Staggerford (22 page)

“Miss McGee, are you okay?”

She opened her eyes and offered Beverly more nectar.

“No, I’ve got to go. I thought you looked funny there for a minute.”

“Merely a slight tremor of the nerves. A passing thing.”

“Will you tell Mr. Pruitt to bring my letter to school tomorrow?” Beverly had been smoking fast, and a great part of her remaining cigarette was a long, bright coal, from which several sparks fell, burning tiny holes in the embroidered linen on the arm of the wing chair.

“I will tell him.”

“Thanks.” Beverly stubbed out her smoke and picked
up her flip-top box and went to the door. “What if he’s still sick tomorrow?”

“Then drop by after school for your letter.”

“Okay.” She crossed the wide porch and went down the steps into the sunshine and turned and said, “Thanks for the nectar.”

“You’re welcome.”

Miss McGee stood at the door and watched Beverly climb into the black truck, start the engine, light a cigarette, lean over and look up at the upstairs windows, shift gears, and drive away. The truck left a disagreeably oily haze in the street.

So that was the Bone woman’s daughter. She would be a pretty girl, thought Miss McGee, if she knew how to care for herself. If she had had a decent upbringing. If she didn’t use the name of the Lord in vain. If she kept herself clean. If she didn’t smoke. Here obviously was a case of faulty training and wasted potential.

“That is, if training counts for anything anymore,” she said aloud as she unpinned the linens from the arms of the chair. For Miss McGee was not so innocent as to believe that training, these days, made as great a difference as it used to. She knew today’s youth. She saw them walking to high school dressed in the style of Fagin’s urchins. She read news items from the Berrington County Juvenile Court. She listened to tales out of school as told by Miles. So woeful was the degeneration of young people after they left the sixth grade that Miss McGee avoided them whenever possible. Indeed she saw their bad behavior as a personal affront. The young of the world seemed to be telling her, “Look, old lady, what your teaching has done for us. It has meant nothing.” And so, against everyone between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five, against this whole sector of humanity, Miss McGee had developed—and she knew it—the first intemperate bias of her life.

Last spring this bias, this aversion to the new flawed generation, had actually brought about Miss McGee’s retirement.
After forty years of teaching (and after Patty Hawk’s wedding on the first day of June) she gave Father Finn her letter of resignation. Her retirement lasted fourteen days. By coincidence, it was a wedding that prompted her to retire and it was another wedding that changed her mind.

Now, it would be unfair to say that Patty Hawk’s wedding was the cause of Miss McGee’s contempt for the modern world. After all, Miss McGee had caught sight of the approaching Dark Ages and had considered retiring long before Patty Hawk got married, or engaged, or even pregnant. It was simply that Patty’s wedding settled the matter.

Patty was married in front of her parents’ cabin on Birch Lake, and Miss McGee drove out there in Miles’s Plymouth. Patty wore a red pants suit—a maternity pants suit, for she was eight months along. The bridesmaids, too, wore red. Later, the article in the
Weekly
said they wore rust, but Miss McGee saw with her own eyes that they wore red. Besides a pregnant bride, the wedding featured a foul-mouthed bridesmaid, a drunk from Sioux City, and a cold wind off the lake. Furthermore, the father of the bride had a black eye.

Most of the guests were from out of town, and when Miss McGee walked among them on the beach after the ceremony, she found scarcely anyone to talk to. Finally Mrs. Hawk came to her rescue and said, “Oh, Miss McGee, we’re so glad you’re here. Wendell and I have always said that you were one of the very best teachers Patty ever had, and Patty has always said so too. Isn’t that right, Wendell?”

Wendell Hawk was standing at his wife’s side in a new suit the color of a banana. Miss McGee shook his hand and tried not to notice his black and purple eye, which was surrounded by a fine network of inflamed arteries.

