Old School Read Free Page B

himself had a collection of first editions you’d almost have to own a mine to pay for.
    These things I understood instinctively. I never gave them voice, not even within the privacy of my thoughts, precisely because the school’s self-conception was itself unspoken and thus inarguable. From my first days there I grasped and gratefully entered the dream but at the same time behaved as if I knew better, as in the following instance.
    The summer before entering the school I’d worked as a dishwasher in the kitchen crew at a YMCA camp outside Seattle. I was the youngest, and the other guys rode me pretty hard until Hartmut, the chef, saw what was going on and headed them off. He did this obliquely, never defending me directly but bearing down on the hardest kidders by giving them the shit work, the grease trap or the fryolator. Eventually some subliminal sense of cause and effect must have taken hold, because they eased up and then we all got along fine. After dinner, when the kitchen was polished to his satisfaction, Hartmut let us play Tom Lehrer albums on his old portable. Though he didn’t get the jokes, he enjoyed our hilarity. Ah! You boys! You crazy crazy boys!
    Hartmut was from Austria. He’d been in the States for many years but his English was eccentric and often ludicrous. He wore an actual chef’s hat and a white uniform that he changed every day. He cooked for those hot-dog-loving kids as if they were royalty—soufflés, pastries of airy lightness, quiches, many-layered tortes. He had great pride and didn’t allow himself to notice when the little pagans made gagging noises over their eggs Benedict.
    Pink and thick and strong, Hartmut ran his kitchen like a ship, everything in its place, all orders to be obeyed on the instant. Though he appeared not to have a family, his love for children was obvious and utterly benevolent. He also loved music. When the record player wasn’t blasting out waltzes and light opera, he whistled and sang. Some of his melodies were catchy and stuck in my head. And that’s what landed me in trouble.
    I’d been at the school for five or six weeks, no more. I was struggling in my classes but every morning I felt a rush of joy to wake to the bells ringing in the clock tower and go to my window and think, My God! I’m really here! In my pleasure I was whistling a tune of Hartmut’s as I climbed the dormitory stairs after breakfast. Gershon, one of the school handymen, was a few steps ahead of me, carrying a laundry bag on his narrow shoulders. He had a plodding gait even on the level; here on the stairs he barely moved at all. I was afraid I’d bump into him if I tried to pass, so I kept pace a few steps behind, whistling all the while. Gershon gave off a stale smell that I’d whiffed before but never so strongly as in this tight passage.
    He slowed even more. I hung back obligingly and continued to whistle, my song resounding pleasantly in the stone stairwell. Then Gershon stopped and turned his long gray face, the laundry bag slumped on his shoulders like a lamb in a Bible illustration. I could hear him breathe, fast and shallow. He said something in what I thought was another language—I knew he was a foreigner of some kind. His too-white teeth clicked as he talked; I watched them with helpless fascination. Then he stopped. He appeared to be waiting for an answer.
    Name! he said. Vat your name!
    I told him.
    Go den! Go! Go!
    I nudged past him and went to my room, and by the time classes started I’d written it off as a misunderstanding: the old crab must’ve thought I’d been trying to hurry him. When a prefect called me out of Latin during second period and sent me to the dean’s office, I assumed it was to receive a lecture about my abysmal grades. I was on scholarship, and had been nervously fearing a summons.
    I hadn’t met Dean Makepeace yet but I knew who he was: he was Ernest Hemingway’s friend. He closed the door behind me and looked me over without a word of