MAGNUM ITER

I

We were ripe for intimidation
and the most inimitable intimidator
of all was Mister Hatch. He taught
Latin and his classroom was right
next the marble portal inscribed
Huc venite pueri ut viri sitis-
"Come this way, boys, that you may be men."
The road to manhood ran past Mister Hatch.

He was the legend of legends.
To pass his room when Latin I
was getting out--the door bursts open
and fourteen boys of wildly various sizes
various amounts of ankle showing
explode into the corridor
some of them in tears.
There they mill

like survivors of a terrorist bomb,
oblivious to traffic patterns, and to
passersby who haven't shared their
ordeal, comparing desperate notes-
"What did he say the homework was?"
"When do we have to have that memorized?"
"My brother--did my brother make it out?
HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY BROTHER?"

What was so terrifying about him?
He was not a big man.
Refereeing a lacrosse game
he looked a tough enough little guy
all bulbs and wire
but nothing out of Steven King.
Knobby knees and calf muscles, forehead,
but I doubt he weighed one-forty.

But put a sportcoat on him, close
him in that little room with us and he'd
bolt up and start to pace behind us
like a lion from the Serengeti loose
in a stableful of calves tethered
round an oval table unable to turn
their heads never knowing when
and where he might strike.

What was terrifying was his voice. Rumor
had it he'd been gassed in World War I.
In soft registers that voice was like
the whisper of a bullfrog, sometimes hard
to hear--which in itself was menacing--
inevitably, any uncaught word
came back to haunt you, and ask him
to repeat himself? Oh come now.

In loud registers, his voice was
lion's roar, not challenge, but a feral
non-negotiable demand for submission
the assertion of one species' absolute
power of life and death over another.
It didn't trigger adrenalin but
paralysis. In its middle registers--
no, his voice had no middle registers.

Each class was like a Bach organ piece
that started soft, one hand weaving
gentle melody fraught with inevitability
promise that before we're finished here
every key, every pedal, every stop
will have been exploited for maximum
dramatic and emotional effect, that
I am going to put you through

the wringer. Most terrifying of
all was the certainty that if
you had left just one thing undone
he would find you out
there was no place to hide
in that little room there
wasn't enough cannon
fodder it might take almost

all of his allotted fifty
minutes but the undone task would
rise like a bubble to the surface
sit there calling, "Mister Ha-atch"
till he would wheel on you and you
would regret your oversight like
Troy regretted letting in that horse.
Once that door shut and locked us in

with him all that we could ever
be to each other was potential
decoys in this little herd
if he took you tonight
he might not get to me
so what if you were my best friend.
This was the optimum in training
for the corporate world.

I don't remember so much
the content of what he would say
when he caught you out
but it felt like, gently, "Why
don't you know
the present subjunctive of sum
Mr. McCarthy?"
"I don't know sir."

"We've already established that you don't
know I was asking why you don't know."
"I don't know why I don't know, sir."
"Wasn't it the most important
thing in the world last night?"
"Of course it was sir."
Then a little more forcefully,
"Have you ever in your life been asked to do

anything more important than memorize
the present subjunctive of the verb to be?"
"No sir." Then bellowing,
like the Minotaur
thundering toward you
from every direction of the Labyrinth
"THEN HOW COULD YOU NOT HAVE DONE IT?"
"I DON'T KNOW SIR!"

And I was one of the lucky ones.
I didn't have Mr. Hatch till senior year
Latin IV Special. We were quam optimi,
as good as it got. We had learned our chops in
the less surreal classrooms of the Stuckeys,
and the Galbreaths, and the Coffins, and we
knew our stuff or we wouldn't have been there.
And if he treated preps as barbari

for the simple reason they did not know
Latin, he respected us because we did.
Not that we didn't at times disappoint him-
times his outrage was compounded by
knowledge we had come so far, that this
once-great school had fallen on such evil times
that Mr. McCarthy could arrive in this class
without knowing the meaning of vereor-

which means what, Mr. Gates? (wheeling).
"I am terrified, sir." “Correct.”
Did Gates really know?
or had he gotten lucky?
We had Mister Hatch at 5:25,
after sports, at the end of a long day
when we thought we were almost home free.
I remember that room always being dark.

There'd be a lamp on over his desk
and a floor lamp somewhere
but I don't think he ever
turned on the overhead light
and entering that room in the dark
months between October and April
was like entering the lair of a predator
who smelled like floorwax and old books.

