If there were better news to receive on a Thursday afternoon, Neil Perry could not think of it. It was a secret muttered to him after a particularly stuffy Latin class by their dorm master, who was passing by with a beat-up suitcase and a generally curmudgeonly expression on his aging face. And, as soon as that man turned the corner of the hallway, Neil bolted down in the opposite direction, as fast as his legs would take him, stopping not for breath or to heed the "slow down" shouts from various professors meandering the hallway as they finish their classes for the day. When he finally reaches his dormitory, he pounds his open hands against his friends' doors as he passes, stopping his running feet only when their doors open and his companions stagger out of their rooms.
"Hey!" He shouts at them all, hands on his waist as he tries to catch his breath.
"Hey yourself," Pitts replies, watching his friend with thinly veiled confusion at the combination Neil's struggle to catch his breath and his immovable, beaming smile.
By this point, everyone has made it into the hallway. Knox and Charlie poke their heads out while Meeks and Pitts and Todd all lean against the nearest walls in order to get a better view of the action. Charlie is unable to contain his smirk as Neil swallows in a gulp of air and turns his dancing eyes to the other men in the hallway.
"Hager's visiting his family this weekend," he says, keeping his voice down as though this is some great secret to be kept from the rest of the boys in this dormitory.
Rolling his eyes, Charlie tuts, wondering why he bothered to come outside of his room at all, when clearly there isn't any news of any great import to be discussed out here.
"Yeah? So?" He scoffs.
This is the news that is so important that Neil would pull his friends from their studying, their homework, and their illegal radios and poetry, the news that he sprinted halfway across campus to deliver firsthand. The words taste like fresh candy on his tongue, melting in the air with sticky sweetness, enticing them with childish glee.
"So Mr. Keating is supervising the dorm until he gets back," Neil reveals, inclining himself in toward his friends as he gives them this gift.
A moment of silence from the boys as the gravity of the situation that they have just been presented with weighs down on them. Eyes widen. Incredulous laughs are exchanged. And then, finally, Knox pipes up.
"You're joking."
Neil holds one hand over his heart and one hand in the air, swearing as solemnly as if he were standing trial.
"If I'm lying, I'm dying," he pledges.
Pitts scoffs, cynically unable to believe in something this fantastically wonderful.
"No way would Nolan let him watch us," Pitts argues.
Cameron nods in agreement. Nolan would have to be out of his mind to put Keating in charge of so many young men for an entire weekend. Hell, he's mad enough as it is to put Keating in charge of so many young men for an hour a day for an English class.
"Too much of a hell raiser," Cameron says.
Shrugging nonchalantly, Neil finally catches up with his breath.
"Go ask him yourself," he challenges.
"Fine. I will," Cameron says.
And just like that, the entire company of young men are tearing down the hallway, to demand answers from the Captain himself.
True to his word, Cameron does investigate the entire rumor, and, true to his word, Neil is correct in his assessment that it will, indeed, be so that Mr. Keating acts as dorm master for the entire weekend. Red in the face and humbled from his blatant distrust of Neil's judgement, Cameron retreats to his room for the rest of the evening, leaving the rest of the young men to their own devices until late in the evening, when Pitts pulls him out of bed for another adventure to the older teacher's room. Head bent in embarrassment, Cameron shuffles after them. As always, Neil leads this charge, this brigade of boys in their pajamas, as they creep toward their teacher's room. When they arrive, they shatter the still silence of the evening with three steady knocks. In no time at all, the door swings open, and Keating appears, the full glow of warm light from his small room pouring out into the hallway, gilding the darkness with a river of quiet gold. To his credit, the teacher does not look particularly surprised at their arrival. To be honest, he was expecting them at a later hour, to fully take advantage of the curfew he is certainly not enforcing at the moment.
"Mr. Knox. Mr. Perry. Mr. Dalton. Mr. Cameron. Meeks. Overstreet. Anderson," he says, nodding to each of them in acknowledgement and welcome, "Good evening."
"Evening, Mr. Keating," they each reply in their own time, a mixture of smiling and awkward faces hovering in his doorway.
"Awfully late for you all to be out of bed," Keating replies, managing to sound a little reproachful. He looks down at his watch, checking for certain that the hour is what he thinks it is, "Past curfew, as a matter of fact."
The young man in the red robe pipes up, his eyes a little nervous at the implication of his mentor's words.
"You're not going to write us up, are you?" Meeks asks, trying his damnedest to seem cavalier about the entire situation, but failing miserably.
An amused smile materializes and a twinkle appears in the eye of the older man as he looks down at the collection of rag-tag gentlemen currently huddled outside of his door like a circle of carol singers at Christmas time.
