"A little sicko-s.e.xual, don"t you think, feces face?" Mary Anne said at the stove.
"You were marvelous, Ben," Lillian said. "Everybody around us was talking about you. I didn"t let on that I even knew you. I just said, "He isn"t that good," and everyone argued with me. Finally I told them you were my boy and they just about died."
"I sat with Mary Helen Epps, Ben," Karen said. "She couldn"t believe you were my brother. Will you say "Hi" to her if I bring her home tomorrow?"
"Naw, I"m real sorry, Karen, but I can"t go around saying "Hi" to just anybody. A man in my position has to be pretty selective."
"Oh barf," Mary Anne said. "The birth of the golden Apollo."
"You"re just jealous, freckles," Matt yelled from the hallway. "Ben"s the star and you aren"t nothing but a bunch of nasty freckles."
"If you ever grow to be over three feet tall, we"re going to have a fist fight, midget."
"Mom, you heard her!" Matt cried.
"Put me down, darling," Lillian said to Ben.
"Hey, drop the old lady. You want to get a hernia or something?" Bull said coming through the door.
"You"d think I weighed a ton, Bull," Lillian said, then, turning toward Mary Anne, she said, "Since you"re the oldest, Mary Anne, I expect you to be mature enough not to get into these fights with your younger brother."
"Are they fighting again?" Bull asked his wife. "Let me mop the floor with them. Then there won"t be no more jawboning."
"That was some game Ben played tonight, wasn"t it, Dad?"
"He"s a hot shot down here among the grits. A good Yankee guard would eat him alive."
"You can"t eat me alive," Ben said.
"You"d be a piece of cake. You don"t have the killer instinct."
"Yes, I do."
"Would you two killers please sit your brutal selves down at the kitchen table and eat some popcorn," Lillian said.
Taking a bottle of George d.i.c.kel from the liquor cabinet, Bull poured himself a drink. Leaning back on his chair he thought again about the game he had just witnessed. The game that night had affected him strangely and in some barely articulated way Bull had garnered some ineluctable insight into the nature of fathers and sons, a recondite lesson in the pa.s.sage of blood from one generation to another. He had watched Ben"s legs that night as if seeing them for the first time. They were his legs pa.s.sed down to this child. The heavy thighs, the thick calves, the strange roundness of the knees, the wide feet. Those were the legs of Meecham men and a few unfortunate Meecham women. Bull took a long drink and looked at Ben who was reading the sports section of the Charleston Evening Post. He stared at him as if he were studying the shadows of an aerial photograph. He felt he had failed Ben badly in one critical way: he had failed to drive the natural softness of Lillian Meecham out of him, to root out and expel the gentleness that was his wife"s enduring legacy to her children. Above all things, Bull wanted to pa.s.s on the gift of fury to his oldest son, a pa.s.sion to inflict defeat on others, even humiliation. Deep down, he thought Ben possessed it. Bull believed that when the flesh was torn away and the bones naked, the fighter would emerge in Ben. The fighter lived in the bones. It lived in the desire to excel and win. Taking another long drink, Bull began to talk of the past.
"The first game I played for St. Mike"s in high school, the other team had this kid named Rosie Roselle who was eatin" the league up with a two-hand set shot. I was only a soph.o.m.ore and hadn"t played much but the coach liked the way I played defense, liked the way I clawed the man I was guardin". Liked the way I growled at him. I was a real skinny kid then, young, and it would be two or three years before I muscled out. Well we were playin" Roselle"s team and no one could stop that son of a b.i.t.c.h from scoring."
"There are three ladies present, sugah," Lillian admonished, "and two gentlemen in waiting."
"Every time Rosie shot it seemed that the ball swished through the net. He had a fine eye. A fine eye. In the locker room at half time, Coach Kelly, Benny Kelly came up to me and said, "Meecham, are you man enough to stop Roselle?" I looked up and said, "Yes, sir," and he looked down and said, "Bulls.h.i.t. Bulls.h.i.t, Meecham." "
"Is that how you got your nickname, Popsy?" Mary Anne said at the stove.
"That"s enough of that, Bull Meecham."
