Читать книгу The Education of Arnold Hitler - Marc Estrin - Страница 20

Arnold Hitler became the language maniac of his school, constantly correcting and criticizing, but with such wit and humble charm that he got away with murder. His teachers loved him, even those who showed up as defendants in his underground language sheet, The Last Word. Much of the school was on his staff: students and staff slipped notes-on-the-overheard through the vents in his locker, some of which made it into his “Language Alert” column.

“Arnold, I hear they’re thinking of calling the library the ‘Learning Resources Center,’” wrote a faculty member. “What do you think of that?” He responded with a Mencken-like diatribe in the next issue.

Arnold Hitler, a lowly junior, had become the local language repository, and Mansfield High by and large embraced his efforts. By and large—with the exception of at least one person, let’s call him Claggart, who also slipped notes into his locker: “Hey, asshole, wanna meet me behind the school after practice today? I got some hot idioms for you to shove. Come alone.”

In November 1966, Arnold Hitler found a missive in his locker too intimate to publish. It was a quote from someone named James Thurber about America needing a “psychosemanticist” to treat “the havoc wrought by verbal artillery on the fortress of reason,” our current language being a tongue “full of sound and fury, dignifying nothing.” Who was this guy Thurber? he wondered. Under the typed text was a note beautifully handwritten in italic script: “His seals barketh up our tree. Love, your Billie Jo.”

“Your” Billie Jo? “My” Billie Jo? “Our” tree? Between the pronoun and the exquisite hand, he found his heart beating more quickly and his own hand slightly shaky.

“Sí, ragazzo, sí!” Jacobo whispered, and Arnold clamped his knees together.

He didn’t know anyone named Billie Jo, but then he didn’t know many girls at all—at least not by name. Girls didn’t play chess, mostly, and girls didn’t play football, and the girls in his classes didn’t say much. They were too worried about appearing smart. But from mid-November on, he found a daily message in his locker, usually an interesting quotation with a personal note in that lovely hand. It was nice, being watched—but also creepy.

On Christmas Day, his sixteenth birthday, an ice-cream cake was delivered to the Hitler door: a frozen, regulation-size, edible football inscribed “DON’T PASS ON THIS ONE, Birthday love from your secret admirer.” Arnold pled ignorance as George and Anna shared a knowing laugh.

On Monday, January 2nd, 1967, she revealed herself to him. A somewhat plain, dark-haired young woman with granny glasses, short skirt, and black tights sat down next to him in the cafeteria and said, simply, “Happy New Year, Arnold. I’m your mysterious love.” He had seen her before, he thought, without noticing, one of the neutral mass of bodies and faces passing in halls and seated in assemblies.

“Are you Billie Jo?”

“Billie Jo Hoffmann, at your service.” She doffed an imaginary cap. She did have lovely, brown hair.

“At your service? What does that mean?”

“You’re the semiologist, so you tell me.”

A promising beginning.

Arnold was intrigued by her audacity. He was not sexually attracted, but all the “sexually attractive” girls were so conscious of their gifted status, so manipulative around it, so made-up and cheap, with their permed hair and push-up bras, that he had always been turned off by the very beauties who were supposed to turn him on. Billie Jo was not unattractive. In fact, over the next days, her natural simplicity of appearance and style began to please him more and more.

She was a senior. At Mansfield High, it was unheard of for a senior girl to be interested in a junior boy. Given the relative maturity of the boys and the girls, it would surely have been robbing the cradle, well and justly tabooed. But Arnold was different. And Billie Jo was different enough to understand that, and to dare to reach out to him, perhaps her only soulmate among the student body.

She and her twelve-year-old brother, Chris, had moved to Mansfield only that year, from Dallas. Her mother, Francine, had just separated from her dad and had moved the twenty miles south to be out of his sphere, yet still close enough to share child responsibilities and to not lose touch with old friends and activities. She still worked three nights a week at a group home in the city. Billie Jo, too, still had ties to Dallas—several girlfriends, an ex-boyfriend, now “just a friend,” her piano teacher, with whom she studied on Saturdays, and a library card using her dad’s address. She did the commute in her own ’65 Oldsmobile, a sweet-sixteen gift from her dad. Arnold had never known anyone with money. Or had a peer with a car.