“Don’t mind this shiner, Miss McGee,” he said heartily. “Last night I slipped on a rug in the living room and went down like a ton of bricks and hit my head on the
magazine rack. I hit my head right here above the eye and I bled like a stuck hog. There isn’t a bit of flesh under a person’s eyebrows, so you tell me where the blood came from. Feel your own eyebrow, Miss McGee, there’s nothing but bone underneath, is there. But let me tell you, bone or no bone, I bled like a stuck hog. And do you know what caused me to slip? My good wife here had waxed the floor. She had the place all waxed for our guests and I came walking through the room last night and the rug we have by the fireplace went right out from under me and down I went like a ton of bricks. Would you believe there’s six stitches under this scab? My good wife can vouch for that. She took the stitches with her own needle and thread.” He laughed and slapped his wife on the back, and his wife laughed too, but not happily. Her laugh was shallow, and the look she gave him was lacerating.

“Please excuse us,” she said to Miss McGee, “we have to get back to the reception line.”

One of the few people Miss McGee recognized was another former student, Jennifer Molstad. Jennifer was Patty’s maid of honor. She was twenty and had been away at college. She was standing under a cottonwood tree by the water’s edge, talking to a middle-aged man with a goatee. Jennifer and the man had one cup of punch between them and they were both sipping from it as the wind furled and unfurled Jennifer’s red pants around her long legs. The man with the goatee was so engrossed in what Jennifer was telling him that Miss McGee stopped at a respectful distance and waited her turn to speak. She looked about her at the convivial crowd of guests, whose chatter was carried first toward her and then away from her on gusts of wind, and she was overcome by a feeling of self-consciousness. It was not, to Miss McGee, a familiar sensation. Ordinarily when she went out in public she went with a certain eminence, attracting the nod of the head and the smile of respect that a small town pays to forty years of virtuous example, and her slightly eccentric habits of dress (the lace hankie pinned to her lapel, the sturdy black shoes) were her marks of distinction. But here on the beach, among
strangers, she felt both odd and old. She wished she had not worn her high, round hat, for the wind was catching at it, and having to cling to its brim was making her tired. She wished she had worn a coat, for the wind was turning chilly. She wished her heels didn’t keep sinking into the sand, making her feel shorter than she really was. She wished, most of all, that she had mailed her gift and stayed home.

Jennifer and the man with the goatee moved to higher ground as the gray-green waves licked at their high heels, his and hers alike, and Miss McGee took this opportunity to break into their conversation.

“How nice to see you, Jennifer,” she said. “You look so lovely.”

It was true. Jennifer was a stunning girl. Her golden hair was even more lustrous now than it had been in the sixth grade when Jennifer was elected, on Mayday, to crown the statue of Mary Queen of the May.

“Oh, hello, Miss McGee,” Jennifer said. She turned again to the man with the goatee and took up her story where it had been interrupted.

“When I think of how I waited for him every Wednesday and Sunday night—Wednesdays and Sundays were his only nights off—sometimes I would wait for him till one, two in the morning.”

Miss McGee did not understand that she had been dismissed. She continued to stand, listening, at Jennifer’s side.

“…  and do you know what he was doing all that time, till one, two in the morning before he came over to my place? He was out with other chicks. And you know in whose car? In my car.”

The man with the goatee shook his head gravely.

“…  he was using my car because his license plates were out of date, and he was out with other chicks in
my car
. And these other chicks would leave their shoes and purses and shit in my car. I mean even their pantyhose. Only he would always put their stuff in the trunk before he came to pick me up, so I never knew. But one day I was out driving—big deal, driving my own car—and I saw my
friend Dorie Burkhart standing by the side of the road trying to flag down help and I stopped. Dorie had a flat tire and she didn’t have a tire wrench. She asked me if I had one, and I said, ‘You tell me, I don’t know what a tire wrench looks like,’ and I got out and unlocked my trunk for the first time since I bought the car and there were all those shoes and purses and shit belonging to all those other chicks he had been taking out. Well, screw him.”

