Alone in the Classroom (3 page)

He liked to enter her classroom without warning. A curt nod in her direction, and her hand went to her throat and the students rose in a single swoosh, a covey of grouse flushed by a gunshot, but no escape, no sky, for there was the peeling
plafond
above their heads. He swept the class with his pale eyes, then proceeded to a straight-backed chair in the corner in the back. He sat down and the children followed suit.

A school with a classroom on either side of the hallway on the first floor, then a flight of stairs to a landing that functioned as a library of two bookcases, then the rest of the stairs to the second floor of two connected classrooms and the principal’s office. On the first floor were the lower grades taught by ancient Miss Margaret Fluelling and the middle grades under young Miss Connie Flood. On the second floor were the upper grades shared by Miss Mary Miller and Mr. Ian Burns, neither young nor old, either of
them. Whenever Parley patrolled the halls or visited the other classrooms, Miss Miller supervised his pupils.

Parley. It was pronounced behind his back with the derisive respect reserved for the over-educated. Oh, he was aware of it. But that was nothing, nothing to how aware the three women were of him.

They formed a classic school harem. Mary Miller, thirty-six, a plain woman but she dressed well, a different dress each week, usually navy with white piping or some white lace, four dresses in all rotated through the months. Very sensible shoes, owing to a back problem. Whenever Parley came to the door of her room, she blushed a most beautiful blush from the base of her throat to the roots of her hair - a surge of crimson, the rolling out of a red carpet that ebbed not in reverse, but all at once, if gradually. What fun it was to follow it with your eyes.

Downstairs, Miss Fluelling, fifty-three, like a man wore the same suit day after day, a mustard-coloured wool suit with wide lapels and a straight skirt. Her thinning grey hair made a ratty bun. She scratched her head with the point of a pencil so frequently that you could see scribbles all over her scalp.

Across the hall, lanky, athletic Connie Flood, eighteen, loped when she walked and dropped into a chair as if her limbs had given way. Five foot eight in high heels (she changed into flats at recess). White tailored shirt, straight black skirt, long wavy dark hair in a ponytail. The same build as my father, the same loose-limbed physical grace.
The town doesn’t exist anymore. It rose overnight from whole grass into wooden sidewalks, railway station, grain elevators, houses, stores, churches, school. Then life rubbed the other way and the pattern disappeared. Nothing is left save a tiny chapel and the remains of a wooden sidewalk hidden by weeds. The buildings went to make granaries in the 1950s after the crops came back but not the people. A hundred years ago, however, they came from all over, from Ontario, the United States, Britain, Scandinavia, central and eastern Europe. Foreign tongues abounded. A child born in Ontario could grow up in Jewel, Saskatchewan, and travel the world and feel oddly at home. (The same child could go back to Ontario, an adult, and find herself crossing paths time and again with people she had known in the West.)

Given what Parley Burns did and what happened to him in the end, Connie never tired of mulling over what kind of person he was deep down. He wasn’t handsome, she told me, but he was distinguished and very attractive to lonely women. Something fashionable, almost feminine in his manner unsettled and excited them - a sensitivity channelled into the dry-bed of bachelorhood. Yet he was far from dry. He was an intricately wired man. The smell of eggs turned his stomach.

He smiled (when he smiled) by baring his teeth, then holding the grimace to a count of five. A long time; a very long time if you were suggestible.

I picture them in the schoolyard, him and Connie, side by side. They’re watching the best-looking boy play ball and play well, but Parley accuses him of making a feeble
throw.”From
faible,”
he says to Connie, “meaning weak.”

She would have returned his unnatural smile with something natural and he would have felt encouraged to go on, to say that the English forget that starting in 1066 the Court of England was a piece of France for three centuries. “Almost a thousand years have gone by and it’s as hard for the English to learn French as it ever was. Only an unusual person will take the necessary pains.”

Her eyes had a way of crinkling when she saw through you. Parley reminded her of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, the same vanity and self-importance. She asked him where he had learned French, and he told her he had perfected his command of the language in
la belle France
. She egged him on. She asked about Paris. The shining city, he called it, a cultured world of paintings, bridges, parks, long walks in the rain. He had worked his way over to France on a freighter and worked while he was there on a farm, and the labour came easily, because he was one of six children raised on a rough and stony farm in Quebec near a village where everyone spoke French. “All six of us,” he said, “were raised to ask what we could contribute to the world. And so two of us are doctors and two are ministers and two are schoolteachers.” When he spoke about Paris, the stiffening went out of him, and when he spoke about contributing to the world, the stiffening went back in.

They were Mr. Burns and Miss Flood to each other - again with the echo of Darcy. Not that Connie had ever been convinced. Oh yes, the wealth. But Darcy had no sense of humour. How could Lizzie be happy married to a prig? In her opinion, Lizzie was by no means wrong in
her first impression and by no means entirely right in her second. Would Mr. Darcy really make her happy? And by “happy” Connie meant in bed.

October. With Indian summer came the last gasp of sundresses and bare legs. A girl brushed her hair at recess - a few long black loose hairs collected on the back of her yellow dress, looping lines, like a butterfly. Susan Graves. The brush twice the size of her hand. Her yellow back, and the long hairs shedding as she stroked, until six of them drifted in uneasy decoration. The power of hair to unsettle. Her legs with their soft nap of fine hairs, her arms.

In the hall, as she passed under his eye, Parley Burns touched the strap of her sundress - an intelligent man.
Strap
, he said, and the word in translation,
la bretelle
.