By Friday of the first week, she had taken him home to show him off. He immediately made two other conquests: Francine, who, if she were only twenty years younger . . ., and Chris, who, if he were only four years older. . . . After some initial heart palpitations, both of them settled into their roles as adoring potential in-law and aspiring little brother. For all three Hoffmanns, Arnold Hitler was certainly “a catch.”

It was the first free Friday night, since the football and holiday seasons had ended and the crush of spring-term assignments had yet to begin. So he stayed late. Chris retired at 10:30; Mom went to her room shortly thereafter (with a wink of her eye and intrigue in her heart), leaving Juliet alone on the couch with her Romeo. After enough time to ensure the finality of all exits, what did they do? They talked. Quietly. They talked about the season, about his occasional appearances in games, his passing record, what it all might mean for his role next year as a senior. They talked about The Last Word and its impact on the school. She traced out her attraction to him, her hesitancy and fear of rejection, her decision to woo Mr. Words via words alone, her researches to discover quotations that might interest him, her New Year’s resolution to materialize, come what may. He said he was happy she had. And with that, she took his head in her hands.

“Close your eyes,” she said.

“Why?”

“Just close them.”

So he did.

She placed her open lips over his left eye and blew ever so gently, rhythmically bathing his lid in warm, moist air, largo sensuoso. He liked it, and smiled. Then, on to the right eye.

“What are you doing?” he murmured.

“Shhhh,” she answered.

Back to the left. She breathed on his lid three times, then began to stroke it methodically with her tongue, tracing the contours of the globe underneath, probing the undersurface of the orbit, caressing the space between eye and nose. His lachrymal duct wept with tickle and joy. He breathed quickly, somewhat from thrill but also to keep himself from laughing. She finished the left eye, then finished the right. “There,” she said.

“Let me do it to you,” he offered.

“Nope. You’re the guest.”

He just sat there. Now what?

“OK. Time for you to go. I have to get up early for my piano lesson.”

“You play the piano?”

“Since I was eight.”

“You must be good.”

“I’ll play for you. But not now. It’s too late. Next time.”

“So there’ll be a next time?”

“You think I lick everybody’s eyes?”

“No, but . . .”

“Listen, buddy, you’re taken. Hear me?”

“I . . . well . . . yes.”

He stood up and headed obediently to the door.

“Bye,” he offered. “Have a good lesson. Um . . . may I kiss you good-night?”

“No. I’m saving myself for my husband.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. I mean, I hope you don’t think . . .”

“You dope,” she laughed, and flung her arms around his neck in her own efficient version of a tackle. It was a good kiss. His first except for Mom.

“Close the door,” she chided. “You’re letting in the cold.”

Billie Jo Hoffmann was an offer he couldn’t refuse. Arnold pedaled home through the Texas night. For all his vocabulary, the only words on the tape-loop of his consciousness were “Wow!” and “Wow!”

Billie Jo lay in bed, also reckoning where things had gotten to. Her presleep assessment was “first base plus.” Her sweetie’s game of football did not lend itself to sexual metaphors. Even the cheerleading Rebelettes, Billie Jo’s scorned and hated rivals, charted their progress to heaven (or hell) in baseball language. “Getting to first” meant kissing. The “plus” in Billie Jo’s assessment applied to kissing eyelids, a technique her Dallas ex had taught her that didn’t figure in the usual calculation. It was the first time she, herself, had been the kisser. “Getting to second”—that would surely come—involved a hand, Arnold’s hand—once burned, a hand feeling, touching, being allowed in under her clothing, but not below the belt. “Third base”? Well, that actually included private parts, his blind, and likely awkward, exploration of hers, perhaps, who knows, even hers of his. Third base with a long and daring lead toward the plate occurred out of clothing, or somewhat out of clothing, and brought in mouths, mouths and tongues on private parts. This might or might not happen.

