Old School

by Tobias Wolff

  None of this seemed ridiculous to me. A friend’s parents back home had learned complicated dances by following footprints on diagrams they rolled out on the floor. I’d seen them do the mambo very impressively at a Christmas party, and they sure as hell weren’t using their scrolls. They weren’t even watching their feet. They were just doing what came naturally, from instincts they had trained with certain devotions, and the result was invention, freedom—mambo!

  I had written “Indian Camp” and “The Undefeated” and had just begun “The Killers” when the headmaster remained standing after the dinner blessing one night and announced that Ernest Hemingway had agreed to be the next visiting writer. He would be with us in the middle of May, some six weeks hence. The headmaster watched us, enjoying the shock he’d produced. I glanced over at Dean Makepeace; he had to be behind this visit. Other boys were looking at him too. He was bent forward in his chair, studying the tablecloth. Then someone yelled Bravo! and the room went nuts—whistles, shouts, feet drumming the floor, fists pounding the tables. It started to die down, then flared up again. None of the masters tried to stop it. They couldn’t have. It was about Hemingway, sure, but it was also about the sap starting to run after the first warm week since Thanksgiving. But mostly it was about Hemingway, and at that moment sitting in the dining hall surrounded by cheering boys, I felt quite sure my story would win.

  THE FORKED TONGUE

  That was the sweetest spring of all my years there. An early shock of heat forced the leaves and blossoms to a lushness that came to seem downright tropical when the chemistry master’s parrot escaped into an elm overlooking the quad. There he preened his bright feathers and stridently mocked us until starvation humbled him to earth, where he sold his freedom for a groundsman’s peanut butter sandwich. The sudden departure of Roberta Ramsey darkened the campus for a few days; she simply vanished, and Mr. Ramsey’s gloom was all the explanation we had. But the sap was running, and for the rest of us the shadow passed.

  Mr. Ramsey had once told us about a riot of boys at his old school, Winchester, back in 1793, that finally had to be put down by a regiment of dragoons. In pale midwinter, with each of us hunched over his own faint ember while the latest blizzard howled at the windows, this story had seemed remote and improbable. Not now. We were all a little drunk with spring, like the fat bees reeling from flower to flower, and a strange insurrectionary current ran among us.

  This went beyond the usual swagger of bloods about to graduate. Even small fry still in beanies started showing up late to class, went sockless in their loafers, forgot to say Sir and then paused a near-defiant beat when invited to correct themselves. The masters chose to regard most of these provocations as trivial, even ludicrous, like the grousing of impotent peasants outside the castle walls. They felt the season too; it softened them. And the last thing they wanted was to throw out a boy from my class, so close to the finish line. We really had to force their hand, and we did, three times.

  It wasn’t mutiny that caused the first expulsion. You might say it was the opposite—excess of devotion. When our glee club went to Boston to sing at an alumni dinner, a boy named Keyes filched a bottle of champagne and got sloppy, maudlin drunk on the bus ride back to school. Some of the other choristers, myself among them, managed to hustle him up to his room undetected, but once there we couldn’t keep him quiet. He was bawling the school songs, hanging all over us and telling us what great guys we were and how we should start some kind of club together.

  The hall master took his time in coming. When he finally showed up he simply tapped on the door and told us to call it a night. He obviously didn’t want to see anything that would make him take action. Then Keyes broke loose and crashed into the hallway and threw his arms around the master, slobbering school spirit. Other boys came out of their rooms to see what was going on. The master gazed at us from Keyes’s embrace. You could tell by how sad he looked, how resigned, that Keyes was a goner.

  Then Jack Broome, Handsome Jack himself, Backfield Jack, Captain of Everything, got bounced for hitchhiking down to Miss Cobb’s Academy one night to meet a girl. When they caught them in the boathouse there it was curtains for her, and our headmaster could do no less.

  Not long after this my friend Purcell began to cut daily chapel. He simply, steadfastly, would not go, and I was only one of many who tried to get him to relent before they had to kick him out. Purcell refused. He said that God was just a character in a Hebrew novel and if it came to that he’d rather worship Huckleberry Finn. Really, he said, I don’t believe a word of that stuff.

  You don’t have to.

  You don’t have to, maybe.

  It’s what, fifteen minutes a day? It doesn’t have to mean anything you don’t want it to mean. Think your own thoughts. What’s the harm in that?

  Just going through the door makes me a liar, Purcell said. I’m not going to do it again.

  He meant what he said. I kept my counsel when I saw the pleasure Purcell took in rejecting it: saw that it made him feel honorable in comparison to me.

  We were allowed a fair number of cuts, but by the end of April he’d used his up and the demerit meter was ticking. The rest of us looked on with a murmurous show of dread as his tally climbed toward the sudden-death number, and told one another how much we admired him for sticking to his guns. And I did, somewhat, though my admiration was muddied by Purcell’s taking the high road with me, as if my going to chapel was nothing but show.

