Alone in the Classroom (25 page)

In the early hours of that Maine morning, she had reached into the oven to pull out the blueberry pie, then reached in again to scrape up the juices that had spilled over, forgetting about the hot inside of the oven door. The burn was three inches long on the tenderest flesh, the inside of her bare forearm, but instead of whimpering, she sliced an onion and placed two thin slices over the length of the burn, then used two large bandages to hold them in place. The relief was immediate, I saw it in her face.

“Nature has everything we need,” she said, “if only we pay attention. I learned that from Syd.”

They were in touch by letter. He had remarried, a woman his own age, and a few years ago, moved by the memory of Jews being turned away from one port after another, they had adopted two children who were among the boat people fleeing Vietnam. He wrote to Connie several times a year. She showed me a recent letter, and it had that communing tone that counts for everything:
Monday
morning now. August 1
^st
and dense fog - can’t see the bottom of the garden - a welcome change in a perverse sort of way. What we’ve had lately is lots of company and getting ready for them has put a strain on my usual equanimity
.

I borrowed
World History Made Simple
, eager to understand a few fundamental things from this knowledgeable man - like fascism, and the Napoleonic Wars. But understanding takes you only so far, to the point where you don’t want to understand, and this happens all too quickly.

I had resolved not to see Michael again after my flight to Maine. I took to heart all that Connie said. She had embraced me when we bid each other goodbye and asked me what I was going to do. I didn’t know.

“Well, I’m going to lie down,” she laughed. And then I saw how much I had exhausted her and how she couldn’t wait to be by herself.

Soon after coming home, however, my thoughts became pliable again. The rise and fall of the urge to get in touch involves the complete overturn of your resolve. As if a giant leans down and plays with your pebbles of feeling - the rock of your conviction has become a mere pebble - and how easily the giant palms it, the giant of hankering that becomes the giant of need. Everything gives way to the desire to hear his voice - and it’s not quite alcoholism, though it’s certainly an addiction, since a mere drop, one gentle phone call, will satisfy.

A year and a half ago, my mother lay in bed recovering from two serious operations, and very frail, her cup of coffee earning the world record for number of times reheated in the microwave. “Give it the one, two, three,” she would say, their microwave being an old barge so slow that half a cup of coffee needed one minute and twenty-three seconds of reheating. Mind you, she liked things hot. What was left of her tongue, after a lifetime of repeated scaldings, liked things hot.

“Jealousies,” she said, and she smiled and shook her head knowingly. “My brother Ken was a ladies’ man.”

In my mind I saw my uncle’s lean, amused face as my mother finished her train of thought about the rivalry between her brothers. “He got a job at the bank through Parley Burns. I know he paid Mother a dollar a
day room and board, and he liked clothes. He wore white pants when he golfed and when he worked in the garden. My brother David wasn’t a ladies’ man and he didn’t care about clothes. He always maintained that when he and Ken worked in the garden, he did all the work.”

David was the first-born, famous for being the sole object of his mother’s love. The day Ken reeled in the largest fish ever caught in the lake, he showed it to his mother in great excitement, and she had a picture taken of David holding the fish.

“Ken had my father’s hands,” my mother said. “Their steadiness. And his conciliatory ways. He could play pick-up sticks for hours without disturbing the pile.”

“You have them too,” I said. “The same hands. The same conciliatory ways.”

The previous week an intern in the hospital had remarked on the many veins in her narrow, tanned-looking, parchmenty old hand, and her retort, “Veins, but no vanity,” passed over his busy head. Upon finding herself in the hospital, she had said, “There’s only one word for this. Helldamnspit.”

“Did Ken like Parley Burns?” I asked her.

She hesitated. She had such a soft spot for Ken. “I think he did. I know he went to his funeral.”

For several summers before he entered the asylum, she told me, Parley Burns used to leave Argyle for weeks at a time. Among the social notices in the
Mercury
, there would be one saying that Mr. Ian Burns had gone to Toronto for
two weeks, or three weeks; he went alone. In the summer of 1940, Connie happened to be in Toronto visiting my father when she passed a small theatre on Berkeley Street and stopped to read the playbills posted behind glass.
What is This Life?
A one-act play by Ian A. Burns.

That night Connie was in the audience of about fifty people, watching a short drama about the Welsh tramppoet W.H. Davies, who had written the lines we all recognize from school:
What is this life if, full of care / We take no time to stand and stare
. From the program notes she learned that on his way to the Klondike in 1899, and in the company of a fellow tramp called Three-Fingered Jack, Davies jumped a freight train in Argyle, Ontario, and lost his grip. The wheels of the train crushed his right foot even as Three-Fingered Jack and the freight train disappeared into the night. In Parley’s play, the poet lies in his hospital bed in Argyle, talking to a lame young man who brings him the newspaper and stays on to listen to his stories of gold, dancing girls, high adventure, and escape. In the end the young man is arrested as he leaves the hospital, charged with murdering a schoolgirl.

Connie remembered her interview for the
Journal
with Johnny’s grey-haired mother, heartbroken that the police had not done her family the simple courtesy of coming to the house to arrest her boy, but had plucked him off the street instead, depriving her of the chance to say goodbye.

Connie was acerbic when she told me years later about the favourable reviews Parley got for his play. She spoke with a kind of pain, salted pain. No matter that the
wound was old, the salt had found its way in, and the salt was praise of someone she couldn’t forgive and couldn’t get out of her system. She admitted the premise of the play was good, that a boy who seems innocent might not be; the question was left open. “The play was better than I expected. I had to admire it. And yet there was something sour about everything he did.”

