Alone in the Classroom (26 page)

I left the library and bicycled home through a city full of tulips, thanks to a grateful Dutch queen. Every year they bloom, then lose their heads to an army of black squirrels that go about like little guillotines, decapitating, decapitating. Tulips have so much more personality than other flowers - cut and arranged, each stem bends and swings low or wide or high, and the flower opens like
a plate and comes right out to greet you as if it were a schoolgirl and Parley a squirrel.

A sentence bears the weight of the world.
The emotional girl set about baptizing her child
. Tess took her dying baby from her bed in the middle of the night and christened him in the presence of her small and sleepy brothers and sisters. Words weigh nothing at all, yet they carry so much on their shoulders over and over and over again.

The long shadow of school falls across the rest of our lives. I draw
Tess
forward, year after year, a novel I studied in grade ten, then taught with limited success for many years. It’s a novel that works better as poetry, although it’s the bare bones of plot I can’t forget.

Last spring, I drove to Lancaster looking for traces of Lovat Hall, and the train came whistling through, barely slowing down. In a coffee shop, from a clutch of white-haired Anglicans gathered after church, I learned that the sanatorium had been torn down and turned into parkland some years ago, its stone fireplace so monumental the dismantling of it required dynamite. One elderly woman, her large face lively and eager, confessed that as a child she had worried about them coming close, the inmates, since they weren’t quite right in the head. She couldn’t stop imagining bodies washing up on shore after one of them, a young woman, drowned herself in the river.

I went down to the wide river. Its waters here extended far enough to be called a lake, Lake St. Francis, a
breeding ground for redhead ducks, least bitterns, great egrets, black terns. The mighty St. Lawrence. I remembered a letter of Connie’s in which she told of attending a conference of educators in Montreal, at which the guest speaker, a punctual professor from Kingston who was expected at ten in the morning, didn’t arrive until four in the afternoon. On his way he had seen cranes lifting houses out of the path of the seaway and watched, mesmerized, for hours. He was seeing the creation of the lost villages, the lost schools, the lost schoolchildren who were put on buses and transported to larger schools before the man-made flood raised the river and drowned its rapids and islands, fashioning a new shoreline with a new view of enormous tankers plying its length.

Standing there, I thought about Connie’s view that we carry the past forward even when things and people are obliterated. But surely you need a very long memory for that to happen.

It was late afternoon, overcast, peaceful. Not another soul in sight. I could hear her voice admitting that Parley had a certain dignity, twisted though he was.

I didn’t expect to learn anything more about him. It was the spring of 2007. Everyone who had known him was dead, except for my mother, and her memory was in tatters. But I stood there for quite a while. I felt like a pilgrim, having travelled to the place where he died.

I began to think of my name, the name I shared with Connie, my parents, the flooded world. In her last years Connie was compiling a genealogy and promised to send me a copy when she finished, but she never did finish it.
The wide river was comforting, the long view, the smooth waters. Nothing to get caught up on, no twigs and branches of learning, no stones to stumble over. I thought of other villages gone back to grass, wooden sidewalks hidden by weeds, and then I wondered if perhaps Connie was right and my fascination with Parley came not just from the obvious, his ruinous connection to people I loved, but from something more submerged.

The phone would ring in the evening and his voice would change, drop a notch, become intimate, and he would settle into long conversations as if he still lived alone.

There were other women - at least two, possibly three. One he had known for years, the other more recently. In time I met them both, and neither held a candle to Connie, although they were much younger than she was, of course. Therese was buxom and burly, in her forties, a woman made for stooking hay in the fields, a good-hearted nurse in the throes of leaving her husband. Cathy was fifty-eight, ten years younger than Michael. She was built like a bird and rode horses. When I asked him once what kind of woman attracted him, he said, “My taste changes. It’s all over the place. I like strong women.”

“Physically strong.”

“Strong in every way.”

In those two years or so of being with Michael, when I lost a husband and half lost an aunt, my thoughts turned more and more to women on their own. In my family I had always had Connie’s example, but also my grandmother’s, the one as exciting as the other was cautionary. After the death of her husband, my grandmother expected my mother, seven years old, to sleep with her, which meant lying on her dead father’s side of the bed and listening to her mother’s fingernails fret the seam of the pillowcase all night long. Side by side, they were sleepless souls, my mother missing the father she never stopped missing, and my grandmother wild with worry about money. Picturing them, I recall something else, something very different, the time my mother and I shared a bed after I took up with Michael. It was in December, right after my husband had moved out, quick to decide that everything was over between us the moment he knew I was having an affair. Our children would remain with me, except for weekends with their father; deceptively sturdy, both of them. We had put the house up for sale, and the sign on the winter lawn was grim. My parents in their concern came to visit. One look at me and that night my mother lay beside me in the double bed, on my husband’s side, and massaged my shoulders and stroked my hair until I slept. In the middle of the night, aware of me lying awake, she rubbed my back with those great hands of hers and I slept again.

She must have done that for her mother, that is, comforted her mother with her presence. But her mother did not comfort her.

The first Christmas after her father’s death, when she was eight, my mother and her brother Ken decorated the Christmas tree while their mother worked in the store. It was a small tree, matching their reduced circumstances, set up on a table in the dining room. The two nimble-fingered children worked long and companionably, placing all the decorations on the little tree, deeply pleased with the effect. My grandmother saw it and exploded. Tired though she was, she removed every single decoration, so lovingly hung, before redoing the tree “properly,” she sputtered, “appropriate for a tree that size.”

