Alone in the Classroom (18 page)

In the afternoon he drove her back to Ottawa, and the next morning she had a dream just before waking. A letter from him, and in the dream she scanned it, then gave it to her mother to read. Her mother got to the end and handed it back, discomfited. Connie looked and saw that his final word was
anatomy
, suggestively, what she might do to his. Then she turned to the beginning, and the letter was full of smudges, grammatical errors, lines that went up and down.

She lay in bed for a few more minutes, thinking about his country kitchen, the sofa against the wall, Evie’s sweater displayed across the back. A homespun composition of colour, light, comforting objects. All the childhood pleasures and griefs. Moments of sunshine as the day wore on. Grey sky giving way to blue.

She would write him a letter.

“They will recede,” she wrote of school and its miseries. “If you don’t dwell on them, they will recede.”

Two days later, he took the letter out of the mailbox at the end of his lane, thrilled to see her strong, familiar hand. He read it standing right there and misread
recede
.

“They will succeed” is what he read. His old torments would succeed.

For several days during that fall of 1938, the front and back gardens near Connie’s apartment on Cooper Street were full of migrating warblers. They balanced on tall coneflowers and picked out the seeds. All the talk was of Hitler’s intentions, the yielding of England and France, the “peace with honour.” Ottawa’s mayor wanted to name a part of Confederation Square “Chamberlain Way” for the statesman of the century, but Connie’s editor advised extreme caution in naming any thoroughfare for Neville Chamberlain, who looked, he said, like his own umbrella.

That fall the outlying fields and woods penetrated the city with their cooler climate, river-fed, lake-fed. The temperature dropped, only to rise again. No answer came to her letter, no telephone call either. His mother took messages for him while he worked in his shop, and knowing
this held her back from calling, yet her fingers itched to call. It was the age-old pattern of urges suppressed, peace purchased, only to have a resurgence more violent than ever of first intentions.

Around this time Syd Goodwin walked into the offices of the
Journal
. He was forty-one years old, in a marriage that was a prolonged disaster. He would tell Connie that the thought of seeing her again had resurrected his old zest for life. He had intended to surprise her by walking up to her desk unannounced, but she saw him first with one of the quick upward glances that helped her gather her thoughts before attacking the next paragraph, and she leapt to her feet and called his name and embraced him.

He seemed delighted to the core of his being. “Michael Graves told me you were here.”

“Michael.”

“He’s doing some work for me.”

“I know. I saw one of the drawings. How is he?”

“Top-notch.”

They took the elevator, run by a tired old man who clanged the heavy gate shut with a great crash of metal, down to the lobby and went next door to a sad, dark-looking cafe. Syd Goodwin was smaller than she remembered, and worn down, but still solid and almost instantly attractive, and nervous, perhaps. When he talked he scratched parts of himself in rotation, back of his head, side of his neck, his wrists, the back of his hands.

He wanted to know how she had come to the
Journal
, and she described returning from France and going for a job interview on a terrifically windy day, when because of
her haste there had been no time to comb her hair. “So my hair was like this.” Wispy and a little out of hand and long enough, once again, to pull into a simple knot at the nape of her neck.

“Your hair was as it should be.”

A pause, a smile as he looked into her eyes, and then he wanted to know what she had worn for the interview. She could not think of another man who would have troubled to ask. She described the brown suede pumps with peephole toes and the linen jacket and skirt, and was he asking because he could see that clothes mattered to her, or because he wanted to imagine in detail what she had looked like, or because he knew that she would enjoy the telling? In any case, women’s clothes were not beneath him.

He had been drawn to Ottawa, he told her, the way so many were, drawn by work and not intending to stay, then staying. The public schools were the most progressive in the country, thanks to an unconventional chief inspector of schools who opposed the strap and favoured what he himself believed in: school gardens, nature study, art, woodworking, music, good literature, making things with one’s hands. Syd had come to help him with his reforms, about five years ago.

Then he didn’t know what more to say about himself, and in the silence his emotions almost got the better of him. He muscled his way through his discomposure by looking down and gripping his mug with both hands, by coughing and clearing his throat and taking his ear and twisting it. “Sorry.” And he changed the subject back to
work. It was one of the few words he said with a Scottish accent.
Weark
. And he said it with the passion Scots reserve for that word alone. Michael had handled his discomposure differently, giving in to it and passing it on to her.

He was writing a textbook, he said, that would present history as a series of disasters and moments of grace. War and peace. The idea had come to him after talking to Michael, who told him he always got stuck on the pointy bits. Will I remember this? The lists of settlements, names of capitals, chronology of leaders. I’ll never remember this. “What do you remember?” Weaponry, rubble, disasters, mainly disasters.

He was paying Michael to make graphic, modern-looking illustrations of events for which there were no photographs, replacing the copperplate renditions and pen-and-ink drawings that make history look so arid.

“That’s a mistake,” she said. “The modern look.”

She turned her coffee mug in her large hands. Draped over her shoulders was a black woollen cape made in France with braided frog fastenings, and made to last, to withstand countless winters. She was still wearing it when I was a girl.

“You have to let the past be old,” she said. “You can’t yank it into the present and tart it up with fancy drawings.”

“Imagine you saying a dirty word like that.”

He eyed her, and she smiled faintly and looked away. She hadn’t expected that and would have preferred more finesse, yet it did the trick. Sex was in the open now, right between them.

