The Palace Thief (21 page)

Of course, it was only Deepak who knew that this answer was not in the “Outline,” because Hamilcar Barca was a Phoenician general eventually routed by the Romans; it was only Deepak, as I have noted, who had bothered to study the conquered peoples. He briefly widened his eyes at me—in recognition? in gratitude? in disapproval?—while beside him Sedgewick Bell again lowered his head into his hands. After a long pause, Sedgewick asked me to repeat the question.

I did so, and after another long pause, he scratched his head. Finally, he said, “Jeez.”

The boys in the audience laughed, but I turned and silenced them. Then I put the same question to Deepak Mehta, who answered it correctly, of course, and then received a round of applause that was polite but not sustained.

It was only as I mounted the stage to present Deepak with the garland of Laurel, however, that I glanced at Mr. Woodbridge and realized that he too had wanted me to steer the contest toward Sedgewick Bell. At the same moment, I saw Senator Bell making his way toward the rear door of the hall. Young Sedgewick stood limply to the side of me, and I believe I had my first inkling then of the mighty forces that would twist the life of that boy. I could only imagine his thoughts as he stood there on stage while his mother, struggling to catch up
with the senator, vanished through the fire door at the back. By the next morning, our calligraphers would add Deepak Mehta’s name to the plaque outside Mr. Woodbridge’s office, and young Sedgewick Bell would begin his lifelong pursuit of missed glory.

Yet perhaps because of the disappointment I could see in Mr. Woodbridge’s eyes, it somehow seemed that I was the one who had failed the boy, and as soon as the auditorium was empty, I left for his room. There I found him seated on the bed, still in his toga, gazing out the small window to the lacrosse fields. I could see the sheets of my “Outline” pressed against the inside of his garment.

“Well, young man,” I said, knocking on the door frame, “that certainly was an interesting performance.”

He turned around from the window and looked at me coldly. What he did next I have thought about many times over the years, the labyrinthine wiliness of it, and I can only attribute the precociousness of his maneuvering to the bitter education he must have received at home. As I stood before him in the doorway, Sedgewick Bell reached inside his cloak and one at a time lifted out the pages of my “Outline.”

I stepped inside and closed the door. Every teacher knows a score of boys who do their best to be expelled; this is a cliché in a school like ours, but as soon as I closed the door to his room and he acknowledged the act with a feline smile, I knew that this was not Sedgewick Bell’s intention at all.

“I knew you saw,” he said.

“Yes, you are correct.”

“How come you didn’t say anything, eh, Mr. Hundert?”

“It’s a complicated matter, Sedgewick.”

“It’s because my pop was there.”

“It had nothing to do with your father.”

“Sure, Mr. Hundert.”

Frankly, I was at my wits’ end, first from what Mr. Woodbridge had said to me in the theater and now from the audacity of the boy’s accusation. I myself went to the window then and let my eyes wander over the campus so that they would not have to engage the dark, accusatory gaze of Sedgewick Bell. What transpires in an act of omission like the one I had committed? I do not blame Mr. Woodbridge, of course, any more than a soldier can blame his captain. What had happened was that instead of enforcing my own code of morals, I had allowed Sedgewick Bell to sweep me summarily into his. I did not know at the time what an act of corruption I had committed, although what is especially chilling to me is that I believe that Sedgewick Bell, even at the age of thirteen, did.

He knew also, of course, that I would not pursue the matter, although I spent the ensuing several days contemplating a disciplinary action. Each time I summoned my resolve to submit the boy’s name to the honor committee, however, my conviction waned, for at these times I seemed to myself to be nothing more than one criminal turning in another. I fought this battle constantly—in my simple rooms, at the long, chipped table I governed in the dining hall, and at the dusty chalkboard before my classes. I felt like an exhausted swimmer trying to climb a slippery wall out of the sea.

Furthermore, I was alone in my predicament, for among a boarding school faculty, which is as perilous as a medieval court, one does not publicly discuss a boy’s misdeeds. This is true even if the boy is not the son of a senator. In fact, the only teacher I decided to trust with my situation was Charles Ellerby, our new Latin instructor and a kindred lover of antiquity. I had liked Charles Ellerby as soon as we had met because he was a moralist of no uncertain terms, and indeed when I confided in him about Sedgewick Bell’s behavior and Mr. Woodbridge’s
response, he suggested that it was my duty to circumvent our headmaster and speak directly to the boy’s father. Of course, this made sense to me, even if I knew it would be difficult to do. I decided to speak to Senator Bell again.

Less than a week after I had begun to marshal my resolve, however, the senator himself called
me
. He proffered a few moments of small talk, asked after the gun he had given me, and then said gruffly, “Young man, my son tells me the Hannibal Barca question was not on the list he had to know.”

Now, indeed, I was shocked. Even from young Sedgewick Bell I had not expected this audacity. “How deeply the viper is a viper,” I said, before I could help myself.

“Excuse me?”

“The Phoenician general was
Hamilcar
Barca, sir, not Hannibal.”

The senator paused. “My son tells me you asked him a question that was not on the list, which the Oriental fellow knew the answer to in advance. He feels you’ve been unfair, is all.”

“It’s a complex situation, sir,” I said. I marshaled my will again by imagining what Charles Ellerby would do in the situation. However, no sooner had I resolved to confront the senator than it became perfectly clear to me that I lacked the character to do so. I believe this had long been clear to Sedgewick Bell.

“I’m sure it is complex,” Senator Bell said, “But I assure you, there are situations more complex. Now, I’m not asking you to correct anything this time, you understand. My son has told me a great deal about you, Mr. Hundert. If I were you, I’d remember that.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, although by then I realized he had hung up.

