THE FORKED TONGUE

That was the sweetest spring of all my years there. An early shock of heat forced the leaves and blossoms to a lushness that came to seem downright tropical when the chemistry master’s parrot escaped into an elm overlooking the quad. There he preened his bright feathers and stridently mocked us until starvation humbled him to earth, where he sold his freedom for a groundsman’s peanut butter sandwich. The sudden departure of Roberta Ramsey darkened the campus for a few days; she simply vanished, and Mr. Ramsey’s gloom was all the explanation we had. But the sap was running, and for the rest of us the shadow passed.

Mr. Ramsey had once told us about a riot of boys at his old school, Winchester, back in 1793, that finally had to be put down by a regiment of dragoons. In pale midwinter, with each of us hunched over his own faint ember while the latest blizzard howled at the windows, this story had seemed remote and improbable. Not now. We were all a little drunk with spring, like the fat bees reeling from flower to flower, and a strange insurrectionary current ran among us.

This went beyond the usual swagger of bloods about to graduate. Even small fry still in beanies started showing up late to class, went sockless in their loafers, forgot to say Sir and then paused a near-defiant beat when invited to correct themselves. The masters chose to regard most of these provocations as trivial, even ludicrous, like the grousing of impotent peasants outside the castle walls. They felt the season too; it softened them. And the last thing they wanted was to throw out a boy from my class, so close to the finish line. We really had to force their hand, and we did, three times.

It wasn’t mutiny that caused the first expulsion. You might say it was the opposite—excess of devotion. When our glee club went to Boston to sing at an alumni dinner, a boy named Keyes filched a bottle of champagne and got sloppy, maudlin drunk on the bus ride back to school. Some of the other choristers, myself among them, managed to hustle him up to his room undetected, but once there we couldn’t keep him quiet. He was bawling the school songs, hanging all over us and telling us what great guys we were and how we should start some kind of club together.

The hall master took his time in coming. When he finally showed up he simply tapped on the door and told us to call it a night. He obviously didn’t want to see anything that would make him take action. Then Keyes broke loose and crashed into the hallway and threw his arms around the master, slobbering school spirit. Other boys came out of their rooms to see what was going on. The master gazed at us from Keyes’s embrace. You could tell by how sad he looked, how resigned, that Keyes was a goner.

Then Jack Broome, Handsome Jack himself, Backfield Jack, Captain of Everything, got bounced for hitchhiking down to Miss Cobb’s Academy one night to meet a girl. When they caught them in the boathouse there it was curtains for her, and our headmaster could do no less.

Not long after this my friend Purcell began to cut daily chapel. He simply, steadfastly, would not go, and I was only one of many who tried to get him to relent before they had to kick him out. Purcell refused. He said that God was just a character in a Hebrew novel and if it came to that he’d rather worship Huckleberry Finn. Really, he said, I don’t believe a word of that stuff.

You don’t have to.

You don’t have to, maybe.

It’s what, fifteen minutes a day? It doesn’t have to mean anything you don’t want it to mean. Think your own thoughts. What’s the harm in that?

Just going through the door makes me a liar, Purcell said. I’m not going to do it again.

He meant what he said. I kept my counsel when I saw the pleasure Purcell took in rejecting it: saw that it made him feel honorable in comparison to me.

We were allowed a fair number of cuts, but by the end of April he’d used his up and the demerit meter was ticking. The rest of us looked on with a murmurous show of dread as his tally climbed toward the sudden-death number, and told one another how much we admired him for sticking to his guns. And I did, somewhat, though my admiration was muddied by Purcell’s taking the high road with me, as if my going to chapel was nothing but show.

The truth was that I looked forward to the moment each day when I passed through that limestone arch he so abhorred. We were loud boys, forever bellowing and jeering, yet we all knew to shut up when we entered the chapel. You felt the hush there as a profound agreement, an act of three hundred wills, and that made it even deeper and more calming. The chaplain always did a short reading and led us in a couple of hymns, but we were otherwise left to the silence and the dark wood, the glowing windows and rough stone and dim vaulted spaces overhead. Purcell ridiculed even the architecture—Episcopalian English-envy, he called it—which irritated me. I didn’t like to wonder if my responsiveness was only another kind of snobbery.

But it was Purcell’s crack about the Hebrew novel that really rubbed me wrong. Not the glib irreverence, but the way he said Hebrew. It came to me as a rank, dismal breath from some deep well of genteel disdain. Purcell didn’t mean it like that, and he would’ve hated the notion of speaking with the unconscious voice of his class. That made it all the worse; it was so unconscious and therefore incorrigible an assertion of class that it made me feel a kind of despair. I wanted to say, Don’t you know who you’re talking to? But of course he didn’t know. I’d made sure of that.

