The Old Priest, as it turns out, pretty quickly became a period piece. It went almost at once to the remainder tables, probably due to its lack of explicitness. Old priests are what sell, but only if you catch them en flagrante. Once in a while you take a peek at the book yourself. It is not veiy good. It is “mannered,” as one reviewer pointed out, and it is also derivative, a retelling of the old priest’s stories combined with some mildly ambiguous hints at homosexuality, a strange and self-conscious amalgamation of The Power and the Glory and Brideshead Revisited by way of A Separate Peace and The Trouble with Angels.
It is as outmoded as those lace things they used to place on the tops of parlor chairs so that one’s head wouldn’t stain the fabric. Why would one’s head stain the fabric? Hair oil, perhaps, or dye the color and consistency of shoe polish. The old priest would know what those things are called, were called. But you don’t, although among your students it is well known that when asked your favorite book your immediate response is the OED. Nobody, not even your colleagues, seems to remember that that was Auden’s famous reply. You’ve got your tweed,
your manners and your mannerisms, a few chestnuts in the one hand, a couple of shibboleths in the other.
Still, it was your dream, publishing a novel, the dream of your youth, and since you have a novel, albeit one that has not done veiy well and is currently out of print (alas), you now have a job, comfortable enough, in which you will live out the rest of your days, professionally speaking. Teaching English in a posh New England boarding school, well talk about mannered! Tweeds, rep ties. For a joke on the first day of school
you sometimes wear a boater! *
And so once again you are back in Boston, thi£ time without the old priest, a strange and portentous reversal to have ended up where he would like to be but is not. You are getting on in years, living by yourself in a large but shabby one-bedroom on Washington Street, the bedroom itself facing the street so that you have to protect your sleep with a white noise machine or an air conditioner, depending on the time of year. The white noise machine, which looks like something designed for a low-budget sci-fi movie, sounds like the endless slosh and chop of some eternal ocean. The air conditioner sounds like the void: empty and metallic and without variation.
Whatever has become of the gaiety of the old priest? Sitting at a dinner table, enraptured with the present moment, seeing and being seen, fine clothes and expensive bar drinks and first class victuals, all of life’s possibilities laid out before you like a flight of oysters. Now you are getting old and have resigned yourself to bachelorhood. Your talent, paltry at its best, has left you; you walk the cold streets of Beantown in shabby clothes, a denizen of the pubs and second hand book stores.
Your students like you all the same. You are an affable old failure who is nevertheless a tough old bird, an eagle’s eye for the misplaced comma and the misused semi-colon: some of the hipper students call you “Old School” behind your back, or you wish they would. The truth is you give them all B’s, and the girls with pert breasts get B plusses. Oh, even the girls without pert breasts get B plusses, who are you kidding? The poor sad pimply-faced freshman boys, arms and legs askew, get the B minuses, and they deserve them, too. They themselves admit as much.
“Walk among them,” advised the old priest when he found out you’d become a high school English teacher. “Always teach standing up. Be a presence among them. Let them feel your presence as you walk among them.”
You walk among your own students and wish to tousle their hair or
to trail your fingers across their downy arms as they sit, scribbling in their notebooks. And what would he so wrong in that?
In your free time you tinker with a second novel, which you call The Western Gate after a line from “Luke Havergal.” These days if you can only get to twenty thousand words they’ll package it some way to make it look like a novel, or at least they will if they think they can sell it that way. The Western Gate is the stoiy of a dissipated novelist, a drunk and a womanizer who is his own worst enemy. He drinks, adulterizes, insults powerful people while he is going about his drinking and adulterizing. Once again the material is a combination of thinly veiled biography and heavy-handed fantasy. You use the details of your own boarding school and place within those details yourself as an idealized creation, a writer talented but with a checkered past and an unreliable conscience. You yourself have neither—at least not to a degree anybody would find interesting. You have never adulterized, have rarely insulted anyone, and go quietly home from the pub after two pints. You have no illusions about leading your students into the promised land of the historical moment; in fact, you have no illusions about anything at all.