by Tobias Wolff
Right, Mr. Ramsey said. Send it later.
His car was parked behind the building. Two younger boys with tennis rackets saw us come out and quickly looked away. The bags, of course. And Mr. Ramsey’s spiritless face, if not my own.
We’re going to be rather in anticipo, Mr. Ramsey said. I thought you’d prefer to spend the extra time at the station. You know, rather than hanging about here.
He drove out on the service road, then took a side street through the village. No other boys saw me leave.
The air was a glaring white haze above the fields. Mr. Ramsey drove as if into a blizzard, slowly, with both hands, peering tensely over the steering wheel. The windows were open and some newspapers on the backseat riffled in the breeze. A pickup truck came up close behind us, dogged us through a series of curves, then made a chancy pass on a short straightaway and barely avoided an oncoming car.
Tell me, Mr. Ramsey said, is that a genuine first edition of In Our Time?
I told him it was, and then, unable to stop myself, asked if he’d packed it.
It’s in your gladstone. Quite a treasure, that—how’d you come by it?
Gift.
Yes? Well, defend it with your life. It’ll make your children rich. If you have any. So. You’re dead keen on the old bull, aren’t you?
He’s a great writer.
There are others.
In this century? He’s the greatest. Can I ask you a question?
You may.
Why did you censor what he said to you? That wasn’t right. You don’t censor Ernest Hemingway.
Oh—the blanks. Alumni office. They get the final edit of everything that leaves this school. Didn’t know that, did you? The News has a big subscriber list. Can’t afford to have some captain of industry choke on his biscuit, can we? But I’ll admit to some censoring of my own.
A car shot past, horn blaring. Mr. Ramsey honked back, as if to return a greeting.
Mind you, he said, the stuff I left out wouldn’t have made it past the vigilance committee, but that’s not why I left it out. Let me say that I do not consider Hemingway the greatest writer of this century, but he is a very great writer indeed, and some of what he said to me was unworthy. At his best, he would never have said it—I’m sure of that. It seemed unfair, even mean-spirited, to make such remarks public. In fact we probably shouldn’t have run the interview at all.
You had no right to touch a word of his. It was wrong.
What I cut would’ve been cut anyway. But I certainly take your point.
Was it about my story?
Susan Friedman’s story, I believe you mean. No. My God, no. Everything but. I’m not sure what it was about, except his own unhappiness. He is not a happy man. He is like the wounded lion in “Macomber,” flexing his claws, looking to take some heads off.
It was still wrong, I said.
This is hardly the time for you to instruct me on a point of honor. Let it go, for Christ’s sake!
Yes, sir, I said, and turned toward the fields.
Sorry, he said. He drove in silence a while, then said, Strange word, honor—can’t be spoken aloud, turns immediately to bilge. Hemingway had that right.
You don’t believe in the Honor Code?
That’s not what I said. But no, certainly not. Send a boy packing if he breaks the rules, by all means. Plant a boot on his backside, but do please leave the word honor out of it. It’s disgusting, how we forever throw it about.
I was shocked. I didn’t see how the school could work without the Honor Code, and I said so.
Make good rules and hold the boys to them. No need to be pawing at their souls. Honor Code? Pretentious nonsense.
We were in town now. This gave Mr. Ramsey occasion to go even slower. I watched myself in the storefront windows as we crept along, appearing and vanishing and appearing again. The few people on the street had a squinty, peevish look, but their ignorance of my situation made me feel thankful to them. For once I was glad for how big the world was. And this somehow gave me heart to ask the question I’d been circling ever since we left the school.
What did my father say?
Pardon?
What did my father say when he heard . . . you know.
Ah. He didn’t believe it. Told the headmaster we didn’t know a thing about you if we thought you’d do anything on the cheat, that you were the most honest person he knew.
He said that?
So I understand. Gave the headmaster an earful. All but called him a liar.
