Bell jumped down from the stage into the crowd of his friends. They clamored around him. He patted shoulders, kissed wives, whispered and laughed and nodded his head. I saw checkbooks come out. The waiters carried champagne on trays at their shoulders, and at the edge of the dance floor the women set down their purses and stepped into the arms of their husbands. When I saw this I ducked out a side door and returned to the lodge, for the abandon with which the guests were dancing was an unbearable counterpart to the truth I knew. One can imagine my feelings. I heard the din late into the night.

  Needless to say, I resolved to avoid Sedgewick Bell for the remainder of my stay. How my mind raced that night through humanity’s endless history of injustice, depravity and betrayal! I could not sleep, and several times I rose and went to the window to listen to the revelry. Standing at the glass I felt like the spurned sovereign in the castle tower, looking down from his balcony
onto the procession of the false potentate.

  Yet, sure enough, my conviction soon began to wane. No sooner had I resolved to avoid my host than I began to doubt the veracity of my secret knowledge about him. Other thoughts came to me. How, in fact, had I been so sure of what he’d done? What proof had I at all? Amid the distant celebrations of the night, my conclusion began to seem far-fetched, and by the quiet of the morning I was muddled. I did not go to breakfast. As boy after boy stopped by my rooms to wish me well, I assiduously avoided commenting on either Sedgewick Bell’s performance or on his announcement for the Senate. On the beach that day I endeavored to walk by myself, for by then I trusted neither my judgment of the incident nor my discretion with the boys. I spent the afternoon alone in a cove across the island.

  I did not speak to Sedgewick Bell that entire day. I managed to avoid him, in fact, until the next evening, by which time all but a few of the guests had left, when he came to bid farewell as I stood on the tarmac awaiting the helicopter for the mainland. He walked out and motioned for me to stand back from the platform, but I pretended not to hear him and kept my eyes up to the sky. Suddenly, the shining craft swooped in from beyond the wave break, churning the channel into a boil, pulled up in a hover and then touched down on its flag-colored sponsons before us. The wind and noise could have thrown a man to the ground, and Sedgewick Bell seemed to pull at me like a magnet, but I did not retreat. It was he, finally, who ran out to me. He gripped his lapels, ducked his head and offered me his hand. I took it tentatively, the rotors whipping our jacket-sleeves. I had been expecting this moment and had decided the night before what I was going to say. I leaned toward him. “How long have you been hard of hearing?” I asked.

  His smile dropped. I cannot imagine what I had become in the mind of that boy. “Very good, Hundert,” he said. “Very good. I thought you might have known.”