by Paul Russell
His dad looked at him with what suddenly seemed like impatience. There was nothing to say, and Noah said it.
“Nothing,” he said.
IX
Remembering Jack Emmerich’s classroom visits—unlike his own, entirely unannounced, a hawk swooping down on its prey—Louis felt himself strangely intimidated rather than intimidating, a wary interloper as he settled, promptly at nine A.M. and as inconspicuously as possible, into a desk in the back of English II.
He’d barely needed to make the suggestion—merely breathed it, so to speak, over lunch in the cafeteria one day—for Tracy eagerly to take him up on it,
“Okay,” Tracy said to the fifteen boys of the class, “today we have a visitor. You all know Dr. Tremper. Just pretend he’s not here.” Invisible by fiat, Louis knew them as well: dark-haired, dyslexic Joey Pinnavaia, whose father was a prominent Long Island restaurateur; Adam Kozlowski, the son of a high-profile lawyer and, by dint of an unfortunate history, now presumably behind him, of substance abuse, a year older than the other boys in his class; Shade Laskii-Meyers whose complicated and unorthodox family situation Louis had never quite managed to sort out; sweetly clueless Benjamin Cannon; Tim Vaughn and Gary Marks the athletes and David Valentine the chessplayer; Mike Choi from Singapore, who, it was said, could answer any question one might have about the school’s computers, not that Louis himself had even a single one.
Seating himself casually on his desktop, Tracy plunged right in. “In some ways the main event of the book comes early on, right? When Gene jostles the branch of that tree and sends Finny falling. And everything else spreads out from there, the repercussions. And so it seems like maybe we want to ask two questions: one, why did Gene do what he did, and two, what does he learn from it?”
It had been several years since Louis had taught A Separate Peace: Bobby Wainmark’s class had been perhaps the last time. But he remembered quite fondly and well the enthusiasms that slender volume could engender, the ways it could touch even those boys who might seem unreachable. It was about their lives, after all, the kind of lives they lived unbeknownst to the adults around them. Among these very students in Tracy’s classroom there were friendships, rivalries—some known to all, but others completely private, passions that flared invisibly, fruitlessly, though perhaps never entirely to subside.
“So I don’t get it,” said Shade Laskii-Meyers in his mellifluous baritone. “If they’re best friends, then why would he go and do something like that? You don’t do that to your best friend. You don’t push him out of a tree. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“They weren’t really friends,” Tim Vaughn said adamantly. “They were mortal enemies. Only Finny didn’t know that. He trusted Gene to be his friend, but Gene was a total creep.”
“I don’t agree with that,” Shade said. “Definitely they were friends. They were like this.” To illustrate, he gripped his hands together firmly, powerfully.
“Let’s look at the text,” Tracy reminded them. “Let’s find quotes. Remember, we’re interested in what the book actually says, not what we want it to say. Remember to mark key passages when you read.”
Books fell open, pages were flipped. A concentrated air of study all at once pervaded the classroom. Louis was impressed. He liked the sight of all those bent heads, the palpable sense of intellectual eagerness. How he missed being in the classroom on a regular basis.
“I’ve got it,” Shade volunteered. He was something of a beauty, though a bit vacant-eyed. His hair could have been neater. Till his father intervened, he’d lived on a women’s commune amidst the redwoods with his mother and his sister Rainwater. He’d made an admirable adjustment to the social and academic rigors of the Forge School.
“It’s where Gene says, ‘The war would be deadly all right. But I was used to finding something deadly in things that attracted me; there was always something deadly lurking in anything I wanted, anything I loved. And if there wasn’t, as for example with Phineas, I put it there myself. But in the war, there was no question about it at all; it was there.’”
“Good,” Tracy said. “So what’s that saying?”
“Well.” Shade frowned in concentration. “It’s saying he was both friends with Finny but also his enemy. Like, he loved him but, underneath everything, there was this war between them.”
“So let’s talk about the war,” Tracy said. “What war is it, by the way? The larger war, I mean.”
“Vietnam?” Benjamin Cannon put forth tentatively.