  The truth was that I looked forward to the moment each day when I passed through that limestone arch he so abhorred. We were loud boys, forever bellowing and jeering, yet we all knew to shut up when we entered the chapel. You felt the hush there as a profound agreement, an act of three hundred wills, and that made it even deeper and more calming. The chaplain always did a short reading and led us in a couple of hymns, but we were otherwise left to the silence and the dark wood, the glowing windows and rough stone and dim vaulted spaces overhead. Purcell ridiculed even the architecture—Episcopalian English-envy, he called it—which irritated me. I didn’t like to wonder if my responsiveness was only another kind of snobbery.

  But it was Purcell’s crack about the Hebrew novel that really rubbed me wrong. Not the glib irreverence, but the way he said Hebrew. It came to me as a rank, dismal breath from some deep well of genteel disdain. Purcell didn’t mean it like that, and he would’ve hated the notion of speaking with the unconscious voice of his class. That made it all the worse; it was so unconscious and therefore incorrigible an assertion of class that it made me feel a kind of despair. I wanted to say, Don’t you know who you’re talking to? But of course he didn’t know. I’d made sure of that.

  As the days passed I came to see the drama of his refusal as another display of blood-borne assurance. It mattered very much to me that I graduate, whereas it didn’t really matter to Purcell. A diploma from the school would open no doors to him that weren’t already open just because he was his father’s son. He wouldn’t even lose his place at Yale. Unless you got kicked out for an Honor Code violation, you could still take final exams at the end of the year and the school would certify that you had met its academic requirements.

  What Purcell would actually lose, then, or renounce, was the chance to end this span of years and shared life with the rest of us. To sit with us on the graduation platform and feel silly in his mortarboard cap and mutter dark footnotes during the As-you-go-forth speech. Then to mingle on the quad with our proud families, drifting from group to group, shaking hands, putting on his best manners with those most obviously not of his world. To doctor his punch from a friend’s flask, but only once, not wanting to dull himself to the unexpected full-heartedness he feels. To linger as the shadows spill across the grass and day turns to dusk—even to lend his raspy voice to the songs being raised by boys still not ready to say good-bye to each other. To look into their faces, some dear, some not, all of them familiar as his own, and allow himself a moment’s blindness as our last song dies away.


  I’m sure I was not alone in having imagined this day ever since I came to the school. But Purcell could give it up without a backward glance because to him the years now closing were a story of no importance, if a story at all. He instinctively saw himself as belonging to a narrative so grand that this part of it counted only as transitional material.

  So I suspected. Or, to put it another way, I suspected that his willingness to be expelled was less a proof of principle than a sort of colossal snub.

  And there was something else. Purcell had begun to absent himself from chapel as the stir over Hemingway’s visit grew more and more feverish. The English masters were all teaching his work. The art master had produced a striking poster—the famous face suggested by a few black strokes over the line One must, above all, endure—that stared out from every bulletin board and entryway. Knowing that the greatest of living writers would soon be among us made us a little crazy with self-importance. Nor was it just the literary boys who got worked up; it seemed like most of the class planned to enter a story. As Picasso and Ted Williams knew Hemingway, as Kennedy knew Hemingway, one of us would soon know Hemingway and so be raised to that company.

  Purcell loved Hemingway’s work. He surely wanted that private audience as much as anybody, but I knew he hated the idea of competing for it. So did I. Only one of the many could be chosen, we all understood that, yet you couldn’t help feeling that not to be chosen was to be rejected. And to be rejected by Ernest Hemingway—Ernest Hemingway tossing your story aside, No, not him, not a prayer. What a terrible thought! If being chosen was a blessing (and how else could you see it?) then to be rejected was a curse. That’s how the logic worked for me. I assumed it worked the same way for Purcell, whose vanity was at least as wary of rebuke as my own.

  Submissions were due the first Monday in May, two weeks before Hemingway’s visit. If Purcell kept cutting chapel, his demerits would send him home on the preceding Saturday. He’d lose his chance for the audience, but spare himself the indignity of jostling with the herd and quite possibly losing. Yet in the very act of retreat he would seem a hero, the boy who would not falsely bend his knee. His expulsion would pass into legend.

  I never thought Purcell had planned any of this, or that he was aware of any fault line under his resolve. He no doubt took his motives at face value. I didn’t, that was all.

  But I might have been wrong. And if I was wrong, supposing so much doubleness in Purcell, it was probably because I saw so much in myself. I should have been rejoicing. I’d been awarded a full scholarship to Columbia University, to work with Lionel Trilling, as I liked to think, and often told myself. An essay I’d written on Shakespeare’s Sonnet #29—When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes—had just won the Cassidy English Prize, a great stroke of luck: five weeks at a summer program in Oxford, all expenses paid. My classmates liked me, most of them, and a few of the younger boys paid me a kind of puppyish attention that I recognized from my own early days, when some upperclassman caught my eye.

