Ms. Hempel Chronicles

her brother and their much younger sister. Calvin talked about a day they went hiking together in Maine, and Maggie, before she started crying, remembered how he used to read aloud to her every night at bedtime, something she still liked to do with him even though she was ten years old now and capable of reading The Hobbit on her own. Ms. Hempel’s story sounded unsentimental by comparison. She described her father picking her up from play practice, when she was maybe fourteen or fifteen. It was winter, and too cold to wait for the bus. Before parking the car in the garage, he would deposit her at the back door, so that she wouldn’t have to walk through the slush. As she balanced her way up the path, he would flick his headlights on and off. The beams cast shadows across the lawn, making everything seem bigger than it really was: the randy cat, her mother’s beloved gazebo, the fur sprouting from the hood of her parka. At the moment she reached the door, she would turn around and wave at him. She couldn’t see him, because the headlights were too bright, but she could hear him. Click, click. Click, click. Only once she stepped inside would he steer the car back out of the driveway.

When Ms. Hempel finished speaking, she looked out at her family. They looked back at her expectantly, waiting to hear the end of the story. The last time she stood on this pulpit, many years before, she had received the same anxious look. She was the narrator for the Christmas pageant, and though she had spoken her part clearly and with dramatic flair, she forgot to say her final line: “So the three wise men followed the star of Bethlehem.” A long pause followed, and then the three wise men stumbled out of the sacristy, as if a great force had propelled them.

For the rest of the pageant, she had to stay inside the pulpit, from where she was supposed to look down on the manger with a mild and interested expression; instead, she watched the other children wolfishly, willing someone else to make a mistake more terrible than her own. No one did. It could have happened to anyone, her mother would tell her, but she knew differently: it could have happened only to her. During her narration, she had fastened her eyes on the choir loft, but as she neared the end, in anticipation of the delicious relief that she would soon feel, she allowed her gaze to slip down onto the congregation below. There she saw her father, leaning forward very slightly, and holding on to the pew in front of him. He was smiling at her. Hugely. She lost her bearings entirely.

Now, standing in the same pulpit, she looked out at her family as they waited hopefully for a final paragraph. She looked at them in defiance: That’s all! He clicked the headlights on and off. The End. And she wished something that she never used to wish: that her father was there, on the edge of his pew. He would have liked the story; it would have made sense to him.

“Is being benevolent a good thing or a bad thing?” Cilla Matsui asked.

“A good thing!” said Ms. Hempel. “Benevolent means ‘generous and kind’.”

“Oh yes,” Cilla said. “That sounds like my dad.”

DWIGHT, TOBY’S STEPFATHER, was the character in the book whom her kids despised most. They shuddered at the humiliations that he made Toby endure: shucking whole boxes full of foul-smelling horse chestnuts, attending Boy Scouts in a secondhand uniform, playing basketball in street shoes because he wouldn’t fork out the money for sneakers. They hated him for coming between Toby and his mother. They hated him for being petty and insecure and cruel. “Dwight…,” they would mutter helplessly. “I want to kill the guy.”

As Toby’s situation worsened, they would turn over their books and study the author’s photograph: his handsome, bushy mustache, his gentle eyes. “He teaches at Syracuse,” they would point out. “He lives with his family in upstate New York.”

They loved these facts, because reading about the abusive stepdad, the failures at school, the yearnings to escape, to be someone else—it made them feel terrible. “He had such a tough life,” they repeated, shaking their heads. “A really tough life.”

But, according to the back of the book, Toby prevailed. The kids saw, in the felicitous pairing of picture and blurb, a happy ending to his story: he became a writer! He didn’t turn into a drunk or a bum. The back cover promised that it was possible to weather unhappy childhoods, that it was possible to do lots of bad things and have lots of bad things done to you—and the damage would not be irreparable. Often a particularly somber discussion of Toby’s struggles would conclude with this comforting thought: “And now he’s a famous and successful writer.” Tobias Wolff.

Fame and success: did that count as revenge? The seventh grade had a lively sense of justice. They wanted to see Dwight pay for all that he had done to Toby and his mother, for all the pain he had inflicted. They longed for a climactic, preferably violent, showdown between the boy and the stepfather. Barring that, they wanted Dwight to suffer in some specific and prolonged way. The fact that he had to live with the meagerness of his own soul—this was not considered punishment enough.

“He’s probably read the book, right?” Will Bean asked.

“And he knows that Toby’s a famous writer?”

They relished this idea: Dwight as an unrepentant old man, hobbling down to the liquor mart, pausing by the brilliant window of a bookstore. And there’s Toby. Mustached, mischievous Toby, the same photograph from the back cover, only much larger. A careful pyramid of his books is pointing toward the sky. NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER, the sign reads. Through the plate glass, the old man can hear the faint slamming of the cash register. He can