The Education of Arnold Hitler
Also by Marc Estrin
INSECT DREAMS: THE HALF LIFE OF GREGOR SAMSA
REHEARSING WITH GODS: PHOTOGRAPHS & ESSAYS ON THE BREAD & PUPPET
THEATER (CO-AUTHORED WITH RONALD T. SIMON, PHOTOGRAPHER)
The Education of Arnold Hitler
Marc Estrin
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 Marc Estrin
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Estrin, Marc.
The Education of Arnold Hitler / Marc Estrin.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-932961-03-8 (alk. paper)
1. Young men—Fiction. 2. Cambridge (Mass.)—Fiction. 3. College students—Fiction. 4. Mansfield (Tex.)—Fiction. 5. Chess
players—Fiction. 6. Linguists—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3605.S77E37 2005
813′.6–dc22
2005000740
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Book Design by SH • CV
First Printing
Acknowledgments
With loving thanks to the many early readers, friends and family, especially Dorian Karchmar, Roger Gillim and Delia Robinson, who have inspired and informed the author and his characters, and to Charles Johnson, his undercover football coach.
And with much gratitude to those invaluable writers and reporters who have been to the places I’ve not (and in some cases would have been too chicken to go to), particularly H.G. Bissinger, for his extraordinary book on Texas high school football, Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team and a Dream; Roger Rosenblatt for his moment-to-moment account of the Harvard strike, Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969; Jennifer Toth for her courageous The Mole People; Heidi Matson for her outrageous memoir, Ivy League Stripper, and David Isay and his crew for their marvelous Sound Portrait of the Sunshine Hotel. Marvin Hightower at the Harvard University News and Public Affairs Office was particularly helpful with school details, and Lois Price with the intimacies of embouchure.
Though Lenny Bernstein comes in for some criticism—as he did in real life—I hope his generous ghost will feel my love, respect and admiration. Special thanks, Lenny, for the gift of Gustav Mahler. And Noam Chomsky, for still looking out for us, Argus-eyed as ever.
Greatest thanks of all go to my editor, Fred Ramey, who has led his people out of bondage into an unbridled, faith-based land.
Preface
All invention flows from words. We are their tributaries. They mark us as strongly as we mark them. Words for joy. Words for unhappiness. Words for indifference and hope. Words for things and for men. Words for the universe and words for nothingness.
And behind each of them, life, simple or complex, keeping its eyes on death.
—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins
In his Book of Practical Cats, Old Possum warned that “the naming of cats is a difficult matter” because cats require three levels of name. There are the everyday ones, low-brow to high, from Abby to Zelda, commonly parceled among the tribe. But, Eliot insists, a cat’s uncommon dignity demands better than that—some wildly uncommon name, for that cat alone: “Munkustrap,” “Jellylorum.”
Most important, however, is the cat’s Third Name, a name we can’t presume to give, and one that we’ll never know. When a cat lies eyes closed, “in profound meditation,” Eliot would have us understand that she is “engaged in a rapt contemplation” of her ineffable, “deep and inscrutable singular Name.”
We humans, too, have our common names—Marc and Donna, Mario and Hans. We may even have uncommon names: I well remember finding “Hopalong Abramowitz” in the Manhattan phonebook in the ’40s. Or we may be known by uncommon attributes, such as Edna (“the Brain”) Rawson, whom we will meet below.
But our Third Names, ah, how many of us know them? Do we know ourselves? I would submit that the goal of all education is—precisely—learning one’s Third Name.
And what would education be for someone whose second name was—Hitler? What graduation might be his? What commencement songs might be sung?
| Gaudeamus igitur | Let us rejoice therefore |
| Juvenes dum sumus | While we are young. |
| Post jucundum juventutem | After a pleasant youth |
| Post molestam senectutem | After a troublesome old age |
| Nos habebit humus. | The earth will have us. |
One
. . . because there is perhaps a song tied to childhood, which, in the bloodiest hours, can all alone defy misery and death.
Edmond Jabès, Songs for the Ogre’s Feast
Arnold’s earliest detailed memory is of being held above a crowd by his father—hard thumbs digging into his armpits—to see the cross lying there, burning on the high school lawn. It leaped and danced like huge candles at a party, just for him. In later life, he could call up the scene, fresh as ever, just by pressing his thumbs hard under his arms.
It was Thursday, August 30th, 1956. George and Anna had taken him to register for first grade, the registration to be held this year for the first time in the Mansfield High main building. But the ordeal was more difficult than they’d expected. What was going on? Where the hell were they supposed to park? Why didn’t they know this was happening?
There wasn’t a parking place up or down Broad Street within four blocks of the entrance, and citizens, some with signs, were streaming toward the school. George and Anna parked several blocks away. “What’s up?” they asked Charlie Trumbull, who was passing them hurriedly on the right.
“Three niggers think they’re gonna register this mornin,” he said, and continued his puffing trot toward the action.
“Three niggers,” Arnold said.
“Don’t say ‘nigger,’” his mother told him.
“Nigger, nigger, nigger,” Arnold said to himself.
The broad front lawn of Mansfield High was jammed with men, women, and children—all white—all milling around. There were reporters, there were cameras, there were sound-trucks. But there was little tension—at the moment it seemed more like a chance to visit neighbors, a Fourth of July picnic at the end of August. In place of the barbecue, a six-by-ten-foot