Lives of Girls and Women (19 page)

There was nothing I could do, of course, and after a while I went home.

But the next day Miss Farris came into the classroom with June Gannett in tow, marched her straight to my desk, said, “Up on your feet, Del,” as if I should have known to do that without being told— she was getting more of her operetta manner—and made us stand back to back. I understood that June was the wrong height but did not know if she was too short or too tall, so I could not stretch or shrink accordingly. Miss Farris put her hands on our heads, moved them off heavily. She stood so close I could smell peppery sweat, and her hands trembled slightly; a tiny, dangerous hum of excitement ran through her.

“You're half an inch too tall, June dear. We'll see what we can do about making you a mother.”

Naomi and I, and others, exchanged studiously bland looks; Mr. McKenna swept a sharp frown around the room.

“Who did you get for partners?” whispered Naomi later, in the cloakroom, when we were scrambling for our boots. We had to march out, by rows, and get our outdoor clothes and bring them in again, put them on at our seats, in the interests of order.

“Jerry Storey,” I admitted. I was not very happy about the allocation of partners. It seemed meant to be apt. Gwen Mundy and Marjory Coutts got Murray Heal and George Klein, who were more or less their male counterparts in the class, being bright, athletic and, where it counted, decently behaved. Alma Cody got Dale McLaughlin, the United Church minister's son, who was tall, loose-limbed, idiotically
audacious, with heavy glasses and one rolling misdirected eye. He had already had sexual intercourse, more or less, with Violet Toombs in the bicycle shed behind the school. And I got Jerry Storey, his head covered with childish curls, his eyes popping with unabashed high-voltage braininess. He would put up his hand in Science period and in a boring nasal voice describe experiments he had done with his chemistry set. He knew the names of everything—elements, plants, rivers and deserts on the map. He would know where the Sargasso Sea was. All the time we practised this dance he never looked in my face. His hand sweated. So did mine.

“I pity you,” said Naomi. “Now everybody is going to think you like him.”

Never mind. The operetta was the only thing at school, now. Just as during the war you could not imagine what people thought about, worried about, what the news was about, before there was a war, so now it was impossible to remember what school had been like before the excitement, the disruption and tension, of the operetta. We practised the dance after school, and also during school hours, in the Teachers' Room. I had never been in the Teachers' Room before, and it was odd to see the little cupboard with its cretonne curtains, the teacups, hot plate, bottle of aspirin, the lumpy leather couch. Teachers were not thought of in connection with such ordinary, even shabby, domesticity.

Unlikely sights continued to present themselves. There was a manhole in the ceiling of the Teachers' Room, and one day when we came in to practise we discovered Mr. McKenna, of all people, Mr. McKenna, wriggling his dusty brown-trousered legs and bottom out of the manhole, trying to find the stepladder. He brought down cardboard boxes, which Miss Farris relieved him of, crying, “Yes, that one, that one! Ah, what have we got, let's see if we've got riches here!”

She broke the string with a strong jerk, and spilled out red and blue dyed cheesecloth, trimmed with loops of the same gold and silver tinselled rope you hang on Christmas trees. Then crowns, covered with gold and silver foil. Rust-coloured velvet breeches, a fringed yellow paisley shawl, some court gowns of dusty, papery
taffeta. Mr. McKenna could only stand by unthanked, slapping dust off his trousers.

“No dancing today! Boys out, out and play hockey.” (It was one of her fictions that whenever boys were not in school they were playing hockey.) “Girls, stay, help me sort out. What have we got here that will do for a village in the Middle Ages, in Germany? I don't know, I don't know. These dresses are too grand. They'd fall to pieces on stage anyway. They saw their best days in
The Stolen Crown
. Would the breeches fit the Mayor? That reminds me,
that reminds me
—I have to make a mayor's chain! I have to make Frank Wales's costume, too, the last Pied Piper we had was twice as big around. Who was it? I even forget who it was. It was a fat boy. We picked him solely for the voice.”

“How many different operettas are there?” That was Gwen Mundy, comfortable with teachers, taking her polite, kind, tone.

