Old School by Tobias Wolff Read Free Book Online Page B

years ago, in England. I expect you boys know about homesickness. It’s called “Mending Wall.”
    He lowered his eyes to read and George wilted back into the pew.
    Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun . . .
    He picked his way slowly through the first line, as if the thought were just occurring to him, and then his dry voice filled like a sail and became good-humored and natural and young. When his farmer said
Spring is the mischief in me
I smiled, because I’d already felt the mischief at work in him as he came alive in the warm day, carrying stones to the wall, watching his neighbor do the same, struck by the pointlessness of their labor and unable to resist teasing his neighbor about it. I had read the poem and thought I understood it: All walls should come down. But in Frost’s voice the scene became newly vivid, and I caught something I’d missed; that for all the narrator’s ironic superiority, the neighbor had his truth too. The image of him moving in the shadows
like an old-stone savage armed
—he himself was a good reason to have a wall, the living proof of his own argument that good fences make good neighbors. Maybe something doesn’t like a wall, but take it down at your peril.
    Frost was good at masking his eyes under those hanging brows, but now and then I saw him shift his gaze from the page to us without losing a word. He wasn’t reading; he was reciting. He knew these poems by heart yet continued to make a show of reading them, even to the extent of pretending to lose his place or have trouble with the light.
    His awkwardness took nothing from his poems. It removed them from the page and put them back in the voice, a speculative, sometimes cunning, sometimes faltering voice. In print, under his great name, they had the look of inevitability; in his voice you caught the hesitation and perplexity behind them, the sound of a man brooding them into being.
    Frost read on, poem after poem, until the underclassmen began to cough and set their pews groaning. Then he raised his head and took us in. You boys are champion sitters, he said. You’ve got
Sitzfleisch,
as our great new friends the Germans would say. That’s enough for one night, eh? Maybe just one more—what do you think—for your man Kellogg. Yes? All right then. I have just the poem here. I believe Mr. Kellogg knows it.
    Still looking at us, Frost recited “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Then he gathered his books and pages while we applauded. The headmaster went up the steps, conferred with Frost, came down again and raised his hand for silence. Mr. Frost, he said, had agreed to take a few questions, if we had any.
    I had some. How did he know he was a good writer for all those years when nobody else knew? What did it feel like to write something really great? Why did he choose George’s poem?
    Sir, if I may . . .
    I looked around. It was Mr. Ramsey. He was standing in his pew. Even in this dimness his chubby cheeks showed their youthful English bloom. Mrs. Ramsey was plucking at something on her sleeve. He had married her four years earlier right out of some southern women’s college where he’d taught after leaving Oxford. She was just a freshman at the time, and Mr. Ramsey lost his job and brought her north to Putney and then to us. Mrs. Ramsey worked in the library and never lacked for boys willing to help. She wore her honey-colored hair in long girlish braids, and smelled good, and her voice was low and pleasantly southern. She had a teasing manner, and looked at us as if she knew what we were thinking.
    When they arrived, two years back, she was still in love with Mr. Ramsey. We could all see it. She hung on his voice, quoted his pronouncements. Lately this had changed. Since October I’d been assigned to their dinner table, and seen her look bored while Mr. Ramsey went on about something. On occasion she turned away while he