by Tobias Wolff
With our editor playing the possessed artist, I had to play the burgher—had to act like the director of publication whose title I bore—and make sure Troubadour got to the printer in time. The deadline for presenting our last issue to Mr. Rice, the faculty adviser, was just days away, the same Monday our Hemingway stories were due. I gave myself up to reading submissions and forcing them on my fellow editors, and tried not to listen to other boys’ typewriters, and typed nothing myself.
We scheduled the final editorial meeting for Sunday night. I’d lobbied for Friday but got voted down because Miss Cobb’s graduating class was joining ours that night for the traditional Farewell Assembly. These assemblies were said to be Neronic in their carnality, like the fabled last night of an ocean crossing, and none of us questioned the truth of the stories we’d heard. Since the girls weren’t going to see us again and we weren’t going to see them again, why be coy? Our regular dances were licentious enough, within the limits set by the vigilant, and of course envious, spinsters who rode shotgun at these affairs. But it was a truth repeated by all of us, and made ever truer by repetition, that at the Farewell Assembly no amount of jealous virginal watchdogging would prove equal to the girls’ desire to be alone with us in broom closets and steam tunnels.
Nobody wanted to miss out. I didn’t either, especially after I got a letter from Rain. This took me by surprise. We’d had our brief grapple at the Halloween dance, but I hadn’t seen her since she tried to make off with my Fountainhead on the train, and she’d certainly never sent me a letter before. It was a perfumed, chatty little piece with no purpose except the unstated but obvious one of nailing down a partner for the Assembly. She must’ve figured she could do worse than me, and probably would do worse if she left it to chance, as the desirables of each school had already begun pairing off through just such letters as this. I had not forgotten how it felt to dance with Rain, how she returned the pressure of my thighs and played her fingers over the back of my neck. And the then-painful fact that she had immediately taken up with another boy (Jack Broome of sacred memory!) after being pried away from me, the sheer impersonality of her ardor, snuffed any scruples I might’ve felt and gave the lurid tint of revenge to my anticipations.
Yet I had tried to set the editorial meeting for that night. Time was running out, and I wanted to put Troubadour to bed so I’d have the weekend to finish the story I hadn’t even begun. There were other Rains in the world, but only one Ernest Hemingway.
And there was another reason I had tried for Friday night. Saturday was Purcell’s day of reckoning. If he didn’t show up for chapel that afternoon, he’d be long gone after dinner, when we gathered to make our picks. I wanted him there, I needed him to help me sort through this pile of submissions in which only two poems and one story stood out as clear choices. Purcell was brutal in his judgments but he was also shrewd, and finally willing to allow that he despised this or that manuscript rather less than the rest.
The other two would be no help at all, George in favor of everything and Bill cryptic and elusive. There are a lot of cats in this story, he’d say, or I didn’t know it rained that hard in Athens, then shrug and fall silent. Though never overtly so, his responses were much more destructive than Purcell’s. They left you feeling dazed, flatfooted. It was exactly the way he played squash—never slamming the ball head-on, like I did, but breezily tapping it through some sly angle so it died in the corner.
On Friday Big Jeff made it known that if his cousin got kicked out for cutting next afternoon’s chapel, he was leaving with him. I heard this at lunch and wouldn’t have believed it except that our table master refused to contradict it. It made no sense. Big Jeff loved the school—anybody could see that. He was an odd duck, and in a place less sure of itself and therefore harder on its eccentrics he would’ve had some rough sledding. Here he received the protections of a holy fool, and he sensed these indulgences if not their reason, and basked in them. It was already plain that he would become one of those alums who return constantly to the Alma Mater, and fatten her with bon-bons from his swelling portfolio, and one day leave her so much of what his own children have been anticipating, and even budgeting into their current expenses, that the disappointed heirs seriously consider paupering themselves further in attempts to break a will that the Old Boys’ office would already have bound in legal iron.
