After he was dead, when I was casting about for material I could use to spit-shine his memory, I would recall the moment when the notion of making a living as a writer first entered my head. It was when I was ten years old and he gave me my first writing job, as his official stenographer, a position I continued to hold straight through high school. My father, as previously noted, was the sort of person who regularly threw fits. Social injustice, endemic political corruption, the rise of rock ’n’ roll, and the depravity of Negroes were the themes most likely to set him off. But unlike other hard-drinking men, he would not let it rest there. Instead, his apoplexy nudged him toward the epistolary mode. Sometimes when he had worked himself into a fit of sufficiently high dudgeon, he would announce his intention to write an angry letter to the editor of the local newspaper. There were three Delaware Valley newspapers at the time, but the one that most incensed him was the
Evening Bulletin,
which he ceaselessly denounced as the mouthpiece of the plutocracy, the pawn of the feckless GOP.
Because his handwriting was atrocious, because he was physically lazy, because he was usually too juiced up to focus his eyes, and because I was in no position to refuse him, he insisted that I transcribe his denunciations precisely as he dictated them and then mail them to the targets of his displeasure. Whenever he plunged into one of these dyspeptic moods, he truly seemed to have taken leave of his senses, just like the rest of those prolix lunatics who never fail to end their letters to the editor without announcing that they are canceling their subscriptions for good, as if this would imperil the financial well-being of the publication. The difference was his prose. Most people who fire off angry letters to the editor write the way they speak: like billygoats. My father, by contrast, had a touch of the poet; his turn of phrase and choice of words were things of beauty. He had read Charles Dickens, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, the Brontës. He could recite portions of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Song of Hiawatha,” “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” “Paul Revere’s Ride,” and a sizable chunk of Mark Antony’s funeral oration from
Julius Caesar
. He was surprisingly fond of Cato the Elder, otherwise lightly regarded in the Quaker City. In short, he knew whereof he spoke. Or, rather, he knew whereof they spoke and imitated their way of speaking.
His jeremiads were, accordingly, laced with poignant imagery, edifying turns of phrase, and a lofty, tongue-in-cheek style he may have appropriated from Mark Twain, filled with pithy phrases like “More in sorrow than in anger, I take my pen in hand” and “Come not between the dragon and his wrath.” At this late date, I can no longer recall what the letters were about, nor the specific outrages that triggered his ire, but they usually included a handful of fulminations against the house vampire Herbert Hoover, whose heartless economic policies had driven the workingman, yea, verily into the shadow of the Valley of Death. There was an anachronistic quality to these attacks, as Hoover, be he villain, stooge, or nincompoop, had been out of office for around thirty years. But a feud was a feud, and a bloodsucking leech was a bloodsucking leech.
Unlike my father, my high school literature teachers did not know whereof they spoke, nor whereof anybody else spoke. They spoke anyway. The syllabi they arrayed against us like Imperial Rome’s merciless legions at Masada were unilaterally punitive, consisting of narcoleptic stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, dreary sludge by Thomas Hardy, lunkheaded prose by John Steinbeck, and a cornucopia of hooey by that stable of braying jackasses whom high school literature professors have always revered. They were quite taken by
The Glass Menagerie
. Quite taken indeed.
Just to put everyone in an even more homicidal mood, teachers would occasionally throw in a few morsels from Chaucer, a perennial hit with high school boys. Never truly sold on the notion that great literature could appeal to us on its own merits—an assumption that was probably true—they forced us to parse and diagram sentences, ferret out cryptic metaphors, and use every last ounce of our sleuthing capacities to pin down the messianic imagery in
Moby-Dick
, though we were never sure whether Captain Ahab, Ishmael, or the whale himself was the Christ figure. Even when they introduced us to undeniably great writers like Joseph Conrad and Henry James, they insisted on our reading their most demanding novels, the ones we were far too young to appreciate, nineteenth-century masterpieces that, however brilliant, would automatically tax any teenager’s patience, if only because of the archaic language. Our teachers did not care. The quality of mercy was a concept that could gain no purchase in their stalagmitic hearts.