As the days passed I came to see the drama of his refusal as another display of blood-borne assurance. It mattered very much to me that I graduate, whereas it didn’t really matter to Purcell. A diploma from the school would open no doors to him that weren’t already open just because he was his father’s son. He wouldn’t even lose his place at Yale. Unless you got kicked out for an Honor Code violation, you could still take final exams at the end of the year and the school would certify that you had met its academic requirements.

What Purcell would actually lose, then, or renounce, was the chance to end this span of years and shared life with the rest of us. To sit with us on the graduation platform and feel silly in his mortarboard cap and mutter dark footnotes during the As-you-go-forth speech. Then to mingle on the quad with our proud families, drifting from group to group, shaking hands, putting on his best manners with those most obviously not of his world. To doctor his punch from a friend’s flask, but only once, not wanting to dull himself to the unexpected full-heartedness he feels. To linger as the shadows spill across the grass and day turns to dusk—even to lend his raspy voice to the songs being raised by boys still not ready to say good-bye to each other. To look into their faces, some dear, some not, all of them familiar as his own, and allow himself a moment’s blindness as our last song dies away.

I’m sure I was not alone in having imagined this day ever since I came to the school. But Purcell could give it up without a backward glance because to him the years now closing were a story of no importance, if a story at all. He instinctively saw himself as belonging to a narrative so grand that this part of it counted only as transitional material.

So I suspected. Or, to put it another way, I suspected that his willingness to be expelled was less a proof of principle than a sort of colossal snub.

And there was something else. Purcell had begun to absent himself from chapel as the stir over Hemingway’s visit grew more and more feverish. The English masters were all teaching his work. The art master had produced a striking poster—the famous face suggested by a few black strokes over the line One must, above all, endure—that stared out from every bulletin board and entryway. Knowing that the greatest of living writers would soon be among us made us a little crazy with self-importance. Nor was it just the literary boys who got worked up; it seemed like most of the class planned to enter a story. As Picasso and Ted Williams knew Hemingway, as Kennedy knew Hemingway, one of us would soon know Hemingway and so be raised to that company.

Purcell loved Hemingway’s work. He surely wanted that private audience as much as anybody, but I knew he hated the idea of competing for it. So did I. Only one of the many could be chosen, we all understood that, yet you couldn’t help feeling that not to be chosen was to be rejected. And to be rejected by Ernest Hemingway—Ernest Hemingway tossing your story aside, No, not him, not a prayer. What a terrible thought! If being chosen was a blessing (and how else could you see it?) then to be rejected was a curse. That’s how the logic worked for me. I assumed it worked the same way for Purcell, whose vanity was at least as wary of rebuke as my own.

Submissions were due the first Monday in May, two weeks before Hemingway’s visit. If Purcell kept cutting chapel, his demerits would send him home on the preceding Saturday. He’d lose his chance for the audience, but spare himself the indignity of jostling with the herd and quite possibly losing. Yet in the very act of retreat he would seem a hero, the boy who would not falsely bend his knee. His expulsion would pass into legend.

I never thought Purcell had planned any of this, or that he was aware of any fault line under his resolve. He no doubt took his motives at face value. I didn’t, that was all.

 

But I might have been wrong. And if I was wrong, supposing so much doubleness in Purcell, it was probably because I saw so much in myself. I should have been rejoicing. I’d been awarded a full scholarship to Columbia University, to work with Lionel Trilling, as I liked to think, and often told myself. An essay I’d written on Shakespeare’s Sonnet #29—When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes—had just won the Cassidy English Prize, a great stroke of luck: five weeks at a summer program in Oxford, all expenses paid. My classmates liked me, most of them, and a few of the younger boys paid me a kind of puppyish attention that I recognized from my own early days, when some upperclassman caught my eye.

And why would I catch a new boy’s eye? Maybe because from my own anxious studies I had made myself the picture of careless gentility, ironically cordial when not distracted, hair precisely unkempt, shoes down at heel, clothes rumpled and frayed to perfection. This was the sort of figure I’d been drawn to almost from the beginning; it had somehow suggested sailing expertise, Christmas in St. Anton, inherited box seats, and an easy disregard for all that. By going straight to the disregard I’d hoped to imply the rest. I had also meant to wipe out any trace of the public school virtues—sharpness of dress, keenness of manner, spanking cleanliness, freshness, niceness, sincerity—I used to cultivate.

