Alone in the Classroom (21 page)

They sat back and regarded each other with love and sadness. She had thought of him in the midst of calamity,
which meant a great deal to him. He was still happy to see her, and that was an enormous relief. She wanted to know how things were with him. He answered as he peeled the orange for her and refilled the Thermos cup, lacing the coffee with brandy. He missed Putman, he said, and she nodded, remembering his old boss at the school board, an irresistible character with a face like a stump, who had died two years ago, and perhaps it was just as well, Syd was saying. Everything the two of them believed in, the child-centred learning they had fought for in the thirties, was sliding away in the face of the new drift towards discipline, patriotism. He was thinking more and more about moving into adult education, probably in Toronto with the Workers’ Educational Association; he admired Drummond Wren. And as for the war, he felt more hopeful now that the thought of defeat was eating into Hitler’s brain.

He stopped talking. “You look radiant,” he said.

“Syd.”

“I would not lie to you.”

They didn’t speak of Michael.

Two days later, it started to rain in the valley. It rained for twenty-two hours. Then came a blizzard that covered every surface with snow and crystal ice. In Ottawa all the trams stopped running. New Year’s Eve, the quiet was broken by the sound of bells on horse-drawn sleighs pulled out of retirement as a teacher might be when midway through the year a colleague cracks up. At the beginning of January, the investigation into the wreck got under way. Thirty-six
passengers were dead; 207 others were injured. On the second day of the inquiry, the conductor of the troop train committed suicide.

During that first week of January, Parley Burns went out on a supervised walk with several other inmates from the mental asylum on the St. Lawrence River, where he had been deposited by his wife. They passed ice-thickened hedges that looked like great masses of steel wool, they passed a maple tree that had a dozen birds frozen to its limbs.

A January thaw melted everything. Wrapped in a blanket, he sat outside against the south wall and absorbed the sun. Birds flitted from branch to branch. A deer came out of the woods and nibbled at grasses exposed by the thaw. The deer took note of the man in the fur hat and bedcovers, and discerned that he was no danger at all.

I didn’t know any of this for a long time. Connie we seldom saw because we were in Ontario and she lived in Boston. Years went by. She sent us books, she wrote excellent letters. It’s easy to fall in love with someone who writes excellent letters. Sometimes, unforgettably, she came for Christmas.

There is such intricate movement in things as they happen and such stiffness and resistance when you go back and try to reconstruct them. Conversations, a series of thoughts - their light-footed routes are untraceable after the fact. But I remember it was 1982 and the day after Christmas, a day always conducive to discoveries as we undergo a letdown so intolerable that by early afternoon the children and uncles and fathers finally expel themselves into the snow. The few who remain indoors
breathe a deep sigh of relief and the house relaxes and stories emerge. And so it was on this day. I was in the kitchen with Connie and my mother, leaning my backside against the oven that was heating up the dinner I had prepared ahead of time; nothing else needed to be done. The house was quiet. My daughter had a fever and was lying on the chesterfield. My father, who wasn’t feeling well either, was asleep in his wing chair among the African violets. For some reason my mother repeated something her high-school principal used to say with cutting sarcasm to certain students. “Sometimes I sits and thinks,” she said, “and sometimes
I just sits.”

“Parley Burns,” Connie said, and a world of meaning passed between them. They began to reminisce for my benefit, since I was hearing about Parley for the first time. He had married one of the two daughters of the previous principal, my mother said, and since the other daughter lived with them, he might as well have married both. I asked her what the two women were like, and she said they were tall, bony, lifeless. So was his stepdaughter, “Doris the Brain.”

“He might have married me,” Connie said. “He asked me to once, in a way.”

“But he was
strange
.”

“He was unbalanced and dangerous.”

My mother’s eyes widened, but she didn’t dispute it.

I hung on every word, amazed that I had never heard of him before, this man with the singular name: Parley Burns, the principal who taught French. But so many things are never discussed at all, never mentioned, never asked. It takes a certain mood, a certain time of day. The
room empties out and in the welcome stillness we find the stray crumbs of our own thoughts.

“I would be reading on the veranda,” my mother said, “and he would walk by our house. We would see each other out of the corner of our eyes, but give no sign of recognition.”

She leaned forward a little as she confided in us, though she wasn’t confiding so much as reliving a childhood I couldn’t get enough of. Her cat would have been draped across her shoulders. Mickey. He rode on her shoulders even when she walked the two blocks to get the paper.

“There was something between him and Miss O’Connor, the Latin teacher,” she said. “Whenever he came to the door of her classroom, she blushed a violent crimson from her throat to the roots of her hair.”

“Like Mary Miller.” Connie’s interjection was a dry aside. She was standing close to the window, above which sat a fine old mahogany clock on a small shelf, a clock that had been passed down from one Flood to another. It was a great mystery to me how so confident and sociable a sister could have such a blustery, taciturn brother. He was a fact one room away, my father, the former high-school principal. (Recently, in the grip of making dinner one night, it occurred to me to wonder if my mother was afraid of him too. I had realized suddenly how alarmed I was, how alarmed I always was, that dinner would be late. I was my mother at the stove, pots rattling, blood pressure rising, face flushed with steam.)

My mother went on describing Miss O’Connor. “She lived around the corner from Parley Burns and he lived on
my street,” she said. “Every day at lunch he walked her home, and every day after school he did the same. But she was a devout Roman Catholic, who advised her students to read as much as possible, since we would never have so much free time again, but cautioned us
not
to read
Anthony Adverse
because the author had been married three times in a cave.”

