In the Absence of Angels (10 page)

Once more I had a glimpse of Miss Totten and Mooley together, on a day when I had joined the slangy, athletic Miss Steele who was striding capably along in her Ground Grippers on the route I usually took home. Almost at once I had known I was unwelcome, but I trotted desperately in her wake, not knowing how to relieve her of my company. At last a stitch in my side forced me to stop, in front of a corner fishmongers’.

“Folks who want to walk home with me have to step on it!” said Miss Steele. She allotted me one measuring, stone-blue glance, and moved on.

Disposed on the bald white window stall of the fish store there was a rigidly mounted eel which looked as if only its stuffing prevented it from growing onward, sinuously, from either impersonal end. Beside it were several tawny shells. A finger would have to avoid the spines on them before being able to touch their rosy, pursed throats. As the pain in my side lessened, I raised my head and saw my own face in the window, egg-shaped and sad. I turned away. Miss Totten and Mooley stood on the corner, their backs to me, waiting to cross. A trolley clanged by, then the street was clear, and Miss Totten, looking down, nodded gently into the black boa and took Mooley by the hand. As they passed down the hill to St. Nicholas Avenue and disappeared, Mooley’s face, smoothed out and grave, seemed to me, enviably, like the serene, guided faces of the children I had seen walking securely under the restful duennaship of nuns.

Then came the first day of Visiting Week, during which, according to convention, the normal school day would be on display, but for which we had actually been fortified with rapid-fire recitations which were supposed to erupt from us in sequence, like the somersaults which climax acrobatic acts. On this morning, just before we were called to order, Dr. Piatt, the principal, walked in. He was a gentle man, keeping to his office like a snail, and we had never succeeded in making a bogey of him, although we tried. Today he shepherded a group of mothers and two men, officiously dignified, all of whom he seated on some chairs up front at Miss Totten’s left. Then he sat down too, looking upon us benignly, his head cocked a little to one side in a way he had, as if he hearkened to some unseen arbiter who whispered constantly to him of how bad children could be, but he benevolently, insistently, continued to disagree.

Miss Totten, alone among the teachers, was usually immune to visitors, but today she strode restlessly in front of us and as she pulled down the maps one of them slipped from her hand and snapped back up with a loud, flapping roar. Fumbling for the roll-book, she sat down and began to call the roll from it, something she usually did without looking at the book and favoring each of us, instead, with a warming nod.

“Arnold Ames?”

“Pres-unt!”

“Mary Bates?”

“Pres-unt!”

“Wanda Becovic?”

“Pres-unt!”

“Sidney Cohen?”

“Pres-unt!”

“L—Lilly Davis?”

It took us a minute to realize that Mooley had not raised her hand. A light, impatient groan rippled over the class. But Mooley, her face uplifted in a blank stare, was looking at Miss Totten. Miss Totten’s own lips moved. There seemed to be a cord between her lips and Mooley’s. Mooley’s lips moved, opened.

“Pres-unt!” said Mooley.

The class caught its breath, then righted itself under the sweet, absent smile of the visitors. With flushed, lowered lids, but in a rich full voice, Miss Totten finished calling the roll. Then she rose and came forward with the Manila cards. Each time, she held up the name of a state and we answered with its capital city.

Pennsylvania.

“Harrisburg!” said Arnold Ames.

Illinois.

“Springfield!” said Mary Bates.

Arkansas.

“Little Rock!” said Wanda Becovic.

North Dakota.

“Bismarck!” said Sidney Cohen.

Idaho.

We were afraid to turn our heads.

“Buh …Boise!” said Mooley Davis.

After this, we could hardly wait for the turn to come around to Mooley. When Miss Totten, using a pointer against the map, indicated that Mooley was to “bound” the state of North Carolina, we focused on one spot with such attention that the visitors, grinning at each other, shook their heads at such zest. But Dr. Piatt was looking straight at Miss Totten, his lips parted, his head no longer to one side.

“N-north Cal …Callina.” Just as the deaf gaze at the speaking, Mooley’s eyes never left Miss Totten’s. Her voice issued, burred here, choked there, but unmistakably a voice. “Bounded by Virginia on the north …Tennessee on the west …South Callina on the south …and on the east …and on the east ...” She bent her head and gripped her desk with her hands. I gripped my own desk, until I saw that she suffered only from the common failing — she had only forgotten. She raised her head.

