The Centaur (21 page)

As my father and I strode along the pavement that divided the school side lawn from Hummel’s alley, a little whirlwind sprang up before us and led us along. Leaves long dead and brittle as old butterfly wings, an aqua candy wrapper, flecks and dust and seed-sized snips of gutter chaff all hurried in a rustling revolution under our eyes; a distinctly circular invisible presence outlined itself on the walk. It danced from one margin of grass to another and sighed its senseless word; my instinct was to halt but my father kept striding. His pants
flapped, something sucked my ankles, I closed my eyes. When I looked behind us, the whirlwind was nowhere to be seen.

In the school we parted. A student, I was held by regulations to this side of the wire-reinforced doors. He pushed through and walked down the long hall, his head held high, his hair fluffed from the removal of his blue knit cap, his heels pounding the varnished boards. Smaller and smaller he grew along their perspective; at the far door he became a shadow, a moth, impaled on the light he pressed against. The door yielded; he disappeared. With a grip of sweat, terror seized me.

G
EORGE
W. C
ALDWELL
, teacher, 50.

Mr. Caldwell was born December 21st, 1896, on Staten Island, New York City. His father was the Reverend John Wesley Caldwell, a graduate of Princeton University and the Union Theological Seminary, New York. Upon graduation from the latter place he entered the Presbyterian ministry, making his the fifth generation of clergymen supplied by the Caldwell family to this denomination. His wife, née Phyllis Harthorne, was of Southern extraction, hailing from the near environs of Nashville, Tennessee. To their marriage she not only brought her great personal beauty and charm but the energetic piety characteristic of Southern gentlewomen. Countless parishioners were to stand indebted to her example of devotion and Christian testimony; when, at the tragically early age of forty-nine, her husband was called to move “from
strength to strength” in the Higher Service, it was she who, in the difficult year of his lingering illness, carried on the work of the church, on several Sundays herself mounting into the pulpit.

The couple was blessed with two offspring, of which George was the second. In March of 1900, when George was three, his father resigned his Staten Island pastorate and accepted the call of the First Presbyterian Church of Passaic, New Jersey, at the corner of Grove Street and Passaic Avenue—a splendid structure of yellow limestone still standing and recently enlarged. It was here that for two decades John Caldwell was destined to shed his learning, wry wit, and firmly held faith upon the upturned faces of his flock. So it was that Passaic, of old called Acquackanonk, a gentle river town whose rural beauties were at that time far from eclipsed by the vigor of its industry, came to be the seat of George Caldwell’s rearing.

Many still living in this city remember him as a cheerful boy, adept at all sports and as skilled in retaining friends as at making them. His nickname was “Sticks”—presumably an allusion to an unusual physical thinness. Following his father’s intellectual bent, he showed an early interest in formal science, though in later years he claimed, with the joking modesty so intrinsic to the man, that the height of his ambition was to become a druggist. Fortunately for a generation of Olinger students, Fate decreed otherwise.

Mr. Caldwell’s young manhood was troubled by the premature death of his father and by America’s participation in the First World War. An instinctive and natural patriot, he enlisted in the Headquarters Troop of the Seventy-Eighth Division late in 1917 and narrowly survived, at Fort Dix, the great flu epidemic which was then sweeping the camps. He stood ready, Serial No. 2414792, for overseas duty when the Armistice
was declared; George Caldwell would never again come so close to leaving the continental boundaries of the nation he was to enrich as worker, teacher, churchman, civic leader, son, husband, and father.

In the years following his military discharge, George Caldwell, now—with his sister, who had married—his mother’s sole support, was engaged at a variety of jobs: as a door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias, as the driver of a sightseeing bus in Atlantic City, as athletic supervisor in the Paterson Y. M. C. A., as a railroad fireman on the New York, Susquehanna, and Western Line, and even as a hotel bellhop and restaurant dishwasher. In 1920 he enrolled in Lake College, near Philadelphia, and, with no financial assistance save that engendered by his own efforts, succeeded in graduating with distinction in 1924, having majored in chemistry. While compiling an excellent academic record and sustaining a demanding schedule of part-time employment, he as well earned an athletic scholarship that reduced his tuition by half. For three years a guard on the Lake football varsity, he suffered a broken nose a total of seventeen times, a severely dislocated kneecap twice, and a leg and a collarbone fracture once each. It was there, on the lovely campus whose central jewel is the shining oak-lined lake deemed sacred by the Lenni Lenape (the “Original People”), that he met and was enchanted by Miss Catherine Kramer, whose family were indigenous to the Fire Township region of Alton County. In 1926 the couple married, in Hagerstown, Maryland, and for the next half-decade travelled widely through the Middle Atlantic States including Ohio and West Virginia, George being employed, as cable splicer, by the Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company.

