Alone in the Classroom (6 page)

Parley folded his arms and leaned against her desk,
unhurried, implacable. “He knows how to memorize. That’s his crutch. He needs to know how to read. Take away his crutch,” he said.

He reappeared as she closed her classroom door, and they headed outside and walked to the road.

“You like the boy,” he said.

She lifted her hand. Of course.

“But you don’t like men, if observation serves.”

She stopped. Her workbooks were folded into her chest. It had been a long day.

“What kind of thing is that to say to me?”

She felt the bones in her head being re-knit - un-knit and re-knit - by these sly questions that weren’t even questions. She resumed walking.

“You are so dedicated,” he said to her next.

“I’m not so dedicated.”

“You’re much too modest.”

But she wasn’t that either.

They passed Graves Hardware, a deep and narrow store with dark corners and high shelves. In the summer men sat on a bench outside the door. In the winter, around the stove inside.

He said, “There’s a concert on the radio tonight. You might care to join us. Mrs. Wilson’s radio. You’re someone who would appreciate Brahms.”

Her mother had loved Brahms.

That evening she would sit in his landlady’s wallpapered living room, listening to the many-knobbed radio that sat on a table next to a window full of geraniums. Why is it, she wondered, that for every slow movement you get two fast movements, instead of the other way around, when the slow movements are a thousand times better? Who made these rules, anyway?

By the end Parley’s eyes were wet, and she felt torn in half.

Blushing Mary Miller said, “He likes you.” They were in the schoolyard together at recess. Mary held the handbell in the crook of her arm. “He walks you home.”

“I don’t like it, that’s why.”

“You don’t?”

“I hate it, Mary.”

Mary, who had a wide face and eyes of no particular colour, gave her a startled look and a small “oh.” After a moment, she said, “But he’s such a gentleman.”

“He’s a sadist. A gentleman sadist.” And Connie laughed.

She came on hard to Mary’s soft; sharp to Mary’s mild. “A gentleman sadist,” she repeated, feeling that she had stumbled upon the truth, a pearl of truth produced by the irritating sand of Mary Miller.

“Mother thinks we’re lucky to have him. He’s doing so much for the school. All his experience.”

“Then what is he doing
here?
If he’s so experienced?”

“Well, I never thought of that.”

Mary was not a stupid woman, but she had stupid eyes.
They looked blank or they looked surprised. She was like soft mud. She would teach until the end of her days. She would live with her mother, who had been a schoolteacher herself. She would plod in her sensible shoes through one day after another, not a good teacher, but adequate, and her mother was adequate company, and everything was adequate and only adequate.

The weather was colder by now. They were in their coats and woollen tams, standing with their arms folded for warmth near the back door of the school.

“You never wanted,” and Connie waved her hand towards the horizon, “to just take off?”

“I can’t. Everybody else did. It would break my mother’s heart if I left.”

Parley Burns strode back and forth at the foot of the schoolyard, smoking one of his cigarettes.

“He makes me feel despicable,” Connie said, yielding to meet Mary’s sad honesty halfway. “I can’t explain it.”

Mary regarded her. “You must encourage him.”

“But I don’t.”

“Or he wouldn’t walk you home.”

She raised the handbell and rang it. Recess was over.

Connie stood there, registering the forcible prick of Mary’s assessment. The needle in the haystack of Mary.

Parley assigned the work and play of
Tess
, handing out parts, choosing certain students to write the in-between narration, others to gather costumes and props, others to
make copies of the text. He assigned Michael to build the columns of Stonehenge, telling him they needed to be tall but portable, impressive but light. “You’re in charge,” he said, giving the job to the son of the man who owned the hardware store.

Connie’s classroom became the hub of the enterprise. Immediately to the inside-left of the door was the cloakroom from which the fledgling actors, dancers, musicians made their entrances and exits. The scene of Tess’s home was played with chairs and a small square table, tablecloth, teacups. When the chairs and table were removed, a bench and milk pails formed a dairy. Later, the corner of the schoolroom became Stonehenge.

TIME: evening. SEASON: summer
.

Parley Burns printed the words on Connie’s blackboard, and they quickened her heart. At fourteen, swept up in her father’s plans to move West, she had asked herself what she would do with her own life, and the answer had come with the urgency of youth: I will go onstage. But nothing had happened the way she planned. At fifteen, she saw her mother die. At seventeen, she was training to be a teacher. At eighteen, she was teaching school. At nineteen, she would turn her back on teaching and take up newspaper reporting. At thirty, she would remake her life yet again.

But the biggest change, she told me more than once, was her mother’s death. In historical accounts you find reports of deep and early snowfalls that continued day and night for weeks, after which nothing was ever the same. Fruit trees died, never to re-establish themselves, and it
wasn’t just the quantity of snow that was to blame, but the unprepared earth, not yet frozen, and the leafy innocence of the branches now groaning under a double weight. You see the same thing with bereaved children. Connie and my father, for example.

And why the early desire to be an actress? I pressed her on this, because I’d had the same impulse. In her case, when she was twelve, she had played the first witch and the second assassin in
Macbeth
, coached to enunciate each word with demonic relish by storming, funny, unforgettable Mr. Goodwin. One lucky girl was assigned to be the Manager of Blood: Ada Lempke took Mr. Goodwin’s recipe and cooked up a syrup of water and sugar doctored with red food colouring and a smidgen of green. He trained them all in the best way to slit a throat onstage: knee the victim from behind, then haul back the head to expose the doomed throat.
Macbeth murthers sleep, innocent sleep
. “It’s a play about insomnia,” he taught, “moral insomnia, about not being able to close your eyes to the dark within. Notice how Macbeth’s language becomes more and more like the witches’ as the play unfolds.”
Approach thou like the Russian bear, The arm’d rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger; Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves shall never tremble
.

