Teacher Man

I liked the way he said assuredly, the first time I ever heard it used outside of a Victorian novel. I promised myself that when I became a teacher I’d use the word, too. It had an important sound to it that would make people sit up and pay attention.

I thought it was terrific the way you could stand up there on that little platform with your podium and your desk and talk for an hour with everyone before you making notes and if you had any kind of good looks or personality the girls would be tripping over themselves to see you afterward in your office or anywhere else. That’s what I thought at the time.

The professor said he had made an informal study of teenage behavior in high school and if we were sensitive observant teachers we’d notice certain phenomena moments before class bells rang. We’d notice how adolescent temperatures rose, blood raced and there was enough adrenaline to power a battleship. He smiled and you could see how pleased he was with his ideas. We smiled back because professors have the power. He said teachers must observe how students present themselves. He said, So much—so much, I say—depends on how they enter a room. Observe their entrances. They amble, they strut, they shuffle, they collide, they joke, they show off. You, yourself, might think nothing of entering a room, but for a teenager it can be everything. To enter a room is to move from one environment to another and that, for the teenager, can be traumatic. There be dragons, daily horrors from acne to zit.

I could barely understand what the professor was talking about but I was very impressed. I never thought there was so much involved in stepping into a room. I thought teaching was a simple matter of telling the class what you knew and then testing them and giving them grades. Now I was learning how complicated the life of a teacher could be, and I admired this professor for knowing all about it.

The student next to me in the professor’s class whispered, This guy is so full of crap. He never taught a high school class in his life. The student’s name was Seymour. He wore a yarmulke, so it was no wonder he said wise things from time to time, or he could have been showing off for the red-haired girl sitting in front of him. When she looked over her shoulder to smile at Seymour’s remarks you could see she was beautiful. I wished I could have shown off myself, but I rarely knew what to say, whereas Seymour had an opinion on everything. The red-haired girl told Seymour if he felt that strongly he should speak up.

Hell, no, said Seymour. I’d be out on my ass.

She smiled at him and when she smiled at me I thought I’d float out of my seat. She said her name was June and then raised her hand for the professor’s attention.

Yes?

Professor, how many high school classes have you taught?

Oh, I’ve observed dozens of classes over the years.

But have you ever actually taught in a high school?

What’s your name, young lady?

June Somers.

Haven’t I just told you I’ve observed and supervised dozens of student teachers?

My father is a high school teacher, professor, and he says you know nothing about high school teaching till you’ve done it.

He said he didn’t know what she was getting at. She was wasting the time of this class and if she wanted to continue the discussion she could make an appointment with his secretary to meet in his office.

She stood and slung her bag strap on her shoulder. No, she would not make an appointment to see him and saw no reason why he couldn’t simply answer her question about his teaching experience.

That’s enough, Miss Somers.

She turned and looked at Seymour, glanced at me and walked toward the door. The professor stared and dropped the piece of chalk in his hand. By the time he retrieved it she was gone.

What would he do now about Miss June Somers?

Nothing. He said the hour was nearly over, he’d see us next week, picked up his bag and walked out. Seymour said June Somers had screwed herself royally. Royally. He said, One thing I’ll tell you. Don’t mess around with professors. You can’t win. Ever.

The following week he said, Did you see that? Jesus.

I didn’t think someone wearing a yarmulke should say Jesus like that. How would he like it if Yahweh or G dash D were a curse and I blasted him with it? But I said nothing for fear he might laugh at me.

He said, They’re going out. I saw them in a Macdougal Street café all lovey-dovey drinking coffee, holding hands and looking into each other’s eyes. Goddam. I guess she had a little chat in his office and moved on.

My mouth was dry. I thought some day I’d run into June and find

my tongue and we’d go to a movie together. I’d choose something foreign with subtitles to show how sophisticated I was and she’d admire me and let me kiss her in the dark, missing a dozen subtitles and the thread of the story. That wouldn’t matter because we’d have plenty to talk about in a cozy Italian restaurant where candles flickered and her red hair twinkled back and who knows what that would lead to because that was as far as my dreams would go. Who did I think I was anyway? What made me think she’d look at me for one second?

