No longer liminal, child

My high school Latin teacher, Dr. Michael Matthew Fiveash, has died. He was diagnosed in June with neuro-endocrine tumors. He died on Thursday. I'd had no idea. I found out from my mother tonight.

I hadn't seen him in two years, since his retirement from Lexington High School. (It was a complicated event. No one except the new superintendent of schools was pleased to see him go.) I would have written to him if I'd known he was ill. He was incredibly important to me. I don't want to say that he was the reason I became a classicist, because I would have taken Latin as soon as it was offered me no matter what, but I came into high school with Spanish as my language and I stuck out Latin I and its painfully repetitious lessons because everyone told me that Latin II–IV with Dr. Fiveash was worth teaching yourself out of the textbook for (which was more or less what you had to do with the first-year Latin teacher) and everyone was right. His classroom was Room 410 in the Greatest Block on Earth, with hubcaps over the blackboard and a poster of the Ministry of Silly Walks on the closet door. The Simpsons were everywhere. I do not remember the origin story of Snappy the rubber alligator, but the brittle Peeps that appeared each spring by the overhead projector were the sacred chickens such as Publius Claudius Pulcher once tossed overboard right before drastically losing the Battle of Drepanum. Other classrooms had whiteboards, but Dr. Fiveash still worked in chalk, eraser, and hypertext stacks projected onto the pull-down screen from an ancient toaster Mac. The random sentence generator was inclined to default to names like Fabio and Madonna and the verbs could have a lot more to do with physical functions than is usually found outside of reading Plautus. There was graffiti from the Carmina Burana in the corner of the blackboard the first time I walked in.

Because beloved teachers gather epithets like Odysseus, he answered to "Doc 5" and "Magister Quinquecineres" as well as the name on his diploma; he was accustomed to call his students victims and varmints, himself the village idiot, and exhort us to do our duty for Zeus and country. There were Twinkie sacrifices at the beginning of class, to see whether the day would be fas or nefas. (The day the gutted Twinkie revealed entrails of shocking Red 40 was nefas without a doubt: there was a pop quiz.) And this is not helping, these are the stories that turn into referring to someone as a real character, even if it's perfectly true that he loved The Simpsons and had an entire shelf of terrible romance novels donated by students over the years because Fabio had posed for the cover. He was my mother's age almost exactly, with thick brown hair and a creased catlike face and a baritone as mellow as a radio announcer's, although he let the Boston in his accent show through now and then, usually in context of threatening to stomp somebody's sorry ass. He had been a student of Albert Lord's at Harvard, meaning that I was taught about Homeric epic and oral tradition as matter-of-factly as third-declension i-stems and poetic elision; we knew ourselves to be in descent from Milman Parry. We got, too, a small current of class rage with our classics, in the middle of affluent Lexington—he had come to Harvard from Boston Latin and was thirty years later still proud that his working-class hard study had stood its ground against the rich kids from prep schools, because it didn't matter how they smiled down at him, he was reading the Iliad in Greek. I read my first Catullus with him. My first Vergil. I didn't read my first Greek with him, because he couldn't create the class for just one student, but I memorized the first five lines of the Odyssey phonetically from seeing him write them out on the board in mythology class. He was easily digressed into comparative linguistics and succession myths, even when we were just reading a redaction of the Argonauts. He loved when his students asked him for more than the lesson plan. I heard the word liminal first from him. And I learned Latin, so that when it came time for me to register for my first semester of classes at Brandeis, I took the requisite language placement exam and tested directly into the junior-and-senior-level complete works of Catullus. The poet had been the last thing I read for Latin IV, anyway: O dulces comitum valete coetus, longe quos simul a domo profectos diversae varie viae reportant.

I don't have to worry that I didn't let him know, at the time, how much he mattered to me. I drew cartoons for him: on my exams, on quizzes, on notecards that I handed him after class. When I discovered The Mask of Apollo, I brought him a first edition from Provincetown because of lynx-eyed Dionysos; I bought a paperback of Steven Saylor's The Venus Throw for him in London in the spring of 1999 because we had just been reading Catullus, even if we both agreed that Saylor's version was kind of too dramatic for words. He is one of the dedicatees of my first two collections and I got to see them on his shelf, right next to the EP that introduced me to the Dresden Dolls. Years after I had fallen out of touch with anyone else from high school, I came back to tell him I was reading Greek, reading Akkadian, publishing short stories, singing in an opera. I wrote him an abominable poem in 2001 and he was kind enough to accept it. So there's that.

But I would have written to him this spring, if I'd known; I can send these memories to his family, but I can't tell him again and finally that he changed the course of my life, even if over thirty-eight years of teaching high school I expect that happens a lot. (He taught my brother four years after me and would ask after him even when I was at Yale: how's Collie? No one else in my experience ever gave my brother a nickname he'd tolerate. Possibly no one else ever will.) He was always threatening to quit teaching and take up a peaceful life as a long-haul trucker, as facetious a dream as his designation of favored students as "wretched toads." My senior year of high school, I was reading The Return of the King under my desk in Latin class. I have no idea why, except that it was my first encounter with The Lord of the Rings and I was too hooked for even hendecasyllables to distract me. I glanced up to find Dr. Fiveash looking down at me with a patented expression of sardonic doom and the entire class waiting to see what would happen. And when he asked what I was reading that was so very much more interesting than Latin lyric poetry, I stammered, "Nine-Fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom?" and held up the split-backed Ballantine edition I'd borrowed from my mother and Dr. Fiveash said mildly, "All right. Just not in class," and I shoved the book in my backpack and paid attention to the rest of the class translating, stunned by my reprieve; but I hadn't known he loved Tolkien. I know so little about the things he liked outside of the ancient world. He was married twice. He had children; I met his daughter briefly, as she sat once at the back of the class. He read my name at graduation, pronouncing it properly, as even my senior yearbook never managed to do, and hugged me as he handed me my high school diploma. "No longer liminal, child," he said. After the aimless, waiting, neither-here-nor-there week between end of classes and graduation, it meant something: it was ritual. The dead cross over and are in another state, more settled than that of the dying. With him, I read of Aeneas in the underworld, trying to hold Creusa, feeling her fall like a shadow or a breath of wind through his arms. I had not imagined my teacher disappearing, then or ever, into that darkness with her.