The Imperfect Teacher

He was the most feared, ruthlessly parodied, and—by some of us—aggrandized teacher in our high school. With his club foot and shriveled left leg (a birth defect? the after-effects of polio?), he'd lurch and sway into the classroom like a wagon with one square wheel, a wildly off-beat metronome. Every high school has a teacher or two like him: brilliant, yet in some way stunted, they terrify and inspire us as students and bewilder us for years after we've left them in front of their blackboards. Why did they settle for initiating hordes of 13 through-17-year-olds into the arcana of literature, physics, world politics? Surely they themselves could have become great writers, physicists, diplomats? And so we imagine for them some taint that won't wash away, some emotional wound that won't heal, some public humiliation from which a high school—with its rules, routines, and dim lights—offers the only hideout. Something grim—something in touch with a persistent belief in the limits of human possibility—kept him in those chalky rooms and echoing halls, dividing his time between declaiming Emerson and sniffing out smokers from the boys rooms. (The antismoking ordinance was repealed, I'm sure to his relief, the year afer I graduated.) It was rumored that he'd tried to commit suicide twice, both times by asphixiating himself with carbon monoxide. Why do I retain an image of his car half-submerged in a wheat field, the garden hose meticulously fed from the exhaust pipe through the right front window? The tremoring engine... Sunlight reflecting off the windshield, the windows opaque... Heat ripples betraying the invisible gas seeping from the car's interior... Is this scene based on historical fact, however third-or forth-hand, or is it a byproduct of my tendency to melodramatize him? Who would choose to kill himself in a wheat field?