The next day, Parks did some research on Christopher Steiner. It would have surprised him less if the boy were some kind of orphan. So he was not an innocent, as he had hoped, a natural, it was disappointing to discover. His father was Ludwig Steiner, a comparative-literature scholar of note with a reputation — some comic stories about him floating around — for being a brilliant crank, irascible in defense of himself. With pain, Parks recalled the interview. He had made a fool of himself, and his student, with that aggressive cool of his generation, had let him. Still, Steiner was, as he had said, a math major, his humanities grades undistingushed to poor, including one failure. It didn’t make sense and Parks, working late at his desk, his mind a page of German (a language he had never been able to read), suddenly saw what he had not been seeing.
It was the obvious that was often hardest to see. His father was a formidable man and Steiner, despite his predilection to be like him, was scared of falling short. Unable to compete without killing the old man, he had opted out of the competition altogether. Curt knew how it was. His own father had been a career Air Force officer, a professional killer, and Curt had chosen to go the other way, becoming a man of peace.
Conceivably, if handled with care, Steiner could be helped to realize his potentiality. It would take someone other than his father to do it, someone not personally involved, who could approach him as a friend, older and wiser in the ways of things, as an equal. As a teacher, for God’s sake. Parks felt — the word sticking in him like a pin on a map — chosen. To succeed where the student’s real father had failed.
When he told Carolyn what he was about, understating as much as he could his enthusiasm, she looked as if, eyebrow raised, someone had stuck a hand up her dress. “If you have nothing better to do,” she said, “you can make an historian out of me.” He had put up with her crap for eight years — God knows why — a woman pretentious as hell about the latest mode, unable to take the really serious seriously.
She had been a student of his briefly at a small California women’s college, a place he had taught at the year he got out of the Army. That was nine years ago. He remembered how serious she seemed then, how sensitive, how bright. She had told him one day, nervously shy at confronting him, that he was the best teacher she had ever had. Since it was the first class he had ever taught, it was an opinion he found hard to resist, wanted to keep close at hand. And yet, even now, soured by mutual disillusion, he knew that she wouldn’t have said it if she hadn’t meant it or thought she had. Carolyn didn’t flatter, told as a rule the harshest truth she knew — it was the one thing about her he could trust. In her version of things, he had pursued her madly and she, too innocent to resist, had given him her virtue, and, in marrying him, her life. He knew better. She had hung around his office, giving him no peace, until he married her. The rest was history, full of wars and peace and unrecorded small violence. Six months after their marriage, she told him she had outgrown him. She had been outgrowing him, in her heart’s malice, ever since.
Parks found himself preoccupied with past mistakes, reviewing his life as if he were telling it to someone as a story, when his student, in faded blue jeans and black turtleneck, arrived for their first meeting. The Army phrase “out of uniform” came to mind, though it was not what he meant, not what he wanted to mean. What did uniform have to do with anything? His student without a pencil, Parks offered him a pad and pencil, which he refused, slouching in his chair, saying he didn’t believe in taking notes. The tension between them almost palpable. Curt asked what his plans were when he got out of college.
“Everyone asks me that,” he said, his nervous eyes turned inward as if he were wrestling with the question. But though Parks waited, nothing more was said.
Curt, habitually neat, loosened his tie, talked about how as an undergraduate he had first been premed — not sure of his interests — then an English major. It was only after he had been in the Army that he had decided on history.
He looked remote, lost in himself, though his eyes as if peering through keyholes were frighteningly alert.
“I want you to feel you can talk openly to me,” Curt said.
“What do you want me to say? Maybe if you had stuck it out, you would have made a good doctor, Mr. Parks.”
Curt had thought so once himself, but saw it now as a vanity — the notion his father had blown him up with that he could do anything well he committed himself to. He had no calling to be a doctor. “What do you want to be?” Curt asked.
He scowled. “What do you want to be?”
“I want to be a good teacher,” Parks said. “I want to — ” He stopped himself.
His student nodded.
“Well, what do you want to be, Christopher? A mathematician?”
“A good history student,” he said fiercely. And Parks, taking it as a joke, laughed alone.
There were times, teaching a class, when he had the feeling that he would never be able to get through to the end. He had that feeling now — the sense that things were out of his control — though he knew he could end the session at any time if he had to, if there were no other way.
“I suppose you’re worried about going into the Army,” Parks said, the subject bringing itself up. He envisioned him, under fire, forced to kill to defend himself, corrupted.
“That’s right.”
“Is there any way you can avoid it?”
“Do I want to avoid it?”
“Don’t you?”
“It’s one of the fundamental racial experiences of my generation,” he said in a dry voice, smiling to himself, his mouth bitter.
“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?” Curt knew from having looked at his record that the boy had quit ROTC after two years.
He stared at his teacher in outrage, his eyes like the points of knives. “Why do you ask me things if you don’t believe what I tell you?”
Off guard, Curt apologized. He assumed, he said, getting up, walking around, that no one who was sensitive and intelligent wanted to go into the military, especially when an unjust war was being prosecuted.
Steiner smiled unexpectedly, like something cracking open, his eyes overbright, his hands tense, clasped. “There’s no way of avoiding the unavoidable.”
“Maybe not,” Curt said, “but there’s something to be said for trying.”
“There’s something to be said for everything, but it’s only words. I don’t trust words, Mr. Parks.”
“I don’t trust wars, Mr. Steiner,” he said gently.
Unable to stop, Curt spent the rest of the hour talking about his Army experiences, embellishing where memory failed. Events long forgotten came back to him once he started in to talk. Humiliations he suffered. The gnawing dullness of so much of it. His refusal, which enraged his father, to go into OCS. He had been an EM, a fuck-up, a Pfc after two years of service. He was telling him about a command inspection he had stood in the field, a comic affair though nightmarish — a drawn-out hassle about which way tent pegs ought to be pointing in a field display — when the bell sounded, ending the hour. The story, incompleted, saddened him. It was as if he had lost something of himself, left it behind.
After he had gone, Parks felt sick, his mouth sour with the aftertaste of himself. In a few minutes it passed and he felt better, elated with his possibilities. Something had happened between them, some flash of trust — a beginning. He rode all week on his sense of things, a cavalry officer leading a charge on a hobbyhorse, looking forward to their next meeting, fleeing the devils of his past failures.