“What
if the target of Thackeray’s criticism of Dickens’
maudlin sentimentality was Silas Marner? Instead of ‘whitewashed
saints, like poor Biss Dadsy,’ it could have been,
‘Biss Eppie 'ull never be naughty again, else she
must doe in da toal-hole--a back naughty pace.’"
“Well,
that might, indeed, have been interesting. And never mind
the fact that Ms. Evans and Mr. Lewes, themselves, had a
– shall we say, vexed-- critical relationship with
said Mr. Boz. And wasn’t it Virginia Woolf, Thackeray’s
granddaughter, who famously opined that Dickens was suitable
for children, but Eliot, for adults?”
“As in
‘Who’s Afraid of . . . ?’ ‘Biss
Ginny, Biss Ginny, come back to the lighthouth!’ And
her dad, Leslie Stephen, said Dickens was a great writer
– for the half-educated.”
"The whole
family seems to have had it in for poor Charles. Yet, as
you both may be aware, it has recently been averred that
Septimus is a Pip-double, and, more generally, that Mrs.
Dalloway is an analogue of Great Expectations.”
“No shit,
Shakespeare!” I (the narrator) say to that averment.
This learned
colloquy (are there 'un-learned' ones?) took place over
coffee, tea and pastries one Friday afternoon after school,
in the English Department office of a New York City prep
school. The participants, all currently teaching Silas Marner
to tenth graders, were the Department’s two Young
Turks, one male, one female, and an older male colleague
(Pontificating Elder).
Can you assign
the proper speech tags to the colloquy? The answers, in
order, are YT (M), PE, YT (M), and YT (F). If the colloquy
sounds like the trio were showing off, they were. Chalk
it up to a long week of teaching and the prospect of a long
weekend of essay grading.
Let us follow
PE, whose real name is Lawrence Messer, as he dons his overcoat
and leaves the building. By now, it is 6:15, and he is anticipating
his dinner date with a lawyer named Margaret White. Mr.
Messer – call me Larry, he might say to you or me,
but certainly not to his students -- is looking forward
to the date for several reasons.
Since Ms. White
is not an English teacher, he will be spared further shoptalk
(of which he has just had a bellyful). The other reasons
include age (Margaret is in her forties, and he is fifty-three);
temperament (she is sure of herself); and, finally, the
nature of the relationship (companionable, possibly mildly
romantic, each of them having been married once before).
But leaving
PE to his pleasant anticipations (and convoluted syntax),
we move to YT (F), whose name is Patricia Foley, or (to
some sarcastic students) Fat Poley. Ms. Foley is aware of
this nasty moniker, and once argued to her senior honours
students, “Hey, guys, I don’t have a single
Polish forebear. As for the ‘Fat’ bit, trust
your eyes.” And she did a daring little pirouette
that would have landed a male colleague in deep shit.
With that, Patty-Cake,
as her main squeeze (a jazz musician, i.e. a Chet Baker’s
man) called her (in private) had carried on with the class,
a spirited debate as to whether Faulkner’s books,
versus his life, made him a suitable target for the Cancel
Culture.
Following the
Friday afternoon tea ritual, Ms. Foley (YT, F) stayed behind
in the Departmental office to get a jump on two classes’
worth of essays, a total of 28 (small classes, high tuition).
She had promised to return them to both sections on Monday.
Or, as she had put it (twice), “Since you’ve
all been so brilliant this week, why shouldn’t I bust
my ass for you while you’re out having fun?”
As she launched
into the first essay, Ms. F. felt a bit guilty for having
told a lie of omission: she had failed to mention the two
gigs that would take up much of the weekend of her SO (Significant
Other, for the older reader) – i.e., her Gilbert (whose
style was avant-garde, or as Patty would sometimes quip,
in one of her sourer moods, “avant-derriere.”)
As Ms. Foley
was digging into (not tearing apart) her essays, YT (M),
or Thomas (Tom, not Tommy) Mason, was heading west (without
encountering young Lochinvar) toward the Avenue.
“Whence
was YT (M) bound?” you ask.
He was “slouching toward” (not Bethlehem, but)
a bar three or four blocks from school.
“Why so far?” you ask.
Not only was
he too tired for further banter with any colleagues he might
run into, he had recently heard, through the usual grapevine,
that several students with fake I.D.’s were tempting
fate (or something), by drinking at two places within a
block-and-a-half of school. And Tom Mason definitely did
not intend to waste his precious weekend liberty collaring
students, and then going through all the rigmarole that
would surely follow, as day follows night. (Tom might call
this trite simile an OH, or Occupational Hazard.)
Plus, you never
knew whom you might meet up with at one of the blarney bars
he frequented. (Did he dare to eat a pastrami sandwich?)
These places were among the haunts of New York City detectives,
not to mention other cops, and fire-and garbage-men, plus
assorted (some of them, sordid) blue-collar civilians. Tommy
M. liked to pretend he was one of the boys.
“School’s
out! Yay.” he exulted, skipping along the pavement,
and flapping his arms against the cold.
“All clear!”
cried a senior girl – young woman -- who spotted Tom
crossing the Avenue. Party Time! And six students, ages
fourteen to eighteen, all with fake I.D.’s, piled
into the pub on the corner.