“Six,” said Miss Farris fatalistically. “
The Pied Piper. The Gypsy Princess. The Stolen Crown. The Arabian Knight. The Kerry Dancers. The Woodcutter's Daughter
. By the time we work round to the same one again we have an entire new crop of performers to pick from and the audience we trust to heaven has forgotten the last time.” She picked up a black velvet cloak, lined with red, shook it out, put it around her own shoulders. “This is what Pierce Murray wore, you remember, when he played the Captain in
The Gypsy Princess
. No of course you don't remember, it was 1937. Then he was killed, in the Air Force.” But she said this rather absently; after he played the Captain in
The Gypsy Princess,
did it matter so much what else happened to him? “Every time he put it on he would swing—like
this
—and make the lining show.” She herself made a swashbuckling swing. All her stage directions, dancing directions, were wilfully, splendidly exaggerated, as if she thought to amaze us into self-forgetfulness. She insulted us, she told us we danced like fifty-year-old arthritics, she said she would put firecrackers in our shoes, but all the time she was hovering around us as if we contained possibilities of lovely, fiery dancing, as if she could pull out of us what nobody else, and not we ourselves, could guess was there.

In came Mr. Boyce to get the recorder he was teaching Frank Wales to play. He saw the swing.

“Con brio,”
he said with his self-possessed English surprise. “
Con brio,
Miss Farris!”

Miss Farris continuing the spirit of the swing bowed gallantly, and we allowed her this, and even understood, for that moment, that the blush absorbing her rouge like sunrise had not a thing to do with Mr. Boyce, only with the pleasure of her action. We got hold of
con brio,
we planned to tell. We did not know or care what it meant, only that it was absurd—all foreign words were in themselves absurd— and dramatically explosive. Its aptness was recognized. Long after the operetta was over Miss Farris could not walk down the hall at school, could not pass us on her way up John Street hill, singing lightly and encouragingly to herself as her habit was (
“The Minstrel Boy
—good morning girls!—
to the War has gone—”
) without this phrase floating slyly somewhere in her vicinity.
Con brio, Miss Farris
. We felt it was the final touch to her; it wound her up.

We started going to the Town Hall for our practising. The Town Hall auditorium was large and draughty, as remembered, the stage curtains ancient dark blue velvet, gold-fringed, royal, as remembered. The lights were on, these winter-dimmed days, but not all the way to the back of the hall, where Miss Farris would sometimes disappear, crying, “I can't hear a word back here! I can't hear a word! What are you all afraid of? Do you want the people at the back of the hall to be calling out for their money back?”

She was approaching her peak of despair. She always had some sewing in her hands. She beckoned me over, one day, and gave me a scrap of gold braid which she was sewing onto the Mayor's velvet hat. She told me to run to the Walker Store and get a quarter of a yard to match. She did quiver; the hum in her had got more noticeable. “Don't delay,” she told me, as if she was sending me for some vital medicine, or with a message that would save an army. So I flew out in my unbuttoned coat and there was Jubilee under fresh snow, its silent, woolly white streets; the Town Hall stage behind me seemed bright as a bonfire, lit by such fanatical devotion. Devotion to the manufacture of what was not true, not plainly necessary, but more important, once belief had been granted to it, than anything else we had.

Freed by the operetta from the routine of our lives, remembering the classroom where Mr. McKenna kept busy with spelling bees and mental arithmetic those not chosen, as someplace sad and dim, left-behind, we were all Miss Farris's allies now. We were putting our separate parts of the operetta together, seeing it as a whole. I was moved by the story, and still am. I thought how separate, and powerful, and helpless and tragic a character the Pied Piper was. No treachery could really surprise him; battered by the world's use of him, he kept, like Humphrey Bogart, his weary honour. Even his revenge (spoiled of course by the changed ending) seemed not spiteful, but almost tender, terrible tender revenge in the interests of larger justice. I thought Frank Wales, that unteachable speller, grew into the part easily, naturally, with no attempt at acting. He carried his everyday reserve and indifference on to the stage, and this was right. I saw for the first time what he was like, what he looked like— his long narrow head, hair dark and cut short like a wiry doormat, a melancholy face that might have turned out to be a comedian's though in this case it did not, the scars of old boils and a fresh one starting, on the back of his neck. His body was narrow like his face, his height was average for a boy in our class—meaning he would be a fraction of an inch shorter than I was—and he had a quick and easy way of walking, the walk of someone who does not need either to efface or call attention to himself. Every day he wore a blue-grey sweater, darned at the elbow, and this smoky colour, so ordinary, reticent, and mysterious, seemed to me his colour, the colour of his self.

