In chemistry we were led by a chubby, angelic mamma who asked the class what atomic piles were. We were discussing isotopes or rather being lectured to about them by a guest from the waterways experiment station. Our teacher was embarrassed that none of us knew what atomic piles were. I finally yelled out that I guess they were the worst disease imaginable, and there was fragmentary laughter around the class. Such was my early wit.
In the same class, sitting directly behind me, was a freckled bottle blonde who would go it to the extent of a finger. I wasn’t in her clique, but I liked talking to her. She’d read the novel Peyton Place several times and told me it was the best novel, going away, for all time. She would knock her-self out in class by taking ten deep breaths and then blowing on her thumb. She actually fainted back in her seat, with a smile, for a minute or so. Her name was Winona. She spoke with some authority, implying that she knew quite a bit for her age — and I knew positively of a few colleagues who’d couped her digitally. She was always telling me what I needed. You need a beer, she’d say. I liked to be mothered that way.
At Dream of Pines High we had teachers quitting all the time for reasons of pregnancy, higher pay in the insurance field, or personal despair.
In the eleventh grade I drank my first beer, and my facial condition evaporated. I looked in the mirror and couldn’t believe what a finished piece of young manhood I was. This one old fossil teacher in history was always yelling about how time flew and how hateful it was. But I loved time, for getting me older and good-looking. I still had a few scratches around the cheekbones from the disappeared pox, but it would take a really finicky critic to say I wasn’t handsome — though maybe a little guarded and un-holy-seeming, like a sheik. I’m told I looked like an Indian long-distance runner. I was five foot ten and yearning toward six feet. My grip on the veneered scroll on the top of the stair rail felt good to me. I could bend a beer can into a crimped wad with my right hand. I still have this Asian cut of face which no one in my family can account for. The Monroes were French-Irishmen with memories of the Middle Ages, according to the lineage-tracing my old man once did with a bonus research offering from whatever encyclopedia we have in the house.
In English lit I ran into a teacher that was deep. Her eyes twinkled with arty secrets, and it didn’t hurt anything that she was lovely of face and had the figure of a schoolgirl. She read poems with a nice, calm movement of mouth. I don’t know why she was at Dream of Pines, which was known as a tough school. She was the only good teacher there. I can still feel the dull, light rhythms way in the back of my head from the poems we read in her class. We had Sir Thomas Wyatt, who composed a poem about his old girlfriends and the girl who said “Dear heart, how like you this?” as she put her arms long and small around him, and I can’t forget old cobwebby Sir Thomas and those girls stalking with naked feet in his chamber. We had “The Love-song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with timid Alfred who wouldn’t even eat a peach, but was fond of women’s forearm hair as seen by lamplight The peach and the arm hair related to each other, the teacher told us. I asked this brilliant fellow with crewcut and bifocals how that was, and he sent me an unfriendly note, not wanting to talk in class: “The peach and the arm are both fuzzy and fleshy. Don’t ask me any more questions.” I was pleased to find that out, and later I showed up that bifocals prick by handing in a poem of my own composition which the teacher raved about. She read it in class. It was about a deep-sea diver talking to the ocean and had a line
There within you, fin and sinew …
which she claimed was superb poetry by anybody’s standards. See the bifocals jackass, who made an unadulterated A in everything, fall apart at the jaw when she read out my name at the end of the poem. Of course, nobody else in the class gave a damn, and I personally was embarrassed by some of the extreme gentleness of the poem when she read it. I’d written it in a gust of all the culture 1 had in me. Our teacher had the knack of convincing you that you had to possess a museum full of culture before you deserved anything at all. You had to know all about the castles of England. You had to know about T. S. Eliot. You had to know about war-weary France.
She taught French too, and I got into it after a week in her literature class. She played the records of a French singer whose name was Edith Piaf. Her husband had brought the records back from occupied Germany. This Piaf woman sang like a petite untrained whore whose bed had been bombed out from under her; she trembled, with her voice from the bomb-metal soil to the bomb-dust sky. Oh, she could tell some stories, though I didn’t understand any of them. I remember “Non, je ne regrette rien” with those beautiful Paris r’s. I linked her exclusively with World War II. It was what the teacher said about the records coming from occupied Germany. And I could just imagine this little Piaf woman huddling down behind some statue as gunfire streaked up and down the rues and avenues. Our teacher had been to Paris and held forth on it unboundedly. The French tongue weighed heavy on my mind, and I feel it like a sinner that I never learned it very well. Even in college, I never understood but about half of Moliére. But the Piaf woman made me sentimental about war all over again. With the help of the two movies in Dream of Pines, which showed almost nothing else but war romances.
I grew sentimental about the casualties of the Korean War from Dream of Pines. I asked around about them until I must’ve been a great bore. We lost six boys from the town, as a matter of fact. The noblest casualty was the son of Ollie Sink, the mill baron. His boy was shot to death on Pork Chop Hill, but only after he’d rendered heroic duty as a corpsman. Ollie had a daughter remaining. Two colored boys from niggertown families I never knew were cut down. One of them was Harley Butte’s cousin, a boy who’d played baritone horn with Butte in Jones’s first-year band. Then one GI had returned safe from the war, but went in-sane for speed with his Mercury convertible when he got back and got killed at a driveway coming out of a joint into the highway. It was one of those crashes everybody in town claimed to have heard. Then I talked with a fellow who ran a sort of half-ass sporting goods store with his father. He was awfully bitter that nobody seemed to’ve cared about what had happened in Korea. He’d been in the conflict. He unbuttoned his shirt and showed me the worst purple stitched wounds I’ve ever seen. They looked like new wounds, in fact. The gooks had overrun a station where he was working the telephone and thrown in a grenade. He told me about the gooks throwing a woman naked down a hill and then sending down a man dressed in colonel’s uni-form to drag her half-living, screaming body up the hill by the hair, just so one GI would peep up enough that they could get a shot at him. This old boy claimed to have risen up and shot down the peasant dressed in colonel’s uniform, in spite of the threat. He claimed that the stone he was be-hind disappeared in shot from the gooks when he stood up, and that his survival was miraculous. Marveling about why he was still alive took up all his time. He held up a dusty mitt and spoke right into the pocket of it.