Old School: Chapter 6: The Forked Tongue Summary & Analysis

As spring blossoms, the boys grow restless and rowdy. The masters disregard most of the boys’ antics, but three incidents go over the line. When the glee club goes to Boston to sing at an Alumni dinner, a boy named Keyes steals a bottle of champagne and gets drunk on the bus, leading to his expulsion. Then Jack Broome gets expelled for hitchhiking down to Miss Cobb’s Academy to meet a girl, where they were caught together in the boathouse.

Soon after, Purcell starts to cut daily chapel, saying that he doesn’t believe in God and doesn’t want to worship him anymore. By the end of April, he’s used up his cuts and begins earning demerits. The narrator grows annoyed—he views Purcell’s decision as a display of arrogance. If Purcell were expelled, he wouldn’t lose his future place at Yale. Unless a person gets kicked out for an Honor Code violation, they can still take final exams at the end of the year.

Another thing stokes the narrator’s frustration: the stir over Hemingway is growing feverish, and Purcell loves Hemingway’s work. But, the narrator knows that (like himself) Purcell doesn’t want to be rejected by Hemingway. Submissions are due the first Monday in May and if Purcell keeps cutting chapel, his demerits would send him home the preceding Saturday. He would lose his chance for an audience, but he wouldn’t have to face losing a competition.

The narrator acknowledges that he may be looking for bad motives in Purcell because he himself is so duplicitous. He was recently awarded a full scholarship to Columbia University, and an essay of his won the Cassidy English Prize, which afforded him five weeks at a summer program in Oxford, all expenses paid. His classmates also like him. But he recognizes that he is constantly “performing” and trying to act like someone he isn’t, and now he feels like stranger even to those people he calls friends.

The narrator realizes that all of his stories had been attempts to make him seem like someone he isn’t. He thinks about what to write for the competition—how to write something that gets at his core, as Hemingway did. Everyone else is writing up a storm, while he feels completely blocked.

The final editorial meeting for the Troubadour is the Sunday night before the stories are due. The narrator tries to schedule the meeting for Friday, but that Friday Miss Cobb’s graduating class is joining the boys for a Farewell Assembly, a dance notorious for its promiscuity. Rain wrote to the narrator to ask him to the dance. Additionally, if Purcell continues to skip chapel he will be kicked out on Saturday, and the narrator won’t have any help in sorting through the Troubadour submissions.

On Friday, Big Jeff announces that if Purcell got kicked out, he would leave too. This doesn’t make much sense to the narrator, and Purcell gets angry at his cousin. The boys then start to prepare for the dance, but the narrator refuses to go until he has a good beginning to his story. The narrator daydreams that Hemingway chooses his story and hires him to work on his boat. He helps a friend of Hemingway’s catch a fish, and Hemingway praises him for it.

At midnight, Bill White returns from the library. The narrator hasn’t written a word. Bill asks how it’s going in a way that surprises the narrator—they have spent four years together and have never fought, but they aren’t close friends. Now, Bill seems to ask about him with genuine interest. The narrator is tempted to tell him that he hasn’t written anything, but he worries that this will lead him to tell Bill more about his life, so he instead says it’s going fine.

Purcell attends chapel on Saturday afternoon. The narrator surmises that he didn’t want Big Jeff to leave the school as well, which would embarrass him. At the Troubadour editorial meeting, the board makes their decisions about which stories will go into the final publication of the year. George is particularly on edge, especially when they evaluate the last story. The story isn’t great, but the author has been trying to publish a story for years and has not been successful.

George says they should just publish the boy’s story, arguing that it’s not like any of their stories were particularly groundbreaking. The rest of the boys are annoyed at this because they take their jobs very seriously and value their work. The narrator agrees to run it, and everyone disperses quickly. The narrator then looks through some old literary reviews on the bookshelves. He observes that all the stories seemed the same—designed to show what a superior person the writer is.

The narrator then reads a story from an old Miss Cobb’s review called “Summer Dance,” by Susan Friedman. The main character of the story, Ruth Levine, is smoking at a bus stop in Columbus after a typing class at the Y. She then takes the bus to her mother’s dingy apartment, where her mom is lying down with a headache. She lies to her mother that she needs more typing supplies so that she can get money for cigarettes.

Ruth then discovers that she has two phone messages: one from an old friend she grew up with, whose message she won’t return, and the other from a girl named Caroline, a classmate at her boarding school, which Ruth attends on scholarship. She calls Caroline back, and Caroline asks her to go to a dance at her country club. Ruth agrees, and Caroline says that she has to give Ruth’s name as something other than Levine—club rules. Ruth says to call her Ruth Windsor.

Ruth leaves that night, thrilled to escape her apartment. She meets up with Caroline and two boys—Colson and Gary. Caroline likes Colson, but Ruth can tell he’s interested in her, not Caroline. Still, Caroline has taken Ruth to the movies and the pool and the club, and she knows that if she betrays Caroline by going out Colson, Ruth will no longer have these privileges and Caroline will also reveal that Ruth is at the club under false pretenses. So, Ruth shifts her attention to Gary, and Colson resumes his banter with Caroline. The story concludes with Ruth thinking that everything’s okay.

The narrator is stunned: he feels as though he is reading a story about himself. The typing class, the bus, and the apartment are all very familiar to him. And the calculations about who to hang out with, manipulating his parents, the desperation to flee his home, the attraction to privilege, the masking of his own identity and desires in order to fit in: every moment of it feels true to him.

The narrator starts copying out the story, just as he had with Hemingway’s works. He feels liberated in writing something so true to his own experience. He changes Ruth’s first name to his, but keeps the last name Levine. He changes the city to Seattle, Caroline to James, and makes other small adjustments. But he feels that the words are his own. He finishes the story just before the bell rings for breakfast. He knows anyone who reads the story would know exactly who he is.