My Mistake (7 page)

I happen to read this piece, and I think, “It sounds like graduate school!” I know my mother and father look forward to reading
The New Yorker
every week. My mother subscribed to the magazine from its very start, in 1925. I know all the famous pieces that have been published there. There's a kind of call-and-response I've noticed among my elders: When adults say “
The New Yorker,
” other adults say “Hiroshima” or “Silent Spring” or “The Fire Next Time.” But still, in the piece by Wolfe, it's a madhouse of genteel repression, a mild Maoism. Who would want to work there? Me.

 

I've just gotten my Master's degree in English from Hopkins and have decided not to go back to graduate school. Instead, I'll teach English at the George School, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, come September. But for the summer I'm living in Nyack and working nearby as a toll taker on the New York State Thruway, at the Spring Valley toll barrier. I with my Master's and its focus on Romantic Poetry. The regular toll takers are mostly retired cops, on half-pay pensions for life and supplementing that income. The contempt they have for the public, especially the Jews who drive up by the vanful from the Bronx and Brooklyn every Friday before sunset to go to their resorts and bungalows in the Catskills, is impressive. “Here come the Bronx Indians!” they yell to each other starting around 4 p.m. “Vitch vay to deh mountings?” they ask each other. “Same vay last veek,” they answer. “No, no—
kveek
-vay,
kveek-
vay!” (There is some kind of shortcut off the Thruway farther north.) “Kveek-vay also same vay last veek.”

The work is so boring, especially when I'm on the side that just gives out the tickets rather than receiving tolls and making change, that I start handing the tickets out by reaching around behind my back. Most of the “patrons” seem to enjoy this tiny variation. Some express annoyance. Men in a hurry.

Speaking of which, it is my sexist observation/conclusion that men have their tolls ready and women do not. Many females root around in their purses, which are often lying on the passenger seat beside them. One of the other toll takers says that they are rummaging around in there looking for the male private parts they don't have. He doesn't put it exactly that way.

Some patrons don't bother with tolls at all: Every now and then over the summer, gypsies arrive at the barrier and make up complicated stories about having lost their toll coupons or whatever. It's not worth pulling over a caravan of four or five trailers and old-fashioned wagons, so they are generally allowed to go on through.

One toll taker's nickname is Vampira. Nobody knows anything about her. She always takes the midnight-to-8 a.m. shift, is skeletally thin, chalk pale, and hardly ever says a word to anyone.

As I've said, it will occur to me when I'm seventy, as I sit waiting for yet more medical tests—a PET scan and a simulation for some high-tech radiation treatments—that inhaling all that car exhaust may not have caused me to get lung cancer but it wasn't exactly preventive, either. Especially as emissions standards were a thing of the distant future. On a hot, still July day at the Spring Valley toll plaza, the air felt, smelled, and tasted like vaporized, rancid butter infused with gasoline fumes.

Sometimes the endless procession of automobiles strikes me as a march of monsters along a wide swath of flat, man-made insult to nature. Cars begin to take on a surreal implausibility—tons of metal often, usually, carrying a single human being oblivious of the peculiarity of the dreadful mechanical complexities his species' overgrown frontal lobe has wrought. The traffic parade also reminds me of my time as a waiter at the Guest Camp, with the guests sitting and eating all at the same time—seventy, eighty, a hundred of them at long tables of ten, working their jaws, spooning up soup, forking London broil. I would sit on the porch rail and watch, and the scene would turn into a Boschian nightmare. To this day, I sometimes divide people psychologically into those who have waited on tables and those who haven't.

 

Twenty-three to twenty-six

 

The kids—boys and girls—who go to the George School, in Bucks County, sometimes seem radically bereft to me. No matter how you try to dress it up in the garments of a good Quaker education, an idyllic campus, good athletic facilities, and so on, these kids have been sent away to school. I swear you can see sadness in their faces when they don't know you're looking. And you know how lucky you were to have stayed home—even a home with Problems—in a home worth staying home in.

