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back of the wrist and said, ‘I wouldn’t bother with them. I had a look at one of them – one of the teachers brought it in, for show, you know. It looked sad stuff to me. He was much more amusing in life, but then, most people are.’
    When I walked in Heinz’s office, he called out, ‘Ah, the famous Markovits.’ Whenever old students came to visit him, this is what he cried: ‘Ah, the famous so-and-so.’ He had taken me under his wing for the nine months I taught at Horatio Alger. I had been warned by other teachers that he liked to play the father-figure, but I didn’t stay long enough for any strain to develop. Still, it disappointed me mildly to be greeted with the stock enthusiasm he showed to everyone else. People who play the father-figure usually find replacements for the young men who leave them behind. Also, in my case he might have meant a dig about the way I had given up an honorable profession to make a name for myself.
    He was a short, round-shouldered man in his early sixties, with a short white beard that covered his cheeks and the loose skin of his neck. I should add, it was one of his jokes that we were distantly related, through a cousin on his side and a married aunt on mine, who had roots in the small close-knit community of Pittsburgh Jews.
    â€˜Look at you,’ I said to him. ‘You’ve got a fish tank.’ Fish tank, mahogany shelves, a new Persian rug. The chair he sat in rotated effortlessly between the two wings of an L-shaped desk. Which had a view, across it, of the baseball field – itself brand new and bright with fresh chalk and turf.
    â€˜It’s what they give you when you reach higher office.’
    â€˜To see if you can keep something alive?’ And so on. This is how we talked.
    â€˜Listen,’ he said at last, ‘I got a class to teach. Why don’t you come along and we can get lunch after.’
    I followed him into the hallway, suddenly filled with students (the noise of them like the noise of ugly birds). The school board didn’t believe in bells; it was one of the illusions of the place that this traffic was voluntary. At the beginning of class, he introduced me as ‘the famous writer,’ but mostly what I felt, as I leaned my head against the back wall, was sixteen years old. For the next forty minutes I sat in a gray plastic chair beside an opened window and listened to a discussion of Bartleby the Scrivener . Heinz was a good teacher; he had the gift of reviving at will his passion for a familiar book. Teaching is like marriage, he once said to me. ‘After thirty years of Shakespeare you got to figure it takes a certain effort of the memory to get it up.’
    Outside I could see the kids with early lunch finding a spot at the edge of the baseball field to sit and eat – the regents were particular about the diamond. And I remembered another conversation I had had with Heinz about marriage. He rarely joined us for a beer at Dorney and Malone’s. At the time he was head of the English department; maybe he liked to keep a certain distance. But shortly before the end of the spring term, he asked me between classes if the young guns still liked to hit the bars on Friday afternoons because he wouldn’t mind tagging along. I said sure; in the end, nobody came and it was just the two of us, which probably suited him.
    There was something on his mind. A son from his first marriage was graduating (cum laude) from Rutgers in a few weeks’ time, and his ex-wife was making difficulties about the weekend arrangements. But he didn’t want to talk about these disagreements, which were equally petty and painful, and more boring than anything else. He never thought when he was young that he would invest so much of his energy and intelligence on administrative detail. Not only at work but at home. It should be clear by now that I spent most of the afternoon on the listening end of this