Their relationship was not by any means just about sex. It was a lot about sex, but not entirely. One night (after getting to third base plus), she lay with her head in his lap. Mom was in Dallas for the night, and Chris had been sleeping soundly for two hours. His own parents had grudgingly become open to his staying out late, so he was feeling relaxed.

“Want to hear the story of my life?” she asked out of nowhere.

“I thought I’d heard it.”

“No. The story of my real life, not my real life.” Her enunciation made all this clear.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Well, once upon a time there was a woman who lost a pearl in the ocean, and started scooping up the water, one cup after another. A sea-sprite saw the tiny eddies she was raising and swam over to her and said, ‘When will you stop?’ The woman said, ‘When I’ve scooped all the water from the sea and found my pearl on the bottom.’ The sea-sprite was so moved she retrieved the pearl and brought it to the woman with thanks.”

There was a long, late-night silence.

“That’s your real story?”

“Yes. You’ll see.”

“Which are you, the woman or the sea-sprite?”

“Which do you think?”

“Both.”

“Smarty-pants. You’ll get into Harvard for sure.”

Maybe this woman with her head on his lap was actually the pearl.

“My grandfather tells me stories,” he said.

“You never told me about him.”

“Grandpa Jacobo. He lives in Italy.”

“You travel to Italy?”

“Unh-uh.”

“He writes you?”

“Not really.”

“Then how does he tell you stories?”

“Through my knee.”

“What?”

“Through my left knee. Here, move your head over. Put your ear over here, over my scar. Press hard. I’ll ring him up.”

Arnold tapped three times on his kneecap and three more times on the top of Billie Jo’s skull.

“OK, go ahead. Avanti.”

A pause.

“Can you hear him?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s in there? You can hear him?” said Arnold, more surprised than she.

“Yeah. He has an accent.”

“He does. It’s true. What’s he saying?”

He waited in reality-warp.

“He’s talking about the ‘Talmud.’ What’s that?”

“A Jewish book. He’s Jewish. How did you know he talks about the Talmud?”

“Cause he’s talking about it now, dummy. He says the Talmud loves silence more than anything in the world.”

“He’s saying that?”

“Yeah.”

This, all in whispers. Silence. Darkness.

“That’s it. He hung up or something.” She sat up. “You know, I agree. You know how you always want me to talk when we have sex and I can’t—don’t want to? Like that. Silence is golden.”

“You’re putting me on. You didn’t hear Jacobo in my knee. You just want me to shut up when we make love.”

“I did too hear him. That’s what he said. How’d I know he had an accent? How’d I know he was Jewish?”

“I told you.”

“How’d I know about what do you call it, the Talmud? I never even heard of it before.”

“Tell me another.”

She sprang up from the couch.

“You don’t believe me?”

“Shh. You’ll wake Chris.”

More quietly: “You don’t believe me?”

He had never seen her angry; he was confused.

“No, I believe you. Come back.”

And after a moment, she did.

When she had known him long enough, she played him the first movement of Beethoven Op. 28. If he hadn’t been in love with her before, he was, by the tenth measure, helplessly, irreversibly ensnared. The pulsing low bass stopped his breath as he stared, enchanted, at this being of straight spine and closed eyes while the long, lovely chordal melody spun out its tension and release. That those hands, those very hands that had held—his penis!—that those hands could now call forth another such mass of beauty . . . He wanted to have those hands, to possess them, to possess the possessor of those hands. Her head lifted at the first cadence, and his eyes discovered, as if for the first time, the loveliness of her neck, the supple bridge between her mysterious heart and perspicacious brain, the tunnel for nerves that fed those hands, the miraculous electrochemistry of her! At the second theme, a second miracle, this time of emergence. He watched her hands again, amazed. He watched them moving back and forth, rocking, thumb to pinky, sagitally, symmetrically around her long third fingers. It was the kind of hand motion one might associate with the octave tremolos of old, out-of-tune pianos accompanying silent films. Yet what emerged was not some rinky-dink whorehouse tune but an inner melody of such beauty, a melody so embedded in its harmonies as to be beyond all accompaniment: It was melody and harmony at once, a fusion of functions out of reach of bodies, of physical human bodies, but somehow accomplished in this sea of sounds. And those hands—her hands!—were bringing this miracle forth, a miracle upon a miracle—that mere matter—molecules of flesh and wood and steel—could bring to birth such infinity. Three miracles happening there, right in front of him. All this and her breasts, too, there under her shirt, suspended above the field of play, waiting, hoping perhaps, for his caressing hands, bony visitors from another world, admittedly, but also a connection between worlds. As her hands were to the music, so were his to her breasts, and through them to her soul and the soul-ineffable sound. The great pain of the great joy: it was more than his being could bear. He had to withdraw.

