Psyche (14 page)

“We will now sing the National Anthem.”

Scrambling to her feet long after all the others had done so, Psyche, her cheeks flaming with embarrassment, for the first time heard vocal homage paid to her country.

“We will now call the roll.”

When her own turn came, Psyche knew precisely what was expected of her. As all the others before her had done, she had only to stand up, say ‘Here, ma'am', and sit down again. It was perfectly simple.

“Maggie Moran.”

Psyche stood up.

“Maggie Moran!”

What combined folly and courage drove her to do what she did then, she would never know. “I ain't—I ain't Maggie. I'm P-S-Y-C-H-E.”

The tittering of the class rose and swelled around her, beating in her ears like a flood-tide in which she wished she could drown, in which she could sink down and down, never to be seen again. Wave upon wave it rose, battering, suffocating, hurting as nothing had ever hurt before. When it receded, and finally died away, she was numb, cast up only half-conscious on a beach where nothing mattered any more, where a name that was not hers was no longer important.

A voice she did not recognize as her own, said, “Here, ma'am.” And Maggie Moran sat down, insulated by shock from all further barbs.

She was graded by age, regardless of the fact that she knew less than most of the kindergarten children. She was twelve, and therefore she belonged in the eighth grade. No other yardstick was employed. It was a perfidious system, but it would have been difficult to improve on it under the conditions that existed in the rural schools in that part of the world. The law of the land stipulated that all children must attend school with a fair degree of
regularity until they reached the age of sixteen. The law did not, however, insist that they learn anything, nor did it make provision for enough funds to underwrite its own enforcements in a proper manner. The result was overcrowded, understaffed schools in which a teacher must attempt both to instruct and control as many as four or five grades in a single room. Split age groups, with the increased restlessness this would encourage, could not be tolerated, and individual attention was, of course, out of the question.

No one ever failed a year. In order to make room at the bottom for the six-year-olds whom the law insisted must be taken in, classes moved up
en masse
every September with the heavy irresistibility of a steam-roller. Since everyone automatically “graduated” at sixteen if he so desired—and only a very few were ever undesirous of this distinction as soon as it became available—it actually mattered very little from what grade they graduated.

In a community that recognized the mines as the East to which all faces turned, advanced learning, or, for that matter, learning of any kind, was a luxury unnecessary in the essential business of making a living. Neither the War of 1812 nor the Einstein theory were of any interest or intrinsic value to a man destined to spend the greater portion of his waking hours a hundred feet or more underground. That the rock wall at which he hacked was half as old as time meant nothing to him, made the quartz no less hard, his job no less back-breaking.

Psyche, her ignorance mistaken for stupidity, was almost immediately classified as mentally retarded. Her burning anxiety to learn thwarted from the start, she withdrew into an impassive unresponsiveness.

Her term reports were awful, but since neither Butch nor Mag could read the teacher's handwriting, they got nothing from them other than the fact that she had passed. Unaware that everybody always passed, they were very pleased.

“Good for you, kid,” Mag would say.

And Butch's comment was always the same. “The kid's real smart, ain't she?”

Psyche never told them how unhappy she was at school. She
never allowed them to guess that the boys and girls to whom she referred were not her friends, that she had no friends at all. For, her natural gaiety and friendliness disguised by her initial shyness, she was as great a social failure as an intellectual one. Eventually she got over the shyness, but by then it was too late to make successful advances to a group who had reached the uneasy, intuitive conclusion that she was, in some way they could not quite define, ‘different'. This very difference, for which she might have been persecuted, was fortunately it itself a protection. The clear blue eyes under the straight dark eyebrows were capable of communicating such cool contempt that most of the class, although they would never have admitted it, were more than a little afraid of her. Aloof and lonely, taking care never again to make a fool of herself in public, she somehow managed to create the impression that she ignored the others, rather than they her.

They talked about her, but not to her.

“That Maggie! I ain't never seen nobody so stuck-up.”

“Yeah, an' what's she got to be stuck-up about? Nothin'.”

“You can say that again. Why, she ain't even smart at her books.”

“I bet that hair ain't natural.”

“An' them airs she puts on, like she was the queen, or somethin'.”

They said the same things over and over again, but they were never able to convince themselves of their truth. The blonde hair was natural, and they knew it. The straight, graceful carriage, and quiet refusal to be drawn into arguments where weight of numbers alone would defeat her, were not airs, but also natural, and they knew this too. With more insight than the teacher, they guessed at an intelligence far superior to their own.

Baffled, irritated, made unsure of themselves by something beyond their comprehension, they kept their distance from a changeling who would gladly have given everything she possessed for a single friend—for someone, anyone, with whom she could share the lonely lunch hours, with whom she could exchange sandwiches, and gossip, and little jokes which would not need to be very funny. Someone who would smile at her when
she came into the crowded, untidy cloak-room, who would linger to talk with her at the front door before she set out on her long walk home through the deserted slag hills.

Without realizing that the protective wall she had built around herself was already unscalable, she went on hoping for a whole year that some miracle would produce this friend for whom she so longed. When she came back to school in September of her second year, she had given up any such hope, and, in so doing, became, if possible, even more unapproachable than before. Tall, unsmiling, and to all appearances offensively self-sufficient, she became accepted as a familiar part of the scene if in no other way.

She learned to write, after a fashion, forming her words with a pathetic, cramped attempt at neatness. She picked up the rudiments of simple arithmetic, and some fragments of history which, with no basis of previous knowledge, she soon forgot. The one thing she learned to do well was to read, and this she did entirely on her own.

