Free Old School by Tobias Wolff Page B

nerves, actually—all that
Übermensch
stuff.
    The German word shut me up. Our history master used it often—too often, really, and with excessive pleasure in his accent—to describe the Nazis’ ideology. Because of this association, when Bill flashed the word I became instantly conscious of his Jewishness, and all the more so because he kept it to himself. I could have argued that a man with a mind of his own and a pair of balls to back it up didn’t have to be a Nazi, but of course Bill hadn’t actually said that. And something else made me hold my tongue. He knew that I’d caught on to his Jewishness, but he wasn’t aware of mine, such as it was. I didn’t want to say something that would touch so tender a nerve, a tenderness I assumed in him because I suffered from it myself, covertly bristling when I read or heard anything that might be construed as anti-Semitic. In fact that part of my blood felt most truly my own at just those moments when it seemed liable to condescension or ridicule. I figured Bill had kindred feelings, and I didn’t want to provoke them by pushing a view that he identified with German murderers. Our balance was fragile enough anyway, with so many complications of ambition and envy and pretense.
    The crowning irony was that Bill himself should appear so much the poster Aryan—so blond, so fair, so handsome. More than handsome: over the past months he had become beautiful. How had that happened? What had changed? Here, too, my secret knowledge of him cast a shadow, because what made him beautiful was a quality of melancholy that softened his gaze and the set of his mouth, and that I attributed to his Jewishness. It seemed to me that the other Jewish boys in school were subject to a similar poignance of expression—intermittently, of course, and some more than others, but all of them to a degree. It was one of the marks of their apartness.
    As the submission deadline approached I entered a fever of elation, as if Ayn Rand had already chosen my story. I literally had chills, my brow was hot and clammy. I began to hear the voices of my characters and see their faces. It was all coming together: a great story, a masterpiece!
    The day before it was due, without yet having committed a word of it to paper, I rose to read a passage of
L’Etranger
in my French class and my head kept floating up until it reached a zone of absolute silence and the faces turned toward me looked as featureless as plates of dough. Then my knees went watery and I reached out to steady myself but fell anyway, bringing my desk down with me. I was all tangled up in it. I tried to sit up and fell back again and lay there, waiting.
     
    They kept me in the infirmary for almost two weeks. My fever was not, it turned out, the fizz of genius. It was influenza, complicated by walking pneumonia. Later, once he knew he wasn’t going to lose me, the school doctor said that people had been dying of this particular bug and that I was lucky not to have died myself.
    My dreams were so vivid those first few days that I could hardly tell waking from sleeping. The one thing I could be sure of was the constant presence of Grandjohn and Patty, who’d driven up from Baltimore right after the headmaster called them. They took turns at my bedside, sponging my face, helping the nurse feed me and change my sheets, supporting me on my wobbly, dizzying trips to the bathroom. Whenever I woke up, one of them was there. At first the sight of Patty or Grandjohn in the chair beside me made me weepy with gratitude, but as my head cleared I got tired of them and worried that they were imposing their dullness on the masters and boys who dropped by to say hello, and telling them more about me than I wanted known.
    Then one morning the nurse brought in a box of chocolates with a tender farewell note from Patty and a copy of
Advise and Consent
Grandjohn had inscribed
To the budding writer.
The Colonel left these off for you, the nurse said. Didn’t want to