So why would Big Jeff let his cousin’s obstinacy and pride come between him and the school he loved? He certainly couldn’t help Purcell by threatening to leave—that was ridiculous. The school was no less hostage to its rules than we were, and he knew it.
Why, then? Love. Worship. This was a curious and agreeable twist, Big Jeff spanieling after his cousin with his tongue out, barking at phantoms as he followed him into martyrdom. It somehow put the whole thing in a farcical light, as Purcell must have understood, because he was furious. First he collared Big Jeff in Blaine Hall after lunch and made some kind of scene. I wasn’t there, but word got around. Then, that afternoon, he came to Big Jeff’s room, just down from mine, and gave him another browbeating. This has nothing to do with you! You have no right! No right!
I listened to Purcell yell and Big Jeff murmur indiscernibly in reply, then the door slammed and I went back to my story. So far I’d been unable to complete even a paragraph without yanking the paper out of the machine.
I was still at my post when the bell rang for dinner, and when everyone came back from dinner. All up and down the hall I heard my classmates preparing for the Farewell Assembly, roaring in the showers, going from room to room to be admired in their tuxes under the pretext of having a tie adjusted, a cummerbund cinched tight. Strange how our voices deepened and slowed when we dressed up like this. It was a kind of hysteria that made us not giddy but deliberate. The air was festively steamy from everyone showering, and smelled of Old Spice.
My tux, delivered with the others that morning, hung in the closet with a stiff pleated shirt of brilliant whiteness. I laid them out on my bed with the patent leather shoes, then went back to my desk. All I needed was a good beginning, something to give me a start in the morning.
The hall grew quiet as the others left. I watched them cross the quad in a long dark line. In the ashen dusk, their shirt collars seemed to float like lights on a hazy sea. Their deep voices still reached me from the far side of the quad, carried on a breeze that smelled of mown grass and rustled in the creeper outside my window, and later brought me the sounds of Lester Lanin’s orchestra and the laughter of girls.
All this was a distraction at first, then faded behind a waking dream. Hemingway had chosen my story and taken a shine to me and hired me to work on the Pilar. We were cruising one afternoon with his wife, Mary, and a couple of their friends. The friendship seemed unaccountable. The woman was catty and the man treated the crew rudely and boasted of his skill at fishing, all of which Hemingway endured patiently though not without giving me a resigned look as I served yet another round of drinks. Finally the man’s wife told him to please go catch himself a fish and shut the hell up about it. He could catch a fish here, couldn’t he, Ernest? They were in the middle of the goddamned ocean, weren’t they? Hemingway allowed that in fact they were in very good fishing grounds. You would have to be cursed, he said, not to catch a fish here.
The man demurred. He was particular about his gear and hadn’t thought to bring it along today. When his wife said he could surely use Ernest’s, the man said he wouldn’t hear of it, thanks anyway.
Now darling, don’t be such a stick, his wife said.
So he was buckled into the hot seat with a pole in his hands and sure enough he had a strike within the first few minutes. The pole bent and the line sang out. Oh Jesus, the man said, then grunted as the pole somehow jumped its holster and yanked him forward. A great marlin leaped high off the port side, shook itself, crashed back into the water. I’m sick, the man said, I’m going to be sick.
Take the pole! Hemingway told me, then helped the man out of the seat and strap
ped me in. I played the fish while the man puked over the side of the boat. He refused all invitations to return to the chair, so I worked the big fellow for a couple of hours while Hemingway stood behind me and offered counsel now and then but mostly left the job to me. Once the marlin was played out Mary took the pole to reel him alongside while Hemingway and I waited to set the grapple hook and winch him up.
This is an unhappy case, Hemingway said. He is a good man who married badly and should not drink. He was very brave in the war.
We pulled up to the dock at sunset. A bunch of gawkers came over. That’s some kind of monster you’ve got there, one of them said. Who hooked him?
He did, I said, and nodded at the man.
Hemingway stood beside me. You have done well today, he said. You have done very well today.
When Bill White came back from the library at midnight I still hadn’t written a word. Didn’t you go to the dance? he said.
