A Writer's Life (10 page)

What my father must have seen was a beatific beauty that eluded me. My father's belief in the meaningfulness of monastic life must have also influenced his emotions and brought tears to his eyes on the day the
Times
depicted the ruination of the Abbey of Monte Cassino. The Americans justified the air raid because there had been intelligence reports claiming that German troops were using the abbey as a fortress. These reports turned out to be false. Meanwhile, six hundred tons of bombs were dropped on the abbey and its grounds by U.S. planes. It was the first time the Allies had deliberately targeted a religious site.

Although the
Times
was owned by Jews, my father believed that it was the only major newspaper in America worthy of being read by committed members of the Catholic Church. The
Times
covered the Vatican comprehensively and respectfully as an autonomous state. When the Pope issued an ecclesiastical message, the newspaper printed every word of it.

Except for my father, the only other
Times
subscriber in our parish was our Irish-born pastor. While I had seen signs of the latter's imperiousness toward some Italian parishioners, especially those who sent him jugs of homemade wine in lieu of cash in response to his fund drives, he and my father were extremely cordial and like-minded on the main political and social issues of the day, including the need to protect church members from the sinful behavior that might be aroused as a result of the distribution of indecent films and such books as those that I was then keeping under my bed.

During one of his sermons, our pastor complimented the
Times
for printing articles and editorials calling attention to the nationwide antipornography campaign led by the Catholic Legion of Decency. My father's words of praise to the priest after Mass affirmed for me the bond
that existed between them as subscribers to the
Times
, as adherents of this seemingly God-fearing and certainly high-minded periodical that eschewed comic strips and, reflecting what I later knew to be the bourgeois sensibilities and sexual prudery of the
Times'
s guiding spirit, Adolph Ochs himself, published each day hundreds of thousands of words and many images from which lewdness and profanity were extracted, and tawdriness was tempered, and the genitalia of racehorses and show dogs was airbrushed from photographs designated for the sports section.

The references to Mr. Ochs in Garet Garrett's conversations with my father gave me the idea of writing a term paper about the owner of the
Times
, who died in 1935. I would have liked to have interviewed Garrett about his former boss, but my father advised against it, fearing perhaps that my intrusiveness might cost him a customer. But I had kept some notes on what I had overheard, and later I found information about Ochs in our town library, which during those days was located within a wing of my school building, Ocean City High School—on the front of which, high above the entrance in ornate stone lettering, appeared the name: OCHS.

Although I had been attending classes in that building for two and a half years, I had never paused to look up at the lettering until I began working on my term paper, and indeed I had never heard of Adolph Ochs until he had been ushered into my consciousness within my father's store by Garrett. But now my school building suddenly seemed to be elevated in my mind in ways both majestic and magical, and as I sat in the library gathering information about Mr. Ochs from biographies and encyclopedias, I believed that I had been preordained to write about this man whom in my five-page term paper I would call “The Titan of The Times.” Twenty years later, in 1969, I would think of this high school effort as the genesis of my 698-page manuscript on Ochs and his dynasty. It was edited and published by a company that specialized in printing and distributing Bibles. The editors there were pleased that I was calling my book
The Kingdom and the Power
because, in addition to whatever appeal the book might have with a general audience, the editors believed that it might sell many extra copies to spiritually minded readers who would mistakenly believe the book carried a religious message. The book became a number-one best-seller in the United States in 1970. When I first wrote about Ochs and his
Times
in my term paper, my English teacher gave me a
B
-minus.

I know why I did poorly as a student in such subjects as chemistry and mathematics, both of which I found boring and confusing, but to receive mediocre grades in English upset me very much because I
did
pay attention in class and I
was
interested in the subject—and, to make matters
worse, my failure to excel in English gave impetus to my father's argument that my true talents might someday be realized in my capacities as a tailor.