I prowled the coffee shops of Macdougal Street hoping she might see me and smile and I’d smile back and sip my coffee so casually she’d be impressed, take a second look. I’d make sure she could see the cover of my book, something by Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, and she’d wonder why she was wasting her time with the professor when she could be with that sensitive Irishman sunk in German philosophy. She’d excuse herself and on her way to the ladies’ toilet drop a scrap of paper on my table with her phone number.

Which is what she did the day I saw her at the Café Figaro. When she left the table the professor looked after her with such an air of ownership and pride I could have knocked him from his chair. Then he glanced at me and I knew he didn’t even recognize me as a student from his class.

He called for his bill, and while the waitress stood at his table obscuring his view, June was able to drop that scrap of paper on my table. I waited till they left. “Frank, call me tomorrow.” The telephone number was scrawled in lipstick.

God. She noticed me, a dockside laborer fumbling my way toward a teaching career, and the professor was, Jesus, a professor. But she knew my name. I was weak in the head from happiness. There was my name on a paper napkin with lipstick that had touched her lips and I knew I’d keep that piece of paper forever. I’d be buried with it.

I called her and she asked if I knew where we could have a quiet drink.

Chumley’s.

OK.

What would I do? How would I sit? What would I say? I was having a drink with the most beautiful girl in Manhattan, who probably slept every night with that professor. That was my Calvary, thinking of her with him. Men in Chumley’s looked at me and envied me and I knew what they were thinking. Who is that miserable specimen with that beautiful girl, that knockout, that stunner? Yeah, maybe I was her brother or cousin. No, even that was unlikely. I wasn’t good- looking enough even to be her third or fourth cousin.

She ordered a drink. Norm’s away, she said. He teaches a course in Vermont two days a week. I suppose bigmouth Seymour told you everything.

No.

So, why are you here?

You… you invited me.

What do you think of yourself?

What?

Simple question. What do you think of yourself?

I don’t know. I…

She looked disapproving. You call when you’re told to call. You appear when you’re told to appear and you don’t know what you think of yourself. For Christ’s sakes, say one good thing about yourself. Go ahead.

I felt blood rushing to my face. I had to say something or she might get up and walk away.

A platform boss on the piers once said I was a tough little mick.

Oh, well. Take that remark and a dime and you can ride the subway two stops. You’re a lost soul. That’s easy to see. Norm likes lost souls.

Words jumped from my mouth: I don’t care what Norm likes.

Oh, God. She’ll get up and walk away. No. She laughed so hard she nearly choked on her wine. Then everything was different. She smiled at me and smiled and smiled. I felt so happy I could barely stay in my skin.

She reached across the table and put her hand on mine and my heart was a mad animal in my chest. Let’s go, she said.

We walked to her apartment on Barrow Street. Inside, she turned and kissed me. She moved her head in a circular way so that her tongue traveled clockwise in my mouth and I thought, Lord, I am not worthy. Why didn’t God tell me about this before my twenty- sixth year?

She said I was a healthy peasant and obviously starved for affection. I didn’t like being called a peasant—Jesus, hadn’t I read books, every word of E. Laurie Long, P. G. Wodehouse, Mark Twain, E. Philips Oppenheim, Edgar Wallace and good old Dickens—and I thought what we were doing here was more than showing affection. I said nothing because I had no experience of activities like this. She asked me if I liked monkfish and I said I didn’t know because I’d never heard of it before. She said everything depended on how you cooked it. Her secret was shallots. Not everyone agrees with that, she said, but it worked for her. It’s a delicate whitefish best cooked with a good white wine. Not an ordinary cooking wine, but a good one. Norm cooked fish once but he made a mess of it, used some piss from California that turned the fish into an old shoe. The poor dear knew his literature and his lecturing, but nothing about wine or fish.