“Blessings come in strange disguises.” In 1931 the national
destiny again intruded upon the personal; due to the economic disturbances sweeping the United States, George Caldwell was dropped from the pay rolls of the industrial giant he had so conscientiously served. He and his wife, who was shortly to enlarge George Caldwell’s responsibilities by another human soul, came to live with her parents, in Olinger, where Mr. Kramer had several years before purchased the handsome white brick house on Buchanan Road presently occupied by Dr. Potter. In the fall of 1933 Mr. Caldwell took up teaching duties at Olinger High School, duties he was never to put down.

How to express the quality of his teaching? A thorough mastery of his subjects, an inexhaustible sympathy for the scholastic underdog, a unique ability to make unexpected connections and to mix in an always fresh and eye-opening way the stuff of lessons with the stuff of life, an effortless humor, a by no means negligible gift for dramatization, a restless and doubting temperament that urged him forward ceaselessly toward self-improvement in the pedagogic craft—these are only parts of the whole. What endures, perhaps, most indelibly in the minds of his ex-students (of whom this present writer counts himself one) was his more-than-human selflessness, a total concern for the world at large which left him, perhaps, too little margin for self-indulgence and satisfied repose. To sit under Mr. Caldwell was to lift up one’s head in aspiration. Though there was sometimes—so strenuous and unpatterned was his involvement with his class—confusion, there was never any confusion that indeed “Here was a man.”

In addition to a full load of extra-curricular school activities, including the coaching of our gallant swimming team, the management of all football, basketball, track and baseball tickets, and the supervision of the Communications Club,
Mr. Caldwell played a giant’s role in the affairs of the community. He was secretary of the Olinger Boosters’ Club, Counsellor to Cub Pack 12, member of the Committee to Propose a Borough Park, vice-president of the Lions and chairman of that service club’s annual light-bulb-selling campaign for the benefit of blind children. During the recent War he was Block Warden and a willing instrument in many aspects of the Effort. Born a Republican and a Presbyterian, he became a Democrat and a Lutheran, and was a staunch contributor to both causes. For many years a deacon and church-council member of the Redeemer Lutheran Church of Olinger, upon recently moving to a charming rural house in Firetown, his wife’s family “homestead,” Mr. Caldwell promptly became a deacon and member of the council of the Firetown Evangelical-Lutheran church body. Such a tabulation by its very nature cannot include the countless nameless works of charity and good will by which he, originally an alien to the town of Olinger, wove himself so securely into its fabric of citizenship and fellowship.

He is survived by a sister, Alma Terrio, of Troy, New York; and by his father-in-law, his wife, and his son, all of Firetown.

A
S
I
LAY
on my rock various persons visited me. First came Mr. Phillips, my father’s colleague and friend, his hair indented by the memory of a shortstop’s cap. He held up his hand for attention and made me play that game which he believed made the mind’s hands quick. “Take two,” he said rapidly,
“add four, multiply by three, subtract six, divide by two, add four, what do you have?”

“Five?” I said, for I had become fascinated by the nimbleness of his lips and so lost track.

“Ten,” he said, with a little rebuking shake of his inflexibly combed head. He was a tidy man in all things, and any sign of poor coördination vexed him. “Take six,” he said, “divide by three, add ten, multiply by three, add four, divide by four, what do you have?”

“I don’t know,” I said miserably. My shirt was eating my skin with fire.

“Ten,” he said, puckering sadly his rubbery mouth. “Let’s get down to business,” he said. He taught social science. “Give me the members of Truman’s cabinet. Remember the magic mnemonic phrase,
ST. WAPNICAL
.”

