Alone in the Classroom (8 page)

Her gift was the ability to step back. She saw not a principal with a specialty in French, but a thwarted man mounting
a little production to give his theatrical bent an outlet, and to give himself time with Susan, who displeased him as much as she pleased him, that’s what Connie saw. Females displeased him as much as they pleased him.

Girls were never strapped, it was an unwritten rule, but one girl Parley picked on more than once. A big, well-formed farm girl with a wide, damp face, Sarah Wilkeson, the oldest of a large brood, who often arrived late to school. Parley wielded the strap on her large open palms and she lost control of her bladder. Her humiliation seemed to relax him. He told her to find a cloth and get down on her hands and knees and wipe it up. The whole time he watched her.

Connie heard about it at recess and took Sarah downstairs into the basement to the box that contained a few mismatched mittens and unclaimed items of clothing. She helped the girl change out of her soggy drawers and felt herself become an island of sanity in the girl’s grateful eyes. It was a lesson in emotional geography. Parley was the volcano that rearranged land and air, and she was the outlying island born as a result.

The next day, teaching synonyms, she asked her class for all the words they knew for “punish.” They took turns going to the blackboard and soon they were standing in a cluster, adding more and more words until they filled the board from top to bottom.
Spank, belt, thump, smack, whack, swat, slap, strap, hit, strike, kick, whip, lash, cane, burn, twist, punch, break, knock, rap, bend, shake, poke, pound, thrash, slam, crack, crush, beat, choke
. When Parley came into her classroom at the end of school to work on the play, he stopped
short and scanned the words she had chosen not to erase.

“English,” he said, “has a monosyllabic soul.”

Even with the standing mirror, he could not make the murder scene work. Susan, in dressing gown and slippers, her long hair tied back with a ribbon, sat at a bountiful breakfast table. By now Tess’s father had died, and with the family facing eviction, and no one else to turn to, Tess had allowed bad Alec to come to the rescue, meaning she had become his mistress.

A knocking at the door and
Tess
goes to answer it
. Angel Clare
enters, hatless, weary, ill, back from Brazil. He puts his arms around her and she steps back
.

Tess: It’s too late.
(Pointing to the breakfast table for two, her dressing gown, etc.)

Angel
absorbs the scene and leaves
.

Tess
closes the door and leans against it sobbing
.

Alec
from the cloakroom-bedroom yawns, then calls out:
Tess, bring yourself and my tea in here.

Tess
goes to the table and picks up the cup and saucer. Then she puts them down and picks up a knife
.

Parley had coached John Jacobs to thump his chest with both fists to produce the gruesome, gulping intake that would be his last breath on earth. It was the boy’s moment of glory and he gave it his all, doing it in the schoolyard on command.

Tess
emerges from the bedroom with her cloak half-dragging from one shoulder and carrying her gloves. She tries to put them on, but they slip off her bloody hands
.

Parley instructed Susan, “Understand that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She doesn’t even know they’re a pair of gloves.”

She takes her brush in her half-gloved hands and tries to brush her hair, but the brush bangs against her head
.

Angel
re-enters. He loosens the brush from her rigid fingers, one finger at a time. Puts her cloak over both shoulders
. Come.
They leave together
.

Moments later the
Landlady
rushes in
.

And this was the sticking point. No matter how effective Susan was with her gloves and her hair, everything was ruined by Klara Munz bursting in and yelling, “Mrs. D’Urberville. Mrs. D’Urberville! There’s a red stain on the ceilin’ and blood’s drippin’ down.”

Then one day it occurred to Parley to have Klara say the words in German, followed by broken English, and the effect worked. It sounded like the end of the world.

He paced the schoolyard as he smoked, and she heard him talking to himself sometimes. Not as Michael did, saying, “I’m no good at this,” but in the third person. “Burns was losing his mind.” Or, “Burns was about to lose his temper.” Or, “They decided to torture Burns again.” He said these things looking at his feet, or sometimes looking straight at you, his eyes furious.

One day he had Susan bring Mabel to school, the dog that was a nervous cross between a collie and a spaniel. They were working on the scene when Angel Clare comes back, but much too late, and Tess sobs after she sends him
away. Susan was at the front of the room and the dog lay by the door. Without warning, Parley lunged at the pet as if about to deliver a swift kick. The dog squealed, and Susan cried out and sprang towards her.