"Then Benny Kelly screamed at me, "You don"t have the guts to stop a door from squeakin", but I"m going to give you the chance." Well I went out of that locker room with blood in my eye. When we met for the tipoff I went up to Rosie and poked him in the belly and said, "If you score on me, I"m gonna whip your f.a.n.n.y after this game." For the rest of the game I hung on him like he was a dog in heat. I breathed in when he breathed out. I kept tellin" him that I was another jockstrap he was wearing. I even followed him to his bench during time out. I told him he would dream about me that night. He didn"t score a single point in the second half. After the game Coach Benny Kelly himself came up and kissed me in the middle of the court, in front of more than three hundred people. I never sat on the bench after that. I went on to become the best that Benny Kelly ever had."
"Popcorn"s ready," Mary Anne shouted. "Dad, I want you to tell me how fabulous you were just one more time. I couldn"t hear the story with all the racket this popcorn was making."
"Before we eat it I think we ought to say a prayer," Lillian intoned, lowering her head.
"Thank you, Lord, for your many blessings. Thank you for letting us beat West Charleston and thank you for letting Ben do so well. But Lord, we especially want to remember in our prayers poor ol" Rosie Roselle."
"Poor Roselle," Ben said sadly, "I bet he"s been a wreck of a man ever since meeting up with Meecham."
"I wonder where poor Rosie is now," Karen giggled.
"He"s probably killed himself by now," Matthew said.
"Poor, poor Roselle," Ben said. "Poor Rosie Roselle."
"Cut your yappin". I was being serious."
"The sad thing, Popsy," Mary Anne said, dispensing popcorn into bowls, "is that I"m probably the only one in this family who knows what that story means to you. But you don"t care that I know. It"s sad."
"It"s just a story, sportsfans. It doesn"t mean anything to me."
"Then why do you tell it twenty times a year, darling?"
"Because I"m a believer in history," Bull answered.
"No, you just like to brag about yourself, Dad," Mary Anne said.
"Poor Rosie," Ben cooed.
"Poor Rosie Roselle," the family chanted.
Before Ben climbed into bed, Mary Anne stole into his room. "Oh, my hero, my jump-shooter. Let me touch your feet. No, your feet smell like something dead. Let me touch your golden hair or your runny red nose. Let me touch your emerald bellyb.u.t.ton."
"Get out of here, Mary Anne," Ben grinned. "Great athletes need their rest."
"Of course. Otherwise you can"t make jumpshots. You just lie there and go beddy-bye and little nothing sister Mary Anne will hum lullabies until the hero makes disgusting snoring noises."
"How would you like a fist where your mouth used to be, little sister?"
"How would you like a Marine where your little sister used to be, feces face?"
"You"re a coward. You won"t fight like a man," Ben said.
"That"s right, mousketeer. I believe in prudence. Prudent people never get hurt or injured. Vishnu approves of prudence."
"Who is Vishnu?"
"Poor dumb jock of a brother. Your brain has begun to rot since basketball season started. Vishnu is the Hindu G.o.d of self-preservation. I believe in self-preservation above all other virtues. Heroes don"t appeal to me. They think of others and do silly things, like die for causes. I like to think about myself. Before I do anything I ask myself, "What good will this do my favorite person, the charming and elegant Mary Anne Meecham?" "
"You are really getting screwed up in the head, Mary Anne. You"ve always been a little screwed up but now it"s beginning to look like you have a terminal case."
"I never thought of this, Ben, but it must be hard on you. I mean everyone in school coming up and saying to you, "Hey, aren"t you the brother of that genius and beauty queen Mary Anne Meecham?" That must be a terrible thing to live in my shadow for your whole life."
"It"s been awful, Mary Anne. But I try to accept my lot."
"You"re sort of like a wart on my f.a.n.n.y. I just got to carry you along wherever I go. Oh, by the way, golden boy, I guess you loved it when all those tacky cheerleaders bounced around you."
"No, I hated it, Mary Anne. I hated having those luscious, gorgeous hunks of womanflesh throwing themselves on me. I would have preferred ugly male midgets."
Mary Anne walked to the window and stared out at the river. "Do you know, Ben, if I had friends I would love this town. I love this house. I love the river, the trees, the privacy. Everything. It"s the most beautiful place we"ve ever lived. If I had friends I"d never want to leave this town. It would be a good place to die."