By now I’d been absorbed so far into my performance that nothing else came naturally. But I never quite forgot that I was performing. In the first couple of years there’d been some spirit of play in creating the part, refining it, watching it pass. There’d been pleasure in implying a personal history through purely dramatic effects of manner and speech without ever committing an expository lie, and pleasure in doubleness itself: there was more to me than people knew!

All that was gone. When I caught myself in the act now I felt embarrassed. It seemed a stale, conventional role, and four years of it had left me a stranger even to those I called my friends.

I wanted out. That was partly why I’d chosen Columbia. I liked how the city seethed up against the school, mocking its theoretical seclusion with hustle and noise, the din of people going and getting and making. Things that mattered at Princeton or Yale couldn’t possibly withstand this battering of raw, unironic life. You didn’t go to eating clubs at Columbia, you went to jazz clubs. You had a girlfriend—no, a lover—with psychiatric problems, and friends with foreign accents. You read newspapers on the subway and looked at tourists with a cool, anthropological gaze. You said crosstown express. You said the Village. You ate weird food. No other boy in my class would be going there.

 

It wasn’t exactly true that I’d told no expository lies. Most of my stories had been meant to seem autobiographical, and thus to give a false picture of my family and my life at home—of who I was. I’d allowed myself to do this by thinking that, after all, they were just stories. But they weren’t really stories, not like “Big Two-Hearted River” was a story, or “Soldier’s Home.” It struck me that Hemingway’s willingness to let himself be seen as he was, in uncertainty or meanness or fear, even empty of feeling, somehow gave the charge of truth to everything else. My stories were designed to make me appear as I was not. They were props in an act. I couldn’t read any of them without thrusting the pages away in mortification.

I couldn’t write like that again, but didn’t know how else to write—how to go about making something that was true. I was frozen. For the simple relief of putting words on paper I continued to type out Hemingway’s stories, slowly, meditatively, a page or so a day. I had the hope that something here would send me off on a story of my own. No luck so far, but I kept at it, page after page.

Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration. . . . In this way he lost everything.

I knew just how Krebs felt.

Everybody else was writing up a storm. As one of the top scholars in our class, Bill had been awarded a private study in the basement of the library. He worked there, so I didn’t see much of him, but when I did he was thoughtful and tense. I had trouble getting a smile out of him; if I succeeded I felt a gratitude I found myself resenting. He told me he had a story in the works, and that was all he’d admit to. The un-boyish sadness I’d seen in Bill that winter had darkened. He seemed lost in the contemplation of something doleful, even tragic, that I could only suppose was finding its way into his new work.

Purcell had a story going as well. With not entirely charming matter-of-factness he told me it was the best thing he’d ever written, and professed to be astonished at the ease of its writing. I didn’t see any mystery here: if he kept cutting chapel he’d never have to expose his story to judgment, and it was at least partly the prospect of judgment that had me all in knots.

George Kellogg decided to submit a new version of a story we’d run in Troubadour that winter, an account of a man bullying his wife at the dinner table while their son eats his veal cutlet and doesn’t say a word. No boy had ever won two audiences. There wasn’t any rule against it, but I thought it was pretty damned piggish of George to try to snag Hemingway after landing Frost. Just knowing he was in the race became a vexation, and it got worse when I went to his room to ask about the manuscripts for the next issue of the review. George hadn’t been passing them around.

He answered when I knocked, though for once his good manners deserted him and he kept typing away on his massive old black Underwood while I stood just inside the door. The machine looked as big as an organ. It made a deep, emphatic, methodical sound. The blinds were drawn, the windows closed, and the air felt swampy. I could hear the muffled plock of a tennis ball somewhere outside. Finally George stopped, but remained hunched over the keys.

I asked him about the manuscripts.

Oh, them, he said. They’re over there. He jerked his head at a stack of papers on his dresser. Take ’em.

Have you read them yet?

What? I don’t know. A few. A couple. He kept his back to me as I crossed the room and picked up the manuscripts.

I hear you’re working on that last Troubadour story.

That’s all of them, he said. Okay?

When I closed the door he started typing again.

All through my dorm I heard typewriters. Maybe it was nothing new, maybe I’d just lost my filter, the way every voice around you will suddenly flood into your head, each with its own rhythm and tone. One machine went off in high crackling bursts like strings of cheap firecrackers. Another, even lower than George’s, grumbled and surged like the engines of a ship. I tried not to listen for them.

