Duet for Three (5 page)

“That would be very kind. If you're sure it wouldn't be too much trouble.”

It was not. He came down to the kitchen after supper the next night with a book, and began to teach her. Which, as it turned out, was what he liked to do best. Her brothers giggled, as their mother hustled them out of the way.

Aggie and he made various kinds of progress. To her surprise, she did rather enjoy the lessons. She could see how there might be something to this, trying to understand, like a game or a puzzle. It was humiliating to know so few words. “Read it to me,” she asked him, and he seemed pleased to do so. By watching closely, she could learn.

She was released from after-supper housework. “No,” her mother said, “you spend the time at your lessons,” and told the teacher, “Aggie's so bright, it's a shame she had to leave school. It's nice, you helping her this way.”

Peeling potatoes, Aggie memorized poems. Her brothers teased her. “Eyes on the teacher, that's what.”

“Call me Neil,” he told her. “This isn't a classroom, I'm not Mr. Hendricks here.” She thought that gracious and informal.

He said, “I'll pick out what you should read,” and handed her small volumes of poems, about flowers and sunsets mainly. “You have to be careful, you know, what things are suitable.” She would have liked stories. After a while, she got a little tired of flowers and sunsets, but he explained they must move cautiously. Some books, some words, he said, should not be exposed to women. Or women to them. She was never clear if his care was for the purity of learning, or the virtue of the female. Possibly both.

She was pleased that when he read aloud, his voice deepened with authority. He said he was pleased with her progress. It was true that she was a keen pupil, likely the best he had, since she was aiming for more than his other students: the man himself.

“Now,” he would say, finished reading, “what do you think the poet is trying to say?” A teacher's dream, she must have been, someone bright he could train from scratch.

“It's important to speak properly,” he told her, correcting mistakes in her grammar. “Language, if it's used precisely, provides precise communication. Proper use of words enables us to know exactly what another person means.” Could that really be true? If so, it would certainly prevent a lot of misunderstanding.

One thing it did mean was that she now spotted mistakes of speech other members of her family made. It seemed to open a space.

Her fantasies shifted. Now she saw the two of them, in some other house. He would be reading and working at the kitchen table, and she would be sewing, cooking, and preserving. He would talk to her about a poem while upstairs, chubby, rosy, dark-haired children would be asleep. It was a warm picture, although it didn't raise much heat.

Looking at him, so different from the man she had envisioned, she began to consider bones instead of flesh.

But then there was also what she taught him. Sometimes after a lesson they went for walks out into the snowy fields where cold air bit at their throats. Out there, that was where she knew things. They went through the stable, where cows' breath made steam in the air and the bull stood stamping, held to a post by a rope through a nose ring. Above, in the barn, she showed him the hay mows and the trapdoors through which the feed was shovelled into troughs below. He walked behind her cautiously, unfamiliar with the smells and the spots where the floor might disappear beneath his feet, and the huge animals he seemed timid of, although she told him they were gentle, with the exception of the bull.

When spring came, they walked in the fields, along the lane and by the creek, watching the water flood the banks as the snow melted. “It feels dangerous to me,” he confided. “There's so much space and emptiness.”

She listened carefully. He didn't often speak about what he saw or how he felt, except to do with poems.

“We had such a little garden at home, compared with this.”

Obviously he did not understand the rules of space, and people's own tight ways of dealing with it, the stone fences and the small farms methods of containment.

But she didn't know how to explain that sort of thing. “Yes, I see,” she said, but she didn't. She thought she must be, after all, only an ignorant farm girl, unable to understand the menace in what he saw, or tell him what she saw. She might know how to make a perfect pastry, and feed a dozen hungry men at threshing time, but she would never be able to properly express what a poet meant to say.

She was flattered by his attention, but terrified he would discern the scope of her ignorance.

What did he see? It was possible he only viewed her as a pupil, a pretty dark-haired girl who would bend obligingly over his lessons, until it was time for him to leave.

Around the house, she was a little absent-minded. “Mooning about the teacher,” her brothers laughed.

“You shush,” said her mother. “Leave your sister alone. It wouldn't do you two any harm to pay more attention to what Mr. Hendricks has to say. It's a chance to learn, having a teacher in the house. He won't be here forever, you know.”

“Boy, that's good,” said her smallest brother.

“Do you like him, then?” her mother asked later. She meant a good deal more, including, “Do you like him enough?” and “Does he like you, and is anything going to come of this?”

“Yes, I think so, he's very nice,” Aggie told her, meaning that she liked him enough and had some hopes.

The cows were released into the fields. Aggie's father and the boys were mucking out the stalls, and the spring air in the evenings was cool and sharp. It smelled to Aggie of greenness and freshness, nicely spiced by manure.

But after a while the teacher would say, “Let's go back in,” and at the door he would scrape and scrape the boots he'd borrowed from her father. Sometimes he seemed to be holding his breath. She thought, “Well, it might not smell so good to somebody who isn't used to it.”

(Frances, intrigued by differing versions, used to ask about him. “He was a good man,” June would tell her. “A gentleman, a saint.”

(“Listen,” Aggie said, leaning forward, “you want to know what kind of man he was? Listen — what your grandfather was, really, was a man who couldn't stand to have shit on his boots.”)

It was May when he mentioned marriage. The day before, he'd gotten a letter from a town sixty miles away. Mail for him, for anyone for that matter, was rare.

