Unwelcome Light: a novel

By David Lehner

David Lehner, a private school teacher, has written in Unwelcome Light a powerful, riveting, disturbing prep school novel, to join the company of such novels as John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, Tobias Wolff’s Old School, and Alice Hoffman’s The River King. In each of these novels, including Lehner’s, the closed society of a boarding school is like a city-state where curses can fester. It is appropriate that the unnamed protagonist and narrator of Unwelcome Light is a teacher of classics at an American private boarding school, for this novel is a modern enactment of tragic themes as old as Sophocles. Because of family secrets to which he is not privy, the narrator comes close enough to committing incest (unknowingly and even innocently) to be judged guilty, and to be punished for the sin, cursed to live out his days in anguish. The understated parallel to the Oedipus story is enhanced by the mystery of the narrator's parentage, a nest of secrets that a “chorus-of colleagues know but won't reveal until it's too late. Although the ironies that shape both stories are similar, the parallels between Unwelcome Light and Greek tragedy are not strict or obvious. The novel is packed with dark themes, but it is also driven by modern plot twists and populated by complex secondary characters with psychological problems and secrets of their own. These problems include adultery, mental illness, theft, alcoholism, and various forms of deviant sexuality. In spite of its dark themes, Unwelcome Light is a page-turning, plot-driven novel, intelligent and written with craft and skill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel & Daniel Publishers
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781564747426

Book preview

Waugh

Prologue

Three years ago, my father came north for my uncle’s funeral. After the service, he took me aside and handed me an envelope. Read this, he said. Not now. Later. When you have time.

I put the envelope in my pocket, but when I got home it was gone. My father was always giving me things to read—articles he had clipped, and so on. I didn’t think anything more about it.

Within a year, my father himself was dead. Walking from the grave, my aunt said, Your father really dropped a bombshell, didn’t he?

I didn’t know what she meant.

He told you?

I don’t think so. Told me what?

He gave you a letter, she insisted.

Yes, I suppose. I don’t remember.

My aunt took my arm with gentle urgency. She glanced nervously at the crowd slowly dispersing. Then she turned to me and said, carefully, distinctly, In that letter your father explained that in fact he was not your father.

I asked her how that could be, but she could not, or would not, say anything more. I was over forty years old, and I had only just found out.

1. What to Come

I arrived for my interview an hour early. I parked my car and walked to the library to wait. Strange librarian, new, or she would remember me, nevertheless an extremely old woman, scowling at this unfamiliar guest. A chain dangled from her glasses. One eye looked blank and off kilter. She wouldn’t stop staring at me.

I got up and walked to the men’s room. A cleaning woman came out. Her I did recognize, as she had worked at the school when I was a boy, ancient even back then. She stood in the middle of the passageway enraged at something, muttering to herself and tearing at the threads of her mop.

* * *

My father’s secretary retired a year after he did. Her replacement didn’t know me. She read my name from a book, paused for moment, then asked if I was related to the former Headmaster.

I’m his son, I said.

How nice.

She lifted from her desk a large pair of scissors to snip a small piece of ribbon. She was wrapping a gift—precisely the sort of thing my father’s secretary did for him. Indeed, she had probably wrapped all of my birthday presents.

* * *

The new Headmaster was a large burly man, balding, with pale red hair around his temples and an intense, somewhat cranky expression—so different to the calm imperturbability of my father. After a brief discussion of my qualifications, he broke off impatiently with There’s no question of your being able to do the job. That’s not the issue. I’m just frankly a little surprised that you want to do it. I’m surprised that you want to come back.

Why? I wondered. I could think of no reason. I looked around the office, which I saw still as my father’s only with different pictures on the walls.

I’m sure I’ll be quite happy, I said in reply. After all, it’s something I’m pretty familiar with.

It was meant as a small joke, but he did not smile.

* * *

The school had always been called an incestuous place. Perhaps that was what he was concerned about. It had been an issue in my father’s day. Always hire the best, he used to say. I can’t help it if the best are always our own.

It was true, though, that there were an awful lot of us around. Most of my former teachers were graduates of the school, and those who retired had been replaced by newer graduates, many my former classmates. A bit close and confining one might think, but I didn’t believe it would do any harm.

* * *

I was given a basement apartment in the senior boys’ dorm—a dorm I had once lived in myself.

My study opened onto the rec room and lounge. The door was heavy, backed by acoustic tiles, the kind used for ceilings, but these did not prevent the roar of voices from penetrating into my apartment.

It was check-in time on the first night of term, and, although I was not on duty myself, I wandered into the lounge to look around.

I watched a game of ping-pong, part of a game of pool, looked into the TV room, a dark cave where a dozen or so boys curled up in chairs or sprawled about the floor. I left to check the laundry room, then the small room where the candy and soda machines are kept, then back across the lounge towards my apartment.

He was born here, or something, I heard one of the boys behind me say.

As unobtrusively as possible, I stepped into my apartment, shutting the heavy padded door behind me.

* * *

Harris McNee, my colleague in the classics department, had been one of my teachers when I was at school. He was a young man then, which made us near contemporaries now.