It’s strange to be with a woman who takes your face in her hands and tells you to have faith in yourself. She said, My father came from Liverpool and he drank himself to death because he was afraid of the world. He said he wished he was a Catholic so he could join a monastery and never have to see a human being again, and it was my mother who tried to get him to say good things about himself. He couldn’t, so he drank and died. Do you drink?

Not much.

Be careful. You’re Irish.

Your father wasn’t Irish.

No, but he could have been. Everyone in Liverpool is Irish. Let’s cook that monkfish.

She handed me a kimono. It’s OK. Change in the bedroom. If it’s good enough for a samurai it’s good enough for a tough little mick who ain’t so tough.

She changed into a silver dressing gown that seemed to have a life of its own. One moment it clung to her, then hung in a way that let her move freely inside. I preferred the clinging part and it kept me alive inside my kimono.

She asked if I liked white wine and I said yes because I was learning that yes was the best answer to every question, at least with June. I said yes to the monkfish and the asparagus and the two flickering candles on the table. I said yes to the way she raised her wineglass and touched it against mine till they went ping. I told her this was the most delicious dinner I’d ever had in my life. I wanted to go on and say I was in heaven but that might sound forced and she might give me the kind of strange look that would ruin the whole night and my life beyond.

Norm was never mentioned in the six nights that followed the night of the monkfish except that there were twelve fresh roses in a vase in her bedroom with a card that said love from Norm. I drank extra wine to boost my courage enough to ask, How the hell can you lie in this bed with me in the presence of Norm’s fresh roses? but I never did. I couldn’t afford roses so I brought her carnations, which she put in a large glass jar beside the roses. There was no competition. Beside Norm’s roses my carnations looked so sad I bought her a dozen roses with my last few dollars. She sniffed them and said, Oh, they’re beautiful. I didn’t know what to say to that as I hadn’t grown them, just bought them. Norm’s roses in the glass jar looked dry and it made me happy to think my roses would replace them, but what she did then gave me the greatest pain I ever had in my heart.

From my chair in the kitchen I could see what she was doing in the bedroom, taking my roses one by one and placing them delicately among, between and around Norm’s roses, standing back, looking at them, using my fresh roses to prop up the roses of Norm that were going limp, stroking the roses, his and mine, and smiling as if one set of roses was as good as the other.

She must have known I was watching. She turned and smiled at me, suffering, nearly blubbering, in the kitchen. They’re beautiful, she said again. I knew she was talking about twenty-four roses, not just my dozen, and I wanted to yell something at her and storm out like a real man.

I didn’t. I stayed. She made stuffed pork chops with applesauce and mashed potatoes and it tasted like cardboard. We went to bed and all I could think of was my roses mingled with his, that son-of-a-bitch in Vermont. She said I seemed low in energy and I wanted to tell her I wished I was dead. It’s OK, she said. People just get used to each other. You have to keep it fresh.

Was this her way of keeping it fresh? Juggling two of us at one time, stuffing her vase with flowers from different men?

Near the end of that spring term I met Seymour on Washington Square. How’s it going? he said, and laughed as if he knew something. How’s the gorgeous June?

I stammered and shifted from one foot to the other. He said, Don’t worry. She did it to me, too, but she had me only two weeks. I knew what she was up to and I told her to go to hell.

Up to?

It’s all for old Norm. She has me up, she has you up and Christ knows who else she has up, and she tells Norm all about it.

But he goes to Vermont.

Vermont, my ass. The minute you leave her place he’s in there lapping up the details.

How do you know?

He told me. He likes me. He tells her about me, she tells him about you, and they know I’m telling you about them, and they have a hell of a time. They talk about you and how you don’t know your ass from your elbow about anything.

I walked away and he called after me, Anytime, man, anytime.

