Within a few weeks of the new school year, I was fretting about whether to drop honors calculus for regular calculus. The decision felt monumental. Has a world ever been so small? The choreography of our curriculum and activities was, even in the early 1990s, tailored toward college acceptances—add Stanford and MIT, and one-third of my class would matriculate at Ivy League schools. As a junior I was already a year ahead of where the standard math sequence would have me, but would it demonstrate a failure of ambition to drop an honors class?
“Alternatively,” said Mrs. Fenn, my fifth-form adviser, “would it be good to give yourself a little break somewhere?”
Easy for her to say, I thought. She taught regular calculus and was master of our dorm, living in the largest apartment, the one with a door that opened onto our common room, from which the smells of dinner cooking and the sounds of her children playing could sometimes make me weak. How could she understand how hard I had to paddle now? Academically, fifth form was a step up. Even if we hadn’t felt the ground beginning to shudder with the approach of college, we all had a full year of Religion class, including the two dreaded exegesis papers; English electives that sent us deep into texts; conversational foreign language and literature classes; lab science; and so on. The only way to be high-achieving was to do everything, and because we never went home, there was nobody stopping us from working all night long, working through breakfast, studying flash cards in Chapel, rehearsing physics equations by the grassy defensive end of the soccer field, conjugating the passé simple while waiting for the alto line to enter Fauré’s Requiem Op. 48.
“But Princeton,” I said.
Mrs. Fenn pressed her lips together and puffed out her cheeks. My father had gone there. My grandfather had gone there. My uncle had gone there. My great-uncle had gone there. Dad liked to joke that I was welcome to attend any college I wanted, but if I went to Princeton, he’d pay for it. I did not experience these expectations as privilege; they terrified me. Besides immorality, the salient feature of entitlement, I think, is the total failure of imagination. The world of my adult life existed on the other side of a keyhole, and the shape of that lock was Nassau Hall. I could imagine no other.
“Princeton will be fine,” said my adviser. “I’m more concerned about you.”
I hung on to honors calc. There were ringers in that room, kids snapping their fingers before calling out answers, already chafing at their confinement to single-variable equations. I felt the chill of confusion, of being left behind, and it panicked me.
For English that term I’d chosen Modern Novel with Mr. Katzenbach, because as a debater I had watched Coach Katzenbach stand at a lectern and coolly prove to a student that he was not actually sitting in the chair he was sitting in, ontologically speaking. I’d had no exposure to rhetoric (only etiquette, brittle pretender). Mr. Katzenbach worked logic like a rope and used ordinary words to give the world the slip. The feeling of watching him do it was similar to the few times I’d been almost drunk, but better, because it was clear and cold. His coaching had been so good that the first time I’d traveled with the debate team to compete, back in fourth form, I’d returned with a trophy, a small personalized gavel with a metal plate bearing my name and FIRST PLACE, SECOND NEGATIVE. I’d gone on a lark. Mr. Katzenbach told me to consider law school. By fifth form I couldn’t fit debate in my schedule alongside varsity sports, but I could take Katzenbach’s English class.
For Modern Novel, he assigned Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. On the first day, we settled around the lacquered round table—humanities classes at St. Paul’s were taught at “Harkness Tables,” in expectation of discussions, not lectures—and set our thick blue paperbacks like dead birds in front of us. Mr. Katzenbach hitched up his huge stained trousers and said, “All right, what’s this? They call me Ishmael.”
We looked around the room. Blanks.
He shook his head. “Really? Okay. All this happened, more or less.”
More blanks.
He growled. “Okay. Come on. All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
We were sinking into our shoulders.
“Argh! Are you there? Are you in there?” He shuffled around the room, panting, periodically tugging at his pants. “It was love at first sight.”
Nobody breathed.
“JESUS! Can you READ? Can you SEE? Open the BOOK!”
Fumbling pages. There it was, the first line of Catch-22: “It was love at first sight.”
“So,” said Mr. Katzenbach. “Who can tell me about love?”
Now, Mr. Katzenbach, by the time I had him in class, had been teaching at St. Paul’s for decades, and in those decades he had touched several girls inappropriately, struck up unacceptable relationships with a few, and harassed many more. I knew nothing of this, and I include it because its presence in the generally aseptic report issued much later by a law firm hired by the school to investigate the history of teacher-student abuse on campus embitters my memories of him, as well it should. Among other incidents, the report details how, after he pawed one girl’s breast beneath her sweater, she went directly to an administrator and coach she trusted, John Buxton, to complain, and Mr. Buxton replied by asking her what she had done to cause Mr. Katzenbach to behave in this way. This happened the year before I was born, sixteen years before I had him in class. Mr. Buxton had risen to vice rector by the time I was there, and
