For the first time, Levy regarded him with what seemed genuine interest. "I don't, in fact. So tell me, Mister Wordsmith, why do we?"
"Beats me," Will admitted. "And I confess I don't know eleemosynary, either."
Turning up his palms, "So look it up!" Levy said. Confidingly then, with a nod at the board behind him, "We teach the kids a few fancy words to impress their teachers with, if they can work 'em into their papers." He stroked his chin. "You're hired, by the way. I see from your transcript," which, per Al's advice, Will had brought a copy of to the interview, "that you got off to a very rough start up there and then really hit your stride. That sets the right example for your tutees."
Will reminded him that he wasn't "quote quite a graduate student quote quite yet."
"Nor are we quite a preparatory school, strictly speaking." Complicitous smile. "More remedial, actually, though we really do prepare the kids' homework assignments. You'll do just fine. Starting tomorrow? And tell your winsome friend Miss Chutzpah that we might just have something for her, too, before the school term ends."
As the Freds made dinner à trois that evening back in Briarwood 304's tiny kitchenette, "Winsome," Al Baumann echoed, wincing, when that friend reported to him what their friend had reported to her of this conversation: "Our winsome Winnie."
"As in 'You win some and you lose some' " supposed the family wordsmith. "Anyhow, I learned a useful new word today: not winsome."
"Eleemosynary, I'll bet," Al teased. "I should've prepped you: Levy had that same list on his blackboard when he interviewed me last year."
Replied Will, "Fuck eleemosynary. On the bus ride home, your fiancée Miss Winsome preceptored me in chutzpah. We didn't hear much Yiddish back in Marshville."
"Part-time fiancée," Win reminded him, and perhaps reminded Al as well, for to Will's considerable surprise — after declaring that although she had indeed explained to him Levy's term for her, Fred Three remained in her estimation lamentably innocent of the quality thereby named — she turned from the stove, embraced that fellow from behind as he chopped onions at the sink, pressed her breasts firmly into his back, reached one hand around to cup his crotch, and declared her conviction that with just a dash of chutzpah their drummer-boy could be "a real stud instead of a sexual ree-tard." Regarding the pair benignly sidewise from the cutting board on which he was dicing Idaho potatoes, "Maybe the kid needs a part-time preceptor," Al ventured.
"Could be," she agreed. And giving her handful a playful squeeze and pat, she returned to her liver-and-bacon sauté-in-progress.
"Remedial or preparatory?" her prospective tutee pretended to wonder, and in the spirit of their three-way tease, made bold to squeeze in turn one plump-but-firm, beskirted Winnie-buttock. "And when's my first lesson, Teach?"
"Enough chutzpah already," declared her part-time fiancé. "Let's fry this stuff and feed our fucking faces."
They did that, bantering of other matters than the one now uppermost in Wilfred Chase's much-aroused narrative imagination; then withdrew to their separate quarters to prepare the next day's schoolwork.
Which in Will Chase's case included not only VVLU's Rudiments of Narrative course — in which he was endeavoring, without impressive success, to "find his own voice" amid the cacophony of his similarly struggling fellow novices and their innumerable full-throated predecessors— but also his maiden sessions on the other side of the pedagogical divide, "tutoring" Lou Levy's after-school enrollees in what was labeled, simply, English.
"How do I Part-Time Preceptor them?" he had wondered to his own preceptor-in-chief. "What part-time precepts do I have to offer?"
"All of our precepts are part-time," Al had replied, "whether in the sense of Inconsistent — like Thou shalt not shoplift except from large chain stores? — or in the sense of Provisional and/or Temporary, like Who were we kidding that it's okay to steal within limits? Anyhow, you won't be teaching TGB" — their shorthand for Lit & Phil's Truth, Goodness, and Beauty—"you'll be fixing their diction, grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and improving your own in the process. Relax and enjoy it."
He did, rather, once he'd met the two or three tutees with whom for the next six weeks he worked at one of several tables set up in what was meant to have been the rowhouse's living room. While other PTP's did similar repair work in other subjects at neighboring tables, and Levy himself held forth in his open-doored office to a select few on antidisestablishmentarianism and other sesquipedalia, Will pointed out misplaced modifiers, dangling participles, subject-verb disagreements, superfluous or missing commas, objective-cased predicate nominatives, and other such lapses in his students' high school English compositions, learning as he went along the names of those errors and the principles by them embodied, and improving by the way his own copy-editing skills. "In this next paragraph," he would explain to Ann Stein, daughter of a prominent local department-store owner, "when you say 'The Indians only hunted and fought on foot until the Spanish brought horses to America,' you imply that they did nothing else on foot, like just walking, or maybe dancing around the campfire. What you mean to say is that the Indians hunted and fought only on foot until et cetera. Okay?" Whereupon that sultry black-haired beauty (at seventeen, only a year younger than her precociously part-time preceptor), who drove from her private school sixth-form English classes down to Levy's Prep in a new canary-yellow Ford convertible, would roll her lustrous eyes and make the correction — not without grumbling that only an idiot would misunderstand what she meant. Likewise when Stanley Fine — curly-headed, mischief-twinkling scion of the city's Fine Laundry and Dry Cleaning chain — wrote "Turning the corner, the Empire State Building came into view," and Will observed that skyscrapers don't normally turn corners: "So if everybody understands it, what's the problem?" Considering that not-unreasonable question for perhaps the first time, Will responded experimentally to the grinning pair that a mother's understanding her child's baby talk is no justification for letting the kid remain at that primitive level of communication. "Weak analogical reasoning," Al would object that evening (and Will would duly report to his preceptees next day), "since nobody except Mom understands the kid, whereas et cetera. What you should've said is that misplaced modifiers and such are like static on the radio: objectionable even if we can make out what number the band's playing. We shouldn't have to get the message despite its wording."
"Aiyiyi," groaned Stein to Fine. "They really dig this stuff! Can you believe it?"
And Will, unbothered, "You'd better believe it, friends. Sloppy language equals sloppy thinking. Honor thy mother tongue."
Cheerfully retorted Fine, "Never mind our mother tongue, man; let's finish our mothering homework and get our tushies out of here."
For that was, as Al had forewarned, what Levy's preceptors were chiefly paid for: not merely to correct errors in their charges' homework assignments with a bit of instruction in the process, but to do those assignments for them, more or less, under the guise of tutelage. Hence the Freds' name for the place: the Cheatery.
"But it's more than just us helping the kids cheat their teachers and themselves," Winnie observed a week or so later, when Levy hired her after all to replace a PTP in French who'd quit without notice: "The kids are cheating their classmates by getting professional help that the others don't have. The parents who know what we're really up to are cheating both their own kids and the school system. And the ones who believe we're actually tutoring instead of cheating are being cheated by us."