I scraped through the teacher’s license examination. I scraped through everything. Passing score on the teacher examination was sixty-five; mine was sixty-nine. The passing points came, I think, through the kindness of an English chairman at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn who judged my demonstration lesson and my good luck in having a skimpy knowledge of the poetry of the Great War. An alcoholic professor at NYU told me in a friendly way that I was a half-assed student. I was offended till I thought about it and realized he was right. I was half-assed all around, but promised that someday I’d pull myself together, focus, concentrate, make something of myself, snap out of it, get my act together, all in the good old American way.

We sat on chairs in the corridors of Brooklyn Technical High School waiting for interviews, filling out forms, signing statements declaring our loyalty to America, assuring the world we were not now, nor had we ever been, members of the Communist Party.

I saw her long before she sat beside me. She wore a green scarf and dark glasses and when she pulled off the scarf there was a dazzle of red hair. I had the yearning ache for her but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of turning to look.

Hi, Frank.

If I were a character in a novel or movie I would have stood and walked away, proud. She said hi again. She said, You look tired.

I snapped at her to show her I was not going to be polite after what she did to me. No, I am not tired, I said. But then she touched my face with her fingers.

That fictional character would have pulled his head back to show he hadn’t forgotten, was not going to soften because of two greetings and a few fingertips. She smiled and touched my cheek again.

Everyone in the hallway was looking at her and I thought they were wondering what she was doing with me: she was that gorgeous and I was hardly a prize. They saw her hand on mine.

How are you anyway?

Fine, I croaked. I looked at that hand and thought of it roaming across Norm’s body.

She said, Are you nervous about the interview?

I snapped again. No, I’m not.

You’ll be a fine teacher.

I don’t care.

You don’t care? So why are you going through this?

There’s nothing else to do.

Oh. She said she was getting a teacher’s license to teach for a year and write a book about it. This was Norm’s suggestion. Norm the big expert. He said education in America was a mess and a muckraking book from inside the school system would be a best-seller. Teach a year or two, complain about the terrible state of the schools, and you have a big seller.

My name was called for the interview. She said, How about coffee afterwards?

If I’d had any pride or self-esteem I would have told her no and walked away but I said, OK, and went to my interview with my heart pounding.

I said good morning to the three examiners, but they’re trained not to look at teacher candidates. Man in the middle said, You have a couple of minutes to read the poem on the desk before you. After you’ve read it we’ll ask you to analyze it and tell us how you’d teach it to a high school class.

The title of the poem described how I felt at that interview: “I Would I Might Forget That I Am I.”

Bald man on the right asked if I knew the form of the poem.

Yes, oh, yes. It’s a sonata.

A what?

Oh, I’m sorry. A sonnet. Fourteen lines.

And the rhyme?

Ah… ah… abbaabbacdcdc.

They looked at one another and I didn’t know if I was right or wrong.

And the poet?

Ah, I think it’s Shakespeare. No, no, Wordsworth.

Neither, young man. It’s Santayana.

The bald man glared at me as if I had offended him. Santayana, he said, Santayana, and I almost felt ashamed of my ignorance.

They looked grim and I wanted to declare that asking questions about Santayana was unfair and unjust due to the fact he was in no textbook or anthology I ever looked at in my four dozing years at New York University. They did not ask but I volunteered the only knowledge I had of Santayana, that if we don’t learn from history we’re bound to repeat our mistakes. They looked unimpressed, even when I told them I knew Santayana’s first name, George.

So, said the man in the middle. How would you teach this poem?

I babbled. Well… I think… I think… it’s partly about suicide and how Santayana is fed up, and I’d talk about James Dean because teenagers admire him and how he probably killed himself subconsciously on a motorbike, and I’d bring in Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” and let them talk about their own feelings about suicide if they ever had any.

Man on the right said, What would you do for reinforcement?

I don’t know, sir. What is reinforcement?

He raised his eyebrows and looked at the others as if trying to be patient. He said, Reinforcement is an activity, enrichment, followup, some kind of assignment where you clinch the learning so that it’s embedded in the student’s memory. You can’t teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don’t you?