“Earlier,” Tracy coaxed.
“It’s World War Two,” Gary Marks said with eye-rolling impatience.
“But it’s also just any war, isn’t it?” Tracy suggested to them. “In some ways it doesn’t really matter which war it is.”
Vindicated, Benjamin nodded vigorously.
“The war’s like a symbol,” Shade proposed.
“Very good,” Tracy said. “What do you think it symbolizes?”
With a prolonged, indeed painful creak, the door to the classroom swung slowly open. Looking as if he’d just woken up from a very deep sleep, Noah Lathrop mumbled, “Sorry.”
“Fashionably late once again, I see.” Tracy spoke banteringly, at ease with his recalcitrant student. But perhaps Louis misgauged his tone. Something mocking flickered in Noah’s eyes that made Louis think, with sudden alarm, that the boy was going to tell Tracy—in the simplest possible terms, and in front of the whole class—“Fuck off.” It was as if those shocking words had already been uttered and hung, palpable, in the air of the classroom.
But instead Noah said, with a faint shrug, “Somebody’s got to set the trends around this place.”
It was uncanny, though, how absolutely certain Louis was that Noah had thought those violent words, even if he had held back from actually saying them. He had seemed to hear them so clearly, the way shepherds had perhaps once been assailed by voices as they tended their flocks in the fields.
But no one else had heard anything like that. They took it all very differently. “Oversleeping is not what I’d call a trend, exactly,” Gary taunted, his voice the confident, bullying voice of the soccer field, the locker room. The class roared with a laughter that wasn’t so much nervous as, simply, genial.
“You wish,” Noah shot back sharply. At sports Louis knew him to be listless, worse than mediocre.
“Okay, okay,” Tracy said. “Enough of that, you two.”
“I wasn’t feeling well this morning,” Noah concluded in a more subdued tone. “I stopped by the infirmary.”
“And I presume they gave you a note?”
“They forgot,” Noah mumbled, to more exaggerated eye-rolling from Gary.
“Well, you’ll bring one by later, right?”
Noah’s shrug, once again, seemed to Louis to border on insolence. It was all he could do to restrain himself from saying something. For the first time since class had started, Tracy glanced his way, his gaze both bemused and slightly humorous; then he turned his attention back to the latecomer. Gingerly he urged him up to speed. “We were talking about the war, what role it plays. What it’s a symbol of.”
“The war in the book?” Noah said. He dropped himself negligently into his seat.
“Right,” Tracy told him.
As if it had all at once come to him, Shade announced to the room, “The war is real life. It’s just all the things that happen. It’s not soldiers and guns and bombs. It’s just”—he searched for the right word—“it’s just…stuff.”
Perhaps it was because he came from California, or perhaps the class genuinely appreciated his efforts: in any event, Tim Vaughn gave him a friendly thumbs-up. David Valentine nodded vigorously. Benjamin looked as if he was trying very hard to follow what Shade had said. It was a moment for coming together, and Louis felt somehow pleased—for the class, for Tracy.
But then Noah spoke. “I don’t think so,” he said sourly, peremptorily. “Look at the end of the book. War’s the easy part, whether it’s the enemy or, as y
ou say, just stuff.” He spoke the word with some distaste. “At least in a war you know who the enemy is. It’s when there isn’t any war that it gets all complicated.”
Shade looked at him blankly, though his voice was not unfriendly. “What do you mean?”
“Let’s look at that passage,” Tracy urged, a little forlornly, it seemed to Louis. “Go ahead and read it,” he told Noah.
“I don’t like to read out loud,” Noah averred.
Tracy was unfazed. “Adam,” he suggested, “why don’t you read it?”
Adam Kozlowski looked as if he’d been ambushed. Louis’s theory was that drugs slowed you down permanently, something nobody bothered to tell these kids.
“You mean the last paragraph?” he asked. Tracy nodded patiently.
In a flat, uncomprehending voice he read out, “‘All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these—’”
“Mah-jee-no,” Tracy helped him along. “It’s French.”
