Teacher

by Mark Edmundson

This question hung for a while in the air, joining a throng of previous Lears questions that had undergone the same fate. The atmosphere of the classroom, could you regard it with the right pair of revealing lenses, was laden with multiple unanswered, and often unregarded or uncomprehended, questions. They swam there, waiting to be attended to, like the poor souls that blow around the edges of purgatory, not quite damned, but far from redemption.

  I left this question suspended with the rest and tuned in closely to the girls. Cuteness was still the issue. They were considering the relative merits of Donny Perkins, a class clown—we had not one but a circus-size supply of these—who was outgoing, a little round, and infinitely likable, who always wore an expression indicating that some prank had just been played, that it was minor but original, that he had done it, and was proud. He was soft-bodied, had red hair and an amiable face; he looked like a cross between Satan and Burl Ives. Donny used to greet you in the hall by asking his standard question: “Do you putt-it?” To which the answer was, or was supposed to be, “Do you?” Then Donny: “Of course I putt-it. Don’t be silly. And so do you. Everyone knows it.” Putt-it meant masturbate—in all probability.

  They were having a tough time with Donny. And who could blame them? Did they want to be spirited off to the Sheepfold, the make-out parking spot, by someone who might slip a whoopee cushion under their seat? They did not say as much. All deliberation was carried out with oohs and aahs and negating exhalations and the like. But one got the idea. Donny was a case of post-modern indeterminacy; he was to cute what a few choice, funny lines from Finnegans Wake are likely to be to meaning.

  Of course, personally I didn’t give much of a damn about how the two Fates would come to regard Donny Perkins. I was waiting, skulking, unwilling to say a word and blow my cover, to see if I myself might be mentioned. Where did I fit in, in this great amorous chain? Around the bottom, I suspected. But one always lives in hope.

  LEARS, FOR his part, didn’t hear, or ignored the whispers between the Fates, and went on. Why do we pine for external authority? That was his question. Why do we want to put others in the place of our own minds? Because doing as much immediately makes doubt disappear. Suddenly you know what to do. You know what to value. There are no questions anymore. Thinking hurts, and to stop thinking confers considerable pleasure.

  That, I sensed to be true, having avoided all such activity since I could recall. And even though the girls were now past the hockey team, from which they’d selected the redoubtable Tom McQue as the most savory morsel, and were moving on to other matters, I turned their volume down lower and tried to bring in Lears. He was working against tough competition, yet somehow something he was saying was winning out.

  “Now, where do you suppose this urge to get rid of thinking comes from? How do we know that not thinking is going to be pleasurable?” Lears looks at Buller and grins a rare cards-up-the-sleeve grin. No one has anything to say, least of all Buller. We sit, mud settling into solid, sound earth, as it was our duty and seeming destiny to do. Dubby puts his head down on his desk and commences a mock nap. John Vincents gets intimate with the dirt clumped between his soccer cleats, which he unaccountably wears to class.

  “We’ve all already experienced this sensation,” Lears says. “We had it as children. When you’re a child, before you reach the age of reason, or some approximation thereof”—he adds this in deference to Buller, I suppose, but maybe in deference to us all—“you’re completely protected. Others tend you, watch out for you, put you in a position of dependence.” And, as Lears outlines it, we all want to go back to that state, the condition in which we’re fully protected, where we always know what’s right and wrong, where someone does all our thinking for us.

  Early in life, don’t forget, we’re surrounded by giants, great figures, who seem omnipotent and omniscient. All our needs will be taken care of. All will be well. It’s as though we were born in paradise and for the rest of life, memories of that place stay alive. When someone comes along and offers reentry, a shortcut back into the garden, slipping past the angel with his flaming sword, then it’s likely that our eyes are going to glaze over with sugary hope.

  And then he began with his questions—ceaseless, annoying questions. But he was getting a little better at it, coming up with some new techniques.

  What groups are you yourselves a part of? Go ahead, take a minute, write their names down. Your church, your sports team, your neighborhood friends, school friends, family, camps, clubs, what have you. How about a country? How about the United States of America—is that a group too? Surely there is a leader.

