Schooling (18 page)

HAMLET

I don’t expect anything to happen, it’s a force outside myself that propels me. I have no way of stopping it.

GIRL

When we returned to London I thought of him again. At night I stitched my A lines into I lines because I saw that is how they are here. My bedroom in London, in the flat I call the plastic flat, looked onto a cobblestone street. I hated that street for its age. I don’t know how to sew, my fingers soon were cramped and pricked. I looked out the window, I stuck my fingers in my mouth for relief. Down the street, a figure huddled against the night. I thought of him then, this boy against the doorjamb. I do not know why, nor how memory works. That night I slept in my jumper, I called it a sweater. I wanted the creases out, wanted it rumpled. That’s how I had seen the others.

OPHELIA

If you think on this boy so much, farewell to university.

Enter FOOL, in his hurried but vague manner.

FOOL

We all know you here as the cynical girl, the American girl. We were told you were coming, our men were instructed to watch for you on the cliffs, to report back when they saw your blue and red mast tip the horizon. They said we would be visited by a host of plagues. We knew you would bring this on us. Around you, a boy meets the dangerous city, a girl burns our history to the ground. Clearly these incidents cannot be separated one from the next when you stand at the center.

HAMLET

Tell me, girl, why did you think on me that night you sewed?

FOOL

Oh now, look you. Such unspeakable acts has this American done. Her brutish manner, her brooding. I know that the memory of her mother may yet be green, yet since her arrival, something rots here. There is a room at Monstead where her deeds unravel. I tell how I find her loping across the hockey pitch, slavering at the zips of older boys. They laugh, I think it less than funny. Pornography runs deep in this one’s veins. I have not yet reported finding
les amants surpris
, the girl recumbent, provocative, on the balcony of Harrington with our own master of science. But look you, it is not only I who notices her seductive ways.

GIRL

I thought only that you stared.

OPHELIA

Girl, let your interest in these matters fade. If only we had burned it together, watched the hockey bibs blacken to ash. Remember Maggot, her pinched face handing them out before a game, red or blue. Never to wear bibs again, imagine.

FOOL

I tell you when I saw her, a girl that age, burlesquing on fields where our innocent play their hockey, inciting those boys, it unsettled my stomach. If the parents of Hopkins, Trethorn or Stevens witnessed the perversion I endured, our doors would be closed today.

Enter the MAGGOT, slick body bound in sweaters.

THE MAGGOT

It’s the edges that want taking off. There’s some way of breaking her.

BRICK

You have already in the shoes she wears.

THE MAGGOT

I gated you once with Sophie Marsden. You were on your way to lunch after Cookery, after failing quiche lorraines. Running, you took shelter from the rain under a piece of dirty plastic. The plastic shifted, slopping dirty water over the two of you. Ill met under the arch, I punished you to remind you to behave like ladies.

OPHELIA

I hoped it was too late for that.

THE MAGGOT

You think I am contrary, rank, maddening. The phlegmatic crone who wishes only to vex her girls. I am plebeian, spinster, dried and unreasonable. No tears, no joy. Certainly, no smile has crossed my face in fourteen years. How odd am I with my gin to be mocked, my underlit flat and overfed fish. Has she ever been found out of antique skirt and cardigan these twenty seasons or off school property? Think you she has a home save our school? And which would make me more abhorrent?

BRICK

There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.

THE MAGGOT

On bath night, three weeks or so after you arrived, I came in from doing a turn around the grounds where the night smelled sweet and young. I expected your dorm-mates to provoke, but strangely, they were docile. There was a sense of lightness, was it me or the evening. I was a girl, visiting Marco, seeing a fresco for the first time. In the washroom I checked down the row of baths. A quarter hour later I checked again. I opened your stall, you floated underwater. There in the river, your narrow naked body shivered like a leaf. You did not know I watched from the door. On the wall, your dressing gown hung, draped from a hook, it was blue and all wrong. Next to the grate, your slippers waited one by the other. Tartan slippers. Tartan. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of fondness and grief. I wanted to rip you from the water, to clutch you against my chest. I wished for words. Words. Which words would fresco our washroom ceiling. None could.

OPHELIA

So you closed her door.