“That’s what I want,” Parley said to her. “That look on your face. Remember it and duplicate it.”

Cowering under a desk, the dog vomited, and would not come out when the girl reached for her.

They were to put on two performances of
Tess
late in November in that prairie schoolhouse. They did it a third time, owing to popular demand. Susan Graves made people cry. She was unthreatening and very powerful.

There were some who went to all three performances. Susan was known in Jewel. More than just recognized, she was known. She blossomed in the role. It was one of those transformations we all long for. She became sensuous and warm and human; her body actually looked riper and fuller. You could see what sort of woman she would be at thirty. She even had a consistent accent, rustic-English, and some who didn’t know her thought she came from Dorset. After each show she was applauded heartily and praised. Parley was heard to say, “She has talent. She has a gift.”

Only Mary Miller found something to criticize. She went up to Susan with a smile and fingered her blouse, which was open at the throat. “That’s so unlike you,” she said. “Did he
make
you undo all these buttons?”

“No one made me.” And she removed herself from Miss Miller’s jealousy.

At the first performance, Michael had looked away when his sister came onstage, terrified that she would forget the lines he had heard her rehearsing endlessly behind her closed bedroom door, not in whispers but at full volume, flinging the words about the room. She was
somebody
, he realized, somebody with a purpose. He watched his mother in the audience and that was almost as gratifying, her astonished pride. Even his father seemed impressed.

The second performance was a Saturday matinee and another success. The final performance was to be Saturday night. Susan didn’t come home for supper, she stayed at the school to have extra rehearsal time with Mr. Burns. Michael saw her at six-thirty, when he went over an hour before the show began. She was too keyed up to speak to him, too flushed with glory and alarm. But again, everything went perfectly. She established the pace - that was most striking - she did not rush a single gesture or word.

Oscar Jacobs would say later to Connie during their French lesson that he fell in love with that talented girl.

At the end, during the bows, Parley presented Susan with a bouquet, and Mary Miller tripped over a bench. She landed hard. Connie went to her aid, and when she next looked at the stage, she saw that Parley had put his arm around Susan. They were taking a bow together. For the first time, Susan seemed stiff, self-conscious. That had been the wonder of her, how at home she had been on the little stage, but now she looked ready to flee.

Monday morning, Mary turned up leaning on her mother’s cane.

“I have weak ankles,” she told Connie at recess, “which is surprising given how thick they are.”

Parley was pacing on the far side of the schoolyard. They watched him, and Connie said, “Why do you suppose he smiles like that?”

“Like what?”

Connie imitated the clamp of his bared teeth.

“I would never ask. That’s his business,” Mary said.

Connie turned away from the prim dead end beside her to watch the children milling about. The schoolyard was threaded with stories. There was Susan Graves not far from a cluster of girls, but not exactly one of them, admired rather than embraced. There was Elsa, whose pale reading face only occasionally looked up from a book; her brother had been killed by lightning while riding on a load of hay in 1927. There was Tula, talented with a crayon, whose persistent headaches were worrisome in a child of nine. Like all the girls, she wore long underwear under her dress and overshoes buckled up with three buckles. Michael was tussling with Red Peter, whose father broke horses and had competed in the Imperial Rodeo in Wembley, England, in 1924. There was Miss Fluelling, her scalp be-pencilled with the noodlings of a four-year-old. And here was Parley turning up the collar of his coat and coming towards her.

Now that the play was over, he began to walk her home again, and to Connie it felt like subtle persecution. It felt like that, she didn’t know if it was. It felt like he saw
through her, read her mind, and at the same time she was obscure to him, and he was indifferent to her. After a few days of this, she said she preferred to walk home alone, having things on her mind she wanted to think about. “Oh,” he said. “Pardon me for ruining your day.” And he fell back and maintained a twenty-five-foot gap between them. In the end, it seemed simpler to endure his company.

The days were much shorter now. They walked home in the dark - Parley to Mrs. Wilson’s porridge, Connie to more potatoes. Recently, Mrs. Kowalchuk had taken to tossing them hot and thickly sliced into a bowl with thinly sliced onions, which cooked a little in their heat, then a splash of vinegar, and salt and pepper; they were delicious.

