THE KOENIG AWARD
by
Ronale Stevens
1. The Summons
The whistle knifed the clamor in the gym, its high-pitched shriek followed by a quick if not deferential silence. Coach Benton, short, pudgy, shaved jowls already darkening before noon, glared at us. "Rawson!" he bellowed.
He always bellowed. You wouldn't believe how much noise a 5'6 basketball coach could make unless you were in his gym class. Then you knew for sure. "Rawson!"
I looked over, making a vague salute in acknowledgment.
"Principal's office. On the double!"
The buzz rose around me as I headed for the lockers. "What'd ya do, Joe? You in trouble, Joe?"
They were more in a sweat than I was. I knew damn well I wasn't in trouble. I never was. I had figured out all my answers ten years ago, and I liked number one too much to get in my own way. I played everything cool, and cool guys have no troubles. Cool guys win. Little things like varsity letters and big things like the Koenig award. Which is what this is all about, I thought.
Benton's order to double time it didn't mean I wasn't going to shower. Even Benton, whose clothes always looked grimy, knew better than to face Schlemmer at less than perfection. Or whatever you could muster that would pass for it.
The needle-sharp spray woke my skin, and I stood there reveling in the steam rising about me. It was the first time I'd had a school shower without forty other guys grabbing the soap or playing snap-ass with the towels. Friday the thirteenth‑-the first one of 1959‑-was going to be lucky for me. It was going to be a day of firsts. My first solo school shower, my first appearance in Schlemmer's sanctum sanctorum, and my first shot at the Koenig award. My only shot.
Hair still damp, I passed his secretary's inspection and knocked on Schlemmer's door. The measured voice I had heard through a year of freshman science told me to enter.
Schlemmer was Clayton's answer to Horace Mann, education's wonder boy. He'd taken his first teaching job in the very school he'd graduated from, going for his master's at the same time. Students had liked his classes, maybe because he kept them interesting; and parents had adored him because he never called to report disciplinary problems. No one gave a damn about his subject till the year after he became principal. Then Russia sent Sputnik over our heads, and not caring about science became unpatriotic.
Schlemmer had changed very little since I'd taken his course. His hair had started graying in his teens and was totally white by the time I'd had him. He wasn't even thirty then, and the young face under the old hair had riveted the class right off. By the time that novelty palled, you knew better than to let your attention wander.
He was even more daunting in his office, painted institution green as was every classroom in the school. Someone ‑-Mrs. Schlemmer, I supposed‑-had tried to make it fashionable by adding navy and white plaid drapes to the window. A couple of seascapes that Schlemmer himself had painted adorned the walls, but nothing was going to make that room cozy. Least of all his dark, unblinking gaze.
"Joel, sit there." He pointed to a hardbacked chair that wasn't intended for comfort.
I sat where he indicated. In his little world everyone did what Schlemmer said. He ran the tightest school in the county, and there was a set to his eyes and lips that clued you in right away. "Don't even try," they said. "I am authority. I am power. I am cool. Capital C cool."
"What do you know about the Koenig award?" he asked.
"Twenty thousand dollars to the senior who can write, sketch, and satisfy Mr. Koenig as to his character." Schlemmer didn't like bush beating and neither did I.
"Interested in competing for it?"
"Sure."
He fixed me with that strange gaze I had long ago dubbed the Schlemmer whammy. A look that bored into you, pulled your insides through the hole it made, and held them up for your examination. I stared at my loafers and then back at him. "I mean yes, sir," I amended.
"In that case you will fill out this application, exactly as it directs, and mail it to Mr. Koenig. If he does not have it by Friday, February 20, you will not be considered."
"Yes, sir."
And that was it. I held in my hand the keys to the kingdom, the passport to power. The power to get through college, get a start, and get people the hell off my back. The hell away from me. The power to cement forever in place the stones of what my mother called Joe's wall of Jericho. The wall that kept Frenchy out.
I tackled the two page application that night. The first page gave Koenig's address and a brief statement: "The Stephanie Koenig Memorial Award is offered yearly by Mr. Michael Koenig. It is presented only to that senior of Clayton High School who demonstrates skill in art and English, and whose character Mr. Koenig deems most suited for its reception. Mr. Koenig is under no obligation to make the award, and he will be the sole and final judge." Beneath this was a list of those who had previously won and the year the award was made. Only seven names were on it, beginning with 1947. Beginning with Benjamin P. Schlemmer.
