Teacher by Mark Edmundson Page A

all about.
    One simple story tells more about the place than any exterior mapping could reveal. This is the Doober’s story, not mine, and Dubby could at times be a little wayward with the truth. Life wouldn’t always arch itself in quite the graceful parabolas that Dubby’s imagination required. Sometimes life needed help. But he told this story so graphically, with such conviction, that I had to believe him. True or not, let it stand as a metaphor for all that was true for me about Medford High School, circa 1969.
    THE DOOBER’S incident occurred in the New Corridor, where I had gone to see Mrs. Olmstead to learn that my prospects on planet Earth were less than modest and the place that, for whatever it may be worth, most often appears in my dreams when they go back to high school. Dubby was on the far end of this corridor, the bright passageway through the old, burned-out sector of the school. Up at the other end, he spotted a girl who was known to everyone not by anything so civilized as her name but simply as the Blind Girl.
    She was, from all appearances, stone-blind, navigating the halls and classrooms of Medford High with a cane and, on occasion, a Seeing Eye dog. She’d been in my Latin class (first row, first seat) and she was quite a good student, though the voice in which she offered her translations seemed to come from beyond the grave, a softly wailing cry. The teacher coddled her in that class, and after a while she coddled me, too. The girl and I had something of a bond.
    It was an advanced Latin class, featuring a year-long troop through Virgil’s
Aeneid,
master poem of imperial triumph. I was, not uncharacteristically, one of the worst students there. I never brought the book home, never studied the stuff. When it was my turn to translate, I’d simply take a running whack at the text, making liberal use of English cognates and soundalikes and also of an overall sense of what was likely to happen next in the story. This I had acquired from my reading, somewhere around the age of eight, the Classic Comic Book versions of
The Iliad
and
The
Odyssey,
the poems on which
The Aeneid
is based. Actually, that’s putting it kindly: Virgil cribs outrageously from both. Thus there was some justice, as you’ll see, to what was going on in the class. I generally got a B or a C in the translation sweepstakes. But overall I didn’t acquit myself too badly, in part because I knew all the mythological references, based on an agreeably semi-pornographic illustrated book of Greek myths, which I’d also read when I was eight—my classical phase, you might call it. From time to time I would put the poor Latinist who taught us out of her misery by revealing, for about the ninth time, who Jupiter and Juno were.
    But on this particular day the Latin matron, with her broom-straight backbone, detected something that made her frozen blood warm a little. It was maybe a rustling and a thrustling of papers under someone’s desk, a muffled, clandestine sound of some kind. But then maybe she had been preparing for this Latin class shoot-out for a while.
    She flung herself toward the miscreant’s desk and at the same time shouted to all of us to keep quiet and not to move. We were to keep our hands in plain sight, on our desks. Cowboy TV junkie that I was, it sounded like a stickup to me. I raised both hands in the air. With her bony hand, she snatched something from off the desk, or perhaps from between the legs, of poor Betty Anders. It was a book, a paperback book. Was it possible that Betty was reading something in class, the way that she had read
Peyton Place
beneath her desk in ninth grade and been caught by Miss Tuttle? Miss Tuttle had crowed in rage at the “filth.” (We were then studying
Hamlet,
that fount of purity; when it came to the business about “country matters,” the territories between Ophelia’s thighs, and other such things, we simply skipped past.)
    The book Betty was perusing turned out to be not a