“Isn’t that nice?” she said when she had finished.

“Yeah.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you like me?”

“Yes. I love you.”

“I thought you’d never say it.”

Billie Jo was thus Arnold’s gateway and guide to the world of Art, twenty minutes north. Dallas, for Arnold, had hitherto meant one thing: the Cotton Bowl on New Year’s Day. Now it came to mean the symphony at Meyerson Hall, the Theater Center, the Shakespeare Festival at Grand Park, and the theatrical experiments at Southern Methodist University. And she paid. Or rather, he was the frequent replacement for missing members of the family subscriptions. But his favorite venue was, coincidentally, the place they went to sans famille, an art movie house, happily located at Inwood Road and Lovers Lane, across from the SMU campus.

And lovers they were, though technically virgins, lovers of each other and of the amazing tour they had booked together: from concert to film to play to film to reading to film to museum to film, a rondo in which film was the fundamental; never were two people better served by the Inwood.

Arnold saw his first foreign film in February of 1966. It was an eye-opener of such force and brilliance as to divide his life—before and after The Seventh Seal. Until that time, his movie fare had consisted of Saturday matinees at the Farr Best Theater on Broad Street, with noisy white kids downstairs and noisy black kids up in the balcony. He had been two or three times at night with his parents: the noise level was lower, but the films were the same—mostly Westerns and grade-B unmemorables with the occasional Marty or Ben Hur.

But The Seventh Seal was something else entirely. It unveiled a whole new way of seizing the world, the way of images that spoke more than they said. The knight, Antonius Block, lay on a gray beach at the edge of a gray sea. But somehow—magically, within five seconds—it was clear that this beach was not just a beach, the beach at Joe Pool Lake, a Beach Boys beach, a Debbie Reynolds beach, but something vast and mysterious and threatening. “Who are you?” asks the knight. “I am Death,” says the man.

“I am Death.” In the hundreds of movies he had seen, in the thousands of cartoons and news broadcasts and TV shows, Arnold had never heard anyone say, “I am Death.” Six words, “Who are you?” “I am Death,” and the so-called real world forever after dissolved to background. The old saga rose up in Arnold’s Texas world, an ancient structure of wood and flesh and iron and stone, of wind and wave and light and shadow, to speak of our true condition, ominous and loveless, no matter that his hand was in her lap, and warm. This was it.

But it was not the opening of The Seventh Seal that most moved him, though it was those initial moments that set him up to be hyper-present throughout. It was not the gorgeous and frightening end, the silhouetted dance of death of people he had grown to love. It was the burning of the witch that stayed most painfully with him, lodged in his throat and chest for years, the gamin on the pyre, her wide eyes filled with smoke, seeing.

For Arnold there was no riding away from this horrifying scene. In her own pain, Billie Jo squeezed his hand, but she found it limp, as powerless to help as those of squire or knight. Arnold knew only that he loved the witch more than he loved Billie Jo, whose hand lay in his, more even than he loved Mia, the juggler’s wife, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the first woman with whom he had been unfaithful—only forty minutes before.

If Billie Jo was Arnold’s gateway to the world of Art, Arnold was hers to the world of politics. Not that he was any expert. But he had been baptized at school with the politics of hate, confirmed at ten with the poisoned policy toward Cuba, and bar mitzvahed at thirteen by vultures coming home to roost on Dealy Plaza. She, on the other hand, had been so protected by wealthy parents that her naïveté was comical. Arnold realized the extent of her ignorance during an Inwood screening of Pabst’s Der letzte Akt, a recreation of the final days of Hitler. During the first ten minutes of the film, Billie Jo leaned over to him three times to whisper, “Is that Hitler?” Though he whispered back, “No, not yet,” he was astounded, and then astounded again, and then again that she didn’t know what that Hitler looked like. When he appeared on the screen, he poked her.