I was still absorbing the marriages in the cave when my mother said, “Once, the elastic in her knickers gave way and they fell to the floor.”

Perhaps elastic was less well made in those days. Or else women wore their underwear long after someone nowadays would have thrown them out. That seems most likely. “And what did she do?” I asked, delighted by these glimpses into an uncensored, unofficial past.

“She scooped them up and stuffed them in her book and continued on, blushing like mad.”

I asked if Miss O’Connor was pretty. Ever on the lookout for romantic possibilities.

She was not. But she took pride in her appearance, as did Miss Wood, the secretary who was also in love with Parley and who wasn’t pretty either, but who had the distinction of owning a genuine Harris tweed coat.

“Parley stood sentry in the hallway,” my mother said, “and more than once I had the bad luck to walk the length of the hall alone and under his eye. He watched my progress the whole way and it made my skin crawl.”

Connie nodded with complete understanding, and my mother continued, her face smoother, younger, ruminative. “He must have had a voice, but I have trouble giving him a voice. Can I say he had a grey voice?”

“You can,” Connie said. “That’s perfect.”

“His one joke was to say to a student without an answer, ‘Please go away and let me sleep. I would rather sleep than eat.’ Which may or may not
be
a joke.”

Still looking for the larger story, I wanted to know if there were certain students he persecuted, and she said that generally he directed his sarcasm at the big louts in the back. “Not at one of them in particular,” she said, raising her hands (the thumbs of which curved backwards into impressive reverse Cs, sculptor thumbs, like Henry Moore’s) and letting them drop slowly, expressively. “Just a canopy of derision that settled over everyone in the room.”

The past made my mother eloquent. It still does.

Connie was wearing a dress of black wool, simple, elegant, as all her clothes were. You have to have the body, the height, the narrowness of hips, the hair. The dress was fitted yet loose and made by a seamstress, one of three articles of clothing that cost a small fortune but were worth it, she said, because you needed nothing else when you travelled.

She was the easiest person in the world to be with, thanks to her knack of getting attention without asking for it and of conversing in an informed way about any subject, thereby earning my father’s hard-to-win respect. But he was putty in her hands, my father. And because he loved and admired his big sister so much, my mother did too, and Connie became an endless source of fascination to me.

I said to her, “What did you mean before? You said Parley asked you to marry him in a way.”

A wave of something crossed her face, old embarrassment, perhaps, something indescribable, but she didn’t look away from me. She said, “We didn’t like each other.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t know. It’s not the sort of thing.” She stopped. “I might have been the only one who talked to him. Maybe he thought I forgave him.”

I was aware of the light outside and the peacefulness inside, the afternoon hours of a Sunday that held no terrors because school wasn’t about to begin tomorrow.

“Forgave him for what?”

She explained for what, and as she did so her voice filled with grief. She told the story she had not told anyone since telling Syd. For a long moment we were silent, stricken. The walls of the past had blown away and we were in the unprotected fields of memory.

“Then when young Ethel Weir was raped and murdered, I wondered,” she said.

My mother’s eyes locked on hers. “I thought of him too. But the hair in her fist was blond.”

Independently, without even knowing his past.

“Such a strange man,” my mother said again. “One day, when he and some other inmates at the asylum were taken for a walk, he committed suicide by throwing himself in front of a truck.”

The heat from the oven pressed into the back of my upper thighs, my bottom. I waited for her to go on.

“I suppose it happened during the war,” she said. “I’d moved away from Argyle.”

“It was 1943,” Connie said. “Six months after he went into the asylum. He was forty-nine.”

“The Brockville asylum,” my mother added. “Argyle didn’t have one.”

“Not the one in Brockville,” said Connie. “A rest home, closer to Cornwall. A sanatorium. But he’s buried in Argyle. I went to see his grave.”

One of the things I most admired about my aunt was that she never apologized for her curiosity, ever.

“He’s in a large impressive plot with his wife’s family, about two hundred feet from Ethel Weir. It took me a while to find Ethel. There’s just a grave marker in the long grass.”

“And the girl who burned alive,” I said.

“Susan Graves. Well, what was left of her would have blown away in the wind.”

Her name is her grave, I thought, as if I were studying
Hamlet
again.

We went outside, leaving my father and my daughter asleep in the living room. A light snow was falling and no one else was about. We took the street to the corner, turned left, and made our way past the old farmhouse of pale-yellow brick, the original house in a neighbourhood that used to be an orchard and now is choked with mega-houses and three-car garages. “Travesties,” my mother called them, “godawful travesties.” She was looking at them with the eye of someone who had grown up poor, a girl for whom Christmas dessert was either red Jell-O or green Jell-O. Every year it alternated. If it had been red at
her mother’s, then it was green at Aunt Em’s. Every year, no matter who carved the bird, as the youngest child, my mother got the neck. She claimed she didn’t mind. “It was turkey and it was good,” she said.

We were making our way to Reservoir Park and soon we were there, walking under trees and past the occasional person out with a dog. At the small sliding hill we caught up with the rest of the family, and my mother was distracted away from her life and into their lives, a great loss, it seemed to me, since now she put on a concerted show of good nature and good fun. I wanted her to myself, that’s all. Instead, her attention shifted towards my brother Ted, who had been so ill. He was frolicking with his children and his nephews, including my small son, and the sight of them delighted her. Connie and I watched for a few minutes. Then because she was cold, and I wanted to check on my daughter, the two of us walked home.

On Christmas Eve my father had seemed very tired, standing in the kitchen between the counter and the door that led to the dining room. He said he had been thinking a lot about his father. I asked him why.