How to express the quality of his teaching? A thorough mastery of his subjects, an inexhaustible sympathy for the scholastic underdog, a unique ability to make unexpected connections and to mix in an always fresh and eye-opening way the stuff of lessons with the stuff of life, an effortless humor, a by no means negligible gift for dramatization, a restless and doubting temperament that urged him forward ceaselessly toward self-improvement in the pedagogic craft- these are only parts of the whole. What endures, perhaps, most indelibly in the minds of his ex-students (of whom this present writer counts himself one) was his more-than-human selflessness, a total concern for the world at large which left him, perhaps, too little margin for self-indulgence and satisfied repose. To sit under Mr. Caldwell was to lift up one’s head in aspiration. Though there was sometimes-so strenuous and unpatterned was his involvement with his class- confusion, there was never any confusion that indeed “Here was a man.”
In addition to a full load of extra-curricular school activities, including the coaching of our gallant swimming team, the management of all football, basketball, track and baseball tickets, and the supervision of the Communications Club, Mr. Caldwell played a giant’s role in the affairs of the community. He was secretary of the Olinger Boosters’ Club, Counsellor to Cub Pack 12, member of the Committee to Propose a Borough Park, vice-president of the Lions and chair man of that service club’s annual light-bulb-selling campaign for the benefit of blind children. During the recent War he was Block Warden and a willing instrument in many aspects of the Effort. Born a Republican and a Presbyterian, he became a Democrat and a Lutheran, and was a staunch contributor to both causes. For many years a deacon and church-council member of the Redeemer Lutheran Church of Olinger, upon recently moving to a charming rural house in Firetown, his wife’s family “homestead,” Mr. Caldwell promptly became a deacon and member of the council of the Firetown Evangelical-Lutheran church body. Such a tabulation by its very nature cannot include the countless nameless works of charity and good will by which he, originally an alien to the town of Olinger, wove himself so securely into its fabric of citizenship and fellowship that, him gone, the cloth seems all undone.
He is survived by a sister, Alma Terrio, of Troy, New York; and by his father-in-law, his wife, and his son, all of Fire town.
VI
AS I LAY ON MY ROCK various persons visited me. First came Mr. Phillips, my father’s colleague and friend, his hair indented by the memory of a shortstop’s cap. He held up his hand for attention and made me play that game which he believed made the mind’s hands quick. “Take two,” he said rapidly, “add four, multiply by three, subtract six, divide by two, add four, what do you have?”
“Five?” I said, for I had become fascinated by the nimbleness of his lips and so lost track.
“Ten,” he said, with a little rebuking shake of his in flexibly combed head. He was a tidy man in all things, and any sign of poor coordination vexed him. “Take six,” he said, “divide by three, add ten, multiply by three, add four, divide by four, what do you have?”
“I don’t know,” I said miserably. My shirt was eating my skin with fire.
“Ten,” he said, puckering sadly his rubbery mouth. “Let’s get down to business,” he said. He taught social science. “Give me the members of Truman’s cabinet. Remember the magic mnemonic phrase, st. wapnical.”
“State,” I said, “Dean Acheson,” and then I could remember no more. “But truly,” I called, “tell me, Mr. Phillips, you’re his friend. Is it possible? Where can the spirits go?”
“T,” he said, “Thanatos. Thanatos the death-demon carries off the dead. Two and three, Billy boy, easy out, easy out.” He adroitly sidestepped and stooped and snatched it up in his webbing on the short hop. He braced, pivoted in slow motion, and lobbed it over. It was a volley ball and behind me all the mountaintops began to shout. I strained to bat it back over the net but my wrists were chained with ice and brass. The ball grew eyes and a mane of hair like the corn-silk that flows from the bursting ear. Deifendorf’s face moved so close I could smell the tallow on his breath. He was holding his hands so a little lozenge-shaped crevice was formed between the balls of his palms. “What they like, you see,” he said, “is to have you in there. No matter who they are, that’s all they like, you in there working back and forth.”
“It seems so brutal,” I said.
“It’s disgusting,” he agreed. “But there it is. Back and forth, back and forth; nothing else, Peter-kissing, hugging, pretty words-it doesn’t touch them. You have to do it.” He took a pencil into his mouth and showed me how, bending his face into the conjunction of his palms with the pencil stick ing, eraser first, from his tartarish teeth. For this moment of tender attention a whole hushed world seemed conjured in the area of his breathing. Then he straightened up, and broke his palms apart, and stroked the two fatnesses of his left palm. “If there’s too much fat here,” he said, “along the inside of the thighs, you’re blocked-you understand?”
“I think so,” I said, furious to scratch my itching arms, where the red shirt was shredding.
“So don’t laugh off the lean pieces,” Deifendorf admonished me, and the dense seriousness of his face repelled me, for I knew it won my father. “You take a skinny kid like Gloria Davis, or one of these big rangy types like Mrs. Hummel-I mean, when a piece like that takes you, you don’t feel so lost. Hey, Peter?”
“What? What?”
“Wanna know how to tell if they’re passionate?”
“Yes, I do. I really do.”
He stroked the ball of his thumb lovingly. “Right in here. The mound of Venus. The more there is, the more they are.”
“The more they are what?”
“Don’t be dumb.” He punched me in the ribs so that I gasped. “And another thing. Why doncha get some pants without a yellow stain on the fly?”
He laughed and behind me I could hear all the Caucasus laughing and snapping their towels and flipping their silvery genitals.
Now the town came to visit me, daubed with Indian paint and vague-faced from idle weeping. “You remember us,” I said. “How we used to walk up the pike beside the trolley cars, me always hurrying a little to keep up?”
“Remember?” He touched his cheek in confusion, so that dabs of wet clay rubbed off on his fingertips. “There are so many…”
“Caldwell,” I said. “George and Peter. He taught at the high school and when the war was over he was Uncle Sam and led the parade down from the fire hall down the pike, where the trolley tracks used to be.”
“There was somebody,” he said, his eyelids trembling in a sleep-walker’s concentration, “a stout man…”
“No, a tall man.”
“You all imagine,” he said with sudden vexation, “if you’re here for a year or two, that I…that I…there are thousands. There have been thousands, there will be thousands…First, the People. Then the Welsh, the Quakers, the Germans from the Tulpehocken Valley…and all think that I should remember them. In fact,” he said, “my memory is poor.” And with this confession his face was brightened by a quick smile that, creasing so counter to the earth-colored markings of paint on his face, made me love him for a second even in his weakness. “And the older I get,” he went on, “the more they stretch me, the streets up Shale Hill, the new development toward Alton, the more…I don’t know. The less things seem to matter.”
“He was in the Lions,” I prompted. “But they never made him president. He was on the committee to get a borough park. He was always doing good deeds. He loved to walk up and down the alleys and used to spend a lot of time hang ing around Hummel’s Garage, on the corner there.”
His eyes were closed and, following the pattern of his lids, his whole face seemed membranous and distended, flickering with fine veins but rapt as a death-mask is rapt. The daubs of paint glistened where they had not dried. “When did they straighten Hummel’s Alley?” he murmured to himself. “There had been a woodworking shop there, and that man blinded by gas in the trenches in that little shack, and now I see a man coming into the alley. His coat pocket is full of old pens that don’t write…”