A High Old Time

In the fall of 1985, shortly after I got out of graduate school, I had the good fortune to land a teaching job at a small private school in Virginia called Glenn Acres. I went around telling everyone I was going to begin my professional life as an English teacher, although teaching was not, as the Catholics like to say about young men destined for the priesthood, my vocation. It was an emergency job — something I fell into so I would have some income and I could save up for bigger and better things. My plan was to work for two or three years and then go to law school. I scored a 160 out of a possible 180 on the LSAT, so I knew I would get in almost anywhere I could afford to go.

And I was right about that. As I write this, I am in my twentieth year of practicing law for the Federal Government — in their antitrust division. My two years as a teacher seem long ago and far away now.

What happened to me in those two short years may have been a consequence of some fault in the understanding between teacher and student, but it changed the world for me in ways I'm still contemplating. This is not a story about teaching. Nor is it about education, or school, although most of what happened started in a school. This is a story about caring a little too much; or maybe about not caring enough. I really don't know which. The only thing I know for certain is that I wish a lot of it did not happen.

My girlfriend Annie believed all the trouble began with Leslie Warren in the fall term, during my last year. Leslie lodged a complaint against me early that year, and Annie thought the complaint, however untrue, got me so bound up with the injustice of it that my "Christ complex" emerged and I spent the entire year trying to right all the injustices in the world. I admit Leslie's complaint hurt me; it was so deeply disturbing on so many levels that I lost the ability to comprehend loveliness for a while. But I worked with her — with the most beautiful young woman I will probably ever know — and when I think now, even now, how much Leslie came to mean to me — I can scarcely get my breath. What happened to her — what became of us, really — is the one thing I can't get myself to accept. Even after all this time.

When I first saw Leslie she was strolling across the school parking lot, carrying her books against her breast, her fine hair, almost the color of corn silk, swaying in the fall breezes. A perfect September day, at the beginning of things, and she looked like autumn — like the blossoming harvest of gold and amber, in sunlight.

I hoped she was a teacher, but I soon found out she was a junior, hoping to finally get the credits she needed to graduate from high school. She was everybody's worst nightmare, I heard — she was not in my class that first year, so I counted myself fortunate, in a way. But in other ways, I longed for just the opportunity to catch sight of her. I am not talking about lust either — just a kind of aesthetic pleasure. You can't help but admire something so perfectly structured. She had high cheekbones, a sleek but soft jaw that curved exactly right around dark red lips. Her eyes were light blue under naturally dark brown, exquisitely arched brows, and dark, curled eyelashes. I had never looked upon such a face. You didn't notice her body — although it was lithe, and shaped well enough. I know the way I'm talking about her only furthers the notion that I was in love with her, but in truth, I wasn't. Or at least, I wasn't in love with her in the way you might be thinking. She was only seventeen when I first saw her and it was hard not to discount all the rumors about everybody's nightmare. She was so perfect I wondered how she could be so completely wild and cross, full of such bitter trouble that nobody wanted anything to do with her. Not having her in any of my classes that first year did not keep me from getting to know her anyway; maybe I even understood her a little bit.

The truth is I don't think my trouble started in the second year, or with Leslie's eventual complaint about me. I think it may have started with little George Meeker, in my first year, before I'd ever spoken with Leslie Warren. If I had not been drawn so completely into George's predicament, perhaps I wouldn't have been so deeply involved in the events of that second year — the last year as it turned out.

I said I wished a lot of it did not happen, but I think mostly I did what my accidental profession called me to. I know that sounds noble, and as if I'm really going to end up talking about my work as a teacher after all, but really I'm not. To say this story is about teaching is exactly the same as saying The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about the Mississippi River.

After a few months of teaching, I wondered how anybody could be a teacher for his whole life. It turned out to be really hard work. I had to deal with as many as twenty to twenty-five students per class, five classes a day, five days a week. That could be as many as one hundred and twenty-five different personalities every day. I had to teach them how to write — how to think on the page, express themselves honestly and correctly, day in and day out. Do you have any idea how many pages and pages of student writing you'd have to read and evaluate just to teach one simple idea? If each student is hardworking enough to produce only two pages of writing per day, that's 1,250 pages a week. Of student writing. And they all had to write about something that mattered, not just to them but to the rest of the world. (How could one escape the burden of teaching values?)

You're teaching them writing, so what else do you do with them? You can have them read, but then they have to write about what they've read, so you have to read that too. And what do you have them read? Every choice is a step into the moral arena. Every assignment you make gives you the feeling that you're standing at the base of Hoover Dam, and you're about to pull the plug that will unleash a deluge. But you have to do it because that's your job. I did it for two whole years. I think I was actually getting pretty good at it until all the real trouble started. I don't want to bore you with details, but I developed ways to get around the various writing requirements that gave me time to actually do some good work with individuals — with the students who cared about what they were learning.

When I first saw Glenn Acres I thought I was in the wrong place. It was a big ranch house — one level that sprawled over most of a quarter of an acre at the top of a long, sloping hill that ran all the way down to a four-lane highway. (I learned later that in fact it was a converted ranch house, with several extensions built on. Just after the Korean War the owner sold it to Mrs. Creighton, the headmistress, and her husband, and they remodeled the inside with rooms and bulletin boards and blackboards, bookshelves, a drinking fountain, and just about everything you need in a school except a gymnasium.) When I first saw it, I was sure it was somebody's house. I was almost afraid to knock on the back door. I had to knock several times, each time more and more loudly. Mrs. Creighton, a red-haired, middle-aged woman with a mop in her hand, finally opened the door. I was immediately aware of a capable odor in the room. It was an odd mixture of Mr. Clean, lemons, and dog...