Alone in the Classroom (7 page)

“A yellow dog appeared early in the morning to announce deaths.”

“So before your grandmother hung herself -“

“Hanged.”

“- hanged herself. You saw the dog.”

“Out by the water pump.”

He didn’t wear gloves or a hat or overshoes, but his scarf was tightly coiled around his neck.

“Granny Rose made a job of it,” he said. “She got up on the hayloft and tied one end of the rope around the beam and the other end around her neck, and then she jumped. I thought it was a wild turkey hanging down. A dead body is
heavy
. They cut the rope and they needed two men to hold her as she came down.”

He lit another cigarette with his bluish-white fingers, the black hairs smoothly attractive between the knuckles. “A year later my sister was born with a strangle mark around her neck. Girls are lucky. They can hide things under their long hair.”

That queasy fall of 1929 was like being at sea on an anchored boat. The school rocked in the unfathomable waves of Parley. His way of looking at Connie, at Susan, at girls in general. His way of looking at Michael. He wasn’t aware
he wasn’t alone, or didn’t care. They weren’t a director’s eyes, assessing talent. Or bedroom eyes. They were more like the eyes of a night prowler standing outside your bedroom window.

There was the day he rounded on Connie for heaving a theatrical sigh of exasperation just for the pleasure of it. “Having an artistic temperament,” he snapped, “does not make you an artist.”

It was obvious he was talking about his savage disappointment in himself and it was childish of him to be so transparent in his self-pity. She folded her arms and asked him why, with his love of theatre, he wasn’t
in
theatre, why was he here in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of nobodies.

Her forthright temper quieted him, just as it settled down a class. An honest answer came sheepishly out of his mouth. He had tried to be an actor. He didn’t have the talent.

“I wasn’t good enough. That’s the truth.”

A trim, tall, disdainful man. He pursed his lips, picked up a pencil and sharpened it to a fine point in the pencil sharpener screwed to the edge of her scuffed and darkly varnished desk. But he was more real to her now, more human.

Word filtered from his landlady, Mrs. Wilson, to Mrs. Kowalchuk, and from Mrs. Kowalchuk to Connie, that he was a perfectly ordered man who liked a bowl of porridge for breakfast and a bowl of porridge before bed.
Porridge-breath, thought Connie, for whatever sorry woman might share his bed.

Over the years she would read widely and catch glimpses of Parley Burns in figures like Odin, the Norse god, solemn, aloof, and so abstemious that he gave any food set before him to the two wolves at his feet. All she had to do was pull an egg sandwich out of her lunch pail, and he fled.

One day he called Jake Aarp a Sassenach for not remembering his lines as Sir John Durbeyfield, then wrote
Sassenach
on the blackboard. “To the dictionary,” he said. Jake found the word and reported back that a Sassenach was what the Celts called an Englishman.

“An invading, unwelcome Englishman,” Parley said.

He illuminated the insult by pulling down the roller map of Europe and using a pointer to show where the Angles and Saxons and Jutes sailed across the North Sea and invaded England in 449. “They slaughtered the native Celts, who either fled or, like King Arthur, resisted. But gradually the old Celts were driven westward,” he said, “and in their place the Anglo-Saxons set up seven kingdoms, including Hardy’s Wessex,
here
. The beaten Celts called the Anglo-Saxon invaders Sassenachs, from which we get
Saxon
. Then a few hundred years later, the Norsemen swept down, murdering, plundering, pillaging, until Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, fought back. In 878 he had his great victory at the battle of Ethandune, right about
here
. The Danes retreated, and Alfred rebuilt the monasteries and schools and saved the English language from disappearing. Hence, ‘Great.’ Two hundred years later
came the Norman Conquest of 1066, and French entered the picture, enriching primitive English with thousands of beautiful words like ‘enter’ and ‘enrich.’
Entrer. Enrichir.”

He called them the “Hardy Players
du nouveau monde
.” They were all assembled now. The boy who would play Alec was a fourteen-year-old with a head of thick dark hair named John Jacobs, older brother of brown-eyed Tula. “Goodbye, my four months’ cousin,” he rolled off his tongue, “I was born bad, and lived bad, and should die bad.”

