Alone in the Classroom (19 page)

“What am I getting myself into?” she said to herself.

He laughed his rich and gentle laugh. “We have to embrace life. Take it on. You can’t run from it.”

On Sunday they went for a drive on the Gatineau highway all the way to the stretch between Kazabazua and Gracefield, where not so long ago a magnificent grove of spruce and pine had lined the road for a mile or so on both sides. Connie was behind the wheel of Syd’s Plymouth, a newer model than hers, and Syd navigated. “It was a lovely bit of road,” he told her, “the joy
of the beholder. Then the cutters came on the scene a couple of years ago and today half the wood is gone. It’s a great pity.”

He was thinking, and so was she, of all the handplanted trees on the prairies, carefully watered and cherished. Here, in this forested world of hills and sheltered valleys, they hated trees. Every so often they passed a rickety blueberry stand left to the winter elements,
Bleuets
, one said, and below that,
Bleubarrys
, and he told her about the berry picking he had done as a child in Manitoba, and that his mother had done. In her old age she collapsed between the rows of strawberries from extended exertion in the full sun and they had to carry her home, but the next day she was back picking more quarts for more jam. Once, driving through Manyberries, Alberta, he had stopped and written a note home about the saskatoonberries in abundance, and about seeing a Siberian husky with pale icy-blue eyes ease the dark-blue berries off the twigs with his long wet tongue.

Syd was one of the men she loved. With his ink-stained fingers he pulled out the tree book he kept in his glove compartment in among the road maps. Anchoring it with his cast, he riffled the pages with his right hand and stopped on White Pine and read aloud, ” ‘Especially in dense woods, old trees have straight clear trunks bearing crowns of graceful plume-like branches. According to Josselyn, an early English writer, “the distilled water of the green cones taketh away wrinkles in the face, being laid on with cloths.” ‘ “

The passage took her back to the single pine at the
confluence of the Bow and Saskatchewan Rivers, and she told him about One Pine - the tree, and the man who reminded her of the tree. Strange Parley Burns. And in talking about him, the story of Susan Graves came out, and he was hearing it for the first time.

He looked out the passenger window and didn’t speak, until finally she asked him what he was thinking.

“I’m thinking that men like that are crippled inside.”

“Perverse men.”

“Enforcers.”

He went on to say that if you were to meet a man as crippled in body as some men are crippled in spirit, you would reach out and help.

“He helped himself,” she said. “He’s doing all right.”

They parked in the sun and ate their winter picnic of sandwiches and tea, their breaths visible, their hands cold. Syd had seen the face of Streicher the Nazi Jew-baiter in a newsmagazine and his face reminded him of someone, he couldn’t think who, and then it came - the public executioner in the old silent film
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. In Streicher’s face, he said, was the secret of the pogroms. “He started out as a schoolteacher. I wish I found that harder to believe than I do.”

“The secret of the pogroms.”

“Arrogance. Unintelligence. Brute power.”

Kristallnacht was barely a month old. “Goebbels,” Connie said, “is not unintelligent. He’s very educated, very smart. Insane, I think.”

“He knows what he’s doing. Stupid-shrewd, my grandfather would say. A profoundly unintelligent man.”

He sat beside her with his ruined arm, movingly stalwart and full of abundant life.

On their way back to Ottawa, they passed the turn in the road that led to Michael’s place and she felt her heart slide sideways in her chest. She glanced back for a fraction of a second, then gazed ahead.

“Syd, I want to ask you something.”

“Ask.”

“How would you describe me? I mean as a person.”

“You’re an open book.”

She knew what he meant. He trusted her, he thought the world of her, too. But in thinking the world of her, he wasn’t giving her a lot of thought.

“Which open book? Am I
Bleak House?”

He smiled.

“
Winnie-the-Pooh?”

“Point taken.”

“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire?”

“You’re not an open book,” he said.

“You wouldn’t describe
yourself
as an open book.”

“I wouldn’t mind if you did.”

They were passing a stand of birch and poplar close to the road. Such slender, graceful trees. And she said, “How would you describe Michael?”

