John Barth - Where Three Roads Meet

As to those Mainly Experimental Lapses: "Intense, even impassioned moral/ethical concern, " Alfred Baumann would remind his students when they were reading Plato and Dostoyevsky, "doth not in itself a moral person make." What ardent discussions he and his Lit & Phillers enjoyed, in class and in Briarwood 304, about Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov, about the mischievously appealing Symposium -crasher Alcibiades, about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki… Yet (or And ) in the same spirit wherewith Will especially, as the least experienced of the Freds, calibrated his tolerance for alcohol by exceeding it, and the threesome shared occasional "reefers" back when few of their age and station had ever seen marijuana, much less used it, they found it mildly exciting — and not morally indefensible, they half-seriously opined, for low-budget students in a corporate-capitalist society — to shoplift groceries, say, from large chain supermarkets (though never, they piously agreed, from small independent merchants); to gain sales access to those potential black-ghetto insecticide customers by declaring, "We're the people who've been sent to spray your house," and then, once inside, pitching their product after spraying one room (a single week of this bait-and-switch scam sufficed to turn their moral stomachs; their ever more adventurous shoplifting, however, extended through a full semester and then some, before one of them — Winnie, most likely — asked, "What are we, guys, lunatics or hypocritical common thieves?" Whereupon they acknowledged their makeshift rationalizing and forswore further larceny, but made no attempt at restitution); and to misrepresent to the Baumann/Stark parents, "for their own peace of mind," Al and Winnie's Briarwood cohabitation.

"In short, Reader, we three played with dynamite the way macho schoolboys used to play with lighted firecrackers, seeing who'd hold on longest before tossing them away or losing a finger. And speaking of holding: Has Lou Levy been on hold back there in B Three-oh-four right through this Extended Narrative Digression? Did we even have telephonic holds in 'forty-nine?"

Not a digression, really, but an aside on the subject of self-knowledge acquired via Mainly Experimental Detours from what the trio knew very well to be the Straight and Narrow. Thou shalt not lie, we learned — about why thou'rt knocking on rowhouse doors, for example, with cockroach-spraygun at the ready. Nor shalt thou steal— not even packaged sliced bacon from the A & P…

"Win scored a six-pound turkey breast once, remember? Pretending she was preggers!"

And actually got away with that apt-though-painful-in-retrospect foreshadowing: our last major heist before both conscience and commonsense risk-benefit analysis set in.

"And Thou shalt not cheat— not even under the benignant cover of Louis Levy's soi-disant Preparatory School."

The Cheatery. It has been made clear, Narrator trusts, that the telephone in B 204, "Will's" studio apartment, was listed as Al's, and the one in Al and Winnie's 304 as hers, for reasons of decorum. When therefore Headmaster Levy desired to telephone prospective tutor Wilfred Chase, he rang up the number supplied him by former tutor Alfred Baumann as his own, understanding the pair to be roommates — which number, however, was the one where Al could be reached in fact: B 304's, routinely answered by Winnie. (Dr. and Mrs. Baumann, when phoning their son, soon learned to expect that it would be Wilfred, his official roomie, who took the call and promised to have said son call back "as soon as he comes in." The actual living arrangement must surely have soon been apparent to them, but for decorum's sake they went along with the fiction, as did M/M Stark — and refrained from visiting their children in situ, where the charade would have been immediately obvious.) All which explaineth why — when Will took the instrument from Win and said "Hello," and was asked resonantly "Is this Wilfred Chase?" and, instead of acknowledging that he sometimes asked himself the same question, said merely "Speaking" — the hearty reply was "Glad to catch you at home, Mr. Chase! I'm Louis Levy. Perhaps you've heard of me from Al Baumann?"

"I have, sir." To put it mildly.

"One of our best preceptors ever! We were sorry to lose him to the higher realms of academia, but so it goes! Now we're looking for another grad student of his caliber to fill a part-time preceptorship that just opened up here, and Alfred tells me you're our man!"

"Very kind of him," Will allowed, thinking, Preceptors? Preceptorship? He really calls them that? Not to mention, Grad student? Me? Of Al's caliber?

"You'll be tutoring a handful of high-schoolers in literature and composition, helping them with their essays and other homework assignments. Good kids, some from our private schools and some from the better public ones. Couple of hours every weekday afternoon — say, half past three to half past five? Two bucks an hour. What do you think?"

From across the room Pal Al smiled, as does his ghost when Narrator here recounts this benign surprise, this little joke of a setup. For in Will's scrabbling after part-time work to supplement the Three Freds' weekend wages from the Trivium — the same scrabbling that led him to peddling roach spray, tallying steel-mill timecards, reshelving library books, and various other jobs — he had envied Al the easy two dollars an hour (not bad money in those days) picked up on the side at Lou Levy's establishment one previous semester. "Best way to learn a book or a language is to teach it" was an oft-repeated Baumann article of faith, and while they'd shaken their collective heads at the nature of Levy's downtown-rowhouse "preparatory school" (dedicated mostly to doing rich kids' homework for them, Al had reported), he had found it possible to improve a bit not only the students' reading and writing skills in their native language, but his own appreciation of the poems and essays involved in their homework assignments. And without mentioning the matter to Will, he had recommended him to Levy as his replacement. "Lit and Phil One and Two it ain't," he would say after the phone conversation in progress. "But some of the brats are likable and even teachable, and some of their preceptors learn a bit about teaching and about the texts. So give it a shot: one more item in your résumé."

But to his caller Will confessed, "I'm not quite a graduate student, Mr. Levy. Actually, I'm just finishing my sophomore year." And would demand afterward of Al, "Why'd you tell him I was a grad student?"

Replied the mellifluous former with a knowing chuckle, "We quite understand that those distinctions get blurred in your university's new fast-track program. But okay by Al Baumann is okay by us." And the latter, with shrug of hands and eyebrows, "Graduate shmaduate: You're good enough for Levy's Prep, and you'll learn a thing or two. He needs to be able to tell the parents that their heirs are getting individual attention from VVLU grad students — which in effect they are, 'cause I'll be checking on you through the first week and as needed thereafter."

"I'll buy that," Winnie declared at this point — Will having accepted Levy's invitation to hop the bus down St. Paul Street next day for the mere formality of an interview. "Come to think of it, maybe I'll apply for a PTP myself: Part-Time Preceptorship? For my résumé."

Which she did, cutting half a day's senior-year classes at Goucher on a pleasant mid-April morning to ride the bus with Fred Three down past the marble-stepped, brick- and Formstone-fronted rowhouse corridor to Levy Prep, and introducing herself to that establishment's pudgy, black-curled, florid-faced, dark-suited but bright-necktied proprietor-cum-headmaster as "Al Baumann's part-time gradstudent fiancée — in case you need another preceptor in Literature, History, French, German, or Spanish?"