I was his only son. I was his main hope as the inheritor of his business, as a follower in this craft that had been pridefully practiced by some elders in his family since the era of Napoleonic rule in southern Italy. And so as my schoolboy journalism continued to absorb most of my free time, and as my academic standing in my junior year fell below the level required by our principal to earn his recommendation for college-entrance consideration, my father became more insistent that I sit for a few hours a week in his workroom practicing certain rudiments under his guidance, such as how to cut and secure a pair of trouser cuffs, and how to make buttonholes, and how to baste the inner lining of a jacket. At the very least, he explained, tailoring was “something I could fall back on.” He also tried to reason with me while repeating an offer that, in my darkest moments of self-doubt, I must admit held a modicum of appeal.

“Wouldn't you like to live in Paris after you're out of high school?” he would ask. All that was required of me, I knew, was to occupy a guest room in the Paris apartment of an older Italian cousin of my father's who had left their village for Paris as a tailor in 1911, and who now owned a thriving shop on the rue de la Paix where I could work as an apprentice. I had also been told that this cousin's clientele included General Charles de Gaulle, several French film directors and performers, and other prominent people who my father hoped would convince me that there was a glamorous side to the tailoring profession. But I knew from watching my father at work that tailoring was tedious, time-consuming, and physically demanding, and that it often brought considerable pain to his back muscles and fingers. He made each suit stitch by stitch, avoiding the use of a sewing machine because he wanted to
feel
the needle in his fingers as he penetrated a piece of silk or wool and moved at a worm's pace along the seam of a shoulder or a sleeve. If whatever he did deviated from his definition of perfection, he would pull it apart and do it again. He hoped to create the illusion of seamlessness, to attain artistic expression with a needle and thread. Much as I admired his aspirations, I was never tempted to become a tailor, and yet I listened respectfully whenever my father alluded to my possible apprenticeship in Paris—which he did more than once after my diligence and weeks of work on my term paper had earned me only a
B
-minus.

I tried to defend myself as my father shared my disappointment with the grade. My teacher's standards in English were not necessarily relevant to my future in journalism, I insisted. My research indicated that the great Adolph Ochs had begun his career without encouragement from his English
teachers—he, too, had been an average student, one whose intelligence and talents became apparent later in his life. He had started out in journalism as a floor sweeper on a small newspaper in Knoxville, Tennessee. I was also convinced, although my reasoning was based on emotion, without a shred of evidence, that my English teacher's assessment of my classroom work was influenced by personal factors, such as the fact that she privately loathed me, or at least disapproved of me, and thus graded me harshly. The
B
-minus was not the lowest mark I had received in her class. I got mostly
C
's, sometimes
D
's, and once—after I had misspelled Shakespeare's name twice in an essay on
Hamlet
—an
F
. She wrote notes of explanation across the front page of each student's composition. On mine, she criticized me constantly for writing sentences that were “too wordy” and “indirect,” and sometimes she underlined sentences in red ink and wrote in the margin a single word:
syntax
. This word might appear two or three times on the same page with exclamation points:
syntax! syntax! syntax!
Although I looked up the meaning of the word in different dictionaries, I was never entirely sure how it related to what was wrong with my grammar, and yet I was reluctant to approach her. I felt intimidated by her in ways that I did not when in the presence of other teachers. I had transferred to this public high school after eight years in parochial school, and my immediate reaction to the new building was liberating. Here the faculty members were predominantly Protestant, and they were definitely less strict and oppressively virtuous than the nuns I had known. In this particular English composition class, however, I felt even more indecisive and detached than I had years before in parochial school, where my main concern had been in keeping my distance from the big Irish boys in the schoolyard who often ganged up on Italian-Americans during recess. In those days we constituted a small minority within the larger minority of Irish Catholics on this Protestant-governed island of Ocean City, founded in 1879 by Methodist ministers. But my teacher in this English composition class had all but reduced me to thinking that I was foreign-born, that English was my second language. My position on the student newspaper and my bylined articles in the town weekly and sometimes in the Atlantic City daily, articles that then represented my sole claim to whatever capabilities I possessed, never drew a word of encouragement from my teacher, nor did she even mention them to me in private before or after class. I could not believe that she never saw them in print, or that she remained silent about them because they were not pertinent to my work in her classroom. No matter how low her opinion of journalism might have been, nor how little regard she might have had for those editors who considered my articles publishable, her omission in this
situation surely was connected to some personal dislike of me, I repeatedly told myself, although beyond this I did not know what to think. Or rather what I
did
think only added to my frustration and bewilderment. I think that in a strange way—strange to everyone except the kind of teenage boy I was in that time and place, a pimply-faced sixteen-year-old in the apex of ignorance and wonderment about women—I was in love with her.