Returning to
Larry Messer, the Pontificating Elder (PE), when he arrived
at a cozy Italian restaurant ten blocks from the school
(surely a safe distance), the host(ess) parked his overcoat
in the check room, then showed him to his usual table, which
he had booked earlier in the week. Consulting his phone,
he saw that he was exactly on time – 7 p.m. —so
it did not concern him that Margaret White had not yet arrived.
Offered a drink
while he waited, he demurred, telling the server (male)
that they would be ordering wine with dinner. After he had
buttered and eaten a single breadstick (double-baked to
a turn), he noted that Margaret was now seven minutes late.
“She must
be clearing her desk before the weekend,” he told
himself. But, then, he noticed that she had sent him a TM
(Text Message, for the luddite reader). He assumed it would
say she would be however many minutes late, for whatever
(good) reason. But as he read, his complacency was quickly
shredded:
L, (M. had typed,
ominously – not 'Dear Larry,' her usual salutation),
So sorry, but this afternoon, Dick Price, a colleague, asked
if I happened to be free for dinner this evening. As I opened
my mouth to tell him the bad news, I suddenly had a crazy
impulse. “Why, yes, Dick, I do happen to be free.
I thought you’d never ask.” After we had gone
over the details, and he had departed for his office (with
a spring in his step), I examined my impulse. The cause
turned out to be simple: a strong feeling that my relationship
with you had grown old. I mean, what are we? A forty-and
a fifty-something, both widowed, both well-educated, liberal-minded
professionals. And all of those dinner dates, plus all the
concerts, plays and films (not movies). Larry, dear, I hope
that you share my feeling, in other words, that the time
has come for us to smooch and split. WE’VE BECOME
BORRRING, MY DEAR, DON’T YOU THINK?
Sorry, and Love
(still),
Margaret (never Marge,Meg, or etc.)
“Well,”
Larry thought, “I guess that’s that!”
(Or as his students might have put it, “What it is!”)
He realized that he was already fending off disappointment,
keeping 'it' in until later, when he would be safely back
in his apartment. Calmly, too, he told the server that his
dinner partner had cancelled the date because “something
came up at the last minute.” (I’ll say!) Stoically,
he directed the young man to remove the second place setting,
and stoically (still), he ordered dinner for one (a simpler
dinner than he and Margaret would have ordered). He even
had the equanimity to add a demi-carafe of (an appropriate)
wine, instead of the usual full bottle.
Dropping a curtain
of consideration over Larry (PE) as he mouths his bitter
breadsticks (of which, as Dante wrote about the bread of
exile, “how salt the savor”), let us retreat
to safe harbour with Pat Foley (YT-F), back at the English
Department office.
By now, it is
7:45. Counting the two piles of essays on her desk, she
realizes that the totals are, as she puts it, “Seven
down, twenty-one to go.” The neatness of this fraction
prompts further mental arithmetic, which reveals that, at
present speed (surely optimistic), she will not finish before
midnight.
Since this prospect
is too grim for even the dutiful Ms. Foley, probably rendering
her comatose on the morrow, for parts of which Gilbert will
be free, she compromises, vowing to grade seven more essays
now, and the rest, tomorrow evening, when Gil has his other
gig.
With the sense of a burden lifted (temporarily), she downs
tools, rises, stretches and crosses the office to the small
fridge, where she has stowed a cheese sandwich and large
salad, prepared and brought from home that morning, and
half of a large coffee, prudently saved from the after-school
gathering.
As she sips
and munches, Pat Foley is suddenly swamped by regret over
her dimming hopes of motherhood. At thirty-seven, the biological
clock is ticking, and Gilbert has said, more than once,
that his work, which includes composing as well as playing,
is the only child he will ever need. “In old days,”
Pat sorrowfully recalls, “angels . . . took men by
the hand and led them away from the city of destruction
. . . the hand may be a little child's.”
How similar
are Ms. Foley’s feelings, as she partakes of her Spartan
fare, to Larry Messer’s, as he awaits his Linguine
Al Vongole and demi-carafe of Pinot Gris. Since stoicism
has its limits, poor Larry has not ordered a salad. (If
he had really not wanted the server to notice his disappointment,
he should have ordered the salad). Unwilling to blame Margaret
for her change of heart, he nurses his despair with a passage
from Silas Marner: “There's nothing kills a man so
soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.”
Meanwhile, back
at the . . . (yadda-yadda), Tom Mason notices for the umpteenth
time how former Mayor Bloomberg’s campaign against
smoking in bars and restaurants has put a damper (a dryer,
really) on the ambience of the city’s drinking emporia
(or emporiums).
Trying to spot
one of his ersatz cronies, he finds none. When he bellies
up to the bar and tries to join in the laughter at a (sexist)
joke made by one member of a trio of strangers, a second
member, a big, beefy, red-faced man wearing construction
boots, heavy Carhartt khaki pants and jacket, and a decaled
hard hat, gives poor Tom the stink eye, and says, “Do
we know you, Mister?”
Slinking down
the bar, Tom (YT, no more) catches the eye of the barista
(female), and orders a pint of whatever. As he waits for
her to draw his pint, Tom berates himself for the quixotic
notion of trying to cross social-class lines, which he realizes
was a kind of slumming, or reverse snobbery.
“If there
is an angel,” he quotes to himself, in partial exoneration,
“who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins,
he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from
false ideas for which no man is culpable.”