THE MAGGOT

I said nothing.

OPHELIA

Then you betrayed Marco.

THE MAGGOT

Yes, yes. That’s right, I did. My god, I always have!

WHARTON

Pipe down, Maggot, this isn’t your epiphany.

THE MAGGOT

Sorry.

FOOL

Tell me girl, your thoughts and wishes, bend they toward France?

GIRL

France. When the list goes up, curiously my name will not appear.

FOOL

Yes, you think you will away to France but—oh dear. Have you not your father’s leave?

GIRL

What’s this? You have a plot, Fool?

FOOL

No plot. I simply indicate to dear Polonius how your marks suffer, that focus is needed, not diversion at the Easter holiday. Sorry, look you frowningly? I only want you better than you are.

GIRL

My father denies me France because of you?

WHARTON
 (shuffling papers)

I’m losing all sense of order, have we reached that bit?

FOOL

Last autumn, on the yearly outing to the natural history museum, I watched the girl. Where others gaped at displays of constructed bears and wolves, this one wandered churlish and ill tempered. As if for her the whole class should be contracted in one dark brow of woe.

GIRL

Well, I had no cause to think the Fool might act differently.

FOOL

My intents are not wicked but charitable.

CROCONIUS happens past on his way to a town meeting.

CROCONIUS

What a crowd have we here. Is there circus in town?

WHARTON

Late on the entrance as always. Take guidance from the Fool who always makes a timely entrée.

FOOL

What ho, the hero arrives, the girl’s partner in foolishness. Think me not deceived. I have eyes. I see. The balcony remains fresh for me.

BRICK

The man with the hand dashed by white. So different now in our lessons. Once your terrible jokes and snooty voice were directed as much at the girl as your other pupils. But in a trice they ceased, you leave her be. Now when you look on her I see something change in your eyes, in the creases by your mouth.

FOOL

Then I am not alone in my suspicions.

GIRL

His terrible jokes remain, I assure you.

POLONIUS
 (from behind a screen)

He drives you away from school to reveal our English nature on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. He indicates which trees own sap, which label as coniferous and those you won’t find in America. He tells you no horses galloped through the new world, lists which animals hibernate, which die, then forgets which of these befalls a fly. He charms, wheedles, adores. Finds reason to touch you, the better to beguile. Outside the classroom, you fall for his pedagogy. Table manners, the elegance with which he opens doors his deference to your opinions on trivial matters. Sandwiches? Curtains? Applications of philosophy? Habits of the domesticated cat? He wins you with humor and diplomacy and attention. Yet he remains as helpless without you as you without him. Green girl, do you believe such slyness? Tell me you do not.

Wharton pulls down the screen. Paul Gredville looks up meekly.

WHARTON

For God’s sake, Gredville. Have some self-respect.

GREDVILLE

Alright, I’m going.

And he does.

GIRL

In happy time, will it all come clear.

BRICK

You need awareness, I beseech you. This man has motivations. Find it in the stars, in their trains of fire. Look out, see it in the hills, bread, the locomotion of clouds.

CROCONIUS

Perhaps you should not be out in the hard morning. You lack outdoor wear. The air bites shrewdly.

FOOL

Your good beauties cause this girl’s wildness.

CROCONIUS

Come now, is she not an American girl? Do we not as masters have our pupils’ happy hearts at stake? I have taken the girl to tea in my home. I have made her the pie of our shepherds, I have shown her paintings and the men who made them. I have whispered in her hair. How she moves me as she tramps away in her big men’s shoes, her queer way of walking as though one ankle has need for the other’s assurance.

A BATTLE-AX on her way to market hears the ruckus and listens in.

BATTLE-AX

Like you I offered warmth, greenery, a respite from the bleak. My dog had reservations, for the girl had a peevish nature and often shot him dark looks. Dog, quoth I, this girl has need of our good charity. To the gardens we went, a conciliatory tour. Perhaps I should have been more certain with her. I could have revealed why I call that school Monster. I am old, you won’t listen. Leaving me forced to talk to a dog. When I was a girl, I was beaten like a rug. When I was older, I knew a man, he came to me with his right eye shot out. He should have been conscripted, fighting, what was he doing, a cyclops in my hospital, where was his eye? Other men were glad to tell their stories, this one stayed resolute, mute. I changed his dressing twice a day. The eye let go slowly, weeping as it went. I held the man at night, he wept for the right side of the world. Daffodils ate antelope, the sea turned to butter, yellow martlets lost in bricked chimneys. He was allergic to morphine, we had nothing else.