“‘Mah-jee-no Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.’ Tracy, what’s a Maginot Line?”
Louis could never get used to students calling their teachers by their first names, an unproductive bit of familiarity if ever there was one. It was a practice he’d always discouraged. Had he failed, he wondered, to mention that to Tracy?
“The French had this system of defenses,” Noah said. He spoke with brusque, even arrogant, authority. “They were so convinced the Germans couldn’t get through, they didn’t realize all the Germans had to do was just go around them and then screw them from behind. But the Maginot Line’s really not the best image here. For what the book’s trying to say, I mean. Because if you look at what it says, it’s not the Germans you need to worry about, or anybody else: it’s you. You’re the enemy. You’re the one who’s going to defeat yourself. That’s what Gene does. He doesn’t kill his best friend; he kills himself. And when he goes to the funeral he doesn’t cry, because you don’t cry at your own funeral. He even says that. Everybody commits suicide, one way or another.” He spoke quickly, passionately. There was an unattractive dogmatism to his points.
From Benjamin his words elicited the involuntary exclamation, “Oh, that’s not true.”
“That is kind of a depressing thought,” Tracy said. “But aren’t you sort of overstating things? Doesn’t Gene learn anything at all useful from Finny’s example? I mean, he does go on to write the book,”
But Noah, it appeared, had had his say. He shrugged vaguely, and slouched back in his seat. He let the discussion surge on past him.
“You have to make your own peace with the world,” Shade offered. “That’s what he learned. Phineas was the example to him. How you have to get over your hate and envy and competitiveness and stuff. You have to accept who you are.”
Shade certainly knew how to earn his keep. Still, what Noah had said hung unpleasantly in the air, a chill that wouldn’t dissipate. Louis was irked. He glared at Noah but the boy didn’t notice. The class had lost his attention. He closed his eyes as if he wanted to make them all go away.
“I think,” Louis said when the last of the students had filed out the door and he and Tracy were alone, “that you perhaps give that character a bit too much leeway.” But then, regretting he’d spoken in such haste, he added, “Not to say it wasn’t a superb class. I thought it was very…deft. You were skillful at bringing the students into the discussion. It’s just aggravating, a student like that. Does he always come to class late?”
“Noah has this thing about mornings,” Tracy said. “The irony of it is, in many ways he’s the smartest student in the class.”
“That was certainly less than obvious.”
“Well,” Tracy backtracked. “Smart. That’s a hard word to define.”
“Don’t coddle him,” Louis said sternly. “I know it’s easy to get distracted by the problems some of these boys have. But it’s important to he strict with them. Set boundaries. The school does have a counselor, after all, and I think Noah sees him with some regularity. I believe, in fact, he’s required to.
“I don’t think Noah likes him very much. Actually, he’s told me that they really don’t get along at all.”
“I can’t really imagine him getting along with much of anyone,” Louis said, more stiffly than he’d intended. “But that’s for the two of them to work out. I must say, though, he was dead wrong about that book.”
“I thought he was being rather subtle,” Tracy said.
“Dead wrong,” Louis affirmed with a tone of certainty guaranteed, he hoped, to settle the matter once and for all. “And one other thing, just in parting: perhaps it’s not the best idea to have the boys go addressing you by your first name. I’m not sure that establishes the proper authority in the classroom.”
He wasn’t happy with himself. He admitted that. The situation had called for some delicacy, and instead he’d ridden roughshod over Tracy’s inexperience. He’d come down much too hard, As if to punctuate his distress, snow clouds gathered outside his office window. By nightfall there would be sleet, freezing rain, some kind of ungodly mess. Claire had called to tell him she was coming home early.
Fruitlessly he replayed his postmortem with Tracy, softening the edges, toning down his strident certainties.
“It’s far too early in the year for snow,” Reid announced, materializing in the doorway and startling him from his remorseful meditation. “Here I’m supposed to fly out on Wednesday evening, and the gods are toying with me. They’re just jealous. You’ll never guess what a deal I got on tickets.”