I remembered that he smoked cigars, and when I was unpacking I found a copy of a cigar magazine which I brought to the office we shared and left on his desk. It was gone later that day and when I asked he said, Oh, that was you.

I thought you might like it.

He groaned, resettling himself in the one old leather armchair in the room. Giving a cigar magazine to me, he said, "is like giving a copy of Teen Magazine to a chronic sex offender. I’ve been trying for years to quit—patch, medication, hypnosis, everything."

I’m sorry.

No problem, he said with a smile. I enjoyed it all the same.

* * *

I was scheduled to teach introductory Greek, level two Latin, and the advanced Greek seminar. I started the advanced group with Sophocles. On the second day, a pretty, bright-eyed girl named Natalie asked, Why would Tiresias go to Thebes in the first place? He was all-seeing, right? He must have known nobody would listen.

All I could think to say was, He was led. He didn’t have a choice.

Her expression instantly became sharp, focused, slightly impatient. She continued, So then why did he argue with Oedipus in front of the whole city? He knows he won’t win. What’s the point?

The point? It’s difficult to explain.

Well, she said slowly, what?

I thought for a moment and finally replied, "Sometimes things need to be said, even when they won’t be believed. After all, we mortals are not all-seeing. We have to have things spelled out for us, often many times. And Tiresias, he’s not entirely all-seeing, either. He sees the big things, but he doesn’t see all of the little details. He’s the opposite of us, if you know what I mean."

The other students seemed to accept this all right, but Natalie studied me with her eyes narrowed and her lips pursed shut. Then she said dryly and, I thought, inconsequentially, I’m sure we see things well enough.

* * *

I woke in the middle of the night. Noises coming from the lounge. Walking out my door I found Ben, the dorm head, the dorm head even when I was in school, elbow deep in the trash cans, which lay at the bottom of a long chute that ran from the top floor to the bottom.

You don’t drink Old Milwaukee beer, do you? he asked.

No.

I didn’t think so.

He had arranged on the floor a neat row of six or seven beer cans, two cigarette lighters, an empty box of condoms. I asked what he was doing.

Check the garbage every week, he said. See what the boys are up to.

Oh.

Yeah, he laughed, then more seriously, Keep your eyes open. If you notice anything, even if it’s just a hunch, let me know. I’ll put it in the files.

Files?

Yeah, he laughed again, files. We keep files.

Files on what?

Files on everything. Lots of files.

Really?

Yes.

Why?

Always done it. Learn a lot that way.

How long have you been doing it?

Oh, from long before even you were in the dorm.

So...you have files on me?

Ben laughed once more and said, "Yeah, sure, yeah. We know all about you."

* * *

I was struck by a loud chorus of voices at the lunch table as I sat down. What were they arguing about? I didn’t know. Something in the news, I supposed, some current issue, some further evidence of our decadence and sickness as a civilization. It was always like that. I was asked my opinion.

About what? I said.

About your home state.

What about it?

Haven’t you heard? Don’t you follow the news?

No, I said.

You’re kidding.

No, I said, the news is something I neither watch nor care about.

Karen Whatman, my old history teacher, was particularly stung by this. She said, You don’t try to keep up?

No.

Not at all?

No.

That’s deplorable, she said, and then hung fire for a moment. I could see she was reassembling her thoughts. When finally she spoke she said, That is why, I suppose, your department continues to promote a dead Greco-Roman culture when you might just as well teach a living one, like the Native American.

I had had arguments such as this countless times in graduate school, so, without thinking, I said, No, I don’t teach the Native American culture because it had no system of writing and consequently no philosophy, no literature, no history, no linguistics, no criticism—none, in fact, of any of the things that I find interesting.

I was joking, but her face turned red and her eyes hardened.

* * *

The boys were relaxing in the lounge outside my apartment. I heard the clack of billiard balls, the television blaring, the laughter and the loud talk. It was almost time for check-in. I grabbed my clipboard and pencil and headed out a few minutes early.

I walked around the game room, the TV room, out to the staircase and back. Some boys said, Hello. Most were too involved in what they were doing. A few boys found me to ask if they could check-in early and go to bed. I said yes and they ran off upstairs.

When the room began to clear I noticed a boy who had, apparently, been sitting by himself not talking to anyone. When he thought no one was watching, he slipped quickly though the door into Ben’s apartment. Summoned, I wondered, or seeking help?

Ben, I should point out, was a great bear of a man, enormous in both size and energy. There was a legend that as a student he had been persuaded to join the wrestling team but, in his first match, he threw his opponent so hard that he crushed the poor boy’s rib-cage. Ben, terrified by the destructive harm his tremendous strength might cause, quit the team that day.

It occurred to me then, watching that young man flee to his office, that Ben’s role for well over thirty years had been defined by precisely the same combination of awesome strength tempered by gentle compassion, which translated itself into father figure and policeman, confessor and interrogator, huge, happy teddy bear and even great, horrible monster, when need be. How many generations of young men, I wondered, felt closer to him than they did to their own real fathers? They came to him with their problems. They trusted his judgment. They followed his advice.

And might not I, too, I thought, be one of them? My father put me in the dorms when I was just thirteen years old. He