  Then think if you will, think if you can, about what kinds of leaders, what kinds of directing fathers and stand-in mothers, these groups offer. And think too of what you lose when you join one of these operations. Think of what, if anything, you might gain.

  The girls became quiet. We all—well, maybe Buller excepted—did what he asked. We wrote, the fifteen or so self-selected seniors clumped in an almost-circle (I was the radical electron, the loose particle maybe about to fly away from the atom) in a well-lit room on the top floor of the old Medford High building, while December subtly modulated its grays outside. It was easy. It was list making and didn’t require the labor of composing full sentences.

  I made my own list, writing down the names of the track and football teams, my church, St. Raphael’s, along with the names of its priests and Sunday school teachers; I included America in the list, and Richard Nixon, too. Then we all stopped and Lears made us stand up and stretch, take a little rest. Because even this much mind-work was to us the equivalent of a dozen or so wind sprints.

  Then Lears began to talk about the qualities of a leader. Some leaders, he said, rule reasonably. They lay out their ideas, they tell you what they value, and then they put you in a position to make a choice. They feel sure that what they have to impart can be of some help and that people will recognize their own advantage in it. But there are other sorts of leaders, too. These leaders play on people’s longing for the old fatherly (or maybe motherly) certainties. They have what’s called charisma, the glow that comes off someone who exudes perfect confidence in what he believes. These people are warm externally. They seem to offer love equally to anyone who is ready to follow them. But inside they are ice. They love no one but themselves. They are indifferent to every other being. A leader of this sort looks completely self-reliant. He needs no one. So everyone tries to get next to him, get a boost from his confidence. He is the one who knows it all, the magus, the prophet, the orator, the dictator, the great helmsman.

  Here, when he had laid these things out, Lears, it seems to me, took a step into becoming the kind of teacher that would change me, and some of the other people in the room, around. Don’t forget, we had been busy driving him crazy. We had imitated him, teased him, in the case of Buller had insulted him; he’d thrown his most valuable pearls in front of us, and we’d coughed dismissively a few times and fallen back to the familiar swinish drowse.

  With this narrative, and after the routine with Rick, he had us cornered. He could have gone at us full tilt. Why didn’t he just command us to look at our dull religious lives—most of us went to church the way we went to school; it was a place to snore and make an occasional social linkup. But more than that, he could have assaulted us for the herd behavior that made us as wearisome to teach as we were. Who is the boss on the football team, who sets the tone? And in the sororities that dominate the school, who are the alpha girls? How do they enforce their petty tyrannies?

  And as to the government—this was 1969, remember—how do they enforce such idiot acquiescence from you? How have they talked you into waging an unjust, useless war in Vietnam? How did they perpetrate the Red scare on your moms and dads? How did they get them into nine degrees of paranoid ecstasy about the Communist threat?

  But he never posed these questions. He never ranted, never got in our faces. He controlled what must have been his utter angry humiliation at the way his cl
ass had been going. He laid off. He trusted us. For the first time, he put us in a position to examine ourselves. It was a chance to become explorers in our own lives. We could raise the spyglass and see ourselves as from a distance. But we could reject the invitation, too.

  You could imagine how great the temptation to grab the helm and steer us where he needed us to go might have been. There sitting in front of Lears was Cap, who was his bane. Much more than Buller, who was just a mobile annoyance, Cap must have come across to him as something of a spiritual enemy, to use Blake’s language. Cap, with his beard, heavier than most men’s, the ropey muscles up and down his arms, and his handsome face, with his slight underbite and dramatic jawline. His teeth were carnivorously white, the white you saw on tigers; he had lovely hazel eyes that only came into certain focus when he was pinpointing a pass or laying up a basketball.

  Lears must have looked at him and seen what the magisterial historian Henry Adams saw when he encountered Ulysses Simpson Grant in the president’s office. To Adams, Grant seemed a crude throwback to some other, primitive time. Could civilization be spinning in reverse?