And thus young Sedgewick Bell and I began an uneasy
compact that lasted out his days at St. Benedict’s. He was a dismal student from that day forward, scratching at the very bottom of a class that was itself a far cry from the glorious yesteryear classes of John Dulles and Henry Stimson. His quizzes were abominations, and his essays were pathetic digestions of those of the boys sitting next to him. He chatted amiably in study hall, smoked cigarettes in the third-form linen room, and when called upon in class could be counted on to blink and stutter as if called upon from sleep.

But perhaps the glory days of St. Benedict’s had already begun their wane, for even then, well before the large problems that beset us, no action was taken against the boy. For Charles Ellerby and me, he became a symbol, evidence of the first tendrils of moral rot that seemed to be twining among the posts and timbers of our school. Although we told nobody else of his secret, the boy’s dim-witted recalcitrance soon succeeded in alienating all but the other students. His second- and third-form years passed as ingloriously as his first, and by the outset of his last with us he had grown to mythic infamy among the faculty members who had known the school in its days of glory.

He had grown physically larger as well, and now when I chanced upon him on the campus, he held his ground against my disapproving stare with a dark one of his own. To complicate matters, he had cultivated, despite his boorish character, an impressive popularity among his schoolmates, and it was only through the subtle intervention of several of his teachers that he had failed on two occasions to win the presidency of the student body. His stride had become a strut. His favor among the other boys, of course, had its origin in the strength of his physical features, in the precocious evil of his manner, and in the bellowing timbre of his voice, but unfortunately such crudities are all the more impressive to a group of boys living out of sight of their parents.

That is not to say that the faculty of St. Benedict’s had given up hope for Sedgewick Bell. Indeed, a teacher’s career is punctuated with difficult students like him, and despite the odds one could not help but root for his eventual rehabilitation. As did all the other teachers, I held out hope for Sedgewick Bell. In his fits of depravity and intellectual feebleness I continued to look for glimpses of discipline and progress.

By his fourth-form year, however, when I had become dean of seniors, it was clear that Sedgewick Bell would not change, at least not while he was at St. Benedict’s. Despite his powerful station, he had not even managed to gain admission to the state university. It was with a sense of failure, then, finally, that I handed him his diploma in the spring of 1949, on an erected stage at the north end of the great field, on which he came forward, met my disapproving gaze with his own flat one, and trundled off to sit among his friends.

It came as a surprise, then, when I learned in the Richmond
Gazette
, thirty-seven years later, of Sedgewick Bell’s ascension to the chairmanship of EastAmerica Steel, at that time the second-largest corporation in America. I chanced upon the news one morning in the winter of 1987, the year of my great problems with St. Benedict’s, while reading the newspaper in the east-lighted breakfast room of the assistant headmaster’s house. St. Benedict’s, as everyone knows, had fallen upon difficult times by then, and an unseemly aspect of my job was that I had to maintain a lookout for possible donors to the school. Forthwith, I sent a letter to Sedgewick Bell.

Apart from the five or six years in which a classmate had written to
The Benedictine
of his whereabouts, I had heard almost nothing about the boy since the year of his graduation. This was unusual, of course, as St. Benedict’s makes a point of
keeping abreast of its graduates, and I can only assume that his absence in the yearly alumni notes was due to an act of will on his own part. One wonders how much of the boy remained in the man. It is indeed a rare vantage that a St. Benedict’s teacher holds, to have known our statesmen, our policymakers, and our captains of industry in their days of short pants and classroom pranks, and I admit that it was with some nostalgia that I composed the letter.

Since his graduation, of course, my career had proceeded with the steady ascension that the great schools have always afforded their dedicated teachers. Ten years after Sedgewick Bell’s departure I had moved from dean of seniors to dean of the upper school, and after a decade there to dean of academics, a post that some would consider a demotion but that I seized with reverence because it afforded me the chance to make inroads on the minds of a generation. At the time, of course, the country was in the throes of a violent, peristaltic rejection of tradition, and I felt a particular urgency to my mission of staying a course that had led a century of boys through the rise and fall of ancient civilizations.

In those days our meetings of the faculty and trustees were rancorous affairs in which great pressure was exerted in attempts to alter the time-tested curriculum of the school. Planning a course was like going into battle, and hiring a new teacher was like crowning a king. Whenever one of our ranks retired or left for another school, the different factions fought tooth and nail to influence the appointment. I was the dean of academics, as I have noted, and these skirmishes naturally were waged around my foxhole. For the lesser appointments I often feinted to gather leverage for the greater ones, whose campaigns I fought with abandon.

At one point especially, midway through that decade in
which our country had lost its way, St. Benedict’s arrived at a crossroads. The chair of humanities had retired, and a pitched battle over his replacement developed between Charles Ellerby and a candidate from outside. A meeting ensued in which my friend and this other man spoke to the assembled faculty and trustees, and though I will not go into detail, I will say that the outside candidate felt that, because of the advances in our society, history had become little more than a relic.

Oh, what dim-sighted times those were! The two camps sat on opposite sides of the chapel as speakers took the podium one after another to wage war. The controversy quickly became a forum concerning the relevance of the past. Teacher after teacher debated the import of what we in history had taught for generations, and assertion after assertion was met with boos and applause. Tempers blazed. One powerful member of the board had come to the meeting in blue jeans and a tie-dyed shirt, and after we had been arguing for several hours and all of us were exhausted, he took the podium and challenged me personally, right then and there, to debate with him the merits of Roman history.