In God We Trust (27 page)

Miss Bryfogel would read poetry to us, as my classmates, clods to a man, dozed fitfully. But I, love buds a-tingle, eyes misty, wept with her over
Evangeline
and
Old Ironsides
. I had
only one way to tell her of my love. To speak to her through our mutual secret language, the one thing other than insane passion we shared together—the Book Report.

Perhaps it is because we are a nation that, almost to the last individual, spent the greater part of its youth sweating over the accursed book report that we have become in our adulthood a nation of book-review readers. What is a book review but merely an overblown book report? And we all half suspect that, like our book reports of our dim past, the book reviewers rarely bother actually to read the books. We instinctively admire their suave fakery, their artful dodging, their expansive self-congratulatory phraseology, their mellifluous padding. We have been through it, too, and we know good trickery when we see it.

Miss Bryfogel placed great importance on our weekly reports. Early in the semester she had issued a mimeographed sheet to us, called the Suggested Reading List, from which we drew our ammunition.

I was never a stylist, but I felt that sincerity and neatness, as well as meticulous spelling and ample margins would get my subtle message through.

As far as my actual reading went, I ran heavily toward
The Outdoor Chums
, which my Aunt Glenn persisted in giving me,
Flash Gordon Meets Ming The Merciless
, and
Popular Mechanics
. And three ancient copies of G-8
And His Battle Aces
, which I had re-read at least seventy-four times, getting more from their rich mosaic at every reading. However, these were not Reportable.

And so, every week was sheer torture as I phonied and nervously mocked up my Friday report. The books themselves were taken from the public library, and were doled out to us by Miss Easter. Miss Easter was a kindly, thin, ancient lady who had been born wearing a pair of gold-rimmed bifocals and with a full head of blue-gray hair, a true dedicated librarian; an alert protector of the morals of the young. I recall vividly one hellish week trying to read four consecutive words of something called
Ivanhoe
which had been highly recommended by both Miss Easter and my true Heart-Wound.

My reports themselves actually ran to a sort of form. For example:

Or,

I felt strongly that unqualified applause for any book on the Suggested Reading List would convey to Miss Bryfogel my deep feelings about the books she read, and also would net me at least a C.

My love grew from Friday to Friday, and little did I realize that disaster was drawing closer and closer by the hour. Trouble invariably sneaks up behind on little cats’ feet; soft and innocent and shadowy. And it quite often results from an attempt to better oneself, to raise the sights, to elevate the standards, to break through into a clearer, brighter world.

Miss Bryfogel continually encouraged something she called “Outside Reading,” which meant books not on the official list.
Miss Easter had a vast file of these desirable Non-official Official books at her command. She worked hand in glove with all the Miss Bryfogels at the Warren G. Harding School, ceaselessly striving to push back the frontiers of Barbarism and Ignorance and to raise high the fluttering banners of Culture. And in Hohman, Indiana, that is not an easy task. Amid the dark, swirling mists exhaled by the Blast Furnace, the Coke Plant, and the Oil Refinery, Miss Easter quietly brooded over acres of silent kids hunched over
The Lady of the Lake
and
David Copperfield
in her brightly lit island of fantasy and dreams—her library.

On several occasions I had gone the treacherous route of the Outside Reading. It was dangerous, and usually stupendously boring. But already I had mastered the art of manufacturing an entire book report from two paragraphs selected at random, plus a careful reading of the dust jacket, a system which still earns a tidy living for many a professional reviewer.

However, the library was not the only source of books available to the probing mind. There was home. And in my instance, the bookcase in the dining room, filled to bursting with my father’s precious collection of bad books. We did not subscribe to Literary magazines. I doubt whether my father had ever read a book review in his entire life, if he even knew they existed, so hence he read for pure pleasure and ran heavily to
The Claw of Fu Manchu, The Canary Murder Case, The Riders of the Purple Sage
, and the complete exploits of Philo Vance. At least these were the books that he kept in the dining-room bookcase. I never really associated them with book reports. They were just Stories, and book reports were about Books.

There were other volumes that were kept around the house, were not talked about much, but were just there. Not many, just a few mysterious books kept in my parents’ bedroom, or in the closet. No one ever said we shouldn’t read them. They were just kept out of our way. For as long as I could remember there had been this thick green-covered, bulky book on the bottom shelf of my mother’s end table. It had been there so long and was so much a part of the scenery that it wasn’t a book any
more; just a Thing. It was always there. I had opened it maybe twice in my entire life—tiny print, incomprehensible; just a book. Until that pivotal day when everything changed.

It was a chill, dark, lowering afternoon. Faint puffs of oily wind bearing the essence of Phillips 66 and the Number-One Open Hearth through the gaunt trees, and under the eaves. I was home alone. And itchy.

These are dangerous conditions, known to us all. Ranging through the empty house, looking for something to do, somewhere to light, chewing a salami sandwich, I homed in inevitably to the Fountain of Evil. I rarely went into my parents’ bedroom, because it was somehow off my main beat. Nothing Freudian or Victorian; it just wasn’t where my action was. However, as the barometer fell and my itch increased, I drifted in past the brass bed, just looking. Drawn.

The how and why of the exact instant the Book came into my hands I do not clearly recall, and perhaps even that fact is significant. I somehow knew without even being told that it was wrong. I somehow knew that what I was doing was vaguely on the other side of the line. Our instincts run deep.