"Why are you talking about dying?"
"I think about dying all the time."
"Why?"
"What else is there to think about?"
"Living."
"That shows a basic difference between you and me, Ben."
"What"s that?"
"I have more depth."
Chapter 22.
On the Monday after the West Charleston game, Ogden Loring stopped in front of Ben"s desk, removed his gla.s.ses and began cleaning them with his silk paisley tie. Mr. Loring had a vulnerable, rubicund face with eyebrows arched into constant and natural inquisitiveness. He was a small-boned man with thinning red hair and elegant clothes. In cla.s.s as he lectured on poetry or the arts, he smoked long, thin cigarettes that he pulled individually from a silver case in his coat pocket. He wrote on the blackboard with pieces of yellow chalk. Absently and when a subject had so consumed and excited him, he would write with the cigarette and smoke the chalk. He accepted the laughter and derision of his students with an embarra.s.sed charm and a touchingly astonished grace. Bull Meecham had met Ogden Loring at a PTA meeting and had come home with a single remark: "Any man who teaches a girls" course like English is bound to be a pansy." But Ben had been coming to a gradual and reluctant realization that Ogden Loring was the best teacher he had ever had.
It was difficult at first. Being educated in Catholic schools was, in some ways, like being educated in another country. Nuns and priests were enforcers of a cla.s.sroom absolutism that tolerated no opposition. Ben had heard more noises in the bas.e.m.e.nts of funeral homes than in some math cla.s.ses taught by the icy ladies who swept down the aisles with their habits whipping up Antarctic drafts in their wake. Ben was accustomed to silence when enclosed by windows and blackboards. Learning was an abstraction that took place beneath the stares and approbation of the Catholic S.S. that had goose-stepped through the cla.s.srooms of his youth. One nun, Sister Saint Ann, had been the kindest woman and the best teacher he had ever had until Ogden Loring, but even her cla.s.sroom was a limbo where the children had floated in the horse lat.i.tudes of their own suppressed energy. All nuns and priests who had ever taught Ben and all Marines and their wives who had ever loved or advised him could step into Ogden Loring"s senior English cla.s.s and know they were in enemy territory.
His opening words to the cla.s.s at the beginning of the year had been, "I am a man of strange parts," and he had then set out on an erratic odyssey and with a demonic single-mindedness to prove it. Each day when his students entered his manic kingdom, they heard music emanating from a stereo behind his desk. Sometimes the music would be cla.s.sical: Brahms, Beethoven, Saint-Saens, or Bach. Other times there would be Negro Spirituals sung by Odetta or folk songs rendered by Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, or Woody Guthrie. For one full week, Mr. Loring played rock and roll beginning with Bill Haley and continuing in a kind of inauthentic historical overview through Buddy Holly until it stopped abruptly with Roy Orbison. Ben paid little attention to the music until the first test of the semester when a quarter of the questions dealt with the identification of the music Mr. Loring had played the first two weeks of school. As Ben agonized over a blank memory, Mr. Loring busied himself by walking around the room removing sc.r.a.ps of paper that were wadded and thrown under each desk in the room. The cla.s.s was openly hostile after the test was over. It was then that Ogden Loring had cheerfully revealed that the answers to all the test questions were printed on the wads of paper he had gathered under their desks and any of them would have been free to make use of these hidden aids if they had only taken the time to find them. "Animules," he had said, "idgits who live in the valley of the shadow of death. Be attuned to your environment. Know what is going on about you. Make yourself aware."
On other occasions, he pinned the answers to tests in obscure corners of the bulletin board. If he put up a print of a painting he had collected from the Louvre or the Prado on one of his summer journeys to Europe then it was certain that the print would appear on a future test. When Jim Don Cooper whined that he just couldn"t get excited over literature, Mr. Loring brought in the varsity cheerleaders and had them lead exuberant cheers for Charles d.i.c.kens, William Faulkner, and J. D. Salinger. Instead of using textbooks, he subscribed to the Atlantic Monthly, Harper"s, and the Sunday Edition of the New York Times for his seniors. "Protozoa," he would announce to his cla.s.s, "I want to introduce you to some other voices in the outside world before life sinks her claws into you."