We got to the station well before my train. Mr. Ramsey went to the ticket counter while I waited on the platform with my bags. An old woman in a black dress and white bonnet kept inching up to the edge to peer down the track. Two redcaps stood by their carts in the shade behind my bench, talking in low voices, as if in deference to the heat. Otherwise I was alone on the platform, until Mr. Ramsey came out of the waiting room with my ticket.
He waved off my thanks. Your father will get the bill soon enough. I’ll wait with you, if you don’t mind.
You don’t have to.
He lowered himself to the bench and closed his eyes and leaned back so the sun fell full on his face. Without opening his eyes he fumbled in the pockets of his wrinkled linen jacket, produced a pack of Gitanes, shook out a cigarette, then tipped the pack toward me as if I were not a boy of the school. I couldn’t bring myself to take one.
How come Dean Makepeace wasn’t there? I said.
Mr. Ramsey put the cigarettes back in his pocket. He didn’t answer.
He’s the dean. Why didn’t he throw me out?
Dean Makepeace left school this morning. Mr. Lambert has stepped in as dean pro tem.
What, he just left?
He had some personal matters to attend to, I believe.
So he’ll miss seeing Hemingway.
Yes, I suppose he will.
We fell into a long silence then. I didn’t mind not talking. I was at ease with Mr. Ramsey because he hadn’t crowed or condescended, and also because I knew Mrs. Ramsey had carried on a flirtation with Bill White that year. I knew this from reading Bill’s notebook, a wail of longing so raw that he hadn’t bothered to change or disguise her name. He addressed her directly, as we argue and plead and rebuke while pacing a room alone. By turns cold, gushy, furious, pained, and punishingly repetitive, these pages had not been written to be read. Bill would never let himself be seen like this.
He referred to her kisses and described them in lingering detail, but nothing more, and I figured there was nothing more to describe or he would have done it in these unguarded pages. I couldn’t make out exactly what had happened, though I could guess how it started—the two of them talking, kidding around when Mrs. Ramsey came down to the library basement to file some periodicals, an impulsive kiss in the stacks, then other kisses, maybe even in Bill’s study. It was a schoolboy fantasy—one of my own, in fact—come true. Until Mrs. Ramsey woke up and ended it.
I suspected that Mr. Ramsey knew. It was just a feeling I had. But whether he knew or not, I did; and this somehow allowed me to be easy in his presence.
The platform began to fill. The old woman in the white bonnet came over to show us her ticket and ask if her train had already come and gone without her. I told her it was my train too, and that it hadn’t yet arrived. A little while later I saw her showing her ticket to another man.
Mr. Ramsey bent forward and rubbed his eyes. What will you do? he said.
I don’t know.
Of course. Quite right, too. But you might . . . Then he stopped and never finished the thought.
When the train came he lugged my suitcase on board and put it in the luggage rack at the end of the car. I followed him out to the vestibule and we shook hands.
Here one says something, he said. It’s not the end of the world, be game, you’ll work things out . . . But for all I know you won’t work things out. How should I know? He patted his pockets for the Gitanes, put one in his mouth, and offered another to me. When
I hesitated he stuck the pack in my shirt pocket and stepped down onto the platform and walked away, two long sweat stains darkening the back of his jacket. I was glad to see him go; several minutes still remained before departure time and I’d worried he might stand vigil outside, watching me through the window and giving sad little nods whenever our eyes met.
A steady line of wilted-looking passengers jostled past me into the carriage. Time to make a move. I pushed through to a forward-facing window seat, claimed it with my overnighter—my gladstone—took out In Our Time, and made my way to the smoking car.
ONE FOR THE BOOKS
I didn’t go home. Instead I got off the train in New York and cashed in the rest of my ticket and took a room at the Y. The Times wasn’t hiring reporters with my qualifications, nor were any of the other papers. They wouldn’t even take me on as a copyboy. I finally landed a job busing tables at a cheap tourist restaurant near Times Square, along with half a bedroom in the headwaiter’s nearby apartment, where two other waiters bunked in the living room. All three came from Ecuador. Since they didn’t speak much English and I spoke no Spanish, they mostly behaved as if I wasn’t there. So did I.
