The Age of Cities (2 page)

“I'd like to hear from you about these tours. See what we can do to improve them. During lunch hour, perhaps?” She hurried to catch up with her class, small quick steps across the buffed linoleum squares.

There was no believing that the sisters at St. Margaret's would not welcome her with open arms—a prodigal daughter—Winston concluded as she directed her students with soft and urgent words of enthusiasm.

 

 

He walked home basking in the diffuse warmth of the sun; wispy cirrus fingers pointed high above and coaxed out his pang of regret for summer's end: there was no better life than reading in repose while in plain sight of flowers and leaves in their full. The cottonwoods were already dropping leaves, he noticed, yellow with blackened edges and cracker crisp. His mother had claimed so that morning, but he'd smilingly chided her about imagining things in her old age. As she read it—and she gave him no hints about her gypsy peering into the future: finger to the wind, canine nose detecting otherwise unnoticed elements of the air, tell-tale bumps on a cob of corn, who could say?—the dry and hot summer portended a wet winter, though not a cold one. Nothing out of the ordinary, give or take an inch of rain, in short.

Even with its droves of chattering shepherded students, the day had run smoothly. Now, though, he was happy to be bound homeward and on a deserted street. He felt taxed and needful of solitude. Winston could not recall ever speaking for so long and to so many. Confronting the boisterous and chaotic vitality of those teens, he'd been reassured about his turtle's choice of a career. The library was a comfortable shell into which he could retract—that was no shameful fact he kept hidden in an unvisited recess in his mind. It was pragmatic, the most practical of solutions. You don't become a jet pilot if you're afraid of heights, after all.

Years ago, he'd decided that his being librarian would work better for all concerned. It had been a sound judgment. He believed he was helpful and capable when he talked with a single student and assisted him in finding his way through the aisles. An entire class was a different species altogether. Winston had seen so. Disciplining was necessary and he'd developed no taste for it. And all those young people listening to him, regarding him and reacting to his words, demeanor, or dress. Motivated by birds and bees, and whispering comments when he wrote words on the chalkboard. Mrs. Dewwlapp was a running joke, and he could only speculate about what object of scorn or mirth they'd be sure to create from him. He bristled at the picture.

Winston recalled jokes he'd made about a Mrs. Peters when he was in high school, and knew that sort of wordplay was not usually meant to be spiteful. Innocuous or not, it was something he would take care to avoid.

Teaching was a calling, he admitted, but one that beckoned him infrequently. Several days over the year, he sat at the front of the class and administered a quiz or supervised readings when a teacher caught the flu or broke a bone. That suited him fine. It would be an onerous career otherwise. On some days—he'd thought it over a few times—he imagined he would not want to be watched like some actor on a stage, subject to audience whim and its applause, silence—or else figuratively pelted by fruit. And on other days, Winston was certain he would not want to encourage—or even hear, truth be told—half-baked, partially baked, or plainly indigestible ideas about the Cradle of Civilization,
King Lear
, or the Trojan War. He'd concluded that the best teachers pulsated with implacable maternal instinct or else were naturally charismatic; mother-love did not course through his veins—that much was self-evident—and while he was personable enough he possessed none of Svengali's enormous sway. He wanted neither followers nor adversaries.

And he'd come to understand that there was disappointment to take into account as well. Teachers did chortle now and again at the crazy gaffes a student might make. Yet often enough Winston listened as their conversations changed form, growing into resigned-sounding laments about degenerating student quality—each new generation, so went the refrain, offering surer evidence of man's fall from grace. The Nuclear Age of Robotics was upon us, Cameron McKay the science teacher had moaned only last spring while flipping through
Popular Mechanics
at the staff room lunch table, but it'll never amount to much with these feeble-minded car-crazy hooligans at the helm. “It'll turn to rust,” he'd said with a doomsday prophet's conviction. He'd snuffed his cigarette with a drawn-out finality, revealing a theatrical streak Winston had never before witnessed.

