Claire Marvel (21 page)

“That’s right.”

“How’d you like it?”

“Well enough to come back here and teach.”

“How long ago was that?” asked another boy, whose tie appeared to be a swatch of hemp.

“Let’s just say it was a while ago.”

“Like how long? I mean, who was president?”

“Eisenhower.”

A pause.

“Gentlemen,” I said soberly, “that was a joke.”

David Glassman grinned. He was the only one. Then I saw a couple of other boys smirk sideways at him, mocking him. Glassman observed this too; he swallowed his grin and ducked his head, turtlelike, down into his neck. Most damaging of all was the look on his face that showed implicit agreement with his detractors, even affection for them—the Stockholm syndrome, I thought, and instinctively my heart went out to him.

It was my first day. And on the first day of school—whether child or adult, student or teacher—in fear and trembling you received with inordinate gratitude what wisps of encouragement and generosity of spirit were offered your way. This wasn’t ass-kissing but mutual recognition. In no more time than it had taken to call out the names and tell a thudding joke, I’d had a vision of a kid that matched in some restorative and hopeful way the vision I’d long harbored of myself: dark-haired and quiet, shy but confident, quick to duck his head but always listening carefully; always thinking. A boy who relied perhaps too heavily on the inventory of his brain as the sole means of getting across to higher ground. A boy who as he matured would grasp with scientific precision a large number of right answers—and yet who, for all that, would fail to translate those answers into the deeper poetics of selfhood. A boy who, having no real compassion for his own tender sensibility, was inclined to side with those who would denigrate it over those who would nurture it. A boy whose parents
probably didn’t love each other, whose family didn’t feel like a family. A boy, in short, in search of a mentor or a big brother or a father. A boy waiting to be taught.

I began to speak to the class.

“This is a two-term course,” I explained. “The second term will be called ‘Effecting Political Change’ and will be something of a kitchen sink of political topics. In one way or another we’ll touch on elections, new communications technologies, voting patterns, media groups—whatever aspects of political life seem relevant to the changing world we live in. This is government and its workings as seen through the lens of political science, not history. But it’s my belief—and it was Mr. Maddox’s belief when I was his student here—that to speak about political science without first having a solid grounding in history is to speak first and foremost out of your asshole.”

Laughter.

“Which brings us to the present term, which as you no doubt are aware is called ‘American Political Institutions.’ Here, we’ll be concerning ourselves primarily with just that—the architecture and goals of the Constitution, the political and social environment that gave birth to it, the mind-set of the authors as we have come to know them. Aspects of Federalism. You all know what Federalism is? You’ve taken your basic U.S. history, I trust. Mr.”—a quick glance again at the list of names—”Chen, would you please give me a succinct definition of Federalism?”

“Federalism was the approach adopted by the Federalist Party.”

“Approach?”

“Um, doctrine?”

“Go ahead.”

“I think Alexander Hamilton was the head of it. The idea was that the country needed a strong government and so it should vote for the Constitution.”

“Who
should vote?”

Brian Chen looked down at the cover of his notebook and sought to become invisible. David Glassman’s hand rose a few inches, then stopped, at war with itself.

“Mr. Glassman, is that a raised hand?”

“The states,” Glassman said. “The states should vote.”

More smirking, from the same source as before.

“Is that amusing, Mr…. Weisberg? The states are amusing? Which ones in particular?”

“Delaware,” Liam Weisberg, a red-haired sharpy, shot back, uncowed. “It’s smaller even than Central Park.”

“Pejorative hyperbole will get you nowhere in this class, Mr. Weisberg.”

“What’s ‘pejorative’ mean again?”

“Disparaging or belittling.”

“Well, George Washington was
from
Delaware and even he was pejorative about it.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. My dad told me an anecdote about it.”

“As I was saying, Mr. Weisberg.”

“Sorry, Mr. Rose.”

“The Constitution. Federalism. This is where we begin. Let’s try to go back to 1780 and see if we can’t imagine what
government felt like then. Its effect. The footprint it left on the psyches of ordinary Americans. How much authority did government have at the time? Where was that authority located and how did it assert itself? Why might such authority be needed? Mr…. Jackson?”

A brown-skinned junior, tall and thin as a reed. “To control people? Otherwise, you know, all hell can break loose.”

“Precisely. All hell can break loose. And what might that say about the nature of power in human hands?”

“It’s a sign of human weakness,” Glassman offered.

“I thought it was an aphrodisiac,” Weisberg chimed in sarcastically.

“That’s probably why you’re in an all-boys school, Mr. Weisberg.”

Laughter. Weisberg, to his credit, laughed the loudest.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let’s stay with this. Power as a laboratory for human fallibility. Power also as a natural source of concern among a people, especially those Americans in 1780, who after finally liberating themselves from British rule were not necessarily keen to put themselves under a highly centralized authority again. Where is power to be observed?”

“In government?”

“Yes. Where else?”

“In families.”

“Yes. Good. Where else?”

“Everywhere. Human nature.”

“All right. Who here has seen the film
2001: A Space Odyssey
?
“
No hands went up. “Okay, so nobody’s seen it? See it sometime, if you can. In the first scene a bunch of semiprehistoric
apes gathered around a watering hole are gnawing on a zebra carcass. Kind of like you guys here, in fact.”

“If we’re the apes, does that make you the zebra carcass?”

