Old School by Tobias Wolff Read Free Book Online

and made the hall thunderous with applause and the rhythmic drumming of our feet on the oaken floor. Frost gave a little bow with his head but we kept up the racket and finally his reserve broke. He smiled boyishly and rose partway in his chair and waved his napkin at us like a flag of surrender.
    I was conscious of him throughout the meal and held myself as though he were conscious of me. Some of the other boys at my table also suffered fits of dignity. The atmosphere in the hall had become theatrical. This had everything to do with Frost himself. The element of performance in his bearing—even the business with the napkin, awkward as it seemed, had a calculated quality—charged the room and put us on edge, not at all unpleasantly, as if a glamorous woman had entered the hall.
     
    Frost read to us in the chapel that night. This was unique in my time at the school; the other visitors all spoke in the auditorium. Maybe it was a sign of the headmaster’s special regard, or maybe Frost himself had asked to read there. Certainly it was the most beautiful building in the school, famous, we were often told, for its stained glass windows, plundered from France by some sharp alum. Even at night, weakly lit, the red panes glowed like rubies. The pews creaked as we settled in. We sat somberly in place, staring straight ahead or gawking up into the heights where the arched ceiling vanished in darkness. The iron chandeliers shed just enough light to cast long, medieval shadows and burnish the bronze memorial plaques, the rich woodwork, the plain gold cross on the altar.
    Frost sat with the headmaster in front of the altar, hands on the carved armrests of his chair, his head bowed as if in meditation or prayer, but I was sitting near the front and I caught the gleam of his eye under the heavy white brows. He was watching us watch him. When the headmaster finally stood to make his introduction, Frost gave a start and looked around as if he’d been worlds away, and that finding himself here was a puzzle indeed.
    The headmaster climbed the steps to the pulpit. He was a lanky, long-faced man with a big wen over his right eyebrow. It was a blistery-looking thing and when you first met him you could see nothing else, but he soon distracted you by holding your eyes with his keen, attentive gaze, and by the arresting beauty of his voice. He had a profound bass full of gravel, which he used to good effect and to his own satisfaction. When we made fun of him behind his back we forgot the bump and mimicked his rumbling drawl.
Purcell, you’re not altogether a dull boy, perhaps you can explain what is meant by
peyote solidities,
or
sexless hydrogen . . .
I am trying to understand these words and I am failing, Purcell, I am failing.
    I expected the headmaster to use this moment for a swipe at the Ginsberg-Ferlinghetti crime family, which had a few soldiers among us, though not as many as he feared. He had read their work and affected to see no difference between “Howl” and “A Coney Island of the Mind.” He did, of course. Ferlinghetti didn’t really matter to him, but Ginsberg he hated. Though he disparaged him in aesthetic terms as sloppy and incoherent, what he really detested was his vision of America as a butcher of souls. The headmaster was a democrat and a meliorist. He’d been steadily adding to the number of scholarship boys, and we heard persistent rumors that he was badgering the trustees to lift the ban on black students. Perhaps he sensed in Ginsberg the herald of those descending furies that meliorism made only more rabid, that nothing could satisfy but the death of the imperfect republic whose promises he cherished, and tried to keep. He hid his detestation of Ginsberg in ridicule, quoting him with such simpering, deadly scorn—
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels!
—that it took me many years to figure out that “Howl” was a great poem.
    Whatever his reasons, he feared Ginsberg’s influence on