Nurturing young minds (Mrs. Pierce's phrase) or drilling them (Mrs. Mittchel's disposition): neither held much of an appeal. Books were simple, Winston could say after handling thousands of them, and getting students to find the ones they needed was rewarding without becoming too much of a draw on his personal reserve. Unlike Delilah Pierce, he had only so much to give. It was improbable that he would have ever become one of Father Pourguet's underlings a century ago, spreading the word to the pagan and uncivilized. It was his belief that a man either wants to learn or he does not: no amount of cajoling or force-feeding is going to make him arrive at a place he has no desire to reach.

Winston turned onto his street and stood in front of his house. He'd apparently rushed; even with the cooling weather, he could sense that a fine sheet of moisture had begun to spread on his forehead. As he patted his face with a handkerchief, he looked up. The worn-at-the-edges house he and Alberta mirthfully called Wilson Manor never failed to raise his spirit. Alberta's front yard handiwork of profusely overgrown flowers—hollyhocks, calendulas, zinnias: end of season, a riot of colour and impending rot—greeted him, but caused none of the chagrin his orderly neighbours hinted at with their kindly offers of clippers, mowers, and fertilizers.

He could not count how often he'd been told that the pickets were crying out for a fresh coat of paint. As though the neighbourhood could hear the plaintive wails each and every day. The weathered wood is a nice match for the flowers, sang his mother whenever she encountered one of these help-happy men. Winston had wondered about his mother's actual motivation on occasion, not sure if she'd turned the Manor into a
ramshackle pile
—the insulting term originating across the street—or simply to goad those upright neighbours and their wheedling wives. Alberta admired what she called independent thinkers; when she was in a mood, she grew garrulous faced with their lemming timorousness. “Thou shall paint all pickets white. I must have missed that commandment,” she'd huff.

He walked to the side gate. His mother would be with her vegetables.

“Hello, Mother. Is everything as it should be?” Winston said as he trod across the grass toward her.

Alberta was digging around in her dwindling plot of onions. She gave him a little wave and stabbed her pitchfork into the loosened soil. Walking toward him, she held three runt bulbs that swung by their green shoots like tiny pygmy heads. She said, “I think it's time for tea. What do you say?” She handed the onions to Winston.

“That would be delightful.”

Alberta removed her gardening gloves and turned toward the shed. She disappeared for a moment, leaving behind her hat and dirty gloves as she closed the door. With a halting gait she moved across the grass and corralled strands of kinky grey hair that leapt out from her head. She held out her hand and Winston returned the onions.

“Well, another day, another dollar,” he said as they started toward the house. Grendel burst from nowhere and raced to the kitchen door.

“Cynical and weary already, my dear? The year's just begun. Surely you've saved a soul already? Helped one of the Wachowski boys find his way to the principal's office?”

It was their habit to mull over the events of Winston's day soon after he arrived home; though she rarely visited him at the high school, Alberta easily recalled the names and personalities her son mentioned. She enjoyed keeping up to date with their stories—some having lunar predictability while others unraveled crazily, like a yarn ball under a cat's fickle guidance.

In the kitchen he told her about the mobile clusters of juveniles and mentioned the boy with the smart aleck question. As she filled the kettle, Winston excused himself. He wanted to see if there was mail—Alberta hadn't mentioned any, so he understood that checking would probably be in vain—and to change out of his stifling work clothes.

Approaching the kitchen from the hallway, Winston saw Alberta stooped near the radio: news at the top of the hour. She lowered the volume when he came near. The newsman's emphatic pronouncements subsided into a murmur. The radio was good company, she said on occasion, as if answering her son's unspoken question about its constant presence. Winston knew she could talk circles around him when it came to current affairs and begrudgingly sought her opinion at election times. He also piggy-backed on her handy overviews for use at the library—fairly or not, students approached him as an all-purpose walking-and-talking encyclopedia, equally knowledgeable about Michael Faraday's contributions to science, the territory and foes of the Mesopotamians, and the exact differences between St. Laurent's Liberal and Diefenbaker's Progressive Conservative policies on taxation.

