All Souls (17 page)

She wanted to give him something to remember her by, but she had to proceed furtively, out of school, or else—and this made no sense she knew but she thought it—her mother would find out and tell her it was another stupid move. Women don't give men presents.

Maybe not, but Anna Mazur had a present for Tim Weeks in her bag, and it made her happy to see him walking toward her down the hall when she had a surprise for him. But they were not yet out of school. Lower-school dismissal was begun, and they craned over the stairwell from just above to watch the little girls jangle down the stairs, little walking packages, projects strapped to their backs. Some looked stunned, some sealed, still others tickled to death. “What was school like for you?” She had asked him this question before, and he had answered in the same way then as
now. School was messy and unfinished, full of guilt. He was shy—largely mute—but physically way ahead of everybody his age. “I was faster. The gap diminished as we got older, but in elementary school I could run circles around my classmates, and I was treated specially. I was picked first for teams. I didn't have to talk to make my way among kids.” Most of school was a sunny tedium, but there were flashes when Tim Weeks felt himself reverse the flow of the game, intercept, drive the ball. “You can be the most closed person, yet if you are an athlete and in that world, junior high school, you are part of the social scene. I eventually worked for the school playgrounds, coaching baseball. I've been teaching kids since I was seventeen. Never had to live in the adult world.”

He said, “But I have a tremendous sympathy for those who don't have the same ease with life.”

Anna Mazur was one of these and uncomfortable in life, which might explain the pleasure she felt in Tim Weeks's company. How, walking with him now on the bridle path around the reservoir, she felt favorably observed by strangers, approved, envied, light on her feet. Anything she had to say seemed of interest to him; he listened; he laughed. Was she really funny? She hoped so!

“Here,” she said, and she took out of her bag a silver-plated personalized bar to hold open books and, tasseled as it was, to serve as a bookmark. She had had his initials and the school year engraved on one side. (For a
time she debated something else, his initials and her own initials, her first name?)

“Annie,” he said. “How nice of you! But this wasn't necessary.” He hugged her. He said, “I am going to miss you next year.”

Really?
she silently asked, and the voice she heard was Gillian Warring's saying,
Do you miss us? Do you like the present sixes better than you liked us?

It was so easy to flatter a teacher.
I hope I have you next year.

Anna Mazur and Tim Weeks stood downwind of a poignant scent—was it verbena? “I'm going to miss you,” she said. “This year has been very eventful, what with Astra Dell and all, and you've made it a heck of a lot easier. You listened to me about my brother and my mother and the English department, Hodd and O'Brien—all of that.” So Anna Mazur was professing love to a man who had yet to kiss her with any romantic intention. “I'm really grateful,” she said. Her tongue stuck in her mouth.

“Oh”—his response—“I was glad to listen.” He said he had learned a lot about
Jane Eyre
that he never knew. Mr. Rochester in disguise was far more dangerous than ever Tim Weeks suspected. Tim said, “We've had fun,” and he turned his body in a way that was welcoming but in a forward direction, not toward her, but continuing along the path. “Walk with me,” he said, when what she heard was
This is why I can't.
The story he went on
to tell had to do with his home, and a hometown girl, and their being rumored into romance—one of the reasons he decided to strike out on his own in New York. “I don't want to be in a position of making anyone unhappy,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“That's all he said, Mother.”

Once Tim Weeks had thought to join the ministry, but he had majored in history instead. He was a sixth-grade history teacher at the Miss Siddons School. Some years he had taught eighth-grade history. Astra Dell had been his student. She reminded her mother of just who Astra Dell was, but her mother cut in.

“I know,” her mother said. “The sick girl.”

Anna Mazur hugged a cushion. “I'm depressed, Mother, is what it is.” Beyond the cloudy window, the river insinuated itself, seeming scaly as a snake and the same dirty brown. This, whatever this was, whatever she had known with Tim Weeks while Astra Dell was sick, was a flirtation. Tim Weeks was as serious about Anna as he was about Gillian Warring. Tim Weeks was the school's bachelor. There were actually three of them that she knew of, but Tim Weeks was nearer her age and so very cute. She was a type, too, common as a robin, a Miss forever in a Miss Siddons School. In Miss
Brigham's office was a portrait photograph of Margaret Witt Siddons, founder, 1921: a barefaced woman from an old-fashioned time. Everything, the picture seemed to say, is gone, everything but the desk and the modern version of Miss Siddons, a head of school who was not above wearing a pantsuit in cold weather.

Marlene Kovack was working backstage in costumes for social service hours when she overheard someone—too loud—a middle schooler, say, “You know when people are gay, don't you?” Mr. Weeks was nearby, with props, and she wondered, as she wondered about many of the unattached faculty in school, but why were the middle schoolers always so out of control? Marlene helped only the lower schoolers in the play. The lower schoolers were delicate and shy; they made peeping sounds as Marlene dressed them, the King of Siam's littlest children.

Francesca Fratini swung into the room and cooed over the King of Siam's two littlest children. “Oh, don't you look pretty. I love your headdresses.” Then to Marlene, “Remember when we were this size?”

The little girls had hands as small as starfish. “How old are you again?” Marlene asked, and the little girls answered: first grade. Marlene said, “I was never this small in first grade.”

Francesca said to Marlene, “You should come to the interschool
Macbeth.
I'm one of the witches. Our director is crazy. I have to lick Macbeth's face like a dog.”

The King of Siam's littlest children turned in their seats to look at Francesca Fratini. “Am I scaring you?” she said. “That's the kind of thing you get to do in high school. I'm a senior.” Francesca said, “What do you think of that?”

