Alone in the Classroom (11 page)

Connie was touched by the boy’s hero-worship of her old teacher. The two of them belonged together. Mr. Goodwin enthused about a dancing-ground for sage grouse near his uncle’s ranch. He said the young birds were very tame and confiding. They dust-bathed in his uncle’s yard and invaded the vegetable garden and plucked out the hearts of the lettuce. Michael was the first to spot the bunch of crocuses coming out of the grass, bell shaped, and on the backs of the bluish petals, silky-white hairs.

Mr. Goodwin squatted and touched the open flowers with his fingertips. “Prairie anemones or windflowers.
Anemone
is the Greek for wind. Such fragile, precious things.”

She gazed down at the flowers, too, and Michael moved to her side and startled her by wishing her happy birthday. It was April 20. She was nineteen.

A child lies like a grey pebble on the shore until a certain teacher picks him up and dips him in water, and suddenly you see all the colours and patterns in the dull stone, and it’s marvellous for the stone and marvellous for the teacher.

Connie had no chance to speak to Syd Goodwin alone until they were back at school. He poked his head into her room after everyone had been dismissed. “You’re still here,” he said.

“You never used the strap. But you lost your temper all the time. I never minded.” She answered herself, “You never directed it at us, though. You never took out your frustrations on us.”

“Weak teachers rely on the strap.”

“I didn’t feel weak when I used it. I felt the urge to hurt.”

He thought she was sorry and concerned. She was both, but that wasn’t the whole story.

“The thing is, the boy’s been good as gold ever since.”

“Which boy?”

“Red Peter. Alfred.”

“You’re lucky he doesn’t hate your guts. There are schools that forbid it.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“A private school outside Toronto for one.”

His voice was serious, and she felt herself slip in his estimation.

“I learned something,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck, and then she was staring around herself at the floor and on her desk and around her desk, looking for the coral beads she had put on that morning.

He couldn’t help her search for them either. He was expected at a trustee’s for supper. Unlike Aunt Evelyn and her diamond, she would have to look alone.

She tried to recollect the feel of them sliding off her neck as she retraced her steps and strained to catch a glimpse of coral red. Mary’s house flickered on the edge of her
vision - poor Mary, lost in fatigue and unable to rouse herself. She had gone to see her two weeks ago and found her in her nightgown, propped up in bed, encircled by pillows.

“These ankles of mine,” Mary had said.

“And your back.”

“There’s nothing the matter with my back.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s my feet. I can’t stand all day.”

“No.”

“I can’t stand all day, you know.”

Connie sat on the bed and almost slid off, what with the pillows and the legs and the unidentifiable lumps.

“I can’t figure it out,” Mary said. “Where does a man get flowers in November?”

It took a moment. Then it came. The bouquet Parley had given Susan when she played Tess.

“Mrs. Wilson has geraniums and African violets. It was just a posy, Mary.”

“He likes Susan more than he likes you. She’s a bit of a tramp, really.”

Connie shifted on the bed. It was quiet, except for the radio downstairs and the sound of Mary’s mother moving about. “It’s hard to know who he likes. Or if he likes anybody.”

“You’re not afraid of him. He doesn’t like that.”

“Oh, I’m a little afraid,” Connie said.

“Susan’s scared to death of him, but she pretends she’s not.”

Susan had changed. She was thinner, paler, the same creamy Irish colouring, but as if snatched from Ireland
too soon, before the sea air had worked its roses into her cheeks. Connie heard her laughing at recess sometimes and she sounded artificially gay, fake. She understood that Susan couldn’t extricate herself from the drama club, and perhaps didn’t want to, but whenever she tried to speak to her, Susan seemed both grateful for the attention and eager to get away.

“Susan’s a faker,” Mary said.

Connie winced. “I don’t think she’s a faker. Or a tramp. Not at all.”

“I know so.”

Mary’s insinuations had worked their way under her skin, as Mary’s insinuations tended to do. Connie had not been back to see her.

