The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Through the end of the semester, whenever Christopher artfully tried to trip me up, I parried his thrusts with all the aplomb of a dashing musketeer. Take that, you rogue! And that! Slash and slash again, until the lad’s white shirt was in shreds and my épée at his throat. But he knew, and I knew, that this was a battle to the bitter end. I won, of course; teachers almost always do in such situations. But I had come to the conclusion by semester’s end that the kid hated me almost as much as I hated him. Thus I was completely taken aback when, at term break, he insisted on introducing me to his famous mother. Dean McIntosh was a handsome woman in her early forties, dressed in a no-nonsense black knee-length skirt and a dark cardigan over a starched white blouse, her sturdy low-heeled shoes those of an English schoolmarm, her dark hair close-cropped. Yet her eyes, dark blue behind her horn-rimmed glasses, revealed a woman not only of substance but of great good humor. And her self-imposed austerity was relieved by the generous, Elizabethan ruffle at the neck of her white blouse. Her son looked nothing like her, and I assumed from the kid’s alabastrine skin that the father had to be an albino, until I saw Dad’s picture on young McIntosh’s dormitory desk: as dark as his mother.

  “Christopher tells me this is your first year here.” The dean smiled sweetly. “How are you enjoying teaching?”

  Aside from your smart-ass, contemptible, malicious little offspring, just fine and dandy.

  “Challenging,” I said. “The boys here are in the main very bright. And the curriculum is far more demanding than where I went to high school.”

  “And where was that?”

  “Northeastern Pennsylvania. Near Wilkes-Barre,” I said. “Coal-mining country. Tough people. Tough area.” I think I was trying not to impress her but to tell her that I grew up anthracitic. Much heat and little smoke. Not like the soft-coal mines. I sensed she was not impressed.

  “I’m sure you’ll do fine.” She smiled graciously and, I felt in my paranoiac mood, a trifle condescendingly. I wondered for a moment whether young Pasty Face had let her in on his little game of Torturing Teacher? I suspected not. I was pretty sure Her Deanship would not have approved.

  It was stifling hot in this refectory where tea and scones were being served, and Dean McIntosh suddenly unbuttoned her cardigan and slipped it off, revealing beneath that pristine blouse a bosom of amazing form and beauty.

  “You have,” I stammered, “a son of amazing form and beauty!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, you have a son whose mind is beautifully formed.”

  “Thank you,” she said, still eyeing me strangely.

  And may his dainty shoes be cast in concrete.

  * * *

  That winter I persuaded Dexter and Manny Mansfield, the football coach with whom I had become good friends, to let me start a wrestling team at Pomfret. Much to our collective surprise, in December after the last football game, a dozen and a half young men from thirteen to eighteen showed up for tryouts. “Tryouts” was hardly the proper term, for with eleven weight classes to fill, virtually everyone was assured a spot on the team.

  Their number was the good news; their physical attributes gave me pause. Why had I argued for such a folly? I warned my new charges that wrestling was as demanding physically as any sport. “It takes guts and stamina,” I told them. “I’m going to punish you guys till you wish you’d never met me. Because if I don’t,” I said, “the first time you get out on that mat in competition you’ll find yourself flat on your back so fast you won’t know what happened. And that, if you have any pride, will humiliate you like nothing you’ve ever experienced. Unlike team sports, in wrestling you’re on your own: nobody to blame but yourself if you lose. So, anybody want to bail out, now’s the time.” I gave them ample time to back out, gazing from one lump of pasty white to the other. They stared back at me, unblinking. I was impressed, but thought: I’ll bet in a week or two, half of them will be back in their dorms, licking their mat burns. Wrong. Of the eighteen who showed up that first day, sixteen stuck it out. None had any experience wrestling. I had less than four weeks to teach them the rudiments of the grand old Greek sport, at least the variety practiced in America. I worked them hard. First a half hour of tough conditioning, for wrestling is nine minutes of grueling, unforgiving exercise, in which every muscle is stretched to the breaking point, and victory often goes to the best prepared. Then the basic moves: taking down the opponent, keeping on top, escaping from underneath, riding, riding, always aggressive, wearing him down, always thinking and moving toward the goal, a pin. My charges kept at it; they learned. Clumsily, but they did improve. They practiced on each other, even though we did not have a full lineup of equal weights, and they practiced on me.

