A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (12 page)

It was a cot we sat on to watch TV. It stretched out to a single bed when you added the back-pillows to the end of the mattress. No one had ever slept on it before, but it was a good suggestion.

“We’ll put the cot at the foot of my bed so he won’t feel so far away,” I said.

Francis began to sleep over often. We stayed up until dawn, making secret expeditions to the kitchen, giggling and telling ghost stories which naturally ended very badly for all the heroes involved.

On the first Monday of the second trimester, a new English class for fluent students was instituted in 7
ème
. It met five times a week. The new teacher was a young, black-haired Irish woman with eyes the color of storm clouds. She had a lovely face with pale skin that wrinkled easily when she smiled.

She told us that her name was Sheila O’Shaunessy, which was unusual in that teachers never volunteered their first names. In fact, it was a big deal if you could discover a teacher’s first name. But there was Sheila O’Shaunessy, who spoke in an English I had never heard before. It didn’t seem she was speaking so much as singing, her voice was so beautiful.

She read us lengthy ballads and Irish fairy tales about wily drunks, terrible dragons, damsels in distress, leprechauns, and pots of gold buried beyond the rainbow.

“I am from Belfast,” she told us one day, in a heavy voice. This meant nothing to us. Sometimes when she told us about Ireland her eyes would brim with tears but she would quickly wipe them away. Then she would smile and say, “We have our troubles but we do love a happy Irish story,” and open one of her many volumes of fables and fairy tales.

One day she talked about the torture of political prisoners and told us that the last thing people did before they died under torture was urinate. This fact bothered me so much that I went home and asked my father about it. He was perplexed, and interested in what kind of a teacher would talk openly about such things.

“I’d like to meet your Miss O’Shaunessy,” my father said.

One of the reasons I liked Miss O’Shaunessy’s class was that I was reunited with my beloved friend Sally Sutherland. Sally was as intelligent and studious as ever, and being quite levelheaded, did not resent my friendship with Francis.

But Francis became furiously jealous of Sally and of Miss O’Shaunessy and turned out to be the laziest and most disruptive student in the class.

Miss O’Shaunessy didn’t seem to know anything about my reputation, and I believed that even if she had, she was the kind of person who would have given anybody a fair chance. I wanted to do well in Miss O’Shaunessy’s class, and listened attentively and raised my hand whenever a question was posed that I could answer. And since I was listening for once, I could answer a good many questions. Whenever Miss O’Shaunessy smiled at me, my heart skipped a beat.

Miss O’Shaunessy did not give us dictations or stupid sentences to write over and over again, she allowed us to create our own stories. “Write about a summer vacation,” she would say. Or, “Make up a story of your own.”

My first essay was about a little girl who wakes up in the middle of the night to find that all her dolls and bears have come alive and are running away. They’re angry at the way she treats them, because she piles them up in a corner of the room under the stairway and forgets their names. When she wakes up they have taken her top sheet, torn it into strips and made knots at each end, and are climbing out the window, down the three stories to the street. She runs to the window and leans out, crying and begging them to forgive her. After a short discussion they come back. The next morning she wakes up and finds her top sheet gone and all the dolls and bears in bed with her.

Miss O’Shaunessy gave me an A and wrote: “You have a most wonderful imagination! Now you must concentrate on your spelling.
Come
in English, not
comme
. A teddy
bear
, not a teddy
bare
. Learn your words and try not to think in French. This is a good way to remember
here
and
hear
: Here is a place, like
where
?—
there
; to hear is in your
ear.”

Sally got a B+, although there were very few red marks on her essay, and Francis got a C. Sally’s essay was about her gerbils. Francis wrote about how much he hated École Internationale Bilingue.

“You’re just a damn teacher’s pet,” he said to me, making his disgusted face.

For some reason, this made me feel proud and wonderful. I redoubled my efforts toward participation and spelling. My first weekly report card brought me an A for
travail
, A+ for é
ffort
, and an A for
comportement
.

After that, Francis started fighting with me in class. I wasn’t so used to being good that I could avoid responding to the badgering. Miss O’Shaunessy didn’t say anything for the first few days, but looked at us with her sad, gray eyes. Her eyes weren’t anything like my nanny Candida’s, which were round and chocolate-brown, but the expression of hurt and betrayal was so similar that they made me want to cry with vexation.

Finally Miss O’Shaunessy threw us out into the hall.

Francis tried to appease me by telling me another opera story.

“I’ve got a real good one for you today,” Francis said, approaching me from behind while I hid my face in the hanging blue coats. “It’s called
La Traviata
and I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

But I was so angry I covered my ears and refused to talk to him.

Next week’s essay was “Write about a friend of yours.”

I wrote:

Dear Miss O’Shaunessy,

My frende Francis is verry strange. He has no father and is verry nerveous. But some times he is verry smart and funny. But he allways wants to have attention and dosent know wen to stopp acting stupide. Your the best teachor I ever hade at this school and I am sory that I got kicked out of your class. Will you come to tea at my hous one day because my father and mother want to meat you because they cant’ beleeve I got an A in you class.