But that may just be me, projecting like a modern-day Imax my own separation anxiety of such long duration. I will never be close to completely rid of it. And many if not most of the kids are no doubt better off away from home. Every now and then I get a small hint of real trouble in their families.

Teaching composition to undergraduates at Hopkins was one thing—basically technical, well suited to my nearly inborn deep grammatical structure, no in-loco-parentis expectations—and teaching fourteen-year-olds is another. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm boring. As I write this, I can't remember what books we read, what kinds of papers I assigned, or very much about the individual students, although a few non-academic moments have stayed with me.

One: An Ethiopian exchange student, brand new to this school and this country, reports for outdoor phys ed in a ribbed white undershirt and white Jockey briefs.

Another: A wily kid offers to exchange a pretty good tape recorder for the prized '52 Series Fender Telecaster I got for my sixteenth birthday. I don't realize the inequity of this swap, but it doesn't matter, because I wasn't ever going to play the electric guitar anyway. It was a momentary passion that my indulgent parents indulged. The kid apologizes to me later, and I tell him to forget about it.

Another: A young teacher friend of mine gets a senior girl in trouble and marries her.

Another: A smart and lovely senior girl gets what I call now a “structural crush” on me and looks me up in New York after she graduates and turns eighteen.

Another: I launch a literary magazine, and we announce it at a school-wide assembly by means of a funny and iconoclastic skit I write, involving students standing up in the audience and proclaiming their authorial genius, or denouncing the whole project as propaganda, or reading awful poetry.

Another: I take one of the poems I've been writing and submitting in vain to
The New Yorker
and copy it and give it, without a byline, to one of my classes to criticize and analyze—this occurs when the head of the English Department happens to be attending the class. Observation. The students pick it apart, and I join in the general disparagement, pointing out affectations and lame tropes and sentimentality. When I tell them, at the end of the class, that I wrote it, they—and my boss—are delighted.

But I find the sequestered and bucolic life of a boarding-school teacher stifling. I eat all my meals with students, I am the resident in a small dorm, and I can't see the girl I'm going out with as much as I'd like; she's taking acting classes in Manhattan. After four years at Swarthmore and two at Hopkins, I keenly miss New York and Nyack. So I apply for and get a job teaching at the Collegiate School, on the Upper West Side.

 

Collegiate, the oldest private school in America, differs as much from the George School as public school in Nyack did from the Little Red School House. And there are no girls. The students are more worldly and streetwise. They go home at night after carousing through the bars with fake IDs. Many are the sons of rich people and professors and attorneys. There is a Bronfman there, an Ausubel, a Dupee, a Kristol, a Bartos. A contingent of black and Hispanic kids descend from Manhattan's upper, poorer reaches and attend Collegiate on scholarship, under a program called ABC—A Better Chance. They're usually among the best athletes in the school, and they sometimes manage to form friendships with the privileged boys, but more often don't. The Castilian-speaking Spanish teacher flunks a Puerto Rican kid in Spanish I.

The students have to wear jackets and ties. The ties grow very wide and floral. This is 1966, 1967, 1968, after all. The pupils (the parts of the eye, I mean) are often similarly wide. When I first arrive, I laugh when the students in my classes call me “Sir”—as they are required to do. After a while I come to like it. On my third day, I hear a usage of the word that I like even more and that contains an inadvertent compliment, about my work and about my looks. A kid says to me in passing, in the hall, “Are you in that new Sir's class? He teaches English. I hear he's going to be pretty good.” I say, “I am in one of the new Sir's classes. I'm in all of them, because I'm the new Sir. So thank you.” The kid says, “Wow! You look too young to be a Sir, Sir.”

The smarter students feel free to argue with teachers about anything. In a doctrinaire way—I should know better but am feeling my authority more confidently at this point—I talk about Macduff's sterling character in
Macbeth,
and one of the boys is able to fluster me by citing a far more negative interpretation of his motives from a respected critic. My second year at the school, I teach an Advanced Placement course in American Literature and assign readings from the Puritans, especially Jonathan Edwards, to Hawthorne to Melville to Poe to James to Hemingway, with some stops in between. The students complain about the workload and the tediousness of the Puritan material, and the Headmaster, Carl Andrews, talks to me about it, and I feel a little abashed, as if I have somehow been showing off with this ambitious curriculum. But I keep on with it, too embarrassed to stop. Not knowing exactly how to stop. But also how much I myself have learned out of doggedness.

