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Authors: Allan Gurganus
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newspapers. Finally I opened my test booklet. I simply tried to describe the thing. As Blenheim had taught us in his reedy rational voice, I energetically looked and looked at it. I mentioned no implied plumbing. I did not assume that this was part of anything larger, mechanically or historically. I treated it as an object whole unto itself, and not without certain peculiar beauties all its own.
In just this way, in this unlikely setting, I now try to see myself.
B EFORE SLEEP , I exercise my memory, recalling seating charts of favorite classes I taught at the Academy. From these I lift my choice of thirty years of boys. All that character, all those eyes. I place each child at his original desk. When I finally survey this composite class of best-loved pupils, I am amused sometimes to find two or even three boys from different years, whole different generations, now stacked, smiling, all one age, in the same desk chair. I imagine my cellmate seated there on the front row, not wearing a school uniform like the others, not in his coarse prison garb, but instead luminous and shirtless, and—I note—shiny, still soapy from some bath. There are no books, no pen staffs before him. Only jewels on his desktop, a great mound of them glittering as in some children’s tale of treasure. The gems refract the morning classroom’s sunlight; they cast prismatic shapes on floor and ceiling. Purest spectral hues dance all across the room. A winking angle comes and goes above the murky lithograph of Goethe. One corner of the green aquarium is spotlit and clouds of emerald algae, glints of fish, drift through it.
The wall map of America is flecked with coin-sized lozenges like ghostly hints at coming capitals or miracles or future battles with Red Indians. And, seated at the center of this blurry constellation, my latest favorite shines. Gems’ light rests upon his glossy chest, the chin, his garnet scar. Suddenly, he lifts the jewels like an armful of harvest or sea life and our classroom is tattooed with rainbow stripes, tremulous octagons and arcs. Other students laugh and dip their hands into these pools of light. They start to sing, in three-part harmony, one song I taught them all in different years. My cellmate holds treasure out to me, and voices of my best-loved children tremble up into a sweet assured crescendo.
Decades of favorites, a class of masterpieces, comrades, all harmonious.
1975
Nativity, Caucasian
For Ethel Mae Morris
(“W HAT’S
wrong
with you?” my wife asks. She already knows. I tell her anyway.)
I was born at a bridge party.
This explains certain frills and soft spots in my character. I sometimes picture my own genes as so many crustless multicolored canapés spread upon a silver oval tray.
Mother’d just turned thirty and was eight-and-one-half months gone. A colonel’s daughter, she could boast a laudable IQ plus a smallish independent income. She loved gardening but, pregnant, couldn’t stoop or weed. She loved swimming but felt too modest to appear at the Club in a bathing suit. “I walk like a duck,” she told her husband, laughing. “Like six ducks trying to keep in line. I
hate
ducks.”
Her best friend, Chloe, local grand master, tournament organizer, was a perfect whiz at stuffing compatible women into borrowed seaside cottages for marathon contract bridge.
“Helen precious?” Chloe phoned. “I know you’re incommoded, but listen, dear. We’re short a person over here at my house. Saundra Harper Briggs finally checked into Duke for that radical rice diet? And not one minute too soon. They say her husband had to drive the poor thing up there in the station wagon, in the
back
of thestation wagon. I refuse to discriminate against you because of your condition. We keep talking about you, still ga-ga over that grand slam of yours in Hilton Head. I could send somebody around to fetch you in, say, fifteen minutes? No, yes? Will that be time enough to throw something on? Unless, of
In just this way, in this unlikely setting, I now try to see myself.
B EFORE SLEEP , I exercise my memory, recalling seating charts of favorite classes I taught at the Academy. From these I lift my choice of thirty years of boys. All that character, all those eyes. I place each child at his original desk. When I finally survey this composite class of best-loved pupils, I am amused sometimes to find two or even three boys from different years, whole different generations, now stacked, smiling, all one age, in the same desk chair. I imagine my cellmate seated there on the front row, not wearing a school uniform like the others, not in his coarse prison garb, but instead luminous and shirtless, and—I note—shiny, still soapy from some bath. There are no books, no pen staffs before him. Only jewels on his desktop, a great mound of them glittering as in some children’s tale of treasure. The gems refract the morning classroom’s sunlight; they cast prismatic shapes on floor and ceiling. Purest spectral hues dance all across the room. A winking angle comes and goes above the murky lithograph of Goethe. One corner of the green aquarium is spotlit and clouds of emerald algae, glints of fish, drift through it.
The wall map of America is flecked with coin-sized lozenges like ghostly hints at coming capitals or miracles or future battles with Red Indians. And, seated at the center of this blurry constellation, my latest favorite shines. Gems’ light rests upon his glossy chest, the chin, his garnet scar. Suddenly, he lifts the jewels like an armful of harvest or sea life and our classroom is tattooed with rainbow stripes, tremulous octagons and arcs. Other students laugh and dip their hands into these pools of light. They start to sing, in three-part harmony, one song I taught them all in different years. My cellmate holds treasure out to me, and voices of my best-loved children tremble up into a sweet assured crescendo.
Decades of favorites, a class of masterpieces, comrades, all harmonious.
1975
Nativity, Caucasian
For Ethel Mae Morris
(“W HAT’S
wrong
with you?” my wife asks. She already knows. I tell her anyway.)
I was born at a bridge party.
This explains certain frills and soft spots in my character. I sometimes picture my own genes as so many crustless multicolored canapés spread upon a silver oval tray.
Mother’d just turned thirty and was eight-and-one-half months gone. A colonel’s daughter, she could boast a laudable IQ plus a smallish independent income. She loved gardening but, pregnant, couldn’t stoop or weed. She loved swimming but felt too modest to appear at the Club in a bathing suit. “I walk like a duck,” she told her husband, laughing. “Like six ducks trying to keep in line. I
hate
ducks.”
Her best friend, Chloe, local grand master, tournament organizer, was a perfect whiz at stuffing compatible women into borrowed seaside cottages for marathon contract bridge.
“Helen precious?” Chloe phoned. “I know you’re incommoded, but listen, dear. We’re short a person over here at my house. Saundra Harper Briggs finally checked into Duke for that radical rice diet? And not one minute too soon. They say her husband had to drive the poor thing up there in the station wagon, in the
back
of thestation wagon. I refuse to discriminate against you because of your condition. We keep talking about you, still ga-ga over that grand slam of yours in Hilton Head. I could send somebody around to fetch you in, say, fifteen minutes? No, yes? Will that be time enough to throw something on? Unless, of
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