I spent my last two years at Cardinal Dougherty hiding in the back of the class, concealed behind a sowlike creature named Arthur Prendergast. It was Prendergast’s girth that enabled me to read the complete works of Ian Fleming, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Ray Bradbury without getting caught by my instructors. Arthur fell into that class of mildly jolly individuals who seem to have been born old and never been young, though it is closer to the truth to say that that they were born fat and had never been thin. Concealed behind this affable razorback, I was able to do a tremendous amount of casual reading, and for this I was eternally grateful. Meanwhile, all the boys up front were being systematically driven out of their minds by clerics delivering listless harangues about the pulverized dreams of the doomed tobogganer Ethan Frome or the moral inflexibility of that honey-tongued Dixie barrister Atticus Finch. My classmates had done nothing to deserve this. They were, to borrow one of my father’s favorite citations, more sinned against than sinning. They were truly the Holy Innocents.
I had one or two memorable teachers in high school; most of the others were dullards or flunkies. My history professor in junior year was a flashy blade in his early thirties who wore ritzy clothes, was rumored to be the son of a wealthy man, and, much like my third-grade teacher, Miss Needham, was suspected of having taken a poorly paid teaching job primarily as a stunt to infuriate his well-heeled father. Nothing else, we felt, could explain his presence among teen mortals; a teacher’s salary in a Catholic school wouldn’t keep him in worsted slacks, much less double-breasted trench coats. This was in the year 1967, when American fashion standards were coming apart at the seams. Mr. Rotchford was an obdurate holdout, the last Beau Brummel, a fiercely stylish chap determined to ride out our long national fashion nightmare.
It was almost impossible then, and is surely impossible now, for a young man teaching high school in an American city not to come across as a dweeb, a suck-up, or a schlub, but this was not the case with Angelo T. Rotchford. Unlike his colleagues, he did not wear serviceable penny loafers and regimentally striped ties, but Milanese slip-ons and teal cravats. Eschewing corduroy jackets with ghastly velveteen patches on the elbows—the uniform of so many pedagogues of the era—he opted for sleek cashmere blazers. He most certainly did not wear what my twelve-year-old son would later derisively refer to as “teacher pants.” His peers shopped at the House of Sears & Roebuck; his charge card read “House of Burberry.” By comparison with the rest of the staff—half of them fatsos in fraying cassocks, half of them string beans in weather-beaten cords—he was Süleyman the Magnificent.
Mr. Rotchford was a very capable teacher with a sharp sense of humor, and we all admired him. This was almost unheard of among students at that time, because teachers were generally viewed as jailers or snitches. If I do not recall anything in particular he had to say, I have no trouble recalling his affectionately irreverent attitude toward the subject matter, and of course, his fabulous duds. His colleagues were far less memorable, in either the sartorial or the pedagogical department. My physics teacher in senior year was a diminutive, mirthless loner who derived enormous pleasure from watching boys paddle each other. An accommodating sort, he supplied the paddle. Some of the boys found this funny, but I did not. The beady-eyed, poorly shaven hobbit was transparently depraved, but not very tall, and even at that tender age I understood that height trumped authority. By this time, I was six feet tall, and sixteen years of life with an ogre was more than enough preparation for two semesters with a reptile.
Dismayed by this weird mélange of voyeurism and bargain-basement deviancy, a group of us approached a priest we admired and asked him to have a word with our professor, but nothing came of it. Shortly before school ended, the pouty gnome threatened to flunk half the class, thereby preventing us from entering college, thereby exposing us to the prospect of being called up and sent to Vietnam. Cooler heads prevailed, and our F’s were upgraded to D’s and C’s. It was revelatory that the powers that be would step in to address the grading issue but did not seem terribly concerned about the wayward dwarf ’s unnerving predilections in the disciplinary realm.
A few teachers tried hard but fell short of the mark. Father Calpin, our chemistry professor in junior year, was a meek and pious soul with a heart of gold, who would obligingly step out of the room for a few minutes during exams, thereby enabling the less gifted students to copy the answers off the more gifted ones, and thereby get into college. But as soon as we found out—through channels—that he suffered from a heart condition, we moved heaven and earth to polish him off by Thanksgiving: grasshoppers in the desk drawer, bowling balls rolling around the stadium seating, frisky rodents cavorting in the closet, and, of course, that trusty old favorite, explosions in the lab. The fact is, we found out that he had a heart condition from a priest we liked who specifically requested that we go easy on him. To this day, I cannot imagine what he was thinking of. Father Calpin himself took no offense at our attempts to send him to an early grave, dismissing our stunts as harmless adolescent hijinks. A living saint, he eventually won us over. By Christmas we had stopped trying to kill him, and by Easter we weren’t even making all that much of an effort to induce a stroke. But right up to the end of the year, we kept on stuffing those grasshoppers in the desk drawer just to watch him go flying out of his chair.