He was a starling-voiced orator who could bring his antiques to school and deliver impa.s.sioned, enraptured lectures on the exquisiteness of Waterford crystal or the fragility of the first edition books he would pa.s.s around the room. Two of his books were signed by Oscar Wilde. His Tess of the D"Urbervilles was a numbered edition signed by Thomas Hardy.
The cla.s.s listened to one opera each month-at least made some effort to listen over the thunder of groans and barely suppressed expletives from the athletes who populated the last row of seats. But Ogden Loring seemed unconcerned whether his cla.s.s applauded his material or not; he merely tested them on every single facet of cla.s.sroom life. He a.s.signed a three-hundred-word essay every Friday afternoon without fail and issued a list of twenty vocabulary words on which they would be tested the following Tuesday.
"Good morning, cracker trash," he had begun one Monday morning. "I believe in oligarchy," and thirty pencils wrote an approximation of the word "oligarchy," knowing that it would appear on some test at some future time.
On Fridays, he would often show slides of his trips to Europe, pausing lovingly over pastoral scenes in England. "Oh, lawdy, lawdy, lawdy," he would sigh. "Sweet England. Sweet, gentle England. Sweet, sad, and gentle England."
"You"re bats, Loring," a voice would call in the darkness.
He showed slides of a bullfight in Spain and his voice would choke up when the bull was felled. Then he would come close to actual weeping when he described to the cla.s.s the death of Manolete which he had studied exhaustively while in Spain. On Wednesday afternoons, three of the girls in the cla.s.s would go to his house where he taught them some of the mysteries of French cooking for extra credit. Extra credit was the bullion he used to bribe the indolent scholar. For every book read Mr. Loring ladled out an indeterminate amount of extra credit, making some arcane notation in his grade book that in theory counted for something during those critical nights when he evaluated the performance of each student.
The truly admirable thing about Ogden Loring was that he did not care at all that the entire town of Ravenel, South Carolina, believed that he was at least half crazy.
In every cla.s.s, Ogden Loring took the abuse of students, heard taunts thrown at him, and endured the bile and venom of students who could not or would not speak up in other cla.s.ses. At first Ben was appalled by the lack of respect for the man and by the man"s ability to disregard the stockpiled vitriol stacked on him by his students. Every day, the first minutes of cla.s.s would be filled by harsh salvos of criticism aimed at Mr. Loring"s round, a.s.sailable figure leaning against his lectern. It was part of the routine, like the Pledge of Allegiance. Sometimes he teased back, lashed out, or screamed in rage at his attackers, but mostly he smiled during the morning wars and listened as students who never spoke in another cla.s.s joined the hunt. But the strangest thing of all to Ben was the singular realization that Ogden Loring was the most popular teacher in Calhoun High School. He had seen Jim Don Cooper almost fight Art the Fart after practice one day when Art made a disparaging remark about Mr. Loring. He knew that Sue Ellen Rogers was enrolled in Mr. Loring"s Wednesday afternoon cooking cla.s.ses. It was very strange to a boy weaned on the fists and calluses of Catholic schools. But soon, through talking to Sammy and Emma Lee, he learned that Ogden Loring was a genuine property, a bona fide character, an heirloom, and for ten years his reputation had incubated throughout the town, had been pa.s.sed on from brother to brother, sister to sister, and it was part of the glory and the gold of high school, the dross and the pyrite of high school, to pa.s.s through the doors of Ogden Loring"s cla.s.s on the way to life.
Each week a steady stream of former students returned to his cla.s.s, the sad flotsam of men and women who had tasted the other side of graduation and found it wanting. Their eyes spoke of failure and they came back to Ogden Loring like ships looking for a safe harbor. It took years in the crucible of human experience to value the gentle people one meets in the eye of the storm. Almost daily they came back to Ogden Loring. A man in uniform or a woman with two or three scrubbed, shining children would appear and these old students would rush to embrace the nervous un.o.btrusive man who blushed deeply and was almost moved to tears so touched he was to be remembered and visited.