  But what Lears didn’t do was foist his view on us. He didn’t address the whole bit about alpha males to Cap the way he might have, or torment him with a sequence of questions that Cap never could have answered about the place of the authoritative other in his own life. No, he put that sort of thing aside. He erased himself from the exchange as much as he could, and in doing so started to become the teacher he was destined, however briefly, to be.

  Frank Lears seemed to be in the process of stepping over and becoming something of a Socratic figure. Socrates, as opposed to his disciple Plato, does not teach a system. He has no portable wisdom. What he offers instead is simply freedom from illusion. He will turn and criticize anything, no matter how exalted. Socrates is a questioner, who leaves no belief untouched. Family, religion, state—whatever it is, he asks you to consider what you owe it and what, if anything, it might owe you. He asks what evidence you have that the esteemed thing is good. He is relentless, and he never stops talking, won’t stop asking. As Kierkegaard says, “His irony was not the instrument he used in the service of an idea—irony was his position, more he did not have.” Lears had more—he had his beliefs, his ideas—but for the most part he held them in abeyance and simply asked us to take a first stab at knowing ourselves.

  Lears asked us to consider whether the groups we had listed had leaders and whether they led by delivering us from doubt and bringing us back to the old certainties. He gave us thirty full minutes to do this, and we all sat silently and pondered, or at least I did. It was the first time I had ever actually sat and thought, at least insofar as I can recall. It was a first, a quiet enough one, one hard to render dramatic in the way a football game, a whipping laid on Somerville by the mighty Mustangs, can be. But it was a major moment for me nonetheless.

  WHAT I thought about when he gave us our half-hour or so of silence was religion.

  It started with a memory. When I was a boy, eight or nine years old, I was praying one day at the altar at the Sacred Heart church. It must have been after confession. When I went outside, a kid was waiting. He was a grade or two behind me, gawky, big-eared, wearing ripped corduroy pants and standing beside a rusted bike. He came up to me diffidently and asked, with no perceptible irony or anything even mildly toxic in his voice, if I was going to become a saint. Why did he ask? “Because you prayed so beautiful.”

  And, truth be told, I was a pious little boy. I loved church; though the sainthood business hadn’t occurred to me, I was more than interested in becoming a priest. The life of renunciation looked very good to me. I could enter the rectory and be left alone. I could get rid of school, family, friends, the whole works, and just lower myself into a completely protecting, completely prescribing environment. And then too, I loved God a great deal and Jesus, if possible, more. I also feared hell.

  For a long time, I wore faith like a deep coat. I worshiped the Christian doctrine, believed fervently in angels and the Blessed Virgin, who would intercede for us at the throne of the almighty, and fiercely retributive, Father. My initiation scene was in the Sacred Heart church, Malden, Massachusetts. There in the lower chapel, dank and frightening as any catacomb where the first Christians practiced their outlaw faith, I listened to Father O’Hara, known to us boys as the Fat Father—awful, gregarious, bluff, and sly—intone his favorite Bible passage, the one where the sinner in hell, burning, begs to be permitted to lick water from the finger of Lazarus, a poor, righteous man who is with Abraham in heaven. “Never,” cries the Fat Father, becoming for a moment a burning pillar of wrath and thus temporarily losing his resemblance to the fat sergeant, Sergeant Garcia, the buffoon on the TV show Zorro, from whom he has acquired his nickname. The sinner was left to roar in everlasting fires.

  Daily I felt hell’s breath. I confessed my sins, did penance, made good acts of contrition, as the priest told me to do after confession, when I read out my partly fabricated list of transgressions. I disobeyed my parents four times, lied six times. I teased Joey Merrill, our neighbor, four years younger than myself. The Joey Merrill teasing was always last on my list: I phrased it ambiguously—so it could have meant either that I had done it just once or that it was perpetual—hoping the priest would imagine option A. B was closer to the truth.

