I love that name. Shamus. I write the name and see a greyish-white beard that manages to look trimmed and wild all at once. I see the oval frames of the wire-rimmed glasses he wore every day, except when he removed them to rub his eyes—usually in the middle of correcting a colossal mistake in identifying misplaced modifiers during first-year English at Westover. I hear the name and feel his towering presence cross behind me as he paces around the long mahogany table while monologuing a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1.
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Lots of people balk when they hear me call an old teacher from boarding school by his first name, and such an uncommon name at that. I miss Westover precisely for that reason; saying his name elicits laughter and sighs of nostalgia from my fellow classmates rather than the confusion I am met with anywhere else in the world. Describing our multitude of unusual traditions to anyone outside of the Westover world ultimately lead to the classic raised eyebrow expressions that regard you like you were a part of some curious cult. Our many traditions and ceremonies were just another day in the life in our secluded world, but I can now see just how strange they may have seemed from an outside perspective. Like many ingredients of that school, Shamus is a relic only Westover girls will ever truly understand.
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During my last year of the eighth grade, it seemed like I would be destined to follow the pack of students who would be attending Nonnewaug High School, the public school in my little Connecticut town. It was an older neighbor of ours, a girl who used to babysit me when I was younger, who introduced us to Westover School. As an alumnus, she spoke highly of the institution and its prestige among the local community. Coming across Westover was like seeing a mirage in the desert, but it was thanks to my parents’ willingness to send me off on a boarding school experiment that my little mirage became an actual haven instead of some shimmering image in the distance of my imagination. Westover, the little yellow nunnery. My classmates and I laughed at the connotation—calling it a nunnery made it sound like an unfortunate, prison-like place. Au contraire. The nickname was an affectionate one bestowed upon the tiny, selective world by girls who loved the butter yellow walls of that palatial school.
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How else can I begin to describe Westover? Maybe with a motto: Cogitare, agere, esse (to think, to do, to be). I still think about those words whenever I conjugate Spanish verbs or trace through French military history or correct someone’s grammar (especially when I correct someone’s grammar…). Westover is a small place, small but important. The little community holds far more meaning than most of the larger, looming institutions I have ever known. 200 girls come in from around the world. Most are boarding students and the rest commute from towns nearby. The international blend was wholly unique, especially in a place like Middlebury, CT.
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Do you know how Westover girls can tell each other apart from the crowd? Not through a visual identifier (which is probably a bit more normal), but through an intellectual one. I would never believe that a girl I met on the street was a former student unless she could recite the prologue to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. Weird, right? That’s Westover. Weird and wonderful. Courses at Westover were fluid, but the English classes have always been set in stone. A rigid curriculum of English classes that spanned the length of each trimester during the year was required for every one of the fifty girls per class, from your first year to your last. Memorizing and reciting that Middle English prologue comes at the start of second-year English with Jo Dexter, but it was Shamus Weber who taught first-year English. His class was the first of many Westover classes I was a part of over the course of the two years I attended. I knew from the get-go that his guidance would become a defining factor of the decisions I would go on to make long after I had left that second home behind.
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Westover was comprised of about two-thirds boarding students and one-third day students, whose parents lived close enough that they could easily commute to school each day. Some of the day students, myself included, had connected over the welcoming ceremonies prior to the start of term, and on that first day of classes we sat lounging together in Red Hall before heading to our first ever high school class. Westover’s main building was large and looming, designed in something of an extended square. The large walnut doors at the front façade of the school opened into the first sight of a regal red carpet, which was a tiny introductory detail leading into the grandest room in the school, Red Hall, named for the red furniture and drapes and carpet and general décor. It really was a scarlet wonder. Directly across the way sat another set of doors, this time opening out into a quad that, to me, rivaled even the University of Michigan’s famous Diag. Light brick paths crisscrossed the grass in between three strategically-placed apple trees (one tree for each of Westover’s spirit groups: the green Wests, the red Overs, and the blue Seniors). Four towering yellow walls dotted with ancient windows formed the square of Westover’s picturesque quad, the quad where Chris Sweeney hid every year during the first heavy snow to throw the surprise snowball that set off Westover’s annual snowball fight. The small history wing was off to the left, the language wing situated on the right. The quad was designed as if it were a school in southern California—classroom doors opened right into the open air of hallways sheltered by roofs but no walls. Following a brick path further to the right led toward a wide and spacious arcade whose path diverted in two. The path adjacent to the quad opened up into Westover’s more modern wing. Frosted glass walls with shiny metal accents distinguished one of the largest libraries I had ever seen on a high school campus. Myriad levels of books welcomed a world of history, philosophy, art, science, and literature into which I had hardly scratched the surface, until that year. Two floors beneath the library lived the cold tile of the science wing, its modernity an occasionally welcome reprieve from the chestnut-colored domain of brick and wood that rendered the rest of the school into something out of a Borges poem.
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Of all its accolades across the arts and sciences, I knew Westover best for its English program, which has produced some of the greatest modern literary and poetic minds that the East Coast has ever seen. That was perhaps why the English classrooms were housed in separate smaller structures off the main building. Shamus’ classroom lived to the right of the grassy playing field behind the quad. A brick path leading up to his door was an infamous winter obstacle, as it bore the first frost with a formidable icy stretch of pathway. But the first time we walked that pathway in our collective group of first-years, the sun was temperate and beautiful. We unlatched the door and pushed open the heavy slab of a door that led into the dingy classroom. Three shallow polished stairs led down to the one mahogany table long enough to host a royal family dinner. At its head, in his rightful place, sat a man in a smooth green-grey sweater. He made no motion to acknowledge any of us outside of an absentmindedly curt nod as we made ourselves comfortable around the table.
