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fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil.

I’ve had a hard week at Bishop Strachan. Every fall, I start out demanding too much of my students; then I become unreasonably disappointed in them—and in myself. I have been too sarcastic with them. And my new colleague—Ms. Eleanor Pribst—truly moves me to do evil!

This week I was reading my Grade 10 girls a ghost story by Robertson Davies—“The Ghost Who Vanished by Degrees.” In the middle of the story, which I adore, I began to think: What do Grade 10 girls know about graduate students or Ph.D. theses or the kind of academic posturing that Mr. Davies makes such great, good fun of? The students looked sleepy-headed to me; they were paying, at best, faltering attention. I felt cross with them, and therefore I read badly, not doing the story justice; then I felt cross with myself for choosing this particular story and not considering the age and inexperience of my audience. God, what a situation!

It is in this story where Davies says that “the wit of a graduate student is like champagne—Canadian champagne …” That’s absolutely priceless, as Grandmother used to say; I think I’ll try that one on Eleanor Pribst the next time she tries to be witty with me! I think I’ll stick the stump of my right index finger into the right nostril of my nose—thereby giving her the impression that I have managed to insert the first two joints of my finger so far into my nose that the tip must be lodged between my eyes; thus catching her attention, I’m sure, I will then deliver to her that priceless line about the wit of graduate students.

In Grace Church on-the-Hill, I bowed my head and tried to let my anger go. There is no way to be more alone in church than to linger there, after a Sunday service.

This week I was haranguing my Canadian Literature students on the subject of “bold beginnings.” I said that if the books I asked them to read began half as lazily as their papers on Timothy Findley’s Famous Last Words, they would never have managed to plow through a single one of them! I used Mr. Findley’s novel as an example of what I meant by a bold beginning—that shocking scene when the father takes his twelve-year-old son up on the roof of the Arlington Hotel to show him the view of Boston and Cambridge and Harvard and the Charles, and then leaps fifteen stories to his death in front of his son; imagine that. That ranks right up there with the opening chapter to The Mayor of Casterbridge, wherein Michael Henchard gets so drunk that he loses his wife and daughter in a bet; imagine that! Hardy knew what he was doing; he always knew.

What did it mean, I asked my sloppy students, that their papers generally “began” after four or five pages of wandering around in a soup of ideas for beginnings? If it took them four or five pages to find the right beginning, didn’t they think they should consider revising their papers and beginning them on page four or five?

Oh, young people, young people, young people—where is your taste for wit? I weep to teach Trollope to these BSS girls; I care less that they appear to weep because they’re forced to read him. I especially worship the pleasures of Barchester Towers; but it is pearls before swine to teach Trollope to this television generation of girls! Their hips, their heads, and even their hearts are moved by those relentlessly mindless rock videos; yet the opening of Chapter IV does not extract from them even so much as a titter.

“Of the Rev. Mr. Slope’s parentage I am not able to say much. I have heard it asserted that he is lineally descended from the eminent physician who assisted at the birth of Mr. T. Shandy and that in early years he added an ‘e’ to his name, for the sake of euphony, as other great men have done before him.”

Not even a titter! But how their hearts thump and patter, how their hips jolt this way and that, how their heads loll and nod—and their eyes roll inward, completely disappearing into their untrained little skulls—just to hear Hester the Molester; not to mention see the disjointed nonsense that accompanies the sound track of her most recent rock video!

You can understand why I needed to sit by myself in Grace Church on-the-Hill.

This week I was reading “The Moons of Jupiter”—that marvelous short story by Alice Munro—to my Grade 13 Can Lit students, as the abrasive Ms. Pribst would say. I was a touch anxious about reading the story, because one of my students—Yvonne Hewlett—was in a situation all too similar to the narrator’s situation in that story: her father was in the hospital, about to undergo a ticklish heart surgery. I didn’t remember what was happening to Yvonne Hewlett’s father until I’d already begun to read “The Moons of Jupiter” to the class; it was too late to stop, or change the story as I went along. Besides: it is by no means a brutal story—it is warm, if not exactly reassuring to the children of heart patients. Anyway, what could I do? Yvonne Hewlett had missed a week of classes just recently when her father suffered a heart attack; she looked tense and drained as I read the Munro story—she had looked tense and drained, naturally, from the opening line: “I found my father in the heart wing …”

How could I have been so thoughtless? I was thinking. I wanted to interrupt the story and tell Yvonne Hewlett that everything was going to turn out just fine—although I had no right to make any such promise to her, especially not about her poor father. God, what a situation! Suddenly I felt like my father—I am my sorry father’s sorry son, I thought. Then I regretted the evil I did to him; actually, it turned out all right in the end—it turned out that I did him a favor. But I did not intend what I did to him as any favor.

When I left him alone in the vestry office, pondering what he would find to say at Owen Meany’s funeral, I took the baseball with me. When I went to see Dan Needham, I left the baseball in the glove compartment of my car. I was so angry, I didn’t know what I was going to do—beginning with: tell Dan, or not tell him?

That was when I asked Dan Needham—since he had no apparent religious faith—why he had insisted that my mother and I change churches, that we leave the Congregational Church and become Episcopalians!

“What do you mean?” Dan asked me. “That was your idea!”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Your mother told me that all your friends were in the Episcopal Church—namely, Owen,” Dan said. “Your mother told me that you asked her if you could change churches so that you could attend Sunday school with your friends. You didn’t have any friends in the Congregational Church, she said.”

“Mother said that?” I asked him. “She told me that both of us should become Episcopalians so that we’d belong to the same church as you—because you were an Episcopalian.”

“I’m a Presbyterian,” Dan said “—not that it matters.”

“So she lied to us,” I said to Dan; after a while, he shrugged.

“How old were you at the time?” Dan asked me. “Were you eight or nine or ten? Maybe you haven’t remembered all the circumstances correctly.”

I thought for a while, not looking at him. Then I said: “You were engaged to her for a long time—before you got married. It was about four years—as I recall.”

“Yes, about four years—that’s correct,” Dan said warily.

“Why did you wait so long to get married?” I asked him. “You both knew you loved each other—didn’t you?”

Dan looked at the bookshelves on the concealed door leading to the secret passageway.

“Your father …” he began; then he stopped. “Your father wanted her to wait,” Dan said.

“Why?” I asked Dan.

“To be sure—to be sure about me,” Dan said.

“What business was it of his?” I cried.