“Michael is a deep well.”

She couldn’t say
Michael
or hear it without a little landmine going off in her body.

“He took my eye the first time I saw him”

“He’s too young for you, Connie.”

“He’s too
moody.”
Overstating, and she knew it.

They passed another berry stand abandoned to winter. “There were two old women in Jewel,” she said, “who stuffed newspapers down their stockings when they went berry picking.” She darted him a quick look, amused, pensive. “To avoid getting scratched by the brambles.”

He reached across with his good arm to rub her gently on the shoulder.

“Don’t be afraid, Connie.”

With Michael, she would get a lot of Michael. She was grown up enough to know that. With Syd, she would get the wide world.

Mrs. Graves died on New Year’s Day, and the next afternoon Connie and Syd drove out to see Michael with gifts of cake and whiskey. They sat in his kitchen and talked. Most of what Michael said he directed to Syd, but whenever he looked her way his glance was so pointed that it felled her.

At the end of the visit, as they were putting on their coats, Syd told him that he and Connie were going to be married.

Michael said, “Well, well, well.” He smiled and gave Syd’s hand a firm and vigorous shake.

“What about me?”

“You.” He put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.

He didn’t meet her eyes again until he held the car door open for her and she swung her legs inside. Then he
leaned down and looked intently at her bundled up in her coat. “Those gloves aren’t warm enough.”

“You’re looking out for me.”

“I am.”

I have a picture of their wedding. The two of them holding hands, Syd with a white carnation in the buttonhole of his dark suit, fourteen years older than Connie, and Connie like a model from France, her dark hair parted in the middle and pulled back, a style only an oval-faced woman can wear. She’s not in white but in a close-fitting knee-length dress that I might have guessed was blue had I not been told it was rose-red. The small wedding party includes my mother and father: Connie’s youngest brother is meeting my mother at last, and he’s as well groomed as Connie (that was her doing), and my mother so fresh faced and pretty that I have tears in my eyes looking at her. Her famous head of curls is a shapely heap above her round and comely face; her eyebrows are plucked. She and my father are both nineteen. But the person my eye dwells on most is Michael. He could be a movie star with his brooding, self-involved looks.

The wedding took place on May 10, 1939. They honeymooned for a week in Algonquin Park, not quite missing the onslaught of the blackflies, and sent my father a few black-and-white snapshots, and so I have those too. Here is the country not in its Sunday best, but in its old clothes, unpaved, unfenced, full of character, ungroomed, unvisited, barely penetrable. My favourite of these photos
is the one of Connie bronzed by the sun, bare-shouldered, a kerchief wrapped round her head, her face gleaming as she spurts water out of her mouth in a long, insolent gush.

They came back to the royal visit of George
VI
and Queen Elizabeth, pages and pages of it in the newspapers, and then, a couple of weeks later, three paragraphs about the
St. Louis
, with its cargo of 907 German Jewish refugees who had been denied entry to Cuba. One of the refugees, a forty-eight-year-old lawyer, had slashed his wrists and leapt into the sea.

That night she woke up before dawn and Syd was lying awake beside her, his mind full of Germany and its Jews.

“You asked what happened to my anger.”

“Yes.”

“I’m older,” he said quietly. “And anger doesn’t help when the worst is happening.”

She was listening to him and listening to the stillness. There’s going to be a war, she thought. And Hitler will beat us. And what then?

“I used to think education helped,” he said.

“The right education does. The right teachers. You should be back in the classroom. No, you should be running education for the province. If the world were different, you would be.”

“I’ve been lucky, Connie.” They were holding hands. “I try not to fool myself,” he said.

That was a true summer, the summer of 1939, its long warmth underpinned by the widespread belief that war had been averted and would keep being averted. Even
Syd and Connie believed it so from time to time. They hatched the idea of a travelling school, and Michael was their sounding board; they were something of a threesome for a while, congratulating themselves on their mutual affection. The one who was most clear eyed was the odd man out, Michael. But he was always knowing when it came to love and education. The school was to be modelled on the information-packed vehicles that used to pull into towns and farms on the prairies, bringing the latest ways to fight drought, rust, grasshoppers.

