“…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?”
And now in his weak and scratchy whine of a voice he be gan to tell my father something of the sort. “I ain’t no enemy, Mr. Caldwell. I like you. All the kids like you.”
“That’s my trouble, Deifendorf. That’s the worst thing can happen to a public school teacher. I don’t want you to like me. All I want from you is to sit still under me for fifty-five minutes a day five days a week. When you walk into my room, Deifendorf, I want you to be stiff with fear. Caldwell the Kid-Killer; that’s how I want you to think of me. Brrouh!”
I turned from the window and laughed, determined to interrupt. The two of them, the chipped yellow desk between, hunched toward each other like conspirators. My father looked sallow and nauseated, his temples glazed and hollow; the top of his desk was littered with papers and tin-jawed binders and paperweights like half-metamorphosed toads. Deifendorf had stolen his strength; teaching was sapping him. I saw this helplessly. I saw helplessly in the smirk on Deify’s face that from my father’s whirl of words he had gathered a sense of superiority, a sense of being, in comparison with this addled and vehement shipwreck of a man, young, clean, sleek, clear-headed, well-coordinated, and invincible.
My father, embarrassed by my angry witnessing, changed the subject. “Be at the Y by 6:30,” he told Deifendorf curtly. There was a swimming meet this evening and Deifendorf was on the team.
“We’ll dunk ‘em for ya, Mr. Caldwell,” Deifendorf promised. “They’ll be cocky and ripe for an upset.” Our swimming team had not won a meet all season: Olinger was a very land kind of town. It had no public pool, and the poorhouse dam’s bottom was lined with broken bottles. My father was, by one of those weird strokes whereby Zimmerman kept the faculty in a malleable flux of confusion, the team’s coach, though his hernia prevented him from ever going into the water.
“Do your best is all we can do,” my father said. “You can’t walk on water.”
I believe now that my father wanted this last statement to be contradicted, but none of the three others of us in the room saw the need.
Judy Lengel was the third student in the room. My father’s view of her was that her father bullied her beyond the limit of her mental abilities. I doubted this; in my opinion Judy was just a girl who being neither pretty nor bright had spite fully developed a petty ambitiousness with which she tormented the gullible teachers like my father. She seized the silence to say, “Mr. Caldwell, I was wondering about that quiz tomorrow-”
“Just a moment, Judy.” Deifendorf was attempting to leave, sated. He all but belched as he got up from his chair. My father asked him, “Deify, how are you and cigarettes? If anybody reports you smoking again you’re off the team.”
The feeble primitive voice whined from the doorway. “I ain’t touched a weed since the beginning of season, Mr. Caldwell.”
“Don’t lie to me, kid. Life’s too short to lie. About fifty-seven varieties of people have squealed to me about your smoking and if I’m caught protecting you Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”
“O.K., Mr. Caldwell. I got you.”
“I want the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle from you tonight.”
“You’ll get ‘em, Mr. Caldwell.”
I shut my eyes. It agonized me to hear my father talk like a coach; it seemed so beneath us. This was unfair; for wasn’t it after all what I wanted to hear from him-the confident, ordinary, world-supporting accents of other men? Perhaps it hurt me that Deifendorf had something concrete to give my father-the breast stroke and the two-twenty freestyle-while I had nothing. Unwilling to expose my skin, I had never learned to swim. The world of water was closed to me, so I had fallen in love with the air, which I was able to seize in great thrilling condensations within me that I labelled the Future: it was in this realm that I hoped to reward my father for his suffering.
“Now. Judy,” he said.
“I don’t understand what the quiz will be about.”
“Chapters Eight, Nine, and Ten, as I said today in class.”
“But that’s so much.”
“Skim it, Judy. You’re no dope. You know how to study.” My father flipped open the book, the gray textbook with the microscope, the atom, and the dinosaur on the cover. “Look for italicized words,” he said. “Here. Magma. What is magma?”