“That’s him.”

“Ah,” she said.

When he read that Alabama governor George Wallace was to give a speech in Dallas, he suggested they go. Billie Jo had heard of Wallace, knew he had tried to block black students from entering the University of Alabama some years before and was running his wife as candidate for governor to replace him. She was game to go. They arrived at the VFW Hall ten minutes late, as the governor of Alabama was intoning a litany of crime in the streets, of courts coddling criminals. He assailed the pinkos undermining U.S. efforts in Vietnam, and the attack on property rights and free enterprise. He zeroed in on the constitutional primacy of states’ rights.

“I have never,” he insisted, “I have never made a racist speech in my life. I mean I never talked against niggras as people. I got nothing against niggras. Southern folks had the most practical approach ever devised for this race business. What good are equal rights if it gets folks killed and ruins everything? Why, you’re safer in the worst part of Montgomery than on the New York City subway. We got less integration but more mingling, and more law and order. And what most folks of all races want is law and order.”

“Thas what we want, George!”

“You know, people keep tryin to polish me up. Course I talk like we all do down South. You know—ain’t got no, he don’t, and all that—I know better, but it’s just comfortable. So I went up and was on television with Martin Luther King, and I talked like I always do, and there he was with that grammar and those big words. And they quoted me in the paper the next day to make it look like I don’t know anything, and then they quote a fellow like that that don’t even know the origins of the English language. . . .”

And so on. Billie Jo found it fascinating, better than Shakespeare, not as good as some films but better than most, with the unmatchable immediacy of a live event steaming in real passion. On the drive home, she was quiet.

“So?” prodded her teacher.

“So let’s stop eating meat.”

“What?”

“How can any sensitive person accept that in order to feed ourselves we should kill all those animals, especially when the earth gives us so many different treasures from plants?”

“What has that got to do with tonight?”

“You want to?”

“No. I like meat. I need it to play football.”

More silence.

“Arnold, could you ever imagine forcing a woman to do something sexually she doesn’t want to do?”

“No, of course not. What’s wrong with you?”

“You wouldn’t ever rape me.”

She took his glare for a response.

“Do you like the way I look?”

“I love the way you look.”

A mile of silence.

“Do you like the way I look because you are socially conditioned? I mean what if I were fat and ugly? Would you still like me?”

“Sure. You’re likeble. I’m not just interested in . . .”

“Would you like the way I look? If I were fat and ugly?”

They arrived home before this aporia could propagate. She wouldn’t kiss him good-night at her door—“I’m tired, and I just want to go to sleep”—the unpredictable response to a loss of political virginity.

But George Wallace was not enough to break them up. She called the next morning, Saturday, chipper as usual.

“You get the Best Cheap Date of the Year Award for last night. Please report to my house at 7 tonight for the presentation. I’m off to piano lesson. Bye.”

Mom was in Dallas, and Chris was at a birthday party and would be delivered home at 9. It was time for a treatment with some special “anthroposophical” massage oil she had bought in a head shop in the city.

“What did I do to deserve this?” her boyfriend asked.

“You don’t deserve it. It’s a gift of grace. Just shut up, take off your shirt, and lie down.”

“Where?”

“On my bed, silly. Where else would you like to lie down? On mom’s bed?”

“No, I . . .”

She warmed the oil between her palms.

“Are you aware of the healing properties of arnica with rosemary?”

“Not exactly.”

“Quiet. Just relax.”

She spread the oil over his back and moved her hands up and down along his flanks as if she were molding an exquisite form.

“Arnica is the master remedy for shock.”

“But I’m not in shock.”

“You will be.” She reads from a sheet that came with the bottle. “‘The patient is bruised, sore, tender, and resents being touched.’ That’s you. ‘He is in a stupor, but answers correctly when roused.’ That’s you for sure. ‘Nervous, cannot bear pain, whole body oversensitive.’” She runs her hair up his bare back to test.

