Teacher by Mark Edmundson Read Free Book Online Page B

ozone. He saw the boys all looking pretty much alike, with our modest bangs, courtesy of the Beatles, and our crewneck sweaters that made us look just a little clerical, and our penny loafers and socks that matched those crewnecks, or were supposed to. (A bit schizoid in the sartorial department, I wore this sort of stuff sometimes, and other times wore semi-greaser getups.) Perhaps Lears also sensed the reservoirs of anxiety and rank horniness and confusion, along with maybe a little bit of potentially usable desperation. Overall, he saw what must have looked like the most god-awfully unhip concatenation of people yet assembled in one small room in the West in the fall of 1969. We had no idea what time it was. People’s Park and the Panthers’ insurrections and the March on Washington had all taken place over our heads, like those scenes of heaven in Wagner-inspired paintings where the gods feast and cavort on high and the mortals toil stupidly below. He must have been ready to walk out, slapping the gunboats on the linoleum, and go back to Cambridge and get his commission reinstated in the anti-army of hip, get his proper togs back and rejoin the revolution.
    He was in one of his legacy suits, a green twill number, hanging and disheveled, I think, of which I would one day, not quite knowing what I was up to, buy an imitation in a New Haven thrift shop. He had on a skinny tie, tamed-snake black, with a modest stripe down the middle, and the inscrutable paper clip. Lears was dressed in a certain kind of drag, but nobody in the room got it (except maybe Sandra); nobody moved with the joke.
    As for us, we continued with our antics, raising the volume progressively. To look at it all from a distance, of course, is more than a little appalling. We were seventeen, a point in life where other people, at other places and times, are beginning to do their life’s work, are writing bad early poems, scribbling music, concocting business schemes, or picking up the rudiments of a trade. And the world around us was more than alive. Our nation was busy bombing a peasant population into Buddhist rage and Buddhist renunciation of that rage. And here we were, with all the promise and absurdity that are inseparable from being seventeen, regressing as quickly as we could. We were regressing, maybe, as a sign of rage at how often—stand in line, don’t talk, no short skirts—we were rewarded for regression. All right, I’ll play along; I’ll go where the conveyor belt seems bound to send me, and I’ll go capering and grinning, too.
    Now Mace Johnson or Paul Tuppermann or Dirty Ed Bush would have whipped around like a G-man, in a quick Eliot Ness pivot, sensing the apostasy at his back, and sought the “ringleader.” Any one of them would have ripped Dubby from his seat—especially Dubby—and pulled him like a human mule, limbs flying, up the row toward the front, stretching, maybe tearing the collar of his new madras shirt, so new that the little band of cloth fixed between the shoulder blades, known as the fruit loop, was still intact.
    Franklin Lears simply looked at us en masse and with an expression of mild bemusement. He didn’t seem at all discomfited by our antics. He didn’t seem ready to rush out the door in anguish at the way we’d messed up his first day of school. Perhaps he understood that the ability to be humiliated and take it in stride is crucial to a certain kind of teaching, the kind that will convey two virtues, which rarely come together—a modesty so intense that it borders on self-mockery, along with a conviction, absolute and unflappable, that one has to see it one’s own way, speak one’s truth, that having experimented in the chaotic laboratory of life, one must, for better or worse, publish the results to the world.
    Socrates, after all, got brained with a plate of urine, thrown by his wife, Xanthippe, who was angry at him for neglecting domestic affairs. When people teased him about it in later life,