Jennifer and the man moved off in the direction of the punch table, leaving Miss McGee hanging on to her hat and squinting into the wind. She was stunned. Jennifer, she knew, had been brought up to know better than that. When Jennifer was twelve she had crowned Mary Queen of the May. That was the horror of this new generation: They had all been brought up to know better. But they were reverting, one after another, to the perverse savagely that the human race had been liberated from ages ago. They were going under a flood of immorality. Nowadays (thought Miss McGee) as soon as children outgrew their childhood innocence, they became foul-mouthed and disobedient. They became robbers and dope addicts. They became murderers, perjurers, prostitutes, and embezzlers. Men became rapists and women aborted their babies. Every morning in the Minneapolis
Tribune
you could read what these people were up to, and every suppertime on TV you could see their pictures. What was the use of teaching Christian standards to twelve-year-olds, if they were going to throw them to the winds by the time they were twenty? What was uglier than the foul language women were using these days? It was uglier, in its way, than Wendell Hawk’s purple eye. This new generation was sapped of all the momentum that had carried civilization ahead for a thousand years—and now in the last quarter of the twentieth century the world waited once more on the threshold of the Dark Ages.

Thus, standing under the cottonwood tree at Patty Hawk’s wedding, Miss McGee despaired. She decided to go home and call Father Finn and tell him she was resigning her teaching position. She circled the crowd on the
beach and walked toward the driveway where she had parked the Plymouth. She passed the gift table and the guest-book table and was almost past the punch table when she was suddenly seized by the wrist. It was a fat man she had never seen before who held her. With his other hand he was stirring the punch.

“Like a snort?” he said.

“No, thank you. I must be on my way.” She had tasted the punch and knew that it was heavily spiked with gin. Floating on the surface now was a bottle cap.

“Oh, come on, just a little snort for the road.” The fat man tightened his grip on her wrist and continued to stir the punch. He was stirring it with a twig.

“No, thank you,” she repeated. She tried to retain her composure by turning her back on the man, and with her free hand she straightened her hat.

“If you’re like me, lady, you could probably use a snort. If you’re like me, you probably came a hell of a way to see this wedding, and it turned out to be the damnedest wedding you ever saw. I mean they have everything at this wedding. In the first place they have the wedding outside in a goddamn windstorm, and in the second place they have the wedding party dressed up in red overalls, and in the third place they have a knocked-up bride, and in the fourth place the father of the bride was cold-cocked last night by the mother of the bride. Now I know Wendell Hawk has been going around telling everybody that he hurt his head by slipping on a rug. In fact he even tried to tell
me
that he slipped on a rug, but I’m a cousin of his wife’s and I got the story from her this morning before Wendell was out of bed. I drove up here early this morning from Sioux City. What happened was that Wendell went out with the boys last night and he came home drunk and when his wife said he ought to be ashamed of himself he slapped her face. And you know what she did? She’s my first cousin. She took a bottle of salad dressing and she cracked him in the eye with it. She cold-cocked him with a bottle of French dressing. So now you know.”

Miss McGee said that she believed she would have some
punch after all, and when the man let go of her hand in order to pour her a cup, she fled. When she got home she called Father Finn and told him that she was retiring as soon as school was out.

“You’re not serious,” he said.

“Father, I have just returned from Patty Hawk’s wedding and I have seen my teaching come to nothing.”

“Why? What did you see?”

“It wasn’t only what I saw. It was what I heard as well.”

“Why? What did you hear?”

“Unspeakable things. The world is in ruins, and I’ll not teach another year. My teaching has come to nothing.”

“Agatha, you’re an alarmist.”

“I know, and with good reason.”

Miss McGee called the principal, Sister Rosie, whose only reaction to Miss McGee’s announcement was to sigh into the phone, indicating that she thought Miss McGee was bluffing (St. Isidore’s pension plan was lousy) and she was waiting for Miss McGee to talk herself out of her decision. But Miss McGee, who had very little time for Sister Rosie, hung up.

The following week when the school year ended, Father Finn and Sister Rosie began looking for Miss McGee’s replacement. There were in the parish three housewives certified by the State of Minnesota to teach sixth grade, but one of them had a new baby and the other two, when they heard that their salary would be four thousand dollars for the entire year, laughed out loud. Sister Rosie called the placement directors at seven colleges and Father Finn advertised in parish bulletins throughout the diocese. Sister Rosie alerted her mother superior in St. Paul, who, out of nuns, alerted the archbishop; but the only unemployed teachers the archbishop uncovered were as amused by the four thousand dollars as the two housewives had been.