Louis could only stare at him gloomily. Airline tickets were one of Reid’s drearier obsessions; he prided himself on being able to ferret out the most implausibly cheap fares to anywhere in the world. It struck Louis as absurd. Here was a man with considerable funds at his disposal who would nevertheless opt to fly Haitian Air to Chicago by way of Port-au-Prince if it could save him a few dollars. Who found himself, with great regularity, aboard airplanes, usually under the imprimatur of some highly impoverished government’s national airline, whose ashen-faced stewardesses, before takeoff, marched up and down the aisle offering free shots of vodka to any passengers whose nerves needed a bit of bucking up.
This particular trip sounded, in comparison to some of his jaunts, positively straightforward. “Air Pakistan, the London leg of the New York—Karachi flight,” Reid cataloged joyfully. “Then I’ve got a shamelessly inexpensive seat to Warsaw. Lot Air—it’s almost as if they’re paying me for the honor of my company. From there it’s a Bulgarian carrier to Thessaloniki, and then good old Olympia to Athens. All for less than it would take to fly from here to Detroit, not that anyone in their right mind would want to fly to Detroit. I’ll be back in New York Sunday night.”
Louis could only shake his head gloomily. “I can never quite believe you do these things.”
“I told you, it’s a professional meeting,” Reid averred. “I have obligations to my field.”
“You have far too much energy for your own good, is what you have.”
“No,” Reid said. “What I have is a chart inside my head, just a straight line, actually, pointing in both directions, and you know what it says in both directions? Eternity. Infinity. Nonbeing. Nothingness. And in the middle of the line there’s an infinitesimal little dot, and above the little dot it says, This Is Your Life. I think about that all the time.”
His sudden earnestness took Louis aback. How could such candor not unnerve one at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning in the middle of November? “And the Greek Orthodox Church? he found himself wondering.
“I’ll try anything,” Reid admitted. “And furthermore, I’ll give it a serious try. See: I’m a faithfully married man. I’m an adulterer. I’m a devout Christian who is terribly afraid that there’s nothing at all out there except empty space. So there you have it. Nothing but a bundle of co
ntradictions. You, on the other hand, have always struck me as a creature of admirable consistency. I never know how you manage.”
And of course, with that, Reid had fingered him exactly. Outside, a cold wind was blowing up a spell of chaotic weather, but in here, his office, everything was warmth and order. If the actual situation were exactly the reverse of that, what did it matter? Louis could only feel a certain solid satisfaction at hearing his success thus confirmed.
“You have my blessing,” he said generously. “Though I must say, I wouldn’t trade places with you for anything.”
“In three days I’ll be standing in front of the Parthenon. I’ll be making love in a little hotel in the Plaka to a woman I love. I’ll be drinking retsina and feasting on grilled calamari. I’ll be alive.”
He had not thought Reid would remember—and, true to form, he hadn’t. But what did that matter? He would mark this day privately, as he had for the past fifteen years. They tended to honor very different pasts.
In a world where everything changed, the Heidelberg on Main Street had managed, remarkably, to persist. He hardly ever went downtown anymore, though there had been a time in the sixties when he and Jack were quite the regulars at the thriving brauhaus. Entering the restaurant’s dark warmth from the chill of the street, he couldn’t help but push aside, like those heavy protective curtains guarding the portals of certain European churches, a vague feeling of guilt, as though he’d neglected some civic duty. Noon on a weekday, and not a soul stirred in the place except for Ilse-Marie behind the bar. Since he’d last been here she’d grown larger, ruddier; these days her curls’ platinum luster was plainly dyed. Her accent, however, had not changed one whit since she’d arrived in this country.
“Professor,” she greeted him affably. “Grüβ Gott.” She seemed to take his long absence from the premises as a matter of course.
“Grüβ Gott,” he answered, though “Professor” always made him jump a bit.
Hunting trophies stared at him solemnly from the walls. He could not now recall which of those antlered beauties Jack had been responsible for, and though Ilse-Marie would undoubtedly remember, Louis decided he would not ask.