That checked with what I knew. Schlemmers and Garfinkels were the only Jews in town, so Koenig didn't care what your religion was. I recognized the O'Brien further down on the list‑-a guy currently interning at the county hospital‑- and a Betsy Hamilton who did some kind of work with retarded children. So Koenig didn't care what sex you were either. And there was no winner for the year before, 1958, despite the stink Mrs. Patterson had tried to raise. I shut my eyes, trying to drag from my memory whatever clues I could from that little debacle.
Mrs. Patterson, pride of the PTA, had stood up at a Board of Ed meeting and charged that Koenig was demanding shameful tasks of the contenders, invading their privacy, and showing sacrilegious and obscene objects. The Clayton Herald had headlined it, and somewhere down around the third paragraph you found that Schlemmer had risen to that challenge and demanded she give all the specifics to her charge. I had no trouble remembering Schlemmer's coup de grace: "Because if she does not, I will."
There had evidently been a hurried conference between Mrs. Patterson and her Pauline, and the charges were withdrawn.
And that was the only clue I or anyone had as to how Koenig ran things. Koenig. A little tin god that nobody knew, who stayed out of politics and social events, and who manifested his power of life and death yearly to the senior class.
I ran through the statement again, searching for the clinker I had hit the first time, the word or line that had seemed odd, out of place. Not "sole and final judge." Power was Koenig's game, and if you wanted your share, you played by his rules. No, it was the word "suited" that I didn't like. It should have been "worthy." That would have told you to practice up on your boy scout virtues. To hold yourself up as the shining example of every truism ever preached to you, including the contradictory ones.
But not "suited." Suited suggested private standards, possibly arbitrary, and certainly unknown. Shit. Start off scared and you start off losing. Well, I didn't need the damn award. It was three times what my father made a year, but I could put myself through college, if I had to, without it. I'd already checked into getting a seaman's certificate; that would get me into the merchant marine and money. All Koenig could really give me was time. He could delay the wall of Jericho but he couldn't prevent its completion, and so I had more to win than to lose. That made it the only kind of game a winner would enter.
I had a hunch Koenig liked winners. He certainly didn't make need a prime consideration. The Hamilton girl was bright, beautiful, and wealthy. In fact, after Koenig and old lady Adams, the Hamiltons were the best off in town. And my competition wasn't going to be all that much, anyway.
There'd be Tuck Balaban. A raw-boned redhead, his real name was Richard, and the nickname Red had been attached to him early. But ever since fourth grade when he'd read aloud the word 'tch' as 'tuck,' he'd been Tuck. He had laughed it off, unconcerned and unembarrassed, and at first I'd figured he had his own wall of Jericho. Never let them in. Don't let them know when they hurt; play it cool, play it friendly, and win it all. Without them. In spite of them. But that wasn't Tuck; he was just amiable and liked to laugh.
He was good at art, not as good as me, but good. But in English he'd write whatever he thought the teacher wanted. Like proving Hamlet was sane, just because Miss Luria had said she thought he was. Well, I thought Hamlet psychotic, and I'd said so and gotten the same A Tuck had.
That finally gave Tuck the message‑-style, not content, for Miss L. The only agreements she would insist on would be between subjects and verbs. And I knew why. The Schlemmer whammy wasn't only for students: teachers faced it too.
Larry Adams was the only other contender I could think of. There were others who could draw, and still more that could write, but we three were the only ones out of a hundred and eighty who could do both. And if Koenig didn't sit on his brains, he'd scratch Larry first off. She was the born loser.
Lard-assed Larry. Really Nalara. Or more really Little Nell, as the girls called her behind her back. A girl named Nalara ought to be soft and slender, the essence of femininity, but Larry was a pig, a real oinker. You couldn't even tell whether she was pretty because her features seemed encased in fat. Five of her extra thirty pounds had gone to her boobs, but the rest were all between her waist and groin. Misshapen, that's what she was. Long, long, slender arms and legs, and a head that might've been a bit too small on anyone and was certainly a lot too small on her. Not that it wasn't packed with I.Q. She was smarter than me, probably smarter than any of us, but only in class. Like she'd wear the latest style, but she'd pick post card bright colors, and on her frame the effect was grotesque.
