Fame & Folly (10 page)

He was, besides, short and ovoid, with short active fingers like working pencil erasers. His pale eyes were small and shy; but they had a rapid look, akin to hiding—a kind of skip, a quickstep of momentary caution. We stood at the blackboard in a mostly empty classroom, doodling with the chalk. The veterans, those wearily cynical old men, began straggling in, swallowing up the rows of chairs, while Chester and I made tentative tugs at each other’s credentials.
He identified himself as a writer. Ordinarily I was skeptical about such claims; high school had already proved the limitations of the so-called “flair.” He told me the name of his high school. I told him the name of mine. I knew without his mentioning it that he had arrived by subway from Brooklyn: I knew it because he had one of the two varieties of Brooklyn speech I could recognize. The first was exceedingly quick; the other was exceedingly slow, dragging out the vowels. Chester’s talk sped, the toe of the next sentence stumbling over the heel of the last. A flying fleck of spittle landed on my chin: he was an engine of eagerness. I was, in those days, priggishly speech-conscious, having been subdued by the Shavian Pygmalions of my high school Speech Department, under whose fierce eyes, only a couple of weeks earlier, I had delivered the graduating address. These zealous teachers, missionaries of the glottis and diaphragm, had effectively suppressed the miscreant Northeast Bronx dentalizations of Pelham Bay—a fragrant nook of meadows and vacant lots overgrown with cattails and wild flowers, archaeologically pocked with the ruins of old foundations: building starts cut off by the Depression, and rotting now into mossy caverns. I lived at the subway’s lowest vertebra—the end of the Pelham Bay line; but the ladies of the Speech Department (all three of whom had nineteenth-century literary names, Ruby, Olive, Evangeline) had turned me into a lady, and severed me forever from the hot notes of New York. Chester, rapidfire, slid up and down those notes—not brashly, but minstrel-like, ardent, pizzicato. I saw into him then—a tender, sheltered, eager child. And also: an envious hungry writing beast, and not in embryo. In short, he was myself, though mine was the heavier envy, the envy that stung all the more, because Chester was sixteen and I was not.

The veterans were invisible. We dismissed them as not pertinent. What
was
pertinent was this room and what would happen in it. Here were the veterans, who were invisible; here was a resentful young woman who was to vanish within the week; here was Chester; and Mr. Emerson; and myself, the only surviving female. The young woman who deserted complained that Mr.
Emerson never acknowledged her, never called on her to speak, even when her hand was conspicuously up. “Woman hater,” she spat out, and ran off to another course section. What it came to, then, when you subtracted the veterans, was three. But since Mr. Emerson was what he was—a force of nature, a geological fault, a gorge, a thunderstorm—what it came to, in reality, was two. For Chester and for me, whatever it might have been for the veterans in their tedious hordes, there was no “freshman composition.” A cauldron, perhaps; a cockpit. Chester and I were roped-off roosters; or a pair of dogs set against each other—pitbulls; or gladiators obliged to fight to the death. All this was Mr. Emerson’s scheme—or call it his vise or toy—arbitrarily settled on after the first assignment: a character study, in five hundred words.

On the day the papers were returned, Mr. Emerson ordered me to stand in front of the class—in front of Chester, in effect—and read aloud what I had written. There was an explicit format for these essays: an official tablet had to be purchased at the university book store, with blanks to fill in. Then the sheets had to be folded in half, to make a rectangle. The face of the rectangle was for the instructor’s grade and comment.

“Read that first sentence!” Mr. Emerson bawled.

I looked down at my paper. There was no grade and no comment.

“ ‘Gifford was a taciturn man,’ ” I read.

“Louder! Wake up those sleeping soldiers back there! And keep in mind that I’m a man who’s deaf in one ear. What’s that goddamn adjective?”

“Taciturn.”

“Where’d you swipe it from?”

“I guess I just thought of it,” I said.

“Picked it up someplace, hah? Well, what in hell’s it
mean?
”

It was true that I had only recently learned this word, and was putting it to use for the first time.

“Does it mean quiet?” I choked out.