Each afternoon I sat waiting eagerly for her to enter the classroom. She was a slender, blue-eyed blonde with a long-legged stride who held her head high and who often wore tight-fitting tweed suits that accentuated her figure. She was then in her early twenties, perhaps teaching teenagers for the first time, which might have explained why she seemed to be so high-strung, and at times timorous, and always quick in trying to assert her control over her students, who were probably only five or six years younger than she was. She had come to us as a substitute teacher, filling in for an elderly and ailing veteran of the faculty, whose longtime popularity with his students had been sustained by his generous nature in grading them—but, much to my regret, this gentleman with coronary problems was never able to regain his health and his presence in English composition class. He resigned shortly before the start of my junior year; and due to scheduling problems and other matters, the more experienced teachers who might have stepped in for him were not as free and flexible as was this lovely female newcomer to the faculty, who would soon become the source of my romantic fantasies and my grief.

My difficulties began on the very first day of her arrival. Our class was scheduled to meet immediately following lunch. While most of us were chatting at our desks awaiting the arrival of our new teacher, my other schoolmates were leaning out of the open windows, calling to their friends entering the building from the street. It was a warm September day, and the breezes blowing across the nearby dunes carried the salty smell of the sea into our classroom, giving us a lingering sense of summer.

As the bell rang and everyone hastened to their seats, our teacher entered, smiling. She said nothing as she surveyed the room. She wore a yellow short-sleeved linen dress; her blond hair was held back by a blue velvet ribbon; her face and arms were suntanned and, compared to the dowdy female faculty members whom we were accustomed to seeing, she glowed with the incandescence of a starlet in an MGM musical—and two boys seated on either side of me in the rear row began to whistle.

She stiffened. Her smile disappeared. She quickly turned toward the back of the room, standing on her toes for a better look, and angrily asked, “Who whistled?”

She seemed to be staring directly at me. I slid down in my seat, my
head bent as I examined my shoes, a pair of penny loafers that I had polished the night before. I suddenly saw myself as the prime suspect, and if I did not quickly clear myself, and if word of this indescretion got back to my parents, it would be very embarrassing to them, especially to my father, my Catholic Legion of Decency-devoted father, the only Italian in our town who wore a suit and tie and was looked up to even by the Protestants. And yet I knew that I could
not
squeal on the two friends I sat between. One was the starting quarterback on our football team. The other was his favorite receiver. I always sat among the varsity players in the back rows of classrooms, it being among my perks as their chronicler and occasional spinmeister.

“Who
whistled?”
she repeated.

I continued to look down and did not glance sideways, which might have implicated my friends. The rest of the class in front of us also remained silent. As the seconds passed, I could hear the teacher's feet tapping impatiently, and a few flies buzzing overhead, and the floor-creaking sounds of a desk shifting under the weight of a fidgety student. But the two culprits next to me remained perfectly still and soundless, not a muscle moving, it seemed to me, nor could I even hear them breathing. I was surprised that they did not finally stand up, tell the truth, and accept the consequences. What could she have done to
them?
The coach would have protected them. The season was just beginning, and they were essential to the team's aerial attack. But they just sat in the classroom like the rest of us, blending in with the crowd, apparently fainthearted in the presence of this thin-skinned female teacher. This did not augur well for our forthcoming football season.