  This experience—coaching wrestling—also taught me a quick lesson, which I retained for life: beware of initial judgments. I had clearly misjudged these youngsters. I, who had always gone to public schools, had arrived at Pomfret impressed by its teaching staff and methods, its gracious leafy grounds, its ivy-covered brick walls, but with a built-in prejudice about my charges, about the student body in general. Virtually all came from money; many also came from broken homes, and sending them to boarding school was their parents’ way both of assuaging their own guilt and of paying others to bring up their kids. Parents’ day in the fall was often painful: in most cases only one parent would show up, usually dressed to the nines, sometimes chauffeured, looking awkward as they walked or talked with their sons, nervously glancing at their watches to see how long this semblance of intimacy had to run. In those instances, the pain in the kids’ eyes was also palpable. In the small towns where I grew up, divorce was rare, so this landscape of children from broken homes was a new phenomenon for me. While from the start I pitied these kids, at the same time I also categorized them as the spoiled rich and assumed they were incapable of toughing it out, whatever “it” might be. Within four weeks, the “it” of wrestling had proved me wrong.

  While the school had allowed me to start the wrestling program, it had no money for us to buy wrestling togs. I worried about the psychological effect when we arrived for our first match wearing presumably clean but mismatched sweats versus our opponents’ slick jackets and tights, all identical, bearing the name and logo of the school. For a moment I considered buying the tights myself but scotched that when I heard the price: more than two weeks’ worth of my lordly eight-thousand-dollar annual salary. Wendell, to whom I took my case, was sympathetic but said there was nothing he could do. Maybe next year.

  Our first formal match wasn’t till late January, but Manny had arranged with a prep school, which we’ll call C____, to meet us in a preseason informal scrimmage a week or so after the Christmas break. Real rules, a referee, normal scoring, but not to count on C____’s record. At the last workout I called the boys together and gave them a short speech about image.

  “Tomorrow, when we arrive at C____,” I said, “you’re going to find your opponents all dolled up in old-school jackets and smart-looking wrestling tights. You may look at yourselves and feel embarrassed. Don’t. Think of yourselves as ragtags and bobtails; think of yourselves as revolutionaries going up against the British in ’76. And you remember how those New England battles turned out.”

  A couple of snickers, three or four guffaws, and several smiles.

  “The point is, clothes may make the man, but not here. If you’re the better wrestler, or are in better shape, chances are you’ll take your opponent, no matter what he’s wearing. They’re not considering this a regular match, since when I called, their season was all booked, but I talked them into wrestling us ‘unofficially.’ In their minds this is a tune-up. But in yours this is a real match.”

  As predicted, the C____ kids were dressed fit to kill: smart blue jackets with the school name emblazoned on the front and, on the back, each wrestler’s name in bold white letters. When they saw us saunter in, no two Pomfret wrestlers looking alike, there was an audible and predictable undertow of disdain. Some f
rowned at their coach, as if to say, “Why don’t you get us a real match?” A few muffled and deprecatory murmurs. “Jerks” was one of the words I picked up. “Hicks” was another. For a moment my heart sank, not because of how we looked, but because, glancing at the C____ lineup, their kids looked so goddamn fit and ready. Eyes steely, muscles bulging. Suddenly I feared a wipeout.

  We lost the first two matches by decisions, 6–4 and 5–3, both close enough to bring a frown to the local coach’s face. Then in the next two weights—112 and 121—both our kids not only won but pinned their opponents. Our 112 was a pure stroke of luck: the C____ kid, ahead on points 11–2, tripped and fell backward, at which point our kid leaped on him like a leopard closing on his prey. But at 121, Jay Long, a deadly serious ninth grader who worked harder at conditioning than anyone on the squad and was both swift and smart, took charge from the start and first harried his opponent across the mat as if he were driving a sled, then jerked up his legs, turned him 180 degrees, caught him in a neat cradle, and pinned him on the spot, giving us a momentary but exhilarating 10–6 lead. (In American wrestling, a pin scores five points, a decision three.)

  Across the gym, the C____ coach was sitting chin in hand, clearly not happy. Here we were down to the last match with lowly Pomfret still in contention! We won, 23–22! I shook my head in disbelief, hugging each of my drenched youngsters in turn. They were whooping and hollering as if we had won an Olympic gold medal, which in a way we—no, they—had.