  Obsessively, I imagined eternal punishment, conceiving of eternity not unlike the way Joyce rendered it in Portrait of the Artist: A bird comes every million years to lift a grain of sand from an endless mountain. In many eons the mountain will disappear. And that whole time will be but one instant, a flashing evanescent tick, in the course of the eternal. Late on summer nights, as fireflies popped their spooky, subaqueous green, my friends and I envisioned heaven and hell, impressed on each other the facts of eternal damnation and everlasting bliss.

  I remembered the nuns who taught me at Sunday school as humours out of Ben Jonson: There were the crones, crabbed, thin, and zealous; and the stalwarts, grand battleships alight with rectitude; and then the seemingly benevolent ones, portly and content. Yet even the most kindly could break into furious rants. Sister Eulalie, with her benevolent, moony face gently framed by her wimple, and her sweet milk-white hands, once told us that when a girl dyed her hair, the poison from the dye seeped through the roots and slowly, slowly built up in her brain. Then one day the fragile organ would start to decompose into polluted gobs, until the brain-pan itself became a horrible vat, bubbling and spitting.

  Over time I moved in and out of churchgoing, pulled from the church’s orbit by the likes of Johnny Kavanaugh, who became, when I was eleven years old, Father O’Hara’s replacement. Johnny was the way, the truth, and the life. He owned a doughnut and sub shop, where he also took, or pretended to take, numbers over the phone. (In my Malden neighborhood, being a bookie was high-prestige work.) Johnny screened stag movies for us, told us about oral sex, and claimed to have gotten it on with one of the Supremes (not Diana Ross, he added with some humility, but a backup singer, backup). Johnny’s friend Durante, an ambulance driver about whose sanity even Johnny had doubts, demonstrated basic fornication for us using an empty juice bottle and his semi-erect item. Johnny—apprehended by all sane adults as a yammering buffoon—was practiced in the ways of the world.

  But despite my waywardness, I knew for a long time that there was a God. I knew it in part because of my horrendous sense of guilt. Whenever I did something wrong—terrorized a younger cousin, spoke harshly to a teacher, lied, or cheated—I quivered under the flying lash of my conscience. I became physically ill at the thought of my sins. And where could this guilt and suffering come from if not from the Lord on high?

  In better moods, on better days, I knew God through the magnificence of his creation—not its beauty or its goodness or pleasure but the overpowering presence of what was, the massive thereness of the world. How could all this grandeur be, I asked myself, if there was no God to send it into light? I acknowledged the God of
creation but I believed, tremblingly, in the God of pain.

  Almost everyone I knew believed in God, or professed to. There were atheists in existence, I knew. But they were damaged individuals, like my childhood friend DeFazio, who would walk down the street hollering out to God to prove his existence by striking him, DeFazio, down with a bolt of lightning from the sky. I recall debating with Fran and Mikey O’Rourke whether we ought to scatter when DeFazio issued such Homeric dares, lest the Almighty cast general death in DeFazio’s direction. A lot of talk ensued. Eventually we agreed that anyone who could create the world in six days had enough fine-motor skill to take DeFazio out with a precise stroke while leaving the rest of us standing by unscathed, if maybe a little smoke-stained.

  But then my sister, Barbara Anne, died an excruciating death, after half a dozen strokes that befell her over a period of two years. She was a sweet, pale, beautiful child, with soft blue eyes. At three, she could barely talk, though all else was normal. Soon afterward, she had her first stroke—so rare in children that a number of doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital had never seen it happen—and came home dragging one foot when she walked, her face drooping on the left side. Then another stroke came, and another, and another.

  I recall that when she was in the hospital for the last time—I must have been in the ninth grade—I prayed incessantly to the Lord above to spare her. I made lists of all the things I would do, the pleasures I would surrender: no more TV, no more desserts—and I would follow through on these things for weeks on end. Nothing would change. Then I would go back to my past harmless habits. Nothing would change for her. Or she would get worse. And I would blame my own waywardness, my own lack of faith. I blamed myself but never the God above, who, despite all of His claims for being merciful and good and His need to be worshiped slavishly for those things, could preside so serenely over Barbara’s slow, horrible death.