The invasion of the budding intellectuals

by David Benjamin

“Wait a minute, Mrs. Twombly! Now that we’ve graduated, you want us to call you ‘ALICE’? That’s like having a friend named Alice and suddenly she asks you to call her ‘Spot’!”

MADISON, Wis.—One Friday night in my seventeenth year, probably after a football or basketball game …
Wait a minute, how do I know it was Friday? Well, there were at least five of us—Barry, Keener, Scott and me in Dick’s ’57 Bel Air—arguing about where to go next. This was a Friday ritual. We had a tempting selection, with two McDonald’s within range, Kelly’s burger joint out on the Beltline, Paisan’s peerless pizza, and a sort of secret joint known only to Madison cognoscenti, the ice cream parlor at Bancroft’s Dairy on South Park Street. It was Barry—possibly Keener—whose brain clicked into unprecedented presumption: “What about Mrs. Twombly?”

“What about her?”

“I know where she lives!”

Now, this was a year when the 1960s had not officially evolved into The Sixties. So, the idea of a bunch of high-school boys hanging out in the home of a teacher still hovered somewhere beyond the pale. But to Barry and Keener, this was a taboo ripe for demolition. So, shrugging diffidently, Dick steered the Chevy toward Badger Road.

Mrs. Twombly’s apartment struck me as eerily familiar. She lived frugally in the lower left quarter of a cramped three-bedroom fourplex, an architectural style unique to Madison and endemic to its less affluent neighborhoods. I lived in one, with the identical floor plan, on Simpson Street—a similarly downscale area.

Perhaps moreso than my comrades, I was hesitant to intrude on Mrs. Twombly’s Friday-night respite from the La Follette High School English Department. I knew—as did Mrs. Twombly ever more anxiously—that if word reached our principal and the school board that she’d been entertaining students of the opposite sex at home, after school, after dark, with beer in the fridge, her career might come to a sudden end before she had registered even a year on the job.

“Yeah, but who’s gonna find out?” said Barry (or Keener) as he mashed the doorbell.

Alice, predictably, was nonplussed, reluctant to surrender her threshold. But this is when we met Bob—Robert Twombly—her husband, who coolly waved us past the checkpoint and said, “Let ’em in. Hi, guys.”

Unlike his wife, whom we daily saw hurrying along the corridors, arms full of books and mingling democratically among teenagers, Bob was shrouded in mystique. Technically, he was a student, working on his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. But this lofty academic endeavor qualified him, in our eyes, as an “intellectual.” None of us could list exactly the specifications that rendered anyone an “intellectual.” But in each of us, it was an aspiration held close to our hearts and unspoken, even among one another. In pursuit of this hazy cachet, we had all partaken of Sartre (or tried) and Eliot, Camus, Leaves of Grass, Freud, Dylan Thomas, Bob Dylan and On the Road. We all knew where Kubla Khan had decreed his stately pleasure dome. We had suffered through hours of e.e. cummings droning his poetry on scratchy black vinyl borrowed from the library. Here on Badger Road, in the flesh, was the embodiment of all that cerebral toil. Bob Twombly duly enhanced his symbolism by withdrawing into the background, saying almost nothing, keeping his cosmic cool while allowing us to spout our adolescent erudition.

Robert Twombly’s thesis, eventually published as Frank Lloyd Wright: His Life and His Architecture, was just incisive enough to make him persona non grata at Taliesen, the shrine to Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin, but it established him as a formidable expert on the subject. It vaulted Bob into a professorship at the City University of New York and to academic attainments beyond.

Barry, Keener and the rest of us repeated our invasion of Mrs. Twombly’s privacy, but no one among school authorities ever sussed our violation of the invisible red line. Despite our further intrusions, however, I never got to know Bob much better. He served us best from a distance (in the kitchen) as the mute philosophe of our intellectual imposture.

In subsequent years, then decades, our ties to Mrs. Twombly—we got used to calling her Alice, then “Spot”—frayed but never broke. I was one of the first to visit her in the hospital after the birth of her son, Jonathan. After Alice moved “back East,” my wife and I crashed occasionally at her home in New Jersey. We bonded with her son Jonathan when he finished at Harvard and moved to Tokyo, where we were living at the time. We learned a little from Jonathan about Alice and Bob’s divorce, Bob’s teaching career and his new wife (well, I think they were married), with whom he lived in Paris. We attended the weddings of Jonathan (in Kyoto), and his kid brother, David (in Vermont). We flew out to New Jersey this month for a reunion with Alice, Jonathan, his wife and daughters.

Our small gang of high-school housebreakers got into the habit of referring to Spot as our “touchstone” because, when we lost touch with one another, we knew we could reach out to her. She always knew where a few of us were, because we eventually got around to getting back in touch with her—although sometimes ten or fifteen years passed between communiqués.

Last week, I got word from Alice that Bob had died. He was in his eighties, which I cannot picture. By and by, from Keener or me, the usual suspects will know—they probably do already—that Bob, who was more to us an evocation than a guy, has slipped the coil. In Alice’s honor, we will mourn, somewhat for ourselves, perhaps a little for expectations unfulfilled and mostly, I hope, for her, Jonathan, Dave.

Although she’s been resolutely single for decades, I know Alice cannot help but grieve, perhaps with a tremor of ambivalence, perhaps for intimations of her own mortality, but also for the life she shared with Bob, struggling together when they were young, thin and very-good-looking—and subject to the illicit society of upstart schoolboys in a hurry to grow up, who barged through the door in the night to fret their facsimile of wit and wisdom.