“Don’t ask
me
, miss. I’m the one that’s supposed to do the goddamn asking.”

“I think it means quiet.”

“You think!
I
think you got it out of some trash heap. Read on,” he commanded.

He let me continue, quavering, for another paragraph or so. Then his arm shot out like a Mussolini salute.

“All right, miss. Sit! Now you! Chester!”

Chester stood. The somnolent veterans were surprised into alertness: they stared across at the ringmaster and his livestock. Now the rapid Brooklyn voice began—a boy’s voice, a boy’s throat. The little pink lips—that rosy bouquet—stretched and pursed, looped and flattened. Chester read almost to the end; Mr. Emerson never interrupted. Humiliated, concentrating, I knew what I was hearing. Behind that fragile mouth, dangerous fires curled: a furnace, a burning bush. The coarse cap of false orange-yellow hair shook—it narrowed Chester’s forehead, lifted itself off his nape, wobbled along the tops of his ears. He was bold, he was rousing, he was loud enough for a man deaf in one ear. It was ambition. It was my secret self.

“That’s enough. Sit, Chester!” Mr. Emerson yelled. “Gentlemen, you’ll never find a woman who can write. The ladies can’t do it. They don’t have what it takes, that’s well known. It’s universal wisdom, and I believe in it. All the same,” he said, “these two, Chester and the lady, I’m not the fool that’s going to let them drop back into the pond with the catfish.”

After that Chester and I had separate writing assignments—separate, that is, from the rest of the class. Mr. Emerson may have been a woman hater, but it was the veterans he declined to notice and looked to snub. His teaching (if that is what it was) was exclusively for the two of us. It was for our sakes—“that plumber,” he sneered—that he disparaged Walt Whitman. It was for our sakes that he devoted minutes every day—irascible still, yet reverential—to praising
Brideshead Revisited
, the Evelyn Waugh bestseller he was reading between classes. And sometimes
in
class: while the veterans slid down in their seats like a silent communal pudding, Mr. Emerson opened to where he had left off and fell into a dry recital:

Dry, but there was a suppressed rapture in it—rapture for the brass lever, for the water colours (in their transporting British spelling) dimmed by steam. It was clear that Mr. Emerson himself, an unhappy man with tired eyes—they often teared—did not like the modern world; perhaps he would not have liked any world, even one with picturesque coal fires. In the grip of some defenseless fatigue, he gave way to fits of yawning. His snarl was inexhaustible; also comically unpredictable. He took a sardonic pleasure in shock. Certainly he shocked me, newly hatched out of the decorous claims of Hunter High (finishing-school-cum-Latin-prep), where civilization hung on the position of a consonant struck upon the upper gums (never against the teeth), and mastery of the ablative absolute marked one out for higher things. Mr. Emerson said “God damn,” he said “hell,” he even alluded, now and then, to what I took to be sexual heat.

It was not that I was ignorant of sexual heat: I had already come upon it in the
Aeneid
; there it was, in Dido and Aeneas. Dido on her pyre, burning for love! And here it was again, between Agnes and Gerald in the dell, in
The Longest Journey
, the early E. M. Forster novel that was included in our freshman composition curriculum. The first paragraphs alone—well before sexual heat made its appearance—were undiluted pleasure:

None of this was familiar in the spring of 1946; E. M. Forster was an unknown name, at least to me; philosophy lay ahead; nothing was solid. Rickie and Ansell were lost in Mr. Emerson’s mercurial derisions. For years afterward I remembered only Rickie’s limp. Much later I began to read
The Longest Journey
over and over again, until ultimately I had certain passages by heart. In class it was hardly discussed at all. It appeared to hold no interest for Mr. Emerson, and Chester and I never spoke of it. It was not what we read that counted for Mr. Emerson, anyhow; it was what we wrote. Chester and I wrote—were intended to write—as rivals, as yoked competitors under the whip. “Got you that time, didn’t she? Made you look small, didn’t she?” he chortled at Chester; and, the following week, to me: “Males beat females, it’s in the nature of things. He’s got the stuff, the genuine shout. He’s wiped you out to an echo, miss, believe me.” Sometimes he made no comment at all, and gave back our papers, along with the weekly work of the rest of the class, with no more than a cocky glare. That left us stymied; there was no way to find out who had won over the other. Since Mr. Emerson never graded what Chester and I turned in (he routinely graded the others), the only conclusion was that we were both unworthy. And the next week he would be at it again: “She knocked you off your high horse, hah, Chester?” Or: “You’d better quit, miss. You’ll never be in the running.” All that term we were—Chester and I—a pair of cymbals, ringing and
striking in midair; or two panting hares, flanks heaving, in a mad marathon; or a couple of legs-entangled wrestlers in a fevered embrace. It was as if—for whatever obscure reason—Mr. Emerson were some sly, languid, and vainglorious Roman emperor presiding over the bloody goings-on in the Colosseum of his classroom, with the little green buds of Washington Square Park just beginning to unfold below the college windows.

What came out of it, beside a conflagration of jealousy, was fraternity. I loved Chester; he was my brother; he was the first real writer of my generation I had ever met, a thing I knew immediately—it was evident in the increasingly rococo noise of his language, and in Mr. Emerson’s retributive glee. If promoting envy was Mr. Emerson’s hidden object in instigating the savagery of Chester’s competitiveness with me, and mine with him, it is conceivable that it was his own envy Mr. Emerson suffered from, and was picking at. It is not unheard-of for older would-be writers to be enraged by younger would-be writers. The economy of writing always operates according to a feudal logic: the aristocracy blots out all the rest. There is no, so to speak, middle class. The heights belong, at most, to four or five writers, a princely crew; the remainder are invisible, or else have the partial, now-and-then visibility that attaches to minor status. Every young writer imagines only the heights; no one aspires to be minor or invisible, and when, finally, the recognition of where one stands arrives, as it must, in maturity, one either accepts the limitations of fate or talent, or surrenders to sour cynicism. Whether Mr. Emerson was embittered by chances lost or hope denied, or by some sorrowful secret narrowing of his private life, it was impossible to tell. Whichever it was, it threw Chester and me, red in tooth and claw, into each other’s arms. It also made us proud: we had been set aside and declared to be of noble blood. (All this, of course, may be retrospective hubris. Perhaps Mr. Emerson saw us as no more than what we were: a couple of literary-minded freshmen whose strenuousness an attentive teacher was generously serving and cultivating.)

We took to walking up and down Fourth Avenue in the afternoons, the two of us, darting into one after another of those rows
and rows of second-hand book stores the long straight street was famous for. The cheapest books were crammed into sidewalk racks under awnings, to protect them from the rain. It seemed always to be raining that spring, a tenderly fickle drizzle and fizz that first speckled and then darkened the pavement and made Chester hood the crown of his head with his jacket. We drilled into back rooms and creaked down wooden basement steps; everywhere those thousands of books had the sewery smell of cellar—repellent, earthen, heart-catching. In these dank crypts, with their dim electric bulbs hanging low on wires over tables heaped with comatose and forgotten volumes, and an infinity of collapsing shelves along broken-plastered brick walls labeled
“THEOSOPHY,” “HISTORY,” “POETRY”
(signs nailed up decades back, faded and curled by dampness), one could loiter uninterrupted forever. The proprietor was somewhere above, most likely on a folding chair in the doorway, hunched over a book of his own, cozily insulated from the intrusions of customers, bothering nobody and hoping not to be bothered himself. Gradually the cellar smells would be converted, or consecrated, into a sort of blissful incense; nostrils that flinched in retreat opened to the tremulous savor of books waiting to be aroused, and to arouse. Meandering in the skinny aisles of these seductive cellars, Chester and I talked of our childhoods, and of our noses. I admired Chester’s nose and deplored my own. “Yours isn’t so bad, just a little wide,” he said kindly. He told me of his long-ago childhood disease; he did not name it, though he explained that because of it he had lost all his hair. He did not say that he wore a wig.