“State,” I said, “Dean Acheson,” and then I could remember no more. “But truly,” I called, “tell me, Mr. Phillips, you’re his friend. Is it possible? Where can the spirits go?”

“T,” he said, “Thanatos. Thanatos the death-demon carries off the dead. Two and three, Billy boy, easy out, easy out.” He adroitly sidestepped and stooped and snatched it up in his webbing on the short hop. He braced, pivoted in slow motion, and lobbed it over. It was a volley ball and behind me all the mountaintops began to shout. I strained to bat it back over the net but my wrists were chained with ice and brass. The ball grew eyes and a mane of hair like the cornsilk that flows from the bursting ear. Deifendorf’s face moved so close I could smell the tallow on his breath. He was holding his hands so a little lozenge-shaped crevice was formed between the balls of his palms. “What they like, you see,” he said, “is to have you in there. No matter who they are, that’s all they like, you in there working back and forth.”

“It seems so brutal,” I said.

“It’s disgusting,” he agreed. “But there it is. Back and forth, back and forth; nothing else, Peter—kissing, hugging, pretty words—it doesn’t touch them. You have to do it.” He took a pencil into his mouth and showed me how, bending his face into the conjunction of his palms with the pencil sticking, eraser first, from his tartarish teeth. For this moment of tender attention a whole hushed world seemed conjured in the area of his breathing. Then he straightened up, and broke his palms apart, and stroked the two fatnesses of his left palm. “If there’s too much fat here,” he said, “along the inside of the thighs, you’re blocked—you understand?”

“I think so,” I said, furious to scratch my itching arms, where the red shirt was shredding.

“So don’t laugh off the lean pieces,” Deifendorf admonished me, and the dense seriousness of his face repelled me, for I knew it won my father. “You take a skinny kid like Gloria Davis, or one of these big rangy types like Mrs. Hummel—I mean, when a piece like that takes you, you don’t feel so lost. Hey, Peter?”

“What?
What?
”

“Wanna know how to tell if they’re passionate?”

“Yes, I do. I really do.”

He stroked the ball of his thumb lovingly. “Right in here. The mound of Venus. The more there is, the more they are.”

“The more they are what?”

“Don’t be dumb.” He punched me in the ribs so that I gasped. “And another thing. Why doncha get some pants without a yellow stain on the fly?”

He laughed and behind me I could hear all the Caucasus laughing and snapping their towels and flipping their silvery genitals.

Now the town came to visit me, daubed with Indian paint and vague-faced from idle weeping. “
You
remember us,” I said. “How we used to walk up the pike beside the trolley cars, me always hurrying a little to keep up?”

“Remember?” He touched his cheek in confusion, so that dabs of wet clay rubbed off on his fingertips. “There are so many …”

“Caldwell,” I said. “George and Peter. He taught at the high school and when the war was over he was Uncle Sam and led the parade down from the fire hall down the pike, where the trolley tracks used to be.”

“There
was
somebody,” he said, his eyelids trembling in a sleep-walker’s concentration, “a stout man …”

“No, a
tall
man.”

“You all imagine,” he said with sudden vexation, “if you’re here for a year or two, that I … that I … there are thousands. There have been thousands, there will be thousands … First, the People. Then the Welsh, the Quakers, the Germans from the Tulpehocken Valley … and all think that I should remember them. In fact,” he said, “my memory is poor.” And with this confession his face was brightened by a quick smile that, creasing so counter to the earth-colored markings of paint on his face, made me love him for a second even in his weakness. “And the older I get,” he went on, “the more they stretch me, the streets up Shale Hill, the new development toward Alton, the more … I don’t know. The less things seem to matter.”

“He was in the Lions,” I prompted. “But they never made him president. He was on the committee to get a borough park. He was always doing good deeds. He loved to walk up and down the alleys and used to spend a lot of time hanging around Hummel’s Garage, on the corner there.”

His eyes were closed and, following the pattern of his lids, his whole face seemed membranous and distended, flickering with fine veins but rapt as a death-mask is rapt. The daubs of paint glistened where they had not dried. “When did they straighten Hummel’s Alley?” he murmured to himself. “There had been a woodworking shop there, and that man blinded by gas in the trenches in that little shack, and now I see a man coming into the alley … His coat pocket is full of old pens that don’t write …”