Coincidence one day led her to open her book of Short Stories and Essays at a page from which the seniors were reading aloud. Mag had taught her just enough, combined with the little she had absorbed in the school, to enable her to follow what was being read, at first with great difficulty, and then with increasing ease. Shaping phrases and sentences under her breath, concentrating as she had never done before, in the space of a few months she became, and was aware of it, a better reader than any of the fifteen-year-olds to whom she listened so intently. The teacher failed to discover this accomplishment because she had long ago given up asking Psyche any questions at all, and no proof of it appeared in the poor written work which she was from time to time required to hand in. Certainly it produced no change in her way of speaking, for she never saw any real connection between the words she read and the distorted version of the King's English which she was accustomed to using; they were, to her, simply two different languages.

Excluded from active participation in either work or play, she fell back on the only thing left to her—the role of spectator. Sitting quietly in the back corner of the room to which she had been
more or less permanently relegated, she watched—except when the top class was reading—all the time. It became an absorbing pastime, and, judge and jury both, she developed a calm, detached contempt for the weaknesses unconsciously displayed by nearly every one of her sixty-odd classmates.

She learned to detect a lie almost before it was spoken. She soon could distinguish the difference between a genuine desire to learn and the slick imitation of the show-off who wanted only to be thought knowledgeable. When one of the boys began paying attention to one of the girls, she knew, almost at once, not only the exact nature of his intentions, but also the measure of success he would achieve. Although the bruises were invisible to her, she knew instinctively when a child had been whipped the night before. She saw friendships formed solely to gain an advantage, perhaps social advancement, perhaps protection, perhaps nothing more than the sharing of a lunch-box more appetizing than the general run. She saw girls scream when pinched by the boys, and fail to run away. She knew, but never said, where most ‘missing' articles could have been brought to light. With cool, disillusioned eyes, she saw the sins of an adult world in embryo.

From all these things she drew conclusions, one-sided, but basically sound. However, if she had been called upon to state them in even the simplest language, she could not have done it. They became, for the time being, things she knew which must wait for additional maturity before they could be fully useful.

That nearly all her observations were adverse was her unrecognized retaliation for being made an outcast. Her normal tendency to like people she satisfied by evolving the naïve theory that God put mostly bad people, and mostly good, in separate groupings so that they might be with their own kind. She pictured, in the fairy-tale ‘outside', large concentrations of human beings activated at all times by only the highest ideals of thought and behaviour. In this way she comforted herself, and saved herself from bitterness, while continuing to dislike the school and every living thing in it. God, she reasoned, had not originally intended her to pass her life amongst these people, and, when He was less
occupied, would undoubtedly put right the mistake. Meanwhile it was up to her to be patient.

Two events alone broke the steady monotony of her second year at the school, both of them purely personal, and neither of them happy.

The first occurred in late January when heavy snows made the slag impassable except for a narrow path beaten between the shack and the highway. Psyche, forced, as Butch was, to follow the open road and a route much longer than she usually took, dressed by lamplight, and set out while morning was still no more than a vague promise in the east, her lunch pail frozen to her mitten before the shack was out of sight. Warmly, if untidily, bundled up in thick layers of mismatched clothing, her feet protected by heavy fleece-lined boots, she never minded the cold no matter how low the thermometer dropped.

When she arrived at the school, instead of at once seeking the warmth of one of the big stoves inside, she would stop to watch the skaters on the rink that the older boys kept flooded in a playground now an otherwise unbroken expanse of white. Wistfully she thought that this was something that, if she but had skates, she could do and do well. Moreover, unlike the games that were played in the spring and fall, it was something that could be done alone. The smooth, rhythmic movements, as she watched them, found a rhythmic response within her that cried out to be allowed expression. It was, she thought, like music you couldn't quite hear, like clouds racing before a high wind, like flying.

Psyche never asked Butch and Mag for anything, and she did not consciously ask for skates. But when she arrived home later than usual one cold winter's afternoon, Mag asked what had kept her.

“Did Teacher make you stay in, kid?”

Psyche, hanging up her snowy jacket to thaw out by the stove, shook her head. “No, she don't never do that. I was watchin' the skatin'.”

“I was scairt you was into trouble.”

“I'm sorry, Mag. I ain't noticed the time.”

“They got a rink right there at the school?”

“Yeah, an' it's that beautiful to watch. Like dancin'. I ain't never seen nothin' quite like it. It's sort of as if a person was free when they's skatin'.”

Mag looked at her thoughtfully. “You wisht you could do it too, kid?”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“But you ain't got no skates?”

Psyche's voice expressed regret without complaint. “No. But it don't matter.”

Laying aside her knitting, Mag heaved herself up from the couch. “Come with me, kid.”

Psyche followed her into the storeroom, and then, at her request, went back to the main room for a lamp.

“I want to get at that there trunk,” said Mag, pointing to the only visible corner of a mouldering steamer trunk buried beneath an avalanche of cartons, crates, and broken bits of furniture. Ever since Psyche had come to the shack, Mag had been saying that she was going to clean up the storeroom, but somehow it always got put off until tomorrow, and tomorrow never came. Now, displaying a rare energy, she began, with Psyche's help, to unearth the trunk which, at the bottom of the heap, had rested undisturbed for more years than she could remember.

An unpleasant musty odour rose around them with the opening of a lid, which all but came off, and the dress Mag lifted aside fell apart in her hands. Muttering to herself, she delved deep into the trunk, and a moment later gave a grunt of satisfaction.

“There you are, kid!” she said triumphantly, and dragged forth a pair of old skates.

“For me?”

Beaming, Mag nodded. “They're all yours, kid. Now you can have as good a time as them others.”

Psyche spent more than an hour polishing the cracked black boots with loving care. The rotted laces were replaced with heavy string. The scratched blades were shone, all trace of rust removed with repeated sandings.