The students in the class are seniors. The next year, when coming back to Collegiate to visit, three or four of them, mostly the whiniest, tell me how helpful the course was in their college English classes—which is not only a compliment but a reaffirmation of the delayed gratifications of persistence.

In that senior class, on Parents' Day, I criticize the Introduction to James's
Daisy Miller
as being more biographical than literarily enlightening. One of the visiting fathers comes up to me when the class is over and says how much he enjoyed the class. I ask him which his son is. “Tony,” he says. That would be Tony Dupee. Which means that the man thanking me is F. W. Dupee, one of the leading American Literature scholars in the world. So the compliment grows even more rewarding. Until I remember that it was Professor Dupee who wrote that Introduction. My mistake.

“Don't worry,” he says as I redden. “It was a really good class and your criticism made sense. Although I can't help defending myself—that's the trouble with academics. I
meant
the Introduction to be biographical, for those who were reading the book—and maybe James—for the first time.”

 

My brother Mike has graduated from law school at the University of Virginia. Law school has made him more studious and somber. He gets serious about the girlfriend who soon ends up his wife and never tells intimate stories about her. Well, maybe a little, at the start. He begins to criticize my immaturities, which are many, in a more sober way. When he's hired by a fancy law firm in New York—Davis, Polk—courtesy of a UVA Law professor who took a liking to him and overlooked his just-shy-of-stellar grades, he finds the work overwhelmingly difficult and tells me glumly that he doesn't think he will ever be made a partner there. He is starting to carry the weight of adulthood, in other words, and in doing so once again shows me the way. I don't like the way and don't follow it—I don't want to have any part of this weightiness. I'm teaching at Collegiate and still want my summers off, my work hours limited, my personal life “free.” And I want Mike to be my brother as he has always been, when we were kids and teenagers and undergraduates. I want time to stop for us. I'm jealous of his relationship with his wife. I think I'm losing him, and in a way I am. This is Mike's hardest fraternal task—putting a stop to my childhood. He succeeds, ultimately, but in a way so devastating to me and my family that I think the worst villain would not have willed it to happen.

It's Thanksgiving of 1967, and we're playing touch football before dinner with some Grace cousins from Boston on the front lawn of the house in Nyack. It's a pure fall day, with the Hudson all blue and white, the tree branches vascular-looking in their bareness, and the air as clean and clear as alcohol. Mike's wife and my girlfriend are standing on the sidelines. Before the game starts, I try to tease him about something, and when he doesn't respond, I grab him around the waist and try to wrestle him to the ground. He shakes me off and says, “Why don't you grow up?” I'm embarrassed and angry.

The game begins, with me and Mike against the Graces. Because he has bad knees and has already had surgery on one of them, Mike plays the more static lineman position and I play backfield. Still consciously smarting from his scolding, I finally say, “I'm tired. You play backfield for once.” My mistake. Mike says, “You know I can't.” I say, “Your precious knees will be fine.” He says OK. On the very first play, he jumps to try to knock down a pass and comes down with one of his legs all twisted up. It buckles beneath him and he tears a knee ligament. He is furious, and his wife glares at me. I'm covered with remorse and apologize to them. Mike hobbles through the rest of the holiday and has surgery in the first week of December.

On the day after the surgery, in Brooklyn, Carl Andrews walks into my classroom at Collegiate and tells me to call my parents at the hospital in Brooklyn where Mike was operated on. I go out of the classroom and dial, then stand there, next to the wall phone, listening to my mother try, without crying, to tell me that something has gone wrong. And that same dreadful feeling of cold and abandonment which descended on me in Grand Central Terminal fifteen years earlier descends on me again. In this terror, I'm surprised to feel my knees go weak—I didn't know it ever really happened, outside of metaphor.