CROCONIUS

I hoped to be the one upon whose shoulder she cried. I hoped to see her through all forms moods shapes of grief. I have been tender, I have been kind. Reproachful? I’m afraid so. And equally, have I caused her distress. My mother was ill, I had little choice but to wait by the phone. I am naïve enough to believe, sir, that I have also caused her a small form of happiness, a laugh for a painted handkerchief, bad weather, stale cake, Courbet. You brick, you hunch, you frown, sulk beneath your beetling brow. You threaten her and lose your books. How can this serve her?

BRICK

I am not duplicitous.

CROCONIUS

Then you call me so.

OPHELIA

If you had listened to me those times in the lab. Make friends not from here, you heard me advise it. These difficulties would not happen upon you now.

FOOL

A pleasant walk after lunch does much for my digestion. I like the vista of the playing fields, the open expanse undulates behind the changing rooms like a woman’s form. The progress of the new pavilion certainly attracts my interest. Here’s a day, no different from any Monstead day. A survey of the cricket pavilion. But you are there already, perhaps like me you chose to forgo the baked ham. You stand on the field, your gaze to the grass. Lo, our hero arrives muffled in his scotch scarf. Do you think you can remain unnoticed, in the middle of a field? We have a headmaster who, had he both eyes, could not see what is so plain to me. I desired only pleasant ambles. Why then am I treated to such intimacies between the two of you. The girl smiles up, one hand at her locks. Even from my distance, I can see you have remarked on it. What have you said, that her hair pleases you? That you long to touch it, whisper in it, to kiss it? Her gesture offers too much. I can tell you that hair is not a suitable subject for any staff member save to give instructions on restraint.

CROCONIUS

How do I convince you as to the nature of my heart?

GIRL

At
Holiday
he sat so close I could sense the short soft hairs on the back of his neck, his cunning profile in the dim light as the sellers of ice and sweets moved through the empty aisles. There weren’t many of us. It was a matinée and the girls were desperate to sell. They came up again and again and each time he smiled, not his real smile, the fangish one, he saves that for me when we two are alone, but a nice-enough grin. The girls retreated, he turned back, listened to me or finished his thoughts. In the black-and-white world, our cinema, our Oxbow, I needed only his unwashed smell and the idea of his neck.

CROCONIUS

We are friends, I pretend nothing else.

BATTLE-AX

I stood before orchids, prattling on about I know not what, the glasshouse reeled, I saw you fading before me. I knew from your scowl, your care with my dog, your hesitant way of disturbing memory, that you had no mother. She’s deceased you said but I knew already that danger lurked.

GIRL

Danger?

BATTLE-AX

Let me say, your arsenal needs constitute more than a crafty way with a tire.

GIRL

I saw a painting. Perhaps I was the bishop of St. Lieven.

HAMLET

My father was a king.

The group threatens to be late for assembly. Here is the ELDER rushing
past on his way to provide moral guidance for troubled minds.

ELDER

What have we here?

HAMLET

My father.

ELDER

Speak, my son.

HAMLET

My father would have died, no matter that I eased him to his end. I spoke to you of that, the day we returned from Oxbow. You see I always tell my confidences in cars, you pull them from me. I never mean to. But suddenly I find myself wanting to talk about my mother with her plans for lettuce. Rosie came to my father in his final moments. My father shouted Benny, What’s it all for? And from down the hall, Benny responded with the name of his favorite bitter. My hand stays on the wheel where I know you watch it slashed with white and wonder how it came to be slashed with white. If I could keep you out for a week of stale cake I would not bore you with tales of my mother waiting on Father’s last day wanting lettuces. Bringing photos of an old dog they had with a bad leg. It wheeled itself on a contraption Father made. And more, of a skiing holiday in France, the first car. When Mother came in, she pulled up a chair and for an hour we heard stories of that dog on wheels, and the one before that, which had legs.