  And why would I catch a new boy’s eye? Maybe because from my own anxious studies I had made myself the picture of careless gentility, ironically cordial when not distracted, hair precisely unkempt, shoes down at heel, clothes rumpled and frayed to perfection. This was the sort of figure I’d been drawn to almost from the beginning; it had somehow suggested sailing expertise, Christmas in St. Anton, inherited box seats, and an easy disregard for all that. By going straight to the disregard I’d hoped to imply the rest. I had also meant to wipe out any trace of the public school virtues—sharpness of dress, keenness of manner, spanking cleanliness, freshness, niceness, sincerity—I used to cultivate.

  By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

  All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

  I wanted out. That was partly why I’d chosen Columbia. I liked how the city seethed up against the school, mocking its theoretical seclusion with hustle and noise, the din of people going and getting and making. Things that mattered at Princeton or Yale couldn’t possibly withstand this battering of raw, unironic life. You didn’t go to eating clubs at Columbia, you went to jazz clubs. You had a girlfriend—no, a lover—with psychiatric problems, and friends with foreign accents. You read newspapers on the subway and looked at tourists with a cool, anthropological gaze. You said crosstown express. You said the Village. You ate weird food. No other boy in my class would be going there.

  It wasn’t exactly true that I’d told no expository lies. Most of my stories had been meant to seem autobiographical, and thus to give a false picture of my family and my life at home—of who I was. I’d allowed myself to do this by thinking that, after all, they were just stories. But they weren’t really stories, not like “Big Two-Hearted River” was a story, or “Soldier’s Home.” It struck me that Hemingway’s willingness to let himself be seen as he was, in uncertainty or meanness or fear, even empty of feeling, somehow gave the charge of truth to everything else. My stories were designed to make me appear as I was not. They were props in an act. I couldn’t read any of them without thrusting the pages away in mortification.

  I couldn’t write like that again, but didn’t know how else to write—how to go about making something that was true. I was frozen. For the simple relief of putting words on paper I continued to type out Hemingway’s stories, slowly, meditatively, a page or so a day. I had the hope that something here would send me off on a story of my own. No luck so far, but I kept at it, page after page.

  Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration. . . . In this way he lost everything.

  I knew just how Krebs felt.

  Everybody else was writing up a storm. As one of the top scholars in our class, Bill had been awarded a private study in the basement of the library. He worked there, so I didn’t see much of him, but when I did he was thoughtful and tense. I had trouble getting a smile out of him; if I succeeded I felt a gratitude I found myself resenting. He told me he had a story in the works, and that was all he’d admit to. The un-boyish sadness I’d seen in Bill that winter had darkened. He seemed lost in the contemplation of something doleful, even tragic, that I could only suppose was finding its way into his new work.

  Purcell had a story going as well. With not entirely charming matter-of-factness he told me it was the best thing he’d ever written, and professed to be astonished at the ease of its writing. I didn’t see any mystery here: if he kept cutting chapel he’d never have to expose his story to judgment, and it was at least partly the prospect of judgment that had me all in knots.

  George Kellogg decided to submit a new version of a story we’d run in Troubadour that winter, an account of a man bullying his wife at the dinner table while their son eats his veal cutlet and doesn’t say a word. No boy had ever won two audiences. There wasn’t any rule against it, but I thought it was pretty damned piggish of George to try to snag Hemingway after landing Frost. Just knowing he was in the race became a vexation, and it got worse when I went to his room to ask about the manuscripts for the next issue of the review. George hadn’t been passing them around.

  He answered when I knocked, though for once his good manners deserted him and he kept typing away on his massive old black Underwood while I stood just inside the door. The machine looked as big as an organ. It made a deep, emphatic, methodical sound. The blinds were drawn, the windows closed, and the air felt swampy. I could hear the muffled plock of a tennis ball somewhere outside. Finally Geor
ge stopped, but remained hunched over the keys.

  I asked him about the manuscripts.

  Oh, them, he said. They’re over there. He jerked his head at a stack of papers on his dresser. Take ’em.

  Have you read them yet?

  What? I don’t know. A few. A couple. He kept his back to me as I crossed the room and picked up the manuscripts.

  I hear you’re working on that last Troubadour story.

  That’s all of them, he said. Okay?

  When I closed the door he started typing again.

  All through my dorm I heard typewriters. Maybe it was nothing new, maybe I’d just lost my filter, the way every voice around you will suddenly flood into your head, each with its own rhythm and tone. One machine went off in high crackling bursts like strings of cheap firecrackers. Another, even lower than George’s, grumbled and surged like the engines of a ship. I tried not to listen for them.