I dragged the book, my ears acutely alert for footsteps on the porch, into the bathroom and began my descent into iniquity and degradation.

The title of the book meant nothing to me. I had not seen it on Miss Easter’s shelves, nor on Miss Bryfogel’s Selected lists, but it was thick and had small print, so I figured it must be good. Or at least Official. Not only that, it had a foreign name, and anyone who has ever gone to school knows that any book with a foreign name is Important.

Well, I hadn’t read four sentences when I realized that I had in my hands the golden key to Miss Bryfogel’s passionate heart. Not only was this book almost totally incomprehensible, it was about friars and abbots, counts and countesses, knight errants, kings and queens, and a lot of Italians. It also had pictures, woodcuts that reminded me of other Important books that Miss Bryfogel spoke highly of. In accordance with my usual practice of book reporting, I looked through the Table of Contents to
pick out something specific to read and to quote in case of embarrassing questions.

I had never seen a Table of Contents like this before. It was listed:

“Day The First”

“Day The Second”

“Day The Third”

and under that heading something caught my eye:

Well, this was a natural, since I knew what “dumb” meant. There were plenty of dumb kids in my class. And Mrs. Kissel, next door, had a garden. I was on home grounds.

I plowed ahead, and the more I struggled to read the more I realized that this was good for at least a B+. My senses alert to sounds in the driveway, I forged into unknown territory. There was something about that story that drew me on like some gigantic magnet hauling an atom of iron with its unseen, mysterious force field. Does the iron understand magnetism? Did I understand what went on in the convent? As the gardener lieth with the abbess?

I somehow got the idea that an abbess was either a safety patrol lady or some kind of bad tooth. But there was something about it! I could not lay it down. And I began, mysteriously, to sweat, a telltale cold clamminess.

The stories didn’t exactly end. Not like
The Outdoor Chums
, where Dan, the bully, shakes his fist at Will, the fun-loving Chum, and, retreating in his cowardly way, surrounded by his toadies, says:

“Will, and all the rest of you Outdoor Chums—I’ll get you yet! Just wait and see!” Brandishing his clenched fist in the air while the Outdoor Chums laughed gaily, mounted their electric
canoe, and headed for camp. No, these stories didn’t exactly end. They just petered out. But I was hooked.

Steamily, itchily, I read on and on and on. And on. The house grew darker and colder, the winds were rising. On the far-off horizon the night shift took over in the vast, sinister steel mills. The skies glowed as the Blast Furnaces and the Bessemer Converters painted the clouds a dull red and orange. My eyes ached throbbingly, my throat was dry and parched. I read of maidens and virgins, nightingales and cuckolds—a small, yellowish, canary-like bird. Finally, palsied with fatigue, a changed man, I carefully replaced the green volume in its regular spot and went into the kitchen to knock together another salami sandwich. It was a good afternoon’s work. Wait till Miss Bryfogel sees what great books I’m reading now.

It was one of the very few times I ever looked forward to getting to work on a book report. It was Thurday and next day was of course our day of reckoning.

After supper I scrunched over the kitchen table, my blue-lined tablet with its Indian Chief cover before me, my Wearever fountain pen clutched in my cramped claws. I began my love offering to Miss Bryfogel.

“The Decameron of Boccaccio
, by Giovanni Boccaccio.” I thought carefully, my mind humming like a well-oiled clock, toying with phrases, rejecting, and finally selecting the opening line:

(I figured this was a nice touch, since I knew Miss Bryfogel liked birds.) Gathering steam, I went on:

I leaned back and re-read my masterpiece. It was good, the best work I had ever done. My mother, hunched over the sink in her Chinese-red chenille bathrobe, doing the dishes, was vaguely humming “When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day.” At that time she was deep in her Bing Crosby period. The kitchen was warm, my stomach was full, and Life was complete.

Friday dawned bright and clear, a perfect gem of a morning. I floated to the Warren G. Harding School with that high exhilarated feeling of a man who has his homework in his notebook and the world in his hand. Birds sang, milkmen whistled, and I could hardly wait for Miss Bryfogel and Six-B English. Now she would know. She could not mistake my devotion for a mere passing whim.

Miss Bryfogel that afternoon sat at her desk looking even more unattainable, elusive, and sultry than ever before. Her opening remarks followed her classic pattern:

“Pass your book reports up to the front and open your books to page seventy-eight.”

Ahead of me Simonson shoved his smudgy scrap of paper, bearing the title
Sam, The Young Shortstop
. From behind me Helen Weathers poked my ear with
Lassie Come Home
, and I, violins playing pianissimo in my soul, added my magnificent epistle to their scrubby lot. Miss Bryfogel simply stacked the book reports together, shoved them in a drawer, and we went to work on gerunds.

At long last my heavenly tryst with Miss Bryfogel ended. The bell rang, and caressing her lovingly with my burning, myopic eyes I drifted out into the hall, knowing that the trap was
set. She had a whole weekend to think about me and our life together. Now that she knows the Higher Things to which I aspire, the pinnacles I have conquered, there can be no stopping us!

Saturday and Sunday flew by on the wings of ecstasy. And then Monday—blessed Monday. It was the first time in the recorded history of education in the state of Indiana that a normal, red-blooded, Male kid ever sprang out of bed at 7
A.M
., a full fifteen minutes early, and took off for school without so much as a single whine.