Students observed them with wonder, like they were fast-sprouting pinto beans in a clammy covered aquarium. Teachers — not all, but some — stayed awake all night hating them, because of their weird grown-up youth, which was like gardenias blooming in January, and their beauty, which was both stunning and sad as racehorses, and their love everyone except them knew wouldn’t last. I deliberately stopped staring (you’d seen one version of Blue Lagoon, you’d seen them all), but when I’d walked to Hanover and pulled open the side door, I nonchalantly glanced back in their direction and realized with shock, I’d made a major blunder in observation.
Charles now stood at a respectful distance (though the look on his face was still like a kitten staring at string) and she was talking to him with a teacherly frown (a frown all decent teachers mastered; Dad had one that instantly turned his forehead into rippled potato chips). She wasn’t a student. In fact, I had no idea how I, given that stance, could possibly have mistaken her for one. A hand on her hip, chin tilted as if trying to make out a falcon circling above the Commons, she wore brown leather boots that resembled Italy and dug the heel of one into the pavement, grinding out an invisible cigarette.
It was Hannah Schneider.
When Dad was in a Bourbon Mood, he’d make a five-minute toast to old Benno Ohnesorg, shot by Berlin police at a student rally in 1967. Dad, nineteen years old, was next to him: “He was standing on my shoelace when he went down. And my life — asinine things I’d wasted time worrying about — my marks, my standing, my girl—it all congealed when I looked into his dead eyes.” Here, Dad fell silent and sighed (though it wasn’t so much a sigh as a Herculean exhale one could use to play a bagpipe). I could smell the alcohol, a strange hot smell, and when I was little I guessed it was what the Romantic poets smelled of, or those nineteenth-century Latin generals Dad enjoyed talking about who “surfed in and out of power on waves of revolution and resistance juntas.”
“And that was my Bolshevik moment, so to speak,” he said. “When I decided to storm the Winter Palace. If you’re lucky, you’ll have one.”
And every now and then, after Benno, Dad might go on to expound upon one of his most beloved principles, that of the Life Story, but only if he didn’t have a lecture to compose, or wasn’t midway through a chapter in a new book on war written by someone he’d known at Harvard. (He’d dissect it like a gung-ho coroner hoping to find evidence of foul play: “Here it is, sweet! Evidence Lou Swann’s a hack! Counterfeit! Listen to this dung! ‘In order to be successful, revolutions require a highly visible armed force to unleash widespread panic; this violence must then gain momentum, escalating into out-and-out civil war.’ Fool wouldn’t know civil war if it bit him on the ass!”)
“Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” Dad said, scratching his jaw thoughtfully, arranging the limp collar of his chambray shirt. “Even if you have your Magnificent Reason, it could still be dull as Nebraska and that’s no one’s fault but your own. Well, if you feel it’s miles of cornfields, find something to believe in other than yourself, preferably a cause without the stench of hypocrisy, and then charge into battle. There’s a reason they still put Che Guevara on T-shirts, why people still whisper about The Nightwatchmen when there’s been no evidence of their existence for twenty years.
“But most critically, sweet, never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story, though you will certainly be tempted to, as you watch those poor souls in school, in life, heading unwittingly down dangerous tangents, fatal digressions from which they will unlikely be able to emerge. Resist the temptation. Spend your energies on your story. Reworking it. Making it better. Increasing the scale, the depth of content, the universal themes. And I don’t care what those themes are — they’re yours to uncover and stand behind — so long as, at the very least, there is courage. Guts. Mut, in German. Those around you can have their novellas, sweet, their short stories of cliché and coincidence, occasionally spiced up with tricks of the quirky, the achingly mundane, the grotesque. A few will even cook up Greek tragedy, those born into misery, destined to die in misery. But you, my bride of quietness, you will craft nothing less than epic with your life. Out of all of them, your story will be the one to last.”
“How do you know?” I always asked, and when I spoke it sounded tiny and uncertain, compared to Dad.
“I just know,” he said simply, and then closed his eyes, which indicated that he didn’t want to talk anymore.
The only sound in the room was the ice melting his glass.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Knowing that Charles was on familiar terms with Hannah Schneider tempted me a little, but in the end I decided not to meet him at the Scratch.
I didn’t have a clue what the Scratch was and didn’t have time to care. I was, after all, weighed down with six AP courses (“Enough to sink a fleet of USS Anythings,” Dad said) and only a single free period. My professors had shown themselves to be sharp, methodical, altogether on the ball (not “entirely in the outhouse,” as Dad described Mrs. Roper of Meadowbrook Middle, who boldly brought a grand finale to her every sentence with a preposition: “Where’s your copy of The Aeneid at?”). Most of them had perfectly respectable vocabularies (Ms. Simpson of AP Physics used ersatz within fifteen minutes of the bell) and one, namely Ms. Martine Filobeque of AP French, had Permanently Pursed Lips, which could present a serious threat as the year unfolded. “The enduring pursed lip, a trait associated exclusively with the female educator, is a sign of erratic academic anger,” Dad said. “I’d think seriously about flowers, candy — anything to get yourself associated in her mind with all that’s right in the world, rather than all that’s wrong.”
My peers too — they were not exactly airheads or fools (pasta, as Dad called every kid at Sage Day). When I’d raised my hand in AP English to answer Ms. Simpson’s question regarding Primary Themes in Invisible Man (Ellison, 1952) (which turned up on Summer Reading Lists with the regularity of corruption in Cameroon), incredibly, I wasn’t quite fast enough; another kid, Radley Clifton, pudgy, with an eroded chin, already had his fat hand in the air. While his answer wasn’t brilliant or inspired, it also wasn’t crude or Calibanesque, and it dawned on me, as Ms. Simpson handed out a nineteen-page syllabus solely covering Fall Term, perhaps St. Gallway wouldn’t be such Child’s Play, such Easy Victory. Perhaps if I actually wanted to be Valedictorian (and I think I did, though sometimes What Dad Wanted blatantly made its way into What I Wanted without having to go through Customs), I’d have to launch an aggressive campaign with all the ferocity of Attila the Hun. “One is only eligible for Valedictorian once in one’s life,” Dad noted, “just as one only gets one body, one existence, and thus one shot at immortality.”
I also didn’t respond to the letter I received the next day, though I read it twenty times, even in the middle of Ms. Gershon’s introductory AP Physics lecture, “From Cannonballs to Light Waves: The History of Physics.” Paleo-anthropologist Donald Johanson, when stumbling upon early hominid “Lucy” in 1974, probably felt the way I did when I opened my locker door and that cream envelope fell at my feet.