Syd Goodwin was another rarity, venting his spleen on property rather than on children. He banged the wall with the pointer, booted the side of his desk, once took a running kick at an empty bushel basket in the schoolyard and broke his toe on the rock inside. The kids laughed themselves sick over that, and he laughed too, eventually.
Outside of Shakespeare, he had the fullest range of insults Connie had ever heard.
Numbskull, knucklehead, nitwit, chowderhead, lamebrain, meathead, dim bulb, dough head, bone-head, fathead, lunkhead, blockhead, hole in the head, mongoose, muttonhead, hambone
. He was a mighty walker, too, taking them on extensive and impulsive field trips, his rousing battle cry being, “It’s too beautiful to stay inside!”

Enter
John Durbeyfield
carrying a basket. He is met by old
Mr. Tringham,
an antiquarian
.

Most of the parts had been handed out. Jake Aarp, a blustery boy in grade ten, was drunken “Sir” John, Tess’s father. Small Henry Rhodes was Mr. Tringham, the antiquarian. Red Peter (for his red hair and as a shortened form of Alfred) played Tess’s brother Abraham. Susan Graves was Tess, of course. Her friend Hildy Kowalchuk played Joan Durbeyfield, the mother.

Parley said, “It takes almost nothing to make you feel the role. A shawl - and you’re Tess. A hat set at a certain angle - and you’re her useless father.” He set a brimmed cap on his own head. “Deep disguise,” he deadpanned. “It works for the actor and it works for the audience. We all want to believe.”

He had not settled on the boy who would play the seducer, bad Alec. In the meantime, he played the rogue himself.

Alec D’Urberville
enters with a cigarette and a little basket of strawberries
.

The strawberries had been constructed by the children
in Miss Fluelling’s class from papier mache painted red, stems painted green.

Alec
takes a strawberry from the basket
and Parley cannot resist: he holds it aloft.

“Papier mache
, from the French.
Papier
, for paper.
Mache
, past participle of
macher
, to chew.”

He
holds it by the stem to her mouth
. Tess
covers her mouth
. He
persists;
she
retreats till she is against the wall; laughs distressfully, and takes it with her lips as offered
.

Alec: There’s a darling.

Connie watched him rehearse the rickety bones of the play and at night she reread the novel to remind herself of its agonizing beauty and depth. The terrible death of the horse. The seduction and fall of Tess. The milk meadows, and the blessed world of Tess’s one happy summer.

She said to Parley as he walked her home, “I think you should have the scene with Prince. There are boys who would love to play a horse, for one thing. For another, you can’t understand Tess unless you know she blames herself for his death.”

She knew how to stage it, too. Tess and her brother would rock side to side on the bench, the make-believe wagon, pulled by ancient, decrepit Prince (two boys under a blanket) on their pre-dawn way to market. From the cloakroom would come the snores of the drunken father. Now Tess and her brother drift asleep. The light on the wagon goes out. The fast-moving Royal Mail whips around the corner, collides with the wagon, and poor
Prince is killed in the smash-up. This was the book’s striking symmetry: an unintentional murder opens the book, an intentional murder closes it.

Parley said, “Then we’ll need more blood.”

The fog of disturbed creation filled the school - excitement, wariness, alarm, envy. Everyone entered Parley’s mood. On the sidelines Mary Miller stood ablushing and in charge of props. Propsy, he called her, which pleased and titillated her. Miss Fluelling offered to play the piano between scenes, musical interludes to keep things moving; she played as she taught, rolling her hard and agile fingers across the keys with aggressive panache, and watching her, children felt their heads hurt. Susan Graves was a perfect Tess, having a certain refinement and being malleable, yet impulsive.

During rehearsals Connie formed her abiding impression of the gentleman sadist. She saw his face redden with animated pleasure, a kind of happy horror, when he accused Susan of being wooden, incapable of the large, relaxed gesture, the brave self-exposure he wanted.

“Tess is a physical being,” he said. ” ‘A sunned cat.’ You need to act with your body as well as your head.”

The confused girl ran the back of her hand across her forehead, unconsciously repeating her mother’s gesture at the end of washday.

Parley said, “When a woman is attracted to a man, she plays with her hair. Lift your hair off the back of your neck. Not like that. Fluff it up.”

He stepped behind her and lifted her hair high, exposing in the process the back of her neck. “Well,” he said. “No wonder.”

Susan tried to turn, but he caught her by the shoulder.

“No wonder you’re Tess. Look at that.” Then, “Look at this,” he said to Connie.

She had been fetching workbooks from her desk. She put them down and went over to look. A red birthmark, wide and irregular, splashed its way across the back of Susan’s neck.

Parley said, “You, my girl, were strangled in a previous life.”

He let her go and she faced them, alarmed, alert to her fortune being told.

“I knew you were special,” Parley said.

“Then so am I.” Connie smiled to dispel his effect on the girl. “I’ve got the same kind of mark. Not as big. But it’s common.”

Only to have her ponytail swept aside and the back of her neck examined. “You weren’t strangled,” Parley said. “You were clubbed.”

There are children who remember past lives. Parley’s youngest sister had been such a one. Peggy Rose, who was remarkable for the low, mature voice that came out of her four-year-old mouth and the livid birthmark that circled her neck. Parley told Connie on the way home that his sister was named after the grandmother who had committed suicide, hanging herself in the barn.

“My sister was born old,” he said. “You know the look some children have?” He paused and ground his cigarette under the toe of his shoe. “She wouldn’t go near
the barn. We none of us ever mentioned Granny’s suicide, but she knew.”

They walked on and he said, “In my family we see ghosts.”

“I’ve never seen a ghost.” Her envy was considerable.