This is the job I had when Ernest Hemingway killed himself. He never did visit my school; too sick to travel. Afterward I worked as a room service waiter at the Pierre, as a restaurant waiter, a picture framer, and, for a short time, a Brinks guard; then, for an even shorter time, as a plumber’s assistant, and again as a waiter. I wrote some wiseguy features for an allegedly hip tourist mag that quickly folded, moved five or six times, drank a lot, had a few good friends and one girlfriend as faithless as I tried to be, read many books, signed up for extension courses at the New School and dropped them all. After almost three years of this I enlisted in the army and ended up in Vietnam.
If this looks like a certain kind of author’s bio, that’s no accident. Even as I lived my life I was seeing it on the back of a book. And yet in all those years I actually wrote very little, maybe because I was afraid of not being good enough to justify this improvised existence, and because the improvising became an end in itself and left scant room for disciplined invention.
A more truthful dust-jacket sketch would say that the author, after much floundering, went to college and worked like the drones he’d once despised, kept reasonable hours, learned to be alone in a room, learned to throw stuff out, learned to keep gnawing the same bone until it cracked. It would say that the author lived more like a banker than an outlaw and that his deepest pleasures were familial—hearing his wife sing as she worked in the garden, unzipping her dress after a party; seeing his most solemn child laugh at something he said. The brief years of friendship with his father before he died, never once allowing that his son had anything to be pardoned for.
It would be very boring. It would also be pointless, merely incidental rather than exemplary. For a writer there is no such thing as an exemplary life. It’s a fact that certain writers do good work at the bottom of a bottle. The outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in one sort of desert or another.
The life that produces writing can’t be written about. It is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind’s business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.
No true account can be given of how or why you became a writer, nor is there any moment of which you can say: This is when I became a writer. It all gets cobbled together later, more or less sincerely, and after the stories have been repeated they put on the badge of memory and block all other routes of exploration. There’s something to be said for this. It’s efficient, and may even provide a homeopathic tincture of the truth.
Here is one such story of my own.
In the fall of 1965 I got orders for a training course at Fort Holabird, Maryland. As I cleaned out my billet before leaving Fort Bragg I came across the copy of the News I’d taken from the dean’s office the day of my expulsion. I lay back on my bunk and read the story through for the first time in years. It held up well, I thought, but I was no longer in any confusion as to whose story it was, or whose talent Hemingway had blessed. I assumed that Susan Friedman had been told what I’d done. To square things a little, at least with myself, I wrote a brief note of apology and mailed it to her, along with the News, in care of Miss Cobb’s alumnae office.
Damn if she didn’t write back. Plagiarism, not imitation, is the sincerest form of flattery, she wrote, and thanked me for the further compliment of showing her work to Ernest Hemingway. So old Hairy Chest liked it! No one at Miss Cobb’s had given her any hint of this distinction; not, she added cryptically, that this came as any surprise. She found the whole thing a fantastic lark, and thanked me again for letting her in on it.
Then, in a postscript: I see you used your own first name in the story, but kept Levine. Interesting touch.
That seemed to invite a response. Her return address was in Washington, D.C., less than an hour away, so why not answer her in person? For days I fretted over my next letter, trying to find the exact tone, witty but not frivolous, that would make Susan Friedman accept my invitation to dinner—in partial payment, as I expressed it, of my debt. Within an hour of posting the letter I was writhing at its juvenility. She wouldn’t even answer. But she did, and said that while nights were difficult she might manage lunch sometime. This sounded like a brush-off, except that she included her telephone number.