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The feeling of the room flitted between discomfort and anticipation as more girls pulled open the heavy door and gathered around the table. They quietly waved to each other and cast wary glances in the direction of our teacher. We passed the minutes scanning the perimeter of the room, which carried enough subtle detail to keep us occupied for as long as the strange silence lasted. All I could manage to think as I took in all the books was, My library was dukedom large enough. Looking back, Shamus would have been proud of the reference to old Will. Off to the right of the long table there was a larger bay window with shelves stacked high with books, ratty and leather-bound alike. A small circular table looking like the ideal place to set up an afternoon tea had the appearance of being recently brushed of whatever books and papers had been stacked there gathering dust before. The new, somewhat cleaner state now featured an old-fashioned clock and a pile of books that I assumed had been much larger before all the frenzied, start-of-term tidying up took place. Back and to the left of the classroom’s entrance, a desk was set up that echoed the appearance of the corner with the tiny tea table. A few hushed whispers pushed past the silence, but for the most part, no one cared to talk all that much given our preoccupation with taking in the wonder of a room that seemed worthy of Hemingway or Kerouac. The minutes ticked by.
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“Welcome class.” Shamus stood abruptly and broke the silence, shattered it like throwing a rock through a window. Even as I hear his voice cascading through my memory as if he were speaking to me in this very moment, I lack the words to convey exactly what it was to sit and listen to his opening monologue. Despite his unshakeable demeanor before the class had begun, in reality Shamus was the furthest thing from strict or stoic. His booming voice was laced with irony and he always carried the beginning of an ornery smile on his mouth. His demeanor was almost gruff, but his language was poetic and rhythmic in a way that denoted a man of great intellectual accomplishment.
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I wish I could recall every detail of the sonorous words that followed as Shamus cracked the silence like a teaspoon cracks the sugary layer of a crème brûlée, but truth be told, the shock from hearing this previously benign man suddenly speak with such gusto essentially rendered me mute. I couldn’t begin to tell you exactly how he brought this group in and out of a collective trance as he traced through a combination of literary history mingled with a few select details from his own personal story. He moved around the table many times again and carried on like it was opening night at the Globe, but for all his drama there wasn’t an inch of pretentiousness leaking through. His sincerity was only cemented by his apparent indifference to how any of us regarded him. That was it. Five minutes into his first speech and I was hooked.
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His classes were never boring. If his tendencies weren’t obvious enough given our unexpected introductions that first class, Shamus had a flair for the theatrical. It wasn’t enough to teach us the literary intricacies that defined the Shakespearian and Homerian greats, it was about providing us with a fully-fledged understanding of the world these authors lived in and represented through their works. He encouraged his students to look up words as we read, making note of anything we didn’t understand. One day he called upon a classmate to explain winnowing, as was used in a metaphor by Odysseus. When she stammered over the concept, he whisked off to the corner and returned promptly, waving a large and looming old-fashioned winnowing fan above his head while emphatically describing the process of separating wheat from chaff. Until that class, the strange-looking wooden tool had simply been a relic resting inconspicuously on the corner of his desk, but from that day forward we noticed it every day. It acted as a subtle reminder of his passion and enthusiasm over something as seemingly insignificant as wheat and chaff.
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Most of Shamus’ classes were divided in two. He spent the first part of the day teaching or reviewing a new concept in grammar to prepare the class for our weekly quiz. There was no pressure to achieve a perfect score—Shamus allowed students to retake the quiz as many times as was necessary so we could learn from our mistakes. What drove our class to study and prepare was that unspoken need to impress an instructor whose disappointment would be far worse than any failing grade. Following the grammar lesson was a deep-dive into the literature section of class. He would hand pick students to read for the characters in one of Shakespeare’s plays or assign one person to read their favorite passage from that week’s assigned reading of The Odyssey. I couldn’t write fast enough during the moments when he would share careful insights as to the history of the text. He strived to provide us with a deeper understanding of the characters and of the author’s motivations in including a certain scene or plot device.
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By some fortuitous occasion, Shamus was assigned to be my advisor during my first year at Westover. Our meetings were frequent and unlike any counsel I had ever received, but as I moved into the challenging second year of classes at Westover, I selected a new advisor when the time came. Hindsight proved to be clearer than ever, reminding me that I was simply being foolish in searching for favor with other teachers that may have seemed more appropriate for the classes I was taking at the time. It wasn’t until later that I discovered Shamus’ disappointment at having lost me as a student and advisee. And it wasn’t until later that I discovered my own frustration at having willingly given up the sage guidance of a teacher who touched my mind so profoundly that to this day I think of him whenever I pick up a book. I wonder if he had ever read it (if it’s a classic he probably has). I wonder what he would think if he had.
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There’s a reason I still read The Odyssey every year, reviewing the cramped notes I made in the margins of my Westover copy. There’s a reason my Warriner’s High School Handbook (the Westover bible of grammar) hasn’t left my side all through college. It’s Shamus. At the risk of sounding immodest, there’s a reason that quick-witted is the highest compliment I could receive. If there’s one way of describing Shamus Weber, outside of intelligent, dramatic, worldly, or facetious, it would be quick-witted. To mirror him in that way is far more than I could ever hope to achieve. I think of him often, I see his hands laced together in that contemplative measure of deep thought and wish I was brave enough to ask for his advice just one more time.
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