Parley had also settled on who would play the parson’s son, the great love of Tess’s life, “educated, reserved, subtle, sad, differing” Angel Clare.

“You’re the type,” he said to Michael, interrupting his reading lesson with Connie. Having fled the invading thespians, she was now using Miss Fluelling’s classroom for after-school tutoring. “You’ll have no trouble learning the lines, not with that memory of yours. Here.” He put a grey fedora on Michael’s head.

“You can’t have the brother playing the husband,” Connie said.

“Come now. It’s just acting.”

“They
aren’t
actors.”

She stood up and Michael took off the fedora, and Stefan Fuchs got saddled with the weak and unconvincing character of Angel Clare.

It really wasn’t hard, she discovered, to hold her own against Parley, even if she felt shaken afterwards, more soiled than triumphant. She thought she had his measure: he was harmless so long as you didn’t let yourself be pushed around. Such miscalculations abound. News
drifted in about millionaires throwing themselves out of windows, but no one in 1929 had any idea that the world was entering the Great Depression. It took two years, Connie told me, for the truth to settle in.

To give the effect of oncoming disaster, Parley covered oil lamps with red tissue paper. “Make them a little uncomfortable,” he said of the future audience. “If they have to strain to see, they’ll pay more attention.”

He wooed the same way, if wooing it was. With extra energy he leaned forward and said to Connie, “Flirt comes from
fleur
. To give flowers.”

She had to smile as she looked away. He wasn’t like anyone else.

If Connie failed to understand him, what was a thirteen-year-old girl to make of this complicated man?

“Susan,” he said in his lordly way,
“Miss Graves
. Do me the kindness of remembering that Tess calls the letter ‘my life.’ You must handle it as if it is precious.”

He was referring to Tess’s written confession about her sinful past (the seduction by Alec; the infant who died) to Angel Clare, the pastor’s son she dotes on and hopes to marry.

“Susan, what is the most important thing in the world to you?”

Her lips moved.

“I can’t hear you.”

Her eyes sought the window and the window provided an answer, as it often does. “My dog.”

“Your dog. What’s the dog’s name?”

“Mabel.”

“Pretend the letter is Mabel.”

A stepladder served as the stairs leading up to Angel’s attic room. A carpeted board nailed to the top of the ladder was the threshold of the pretend doorway. Susan climbed the steps and slid the folded letter halfway under the threshold, then gave it a gentle caress before pushing it very slowly the rest of the way.

Connie watched, fascinated by the terrible moment when Tess’s life slides not across the floor into Angel’s view, but out of sight under the carpet. Susan had an extraordinarily sensitive face.

Parley kept lines to a minimum. The play was more like the re-enactment of a crime scene, a pantomimed version of an old, sad story. To convey the plot and the passage of time, he wrote big inter-titles on the blackboard, like the written frames in silent pictures.

TESS THINKS ANGEL HAS FORGIVEN HER
.

THE WEDDING GOES FORWARD
.

“Before the wedding,” he said to Susan, “you’ll brush your hair. Then after the murder, you’ll brush your hair again, and the contrast will speak volumes.”

Pre-wedding Susan ran her hands up through the hair on the back of her head, then brushed her hair slowly and thoughtfully. She put on a pair of white gloves. The stepladder on its side became the altar where she and Angel knelt and were married.

TESS TELLS ANGEL HER PAST
.

HE ABANDONS HER AND GOES TO BRAZIL
.

A YEAR PASSES
.

SCENE:
The town where Angel’s parents live
.

Now the stepladder on its side becomes the hedge into which Tess shoves her boots before putting on shoes to enter Angel’s town and seek help from his parents.

The stage consisted of six boxes, four feet by six feet wide and eighteen inches high, pushed together, and built by the boys under Michael’s supervision. Parley’s landlady had sewn the curtain from scraps of sheets and counterpanes dyed black. Parley hung them on a long pole suspended from the ceiling, and two boys opened and closed them.

Connie, curious about Hardy (who had died the year before) and even more curious about Parley the bachelor, said to him, “When you saw Thomas Hardy, was he with his wife? Did he
have
a wife?”