 

With our editor playing the possessed artist, I had to play the burgher—had to act like the director of publication whose title I bore—and make sure Troubadour got to the printer in time. The deadline for presenting our last issue to Mr. Rice, the faculty adviser, was just days away, the same Monday our Hemingway stories were due. I gave myself up to reading submissions and forcing them on my fellow editors, and tried not to listen to other boys’ typewriters, and typed nothing myself.

We scheduled the final editorial meeting for Sunday night. I’d lobbied for Friday but got voted down because Miss Cobb’s graduating class was joining ours that night for the traditional Farewell Assembly. These assemblies were said to be Neronic in their carnality, like the fabled last night of an ocean crossing, and none of us questioned the truth of the stories we’d heard. Since the girls weren’t going to see us again and we weren’t going to see them again, why be coy? Our regular dances were licentious enough, within the limits set by the vigilant, and of course envious, spinsters who rode shotgun at these affairs. But it was a truth repeated by all of us, and made ever truer by repetition, that at the Farewell Assembly no amount of jealous virginal watchdogging would prove equal to the girls’ desire to be alone with us in broom closets and steam tunnels.

Nobody wanted to miss out. I didn’t either, especially after I got a letter from Rain. This took me by surprise. We’d had our brief grapple at the Halloween dance, but I hadn’t seen her since she tried to make off with my Fountainhead on the train, and she’d certainly never sent me a letter before. It was a perfumed, chatty little piece with no purpose except the unstated but obvious one of nailing down a partner for the Assembly. She must’ve figured she could do worse than me, and probably would do worse if she left it to chance, as the desirables of each school had already begun pairing off through just such letters as this. I had not forgotten how it felt to dance with Rain, how she returned the pressure of my thighs and played her fingers over the back of my neck. And the then-painful fact that she had immediately taken up with another boy (Jack Broome of sacred memory!) after being pried away from me, the sheer impersonality of her ardor, snuffed any scruples I might’ve felt and gave the lurid tint of revenge to my anticipations.

Yet I had tried to set the editorial meeting for that night. Time was running out, and I wanted to put Troubadour to bed so I’d have the weekend to finish the story I hadn’t even begun. There were other Rains in the world, but only one Ernest Hemingway.

And there was another reason I had tried for Friday night. Saturday was Purcell’s day of reckoning. If he didn’t show up for chapel that afternoon, he’d be long gone after dinner, when we gathered to make our picks. I wanted him there, I needed him to help me sort through this pile of submissions in which only two poems and one story stood out as clear choices. Purcell was brutal in his judgments but he was also shrewd, and finally willing to allow that he despised this or that manuscript rather less than the rest.

The other two would be no help at all, George in favor of everything and Bill cryptic and elusive. There are a lot of cats in this story, he’d say, or I didn’t know it rained that hard in Athens, then shrug and fall silent. Though never overtly so, his responses were much more destructive than Purcell’s. They left you feeling dazed, flatfooted. It was exactly the way he played squash—never slamming the ball head-on, like I did, but breezily tapping it through some sly angle so it died in the corner.

 

On Friday Big Jeff made it known that if his cousin got kicked out for cutting next afternoon’s chapel, he was leaving with him. I heard this at lunch and wouldn’t have believed it except that our table master refused to contradict it. It made no sense. Big Jeff loved the school—anybody could see that. He was an odd duck, and in a place less sure of itself and therefore harder on its eccentrics he would’ve had some rough sledding. Here he received the protections of a holy fool, and he sensed these indulgences if not their reason, and basked in them. It was already plain that he would become one of those alums who return constantly to the Alma Mater, and fatten her with bon-bons from his swelling portfolio, and one day leave her so much of what his own children have been anticipating, and even budgeting into their current expenses, that the disappointed heirs seriously consider paupering themselves further in attempts to break a will that the Old Boys’ office would already have bound in legal iron.

So why would Big Jeff let his cousin’s obstinacy and pride come between him and the school he loved? He certainly couldn’t help Purcell by threatening to leave—that was ridiculous. The school was no less hostage to its rules than we were, and he knew it.

Why, then? Love. Worship. This was a curious and agreeable twist, Big Jeff spanieling after his cousin with his tongue out, barking at phantoms as he followed him into martyrdom. It somehow put the whole thing in a farcical light, as Purcell must have understood, because he was furious. First he collared Big Jeff in Blaine Hall after lunch and made some kind of scene. I wasn’t there, but word got around. Then, that afternoon, he came to Big Jeff’s room, just down from mine, and gave him another browbeating. This has nothing to do with you! You have no right! No right!

I listened to Purcell yell and Big Jeff murmur indiscernibly in reply, then the door slammed and I went back to my story. So far I’d been unable to complete even a paragraph without yanking the paper out of the machine.

