“That was a nice little teachable moment,” I say. “Very pastoral.”
Coleman harrumphs. “All I did was ensure that those young men know what the word effete means. I can guarantee you they’ll remember it.”
“Yeah, about that. What’s with calling me effete?”
“You love poetry, I thought of John Keats, ergo effete.”
“Ergo? Keats wasn’t effete. The man wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language while he was dying of tuberculosis, and he only lived to be twenty-five. Ergo, Keats was a badass.”
Coleman shakes his head, scowling, but I know I’ve pleased him. He appreciates wit and enjoys locking horns in argument. The people who are frightened of him—and there are more than a few—don’t realize how much of Coleman’s behavior is an act. The man uses bluster as a way to engage with the world because, at heart, he doubts both the world and himself and longs for assurance that all will be well, which perhaps explains why he is a priest. I have learned that such assurance is hard to find, and harder to keep.
“I got coffee,” Coleman says as we walk down the hall toward his classroom. “Not the swill in the lounge, the real stuff.”
“What, you import it from Colombia?” I say. “Grind it by hand?”
“It’s Starbucks in a French press, as you know very well.”
In Coleman’s classroom, Betsy Bales is sitting at Coleman’s desk, typing on her laptop. She gets to her feet as we enter, all five foot two of her. Her short height accentuates how enormously pregnant she is. “There you are,” she says, brushing her blonde hair off her forehead.
“Here I am,” I say.
Betsy quirks an eyebrow. “I was talking about Father Coleman,” she says.
Coleman frowns. “You just want coffee,” he says.
Betsy lays a hand on her belly, which is roughly the size of a pumpkin, and gravely tells him, “Only your coffee. And just half a cup.”
Coleman grumbles but moves to a table at the back of the room, where he has a large French-press coffeemaker. Betsy follows him, giving me a smile over her shoulder.
Coleman pushes down the plunger on his already-steeping French press, then pours Betsy a chipped mug of coffee, another for me, and a third for himself. He holds up his mug. “Onward and upward,” he says, and we clink our mugs and sip. Coleman pauses and sighs contentedly. I look at Betsy and roll my eyes, causing her to stifle a giggle.
Betsy, who teaches European history, has been team teaching with me this year under Coleman’s guidance as part of a new Humanities course, combining English and history. At the end of last spring, Betsy found out she was pregnant. She taught all fall, her body slowly growing until she resembled the world’s most adorable Weeble, but now she is supposed to go on maternity leave this week. However, her long-term sub, a retired teacher who’s been scheduled since last October, emailed last week to say her husband had—honest to God—won a cool million playing the lottery and they were moving to California immediately. Now we are scrambling to find someone before Betsy gives birth in the classroom.
“So,” Coleman says, “what are you kids teaching today?”
“Ethan’s wrapping up Macbeth,” Betsy says, taking a sip. She sighs, supremely content with her coffee.
“ ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ ” Coleman says, waggling his free hand as if conjuring something. Nodding toward me, he says to Betsy, “How is he?”
Betsy looks at me over her mug, considering.
“Brilliant,” I say. “The word you’re looking for is brilliant.”
“Not bad,” she says.
Coleman grins.
Indignant, I say, “You’ve been teaching with me for more than a semester now, and the best you can say is I’m ‘not bad’?”
“I’ve seen worse,” Betsy says.
“Getting Mark Mitchell engaged in class conversation is a lot better than not bad.” I insist.
“That’s funny,” Betsy says. “I never have trouble getting Mark to talk in class.”
“That’s because he loves you,” I say.
Betsy dismisses this with a wave of her hand. “You just need to know how to engage them, get them to do what you want.”
“I’m a teacher, not a psychologist.”
Betsy frowns in mock puzzlement. “There’s a difference?”
Coleman noisily sips his coffee. “This is cute and everything,” he says, “but I was actually asking because I’m going to need your observation notes before you go on maternity leave.”
“About that,” Betsy says. “Any luck finding a sub yet?”
Coleman’s phone makes a loud ding, interrupting whatever response he’s about to make, and with an irritated grunt he pulls it out of his pocket and glances at his screen. “Speak of the devil,” he says. “Got a teacher interested in a long-term sub position who just showed up at the front desk.”
“Please, Baby Jesus,” Betsy says.
The bell in the hallway chimes, signaling five minutes before class starts.
“I’ll check on the sub and fill you in later,” Coleman says. He motions us out with his coffee mug. “Go on, go mold young minds.”
“More like scrape the mold off of them,” I say. “I’ll bring your mug back later.” I go to the door and hold it open. “Come on, young Jedi.”
Betsy picks up her workbag. “Whatever, Yoda,” she says.
* * *
THE WHITEBOARD AT the front of my classroom has the words EVIL, TEMPTATION, and DISRUPTIVE written in red marker. I circle EVIL and then draw lines from it to each of the other two words. This is what my student Sarah Solomon has dubbed the Trinity of Terror. I turn to face my AP English students, who are all seated in a half circle before me in their school uniforms: white button-down shirts, gray flannels for the boys, plaid skirts for the girls. Their laptops are open on their desks, their copies of Macbeth balanced on their knees. “So,” I ask, “what’s Shakespeare saying about evil and Macbeth?”
Mark Mitchell stirs, his moon face rimmed by blue-black stubble. “He likes it. Being evil.”
Sarah Solomon squints behind her cat-eye glasses. “Does he?” she asks. “He freaks out after he murders the king, he keeps getting frustrated by the witches—”
“The man’s complicated,” Mark says.
I tap the whiteboard under the word TEMPTATION. “So what tempts him?”
A pause as my students reorient themselves to the class discussion. Then Mark shrugs. “He wants power and his wife’s a psycho.”
I shake my head. “True, but that’s not enough.” I start pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard. “He’s not some greedy pushover who gets bullied by his wife. He wouldn’t be a compelling character if he were. It’s not just ambition. Macbeth knows he’s doing something wrong. He murders the king of Scotland in his own home, then frames the king’s sons for it and takes the throne. He sends murderers to kill his best friend and his friend’s son. He has Macduff’s entire family slaughtered. He ends up literally alone in his castle at the end, no friends, his wife dead, facing Macduff. He never convinces himself that anything he does is the right thing to do. He knows it’s wrong, the entire time. So why does he do it?”