Free My Mistake by Daniel Menaker Page B

decades.
    But then there’s this: literally this. It allows me to write. It compels me to write. For five or six months I was so paralyzed by sorrow and dismay that it was all I could do simply to function. To go back to Collegiate and teach. To try to figure out how to talk to my parents. To brush off kind inquiries from colleagues and students, for fear that if I gave in to what pressed down on me so hard, I would never get up. And then out of desperation I wrote a story based on what had happened. And then came more writing—because much as I dislike the actual work of writing, it settles me, makes me feel as though I am actually managing myself, as nothing else does. I suppose this goes in the plus column too.
    But finally there’s this: Would I give back every sentence, every lesson learned, every bit of wisdom, every gram of sympathy for others, every sensitivity, every penny, every square inch of real estate, to have Mike walking three years ahead of me? Instead of adding year after unnatural year to my seniority over him? Instead of coming around the bend of the year and into the fall with the usual schoolboy’s summer’s-end sadness so uniquely sharpened? Instead of living in the shadow of an alternative unlived life? You tell me.
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    Twenty-seven
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    Tom McDade, Mike’s and my godfather and the former FBI man who investigated my father and someone who lost
his
brother when they were both young, visits us in Nyack after Mike’s death and, unprompted, says to me, “I know you think you’ll never get over this, but you will—I promise.” And, well, eventually I will. Over it but, obviously, not through with it.
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    I’ve been teaching English at the Collegiate School for two years. Now that I’m over twenty-six, over draft age, I decide to leave teaching.
    The Headmaster, Carl Andrews, is an excellent man—a little short, a little heavy, a heavy smoker, very smart and decent, always scooting around from one responsibility to another, a great basketball fan, and extremely proud of and fatherly toward the school’s students, with their startling ties and dope-widened eyes.
    Carl tells me that when Jacqueline Kennedy was considering Collegiate for her young son, John, he had shown the two of them around the school and its new building. Mrs. Kennedy kept saying things like, “If John is accepted, would there be an orientation for new boys in the fall?” and “If John is accepted, I assume we’d need to provide you with records from his previous school.” Carl finally stopped in the middle of a hallway, drew Mrs. Kennedy aside, and said, quietly, “Mrs. Kennedy, I think it’s safe for me to say that John is accepted at Collegiate.”
    I laughed, but for a few minutes this story struck me as being a poor reflection on the Headmaster’s integrity. I could hear Enge and my father saying, “You see?” I did see. But I was also continuing to learn that, as in the English Department at Hopkins, influence and connection are always part of the way of the world. And that Carl has been treating me like an adult by confessing his own—and understandable—susceptibility to influence, not so much for the sake of this fortunate unfortunate child as for the sake of the school.
    â€œI’m sorry, but I’m not coming back next fall,” I tell Carl in the late spring of 1968.
    He gets angry. “This is a real problem, Dan,” he says. “This means we have to find a replacement in an impossibly short time.”
    My mistake. I feel awful. I haven’t given a single thought to the predicament I am putting the school into. “I’m really sorry,” I say again. “I guess I didn’t realize—”
    â€œYou should have. This is just typical of the selfishness of some young people today. It really speaks poorly of you.”
    Desperate to regain some sort of footing, I remember an