“I’m enjoying this,” he said.

“Women make that mistake when they dress too young for their years and look even older.”

The truth drew appreciative laughter from across the table.

“I like your idea of disasters,” she said. “I’m just saying that we’re in the present when the past touches us. If you could teach history as a series of shocks. The shock when something happens, and the shock when we stumble upon it a second time.”

“I’m going to enlist you in my enterprise,” he said.

She couldn’t help herself. She drove to the curve of land beyond the curving road, which seemed to narrow and form an inviting angle there, his house quite visible now that all the leaves were down. It was unseasonably warm, a sunny November morning.

“I thought of coming to see you,” she had said to him on the phone.

“Come.”

She turned in at the mailbox and followed the lane into the wide-open clearing where house and outbuildings stood, and there she saw a mud-spattered automobile she didn’t recognize. She parked and got out of her car. The door of the house opened and Michael came out.

What she had missed in Europe was what she had missed out West, a landscape full of swimming lakes and pine needles baking in the sun and rock you could walk
across like banquet tables. Jacob’s pillow wasn’t so hard to imagine here, how he might have rested his head on a stone and dreamt of a ladder rising up to heaven, and then years later met up with the brother he had wronged only to find himself forgiven. Like Esau, this part of the world was a wild and generous place.

Michael walked across the grass towards her, relaxed looking, almost sleepy. She had a long time, or it seemed like a long time, to watch him.

Inside, Mrs. Graves lay with her eyes closed on the kitchen sofa. The doctor sat in his shirtsleeves at the table. Michael had been giving him something to eat, a sandwich, a bowl of soup.

“That’s a well-travelled Ford,” she said to the doctor.

“I learned how to swear driving that Ford.”

His sharp, humorous eyes were even brighter when he took off his glasses to polish them with his handkerchief. Michael told him that Miss Flood had been his teacher, and the doctor confessed that geometry had nearly finished him off. “But my father begged me to keep going, to make more of myself than he had.” He put his glasses back on and took the cup of coffee Michael handed him. “He came to my room in the dark and tried to persuade me, but I told him I wasn’t going back. Then he said I could drop geometry for the rest of the year. You make up your mind you’re
not
going to do something and that’s when the floodgates open.”

And so it is with love. You say no. You turn your back on it. And the next day you find yourself travelling to see him - caught up, transported.

On the sofa Mrs. Graves slept from weakness and medication and not without moans. It was cancer, Michael told Connie after the doctor went on his way. He had called him against her wishes. “But she was in too much pain.”

Connie knew about mothers in pain. “Is someone helping you?”

Someone was. The neighbours on either side. Especially Claire, the daughter on the adjoining farm.

He had moved some of his work to the kitchen table to be close at hand when his mother needed him, and he showed it to Connie in the midday light, the illustrations he was doing for Syd. He was all coolness and self-containment, which surprised her, yet as eager to show himself as an orchid.

“You’re beautiful,” she said to him, looking at the skilful drawings.

“But I’m not going to succeed.”

“Why do you say that?” Startled by his bleak tone, puzzled.

He got her letter from where it sat under the lamp on the kitchen table, and she taught him the difference between
recede
and
succeed
.

Then his spirits lifted and he was no longer aloof. She would have to tread more carefully, she realized.

Just as she was leaving, someone knocked on the door and came in. In this way she met Claire, the girl he had mentioned, a strong-boned, good-looking French Canadian, eighteen or so, with whom he was clearly on easy and intimate terms.

A month later, she was walking with Syd Goodwin past the newly completed war memorial downtown (neither of them cared for it, although the foggy air of this unusually mild December gave it a fleeting beauty), and he slipped his right hand through her arm. “Marry me.”

She saw he was serious and looked away and frowned. “You’re not expecting me to convert?”

His left forearm was in a cast, broken in three places from having fallen on it with all his weight while playing hockey with his neighbour’s sons. But he was happy. She hadn’t said no.

“I’m not religious, Connie. I have no interest in synagogue.”

“I love the Old Testament. Jacob and Esau, Samson and Delilah. The Psalms.” She was buying time. “I’m not religious either. I haven’t really read the Psalms.”

“Don’t think I want you to change in any way.”

“I was engaged once, in France, until he said I had to give up smoking. I broke it off.”

“Smoke,” he said.

His divorce was turning out to be less troublesome than he had feared. They weren’t going to stand in the way, his wife and her lover. “I should have done it years ago.”

“Why didn’t you?” she said, and she turned her questioning eyes upon him and all he could do was shake his head.

“What happened to your anger?” she said.

“I still have it. But it didn’t do me any good.”

“It did
me
good. It was wonderful to see you lose your temper.”

That week there were the kind of dark, intense, festering skies that reminded her of a full range of blues in a child’s box of colours. She felt a great urge to see the water. On Lady Grey Drive, overlooking the Ottawa River, they stood watching the gulls on the ice moving and forming below, and marvelled at how they kept their feet warm. She told Syd she wasn’t sure she was made for marriage, for being tied down to one person, although she thought the world of him. He had his good arm around her shoulders. He didn’t want to tie her down, he said, it wasn’t in his nature. That’s what he admired about Judaism. Everything was open to question, at least in theory. In practice, of course, his father had been rigid and punitive, overbearing. He himself hadn’t been inside a temple since he was twenty-five, the year his mother died.