Alone in the Classroom (20 page)

On August 2 it was cool enough that Michael burned wood in his cookstove first thing in the morning. The stove was a Forest Beauty built by the Findlay Brothers in Carleton Place; it had a large front cooking surface and a bread oven at the rear. The day seemed to mark a turning point in the season, but then it got warm again and stayed warm.

Connie had awakened beside Syd from a morning dream in which a vicious dog had her right hand in its mouth and wouldn’t let go. Its owner was in among the trees. She told Syd about her dream, and he told her about his boyhood dog, who lay on her back to have her belly rubbed and would move his hand with her paw to the spot she wanted stroked. They went for an early-morning walk and sniffed fall in the air. Her sandalled feet were cold, monarch butterflies swanned about. One of them flirted
repeatedly with Syd as he talked to it tenderly, asking it if it was on its way to Mexico.

Then a few weeks later, on August 23, came the numbing shock of the Hitler-Stalin pact, and they knew it was all over, the summer of 1939. From then on, Connie worked long hours at the paper. The moment she learned about the invasion of Poland, she called Syd, and they listened together two days later, the third of September, when Neville Chamberlain’s sad voice came over the radio declaring war. Syd, who had read
Mein Kampf
, was calmer than she was, but he was always calm in the early stages of a catastrophe. Michael was with them, too, on that Sunday. They walked to Sparks Street after the broadcast, and all the talk around them was of war and how it would be fought. Michael was keyed up and silent. At the end of September, he enlisted.

During the war, many young couples married hastily, urgently, before the young man was sent overseas. They often did so against the advice of their elders. “There was opposition,” my father told me once, referring to his own wedding. His father had written to him, counselling him to wait until the war was over, but my father ignored the advice. He married my mother as soon as he graduated, in May of 1942, and then he enlisted. Connie was teaching in Boston by then and couldn’t make it to the wedding. She joined them for Christmas at my grandmother’s instead. My grandmother was not an easy person to visit, but
Connie knew that - she knew her to be snobbish, critical, fretful about money, adept at making everybody feel bad by being blunt and cutting and oblivious. The visit worked because it was brief. Her gift to my grandmother was a big canister of tea, rationed in Canada but not in Boston. She gave my parents a detailed atlas of the world and a handsome magnifying glass to locate Singapore, Sumatra, Java, Moscow, Guadalcanal.

During that Christmas in Argyle, Connie learned about Parley’s breakdown, how he had been given a leave of absence from school and was at home recovering from nervous exhaustion. It had become embarrassing, my grandmother said. He had taken to talking to himself in the school hallways, his breath reeked, whatever he picked up he dropped. Now he couldn’t get out of bed. Connie said she wasn’t surprised, but she was. It was like hearing about the death of someone terminally ill: a shock of a special kind. She didn’t tell the story of Susan Graves. Not then. Certain things we keep to ourselves for a long time. (Others we spill, as if our minds are brimming bowls that slop over from time to time.) Mental illness ran in his family, my grandmother said.

Two days after Christmas, Connie packed her bags for her journey back to Boston. My parents went with her to the station at the end of my grandmother’s street. The evening local was running late, a longer train than usual due to heavy holiday traffic. Amidst all the bustle my mother saw her childhood friend Bess Macswain. Bess was even taller than Connie, a gangly young woman with a memorable grin, two years younger than my mother and heading back to Kingston with a friend.

Passengers boarded at the rear of the train. Connie made her way to the end of one coach and continued on to the next, looking for a window seat, and then the next, because Parley Burns and his wife were sitting side by side and she pretended not to see them. She recognized others too: the short, aggressive housewife who five years earlier had noticed John Coyle hanging out a pair of trousers and a shirt when she stepped outside to empty coffee grounds onto her flower bed at seven-thirty in the morning; and Miss Ivey, who had been searching in the bush and calling out Ethel’s name when Johnny joined her, and whose opinion that terrible things were afoot in the world had been more than amply justified.

The train pulled out twenty minutes late. A light rain was freezing as it fell, and they continued to lose time. At every stop in the valley more and more passengers got on, until by Arnprior they were standing in the aisles. The train approached the town of Almonte forty minutes late. Mist rose from the river over which ran the trestle bridge that brought them curving into the station. A few passengers got off and upwards of sixty got on.

Connie stood up to stretch her legs. She caught Miss Ivey’s eye and went forward to speak to her. Rosamond Ivey had a limp, not pronounced like Johnny’s - she was not in need of a cane but had a slight lameness, an in-turned foot. Connie remembered thinking at the time how odd it was that the two searchers who found Ethel were both lame. Rosamond was a single woman in her thirties, intelligent looking, dressed in a new winter coat. She told Connie that she had noticed her name in the
paper a few months ago as the sister of the man who married Hannah Soper; she herself was on her way to Ottawa to spend a week with her brother’s family. The train was about to pull out. Connie wished her well and worked her way back to her seat, where her book was waiting for her.

H.L. Mencken’s
Newspaper Days
. She opened it and was slammed backwards against her seat. The lights went out. Then grinding steel, and another jolt, which flung her into the air, after which she seemed to be falling all the time, grasping on vacancy. She landed on her backside on the station platform, shaken up and bruised, but in one piece when she picked herself up. In front of her was chaos - wreckage and moaning and billowing steam. The coaches had splintered into bits, but she was standing like a tenpin that hadn’t been toppled. Men were running by and she called out, “What happened?” and one of them threw back, “Struck from behind.” All the general noise had fallen away and particular sounds stood out, hanging in the air. A little girl covered in blood, except for her long yellow curls, was wailing out a Montreal address. Connie went to take her by the hand, but a trainman holding a lantern got to her first. Then came a distant siren, the fire brigade was on its way, and it occurred to her that the wreck might burst into flames.