Our religion instructor during sophomore year was one of those diffident, cerebral sorts who were often found in Catholic colleges but rarely in high schools. His assignment to Dougherty seemed to constitute some form of ostracism by the diocese, or perhaps a test of his mettle, though once he’d been around us a few weeks, he may have interpreted it more as a reprisal. He had come to the right place to get his mettle tested, because no one in our class was interested in anything he had to say. Not one of us cared about Vatican II, an event of stupendous importance that was much in the news those days. None of us cared about the freshly unearthed Dead Sea scrolls, which were all the rage. And it goes without question that none of us made any effort to behave.
Frustrated, he took to grabbing students by the collar and giving them three sharp smacks across the face. He referred to these as “three smashes,” which sounded more like “thwee smathes,” as he was afflicted by a pronounced lisp. He was a magnificently homely man, with a face like a Komodo dragon. He also had a tendency to bite down on his tongue when he hit a student; as the victim’s face was practically adjoining his at the time, it was hard for the miscreant to avoid giggling, since it always appeared that the priest was choking on a wiener the size of Denmark. Smirking, chuckling, or any other form of physiognomic insubordination could lead us into uncharted waters: four smashes, five smashes, sometimes as many as six. Prickly, but no idiot, he did not try smacking any of the larger, tougher boys.
He was not a vicious man, merely outgunned. At the outset, he was fond of me; aware that I had only recently left the seminary, he assumed that I was fully conversant with the latest developments in the Curia. But I was not at all fond of him, as he was an unsightly goof, and once or twice I deliberately put him in situations where he had no choice but to retaliate. Getting him to smash me in the face apprised my peers that I was no longer a pious seminarian but just another run-of-the-mill punk like them. There was nothing especially unwholesome about these measures; in fact, there was something nostalgic about his lighthearted retribution. I thought he was silly; I did not think him cruel.
The absence of pedagogical mentors was a source of no concern during my high school years, as I was getting all the motivation I needed from my two employers. But if I did not have an inspiring teacher, I did have an inspiring subject: French. I was smitten by the French language from the first time I heard it uttered and have remained infatuated ever since. This unlikely romance had begun to flower five years earlier, when I stayed up late one Saturday night to watch the classic black-and-white film
Beau Geste
with my father.
Beau Geste
was a hell-for-leather saga about three English brothers (Ray Milland, Robert Preston, and the fantastically miscast Gary Cooper) who run off to join the French Foreign Legion after a precious jewel disappears from their aunt’s home during an impromptu séance. The story kicks off in the rolling English countryside, but most of the action takes place in the swirling sands of the Sahara. There, at Fort Zinderneuf, a desolate military outpost in French West Africa, two of the three boys fall prey to the sadistic martinet Sergeant Markoff, played with demonic glee by Brian Donlevy, who was nominated for the Oscar as Best Supporting Actor for his performance. Ultimately, reviving a tradition from the games of their youth, two of the boys give the third what they refer to as a “Viking’s funeral”: a huge floating bonfire, with a dog buried at the corpse’s feet. The dog in this case was Sergeant Markoff, by this point very much dead. The film was based on Percival Wren’s immortal novel of the same name, one of the most popular works of fiction ever published. It sold millions of copies, was translated into countless languages, and was made into four feature-length films, not counting a dire parody called
The Last Remake of Beau Geste.
Sadly, Wren and his work are now completely forgotten. This is unfortunate, since
Beau Geste
had everything a young boy could possibly ask for in either a book or a film: honor, romance, intrigue, swordplay, surprise attacks by bloodthirsty Tuaregs, heroic deaths, fatal confrontations with corrupt authority figures, and first-rate funerals. Not to mention hell-for-leather.