He closed the books, ending their lesson at the kitchen table, and said, “I've been offered another job next year. In a town school. I'd just be teaching two grades, and they'd be paying me more.”

What did he expect her to say? “That's wonderful. You must be pleased. Are you going to take it?”

“I think so. It seems a good move.” He stacked the books and picked uncomfortably at the yellow oilcloth tacked to the table. “I've been thinking, I'm twenty-eight now, and this position will be secure. It's a nice town, well-kept and prosperous. I think you'd like it.”

“Would I?” Imagine how hard, being the man and having to be the first to speak. So risky, leaving yourself open like that.

“So I wondered how you would feel about getting married this summer. I could go on ahead and get us a house, and we'd be there for the beginning of school. I'd like to settle, you see. Have a family. Could you think about it? It'll be quite a different sort of life, but you might like it.”

He didn't mention love or desire, so neither did she. She ought to have asked why he was asking, though. She failed to see past her own picture, which was what she loved: the two of them, warm and companionable in the kitchen, teaching and learning, with unseen children sleeping upstairs.

She measured his mouth and his slender body. There were magical parts to marriage. He was right that it would be a different sort of life. Who knew what was out there, in other places? Potential delights were being laid out like candies at Christmas, so of course she said, “Oh, but I'd like to marry you, very much, thank you.”

“Good then, I'm glad.” Then he didn't quite know what to do and stood, gathering up the books, and said only, “Well then, I'll see you tomorrow.”

“I'll miss you, Aggie,” her mother said. “You'll be a long way off. But I'm pleased for you, really.”

Aggie herself could not yet feel the distance.

Now when they went for walks they touched lips chastely at the door before going back inside. They held hands, too, although lightly, a connection of fingers, not palms. At night in her bed, she imagined him beside her, and wished for a little impropriety.

He continued his instruction with the poems at the kitchen table, but also with other information elsewhere.

“It's not a big town,” he told her, “but it's prosperous, and the school is good. For one thing, children aren't expected to drop out to help at home, or at least most of them don't. It will be quite different from living here, and you'll be a long way from your family. I hope you won't be unhappy,” and he looked at her anxiously.

“Then there's being a teacher's wife, you may find that an adjustment. There are certain standards for a teacher, he has a position to maintain, and his wife is the same, she has a certain position as well.”

Was he worried? Did he think she would embarrass him?

“No, no, not at all. It's just that you're young, and there are expectations you're not used to. Things like entertaining parents of my pupils and other people with some position. It will be a different class of people, that's all I meant.”

All? She had a flash of resentment, on behalf of her parents, her sisters and brothers, the people of the area, who were not, apparently, quite good enough. Also, he sounded like a teacher, not a — what? Fiancé? It was hard to find the word for him. Anyway, he was using that deeper, more assured tone of his poem-teaching.

But it was quite true that, without instruction, she might well fail to measure up. And it was also true that the big, ruddy members of her family would not fit comfortably in a banker's parlor, there was no getting around that.

“But don't worry,” he assured her, “you'll do fine, I know.”

He made the future sound like a foreign country. She would not be popping back and forth like Sylvia, just down the road.

He went away to find a house for them, and while he was gone the neighbors held showers and she came away with hand-embroidered pillowcases and towels with monograms. Her new initials would be AH, which looked like either an expression of delight or a sigh, stitched out like that.

“You'll be so far away,” said Edith, as they lay whispering in their beds.

Aggie imagined lying in bed whispering to her husband.

Her mother came to her, sat uncomfortably on the edge of the bed. “I'm sure you know, Aggie, that there are things that will happen when you're married? That married people do?”

Well, everyone knew certain things, just from seeing the cows with the bull, and the cats in the barn with their litters of kittens. Obviously something more would be involved with people, since they were not mere animals, and her own body hinted at longings, if not at how they might be resolved.

“What you have to remember,” her mother explained, “is that men are made differently. They get their pleasure with their wives, and a woman's pleasure is in her children. So you have to be patient and wait. Do you see? Whatever happens, you'll find joy in your children.”

The way she put it, it seemed like a somewhat lopsided bargain. Also, Aggie was never very good at waiting, although she supposed that might be something that would come with maturity and marriage. Anyway, her mother was so clearly embarrassed that there was no way of inquiring further. There was some kind of conspiracy of silence on the matter. It might be, though, that, once married, Aggie and her teacher would find a communion of silence, instead.

There were going to be so many things to find out, she could hardly wait. On the other hand, she wanted the wedding day itself to go very slowly. She wanted attention paid to her mysterious, exotic future far away. She wanted a day of being proud, and having everybody look. Beyond that, circumstances could hardly be foreseen.

Her family and their neighbors filled up the little church. Neil looked strained and solemn and his voice quavered over the vows. Her own voice she could barely hear.

The women took cakes and special sandwiches, with the crusts cut off for the occasion, to the church basement for the reception. It was true that everyone paid attention. She hung on his arm and was proud. He spoke so seriously and properly. He made everyone else, even the women, look a little rough and shabby. Oh, they might make fun of a slender young man who spoke oddly and did not do a man's work, but they were also impressed by the unknown; and now she was part of his unknown.

She found herself a little distant with her family, although benign. They drove home from the church to get changed for the journey. It was hard to understand this really was a farewell. “I'll be back,” she said, “and you must come and visit.”