I was still at my post when the bell rang for dinner, and when everyone came back from dinner. All up and down the hall I heard my classmates preparing for the Farewell Assembly, roaring in the showers, going from room to room to be admired in their tuxes under the pretext of having a tie adjusted, a cummerbund cinched tight. Strange how our voices deepened and slowed when we dressed up like this. It was a kind of hysteria that made us not giddy but deliberate. The air was festively steamy from everyone showering, and smelled of Old Spice.

My tux, delivered with the others that morning, hung in the closet with a stiff pleated shirt of brilliant whiteness. I laid them out on my bed with the patent leather shoes, then went back to my desk. All I needed was a good beginning, something to give me a start in the morning.

The hall grew quiet as the others left. I watched them cross the quad in a long dark line. In the ashen dusk, their shirt collars seemed to float like lights on a hazy sea. Their deep voices still reached me from the far side of the quad, carried on a breeze that smelled of mown grass and rustled in the creeper outside my window, and later brought me the sounds of Lester Lanin’s orchestra and the laughter of girls.

All this was a distraction at first, then faded behind a waking dream. Hemingway had chosen my story and taken a shine to me and hired me to work on the Pilar. We were cruising one afternoon with his wife, Mary, and a couple of their friends. The friendship seemed unaccountable. The woman was catty and the man treated the crew rudely and boasted of his skill at fishing, all of which Hemingway endured patiently though not without giving me a resigned look as I served yet another round of drinks. Finally the man’s wife told him to please go catch himself a fish and shut the hell up about it. He could catch a fish here, couldn’t he, Ernest? They were in the middle of the goddamned ocean, weren’t they? Hemingway allowed that in fact they were in very good fishing grounds. You would have to be cursed, he said, not to catch a fish here.

The man demurred. He was particular about his gear and hadn’t thought to bring it along today. When his wife said he could surely use Ernest’s, the man said he wouldn’t hear of it, thanks anyway.

Now darling, don’t be such a stick, his wife said.

So he was buckled into the hot seat with a pole in his hands and sure enough he had a strike within the first few minutes. The pole bent and the line sang out. Oh Jesus, the man said, then grunted as the pole somehow jumped its holster and yanked him forward. A great marlin leaped high off the port side, shook itself, crashed back into the water. I’m sick, the man said, I’m going to be sick.

Take the pole! Hemingway told me, then helped the man out of the seat and strapped me in. I played the fish while the man puked over the side of the boat. He refused all invitations to return to the chair, so I worked the big fellow for a couple of hours while Hemingway stood behind me and offered counsel now and then but mostly left the job to me. Once the marlin was played out Mary took the pole to reel him alongside while Hemingway and I waited to set the grapple hook and winch him up.

This is an unhappy case, Hemingway said. He is a good man who married badly and should not drink. He was very brave in the war.

We pulled up to the dock at sunset. A bunch of gawkers came over. That’s some kind of monster you’ve got there, one of them said. Who hooked him?

He did, I said, and nodded at the man.

Hemingway stood beside me. You have done well today, he said. You have done very well today.

 

When Bill White came back from the library at midnight I still hadn’t written a word. Didn’t you go to the dance? he said.

I was working.

Bill sat on his bed and slowly unlaced his shoes. He fell back and stared up at the ceiling. You could still go, he said.

No point. They’ll be shutting down pretty soon.

Working on your story?

Working on my story. You?

Yeah, sure. Bill rolled onto his side and watched as I pulled the empty page from my typewriter and slipped it into my desk drawer, under the full pages I’d copied from “Soldier’s Home.” He said, I saw George coming back from the dance.

George went? No kidding. I’ve never seen him in a tux. How’d he look?

Was he in a tux? I suppose he must’ve been. I didn’t really notice.

Can’t blame you, I said, then added—meanly, helplessly—George makes everything look like tweed.

Bill didn’t answer.

I guess he finished his story, I said.

I guess so, Bill said. How’s yours going?

He said this in a worn, tender way that surprised me. We were almost at the end of our years together, and without ever fighting or deviling each other as most other roommates did, we were farther from being friends than on our first day. We had made ourselves unknowable behind our airs and sardonic courtesies, and the one important truth I’d discovered about him we’d silently agreed never to acknowledge. Many such agreements had evolved between us. No acknowledgment of who we really were—of trouble, weakness, or doubt—of our worries about the life ahead and the sort of men we were becoming. Never; not a word. We’d kept everything witty and cool, until the air between us was so ironized that to say anything in earnest would have been a breach of manners, even of trust.