Little shrugs from the little rouged girls, who stepped away lightly as if their feet were bound.

“You scared them,” Marlene said.

“Look, Marlene,” and Francesca turned around, and there was a bumper sticker on her butt:
Property of the King of Siam.
“Prank night,” she said. “When we all bow and our hoop skirts flip up, this is what the King and Anna will see!”

 

Marlene stayed for the cast party and ate cake and went downtown with Francesca Fratini and Gillian Warring, who were doing their imitations of Dr. Bell. They called him the stress doctor and said he came to Siddons twice a week to get the kinks out. Their story was Dr. Bell had an office in the basement at school and that only the nurse had a key. “She takes us downstairs and lets us in,” Francesca said.

“He helps you with all the ways you're backward,” Gillian said. “I can't believe you don't know this. I know this, and I am in eighth grade!”

Marlene said, “It's an extra, probably, like tutoring.”

“No,” Francesca said, “you just have to reverse your letters to be in the club.”

Dr. Bell had a mustache, and when he spoke, spit caught on the bristles of his mustache and it was gross. It was a mustard color, too—dirty mustard. “It makes me sick,” Gillian said. “He has terrible breath, and he sits too close and watches you read for speed, and he keeps his pencil near when you write, and he corrects you as you go along, and you get all confused and of course you seem dumb to him. You're dumb to yourself. The man makes you dumb.” Gillian took up Francesca's hands and danced with her the way the King did with Anna. “God! I hate him! Dr. Bell . . .” After a few turns, Gillian stopped short and confided to Marlene, “Can you tell I've been drinking?” One of the beauties of school was in its bringing like minds together briefly and intensely in these moments outside of school. Now in the Village outside a bar that blinked at fake IDs, Marlene held Gillian's hair while she puked into the street. Francesca went back in the bar to buy the drunk girl a Coke.

“I've just been here too long,” Lisa Van de Ven said to Miss Wilkes. “I can't get interested in a single subject. I don't like anyone in my class. Nothing. The other day
three of the nine seniors in AP French showed up.” Lisa Van de Ven said, “I can't wait to get out of here.” Then she said
college
as if she were making a wish, and she shut her eyes. “That's what I'm passionate about, if you want to know. Leaving. I can't wait.”

Youth in its sullen husk, dry, shrunk, ugly as a cornstalk, prematurely autumnal, an awful, rasping wastefulness, Lisa Van de Ven tamped her bloody thumb with a napkin and talked about how alienated she felt from all of her classmates. “Ever since the Dance Concert,” Lisa said to her, and said again, “I can't wait to get out of here.” She did not look up at Miss Wilkes until the end of recess, and for a moment it seemed to the woman that the girl's face signaled something other than complaint. Was Lisa embarrassed, for Miss Wilkes was certainly embarrassed. However could she have cared so much about this tough girl, but she had; she hoped Lisa Van de Ven would stop chewing her thumb long enough to look up again and see the expression on her teacher's face, an expression that felt easy and dispassionate in its perfect insincerity. “Soon enough you'll be gone,” Miss Wilkes said, “but you'll be missed. You must promise to come back and visit us.”

”Happy in this, she is not yet so old / But she may learn; happier than this, / She is not bred so dull but she can
learn.” Portia to Bassanio at the English Speaking Union Shakespeare contest, 1995. Anna Mazur had coached her in Miss Hodd's stead. (Poor Miss Hodd had been sick then.) Anna Mazur had coached Astra Dell, and Astra Dell had remembered the speech as well as the sonnet. One of their chief topics of conversation in the hospital had been Shakespeare and what plays Astra Dell knew and liked best. Her favorite was
A Midsummer Night's Dream,
which wasn't original, Astra knew, but Anna Mazur said, of course, it was a favorite of hers, too.

Favorites. Anna Mazur wanted to be a favorite.

“See what a memory she has!” Anna Mazur said to Tim Weeks.

“I heard,” Tim Weeks said, and he saw how small Astra was, shrunk a little, her long sleeves loose over her hands, only fingertips visible. He stood with Miss Mazur and watched as Astra walked down the hall to her next class.

Anna Mazur said, “Her hair, at least it's growing. I almost said ‘glowing.'”

The prom was in the future, along with a lot of other ceremonies from which someone would walk home with a corsage or a scroll or a secret-society pin. “I'd hoped
to be invited,” Suki said. Carlotta Forestal, Elizabeth Freer, and Katherine Johnson were the new inductees from the senior class to Cum Laude, the high school equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa; seniors made members in their junior year were Ufia Abiola, Sarah Saperstein, and Ny Song. A cardiologist, Siddons, class of '72, addressed the assembly. The cardiologist, at the beginning of her talk, asked if Siddons seniors still had the tea party with the headmistress in the Conservatory Garden.

No
s from the audience.

Suki said to Alex, “So this person I hardly know asks me if I'm on Wellbutrin. I want to know what about me screams I really require heavy-duty anti-depressants.” Something the cardiologist said—death? “All year it's been doctors. Astra's still not out of the woods, you know.” Suki said, “Get me on Astra's video after this is over. I have something to say.”

Tea parties with the headmistress.
Headmistress,
that was a word from years ago.

“Too bad,” Miss Hodd said, “it's prettier than
head of school.”

“You can't have it both ways,” Mr. O'Brien said.

“I'm contradictory. I like the white dresses for graduation, too,” Miss Hodd said.

“The girls should be in academic robes,” Mr. O'Brien said.

“Oh,” Miss F joined in, “white dresses.”

“Comme une jeune fille,”
Madame Sagnier said.

Suki smoldered at the camcorder, and Alex turned it off. “I thought you had something to say.”