We agreed to meet at an Italian restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue. I got there early and Susan was late, so I had plenty of time to pass from elation to despair, as I’d been doing all week. What did I hope for, to be in such a state? I pretended to hope for nothing, just a good meal and some interesting talk, but I couldn’t fool myself. This meeting felt momentous to me, it had the potential of making sense of the maze I’d wandered into when I chanced upon her story. Suppose—a ridiculous supposition, I knew, but just suppose—we fell in love and ended up together. Then it would turn out to have been something more than bad luck that led me to “Summer Dance,” and all the confusions since would be revealed as cunning arabesques in a most intricate, beautifully formed story.
I knew I should keep my feet on the ground, knew that my enforced isolation from women had made me vulnerable to runaway dreams. But we already had so much in common—the same story, so to speak. I had liked her voice when I called to arrange lunch: cool and low, with an elusive teasing quality. She’d laughed at odd times as we talked, and this flustered me pleasantly, and made me laugh too, as if we both understood something we couldn’t say.
She was very late. I nursed a beer and looked over the lunch menu, surprisingly cheap for such a busy, sunny place, with snowy tablecloths and heavy silver and real Italian waiters in black vests. I guessed she’d suggested it to save me money, and for this I was both pleased and suspicious of condescension. Now and then my waiter glanced at me and I smarted under his gaze. He was young and roosterish and I knew what he was thinking—that I’d been stood up and might as well admit it and either order up or scram. But I held out, and then she was coming toward me, pulling off her gloves. She had a slightly cleft chin and straight dark hair cut in an old-fashioned bob and wore the black overcoat and red scarf she said she’d be wearing. Her color was high. She seemed to bring with her some of the crispness of that fine November day. She gave the waiter her coat and scarf and we shook hands and sat down together.
I expected her to make some excuse for being late but instead she reached into her purse and brought out a pack of Luckies. This is one for the books, she said, and laughed. Having lunch with my own personal plagiarist.
I lit her cigarette. She stopped my wrist with her hand and my breath caught, but she just wanted to see the lighter. She turned
it over, squinted at the unit insignia on its side, then fished a pair of glasses from her purse and studied it again. She had a soft fleshy prettiness like girls in silent films, and the clunky black frames of her glasses did not make her any less pretty, only more vivid, as she certainly knew. Hmm, she said, and handed the lighter back and turned that studying gaze on me. I saw that she had a lazy eye.
You don’t look anything like I thought you would, she said.
Neither do you, I said, in revenge, but it was true. I had thought of her as leaner, sharper, a little wolfish.
I won’t ask what you were expecting, she said.
Then I won’t either.
Do they make you cut your hair like that?
Yes, but it isn’t much different from the way I used to wear it.
That’s okay, she said. I don’t like long hair on men.
She asked me about the unit I served with and why I’d joined the army. I picked my way through the answer, afraid of striking a false note. My carefulness bored her. She glanced over the menu while I trailed off.
Then I said, it’s something I thought I should do.
For God and country, she said, eyes still on the menu.
No. It was an expectation I had of myself. I would have always felt like I’d missed a base if I hadn’t done it.
I’m going to have the tuna salad. She put the menu down and looked at me. Why do you think you had that expectation?
When I told her I didn’t exactly know she laughed and said, You don’t exactly know. Well, I do.
But when I asked her what she knew she smiled like a big sister holding something over her little brother’s head, just out of reach, and would not tell me.
And that was how it went from there. My case was hopeless. Susan had five years on me, which didn’t have to mean anything in itself, but did mean something because of what she’d done with that time. From Miss Cobb’s she got a free ride to Wellesley but dropped out after a semester when her mother was diagnosed with cancer. Susan looked after her sister and their mother until she died two years later, then worked at different jobs while finishing her degree. She didn’t return to Wellesley; she went to Ohio State to stay closer to her sister, and was now in her second year at Georgetown Medical School. I saw that she was an extraordinary person, and that I had nothing to offer her but an hour or so of good company, which proved easier once I no longer felt the tension of hope.