Upon reaching the riverbank, she began to search in earnest. Rain was on its way and her necklace would be muddied, buried, berried, burried. But the necklace was nowhere to be found, and it didn’t rain.

She rose early the next day to resume her search, going outside with only a light jacket for warmth. She had the world to herself, the boundless prairie rolling south across the border into the Great Plains and north towards poplar country and black spruce. At the foot of the street she heard something that made her pause. The sound of typing came from Mrs. Wilson’s house, an open window on the second floor. It came in fits and starts, a train of private thought making its way onto a page. How secretive it sounded as it called attention to itself. It couldn’t be anyone but Parley.

She continued on towards the creek and here was Syd Goodwin on his way back. His shirt open at the neck, awaiting his tie, and looped through his fingers her dusty necklace. Now she remembers pulling her sweater over her head. She must have taken the beads with it and not realized.

“Where was it?” Accepting it gratefully from his outstretched hand and acutely aware of him standing so close. He was her height, no taller.

“Under a willow bush. Here.” He took the necklace back and stepped behind her. She bent her head while he opened the clasp and she felt his breath on the back of her neck and his cool, fumbling fingers.

“You just happened upon it?”

“I conducted a scientific search. A bloodhound couldn’t have been more thorough.”

Her smiling face studied the ground.

“Mr. Kowalchuk told me you hadn’t managed to find it. There,” he said. And she reached behind her neck and felt it to be secure, then turned around and looked into his face.

“You were going to tell me what you learned,” he said.

“What I learned.”

“Yesterday. You said you learned something.”

Her glance fell on his hands. He wore a wedding band, he always had.

“I learned that children want to forgive us. They’re eager to forgive.”

“If you’re pretty,” he said.

“I don’t think that matters.” She looked into his playful, deep-set eyes. He was minimizing her point, missing her point.
“You’re
not pretty. No one would ever accuse you of being pretty. But we forgave you.”

He laughed, and they started back towards town. She knew that his people were Jewish and that they had been bookbinders in Glasgow before moving to Winnipeg. He had talked about it in geography class. How they came out of Galicia, which was now a part of Poland. How maps may look stationary, but boundaries shift, worlds open up, other worlds and civilizations pass away. And none of us is stuck or alone, because coursing through us is everything that brought us to where we are.

She told him she was learning French from an old gentleman who kept peppermints in a bowl and schnapps hidden behind his books, and as she talked she was thinking that being an inspector meant not being at home for long stretches of time. You wouldn’t see your wife all that much, you might not even like her.

“Do you have children?” she ventured.

He shook his head. They slowed their pace. In another month it would be hot and the absence of trees would hurt, but now the light itself was like gold leaf. She took off her jacket and folded it over her arm.

“Plants are so grateful,” he said, looking around him. “You give them water and they say thank you. You can hear them.” He spread his hands wide. “The earth is offering us its beauty.”

She was wearing a dress and she was wearing it for him - a dark-blue dress with a pale-blue collar, and a very deep waist.

Michael’s eyes were on her all day. He loved to watch her at her desk - how fast she wrote, how determined and intent and slightly comical she looked when she concentrated hard. He took her anger in stride. It was her lack of attention that caused him anguish.

“Michael?” She was at the blackboard now, her back to the class, her mind full of Syd’s departure. “Have you finished your work?”

She could read him from a distance and with her eyes closed.

That afternoon, Parley Burns walked her home. His eyes were dark and his face was white from lack of sleep. He looked more like a prisoner than a principal.

“I heard you typing,” she said, curious to see his reaction. But his eyes were on the ground. “This morning.”

“Then you were up early.”

“I could hazard a guess about what you’re writing.”

“You won’t guess.”

“You’re writing a play.”

He gave her a surprised and bitter look.

She said, “I’d write one too, if I knew how.”

Her gift for difficult men came from being able to see around their belligerent corners to the mud puddle
behind. I’ve seen her with my father and I know. Rudeness that would reduce anyone else to blistered agony seemed to smooth her skin like some all-knowing cream.