“We’ll be nomads,” Connie said, imagining a book-filled automobile going into remote parts of Northern Ontario and teaching children in a week what it took months to teach them at school.

The married couple lived in Connie’s second-floor apartment on Cooper Street. Now and again the three of them talked so late that Michael stayed over in the spare room down the hall. One night, in the middle of July, Connie made coffee for Michael as Syd headed to bed; their room was directly off the kitchen, hers and Syd’s. Michael was planning to drink his coffee and then drive home. “But if you change your mind,” Connie said, “the spare room is yours.” They talked for a few more minutes and then she followed Syd to bed, leaving Michael to let himself out.

Syd was already asleep. She undressed and got in beside him. He snuggled against her and soon he was aroused. It was quiet beyond the door - Michael had left. She and Syd made love as they usually did, that is to say, satisfactorily for Syd, but not for her: a fast and loving grapple
followed by a deep snore. She lay still for a few minutes, then went out into the kitchen, and Michael was at the table smoking a cigarette.

Now it was her turn to feel as mortified as he must have felt at having his failures on full view at school. Her lovemaking overheard and less than stellar. She took herself to the bathroom and relived the sounds that would have reached Michael’s ears, the pitifully short rustle and flurry and creak that produced only one cry of rapture. She was an orchard ready to be picked and Syd could not find the fruit.

Michael was still at the table when she came back. He reached for her hand.

“You’re shivering,” he said.

The murmur and rustle of leaves through the window screen, the wisp of smoke rising from the ashtray. He ran his finger up her bare arm. He knew how to make her happy, he insinuated, and clang clang clang went the trolley of her arm.

They say the past goes on and on, but what I love about the past is that it’s over. The past is on its own, just as your children in some essential way are on their own, and your parents, no matter how dependent they might have become, are still on their own. I suppose what I love is independent life and independent lives, and that includes independent love. Brave, unsanctioned, amorous love. And then when that’s over, what’s even harder: becoming yourself again.

What began between Connie and Michael didn’t end. They couldn’t stay away from each other. I don’t think they tried. There was an evening in late July, during that first summer of her only marriage, when she left Michael’s place near Wakefield under gathering clouds and drove home into the darkest sky, black but greenish, like army
fatigues. Once she crossed the rumbling boards of the Alexandra Bridge, she turned left and followed Sussex to where it joined Lady Grey Drive, which dipped below the Mint, and down there she parked. Then she walked over to the same spot from which she and Syd had watched the gulls and the ice in December, and took in the huge drama in the summer sky. A French couple watched too. The wife addressed Connie, telling her about urging her husband on as he drove. “But you hit every red light,” she said, turning on him. “And we’ve missed most of it.”

The darkness passed to the east, skirting the city, but around midnight rains hit. Connie was in bed by this time. She got up and lowered windows and watched the thrashing of trees caught in the walloping and windy thunderstorm. When she slipped back into bed, Syd pulled her into his arms.

“It’s wild out there,” she said to him.

“I hear it.”

She was thinking of the French couple, the wife’s palpable disappointment and the husband who couldn’t do anything right. So far she and Syd had been very careful: what he asked, and what she said, hadn’t scratched the smooth yet precarious surface between them.

In the morning she heard on the radio about a campsite in Quebec where pine trees had toppled, falling on a woman and crushing her legs. And she remembered lying on the ground in Michael’s woods, looking up at feathery boughs, each gleaming needle a many-sided surface for refracting light. The bruise on her left upper thigh, the colours of a summer storm, had happened on her way out
of his bedroom when she walked too close to the corner of his dresser.

“What’s this?” Syd said one night, bending over the bruise.

“I don’t even remember it happening.”

“It’s huge.”

“I must have whammed into a table on my way by.”

“Where?”

“In the kitchen,” she said, after a pause.

Syd lay back against his pillow and said nothing. In that long moment she knew that he had guessed and decided not to make an issue of it for now.