But as young boys here we had marked each other for friendship. I still felt the possibility, and it troubled me that we had always let it slip. Mostly I blamed Bill, for not coming out from behind his polish. He’d been in the dumps for weeks yet he wouldn’t break cover and talk straight to me, though we surely had things to talk about, more than he knew. The sadder he got, the more remote. Until now.

How’s yours going?

His question was serious, the interest behind it wearily intimate, undefended, as if he had lost whatever push it took to support his urbanity. I was so wrung out myself, so tired of all this beggarly waiting for words, that I actually felt tempted to tell him the truth—that I hadn’t written anything, and couldn’t. Poised right on the brink, I still held back, perhaps sensing that the moment it started, once I allowed myself the comfort of his interest, I wouldn’t be able to stop; that the relief of confessing this paralysis might betray me into other confessions. In some murky way I recognized my own impatience to tear off the mask, and it spooked me.

Lester Lanin’s orchestra was playing “Auld Lang Syne.” A few voices sang raggedly along, boys and girls together.

It’s going fine, I said. Like gangbusters. Yours?

Oh . . . same here. Like a house afire. Like crazy. Like nobody’s business.

 

When Purcell showed up for chapel on Saturday afternoon he took his place on the steps and waited in line for the processional to begin, eyes dead ahead, the fierce helpless blush on his pale, freckled neck his only response to the looks he was drawing from the younger boys and the studious inattention of the older. But as the organ sounded the first notes he raised his voice with the rest of us—For all the saints, who from their labors rest—and marched up the aisle to his seat in the second row without letting the words trail off as most of us did. He sang every verse and then sat straight and intent through the chaplain’s readings and remarks, and when we were left in silence he bowed his head and did not stir.

At the end of the service the headmaster got up to congratulate the sixth-form dance committee on a successful Assembly, and we all applauded, and then kept on, decorously but persistently, beyond any conceivable gratitude to the dance committee, and Purcell must have known it was for him—in celebration that he was still with us, and in tribute to his selflessness in yielding dear principle for his cousin’s sake. Though he was clapping too and looking up at the headmaster, his neck had again turned scarlet.

I had my own idea about his change of heart; that it had less to do with sparing Big Jeff a painful separation from the school than with sparing himself the absurd, humiliating spectacle of Big Jeff throwing himself on Purcell’s very own funeral pyre. But I applauded him with the rest, for the dignity of his surrender; no winking or mugging, no holding back, no hamming it up to signal derisory assent. He had something, Purcell. Sand. Backbone. Class, I guess you could say.

 

At the editorial meeting that night we made our decisions without serious disagreement until we came to the last manuscript, a story by a classmate named Buckles who’d been submitting work all year to no effect. This story did not seem to me any better than the ones we’d rejected, and I said so.

What’s it about? George said. I can’t even tell what it’s about. He said this with such violence that Purcell and Bill and I were made shy for a moment. George usually took his post at the editor’s desk, but tonight he was sitting by the door, cross and itchy.

Still, this is his last shot, Bill said. Graduation issue.

That’s true, Purcell said. It’s now or never for Buckles.

The story’s not that bad, Bill said.

It’s not that good, I said.

Bulldog Buckles, Bill said. Never say die. Remember that story about Geronimo?

We laughed, all but George. “The Forked Tongue,” he said sullenly.

What? Purcell said.

It was called “The Forked Tongue.” Let me see this one again.

We watched George glance over the first page. Just listen to this, he said. He read a few lines aloud.

That’s not so bad, Purcell said.

There’s something there, Bill said.

Come on, I said.

Oh for Christ’s sake, run the stupid thing! George said. Who cares? It’s not like the rest of this crap’s about to set the world on fire. When we looked at him he bristled and said, Well? Is it?

Of course the answer was no. Our schoolboy journal was not going to set the world on fire. But for the past year we’d been acting on the faith that it might, choosing and shaping every issue with the solemnity of Big Jeff designing a spaceship. So, the game was over—that’s what George was telling us, the prick, the spoiler. He’d somehow lost his innocence and now he couldn’t rest until we too had seen that our sanctum sanctorum was only a storage room, our high purposes not worth a fart in a gale of wind.

But George, of all people—what had worked this change in him? What had he been writing up in that airless room, what vein of acid knowledge had he struck?

Okay, I said. What the hell. Let’s run it.

So we’d come to the end; our last issue laid to rest, albeit with a bullet in its head. The others fled the room, leaving me to order and stack the manuscripts and hand them off to the incoming editor, a fifth former who’d been sitting in on the meeting to see how it was done. He looked pretty disappointed.