She'd have the edge in English, but never in art. The faces she drew were always soft and doe-eyed, and her paintings had the garish contrasts of technicolor cartoons. I couldn't see Koenig handing twenty thousand to a piglike Walt Disney. No, I'd have the inside track, and with a sigh of satisfaction I reached for the second page, the application proper. It too was short. I filled in my name and address, read the only other question that was on it, and then flipped my pen across the room and started pacing.
Because Koenig was nuts. Stark, raving mad. He had bats in the belfry, he was off his trolley, and he could take his damn award and shove it. Only a lunatic would pose the question he asked, and it would take a bigger lunatic than him to answer it. I stormed back to the desk and read it again.
"Wealth, truth, love, and knowledge have all been considered sources of power. Rank these in order, placing the most powerful first. Then write an essay explaining the reasons for each choice."
Screw you, Koenig, I thought. Then I shoved the papers in my drawer and started my homework.
It was a monstrous question to ask, monstrous. The kind the Gestapo would have thought up if they'd figured mental pain could hurt more than physical. It tormented because it had no answer, or maybe as many answers as I wanted it to, and it tormented because once asked it wouldn't let me be. It haunted my homework, it pounded on me as I dribbled down the basketball court, and at night it turned itself into a little chant and sang through my brain. Knowledge, truth, wealth, and love; knowledge, truth, wealth, and love. I'd seen it at once as a madman's question, and after two days of pushing it off me, of willing it outside the walls of Jericho, I conceded it had made me a madman too. Because I was going to answer it if only to get rid of the damn thing. And then I was going to plug up whatever chinks it had come in through, the chinks I couldn't find until I had answered it.
I sat down and willed myself to think logically. Was the order of that endless chant the right one? Was it a flash of intuition, a hunch I should play? I decided not. When that kind of hunch grabs you, you feel right, confident, and I felt troubled and angry. Angry because Koenig was asking a question I didn't think was fair. If he wanted our opinions of power, he could have asked if the pen was mightier than the sword, as Mr. Jarron had in junior English. Or even a looser question, like what's the most powerful thing there is. Then we could have answered might makes right, or God, or Frenchy. But for twenty thousand bucks Koenig wasn't asking easy questions, and maybe he wasn't so loony at that.
I considered the order Koenig had put them in. It took me less than a minute to see the reversed alphabetical pattern, and I thought Koenig, you bastard, you sure as hell leave no clues. Then the hunch came grabbing for me, and I sat very still letting it make contact.
There was a clue, a toehold on the unscalable mountain, somewhere in the two pages Schlemmer had handed me. I made my mind totally blank and sat listening, waiting for the words I knew were going to come.
"Schlemmer," said my hunch. "Schlemmer." Schlemmer whose name headed the winner's list, Schlemmer whose whammy made kids look at shoelaces and teachers play fair. Schlemmer who at eighteen must have had the answer without himself as a clue. Or maybe perversely, ironically, with only himself as a clue. What would Schlemmer have ranked first?
Not wealth. Schlemmer wouldn't have picked wealth as an answer to flatter Koenig, because Schlemmer never flattered anyone. He called the shots as he saw them. And he hadn't gone after wealth even when he'd had the chance to, because he had settled for the crummy pay of a small town's high school principal. Scratch wealth, then.
Love? Schlemmer was married and had a couple of kids, and no doubt he loved them, but he sure as hell wasn't running the school on love. Justice, maybe, but not love.
So it had to be knowledge or truth, which ought to be synonyms but aren't. And since Schlemmer was devoting his life to education, it had to be knowledge. Except not every Koenig winner had gone into education. And education and knowledge aren't synonyms either.
The only thing left, then, was truth. The more I thought about it, the surer I was. It was the weapon he'd used against the Patterson woman. She'd made her vague accusations against Koenig in headline grabbing words, but Schlemmer had demanded the specifics. The truth, whole and nothing but. He'd done more than demanded it; he had literally threatened her with it, and she had backed down. So truth ranked first, and given Schlemmer as my lead, wealth came last.
But what came second, knowledge or love? What would Schlemmer have said a dozen years ago? Had he wanted to be a principal then? That would make it knowledge. And no sooner had I decided that than the hunch grabbed hold again and said, "Love; it's love." I kept shaking my head, trying to still the voice in it, trying to drown it out with my logic and my reasoning. But it wouldn't shut off, not till I picked up my pen and wrote the irrevocable rankings. Truth, love, knowledge, and wealth.