But we were the favored sons
and whole classes could pass
without a spark catching his fuse.
Once even this: I was translating
a passage about the Cyclops, and the Latin
had alliteration, so I went for it
in my English, passing up the obvious
"His feet struck the grass," for

the marginally more ambitious "smote the sod,"
and Mr. Hatch said, "You have..."
in that way he had of beginning a phrase
before he had really had time to gather
the entirety of his fragmented voice
and we all froze because we knew that
when he was moved enough to do that
the fasces was about to fall

and he went on
"...the nicest way of coming up
with just the right phrase in translation..."
and we sat there stunned.
I stammered, "Thank you, sir" and risked
a glance across the table at flabbergasted
faces, Barzun, Lenesse, and Marcus
their bodies rigid

their breath still indrawn
nobody knowing what to do with this
totally uncharacteristic lapse
somehow more frightening
than anything he'd ever done before.
It was probably from that moment I was
fated to teach prep school Latin
a few years myself.

II

That fall my mother died
and in adolescent bravado I
promised my father I'd get
Highest Honors for the fall term
something I'd never been able to do.
I worked hard, would have made it
except Mr. Hatch gave me a B-plus
instead of the A-minus I had earned.

I dared approach him and he told me
he'd deducted for some lines of poetry
I'd failed to memorize. I wailed,
"But that was extra credit,"
and he painstakingly explained,
like astronomy to a small child,
"You can't expect extra credit if
there's no deduction if it's not done."

Then, sensing the depth of my disappointment,
he surprised me, offered, "Is there some
reason this grade's important to you?"
But I hadn't come looking for charity
and I said no, left quickly so he wouldn't
know I cried. In March, when my classmates
were deep into their Aeneid papers,
my father died.

Returned to school I tried to
weasel out of the paper, arguing
I couldn't concentrate, I was
worried about things at home,
what would become of my brother?
But Mister Hatch didn't buy it,
so I ended up throwing together
over two all-nighters

a collage of quotes
transcribed from impeccable sources
but too obviously selected
for their extravagant length.
He gave me D-minus, which let me graduate,
but brought me down to C-plus for the year—-
though it did not deny me
third place on the Latin prize exam.

The next few years got ugly fast.
I dropped out of Dartmouth, went
down a labyrinth or two of my own
devising. Maybe someday it will be of
benefit to remember even those things.
I came out the other side and at
twenty-five was back at Dartmouth
taking Latin and writing, finally,

an Aeneid paper good enough for
presentation to the Classics Club.
The central insight of that paper
was supported by my discovery that
in the first six books Aeneas weeps
fourteen times; in the last six, once.
A demonstrative, emotional Phrygian
becomes a stoic, Augustan Roman,

culminating in his Disce puer speech
to his son: "Learn from me, boy, about duty,
about doing the right thing always.
You'll have to learn from someone else
about happiness." Mister Hatch,
retired from Exeter and living in Vermont,
was at the Classics Club that night.
I introduced my paper with the story

of the Exeter D-minus, ending,
"Mister Hatch, this paper is for you.
I apologize for being eight years late."
I had survived, and I had come to
love him. I've always felt that was
the year that I became a man, never quite
known why; having told this story I
suspect that might have been the night.

III

Huc venite pueri ut viri sitis.
What did it mean, really? Never
would we be men unless we came
this way? It frightened me
the first time that I read it,
as though I knew intuitive my way
to manhood would be terrible indeed.
I always preferred the side door

of that building, uninscribed,
unpromising, unthreatening.
But some read that inscription
and declined to enter at all.
Others came, but disappeared along
the way. For some the obstacle
was Mister Hatch's class, to
"Did my brother make it out?"

the answer was No. Yet surely they
all came to manhood too. On different
timetables, by different routes.
If we survive the terrorism of
our very maleness, we arrive.
Sometimes working phonathons
I get a man confides, "I only
stayed at Exeter a month,

but I still like to give something,"
and I feel a special gratitude to him,
but at the same time embarrassment,
as though inadvertently I've raised
some ancient shame.
I want to ask him,
"Was it Mister Hatch?"
I want to tell him, "Yes,

we were a hard proud lot, who
came that way and who survived."
Nobody called you a deserter
but neither did Latin have a phrase
for "conscientious objector."
You took the road less travelled by,
and how much difference, really,
did it make?

Magnum iter is an idiom;
it looks like "great journey,"
but it translates "forced march."
We were on a magnum iter.
Sometimes in the long dark nights
of those marches, we abandoned
our impedimenta, the softnesses
within us that were destined

not to serve us in the coming
battle with barbari who would
have every advantage over us except
virtus, the stuff of manhood. We had to
leave some of our comites to fend for
themselves by roads in enemy territory.
Today when we look back we see only
a great journey and a victory

not a forced march
never the casualties.
But the issue never was
that we be men, it was
the kind of men we should become.
And I want somehow to apologize
for all of us to the man
who left after a month.

And I want to ask if he
by any chance remembers seeing,
back beside the road
he didn't take,
any of my impedimenta,
my brother, or the last
promise I made
to my father.