  I walked across the gym to the C____ coach, who, though in shock, had the good grace to smile and say, “Some tune-up! How long ago did you say you started your program?” I laughed and swore that it was less than six weeks old. He shook his head. “Well, you’ve got some gifted youngsters there—or should I say a gifted coach?”

  “Beginner’s luck,” I said, watching as the respective teams paraded past each other.

  “Coach?” Jay asked.

  Of all the epithets with which I’ve been saddled in the course of my life, I must confess that “Coach” is perhaps my favorite.

  The bus trip home was boisterous. General elation had taken over the team. And I too was sharing the joy. I was even beginning to wonder whether I shouldn’t stay a bit longer as coach of this fledging team. As we were approaching Pomfret, I felt it important to remind the boys that the fact that they had won today didn’t ensure their success in future matches.

  “I’d like to tell you and the team that conditioning is all-important in any sport, especially in wrestling. I’ve heard you guys griping at all the tough training I put you through before the Christmas holidays, and I’m sure you told your parents how this new coach named Seaver tortured you unmercifully—”

  “My dad said, ‘More power to you,’” Billy piped up. I took grateful note.

  “Today you saw it pay off. You think: a wrestling match is only nine minutes, compared with, say, a two- or three-hour football game. True. But in those nine minutes you put your body to its toughest test. Every muscle and fiber of your being is stretched to the core. Take Jimmy, for example: your opponent is a better wrestler than you—sorry—but last week he must have cheated; he goofed off, thinking we were a bunch of patsies. And in that third period he ran out of gas, whereas Jimmy’s hard work paid off.”

  The bus swung into the school grounds, past the stone pillars heading down to the refectory just in time for dinner. The Six Stalwarts, who had been oddly silent in the back, unfurled a hastily made banner that said:

  Pomfret 23

  C____ 22!

  What pleased me most was that the Pomfret squad, over a period of three short months, had coalesced into a tough-minded, high-spirited, unified team, each caring about the other. After the last meet, I called them together in the gym and told them how proud I was to be their coach and that I was convinced wrestling had made them stronger and more prepared for whatever they would end up doing in life.

  * * *

  I had applied for an American Field Service fellowship to France, a long shot.

  The letter finally arrived, bearing the return address of the American Field Service Foundation, in glowing red. The AFS had been set up during World War I, before America entered the war, to recruit and send overseas young men to drive ambulances and serve as noncombatant medics, officially part of the French army. Ernest Hemingway was one of the recruits, as was the poet e. e. cummings, as was my father. After the war, a group of French and American veterans established the American Field Service Foundation, whose goal was to further cement relations between the two countries. Each year it awarded four fellowships, two Americans to France, two Frenchmen to America. I had applied, and though I was not holding my breath, I had continued to hope, and ratcheted up my crash course in spoken French throughout the school year.

  I opened the envelope with hands that actually trembled. Yes, the answer was, goddamn it, yes! I was going to France, a year’s study guaranteed. I felt a surge of pure pleasure, followed quickly by a feeling of guilt. All these boys I had come to know, many of whom I considered friends (more so, I must confess, than my fellow teachers, all of whom were at least ten or fifteen years my senior), I would now be forsaking. And there was Manny. He truly saw me as his replacement. And then the wrestling team I had started: What would become of it? “Don’t ever start things you can’t finish”—my father’s dictum, one of many. Maybe I should give this fellowship a second thought. I decided to sleep on it.

  Hell, yes. By mid-afternoon I had decided: there was no way I was going to pass up that year in France. If I didn’t like it, if it didn’t work out, I could always come back. Or could I?

  Dexter was magnanimous. “I knew you’d go if accepted,” he said. “My only hope was you wouldn’t win. But you should know that if after a year you’d like to come back, there’s a place here for you.”

  Manny was another matter. He knew where to hit all the right buttons. “What’ll happen to your wrestling team?” he probed. “Probably down the tube without you.”

  “Hire a teacher who’s been a college wrestler,” I said. “There have to be dozens out there.”

  “Not as easy as you think,” he said, “though I can plant that idea in Dexter’s mind.”