Ben had gone to complain to Mr. Dacus about the teaching of Ogden Loring during the first two weeks of school. Mr. Dacus had listened to Ben"s complaints very patiently, then suggested that Ben wait until a month had pa.s.sed before he made any final decision about the quality of Ogden Loring"s teaching. If, at the end of a month, Ben still thought Loring was a poor teacher, then he, Mr. Dacus, would personally break Ben"s neck and kick him out of his school.
"p.i.s.sant," Mr. Dacus had said, "it isn"t very often you come across a holy man. But you have. And this one has a genius for teaching p.i.s.sant. So go on back to his cla.s.s and I"ll accept your apology later after you decide that Og is the best teacher you"ve ever had."
It was weeks before Ben could gather up the crosscurrents shifting through the English cla.s.s commanded by the flaccid, bird-nervous man and arrive at some theory that appeased his glandular requirements for what was and was not acceptable for the last English course he would take before college. When Ogden Loring had cast burning eyes over the students before him, shook his head sadly and said, "It is a pity. An absolute pity that some of you have not read at least ten thousand books. Then, perhaps, we could begin to have a conversation," Ben felt himself wanting more than anything in the world to sit before Ogden Loring, ten thousand books glowing in his memory like rubies, and carry on a conversation that had no boundaries, no arbitrary purlieus. Ben Meecham would dazzle this man with shimmering images and razor-cut metaphors lifted from the great works of every century. Without his knowledge, Ben had been ensnared by a single sentence, one of thousands that Loring would drop during the course of the year with the unshakable credo that the leitmotif of his cla.s.s was intellectual voyage. A student could accompany him on all voyages or only a few. It was a simple matter of choice, predilection, and a pa.s.sing grade.
After he polished his gla.s.ses, Mr. Loring put them back on and stared unsteadily at Ben. It had been a day of undiminished triumph for Ben so far. A single basketball game had given him a name, a face, and an ident.i.ty. He had been invisible in the halls of Calhoun High for too many months not to enjoy it.
"I reckon you just think you are plain wonderful, don"t you, animule?" Mr. Loring said.
"Pardon me, sir," Ben answered.
"I bet you just woke up this morning, looked at your wonderful self in the mirror, and gave yourself a standing ovation. Admit it, creeter. You think you"re the cat"s meow now that you"re the big basketball jock."
"No, sir."
"A jock," Mr. Loring sneered. "A worshiper of muscle? A salesman of speed? I think it"s absurd. Yes, absurd. Here I am, Mr. Meecham, teaching my guts out, trying to the best of my ability to make a scholar out of you, and in one night"s time, I discover that you are a jock. A resident of those smelly, nasty locker rooms, trained by those brainless chimps called coaches. Extraordinary. I think I"ll faint. I might just die. Or sing a song to the Lord. I just think it"s wonderful that you think you"re so wonderful."
"We"re going all the way to State this year if Ben keeps up the good work," Philip Turner said, sitting directly in front of Ben.
"All the way to State!" Mr. Loring gasped. "I"ll just expire if we don"t get all the way to State. Yes, I must go there myself. I must go to State."
"You know what I mean, Mr. Loring," Philip said.
"Everybody in this town thinks you"re as crazy as Crowder peas, Mr. Loring," Sue Ellen Rodgers said.
"That"s right," Jim Don Cooper said from the last row. "My daddy wants to kill ol" Loring with his bare hands. Just strangle him until his eyes pop out of his bald ugly head."
"My mama says they ought to lock up ol" Loring and throw the key into the Pacific Ocean," Sue Ellen said.
Mr. Loring, unperturbed, answered Sue Ellen with calm and dignity. "It is because my students love me that I can remain in this bleak town teaching the King"s English to creatures damaged geographically beyond repair the very moment of their birth. I remain here because some of you idgits will go from this cla.s.s with a rather vague notion that there is a small difference between a verb and a spark plug."
"I want to learn some real English, Mr. Loring," Philip said. "We haven"t diagramed a single sentence all year. I"m getting worried about the College Boards."
"Yeah, all we do is memorize these three million dollar words that I can"t even p.r.o.nounce," Sammy Wertzberger said.
"Quit pretending you"re stupid, Samuel. Of course you can p.r.o.nounce them and they"ll be valuable in the future," Emma Lee Givens scolded.