It’s not hard to imagine the seething anxiety and fatigue that swept away every other consideration, or the children who said nothing, but remembered.

I think back to what drew me to Michael, and what held me, and remember an afternoon in August charged with late-summer warmth rather than burning heat, when he taught my children not to be afraid of snakes. They were seven and five, my daughter and son. Michael lay on his belly on the sun-baked rock and they lay beside him, all three of them watching intently as two water snakes slid through the water and up onto a nearby rock, black and coiling. He was deft at slipping his hand under the upper body, gently lifting, then grasping the lower body with his other hand and getting my children to reach out and touch the black suppleness, the creepy undulation. “These wild creatures have such a different rhythm,” he said.

He could mimic a raven’s call, the gurgle in the throat, the little popping and ponging sounds that accompany the croak. He could mimic the sound of crickets. “They’re sharpening their scythes to cut the grass,” he told my children. He taught them how to build a campfire and he was meticulous, fanatical about the proper use of matches, the danger of wind. I read his past into his precautions. Next to the rapids, we found a family of snakes in among the grass and the rocks, alerted by one brown tail and one brown head poking out from beneath a rock - and then there were many and they were all wriggling on bellies that were almost orange. Copper bellies, Michael said. Garter snakes proliferated; their bellies were the colour of lima beans.

I loved how he hoisted himself effortlessly out of the river onto the raft - the strength of his arms and shoulders, his dexterity, his physical confidence - yet he wasn’t a good swimmer: too many years on the prairie. I was the better swimmer. My children loved to splash him, loved to be around him. He was the least straitlaced, most playful of men. But he didn’t have a lot of time for them and then he had less. When his playfulness disappeared, the verbose, unlistening Michael would appear, and my children and I would drift away.

I read to him. He liked poetry. We worked our way through Ted Hughes, which sort of amused me. Both men were catnip to women, but their true loves were not women, it seemed to me, but animals trying to sneak past the human storm. Michael lay with his head in my lap, listening closely and gradually falling asleep.

He wore dollar-store reading glasses whenever he read
to himself. He followed the lines down the page with his forefinger, then returned to the top and inched his finger down the page a second time like a student reading Hegel. His handwriting was spidery and loose. He watched in simple wonder as my daughter learned to read, reminded of his early agonies, of lying on his back after a day of school, looking at the treetops and the clouds and recovering some sense of his right to exist.

“You don’t get over it,” he said, “failure in elementary school. Other sorrows you might get over, but not that.”

And once he asked me, “I imagine you were good at school?”

It was the most wistful question I had ever heard.

I was always aware when I was with him that I was in the presence of a sad and intricate story, his misery at school, his rescue by Connie, the tragedy of his sister’s death, his hatred of his father and his love of his mother. He told me that his mother had read to him, but she stopped “after my sister burned alive.”

“What was that day like?” I said, after a pause, fully expecting him to change the subject. But in an even tone, without emotion, he said he remembered how she came home sobbing in a yellow dress and stood in the doorway. The hem of her dress was torn, she had chalk on her forehead. It flashed through his mind that she had been cleaning the blackboards and fallen somehow, or had a fight in the schoolyard. But then she stuttered out the words, “Mr. Burns.” That week he saw the man at school. He watched him and hated him for going after his sister and hurting her, but the one he really despised was his father who did
nothing - nothing, that is, except punish Susan, and for what? For
embarrassing
him. He paused in his recounting, and I thought he had stopped and wasn’t going to talk about the fire itself. But then he picked up the thread again. On the night she died, he said, people came up to them afterwards as they stood staring at the smoking ruins - he and his mother and his father and his little sister - to say they were sorry. “They shook my father’s hand.”

I was watching him. He was still speaking in a low, flat voice, but his face had darkened as the story welled up and suddenly the even delivery was gone. “I wanted to kill him,” he said, “even if he was my father. I grew up wishing he’d drop dead. But this was something else. Killing him. Making him suffer like Susan did.” He looked at me then. “I saw her in the window, you know.”

I put my hand on his. He didn’t seem to notice.

He said, “That night all I did was turn my back on him. I don’t think he cared. Or even knew.” He drew his hand away from mine. “My father was the kind of guy who’d come home in a foul mood and strike me on the side of the head. ‘That’s for nothing. Do something and see what you get.’ “

He paused again. He bit at the side of his index finger, tearing off dry skin. “I just wish I knew how it happened. It wouldn’t have taken much - a candle too close to the curtain, or the wind knocking over the lamp.”

He seemed about to say something else.

“What is it?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

His sister came with her sons for a week in July during the only full summer we were together. I liked Evie. She indulged Michael by cooking for him, by mending his clothes, but not necessarily by listening to him talk about himself. “He tries too hard,” she once said to me when he left us to go upstairs. “He always tries too hard when he wants to impress.”

“Not always,” I said.

She didn’t look like him, being stocky, fair haired, pale. I assumed she looked like her father.

She said, “I didn’t see Michael for years, not until after Dad died. I was living in Toronto with Dad’s sister and he showed up one day in his uniform.”

I knew this from Michael, but hearing a story retold has its own power. I asked her how old she had been.

“It was right after the war. I was nineteen. I remember him eating a banana, how thrilled he was, his first banana in six years.”

She and I would have been sitting in the screened-in porch and it would have been late, since we were night owls in the summer. Aware of how different she and Michael were, I asked her how
she
felt about her father.