“She was sitting right beside him. I didn’t get a good look, I was too far away. That would have been his second wife. His first wife died, and he married someone much younger.”

“Were there children?”

“None he admitted to.”

Interesting.

Like school,
Tess
was bursting with sex, yet leached of it. School oozed prepuberty, puberty, post-puberty, premenopause, menopause. Connie never tired of watching Mary blush. Never stopped looking to see if Parley returned her interest. She felt his eyes follow her instead,
a glance she one day returned with a level stare until he clicked his teeth and looked away.

Tess
underlay all other subjects, like lace brought from the old country. Dorset on the Canadian plains, and the plains worked their way into the story.

“Propsy,” Parley cried, “find me a big mirror.”

One of the children, Tula, offered up the fact that her grandfather had a standing mirror in a mahogany frame. Tula took Miss Miller, who enlisted Connie for moral support, to see the old man known as the scholar of Jewel, thanks to his glass-fronted bookcase full of books. Oscar Jacobs.

He was small, nimble, leathery, a reformed alcoholic from Montreal whose farming son had come west to own land and cultivate it scientifically. (This was Tula’s father.) The old man himself had been a peddler of fabrics and threads until his wife opened a dry goods shop in Montreal, which they ran together until she died. He welcomed the two teachers and his granddaughter into his snug house that smelled of peppermint and woodsmoke and introduced them to the pet crow that came and went through a half-open window in the summer kitchen. “Esau, meet Miss Flood, meet Miss Miller.” Then he found a dust cloth and polished the handsome mirror, which happened to be perfect for their needs.

Proudly, Tula opened the glass doors of her grandfather’s bookcase, and Connie smelled the smell she would spend the rest of her life walking into. (I remember being
with her once in a used bookstore on Queen Street in Toronto when it began to rain. While we waited, we fell into conversation with the owner, a man from Medicine Hat, who told us that the dry summers and winters in the prairies were benevolent towards books, whereas the humid east ruined them with mildew. Connie was looking for illustrated books about birds for a friend of hers who carved wood. At the time I didn’t know who the friend was, but now I know it was Michael.)

Oscar Jacobs drew from his bookcase a copy of
Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible
. “Travellers leave books behind,” he said to Connie and Mary as he opened it. He read out the name in the front. ” ‘Mrs. Harry Stumpf, Wiarton, Ontario.’ “

“I’ve heard of Wiarton,” Connie said. “But not Mrs. Stumpf!”

He put the book away and pulled out another.
Madame Bovary
. “I remember particularly,” he said, “how she changes colour after she poisons herself. Such a beautiful woman.”

And the woman in Mary who wanted to be beautiful said, “What made her beautiful?”

“Her great dark eyes and dark hair. Full lips, small teeth. She was outstandingly beautiful. Mrs. Graves reminds me of Emma Bovary. Wilda.”

“Is that Mrs. Graves’s name?” Connie said. “Wilda?”

“La brunette
.”

“You speak French.”

“Bad French. Very bad.”

“You could teach me.”

He raised his eyebrows, and she explained what it had been like trying to teach French without being able to speak a word, and he allowed that he would be honoured to teach her whatever he knew.

After a second’s hesitation, she ventured, “And how much would the lessons be?”

That drew a smile. “I don’t have any material in French, you know, except for the Eaton’s catalogue.”

And so Connie would learn the French words for various hats and dresses and fabrics and shoes.
Toile
and
chiffon
and
tweed importe
and
flanelle
and
crepe de chine
and
chambray
or cambric, the smooth cotton that took its name, he told her, from Cambrai, the town in northern France that manufactured it. She learned a peddler’s poetic and utilitarian French, and it suited her.
Un chic ornement de metal embellit le collet. Une valeur remarquable. Le dernier cri du chic
. Galosh, it turned out, came from the French
galoche
. Every child’s pleasure, sloshing along in the spring in unbuckled galoshes, long underwear folded just right to keep young legs from being rubbed sore, was steeped in an old French word.

Oscar had true European charm. He offered her nuts and candies. His hands were olive skinned and shiny, large hands for such a small man. Against his protests, she paid him twenty-five cents a lesson.