Towards Christmas she began to read “A Christmas Carol” to her class, and one afternoon she had them write up the story in scenes (they knew all about scenes from staging the play), and Michael wrote, “Scrooge woke up at 12 o’clock he lisend to the big booms of the clock the big booms the loud full sounds of the big clok.”

Connie corrected his spelling and punctuated his rolling repetition. “Scrooge woke up at 12 o’clock. He listened to the big booms of the clock, the big booms, the loud, full sounds of the big clock.”

He had gone on to write about “aproching as sighlently as humanly possible” and “weighting in the black scielence of the savadgely wether beten trees.”

His way with words was like a small child’s way with colour - an aptitude that generally fades into eight-year-old mist. And his good vocabulary came from where? “Do your parents like to read?”

“My father says my mother reads every day and most of the night.”

Connie went to see her, the brunette, who welcomed her and told her that Michael had been the quickest child, walking at nine months, talking before he was one, remembering the words to the songs she sang, loving to cook with her in the kitchen. “I would read him things and suddenly discover that he knew them. ‘The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow, Gave the lustre of midday to objects below.’ But when I tried to teach him to read, we got nowhere. Nothing was wrong with his eyes, either. He could see a ladybug at a hundred feet. In grade one he tore out two-thirds of his hair, he was so frustrated. I found tufts of it behind his bed and under the chair. But he talks and thinks
well
.”

Her son reminded her, she said, of an older brother who had also been backward in reading, though sharp as a tack in other ways.

Connie asked what had become of him, this older brother.

Well, that was a sad story. He got in with the wrong sort, and died young and badly. She had named Michael after him. “My sister spent hours teaching my brother. She would do the same for Michael, but we’re so far away. Pontiac County. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it.”

Connie knew it well enough. It was in Quebec, across the river from where she was born, a wooded and rolling part of the world with some good farmland.

The next day, on one of those awkward walks home with Parley, Connie found herself talking about her visit
to Mrs. Graves. “I wish I knew what to do. I wish I
knew
more.”

“Not every child is a scholar,” he said. “You can’t gift-wrap a toad.”

She pushed her hands deeper into her pockets.

“You think I’m harsh. But either you have it or you don’t.”

He wore an aftershave scent and she smelled it in her room sometimes when she turned her head quickly. There he was, perched on her shoulder and floating around her head.

Connie didn’t tell Parley that she was taking French lessons, but he knew. He began to speak to her in French, and she would have to ask him to repeat himself and still not understand. It was a little game he played. You should have come to
me
for French lessons.

In December, the school geared up for the customary Christmas concert of recitations, songs, drills, plays, a mighty endeavour that involved every child and turned Connie’s classroom back into a theatre. The children stayed in at recess writing out copies of the songs and skits, they stayed after school and helped each other memorize their parts, and soon whole Friday afternoons were given over to practising. Tula drew Christmas scenes freehand on the blackboard with coloured chalk, and it was her idea to string across the ceiling blue crepe paper of various
lengths in a great X-shaped fringe that moved prettily in the air currents.

At noon on the Friday of the evening concert, the children went home and the school trustees came in and set up a Christmas tree in the hallway and adorned it with glass and paper ornaments. Everyone came back in the evening dressed in their best to see the splendid tree and underneath it, for each child, a bag of candies, nuts, and oranges. As with
Tess
, the school filled up until there was standing room only.

Parley didn’t don the Santa beard or the comic wig. He was the director, never the ham. Connie loved to wear a costume. Mrs. Kowalchuk had provided her with an old taffeta ballgown her mother had worn, and she sashayed about calling herself Madame Pompadour. It was afterwards - after the children had sung their final chorus and the bags of treats were handed out, after the mothers had served the evening lunch of coffee, sandwiches, and cake and the room was cleared for dancing, after the caller had announced the first of many dances and everyone, even Parley, danced until two in the morning, after “Home, Sweet Home” had been played and everyone gathered up their things to leave - it was after this that Parley put his hand on Connie’s shoulder and asked her to stay behind. They would tidy up a bit. He took the broom to the scattered orange peels, nutshells, and cigarette butts on the floor, while she brushed crumbs and wrappings off the lunch table into a waste basket. Then he put aside the broom and came over to her and stood so close that she felt her knees give way a little. He put a small wrapped box into her hands.