The Secret History - Donna Tartt [255]
The teacher had dragged in some chairs from the dining hall. He was a round-faced, fair-haired man of about thirty, in turtleneck and jeans. A wedding band shone conspicuously on one pink hand; he had a conspicuous smell of after-shave. “Welcome,” he said, leaning to shake my hand, and in his voice I heard the enthusiasm and condescension of a man accustomed to working with adolescents. “My name is Dick Spence. Yours?”
It was a nightmarish hour. I really don’t have the heart to go into it: his patronizing tone at the start (handing out a page from the New Testament, saying, “Of course I don’t expect you to pick up the finer points, if you can get the sense, it’s okay with me”), a tone which metamorphosed gradually into surprise (“Well! Rather advanced, for undergraduates!”) and defensiveness (“It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen students at your level”) and, ultimately, embarrassment. He was the chaplain at Hackett and his Greek, which he had mostly learned at seminary, was crude and inferior even by my standards. He was one of those language teachers who rely heavily on mnemonics. (“Agathon. Do you know how I remember that word? ‘Agatha Christie writes good mysteries.’ ”) Henry’s look of contempt was indescribable. The rest of us were silent and humiliated. Matters were not helped by Charles stumbling in—obviously drunk—about twenty minutes into the class. His appearance prompted a rehash of previous formalities (“Welcome! My name is Dick Spence. Yours?”) and even, incredibly, a repetition of the agathon embarrassment.
When the lesson was over (teacher sneaking a look at his watch: “Well! Looks like we’re running out of time here!”) the five of us filed out in grim silence.
“Well, it’s only two more weeks,” said Francis, when we were outside.
Henry lit a cigarette. “I’m not going back,” he said.
“Yeah,” Charles said sarcastically. “That’s right. That’ll show him.”
“But Henry,” said Francis, “you’ve got to go.”
He was smoking the cigarette with tight-lipped, resolute drags. “No, I don’t,” he said.
“Two weeks. That’s it.”
“Poor fellow,” said Camilla. “He’s doing the best he can.”
“But that’s not good enough for him,” said Charles loudly. “Who does he expect? Fucking Richmond Lattimore?”
“Henry, if you don’t go you’ll fail,” said Francis.
“I don’t care.”
“He doesn’t have to go to school,” said Charles. “He can do whatever he fucking pleases. He can fail every single fucking class and his dad’ll still send him that fat allowance check every month—”
“Don’t say ‘fuck’ anymore,” said Henry, in a quiet but ominous voice.
“Fuck? What’s the matter, Henry? You never heard that word before? Isn’t that what you do to my sister every night?”
I remember, when I was a kid, once seeing my father strike my mother for absolutely no reason. Though he sometimes did the same thing to me, I did not realize that he did it sheerly out of bad temper, and believed that his trumped-up justifications (“You talk too much”; “Don’t look at me like that”) somehow warranted the punishment. But the day I saw him hit my mother (because she had remarked, innocently, that the neighbors were building an addition to their house; later, he would claim she had provoked him, that it was a reproach about his abilities as wage earner, and she, tearfully, would agree) I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool