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but his fear of Ovid. And why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.

ON FIRE
    The day before our Frost poems were due we had a fire at the school. Fire was the great nightmare. Early in the century a residential house had burned to the ground with thirteen boys inside, and the shock of those deaths could still be felt in my day. They were known as the Blaine Boys, after the house they lived in. Their group photo, taken for the yearbook they never saw, hung in Blaine Memorial Hall, where we sixth formers gathered for talk and singing after dinner. I was drawn to the picture. I studied their serious faces (no clowning for the camera in those days), their way of sprawling against one another, leaning back to back, one boy resting his head on another’s shoulder. The sense of loss I felt wasn’t just for their lives: how artlessly tender, how easy they were together.
    Their housemaster had been drinking in the village when it happened. He left for another boys’ school the next year and then, the story went, drifted to another, and another, never to find rest.
    The fire was said to have been started by a cigarette. How anyone could know that, we didn’t ask. It was revealed truth. And it led to a commandment: Thou shalt not smoke. Get caught and you were out; no discussion, no exceptions. Even the softest masters were without mercy on this point. Two or three smokers a year got the boot, given just enough time to pack and call their parents. A boy would return from swimming practice and find his roommate gone, hangers tinkling in an empty closet, the other mattress stripped and doubled over. No announcements were made and no lessons preached. This swift and silent erasure of smokers from the school served grim notice on the rest of us. It was the same fate suffered by thieves and violators of the Honor Code, and smoking was meant to be seen in that light, as a betrayal of us all.
    So we had fair warning and plenty of it—in spite of which an unteachable cadre of resolutes, including me, kept smoking anyway. I’d sneaked the occasional gasper since eighth grade but at school it became an obsession. Crazy as I was for cigarettes, my true addiction was to the desperate, all-or-nothing struggle to maintain a habit in the face of unceasing official vigilance. Always on the scout for new venues, I smoked in freezers and storage lockers and steam tunnels. I joined the Classical Music Club so I could smoke in the bathrooms of the concert halls we visited, and went out for cross-country so I could smoke while running in the woods. I kept a store of spearmint Life Savers to mask my breath and used a holder so my fingers wouldn’t stain. It was fretful, laborious work, but when I took that first deep drag I went dizzy with pleasure, not least the pleasure of getting away with it one more time.
    Then I almost got caught. I’d been smoking in the basement of the chapel with a boy who was discovered there by the chaplain just minutes after I left. I was putting music in the choir stalls—my chore that week, and my excuse for being there—when the two of them came upstairs and walked down the aisle, the chaplain sad but decided, holding the boy by the elbow, and the boy . . . I could only glance at him and then I looked away, but I saw enough. For the rest of the afternoon my gut clenched at the approach of any master. I was afraid the other boy had given me away, not to save himself—no chance of that—but in a fit of clear-cutting confession, or resentment at my escape. He didn’t, though. He went out the gates alone.
    I had seen his face. I knew what was happening to him. He was in free fall, and still trying to believe he was only in a dream of falling. He lived in New York. It would be a long night’s ride for him, on the train, by himself. I could easily see myself on that train. My journey wouldn’t stop in New York, though.