They fell silent and above the treetops on the left of the clearing a black eagle arrowed across the sun. Chiron feared for a moment, then realized that though it was on his left, it was on the children’s right. On their right, and ascending: doubly propitious. (But on his left). The class sighed in awe and, after the eagle vanished on the iridescent edge of the solar halo, chattered excitedly. Even Ocyrhoe, it pleased her father to see, was impressed. Worry in this interval slid from her brow; her glittering hair merged with her shining eyes and she became any gay, thoughtless girl. By no means instinctively reverent, she claimed to foresee a day when Zeus would be taken by men as a poor toy they had themselves invented, and be terribly taunted, be banished from Olympus, sent scrambling down the shingle, and branded a criminal.
The Arcadian sun was growing warmer. Birdsong encircling the clearing turned sluggish. Chiron felt in his blood the olive trees on the plain rejoice. In the cities, worshippers mounting the white temple steps would feel the marble hot on their unsandalled feet. He took his class for their lesson to the shade of a great chestnut tree that it was said Pelasgus himself had planted. The trunk was as thick around as a shepherd’s cottage. The boys arranged themselves swaggeringly among the roots as if among the bodies of slain enemies; the girls more demurely sought postures of ease on areas of moss. Chiron inhaled; air like honey expanded the spaces of his chest; his students completed the centaur. They fleshed his wisdom with expectation. The wintry chaos of information within him, elicited into sunlight, was struck though with the young colors of optimism. Winter turned vernal. “Our subject today,” he began, and the faces, scattered in the deep green shade like petals after rain, were unanimously hushed and attentive, “is the Genesis of All Things. In the beginning,” the centaur said, “black-winged Night was courted by the wind, and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness. From this egg hatched Eros, which means-?”
“Love,” a child’s voice answered from the grass.
“And Love set the Universe in motion. All things that exist are her children-sun, moon, stars, the earth with its mountains and rivers, its trees, herbs, and living creatures. Now Eros was double-sexed and golden-winged and, having four heads, sometimes roared like a bull or a lion, sometimes hissed like a serpent or bleated like a ram; beneath her rule the world was as harmonious as a beehive. Men lived without cares or labor, eating only acorns, wild fruit, and honey that dripped from trees, drinking the milk of sheep and goats, never growing old, dancing, and laughing much. Death, to them, was no more terrible than sleep. Then her scepter passed to Uranus…”
IV
AFTER SCHOOL I went up to my father’s room, Room
204. Two students were in there with him. I glared at them both and in my haughty red shirt crossed to the window and looked toward Alton. I had made a vow during the day to protect my father, and these two students consuming his time were the first enemies I had encountered. One was Deifendorf, the other was Judy Lengel. Deifendorf was speaking.
“I can see shop and typing and like that, Mr. Caldwell,” he said, “but for somebody like me who’s not going on to college or anything, I don’t see the point of memorizing lists of animals that’ve been dead a million years.”
“There is no point,” my father said. “You are two hundred per cent right: who cares about dead animals? If they’re dead, let ‘em lie; that’s my motto. They depress the hell out of me. But that’s what they give me to teach and I’m going to teach it to you until it kills me. It’s either you or me, Deifendorf, and if you don’t get rid of those jitters I’ll do my best to kill you before you kill me; I’ll strangle you with my bare hands if I have to. I’m up here fighting for my life. I have a wife and a kid and an old man to feed. I’m just like you are; I’d rather be out walking the streets. I feel sorry for you; I know how you’re suffering.”
I laughed by the window; it was my way of attacking Deifendorf. I felt him clinging to my father, sucking the strength from him. That was the way of the cruel children. An hour after they had goaded him to the point of frenzy (flecks of foam would actually appear in the corners of his mouth and his eyes would become like tiny raw diamonds), they would show up in his room, anxious to seek advice, make confessions, be reassured. And the instant they had left his company they would mock him again. I kept my back turned on the sickening duet.
From my father’s windows I overlooked the school’s side lawn, where in the autumn the band and cheerleaders rehearsed, and the tennis courts and the line of horsechestnut trees marking the poorhouse lane and, beyond everything, Mt. Alton, a humped blue horizon scarred by a gravel pit. A trolley car stuffed with Alton shoppers came sparking and swaying up the line. Some of the students who lived toward Alton were bunched at the stop, waiting for this trolley’s mate to come down the pike. Down on the cement walks leading from the girls’ exit along the side of the building- I had to touch my nose to the icy glass to see this sharply down-girls, foreshortened into patches of plaid, fur, books, and wool, walked in pairs and trios home together. Frozen breath flew from their mouths. What they said I could not hear. I looked for Penny among them. I had avoided her all day, because to draw near to her seemed a desertion of my parents, whose need for me had mysteriously, solemnly deepened.
“…the only one,” Deifendorf was saying to my father. His voice scratched. His voice was queerly feeble, disassociated from his emphatic, athletic body. I had often seen Deifendorf naked in the locker room. He had stumpy legs woolly with sandy fur and a huge rubbery torso and sloping shining shoulders and very long arms culminating in red scoop-shaped hands. He was a swimmer.
“That’s right, you’re not, you’re not the only one,” my father told him. “But on the whole, Deifendorf, I’d say you’re the worst. I’d say you’re the itchiest kid I have on my hands this year.” He made this estimate dispassionately. There were things-itchiness, intelligence, athletic ability -that his years of teaching had given him absolute pitch in gauging.
No Penny had popped up among the girls below. Behind me, the quality of Deifendorf’s silence seemed baffled and even hurt. He had a vulnerable side. He loved my father. It pains me to admit it, but there existed between this obscene animal and my father an actual affection. I resented it. I resented how lavishly my father outpoured himself before the boy, as if somewhere in all this nonsense there might be the healing drop. “The Founding Fathers,” he explained, “in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you. I am a paid keeper of Society’s unusables-the lame, the halt, the insane, and the ignorant. The only incentive I can give you, kid, to behave yourself is this: if you don’t buckle down and learn something, you’ll be as dumb as I am, and you’ll have to teach school to earn a living. When the Depression hit me in ‘31, I had nothing. I knew nothing. God had taken care of me all my life so I was unemployable. So out of the goodness of his heart my father-in-law’s nephew Al Hummel got me a job teaching. I don’t wish it on you, kid. Even though you’re my worst enemy I don’t wish it on you.”
I was staring, ears warm, toward Mt. Alton. As if through an imperfection in the glass I looked around a corner of time and foresaw, fantastically, that Deifendorf would teach. And so it was to be. Fourteen years later, I went home and on an Alton side-street met Deifendorf in a saggy brown suit from whose breast pocket the pencils and pens thrust as from my father’s pocket in the old forgotten days. Deifendorf had gone fat and his hairline had receded, but it was he. He asked me, dared in all seriousness to ask me, an authentic second-rate abstract expressionist living in an East Twenty-third Street loft with a Negro mistress, me, if I was ever going to teach. I told him No. He told me, his pale dull eyes shelled in Seriousness, “Pete, I often think of what your Dad used to tell me about teaching. ‘It’s rough,’ he’d say, ‘but you can’t beat it for the satisfaction you get.’ Now I’m teaching myself, I see what he meant. A great man, your Dad. Did you know that?”