Years later, I stood again in front of the lions, hands in my pockets as I looked up at them, one defiant, the other coldly reserved. My car—a red Porsche Boxster, my last personal asset of any value—sat parked before the entrance, its driver’s side door flung open like an aimless wing. I could smell on the air the sharp tang of cow urine, like cider that has turned. The heat lay heavily on me, and my shirt clung to my back. Summers were always like this here, so warm and humid that you felt you would lie down and sleep forever come evening. But summer was ending, and it seemed as if everything—the trees, the fields, the sky itself—was pausing in anticipation, quietly gathering itself for the leap forward into autumn.
I reached out and ran my hand across the snarling lion’s flank. It was rough and surprisingly cool to the touch. My fingers traced the lion’s tail, ran up to its mane. I touched an ear, avoided its smooth, perfect eyes, and paused, my finger barely pressing against the tip of a tooth. The lion did not budge. I removed my hand, took a last look at it and its one-eyed partner, and returned to my car. It was getting late, and Sam Hodges was expecting me.
I drove between the lions and into the trees, winding my way slowly up the drive, and remembered something I’d learned as a student at Blackburne. The school’s founder, Colonel Harold “Harry” Blackburne, had planted these trees, mostly oaks, upon his resignation from the Army of Northern Virginia following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. As I drove, I noticed how pristine the ground was for fifty yards on either side of the road. No virgin wood ever looked like this one, with mown lawns at the feet of the trees. It was a minor detail, but it reminded me of how attentive Blackburne was to appearances.
Returning to a place from your past is unsettling. You expect to find the place altered somehow, different in some essential way. Many alumni who return to Blackburne say that the school hasn’t changed a bit, and they find comfort in this, a constant in the rapidly shifting, twenty-first-century world. Some, however, return to campus and look disturbed, as if searching for something they cannot find. I’d always rolled my eyes when I’d seen older men gaze wistfully at the oak trees on the Lawn or at the empty football field. It had seemed somehow pathetic. But now I understood why they had looked the way they had. The unchanging school had reminded them of how they had changed, and conjured in them sorrow at the loss of intangible things, innocence and youth and time.
I’d lost all three in the nine years since I had graduated, and I’d lost more besides. Money, for one, a lot of it. A girl, too, Michele, a long-legged pouty blonde—a model, of course. She was poised to get her first magazine cover shoot, and I was a debut novelist with a starred review in Publishers Weekly. We careened through New York City like lost partygoers from one of Gatsby’s soirées, occupied with getting reservations at the hottest restaurants and being seen at the newest nightclubs and searching for the perfect designer-casual blazer—all the things that I thought were important in my new life as a Young Urban American Novelist. And after the fancy cocktails and the empty brushes with celebrity and the mounting bills and festering insecurities and the small, petty arguments with Michele that turned us into small, petty people, the one thing I’d had and could depend on—a talent for writing, one that had led to a well-received novel, a big advance for book two, and an even bigger payment for the film rights, which were now languishing in some Hollywood studio office—well, that talent had dried up, gone, vanished. It seemed like the most important things in my life vanished.
Sam Hodges, the academic dean at Blackburne and my former advisor, had called me in New York a month before. I hadn’t spoken to him since graduating. But when I heard him on the phone saying, “Matthias, my boy!” I could see him as if he were standing in my cramped apartment: prematurely white hair, upturned nose, and the beginnings of a potbelly, all combining to make him look like a spry elf who had his eye on the reindeer and sleigh when Santa retired. Many boys, myself among them, had made the mistake of thinking that Mr. Hodges, with his bow tie and suspenders and jolly smile, was some sort of dim, amiable hick. We hadn’t made the same mistake twice.
I couldn’t fathom why Sam Hodges would be calling me. And the reason was a genuine compliment. He told me the school had an unexpected opening in the English department—one teacher had gotten married and was moving to Atlanta, and the man they had hired to replace him had been diagnosed with cancer and had chosen to remain where he was in Milwaukee, leaving Blackburne with a spot to fill less than two months before the start of school. Sam Hodges said he’d read an interview with me in the Blackburne alumni magazine in which I was quoted as saying I would be taking some time off from writing. He asked me, if I was still taking time off, whether I would consider spending some of it teaching for a year at Blackburne.