I loved him. I loved the Pied Piper. I loved Frank Wales.

I had to speak about him to somebody so I spoke to my mother, pretending objectivity and criticism.

“He has a good voice but he is not tall enough. I don't think he'll stand out on the stage.”

“What is his name? Wales? Is he the son of that corset-lady? I used to get my corsets from Mrs. Wales, she had the Slender-eze line, she doesn't have it any more. She lived out on Beggs Street, past the Creamery.”

“It must be his mother.” I was strangely elated to think there had been this point of contact between Frank Wales's family and mine, his life and mine. “Did you go to her house, did she come here?”

“I went to her, you had to go to her.”

I wanted to ask what the house was like, were there pictures in the front room, what did his mother talk about, did she mention her children? Too much to hope that they would have become friends, that they would talk about their families, that Mrs. Wales would say that night at supper, “Today there was such a nice lady here to get her corsets fitted and she says she has a daughter in the same class at school as you—” What good would that do? My name mentioned in his hearing, my image brought before his eyes.

The atmosphere of the Town Hall, these days, put more than me in this condition. Ritualized hostility between boys and girls was cracking in a hundred places. It could not be kept up or, where it was kept up, it would be in a joking way, with confused undercurrents of friendliness.

Naomi and I, walking home, ate five-cent toffee bars which were extremely hard to bite in the cold, and then almost as hard to chew. We talked with cautious full mouths.

“Who would you like to be your partner if it didn't have to be Jerry Storey?”

“I don't know.”

“Murray? George?
Dale?
”

I shook my head securely, noisily sucking back toffee-flavoured saliva.

“Frank Wales,” said Naomi diabolically.

“Tell me yes or no,” she said. “Come on. I'll tell you who I would like if it was me.”

“I wouldn't mind him,” I said in a careful, subdued voice. “Frank Wales.”

“Well I wouldn't mind Dale McLaughlin,” said Naomi defiantly and quite surprisingly, for she had kept her secret hidden better than I had mine. She hung her head over a snowbank, dribbling, and gnawed at her toffee-bar. “I know I must be crazy,” she said finally. “I really like him.”

“I really like Frank Wales,” I said in full admission. “I must be crazy too.”

After this we talked all the time about these two boys. We called them F. A.'s. It stood for Fatal Attraction.

“There goes your F.A. Try not to faint.”

“Why don't you get your F.A. some Noxema for his boils, ugh?”

“I think your F.A. was looking at you but it's hard to tell with his crosseyes.”

We developed a code system of raised eyebrows, fingers fluttered on the chest, mouthed words such as
Pang, oh, Pang
(for when we stood near them on the stage).
Fury, double Fury
(for when Dale McLaughlin talked to Alma Cody and snapped his fingers against her neck) and
Rapture
(for when he tickled Naomi under the arm and said, “Out of my way, butterball!”).

Naomi wanted to talk about the incident in the bicycle shed. The girl Dale McLaughlin had done it to, asthmatic Violet Toombs, had moved away from town.

“Good thing she moved. She disgraced herself here.”

“It wasn't all her fault.”

“Yes it was. It's the girl's fault.”

“How could it be her fault if he held her down?”

“He couldn't have held her down,” said Naomi sternly, “because he couldn't hold her down and—get his thing in—at the same time. How could he?”

“Why don't you ask him? I'll tell him you want to know.”

“My mother says it's the girl's fault,” said Naomi, ignoring me. “It's the girl who is responsible because our sex organs are on the inside and theirs are on the outside and we can control our urges better than they can. A boy can't help himself,” she instructed me, in a foreboding, yet oddly permissive, tone of voice, which acknowledged the anarchy, the mysterious brutality prevalent in that adjacent world.