“And on the east,” she said joyously, “and on the east by the Atlannic Ocean.”

Later that term Miss Totten died. She had been forty years in the school system, we heard in the eulogy at Assembly. There was no immediate family, and any of us who cared to might pay our respects at the chapel. After this, Mr. Moloney, who usually chose
Whispering
for the dismissal march, played something slow and thrumming which forced us to drag our feet until we reached the door.

Of course none of us went to the chapel, nor did any of us bother to wonder whether Mooley went. Probably she did not. For now that the girl withdrawn for so long behind those rigidly empty eyes had stepped forward into them, they flicked about quite normally, as captious as anyone’s.

Once or twice in the days that followed we mentioned Miss Totten, but it was really death that we honored, clicking our tongues like our elders. Passing the umbrella-stand at home, I sometimes thought of Miss Totten, furled forever in her coffin. Then I forgot her too, along with the rest of the class. After all this was only reasonable in a class which had achieved Miss Steele.

But memory, after a time, dispenses its own emphasis, making a
feuilleton
of what we once thought most ponderable, laying its wreath on what we never thought to recall. In the country, the children stumble upon the griffin mask of the mangled pheasant, and they learn; they come upon the murderous love-knot of the mantis, and they surmise. But in the city, although no man looms very large against the sky, he is silhouetted all the more sharply against his fellows. And sometimes the children there, who know so little about the natural world, stumble still upon that unsolicited good which is perhaps only a dislocation in the insensitive rhythm of the natural world. And if they are lucky, memory holds it in waiting. For what they have stumbled upon is their own humanity — their aberration, and their glory. That must be why I find myself wanting to say aloud to someone: “I remember …a Miss Elizabeth Totten.”

H
OLDING THE SMALL
white card so as not to bend it, Letitia Reynolds Whyte, aged twenty-four, looked cautiously up and down the main hallway of the school. Only the Senior girls were left in the school now, and most of them were in their rooms, lying on the beds in their underwear, talking dreamily of what they were going to do after graduation, the ones who were not getting married, who were only going to Europe with their parents, or just back to Locust Valley, or Silver Spring, or Charleston, listening enviously to the fluttery, conscious plans of those who were. Through the closed door of the Green Room down at the end of the hall she heard the laughter of the girls closeted there, rehearsing the skits for the Senior Banquet that evening. Tomorrow, hordes of parents would descend on the school for the graduation exercises, but today, the empty lawns outside — carefully shaven to a final unusual neatness that morning by Norval, the gardener — the echoing halls inside, all had a hush over them, a left behind hush of desertions and departures, of feverish routines suspended, of another school year gone, and another deadened summer begun, in which only Miss Sopes — the Head — the colored cook, and Norval would be left to wait for fall. And, of course, Letitia.

She looked up and down the hall again. All the teachers’ cubbyhole private offices were closed and locked, even the larger one at the very end, a former parlor, which was rated by “Papa Davis,” Professor Walter Wallace Davis, because he was the oldest, the most distinguished looking, and the only one who was a real professor, having come to Hyacinth Hall after the close of a career in Latin and Greek at the State University. Usually, long after the others had locked up and gone he could be found lingering in the musty brown room with the shabby davenport and the bronze lamp with the purple frosted grapes. “This is my real home, girls. My real home,” he would say, leaning forward and smiling expansively, rubbing the grapes with a restless, worrying hand. But today even he had gone home to his palsied sister in their dark old house across the bridge in Minetteville, although he would return tomorrow to address the parents, as he did every year at graduation.

Satisfied that no one was around, Letitia crossed the hall to the large Student Mail box which hung on the wall in its very center. Ordinarily the box was a plain drab, lettered “Hyacinth Hall” in white, a smart, monogram-like inscription which the elder, dead Miss Sopes,
the
Miss Sopes, in some fierce spinsterish urge, thwarted possibly as to bedspreads and guest towels, had always had imprinted on every wastebasket, towel, door, and object that attached to the Hall. This tradition, like every one which stemmed from the mourned competence of her sister, the present tremulous Miss Rosanna had of course carried on.