Mr. Rice’ll need those first thing tomorrow, I told him.

I know.

It was late, past midnight, but I was too jumpy to make another start at the story that was due later that morning, so I figured I’d warm up with a few rejection notes. Usually George took care of that but he had apparently abandoned his duties.

The office machine was a tinny portable that jumped a little every time you struck a key. I wrote three or four letters and took a break. It was tomb-quiet in there, the walls soundproofed by bookcases crammed with student lit mags, the overflow stacked in precarious towers on the two file cabinets and the editor’s desk. Here were the Troubadours of Andover, Milton, Dobbs Ferry, Taft, St. Timothy’s and St. Paul’s and St. Mark’s, Nottingham, Hill, Woodberry Forest, Madeira, Portsmouth Priory, Foxcroft, Kent, Emma Willard, Culver, Thacher, Roxbury Latin, Baldwin and Lawrenceville, Miss Cobb’s and Miss Fine’s and Miss Porter’s, Peddie, Hotchkiss, Pomfret, Choate, on and on and on . . .

As director of publication I sometimes came here to file the new arrivals, though mostly I just sat at George’s desk and gloated at being in the middle of all this writing. But what sort of writing was it, really? I took down a review from Andover and flipped through the stories, then looked at one from Deerfield and another from Hill. Within a few sentences every story seemed familiar, the same stuff we ran—mannered experiment, disillusioned portrait of family or school, all designed to show what a superior person the writer was.

Were the girls any better? I picked up a copy of Cantiamo, the review from Miss Cobb’s; it was a back issue, five years old. The first story concerned the superficiality of a woman prepping her house for a bridge party. I skipped to the next, called “Summer Dance,” and the smirk this title provoked died on my lips after the first line.

I hope nobody saw me pick up the cigarette butt off the sidewalk, but I’m all out and getting shaky and it’s a nice long one, with just a smudge of lipstick from the old bird who dropped it when her bus pulled up.

I kept reading. The narrator is at a bus stop, heading home after a typing class at the Y. She smokes the butt while she waits, even when it becomes apparent that another girl has caught her in the act and is completely grossed out. I don’t really care, the narrator says, because I don’t know her. If I knew her, or if she was a boy, that would be different. As she smokes she thinks up a lie to scare up some cigarette money from her mother; another fee for supplies in the typing class.

She rides the bus across the city—Columbus—and walks home through a neighborhood of brick apartment buildings. Her mother’s apartment is on the third floor. It’s sweltering inside. The narrator’s little sister is watching TV, her mother’s in her bedroom with a headache. She calls out to the narrator—Ruth, it turns out her name is—and Ruth puts some ice in a dishtowel and carries it into the darkened room. She sits on the edge of the bed, holding the icepack to her mother’s forehead, and after making some tender inquiries slips in the lie about the typing supplies. Her mother sighs and says, Okay, of course, take what you need. She tells Ruth that two of her friends called, but asks her please not to make any plans as she feels really awful and needs help with Naomi.

Ruth goes into the kitchen and looks at the notepad by the phone. The first message is from a girl she grew up with. It’s the second time she’s called since Ruth got home for the summer and though Ruth feels guilty for not calling her back she knows she won’t do it this time either. The other message is from Caroline Fallon, a classmate at the boarding school Ruth attends on scholarship. She dials the number immediately.

The two girls make clever talk about how bored they are. Ruth calls her mother Maman, and describes her indisposition in terms that make Caroline laugh. Then Caroline asks if she’d like to go to a dance at the country club that night. When Ruth hesitates, she apologizes for the late notice and says, by way of explanation, They need girls.

Okay, Ruth says. I need boys.

There’s just one thing, Caroline says. It’s so ridiculous, but anyway—can I give your name as Lewis instead of Levine?

Lewis?

You know, Lewis, Logan, something like that. I’m sorry, Ruthie. Club rules.

I see.

It’s disgusting. I probably shouldn’t have called you.

No, that’s all right. That’s fine. Tell them Windsor.

Windsor! You are a stitch! I mean, Ruthie Windsor!

Ruth Anne Windsor.

Ruth and her mother argue over her plans for the night, and Ruth handles it so deftly that her mother gets out of bed to coax her back from desolation and take in the waist of a smart old evening gown of her own that Ruth’s been coveting. When she leaves the apartment she has to stop and catch her breath, she’s so heady with the relief of escape, like getting out of granny’s hospital room.

