Wives and Lovers (11 page)

Margaret never used the comb or the pennies. She hoarded them in a corner of her desk. On Valentine's Day Miss Kane received a paper penny valentine, “To a Cross Patch Teacher,” bearing the picture of an old witch in spectacles riding a yard ruler. When Miss Kane took the valentine out of the valentine box, the other children watched in silence while Margaret sat at her desk, snickering behind her hand.

Thank you for the valentine, Margaret.

I didn't send you no valentine, Miss Kane.

Any valentine.

I didn't send you any valentine.

I was under the impression, Margaret, that you did.

I wouldn't have no money to buy one.

Any money.

I wouldn't have any money to buy one.

“I bought her a little comb,” Ruth repeated. “She was an odd child, I could never get close to her.”

“You took your job too seriously.”

“I hoped, I wanted to give her some pride in herself. It was impossible, I see now. The home factor is so much stronger than the school factor. I couldn't make up for poverty and neglect and brutality. Years and years—”

The years were numbered, like the hours of the chil­dren's play, and into the last one she had crammed frenzied activity. The last year brought the angel-eyed Mexican boy, Manuel, who never talked.

Thank you, Lucy. And now it's Manuel's turn to read. Begin at the top of page 79, Manuel.

Manuel sat mute, unmoving.

Manuel, it's your turn. Now see if you know what the first word is. It's a hard one.

Manuel looked weary and innocent while the children giggled, and whispers fluttered in the air like invisible moths.

Is there anybody who can help Manuel with the first word? Janie? That's right—gradually. There now, Manuel, you have the first word, gradually, can you go on from there?

The book lay unopened on Manuel's desk.

Home Manuel reeds good or else—

Manuel didn't play with the other children. As soon as the recess bell rang he dashed across the school yard and swung himself up to the top bars of the jungle gym. There he sat all during recess, with his legs twined around the bars and a faint smile on his face, as if he enjoyed the sensation of being high up, above the other children.

Once he had, without being seen, shinnied up the trunk of the old pepper tree beside the swings, and hidden him­self in the feathery leaves. When the time came to re­turn to class Manuel remained in the tree, plucking the pepper berries one by one and letting them slide out of his hand to the ground. He counted them in a whisper—“thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight”—and as they bounced and rolled in the dirt like tiny marbles, Manuel followed each one with his eyes, dreamily. He was Dick Tracy and the berries were drops of his life's blood. He was Superman and the berries were atom bombs. He was Manuel and Miss Kane was calling him. He heard her calling him and he watched her looking for him, but he made no move to get out of the tree. He would have liked to stay there forever shedding his blood and dropping his bombs, high up above the other children.

Miss Kane knew that Manuel liked to climb, and so she looked first on the roof of the Boy Scout shack, and then on the roof of the kindergarten sandpile. Re-crossing the yard she saw the falling berries, and looking up into the pepper tree she saw Manuel. His eyes were closed, and he seemed to be asleep, entwined gracefully among the boughs. In sleep his right hand dropped the berries, one by one, and the delicate leaves slid over his wrist like lace. He looked so beautiful, so innocent, that she couldn't say the ordinary words:
You know the rules about climbing that tree, Manuel . . . The bell rang some time ago . . . The principal wouldn't like . . . The bell rang . . .

“It's time to come to class,” she said quietly.

Manuel slid down the trunk of the tree and followed her across the yard.

She never again asked him to read, but one afternoon she kept him in and tried to talk to him and to make him talk to her. She tried too hard and Manuel was puzzled and a little contemptuous. When he was gone Miss Kane put her head down on her desk and cried because she had failed. All her failures came back to her and gathered like cysts inside her head and her breasts and her throat. Her tears did not dissolve these cysts, but they altered their sub­stance. The benign
I have failed
became the malignant
They have failed me
, and the Mexican boy, Manuel, became the crux and the symbol of this change.

When the janitor came in to sweep the room and collect the waste baskets he found Miss Kane sitting behind her desk, swollen-eyed, reckless.

“As you can see, I've been crying, Mr. Thursten. No, don't go away. It doesn't matter. We all have our moments.” As she talked she scratched one spot on her head, near her left temple, over and over again. “I do my best. Everyone knows that. I've always done my best, without any help from anyone least of all from the ones I'm trying to help. There's this one boy, Mr. Thursten. It was funny, he climbed the pepper tree, and you know he looked so odd up there, as if he belonged. I didn't want to bring him down. Perhaps I ought to have left him. It's difficult, difficult to make decisions all the time. Some of the African tribes live in tree houses to protect themselves from the wild animals.”

She saw Manuel in his tree house, surrounded by the yapping snarling faces of the little human animals. Manuel, I will help you. Manuel spat into the dirt.

Mr. Thursten shuffled up and down the aisles, pushing his brush ahead of him, gathering up the litter of the day. He knew Miss Kane was speaking but he didn't hear her words. He was immune to noise and engrossed in his passion for cleaning up. All his aggressive and destructive instincts had been channelized into this one great passion. He loved to collect little piles of rubbish and thrust them savagely into the incinerator. At home he burned his mail as soon as he had read it. He was a bachelor, and did his
own housework, and when he cooked his own meals he always washed and dried the dishes from one course before he began eating another course. After the meal he emptied the garbage on a newspaper, squeezing and compressing it into a small neat satisfying bundle. Nearly every day he hung all his blankets and his rugs on the clothesline and beat them into submission. He cleaned the mirrors and windows until they squeaked in protest, and he scrubbed his kitchen with chlorine water until the linoleum peeled and his hands were raw. Mr. Thursten was fortunate. His peculiarities accorded with his job and were mis­interpreted as virtues.