Susan was not the prettiest girl in school, but there was something about her that struck him. Nervousness, willowiness, shyness, apartness.

Beige walls and chalk dust. Enclosed air, the quiet of students writing, and suddenly, in passing, the sound of crows.

The final class of the day. He lingered after Connie dismissed her pupils - they were gathering up their things when he came forward, not to speak to her, Miss Flood, but to Susan. He asked the girl to stay behind at her desk. The pupils left. Connie took her papers and left too. Susan was alone with Parley Burns.

Susan Graves had a brother, the good-looking boy who liked baseball. Michael was a year older, but three grades behind her. The physical resemblance was strong, the same dark hair and blue eyes and high colour in their cheeks. Outside, Michael’s glance was full of amusement, mischief, secret ambition. His voice was loud and undiminished: hear me roar. In a classroom, he was pitiful.

After Parley Burns took over the school, he released Connie from her valiant efforts on behalf of
la belle langue
and she concentrated on English grammar, on assertive, interrogative, imperative sentences. Example of the latter? The house is on fire! Run! Run! Parley moved Susan into his own class and deposited fourteen-year-old Michael with “capable Miss Flood, who will take you in hand.”

Parley was not the only one who claimed the boy was unteachable. None too bright, said Miss Fluelling, who had watched his lack of progress from the age of seven. A boy who read and wrote laboriously, grindingly, though memory work was no problem. Poems and songs he recited without effort and numbers in his head were a snap. But they all did a strange soft-shoe when he wrote them down. He survived because so many others were behind too - children who arrived not knowing English and were removed at regular, arbitrary intervals to help with the seeding and harvesting. He survived because at recess he ran and ran and shook off the hounds of learning. His father was a man of standing from Ontario. Owner of the hardware store in the centre of town and the big white frame house across the road from the school.

Michael interested Connie from the first moment. She was intrigued by his cockiness in the schoolyard and by his affection for his sister: he teased, admired, listened to her. In her own experience brothers and sisters were close when the parents were not, and she wondered about Mr. and Mrs. Graves, the former bull-like in appearance and the latter the most attractive woman in town.

She had also wondered about Parley alone in her classroom with Susan and had paused on the way down the front steps, unresolved. Then she had turned and gone back up the stairs and into the school.

She waited in the hallway near the closed door, moving her load of workbooks from one arm to another. The young Prince of Wales kept her company, his framed
likeness on the wall beside the door. In those days nothing animated her mind more than fantasies of rescue, and of those fantasies, the most vivid involved rescuing not a friend, but an enemy. To rescue a lamb has merit; to rescue a wolf quickens the pulse. She was anxious on Susan’s behalf, but her inner dramatist leapt forward to Parley behind bars, and she was visiting him, bringing books into his pale, tormented, despicable life.

The door opened and she was the guilty party.

“Susan has agreed to help out,” he said. “We’re forming a drama club and she’s going to help me organize it.”

Nothing bad about that, although the play in mind gave pause. Scenes from
Tess
starring Susan as the ill-fated beauty. But he was a staple of the curriculum - pessimistic, erotic Thomas Hardy.

They were halfway through October. At midday Connie sat on the back steps of the school paring an apple with an old penknife when around the corner came Michael Graves returning from the noon-hour dinner break. Her smile, the unreserved smile of this pretty teacher, had him reaching into his pocket and offering her his jackknife, wickedly sharp. Then he simplified matters by taking over the apple. He sat on the step beside her and proceeded to display an exactitude, a hatred of waste, a remarkable aptitude with his hands. One thin, continuous peel slid off his blade and curled into his lap. His hands were sunburnt and dry and nicked, familiar with gopher holes and fox diggings and snake squirmings.

The same feeling of fascination came over her that used to settle on her as a child watching her mother bandage a cut knee, or roll a lemon under her palm, or scrape batter off her fingers with a bone-handled knife, or peel potatoes with such infinite regard for the flesh that her peelings too were skin-thin and elegant. How it lulls a person, the sight of work done easily and well and without conscious thought.

A shadow fell over them. Parley moved through the school like mustard gas in subtle form. You were aware afterwards that you’d been poisoned.

From behind them, “So, there’s
something
he can do.”

Michael’s nut-brown face went scarlet and he was gone.

“Fifteen years old and thick as a plank.”

An unpleasant voice. It had an unending complaint in it, a tone of resentment, a sourness.

“Fourteen,” she said.

She fixed her eyes on the naked apple Michael had shoved into her hands. Parley went back inside and she ate it; she swallowed it down. Then she stood up, wiped her hands on her handkerchief, and watched all the brave children come back to school.

At home (she boarded with the Kowalchuks, who had the barbershop), she prepared her lessons, the old speller her favourite diversion, the early lessons as opposed to the advanced. Who had written this speller? Anonymous, like the makers of medieval churches. In the early sample sentences,
everything was an action, a picture, and how absorbing and comforting the sentences were.

From there she flipped ahead to advanced Grade
VII
, where sentences lost their loveliness, their physical charge, and became riddles spoken with too many teeth. “The peevish patient suffers keenly from swollen tonsils.” “The shrewd sentinel visited a Turkish bazaar.” “It is quite probable that he will entrust his mettlesome horse to the reliable hostler.”

In the same fashion, child advanced to adult, to inscrutable Parley Burns. “The auditor found traces of tactful swindling.” “His ill-humoured demeanour resulted from a trivial dispute with his employer.” “Neither dyspepsia nor neuralgia is conducive to vivacity.”