When I listened to her describe the virtues of his play - the rapport between the poet and the boy, their light-hearted swagger - I didn’t assume that Parley was, in fact, curious and kind and misunderstood. But his personality widened a little, a door in the house opened. Spaciousness entered. You wait for a moment when someone is different, even a little, from what you expect.

After the Almonte train crash, Connie had written to my grandmother thanking her for Christmas and mentioning that Parley and his wife, also on the train, had escaped unhurt. In her reply, my grandmother passed on the information that Parley had been on his way to the mental institution named Lovat Hall in Lancaster on the St. Lawrence River. He had been committed, but not against his will, so far as she knew.

This bit of news threw Connie’s sighting of them into a much darker light.

At Easter 1943, when she made the long drive from Boston to Brockville to see my parents (my father was undergoing officer training and my mother was private nursing), she made a little detour to find out what had
become of Parley Burns. She was more curious than my father, as well as more sociable, yet my father once spent two years tracking down former students, the several for whom he’d had the highest expectations and the several for whom he’d had the lowest, to find out what they had made of their lives; by no means the pursuit of an un-curious man.

The village of Lancaster is close to the Ontario-Quebec border. Railway tracks run through the middle of it, crossing the short main street that in those days had shops, restaurants, and a single hotel. Connie followed the hotel clerk’s directions and drove to the long, curving driveway on the outskirts of town that led through extensive grounds to an impressive brick mansion on a knoll: this was mental care for the moneyed. Inside, a wall of south-facing glass overlooked the wide and tempting waters of the St. Lawrence. A huge fireplace filled one wall, and nearby an elaborate spiral staircase led up to the second floor. The staircase had a double banister, she noticed, one on top of the other, to prevent the inmates from pitching themselves over the side.

Parley was in his room on the second floor, in an upholstered armchair, staring into space. He didn’t grimace when he saw her, or brighten. He knew who she was. And because Connie couldn’t explain even to herself why she had come, except to satisfy personal curiosity, she soon ran out of things to say. She reached into her handbag and pulled out the book she was returning after all these years. “You will have forgotten you lent it to me.”

He had not forgotten. Not forgotten the book she had lugged around from place to place like a punishment.

“Shall I read a few pages?”

She read the opening of
Jude the Obscure
to Parley, who stared at the floor and gave no indication that the story meant anything to him at all. But the words hit her as if for the first time, about the schoolmaster leaving the village and everyone being sorry, especially the boy named Jude, and she read very slowly, her skin prickling. After a few paragraphs she stopped and sat with the book open in her lap. Parley looked at her with his pale, brown, bloodshot eyes. Behind him and on top of his chest of drawers, in a hinged double frame, were photographs of his wife and stepdaughter, the bony wife and brainy child. They had the high foreheads of intelligence and the furtive non-smiles of the emotionally reserved. And it was driven in upon her again that he worked on the insecurity and the generosity of girls and women - his attentions a balm and an irritant; a distressing excitement. For him, too, distress and excitement.

She put Hardy on his bedside table and went over to the window. A tree-lined driveway led down to the river that flowed all the way to the Atlantic. “You must enjoy taking walks. The grounds go on forever.”

He didn’t answer, and she turned around and looked at him. He wore a cardigan and a shirt without a tie. He was ill shaven. He was thinner. She saw the worry scab on his lip and the bitten nails.

“They take us in groups,” he said finally, with a sigh, and his breath didn’t smell nearly so bad as it had before.

“I’m teaching again,” she said.

“I couldn’t do it anymore. So you got your way.”

She knew what he meant.
You’re unfit to teach children
. She had been on his trail ever since, not intentionally, but it must have seemed so to him.

There was an Olivetti typewriter on the small desk beside the window and a sheet of foolscap beside it covered in tiny but fierce-looking handwriting.

“You were writing,” she said.

“Something came to me.”

She thought he was referring to his work, but he reached for an envelope. “It’s for somebody else,” he said.

She took the envelope from his outstretched hand and saw that it was addressed to Andrew Burns. “It’s probably meant for you,” she said. “They got your first name wrong, that’s all. You can open it.”

“There are things a man of honour can’t do. If I’m given a letter that’s not addressed to me, I’m not going to open it.”

He had found a plank to cling to inside the wreckage of himself. A way to give himself a high moral grade.

“You’re doing some writing,” she said again.

“Every word is bad. Every sentiment is maladroit.”
Jude the Obscure
had loosened his tongue after all. “But we are who we are, no matter how much it complicates our lives.”

“And the lives of others,” she said.

“Have I complicated your life?” His gaze was forthright and his voice was quiet. He seemed in that moment more self-aware than she had imagined.

“I wasn’t thinking of me, but I suppose you have.”

“For that I’m truly sorry.” He said it quite sincerely and life flooded in. Complexity that was very simple flooded in. He was sorry.

She would always be careful around people like Parley Burns, tricky people who are thin skinned and punitive and intelligent and surprisingly honest.

The smell of the place stayed with her. When she arrived in Brockville to see my parents, she carried something clinical and medicinal on her clothes and hair - the vase itself, emptied of old flowers, but smelling of them, unrinsed.

In the library I found Parley’s obituary, and a death I was aware of finally registered with the force of a tolling bell. He threw himself under the wheels of a passing truck on May 24, 1943, and that was the end of him.

In his obituary he was Ian A. Burns, the principal of a collegiate highly praised by inspectors, a man who had given generously of his time and energy to maintain its fine traditions of scholarship and service, a man whose devotion to duty had led him to overtax his strength and impair his health. A past president of the Rotary Club, chairman of the public library board, member of the curling club, and “a patient at Lovat Hall since early this year, for the benefit of his nervous system.”