“‘Useful remedy for sprains, concussion, and aftereffects of blows or falls. Useful for all pains anywhere, rheumatism, or any condition where “as if bruised all over” is a major symptom.’”

By this time Arnold had entered the alpha state of the deeply massaged. Embarrassed at being so passive, he semiroused his mouth from lethargy, a small area of I-can-still-move.

“What’s the rosemary for?”

“Dunno. It doesn’t say. It smells good.”

The work continued, a first-class massage from a deeply intuitive masseuse, with no sexual hanky-pank. Deep under the shroud of musculoskeletal bliss, Arnold felt a mild gnawing.

“I will be what?” he managed.

Poof. The carriage changed back to a pumpkin. Billie Jo whipped off her seat on his buns and threw him a towel.

“You can wipe off the oil.”

“Can’t reach,” he said, easing himself up on stretched arms. “You do me.”

Billie Jo balled up the towel and began to rub.

“Hey, leave me some skin, please.”

“Gotta unstick the stuck blood. Open up the chi. Here, put this on. I bought it for you after my lesson.” She flung him a navy-blue sweatshirt marked “UNIVERSITY OF PARIS.”

“Paris, Texas?” he asked.

“No, silly. Paris, France. It’s from the Sorbonne.”

“And you want me to wear it?”

“If you like it.”

“But I don’t go to the Sorbonne.”

“So? Why do you have to go to the Sorbonne to wear it? Plenty of people wear sweatshirts from places they don’t go to.”

“But it doesn’t make sense. What have I got to do with the Sorbonne?”

“Don’t be so literal.”

“Billie, it makes the words meaningless—empty symbols.”

“You know what the opposite of symbolic is?”

“Unh-uh.”

“Diabolic. Symbol from the Greek sym-ballein, to draw together. Dia-ballein, to tear apart. Mrs. Aron told me that this morning. We were talking about musical symbols.”

“Well, OK. So you want to be diabolic? This sweatshirt is dangerous.”

“Arnold, I got my acceptance from Oberlin today.”

“What?”

“I’m going to Oberlin.”

“You’re going to go to Oberlin?”

“Yup.”

“Not SMU or UT Arlington?”

“Nope.”

“But . . . what will happen to us?”

“Button up your shirt. I can’t stand those marvelous pecs.”

“What . . .”

“Well, I don’t know. We’ll write. We’ll visit. Ever been to Ohio?”

“No. I’ve never been anywhere. You know that.”

“I thought maybe Ohio didn’t qualify as anywhere. It’s a good school, just right for me, I think. Mom and Dad want me to go.”

“I see.”

“Now are you in shock?”

“Kind of.”

“Told you so.”

“What?”

“You would be in shock.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“You know when I first came to Mansfield, the first piece of advice I got was to try to become a cheerleader. Did you know that? You know what Cheryl told me? ‘It’s very revered to be a cheerleader.’ Revered. Just what I always wanted to be. And of course it was crucially important to look a certain way and to have a boyfriend. And the best possible boyfriend was a football player, as in, ‘Wow, you’re going out with a football player!’”

“Is that why you went after me? Why are you telling me this?”

“I went to the first pep rally, and I watched all those girls, so cliquey and obsessed with their appearance, always flicking their hair back. I watched all those arms pumping frantically up and down, and I thought maybe I’d like to be like them. I tried dressing like them, but I wasn’t pretty enough. You know, pretty? And what was worse, I didn’t act silly enough, so they put me in a category—‘stuck-up brain,’ ‘book bitch.’ There was no way I could break into their circle. I tried, I really did. And then the irony was I fell in love with a football player, as in, ‘Wow, you’re going out with a football player.’ I even got outlaw points for robbing the cradle. And you ran interference. You showed me who I really was. And Arnold, I’m not a UT or an SMU co-ed. We both know that, right? I’m going to go to Oberlin. I can study at the Conservatory and still be in a good school, not just a piano player. You can come visit, I promise. I’ll send you money for airfare. And I’ll be home Christmases.”

