In Modern Novel, Mr. Katzenbach spent classroom hours forcing us to notice odd fragments of narration in Catch-22, places where someone complains of being cold. We were all cold. What was the big deal? The novel’s unfolding was not linear, and this offended my new hunger for logic—a rigid, illiterate instinct that emerged the day after the assault, as if in open revolt against the girl with a head full of stories who had cruised to their room. Mr. Katzenbach hollered at us all: there was a secret in this book, there was a haunting. He made us identify every moment of this strangeness in the pages, what felt to me a tiresome scattering of ill-fitting detail, and list them all on the chalkboard. He wrote SAVE on the board so our list was preserved as it grew. The book was baffling—iterative and told from several points of view—and Mr. Katzenbach had us track each story line too. “And then what?” he fired at us. “And then what?” Character by character, we called out plot points, cracking the spines of our books so we could rifle faster. Sweat flew off his forehead onto the floor. After he had a student take over the chalk, he pounded on the board with his fist, sending up tiny yellow puffs.
What is to be said about the fact that the teacher who reached me—who made me not only think but feel, who ignited the material at hand—was one who was abusing his power of connection with other girls? Do we call that an unfortunate coincidence? Am I betraying the women he violated by writing about how he, almost alone and without knowing it, helped me that fall?
Mr. Katzenbach demonstrated how the narrative of Catch-22 unfurled in a circular motion. He plotted every scene in space graphically, following chronology and character, using every last blank bit of board to reveal the spiral thus created. With his curled hand he traced the figure, drawing his finger in toward the center. Before us was a labyrinth, a closing in. What was at the center? What were we reading toward?
“What,” he howled, “can you NOT ESCAPE?”
He directed us to open the book to a page near the very end and recited from memory the scene in which the hero, Yossarian, opens his friend Snowden’s flak suit to find a hole has been blown in his guts. Snowden’s intestines spill free. I thought his injury was tragic, of course. But I was haunted by the fact that the living man alone knew that his friend was dying.
Do something do something DO SOMETHING! I thought.
“I’m cold,” said Mr. Katzenbach, softly, repeating Snowden’s final words. “I’m cold.” He waited, drawing out our attention, which was entirely his. Hushed, he continued: “‘There, there,’ says his friend. ‘There, there.’”
Our eyes were shining.
“That, my friends, is war.”
Then, mopping his brow, he released us to the bell.
Walking into breakfast one morning, Caroline sidled up to me and said, “Lace, did something happen with Rick Banner?”
“No.” I said it before I even thought it. It emerged reflexively. And then there was ringing in my ears.
She was silent.
We stepped up into the common room outside the upper dining hall and then fell into the line along the hallway that led into the kitchen. There were notices pinned here on a bulletin board, and I pretended to read them. Schedules for laundry collection, community service opportunities. An athletic calendar showing home and away games.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
In my mind I begged Caroline to say something else. I had no intention of deceiving her. It was a rejection of our friendship to refuse her question the way I had. It would make her angry, as well it should. But what else could I do? How could I help this?
At the beginning of fifth form, the sixth-form heartthrob Knox Courtland had declared, first through back channels and finally open proclamation, his love for Caroline. But she’d had eyes for someone else: a fellow rower, enormously strong, with what she called “floppy hair.” She loved the way his hair bounced around when he walked, the contrast between this and his oversize smile and muscled body. In a few years he’d be an Olympian, but at St. Paul’s he was just a sixth former named Dave. And not fit to date Caroline, thought the friends of Knox Courtland.
One evening in lower dining hall, not too many weeks before Caroline asked me about Rick Banner, one of Knox’s friends had stood suddenly at his seat, as though to give a toast, and shouted, “Hey!”
All the tables looked up. We were in our usual circle—the Kittredge girls and now Meg and Tabby, too—and we all turned. Knox’s friend was staring hard at Caroline.
“You could have had him,” said this minion, pointing to Knox. “Do you understand that?”
Caroline was pale, her eyes pained. She’d been hanging out with Dave the rower for a few weeks, but she hadn’t said anything unkind, hadn’t rejected Knox to his face—she had just taken up with someone else. We girls were uncertain how to react to this boy’s eruption of righteous anger. Brooke was gape-mouthed, already starting to laugh. The rest of us were horror-struck. Now this sixth former pointed at our friend Caroline and yelled, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” He picked up his tray and kicked back his chair, and his friends, Knox among them, followed, heads hung. As he passed us, he leaned low and added, “Dave is a tool.”
Caroline would have been able to understand domination. She’d have accompanied me to tell a teacher. She’d have listened.
Why could I not tell?
The memory existed behind what I can best describe as a narrow and tensile membrane that felt more than anything like a part of my very body, and I had a pure, instinctive unwillingness to break it, as though to push