When asked about the latter, he was little more than a parrot for Alberta's point of view. He could never get himself worked up about such matters, particularly since the ancient civilizations—rising and falling between the Tigris and Euphrates; perched for a span of centuries on the Aegean; spreading out like fever across the Mediterranean—held his attention with such a grip. If it turned out that Alberta made an error of fact, then he would blithely repeat it; so far as he was aware, no such lapse had yet transpired: students were not likely to prove him wrong. “Mind like a steel trap,” she claimed.

Alberta prepared their tea as Winston drew his chair away from the table. Once he was seated she spoke. “It seems to me,” she said, “that young people always dream that any grass must be greener than the dry patch they're stuck on. You know: some great excitement must surely lay in a far away place.” She dabbed her forehead with a tea towel: the kitchen always felt a few degrees warmer than the rest of the house.

She lifted the lid and peered into the teapot. After pouring two cups, she carried one to her son. He nodded his appreciation.

Leaning near the sink, she continued with her thought: “Yes, when I was a girl—I was one once, you know—I caught a fancy and sighed for months about leaving for Paris to become a milliner. It was London and dressmaking a few months after that. The ideas didn't seem so far-fetched. Mind you, at the time I hadn't travelled more than ten miles from home. Imagine that!”

He inhaled the smoky steam of his mother's afternoon Lapsang Souchong. She felt that a savory taste was suitable before supper, to whet the appetite. Winston had been taking this blend with her for years, but felt no real love for it; it made him think of burning cedar and smoked salmon. He would have happily exchanged it for another pot of Earl Grey, which he sipped over breakfast on weekends. Alberta held to her rule that it was too sweet for the late afternoon.

“And then you grew up and settled down?”

“I suppose so. The line of least resistance, and so forth. Something like that: the world lets you know that one choice will be more vexing than another.” Alberta was roving the kitchen, her cup and saucer in hand.

“That's a nice way of saying it, Mother.” Winston raised his cup to salute her placid coinage. He felt parched; even with the hint of breeze passing through the screen door the kitchen air was hot as soup.

“I seem to recall a period when digging up mummified royalty in the Egyptian sand was how you imagined your future.” Hazel eyes squinted as she smiled.

“Yes, that is true, I was smitten alright. Mind you, that had all ended before I was twelve.” He could not remember what new aspiration had replaced his dream of archaeology.

“This boy's disdain, though,” he said, taking a moment to dunk some shortbread into the tea. “We all might imagine adventure-filled lives, but what was remarkable was that he seemed so contemptuous of home—as though the Bend is little more than a prison to him. I know I didn't feel that and it doesn't sound like you did either.”

“You're right, I wasn't running away from home. More like I was drawn to some magical place where I imagined hat makers lived.” She topped up her teacup. “But I have no trouble empathizing with the boy, though. You can't call it the land of opportunity here, now can you? Especially if you want to try something out of the ordinary.” She walked to the table and grabbed a cookie. “Just think if I had chosen to be a hat maker…. I'm already dangerously close to being the town's eccentric old bat and I never give anyone cause to look twice.”

She deposited her tea—half a cookie stowed on the saucer—on the table and picked up the newspaper, reading aloud in her mock newscaster's voice, guttural and low: “‘A local crone, long rumored to be a witch, was burned at the stake by angry berry farmers yesterday evening. They claimed that for reasons unknown she had placed a hex on their crops.' I can see the headline already.”

“Oh, Mother.” His mother, the comedienne. They remained silent for a moment; ornery crows on the clotheslines broke into squawking conversation.

She picked up her saucer again. “I'm thinking of ham with navy beans and fried potatoes for supper … though with this heat, potato salad and a few slices of cold ham might be just the thing,” she announced, her speculation of a minute before having abruptly reached its conclusion. She'd already moved to the pantry and begun to shuffle through her clutter of jars and bottles. Grendel wound himself between her calves.

Winston told her that he could eat her ham and beans every day of the week. While she prepared it, he'd have time to digest a chapter or two of
Claudius the God
. He refilled his cup, stirred in a half spoonful of sugar, and headed toward the living room.