“Not bad, Mr. Weisberg, not bad. Now, to continue: the scene’s sort of kitschy and amusing till a rival ape gang shows up wanting the food and water for themselves, and brutally attacks the first gang. What we then see, as Mr. Jackson so aptly phrased it, is all hell breaking loose. Bloody murder. As a metaphor for human nature at its most unbridled, this is about as good as it gets. Ape versus ape holding up a mirror to man versus man. Better even than all those old reruns of
Wild Kingdom.
Not a bad reason to start thinking about the role and function of government. After all, it’s supposedly our brains that got us here, allowing us the rational capacity to control our otherwise animalistic tendencies toward the abuse of raw power. Checks and balances, in other words. Which brings us to the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, whom you will all read more thoroughly when you get to college, I hope, and who among other things advocated the need for some restraining authority to keep that raw power in check against the bullies of the world. And there are still plenty of bullies in the world. If you don’t believe me, just take a look any day of the week at the
Times
Metro section.”

Brian Chen raised his hand.

“Mr. Chen.”

“You mentioned bullies. Well, I was mugged last week.”

“You were? Sorry to hear that.”

“They took my watch,” Chen said. “And fourteen dollars.”

“That’s terrible.”

“I’ve been mugged three times in the last five years,” another boy said.

“Which brings us,” I persisted, “to Madison. James Madison. Anybody? Mr. Glassman.”

“The fourth president of the United States and one of the authors of the Federalist Papers.”

“Correct. And Madison, you can be sure, had read his Locke. He’d read Locke’s
Second Treatise.
He’d read a great many things. He knew Locke’s writings on the state of nature intimately, and drawing on them, and on his own observations as a political thinker in a newly formed nation, he was able to dream up the notion of using the idea of human fallibility, human weakness, as a virtue within a new and necessary document—the Constitution—that would address and codify the relationship between the people and the power they had entrusted to their government. It’s a beautiful thing, this system of checks and balances. The three branches—legislative, executive, judiciary—each working as both initiator and ballast….”

Suddenly, outside our classroom, a clamor had begun, the hallway rumbling with footsteps and voices. My momentum broken, I glanced at the clock on the wall: the period was over.

“Okay, I guess that’s it for today.” I felt the disheartening change in the room—the communal distraction, the itching to bolt. A couple of students had put down their pens. “For Thursday, read the first chapter of
American Government
by James Q. Wilson and John DiIulio.”

“How do you spell that?”

They were closing notebooks, stuffing book bags.

“Look it up on the syllabus, Mr. Weisberg.”

In a minute they were gone, all of them, Weisberg and Chen and Jackson, David Glassman too, packed up and eager to join the boisterous river of youth flowing to other parts of the building, other teachers, subjects, words, dreams.

Standing in the empty classroom, I felt the shock of the vanished hour, the relief of having navigated it, and the hollow sadness of depletion.

four

F
OLLOWING TRADITION,
at the end of term I took my class on a trip to Washington. The highlights were a tour of the Capitol, a lengthy observation of the House in the throes of procedural debate (an amendment to an existing logging bill), a fifteen-minute meeting with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, and a somewhat longer meeting with Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts.

The boys were curious and enthusiastic. Our second night we ate a celebratory dinner at a chain steakhouse. As the chocolate sundaes arrived, Liam Weisberg stood up, tapped his glass with a spoon, and announced his candidacy for president in ‘92. He was aware that it was a little early in the process—there was a year to go yet before the ‘88 election—but, he said, he wanted to let us all know now, so we’d have a
chance to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, while decent Cabinet positions were still available.

“That’s very thoughtful of you, Mr. Weisberg.”

“In return for a perfect grade, I’ll give you Health and Human Resources, Mr. Rose. Whaddya say?”

I laughed. “Weisberg, you’re a little Caesar in the making.”

“Caesar knew how to handle his PR, Mr. Rose, I’ll say that for the guy.”

“Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by his most trusted aide, Mr. Weisberg.”

“Bullies!” Brian Chen declared in a jovial voice.

Chen’s face, I suddenly noticed, was the color of rhubarb; so, for that matter, was Weisberg’s. I wondered if they hadn’t sneaked a couple of drinks somewhere before dinner.

“Sort of, Mr. Chen.”

“How about me?” David Glassman asked. “What position do I get?”

“Missionary,” Weisberg shot back.

General laughter. Ducking his head, Glassman took a bite of sundae and did not speak for the rest of the meal.

We returned to our hotel. By eleven o’clock sharp the boys were in their rooms for the night. I went to my own room and turned on the TV and found Larry King interviewing Susan Estrich, the manager of Dukakis’ bid for the Democratic nomination. Dukakis hadn’t failed yet. He was still climbing the mountain, still rising. The earth from where he stood must have looked flat, despite what he’d learned to the contrary in
grade school; he could reach out and cover it with his hand. Such was his confidence at the time. And Estrich too—smart tough-talking commander of the minions—shared in the sense of imminent power. She was brazen in the face of King’s self-satisfied mien.

I turned off the TV and lay there—fully dressed, shoes on—in the hotel quiet. Sleep anytime soon was out of the question.

It was not a real quiet in that generic room, but a pervasive humming. As if there existed somewhere close by a generator, a strange white-noise machine designed to drown out all the televised lie-mongering and whining mea culpas and pandering.

I got up and left the room, intending to go to the bar for a drink. As the elevator doors opened on the lobby, I almost ran into David Glassman.

“David! What are you doing down here?”

His head ducked. “I …”

“It’s after curfew.”

“I know, Mr. Rose. Sorry.”

He ducked his head again, and this time I felt a flash of annoyance. I suppressed the urge to point it out to him, to explain how a tic like that—a kowtow in miniature—might express weakness or even servility to other kids, and how under certain circumstances kids could be as power-mad and ruthless as adults. Hadn’t he read
Lord of the Flies
?