Farnham nodded. It seemed as though he’d rehearsed every gesture. “You’d be good at basketball, I imagine,” he said. “You’re tall, well built.”
This was a little embarrassing.
“What about doing both?” said Farnham. “You could take a small part in the play, something like Desdemona’s father, and only rehearse once a week.”
“I don’t know,” said Thomas. He really didn’t know. He did like to act; he and Barbara and Jeff had been doing their own shows at home in the living room ever since they were little kids. But the guys who did theater here were sort of on the fringe of things. Thomas wanted to fit in.
“Your father was excited about the idea of our doing Shakespeare when I spoke with him over Parents’ Weekend,” said Mr. Farnham.
“Oh,” said Thomas. So that was it. He wanted Thomas in the play because he happened to be the son of Preston Boatwright, who happened to be the drama critic for the biggest newspaper in Washington.
“Don’t get all down in the mouth,” said Mr. Farnham. “What did I say?”
“You’re just asking me to be in the play because my dad was pushing you to.”
“That’s not true.” He pulled his chin up a notch. Farnham was a small man, 5'6", 130 pounds. He looked like he shaved around that mustache maybe once a week, and with his short brown hair and his tortoiseshells, he could pass for a sixth-former.
“He’s always prodding me to be in the plays here,” said Thomas. “What did he say, that he’d give you publicity in the Post if you gave me a part?”
Mr. Farnharn’s face flashed red as though a spotlight had hit it. “What he said,” said Mr. Farnham, “was that you were good.”
Thomas was surprised, then pleased. It was pretty neat to hear even a secondhand compliment from his dad.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Coach McPhee says we’ll be pretty busy.”
“Come by the theater after basketball practice this afternoon. We can talk about a part then.”
Thomas had to go to class.
“I don’t know, Mr. Farnham,” he said, as he backed toward the door.
“Just come by anyway,” said Mr. Farnham. He smiled. “We can just talk. You can tell me about your Thanksgiving holiday.”
“Yes sir,” said Thomas. Dammit to hell, can’t he understand when somebody says no? Be polite anyway, he thought. “Did you have a good holiday?”
“I had an excellent holiday,” said Mr. Farnham. “I went to New York.”
But Thomas did not have time to hear about some boring trip to New York.
SCENE 3
Benjamin Warden looked down at the papers in front of him. It had been a cheap trick to assign some writing in class on the first day back from vacation, but it had kept him from having to run the class. Now, however, he had to grade the results.
It was 10:15 in the morning. Three class periods had already met, and now it was recess, a half hour for the boys to clean their dormitory rooms for inspection. Warden was trying to keep his mind off Cynthia and on schoolwork, but his thoughts refused to be so tractable.
As department chairman, Warden taught three sections, two of which were electives in creative writing, where he worked with the most gifted seniors. These papers, however, were from his class of sophomores, his only section that happened to meet on Monday mornings—and his only problem class. They were the remedial section of fourth-form English, still working on grammar and the most elementary principles of composition, though Warden was eager to get them into writing poetry and spending more time on literature. Today he had forgone grammar and had given the class six words, all six of which they were to use in a poem. He had allowed them forty-five minutes—the entire period—to work.
The six words, which embraced at least four parts of speech and three of the five senses, were “muffin,” “licorice,” “blithely,” “strummed,” “squeaky,” and “moist.” Robert Staines had written the poem on the top of the pile:
My Mother baked, A licorice muffin,
It tasted like turkey, Without any stuffin:
The inside was moist,
The outside was squeaky,
I strummed when I ate it, Delicious and blithely.
Warden had watched Staines work. The boy had taken five minutes to dash off the writing, and then he had doodled until the end of the period when his classmates turned in their papers. What annoyed Warden was that Staines’s poem was actually all right, if only by accident. He had produced some startling images—“the outside was squeaky” and “I strummed when I ate it”—but Warden knew the boy was unappreciative of his own inadvertent imagery. It was the old dilemma of the English teacher: to praise work for what he saw in it or to nail the student for not taking the assignment seriously.
Warden knew that he was supposed to be objective about all his students, and he could usually find something likeable about everyone in a class. Not Staines. There was something shifty and arrogant about Staines. He was a good athlete, but he was absolutely uninterested in anything academic. In his poem, for instance, he hadn’t even tried to find out what the words meant. “Delicious and blithely”: that was an accidentally interesting line. Warden supposed that he should give the boy some credit for the clever feminine rhyme of “muffin” with “stuffin’.”
Why hadn’t anybody called from the doctor’s?
Warden had wanted to summon an ambulance this morning, but Cynthia had stopped him. She had already arranged transportation with Kathleen Somerville last night, and she had told the doctor she was coming. She had also accused Warden of missing too many classes with his readings anyway. He had allowed her to prevail, and now he felt guilty and frustrated for doing so.
What was the diagnosis?
He hunted through the pile of papers until he found the Lipscomb boy’s work. This one was likely to be quite good. The boy had no business being in a remedial English class; he was there only because he was a