Oh. I felt desperate. I blurted, I’d tell them to write a hundred-and- fifty-word suicide note. That would be a good way of encouraging them to think about life itself, because Samuel Johnson said the prospect of hanging in the morning focuses the mind wonderfully.

Man in the middle exploded. What?

Man on the right shook his head. We’re not here to talk about Samuel Johnson.

Man on the left hissed. Suicide note? You would do no such thing. Do you hear me? You are dealing with tender minds. Jesus Christ! You are excused.

I said, Thank you, but what was the use? I was sure that was the end of me. Easy to see they didn’t like me, my ignorance of Santayana and reinforcement, and I was sure the suicide-note idea was the last straw. They were high school department heads or had other important jobs and I disliked them the way I disliked anyone with power over me, bosses, bishops, college professors, tax examiners, foremen in general. Even so, I wondered why people like these examiners are so impolite they make you feel unworthy. I thought if I were sitting in their place I’d try to help candidates overcome their nervousness. If young people want to become teachers they should be encouraged and not intimidated by examiners who seemed to think Santayana was the center of the universe.

That is what I felt at the time but I didn’t know the ways of the world. I didn’t know that people up there have to protect themselves against people down here. I didn’t know that older people have to protect themselves against younger people who want to push them off the face of the earth.

After my interview she was already in the hallway, knotting her scarf under her chin, telling me, That was a breeze.

It was no such thing. They asked me about Santayana.

Really? Norm adores Santayana.

Did this woman have any sense at all, ruining my day with Norm and that damn Santayana?

I don’t give a shit about Norm. Santayana, too.

My, my. Such eloquence. Is the Irishman having a little tantrum?

I wanted to hold my chest to calm my rage. Instead, I walked away and kept walking even when she called, Frank, Frank, we could be serious.

I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, repeating, We could be serious, all the way to McSorley’s on East Seventh Street. What did she mean?

I drank beer after beer, ate liverwurst and onion on crackers, pissed mightily in McSorley’s massive urinals, called her from the public phone, hung up when Norm answered, felt sorry for myself, wanted to call Norm again, invite him to a showdown on the sidewalk, picked up the phone, put it down, went home, whimpered into my pillow, despised myself, called myself an ass till I fell into a boozy sleep.

Next day, hungover and suffering, I traveled to Eastern District High School in Brooklyn for my teaching test, the last hurdle for the license. I was supposed to arrive an hour before the lesson, but took the wrong subway train and arrived half an hour late. The English department chairman said I could come back another time, but I wanted to get it over with, especially since I knew I was on the road to failure anyway.

The chairman handed me sheets of paper with the subject of my lesson: War Poems. I knew the poems by heart, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Does it Matter?” and Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”

When you teach in New York you’re required to follow a lesson plan. First, you are to state your aim. Then you are to motivate the class because, as everyone knows, those kids don’t want to learn anything.

I motivate this class by telling them about my aunt’s husband, who was gassed in World War I and when he came home the only job he could find was shoveling coal, coke and slack at the Limerick Gas Works. The class laughs and the chairman smiles slightly, a good sign.

It isn’t enough to teach the poem. You are to “elicit and evoke,” involve your students in the material. Excite them. That is the word from the Board of Education. You are to ask pivotal questions to encourage participation. A good teacher should launch enough pivotal questions to keep the class hopping for forty-five minutes.

A few kids talk about war and their family members who survived World War II and Korea. They say it wasn’t fair the way some came home with no faces and no legs. Losing an arm wasn’t that bad because you always had another. Losing two arms was a real pain because someone had to feed you. Losing a face was something else. You only had one and when that was gone, that was it, baby. One girl with a lovely figure and wearing a lacy pink blouse said her sister was married to a guy who was wounded at Pyongyang and he had no arms at all, not even stubs where you could stick on the false arms. So her sister had to feed him and shave him and do everything and all he ever wanted was sex. Sex, sex, sex, that’s all he ever wanted, and her sister was getting all worn out.