“Mr. Thursten—”

The brush paused.

“Mr. Thursten, I wonder if—I feel quite giddy—is there, could you fetch me a glass of water?”

Mr. Thursten brought her some water in a paper cup. When she had finished the water, he took the cup and folded it over and over into a tight, tiny rectangle. Mr. Thursten took particular care of this rectangle. He put it into the incinerator separately, and as it snuffled and expired he had a nice loose feeling inside.

Mr. Thursten, Margaret, Manuel, they had all been a part of the last year. When the year ended Miss Kane ceased to exist. She became Ruth again, and it was Ruth who stood at the bedroom window looking out at the playground of another school, watching the anonymous children whose faces seemed so familiar.

“You took your job too seriously,” Hazel repeated.

Ruth turned from the window, wiping the palms of her hands on her apron. “I guess I'll start the meat loaf.”

“You never admit anything. If you won't tell people things they can't help you.”

“My goodness, as if I—”

“Why were you in there bawling?”

“I tell you I wasn't, Hazel.”

“Has it anything to do with the Mexican?”

“What—?” Ruth stopped, on the point of asking, what Mexican? She had been thinking of Manuel, but she realized at once that Hazel didn't know about the boy in the pepper tree and that she must mean Mr. Escobar. “I don't even know what you're talking about.”

“I just wondered,” Hazel said carefully. “I just thought maybe he'd been rude to you or something. I mean, some­times you get ideas in your head about certain people, you imagine things.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you do. And I just thought—oh well, skip it. Where'd he go?”

“He said he had to go home and get something; a sprayer. He says the eugenia hedge has some disease called scale.”

“It doesn't look diseased to me.”

“He showed it to me himself. You know that part at the end where you thought the hedge was just dirty? It isn't dirt at all. The sap has been sucked out. He showed me some of the things that do it. They're like little bumps on the wood, hardly noticeable. He scraped some of them away with his thumbnail to show me. I told him, I said, why show
me? I'm
not the lady of the house, I just work here. And do you know what his answer was? He said he thought I'd be interested. Me,
interested
.” Ruth laughed, and color splashed across her cheeks. “I said—”

“Little bumps,” Hazel said bitterly. “Jesus Murphy, I thought we had everything, gophers, snails, sowbugs, ants, and now we got little bumps besides.”

“They can be sprayed.”

“I don't know what's the matter with this damn place.”

“Neglect is the matter.”

“Or maybe it isn't the place, maybe it's just me. I attract things, that's all there is to it. I'm like Millie, I've got a jinx.”

Ruth looked blank. She didn't know Millie or the nature of her jinx. “He said if the hedge is sprayed now the other things in the yard won't catch the disease. He says it's very catching.”

Like measles
, Escobar had said, scraping the little bumps away with this thumbnail while Ruth watched him with fastidious distaste. She did not want to be out in the garden with a Mexican laborer, and she experienced a sense of shock and unreality at finding herself there, and even more strongly, the feel
ing that a cruel fate had driven her there. I did not come, I was driven.

Persecuted by fate, she stood beside the eugenia hedge and watched Escobar's thumb. It was thick and blunt, the nail heavy with dirt and every crack in the skin outlined as if in charcoal. The thumb moved, bent on destruction, but without hurry, without savagery.

Like measles, Escobar said.

She jerked her eyes away, she laughed nervously, without mirth, she put her hand in the pocket of her apron and shifted her weight to her other foot. She coughed to clear her throat, and when her throat was cleared she had nothing to say. The rays of the sun pelted her face and she thought of the dark house with the blinds drawn and she could not believe that she had left it to come out here. I was driven.

Still she couldn't force herself to return to the house, and in the end it was Escobar who left. He said, “I have a
hand spray at home. I will go and get it. It is not far.”

She moved with quick jerky steps toward the back door, her head ducked as if to avoid a blow.

Escobar wheeled his bicycle out of the garage. A bicycle was a delicate and expensive vehicle, and Escobar lavished great care on his. It was over four years old now, but there wasn't a single dent in the mudguard or a nick in the red and green paint. Throughout the years he had equipped it with several pounds of gadgets. It had two headlights, one reflector (plain) and a larger one bearing the words “Watch My Speed!” On the handlebars there was a bell, a horn, a speedometer, a basket and a rabbit's foot, and from the end of the carrier at the back dangled a skunk's tail. The original seat was softened with a lamb's wool cover, and between the seat and the cover a St. Christopher's medal was hidden.

Escobar adjusted the pedals and swung his right leg over the bar. He rode away, moving his feet up and down in a proud, ponderous, dignified manner. The reflectors winked behind his back, “Watch My Speed!”

From the kitchen window Ruth had seen him pedaling down the street like a grave and happy child.

“It's a jinx,” Hazel said. “We're a pair, Millie and me. Where's my other shoe?”

“I thought you had it.”

“I haven't.”

“I thought you took it away from her.”

The shoe was located under the bed with the lift flapping loose from the heel, but the dog Wendy had disappeared.

“Jesus
Murphy
!”

“She didn't mean it,” Ruth said anxiously. “It can be fixed. Look, it's easy as pie to fix.” She held the lift in place. “All it needs is a nail or two. I'll pay for it, naturally. I'm going over to the Fosters' tonight to sit with the children, and I'll have the money.”

“Oh nuts, forget it.”

“Very well.”

From outside came a rhythmic hissing sound. A pulse began to beat in Ruth's temple and the spot of color reap­peared at the base of her throat.

“The Mexican's back,” she said.

She went out into the kitchen and stood at the screen door.