"Well, I wasn't planning on writing any of you up, Stephen, but I could always make an exception if you'd like me to," Keating teases.
Shrugging his shoulders and looking at the floor with a bashful chuckle, Meeks shakes his head, knowing that the eyes of all of his friends are on him even as he flushes bright red.
"No, sir."
"Good," the man says, clapping his hands together once, "As I said, the hour is late, and this room is awfully cramped for all of us to be hovering, so if you don't mind-"
But, by the time he's gotten the words even halfway from his mouth, Neil Perry has spotted something over the man's shoulder, and has proceeded to sweep past his teacher in order to get a better view of the oddity that he has just seen. Without permission, he picks up the trinket, unaware that his friends have followed his lead, pushing their way into their mentor's room. It's a small square photo frame hosting a black and white photo of a smiling couple.
"Who is this?" Neil asks.
His friends clammer around him, edging their way over his shoulder to see the thing that has so captured Neil's attention.
"Who?" Keating asks, turning around with a sigh, now resigned to the presence of so many young men in his room at once.
Nonchalant, Neil tilts the frame in the other man's direction, flashing the picture for identification.
"The woman in the photograph. Who is she?" Neil asks, his voice quiet and reverence.
It's amazing, Keating remarks to himself, that without even knowing anything intimate about the situation or the photograph, Neil somehow manages to give it the hushed respect that such a heavy memory in Keating's mind deserves.
"She is a long story," Keating says, sinking into the chair in front of his desk so he may properly address his students in comfort.
On cue, the young men begin to settle themselves into various corners and nooks in the room, sitting anywhere there is a free space. It should send a thrum of dread into the teacher's stomach, but something about the image is oddly calming. Like relaxing around a fire to tell stories with friends. He smiles, even as he continues to debate if he will actually reveal this chapter of his life's story.
"We've got nothing but time," Charlie drawls, "It's Friday night and we're all dressed up with nowhere to go," he finishes, pushing Knox aside so he can have more room on the floor to stretch his legs out.
"So, who is she?" Neil asks, passing the photograph to Keating.
"C'mon, sir, we're starving here," Knox implores.
Eyes draw the familiar lines of the photograph's faces, his heart stirring at the lessons he's learned from the pages of this tale.
"Fine," the man says, before favoring them with his account, a smile on his weathered face and a distant look in his gaze.
He was twenty years old when he first laid eyes on her in a hazy, cigarette smoke hazed pub just outside of campus. It had been a long week pouring over Derrida and Yeats, in dark libraries lit only by poorly wired lamps and air thick with dust so heavy it might as well have been a physical presence against his young, jacketed shoulders. Since he woke up this morning, he has been dreaming of a tall pint of beer and conversation with fellow literary snobs, and he wondered curiously and vaguely if this will be anything like the salons of old, if ideas will be exchanged like coins into wishing wells. John Keating was young and idealistic like that at this moment in his life, and when he walked into this pub at this hour of the evening, he believes that the world could change with just the small act of his sitting down on a barstool. And, to his immense surprise, he was right. Because she was there. Pulling pints behind the bar in a simple dress and apron, her dark hair held down with pins and ties, her smile glittering with the simple joy of a day's work.
And, when John looked at her, he was speechless. She walked down toward him after giving pints to two students at the opposite end of the pub, leaning against the wooden bar to look him in the eye with a warm expression.
"Hey there, soldier," she intoned.
John' head spun around, looking over his shoulder, expecting that someone in uniform was standing behind him. When he realized that nothing of the sort was happening, he looked to her with bewilderment before attempting to gather his thoughts.
"Oh-uh-I'm not-" John stammered.
She nodded, her red lips smirking at him.
"I know. But you students call us civilians, so I thought it only fair," she quipped.
No more speech from John for a long time, so much time, that the young woman began to get uncomfortable at the feeling of his look on her skin and his lack of speech. She breathed a laugh.
"You look stupefied," she began, "What's on your mind?"
John hesitated, and the young woman reached for a tall glass before putting it under the nearest tap and pulling down.
"It's foolish," he finally settled, deciding that those were the easiest words to explain his position.
The glass, now full of beer, appeared in front of John' nose, and he looked up at her with some confusion.
"This one's on the house," she said with a shrug, "Maybe when you're a little bit drunk, you'll tell me."
And, sure enough, John drank his full until the skies darkened and clouded over, and the barroom emptied. He watched her as much as he could without feeling voyeuristic, embracing her smile and cataloging her laughter in the back of his mind as nothing short of a poet's dream. When the clock struck midnight, she returned to his place at the bar with a regretful cadence to her tone. In his wildest dreams, Keating liked to imagine that she was sad to see him go.
"I have to ask you to leave now," she said.