Then the dance—the convertibles in the parking lot, the Japanese lanterns along the path to the ballroom, the music, the boys. Ruth sees that the boys have noticed her, but the one who catches her notice happens also to be the boy Caroline has in her sights. His name is Colson. He and his friend Gary sit down at Ruth and Caroline’s table. They’re both handsome, but Gary’s sort of bland and Colson’s broody and smart—too smart really for Caroline—and just as Ruth feels his interest shift toward her she senses a growing restlessness in Caroline, a watchful formless unease. Something’s wrong and Caroline doesn’t yet know what it is, but she’ll know soon enough if things follow their present course, and she will hate Ruth for it and drop her like a toad.

Normally that wouldn’t bother her. Ruth likes to compete with other girls, and she fancies this Colson with his rumbly voice and hooded eyes. At any other time she would encourage his attentions.

But this isn’t any other time. She’s at the beginning of a long summer. One of the convertibles in the parking lot belongs to Caroline, and already Ruth has gotten used to being rescued from her hot apartment for breezy drives to movie theaters and the pool at Caroline’s house. This is only the first of many dances at the club, and she wants to be invited to the rest. Caroline won’t just drop her if she feels betrayed, she will make sure Colson knows that Ruth is here tonight under false pretenses, and exactly what those pretenses are. How interested will he be then?

Lousy odds, Ruth thinks. She fastens her attention on Gary. He warms to it, and Colson withdraws moodily before resuming his languid banter with Caroline, who comes brightly to life. But Ruth is still aware of Colson and knows that he’s aware of her. Something may yet come of it before this summer is over, something secret where Ruth can get her own back. Even now the current between them is so obvious to her that she can hardly believe Caroline doesn’t feel it. Ruth stands and takes Gary’s hand to lead him toward the dance floor. Caroline smiles up at Ruth and lifts her glass. Good—she doesn’t know. Everything’s okay.

 

Everything’s okay. That was the last line in the story, this story where nothing was okay. I went back to the beginning and read it again, slowly this time, feeling all the while as if my inmost vault had been smashed open and looted and every hidden thing spread out across these pages. From the very first sentence I was looking myself right in the face.

It went beyond the obvious parallels. Where I really recognized myself was in the momentary, undramatic details of Ruth’s life and habits of thought. The typing class, say. What could be more ordinary than spending your summer days in a typing class at the Y? That was exactly what I’d done for part of the previous summer, yet I’d never once mentioned it to my schoolmates just because it was so completely ordinary, and uncool. And taking a bus to get there! No character in my stories ever rode a bus.

The whole thing came straight from the truthful diary I’d never kept: the typing class, the bus, the apartment; all mine. And mine too the calculations and stratagems, the throwing-over of old friends for new, the shameless manipulation of a needy, loving parent and the desperation to flee not only the need but the love itself. Then the sweetness of flight, the lightness and joy of escape. And, yes, the almost physical attraction to privilege, the resolve to be near it at any cost: sycophancy, lies, self-suppression, the masking of ambitions and desires, the slow cowardly burn of resentment toward those for whose favor you have falsified yourself. Every moment of it was true.

How do you begin to write truly? I went back to that first sentence. I hope nobody saw me pick up the cigarette butt off the sidewalk . . . It made me cringe. This was not how I would ever want to be seen, though in my own cigarette-craving I had done that very thing, and more than once.

What the hell—let’s see how it felt to write it. I rolled a fresh sheet into the typewriter and started pecking it out: I hope nobody saw me . . . Then the keys jammed. I separated them and they jammed again. That sentence did not want to be written, but I wrote it still. And there I was, winner of the Cassidy English Prize, future protégé of Lionel Trilling, bending to the sidewalk for a lipsticked butt.

I had stopped going to confession right after my mother died. Even as a young boy I’d performed it grudgingly and with no payoff I was ever aware of. But in writing those words I felt at least an intuition of gracious release. To strip yourself of pretense is to overthrow a hard master, the fear of giving yourself away, and in that one sentence I gave myself away beyond all recall. Now there was nothing to do but go on.

Word by word I gave it all away. I changed Ruth’s first name to mine, in order to place myself unmistakably in the frame of these acts and designs, but kept Levine, because it made unmistakable what my own last name did not. I changed the city to Seattle, Caroline to James, and brought other particulars into line. I didn’t have a lot of adjusting to do. These thoughts were my thoughts, this life my own.

It took a long time. The typewriter kept inching back, and as it retreated I leaned farther and farther over the desk until the discomfort broke my trance. Then I’d have to return the machine to the starting line and get up and pace the room a while to ease my back before bending once again to the work.

I finished the story just before the bell rang for breakfast. I read it through and fixed a few typos, but otherwise it needed no correction. It was done. Anyone who read this story would know who I was.