Today, in accordance with still another tradition, the box was covered, except for the slit for envelopes, with a large, fanned-out frill of stiff white paper, and stuck above it, a fancily inked sign said “Announcements.” All week long Senior girls had been surreptitiously seeking out the box and dropping in their white cards, or slips of pink or blue notepaper, when no one was looking. On Banquet night, the box, lifted from its hooks, would be set in the middle of the draped head table where the class officers sat, and after the jerkily rhymed class history had been read and the class prophecies for each girl had sent them all into gales of merriment, the class president, standing solemnly above the box, would dip her hand into it slowly, teasingly, and read off, one by one, the names and announcements of all the girls who were leaving Hyacinth Hall “engaged.” Each girl stood, was clapped for, walked forward smiling and reddened to the head table and was handed a long-stemmed rose, which she pinned to her shoulder and wore mincingly the rest of the evening. A girl could not just put any name, or even the name of her “steady” in the box. She had to be really, seriously engaged. Letitia knew, for Senior Banquet, since there were never any boys present, was one of the school functions she was allowed to attend. She had been to two of them already. Tonight’s would be the third.

After one more hesitant look around, she bent over the card in her hand, scrutinized it lovingly, tabbing each letter with a slow forefinger. Some of the girls even got themselves engaged just so they could announce it on Banquet night; just so they would not have to be one of the others barred from the flushed group of those who had been tapped, anointed, by love’s mysterious rose. Just a few nights ago, Letitia, leaning pressed against the locked connecting side door of her room, the door which led to Willa Mae Fordyce’s room on the other side, but was never opened, had heard Willa proclaiming to other murmurous visiting voices: “Why I’d count it a disgrace not to announce on Banquet night, really I would. I just wouldn’t feel
graduated,
honest!” And Willa had given a low, satisfied laugh. She had meant it too, for just this morning, Letitia, stealing breathlessly into Willa’s empty room through the unlocked regular door, had seen the slip readied on Willa’s desk. “Engaged. Wilhelmina Mary Fordyce and Homer Watson Ames.”

Letitia gave her own card a last admiring look. It was beautifully printed — the best she had ever done. In art class, Miss Tolliver would often pause, leaning over Letitia’s shoulder, and knitting together tenderly her gray, mock-fierce eyebrows, she would say, extra-loud: “ ’Titia, your copy-work is certainly real nice, dear. Truly lovely.” And shaking her head at some imaginary crony in the air, she would make a kind of soft sad sigh and pass on to the desk of the girl in front.

Almost reluctantly, Letitia raised the hand with the card in it, held it poised near the paper frill for a second, then quickly pushed the card through the slit in the box. She heard the slight sound it made, not the sharp tap of paper falling into empty metal, but a slithery rustle which meant that it had fallen on others like it. She gave her flat, tuneless giggle, which always sounded as if it needed finishing, and turning away in the dogged, laborious way she had, she walked down the marble steps, out onto the lawn, and across it to the pretty gabled dormitory on the other side.

From behind, with her pale blonde hair swinging over the pink cashmere sweater and the dyed-to-match tweed skirt, with her loafers and pink socks, Letitia looked like any one of a dozen others. Even better groomed, even a little too carefully matched, perhaps — as she had been ever since that day, six years ago, when she had walked into her first class at the school, her mouth, which peaked way up in the center like a baby’s, widened in a grin, on her head, perched clumsily there, the glittering gold sequin and seed-pearl cap which an inept uncle, knowing her fondness for shiny gauds, had given her for Christmas. Ever since then, Delia, the light-colored upstairs girl, who had seen service as a personal maid on some of the big estates near the school, had been detailed to go to Miss Letitia’s room each morning and set out the proper clothes for the weather and the day. Sometimes, if there was a special occasion, although there seldom was, Delia came in the evening, too. In the summer, when Delia worked elsewhere, Miss Rosanna came herself, and would stand there clucking a little to herself, her unassertive manner sharpened with impatience, although once in a while she spent a little extra time handling greedily the beautiful quality underwear and clothes Letitia’s family bought and sent down to her, with never any trouble about sizes or ideas, for the girl had stayed the same and looked the same as when she first came.