“When I met you,” Arnold admitted, “I thought it was funny that it was you who gave me those gifts. I mean, I thought it was some cheerleader. A yellow-and-black wastepaper basket filled with popcorn balls? This is the girl who gave me those?”

“Pretty good cover, don’tcha think? I spent forty bucks on all that stuff.”

“You could work for the CIA.”

“They probably recruit at Oberlin.”

“Can we make love?”

“In the next two minutes?”

“No. Before you go away.”

“You mean home plate?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“I told you before: I’m saving myself for my husband.”

“I thought that was a joke.”

“You thought wrong.”

“But we’ve done everything else.”

“The outer boundaries of virginity. Are you my husband?”

“No. Not yet. But . . .” Arnold was wise enough to stop. “I’m applying to Harvard—so if I get in, I wouldn’t be here anyway to date a UT gal.”

It was Billie Jo’s turn to be afraid.

“There are lots of beautiful, smart women in Cambridge.”

“Really?”

“Oh, you . . . aren’t we awful?” She jumped him and sank her teeth into his neck.

The door opened and Chris yelled, “OK, you two, come out with your hands up.”

Arnold and Billie Jo tucked in their shirts and made a not-quite-convincing Entrance of the Innocents into the living room.

After her initial shock, and her frenzy of jealousy, Billie Jo became aggressively enthusiastic about his plans for Harvard. She assured him he would get in—he had the grades, he was poor (for balance) and from Texas (for even more balance)—but just to cinch it, she insisted he try for a Merit Scholarship and even gave him some inside dope from her Phi Beta father, “the very one who insisted she go to public, not private, school”—on how to up his chances with an academically respectable community service project, well documented on his application. She knew the perfect thing for him: a curriculum plan for the study of language. Given who he was, his new English teacher, Carl Gimple, allowed him to go off with six students as an “experimental unit” (hurrah for the Mansfield Integrated School District) to try out his curriculum for the last six weeks of the spring semester. The project got Carl another Merit scholar for his cap. Here, the first page of the addendum to Arnold’s application. The talented hand of his muse and éminence grise is apparent in the background:

A STUDENT-CENTERED CURRICULUM FOR

UNSUCKERING OUR GENERATION

Arnold Hitler, Mansfield High School, Mansfield, Texas May 1–June 15, 1966

Generals, clergymen, advertisers, and the rulers of totalitarian states all have good reasons for disliking the idea of universal education in the rational use of language. To the authoritarian mind such training seems (and rightly seems) profoundly subversive.

Aldous Huxley

INTRODUCTION

This project is part of the war on cancer, in this case against the “carcinominclature of our time” (Thurber), a language in flight from reality and rapidly becoming the servant of nightmare. Nowhere is the pathology more evident than in the language of “Vietnam,” the poor country metamorphosed into a synonym for unspeakable acts: “attrition,” “pacification,” “defoliation,” “body counts,” “progressive-squeeze-and-talk.” Such usage not only pollutes the language but leads the young minds of our generation into a world cut adrift from meaning.

One hundred and thirty years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville wondered whether language deterioration might be inherent in democracy. Does the compulsion to win riches, pleasure, and power in a competitive society make the perversion of meaning and the debasement of language inevitable?

We at Mansfield High School have tried to say NO by introducing and testing a pilot course for high school juniors on “Semantics in Situ, or The Unsuckering of our Generation.”

Then Arnold described his pedagogical strategies—for Poetry and Public Speech, for Language in Education, for an annotated Language Pollution Index—and gave several examples of successful student projects. This was his

CONCLUSION

Applying to real life skills learned in literature study, and concepts learned in biology and ecology, can serve to lead students to the semantic sophistication necessary for “unsuckering.” From our six-week experience the class and I conclude that separate units on semantics will not have a meaningful effect unless they can be incorporated into an entire curriculum. Given the explosion of mass media and the “havoc wrought by verbal artillery on the fortress of reason” (Thurber), semantics must become the core of the high school curriculum if an educated population is to have any hold on democracy.

Arnold got his scholarship and was one of the first accepted at Harvard. But this to skip ahead.