He pushed the now empty glass toward her, sober as the moment he walked in through the door.
"Alright. Thanks," he responded.
Putting his jacket back over his shoulders, he began to depart, heading for the door. But something stopped him, a change in the air, a whisper of the future on the wind. He turned back around and his eyes met hers; he gathered enough courage to say the only words that have been rotating around his mind since the moment he first saw her.
"I must not strain the moment of our meeting, striving for each look, each accent, not to miss, or question of our parting and our greeting. Is this the last of all? Is this-or this?"
She froze at her place behind the bar, her hands halting over the glass she was cleaning.
"What's that?" She asked, curiosity radiating across the room.
"What I was thinking when I first looked at you today," came his simple reply.
"Mr. Keating, you sly old fox," Charlie hollers, beaming at his teacher with a prideful gaze.
But not everyone is as voracious as Charlie; Todd nods encouragingly at the man in the chair, looking up at him for answers.
"What happened then?" He asks.
Keating shrugs, looking down at the photo in his hands.
"We started seeing each other. Parties, dances, the pub whenever I could manage it," Keating replies.
"And?" Neil prompts.
One night he snuck her into the library. It was Christmas and her folks were nowhere to be found, but he had studying to do and no money to spend on presents, so he snuck her past the guards standing outside of the campus gates for a once-in-a-lifetime candlelit poetry reading. With skillful dexterity, he slide his favorite tome of collected poems from the special hiding place he gave it on his first day of college, hoarding it so that no one may check it out and deprive him of the wonders inside. Then, he tucked the book into the knapsack over his shoulder, and helped her climb up one of the tall, ever-higher reaching bookshelves in the center of the library, until they sat atop of it like kings atop a throne. They looked out across the library with hushed awe, and John Keating watched joy illuminate her face as she took in the completely empty library. Just the two of them and thousands upon thousands of books. And then, when the moment was right, he opened the one tome that he smuggled up to the top of their perch, and began to read aloud, his voice cursing the stillness from the room, his impassioned tones echoing through her very soul.
"I read her Whitman," Keating explains.
Neil coughs out a laugh.
"Of course you read her Whitman."
"The smallest sprouts show there is really no death, and if there ever was, it led forward life, and it does not wait at the end to arrest it, and ceased the moment life appeared. All goes onward and outward...And nothing collapses. And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier," he preached, the words dancing between them with fire on their heels.
And then they kissed, so tenderly, so elegantly, that for a moment the young man was certain that wings were sprouting from his back to guide him up into the heavens.
"There's a lesson in there somewhere, I think," Keating muses, his mind still halfway in between the world of reality and the world of memory.
"Breaking rules makes girls want to kiss you?" Knox mutters, looking out of the corner of his eye at Charlie, who is currently smirking for the entire room to see.
"I was thinking something about the power of words, Mr. Overstreet, but your idea is fine, so let's go with that."
It was weeks later when she would finally shake his world for good. He was in his dormitory, studying as a good university student does, when through his open door he heard a small voice calling out his name, accompanied by small, pounding footsteps.
"John? John?" She shouted.
Keating pulled himself from his studies and peered out of his doorway; when he spotted her, she was peeking into rooms that didn't belong to him, but when she saw him, she immediately pulled herself away to sprint into his arms, throwing herself into his embrace. John gladly welcomed the motion, though it confused him more than anything else.
"What are you doing here? This is a private residence and you could be-" He scolded, but only half-heartedly.
She pulled away from him, her face still unbearably close to his. He could see from this distance that there were tears in her eyes.
"I got in," she crowed.
Hands around her waist, Keating raised an eyebrow and attempted to make an innuendo of such a statement.
"That sounds like private talk and we might want to-"
But she was not in the mood for games, not in the mood for such a joke. Instead, she clarified her declaration, feeling her heart about to rip its way from her breast.
"I got into Wesleyan," she declared.
His world stopped spinning. That was the moment it happened.
"What?" He responded.
"I'm going to college, John."
This was the most outrageous thing she could have said. After all, she was a hardly educated barmaid who hung around intellectual students for the Hell of it. Keating never expected her to ever go to college of all places.
"But- But-" He stammered.
"You inspired me. Poetry. I'm studying poetry," she cried, unable to keep the face-splitting grin from her face.
The excitement in her very breath made it impossible to deny her anything, even his approval, which he most certainly did not have to give.
"I-I'm so proud of you."
"But you weren't, were you?" Meeks asks, looking up from the place on the floor where he has been staring for twenty minutes, his stomach sinking with what may come next in this story.
Keating shakes his head, brushing away that accusation carelessly.
"Oh, no. I was. But I was more selfish than anything else," he confesses.