He said, “You got on well with the inspector.”

She had noticed his own efforts to please. He was more than ingratiating, he was grovelling - smiling, smiling, and pretending to be interested in birds.

“Since you’re so good at guessing,” he said, “guess what I’m writing the play about.”

“Wait, let me think.” She considered for a moment. “Ghosts.”

“Wrong.”

“School?”

“Wrong again.”

“Thomas Hardy. Thomas Hardy and his wives.”

“You,” he said.

And her mind swung to all those occasions when he had sat at the back observing her.

“It’s not about me. Why would it be about me?”

He clicked his teeth; he had her. They walked on without speaking until he said, “There’s a book you should read. If you’ll allow me.”

So she continued on with him past her own lodgings to Mrs. Wilson’s and they entered the geranium-filled house. She waited while he went upstairs and came back with his copy of
Jude the Obscure
, which he put into her hands.

“Thank you,” she said.

She carried the book home and set it on her small desk, aware that Parley’s fingerprints were on every page. She
had already ploughed her way through
Jude the Obscure
. But instead of saying so, she had accepted his copy, caught in an act of insincerity spawned by the desire to keep things simple, when things were anything but simple. All around her was the curdled essence of this clever man, who found ways to bind you to him, to get you into his pot, where you simmered.

She remembered the leafy Ontario light on her mother’s face, the perfumed air in the one-hundred-tree orchard of McIntosh Reds, Snows, Wealthys, Tallman Sweets, and Pippins, and she wished very much that her classroom windows faced east instead of west. He weighed on her heart, this strange man who hadn’t learned how to tell time until he was eleven, a recent confession that had paved the way to a larger boast, that he mastered Latin in a year. She saw the artfully humble braggart he had become. She also saw the eleven-year-old boy, outfoxed by a clock.

Michael pulled her back to the present. “You look sad when you’re not talking.”

She turned from the window and went back to her desk where he was waiting, touched that he would notice
such a thing, and impressed that he was so bound and determined to improve. It was after four o’clock. He was here for extra help. And here for her, of course. She was aware of that.

He would never be a speller. His sister was the one who could spell.

But the next day Susan got caught cheating on a French test. Several words inked on her palm. Her cupped hand was a dead giveaway. Any teacher, let alone Parley, would have spotted it.

He took hold of the long wooden pointer and indicated the carved plaque high on the wall above the maps. “What does it say, Susan?”

She stood beside her desk and read the words aloud.
Honesty is the best policy
.

Unless honesty is impossible. And then you try other means.

“I’m surprised at you.” His voice was icy.

He kept her at her desk after everyone else had left. The days were long now, adolescent, bursting their buttons with light. She heard children calling to each other outside and Mabel barking across the road. Her father must have come home.

Mr. Burns worked at his desk and she sat with folded hands, waiting.

Michael was pouring himself a glass of water from the enamel pitcher on the table when his sister came sobbing through the kitchen door. It was about five o’clock. His
mother was at the table, serving coffee to a neighbour, Mrs. Peter. His father - he’s not sure where his father was. He seemed to loom and fill the whole kitchen, but he was probably sitting at the table with his smallest child, his pet, on his knee. Susan’s face was wild, and so was her hair, so was her dress. She swayed and her voice when it came out was choked and cracked. “Mr. Burns,” she got out. “Mr. Burns.” Then hiccups took over.

His mother went to put her arms around her, but his father blocked the way. He laid his hand on Susan’s shoulder and marched her up to her room, away from the shocked eyes of Mrs. Peter, who left them then to sort out their sorrows.

They waited a long time for his father to come back down, and when he came, he came alone. He told Michael to take his little sister outside. They would call him when they were ready for him to bring her back in.

The air was hot and dry and windy. Michael took Evie over to the pump and they filled a bucket and played at pitching stones into the water. And all the while he was thinking of Susan. What had she done?

Half an hour went by before they got called in for supper. It was dead quiet in the kitchen. His parents said nothing. His mother was serving out the food, her face blotched and strained.