I was just opening my book and then there was carnage
. She said these words in her head to Michael.

It started to snow as she stood there. Damp, heavy flakes, just this side of rain. They melted on her face and on the ground. She turned in a circle and saw her handbag upright amid the rubble like an unbroken wineglass; she
picked it up and clutched it to her chest. Then she recognized a voice asking for help and went towards it and saw a woman lying on the ground, her legs clearly broken, and it was Rosamond. She knelt beside her and put her handbag under her head. Rosamond’s face glittered and Connie wiped the tears with her fingers but they were bits of broken glass.

Soldiers came with stretchers and Connie stepped back. They lifted Rosamond up as if she weighed nothing at all and carried her away. She retrieved her handbag, by now tromped on by pairs of boots, and stood for a moment wiping it with her ungloved hand. Then she was being led across the street into a stone house and given a blanket. Other passengers were there, all of them in shock. Parley Burns was standing next to his wife. He was patting her head like a boy patting a strange dog.

Connie went over to them, and since he didn’t appear to recognize her, she reminded him who she was.

He said, “You avoided me on the train.”

His breath smelled so bad that she took a step back. It smelled of rotten meat, gross decay. She took a further step to the side to get out of range.

His wife reached for his hand and held it. There was a sympathy between them that Connie hadn’t imagined, and perhaps it was new.

A boy of about eight drew her attention. He was saying that he was awfully tired and couldn’t he stay here for the night. And just beyond him, sitting on the floor, was a man with broken glasses and blood on his forehead. Someone gave Connie a cup of tea, scalding, bitter, and as
she drank it, the journalist in her came back to life.
I should be at the station asking questions
. In her handbag she had a small notebook and pencil. She went back across the street to the station and began to collect the information that she would feed by phone to the night editor at the
Journal
.

It turned out that a solid-steel troop train from Petawawa had ploughed into their passenger train from behind, driving right through two of the ten wooden coaches and halfway through a third, scattering bodies into the night. Some of the injured were being taken to the local hospital, others to the theatre just down the street from the train station, where they were given first aid. The dead were being carried to the old guard room downstairs in the town hall. Connie made her way over there, following the downhill slope, treacherous in the wet snow. On the stone floor in the basement, she counted nine bodies laid out under grey blankets, and more were being brought in. A young doctor, nervous, overtalkative, told her that the male victims were fairly easily identified from the cards and licences in their wallets or pockets, except for one man, who had been stripped of his clothing, even his socks, by the force of the impact. But the women’s handbags had been thrown about in the snow on all sides of the train. He said it was going to take a lot of work to remove the slivers of glass and bits of lace and silk from the cuts and gashes in their mangled faces. He was referring to the injured, she realized, not the dead.

Relatives began to stream in. They came by car from all over the Ottawa Valley, having heard the news by radio or phone. They entered the temporary morgue, and provincial
policemen turned back the blankets as they went up the long row. Connie heard a man say he was an undertaker looking for his niece. He said his name was Macswain. She saw him kneel beside one of the bodies and knew by his stillness that he had found Bess, my mother’s friend.

Then word came that the undamaged part of the train would be leaving before long to make room for the hospital train coming in from Smiths Falls, and Connie returned to the commotion of the station. She dug coins out of her purse and used a pay phone, and the operator put her through to the
Journal
. She couldn’t remember the night editor’s name, but he remembered her. She told him she was in Almonte and he sucked in his breath, already aware of the wreck, thrilled to get anything first-hand. After that call, she made another, and Syd picked up the phone.

She had left him after a year of marriage, after they celebrated their anniversary in the Wakefield Hotel, where he reached across the table and took her hand and said, “Here’s to our life together, love.” His vulnerable, trusting, knowing face made her feel so fraudulent and so pained for him and so trapped that all she could do was hold his hand and stare at the white tablecloth. She knew a woman in Boston, someone she had met in Paris, who had contacts in education, and she obtained a teaching job in a Boston private school.

She and Michael were writing to each other. On paper he was bashful and sweet and unpunctuated. “Well I’ve outshone myself here I am on my third page.” He was on a bomber base in England, a parachute rigger with the
RCAF
, part of the ground crew and relatively safe. “I’m
about all washed up as far as talk goes so I’ll say so long Sweetheart for now.”

She told Syd, “I’m all right. I’m perfectly all right, but there’s been a train crash.”

A few hours later, when her shortened train of six cars pulled into Ottawa’s Union Station, Syd was waiting for her with a Thermos of coffee, a flask of brandy, an orange, cold sausages, boiled eggs, apples; also, mittens, a hat, a scarf, a sweater. He had hoped to take her home with him, but she refused, and he kept her company instead until her connecting train left, shepherding her through the tunnel under Rideau Street to the Chateau Laurier’s lower level, then up into the hotel’s grand lobby, where he claimed two deep armchairs next to a small table.

Her head was splitting and she asked if he might have some aspirin. From one of his pockets, he fished out a pillbox. Watching him fiddle the tiny box open with his big fingers, she thought her heart might burst as well as her head. He was the same prince of a man in the same tweed jacket, two years older than the last time she had seen him. From another pocket he pulled out a deck of cards. They played rummy for an hour and she beat him soundly. She loved to win at cards.

“I saw Parley Burns,” she said. “He and his wife were on the train. They weren’t hurt. He still has his Hitler moustache. Well, he’s lost his mind, they say.”