Then, like the lunatic Koenig had made me, I started to laugh. I had just committed myself to saying that truth was the most powerful of the four choices he offered me, and it was the one thing I couldn't use in my explanatory essay. I kept trying to picture Koenig's expression if I wrote, "Truth first, because that's how Schlemmer won your award; love next, because I had a hunch that wouldn't shut off; and wealth last, because it's a way of saying piss on you, Mr.Koenig." The more I thought about the crazy, upside down irony of it, the louder I laughed, and finally my mother knocked at my door and asked if everything was all right.
"Yeah, mom." She was still standing outside the door, but I knew she'd go way. I had answered her in my Jericho voice, the cool, calm tones that locked her out and that she couldn't defend against, and after a moment I heard her footsteps, slow and shuffly, moving off.
I spent the rest of my evening coming up with cogent arguments to defend my rankings. Then I sketched out a rough draft of them, one that would demonstrate my command of unity, coherence, and emphasis. Koenig would look for style as well as content. Like me he'd cover all bets.
I didn't get the essay finished till Tuesday night, but that was only the seventeenth, well under Koenig's deadline. Relaxed now that the job was done, I took a leisurely stroll to the mail box and listened with pleasure to the satisfying thunk the envelope made as it hit bottom. Then my stomach went thunk too, and turned into a knot I couldn't untie. I kept seeing the first page, the page I hadn't mailed back, the page my stomach had knotted around. I raced back to my room and snatched the paper from my desk.
Fool! Blind, stupid, losing fool! It was a memorial award. Not the Michael Koenig award, the Stephanie Koenig award. And I was sick.
I'd gotten the right clues but the wrong answer. A hunch that told me Schlemmer, a hunch that led me to the first page, and a hunch that had abandoned me. Because of course Schlemmer had had a clue. It had stared at him from the first page just as it now stared at me. "The Stephanie Koenig Memorial Award." And without any list of winners to distract him, to start him off on convoluting trails of logic, Schlemmer would've seen the obvious.
Koenig was prepared to offer money, lots of it, to enshrine the dead Stephanie. It didn't matter whether she'd been his mother, sister, or wife‑-she was someone he had loved. It could never be truth Koenig wanted for the first answer because the truth was that his Stephanie was gone, that money couldn't bring her back, nor knowledge, and that the only way she could linger at all for him was through love. That was why my second hunch wouldn't shut up till I'd written the word "love." But it had come too late; I'd already written truth at the top of the list.
Okay, I had lost. I took the lump in my throat and pushed it into my chest, and I made another stone of it and added to the walls of Jericho. Keep out, Koenig. Only the merchant marine can have me now.
Had Tuck and Larry seen the obvious? I considered Tuck. Maybe amiable people think of love right off, but I couldn't imagine Tuck viewing love as a kind of power. If Tuck had put it first, then he would've come to his decision not by instinct but by reasoning. Maybe he'd picked right and maybe he hadn't.
But Larry would surely have put love first. She'd have the right answer for all the wrong reasons. She'd pick it because it was the thing she wanted most and would never have, just because she wanted it so much.
You didn't have to know her for ten minutes to see that. She came at you like a huge vacuum, trying to suck warmth and friendship and love from wherever they were inside you. She'd offer to do something for you, to help you in some way, or worse yet she'd let her money do the asking.
When everyone had to contribute a present to the Christmas grab bag, you could be sure she'd put the most expensive one in. When she got her car, she offered anyone, even kids who lived near the school, a ride home. Every June she'd throw a party for her homeroom class, and we got to use the Adams swimming pool, the only one in town. So we'd go, laughing at her on the way there and the way back. And wondering why she hadn't caught on three years ago when it had rained, and no one had bothered to come at all.
I wondered what reason she would give for putting love first, and then I started to think dizzy thoughts. What if Larry blundered into the right answer and won the money she didn't need, what kind of winner would that make her? But what if Koenig, like Miss Luria, didn't care what you thought so long as you could write it well? I would've liked to believe that. But I was no Larry to live in a shut-your-eyes fairy tale world. Once you read his question you knew that your thoughts would be judged, and that you had damn well better put things in the order Koenig had predetermined. Only who the hell was he to decide?