  * * *

  And then it was commencement, a grand ceremony in the handsome stone church, whose stained-glass windows were the envy of the region. Senior boys, resplendent in their black robes and caps, the latter of which, when the ceremony was over and the boys outdoors in the (at last) golden spring, spiraled skyward, five-and-twenty blackbirds settling swiftly back to earth. A couple dozen parents thanked me for teaching their boys well, with a special thanks from several fathers who had seen their sons flourish through wrestling. Even the dean of Hunter complimented me on the strides her lad had made not only in math but in Latin.

  “My son is upset you’ll not be returning next fall.” She smiled, taking my hand in her firm grip.

  When I had started the wrestling team and was in dire need of a ninety-five-pounder, I had suggested he give it a try. He smiled and said wrestling was not for him. “If you had lived in ancient Greece or Rome,” I tried (for he was my best Latin student and flourished in the course), “I’ll bet you would have been flattered even to be asked.”

  “Ah, but I don’t,” he responded, “do I?”

  Most of his responses, I had noted through the year, ended in questions, in effect forcing the ball back into my court. Still, he finally agreed (the Latin allusion apparently having worked) to come to the gym at least to be weighed. But when he stripped to the waist and stepped on the scales, I knew mine was a lost cause. Eighty-two and a half pounds, and not a muscle, not a hint of a muscle, anywhere in sight. I thanked him for coming, suggested he might make an effort to put a bit more meat on his bones, and excused him. “I told you,” he said primly, “didn’t I?” The kid was a royal pain in the ass, and yet somehow I had a soft spot for him. I had always thought, despite his tender years, he sat in judgment on me, saw me as an unsoph
isticated boor uninterested in the finer things of life such as music and poetry (both of which did indeed interest me), but now, from what his mother had just said, I was apparently wrong.

  “It will only be a year,” I noted.

  “Paris is very seductive,” she said quietly, but as if she knew well whereof she murmured. “Once you’ve tasted it, I fear Pomfret will seem very pale and rustic.

  “Good luck in France,” she said, finally (to my regret) releasing my hand, and headed over toward the headmaster, around whom a dozen parents were clustered.

  I pictured Paris, whose sites and sounds I had explored vicariously untold times over the last few weeks, and all doubt was erased.

  Besides, I reminded myself, you can go home again.

  10

  To Paris, by Tiger, by Foot, by Bus, by Bicycle

  TO MAKE IT TO FRANCE, I had agreed to join the summer work program in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and was ostensibly to monitor and oversee three work campers, whom I met for the first time at the Collège Cévenol American headquarters on East Twenty-ninth Street. One student was a senior at Harvard, the other, Princeton, and the third, a girl, a junior at Smith.

  Our ship was a three-year-old, ten-thousand-ton, broad-beamed product of the Kaiser Shipyards in Vancouver, Washington, the USS Tiger, one of several hundred such vessels, labeled C-50s and C-60s, built starting in 1942 for cargo and troop transport and rushed into service. The Tiger, one of the last of the breed, was commissioned in 1945 and saw only limited wartime service transporting some nine hundred men to the Pacific and then, after Japan surrendered, carrying the forces of occupation from San Francisco to the Far East. Now, as Europe was once again open to travel, it had joined the youth movement, bearing American students eastbound and displaced persons to the States on the way back. A worthy endeavor both ways, for most of the students were part of one group or another—SPAN (the Student Project for Amity Among Nations), American Friends Service Committee, American Youth Hostels, Experiment in International Living, Institute of International Education—whose goal was to help rebuild the still-ravaged Europe, foster international relations, take part in conferences, or broaden horizons. A quick check indicated that roughly three-quarters of those on board were affiliated with some organization. We were six hundred in all, which made the ship seem incredibly crowded, and I could only imagine what it must have been like with another three hundred during wartime. We had been warned ahead of time that as berths we would have hammocks, not beds, which was fine with me but a cause for grumbling among some. There were two below-deck sections, one for women, one for men, and the heads—naval parlance for toilets—were in both instances military latrines. I had to laugh wondering how the women would deal with the urinals, but cope they surely would, to judge by Tish, who, even on shipboard, dressed in halter and shorts and stout hiking shoes as if she were ready to scale the nearest mountain as soon as we landed.