I was working.
Bill sat on his bed and slowly unlaced his shoes. He fell back and stared up at the ceiling. You could still go, he said.
No point. They’ll be shutting down pretty soon.
Working on your story?
Working on my story. You?
Yeah, sure. Bill rolled onto his side and watched as I pulled the empty page from my typewriter and slipped it into my desk drawer, under the full pages I’d copied from “Soldier’s Home.” He said, I saw George coming back from the dance.
George went? No kidding. I’ve never seen him in a tux. How’d he look?
Was he in a tux? I suppose he must’ve been. I didn’t really notice.
Can’t blame you, I said, then added—meanly, helplessly—George makes everything look like tweed.
Bill didn’t answer.
I guess he finished his story, I said.
I guess so, Bill said. How’s yours going?
He said this in a worn, tender way that surprised me. We were almost at the end of our years together, and without ever fighting or deviling each other as most other roommates did, we were farther from being friends than on our first day. We had made ourselves unknowable behind our airs and sardonic courtesies, and the one important truth I’d discovered about him we’d silently agreed never to acknowledge. Many such agreements had evolved between us. No acknowledgment of who we really were—of trouble, weakness, or doubt—of our worries about the life ahead and the sort of men we were becoming. Never; not a word. We’d kept everything witty and cool, until the air between us was so ironized that to say anything in earnest would have been a breach of manners, even of trust.
But as young boys here we had marked each other for friendship. I still felt the possibility, and it troubled me that we had always let it slip. Mostly I blamed Bill, for not coming out from behind his polish. He’d been in the dumps for weeks yet he wouldn’t break cover and talk straight to me, though we surely had things to talk about, more than he knew. The sadder he got, the more remote. Until now.
How’s yours going?
His question was serious, the interest behind it wearily intimate, undefended, as if he had lost whatever push it took to support his urbanity. I was so wrung out myself, so tired of all this beggarly waiting for words, that I actually felt tempted to tell him the truth—that I hadn’t written anything, and couldn’t. Poised right on the brink, I still held back, perhaps sensing that the moment it started, once I allowed myself the comfort of his interest, I wouldn’t be able to stop; that the relief of confessing this paralysis might betray me into other confessions. In some murky way I recognized my own impatience to tear off the mask, and it spooked me.
Lester Lanin’s orchestra was playing “Auld Lang Syne.” A few voices sang raggedly along, boys and girls together.
It’s going fine, I said. Like gangbusters. Yours?
Oh . . . same here. Like a house afire. Like crazy. Like nobody’s business.
When Purcell showed up for chapel on Saturday afternoon he took his place on the steps and waited in line for the processional to begin, eyes dead ahead, the fierce helpless blush on his pale, freckled neck his only response to the looks he was drawing from the younger boys and the studious inattention of the older. But as the organ sounded the first notes he raised his voice with the rest of us—For all the saints, who from their labors rest—and marched up the aisle to his seat in the second row without letting the words trail off as most of us did. He sang every verse and then sat straight and intent through the chaplain’s readings and remarks, and when we were left in silence he bowed his head and did not stir.
At the end of the service the headmaster got up to congratulate the sixth-form dance committee on a successful Assembly, and we all applauded, and then kept on, decorously but persistently, beyond any conceivable gratitude to the dance committee, and Purcell must have known it was for him—in celebration that he was still with us, and in tribute to his selflessness in yielding dear principle for his cousin’s sake. Though he was clapping too and looking up at the headmaster, his neck had again turned scarlet.
I had my own idea about his change of heart; that it had less to do with sparing Big Jeff a painful separation from the school than with sparing himself the absurd, humiliating spectacle of Big Jeff throwing himself on Purcell’s very own funeral pyre. But I applauded him with the rest, for the dignity of his surrender; no winking or mugging, no holding back, no hamming it up to signal derisory assent. He had something, Purcell. Sand. Backbone. Class, I guess you could say.