"What do you mean?" Pitts asks, furrowing his brow.
Unable to stare at her smiling face any longer, the man replaces the photograph to its home on his desk. It feels heavier now than it ever has before.
"I wanted her to myself. She was so...bright. I wanted her to shine only for me," he says, feeling disgusted with himself for even admitting such a thing.
"So, what'd you do?" Knox asks after a long stretch of silence.
She was trying to get on the train that foggy morning, but Keating just kept holding her hand, begging her to look at him for just a moment. A moment was all he really needed.
"I need you to listen to me," he implored.
The woman chuckled and shook her head, not believing the sincerity of his conviction, thinking that this is just another one of those silly moments shared between lovers, believing that John was only trying to lighten the mood as he always did.
"I have to get on this train," she said.
With his free hand, John reached into his pocket and withdrew a sheet of paper, holding it up for her inspection.
"I have a speech," he said.
This halted her movement, and she planted her feet steadily on the ground, rooting herself to stand directly before him.
"You have a speech?" She asked, surprised and even a bit flattered at such a gesture.
He nodded and began the words that he wrote out, remembering the draft upon draft that he tried to create of this, trying to call upon the perfect words to express how he felt, knowing that there were not enough words to properly explain...
"What is more noble than the cause of love? What is more important in this world that the love that two people can have between each other? Thomas Carlyle said that a loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge, and...and...I love you. Do you understand that? Can you understand how deep my love is, how much it holds my heart without relent? I love you and to lose you would be to lose a part of myself. Please. Don't go."
It was the first time he ever said such a thing. I love you. It was the first time he had ever said it. Tears choking her, the young woman threw herself into his arms, muttering all the way:
"I love you too. I love you too."
Mister Keating stops there, as though this is the end of his story. The boys wait for a long, unbearable moment with baited breath, until finally, Cameron tires of waiting, and asks:
"And?"
Keating looks mildly surprised that the boys, with all of their knowledge and their fancy educations, didn't deduce how this particular story ends.
"And what?" He replies.
Staring up at him, dumbstruck, Neil tries to sort through the pieces of the puzzle.
"And what happened then?" The young man asks.
The phrase bittersweet has been abused in stories, but Neil Perry and his friends know its true meaning in that moment, when the corners of Mr. Keating's lips tilt upward only ever so slightly, and his eyes mourns something that the gentlemen listening to his story cannot quite see or reach. It strikes them at their core, a place deep within their very souls that they were not entirely sure actually existed.
"She got on the train. And started her life. Because I walked into a bar and used my big fat mouth to mutter some poetry," he says, regret and hope mingling together like a dangerous, woozy cocktail.
"Did you ever see her again?" Meeks asks, desperately trying to hide the water welling in his eyes before someone sees.
Wanting the boy to have his own private moment, not wanting him to feel embarrassed for the emotions he's feeling, Keating looks away from Meeks, answering the question instead with his focus squarely on the wall ahead of him. His mind, however, is trapped in a small apartment in London, which by the end of a weary afternoon in the early 40's was reduced to nothing more than rubble and blood.
"She died in the Blitz in London, just after taking a post studying the works of Chaucer. Her favorite writer," he says, with a resigned sigh.
With two fingers, Keating taps his heart and grows contemplative, distant.
"Words and ideas, boys. Words and ideas," he mutters.
It was words and ideas that made her love him, made him love her. And it was words and ideas that sent her away, sent her to live her life. Words and ideas that sent an air force to destroy her home. And words and ideas that now bring hot, flustered tears to his eyes.
"Do you miss her?" Todd finally bucks up the courage to ask.
Keating nods.
"Everyday."
The room silently mourns, each young man turning over truths in their own hearts, tumbling them like snow down an avalanching mountain. When Keating finally recovers, he reaches over to an old globe positioned in the corner of his room, and opens up the top half, revealing a small bar. Pulling out bottles of hot Coca-Cola, he relieves them of their caps and hands them, one at a time, to the young men scattered around his room, before standing to his feet and ushering the boys to do the same.
"Now, all good stories should end in a toast," Keating declares, "So, drink up, and don't tell Mr. Nolan."
Neil raises his glass, and his friends follow. He looks to his mentor, smiling wearily as he goes.
"What should we drink to?" He asks.
Keating considers this for a moment, before summarizing the one thing, above all things, that the love of his life taught him.
"To living and living well," he toasts.
And the room echoes back.
"To living and living well."
Well, my friends, I've had this document on my computer for about two years now and have never had the heart to post it. But after last night, I just felt that perhaps it's something that could be useful to some people, as when I read over it last night, thinking of Robin Williams as such a hero brought me a smile and some hope. I hope you all enjoy, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this little story of mine.