Youre frende and studente

Channe Willis

Miss O’Shaunessy called me in for a private conference. She said she understood my friendship with Francis perfectly well, but she said in her beautiful singing, gentle voice,

“If Francis is truly your friend he will understand that he must not disrupt your studies.”

And this is precisely what I said to Francis that afternoon as Candida drove us home. Candida didn’t understand English well enough to keep up with us when we spoke rapidly. After I made my statement, Francis sat pouting against the door, as far away from me as he could get.

“Stop acting stupid, Francis,” I said. “If I want to study in her class, I have a right to. You’re just messing it up for me on purpose.”

“That’s a lot of crapola,” he said. “And what about
you
?
You
never want me to go to violin class and
you
disrupt my practicing
every day
.”

“You don’t
like
to practice the violin, Francis. It’s different. Anyway, you can practice at night after dinner.”

“After dinner I’m too tired to practice, after running around in the street and playing opera with
you
, my head’s too full of whirlygigs.”

I considered the alternatives. I thought about my terrible, bossy nature, my big mouth, my lack of friends, and Miss O’Shaunessy. I wanted to change my bad ways—yet I did not want to go back to being alone the way it was before Francis. But things could never quite go back to the way they had been because now there was Miss O’Shaunessy, and if I continued to apply myself, with Miss O’Shaunessy’s help, I might even get moved back out of the dummy class. I did not believe Francis would be willing to give it all up—our opera stories, Saturday nights, our morning and afternoon rides—over Miss O’Shaunessy’s class, so I gambled on this. I said:

“If you don’t leave me alone in Miss O’Shaunessy’s class, then you’re not really my friend. Because if you’re really my friend, you’d help me. So I won’t be your friend anymore unless you quit bugging me in Miss O’Shaunessy’s class.”

When Candida stopped in front of his apartment building, Francis got out and slammed the door. We watched his back as he slinked off, his head sagging unhappily, dragging his
cartable
by its strap.

“Whatta jou say to him?” Candida asked, frowning as she turned her head toward me in the backseat.

“Nothing bad. You know my new English teacher I told you about? I told him to stop bothering me in her class, that’s all.”

“Good girl,” Candida said, nodding with approval. “That one es a wild dog. You es a wild dog too. Two wild dogs es enough to make any saint crazy. What happened to you friend that nice quiet fat littel girl? Why not play with her again instead? You know I esleep badly and I’m sick and tired of you two wild dogs howling at the moon all night every Saturday night.”

Candida liked everything in life to be clear as day, pure as rain. Anything out of the ordinary threw her into a suspicious, gloomy temper. She had not liked Francis from the start and had just been waiting for the proper opportunity to express her feelings.

“Shut up, Didi,” I said lightly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Candida shook her head and drove away, hitting the gas with her lead foot and forgetting, as usual, to look in the rearview mirror.

The next morning Mrs. Fortescue picked me up, and I began to dread this ride before I even got in the car because Francis was sitting in front, staring out of the window with a sour look on his face. It would have been better if it were one of Candida’s mornings, but as fate would have it, it was a Mrs. Fortescue morning and I got in the back and didn’t say a word. No one said anything and so started the day.

After lunch (Miss O’Shaunessy’s class was after recreation) Francis gingerly approached me as we were all pairing up for the walk to the park, and said,

“All right. I won’t sit with you anymore in Miss O’Shaunessy’s class. All
right
?”

“All right,” I said. And we paired up as usual, feeling relieved.

The strain this ultimatum put on our relationship was not apparent to me for a long time. Just before the summer, the administration offered to move me back to the A group, and I accepted, deeply relieved. Miss O’Shaunessy’s attitude toward teaching had so influenced me that it had begun to affect my work in other classes. Only when I absolutely abhorred the teachers—the ones, of course, who were more predisposed than others to disliking me—did I refuse to apply myself.

The following year, the native speakers of English were permitted to take history and geography in English as well. This second new teacher was almost as fabulous as Miss O’Shaunessy. She was a Canadian called Mrs. Dubois. She pronounced her name Duboy, and took great pleasure in correcting the French administrators. Her straight brown hair was parted in the middle and constantly falling over her glasses. She wore large, flowing hippie dresses with cowboy boots. Her voice was incredibly loud; she always seemed to be yelling although she was never angry, only very demanding. “ALL RIGHT, ALL YOU ENGLISH-SPEAKING FOLKS, WE’RE GONNA STUDY AMERICA THIS YEAR. GET READY TO WORK ‘CAUSE BY THE END I’LL WANT YOU TO KNOW THE NAMES OF EVERY BLASTED RIVER AND LAKE AND STATE AND CAPITAL IN THAT CONTINENT, NORTH, CENTRAL, AND SOUTH.”