At the editorial meeting that night we made our decisions without serious disagreement until we came to the last manuscript, a story by a classmate named Buckles who’d been submitting work all year to no effect. This story did not seem to me any better than the ones we’d rejected, and I said so.
What’s it about? George said. I can’t even tell what it’s about. He said this with such violence that Purcell and Bill and I were made shy for a moment. George usually took his post at the editor’s desk, but tonight he was sitting by the door, cross and itchy.
Still, this is his last shot, Bill said. Graduation issue.
That’s true, Purcell said. It’s now or never for Buckles.
The story’s not that bad, Bill said.
It’s not that good, I said.
Bulldog Buckles, Bill said. Never say die. Remember that story about Geronimo?
We laughed, all but George. “The Forked Tongue,” he said sullenly.
What? Purcell said.
It was called “The Forked Tongue.” Let me see this one again.
We watched George glance over the first page. Just listen to this, he said. He read a few lines aloud.
That’s not so bad, Purcell said.
There’s something there, Bill said.
Come on, I said.
Oh for Christ’s sake, run the stupid thing! George said. Who cares? It’s not like the rest of this crap’s about to set the world on fire. When we looked at him he bristled and said, Well? Is it?
Of course the answer was no. Our schoolboy journal was not going to set the world on fire. But for the past year we’d been acting on the faith that it might, choosing and shaping every issue with the solemnity of Big Jeff designing a spaceship. So, the game was over—that’s what George was telling us, the prick, the spoiler. He’d somehow lost his innocence and now he couldn’t rest until we too had seen that our sanctum sanctorum was only a storage room, our high purposes not worth a fart in a gale of wind.
But George, of all people—what had worked this change in him? What had he been writing up in that airless room, what vein of acid knowledge had he struck?
Okay, I said. What the hell. Let’s run it.
So we’d come to the end; our last issue laid to rest, albeit with a bullet in its head. The others fled the room, leaving me to order and stack the manuscripts and hand them off to the incoming editor, a fifth former who’d been sitting in on the meeting to see how it was done. He looked pretty disappointed.
Mr. Rice’ll need those first
thing tomorrow, I told him.
I know.
It was late, past midnight, but I was too jumpy to make another start at the story that was due later that morning, so I figured I’d warm up with a few rejection notes. Usually George took care of that but he had apparently abandoned his duties.
The office machine was a tinny portable that jumped a little every time you struck a key. I wrote three or four letters and took a break. It was tomb-quiet in there, the walls soundproofed by bookcases crammed with student lit mags, the overflow stacked in precarious towers on the two file cabinets and the editor’s desk. Here were the Troubadours of Andover, Milton, Dobbs Ferry, Taft, St. Timothy’s and St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s, Nottingham, Hill, Woodberry Forest, Madeira, Portsmouth Priory, Foxcroft, Kent, Emma Willard, Culver, Thacher, Roxbury Latin, Baldwin and Lawrenceville, Miss Cobb’s and Miss Fine’s and Miss Porter’s, Peddie, Hotchkiss, Pomfret, Choate, on and on and on . . .
As director of publication I sometimes came here to file the new arrivals, though mostly I just sat at George’s desk and gloated at being in the middle of all this writing. But what sort of writing was it, really? I took down a review from Andover and flipped through the stories, then looked at one from Deerfield and another from Hill. Within a few sentences every story seemed familiar, the same stuff we ran—mannered experiment, disillusioned portrait of family or school, all designed to show what a superior person the writer was.
Were the girls any better? I picked up a copy of Cantiamo, the review from Miss Cobb’s; it was a back issue, five years old. The first story concerned the superficiality of a woman prepping her house for a bridge party. I skipped to the next, called “Summer Dance,” and the smirk this title provoked died on my lips after the first line.
I hope nobody saw me pick up the cigarette butt off the sidewalk, but I’m all out and getting shaky and it’s a nice long one, with just a smudge of lipstick from the old bird who dropped it when her bus pulled up.
