Staggerford (29 page)

Miles dropped these thoughts, typewritten, into the plastic briefcase, closed it, and put it in the closet. He then opened his old leather briefcase and fished out Jeff Norquist’s paper:

No wonder the briefcase was so heavy, thought Miles. He should have known better than to collect all 114 papers at one time. The wrongs and losses and near misses of 114 people, when packed together in one briefcase, took on the heaviness and solidity of rock. So it wasn’t the poor penmanship after all that made reading these papers so difficult. Nor was it the futility of trying to teach English grammar. It was the way these papers teased him off the road of hope into the gulch of despair.

Miles stuffed Jeffs paper into the briefcase and snapped it shut. If Coach Gibbon were to read these papers, he thought, then Coach Gibbon would understand why a tie was as good as a win.

FRIDAY
 
 
N
OVEMBER
6

I
T WAS BOOK REPORT
day.

The boys in first hour (about four years after the rest of the senior boys) had discovered John R. Tunis, and Lee Fremling was one of six who reported on
All-American
, though he was one of only two who had actually read the book. For seven weeks Miles had watched Lee reading the book in study hall, forming his heavy lips around each word. Today, after hearing the story from Lee, five other boys stood up in the front of the room and told the plot to the class, but a question or two from Miles revealed that four of them had never read it, and he gave them F’s. None of the four contested the F. They all shrugged as if to say, “Well, anyhow I tried,” and returned to their desks and yawned.

Love was big with second hour. Miles sat at Jeff Norquist’s empty desk and listened to Roxie Booth, who had never read a book in her life, review
Love Story
, which had been last night’s late show on TV. She concluded her review by saying, “It would be almost worth it to die young so you could see how hard your boyfriend would take it.
Boys make me cry all the time. Just once I’d like to see
them
cry.”

Miles asked her if she saw the movie on TV. “No, I never did.”

“You read the book?”

“Yeah, I read the book,” she adjusted the ropes and chains and spangles that hung around her neck.

“Then why do you refer to one of the characters as Ali MacGraw?”

“Because that’s who took the part in the book.”

Miles gave her an F.

Miles expected weighty matters from third hour, but nothing so dull as William Mulholland’s review of
The Computer Programmer’s Handbook
. His stoical classmates gave all thirty minutes of it their grave attention. Miles covered his eyes and slept.

During his free hour, Miles was the guest of Thanatopsis Workman’s home ec class. Once or twice a year Thanatopsis liked to give her girls a guest to practice on. He sat at a square table with three sophomores and ate a grapefruit, a pile of underdone macaroni, and a tasty apple turnover. The girl on his left, a
large
blonde named Tina, was in charge of serving; and the girl on his right, a small blonde named Dee Ann, took credit for the cooking. The third girl, a skinny bundle of nerves named Virginia, had been assigned to keep the conversation alive, but as she took her place at the table something struck her funny and she spent the entire meal giggling behind her hand.

“What’s so funny, Virginia?” asked Tina with a scowl.

“Stop laughing, Virginia, we have a guest,” said Dee Ann.

“You’ve got an A going in this class, Virginia, now don’t blow it on one of your silly spells.”

“Virginia, you aren’t touching a bit of your food.”

“Mrs. Workman, can’t you do something about Virginia?”

Virginia, behind her hand, turned purple and began to
strangle on her laughter, and Tina, to save her life, carried her away to the nurse’s office.

As Miles expected, fifth hour got off to a superb start with Nadine Oppegaard’s review of
John Brown’s Body
. Nadine was hooked on the Civil War, and she reviewed Benet’s book without notes. She was eloquent, and she ran her fingers over her face as she spoke, exploring for pimples. She recited from memory the sad section about Stonewall Jackson’s death, concluding with his dying words,
^“ ‘
Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.’ ” The class was a hushed audience. Miles gave her an A.

Nadine did not return to her desk, but remained at the lectern and said, “Stonewall Jackson died at thirty-nine, Mr. Pruitt. Are you thirty-nine yet?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“I’m trying to picture thirty-nine. Wouldn’t it be nice to have your place in life and in history established by the time you were thirty-nine, like Stonewall Jackson?”

“Or like Alexander the Great,” said Peter Gibbon, place kicker and reader of ancient history.

“Or like Mozart,” said Nadine, violinist.

“Or like Keats,” said Peter, who wrote sonnets in secret.

“Or like Toulouse-Lautrec,” said Nadine, painter of cancer of the mouth.

“Or like Mr. Pruitt,” said Beverly Bingham.

The discussion stalled. The class turned to look at Beverly, who was gazing at her teacher with such bald-faced admiration that Miles blushed. The class saw the blush. They looked back at Beverly and saw in her blue eyes that she loved him. Even those who had not heard the rumor began to wonder what this was all about.

Nadine said, “What I mean is that here was Stonewall Jackson in his thirties with the respect of all his troops and the respect of his commanding general, Robert E. Lee. How many of us will be able to claim that much respect for ourselves by the time we’re thirty-nine?”

“Mr. Pruitt has the respect of his troops,” said Peter Gibbon. “We’re his troops.”

Several students nodded and warmed Miles’s heart.

“All right, if we’re his troops, who is his Lee?” asked Nadine, who was enjoying her position at the lectern.

Somebody said, “Mr. Workman is his Lee,” and the class groaned.

Somebody said, “Mr. Stevenson,” and the superintendent must have wondered why at that moment the entire class turned to look at him across the courtyard.

Nadine said, “A man’s Lee has to be the person he lives for and is ready to the for.”

The class thought further, and so did Miles.

“Who are you close to, Mr. Pruitt?” asked a girl from the back row—someone afraid that this investigation into her teacher’s private life would the on the vine. Nothing interested a class more than the details of a teacher’s private life.

“Don’t you have any family?” prompted Nadine. “I mean, we know you’re not married, but don’t you even have parents?”

“I have a father and a brother.”

“Are they your Lees?”

“To be honest, the closeness we once felt doesn’t really exist any longer. In the seventeen years since my brother moved to California, we haven’t exchanged one letter, and in the five years since my father became senile we haven’t exchanged one thought.”

“Miss McGee is his Lee,” said Beverly Bingham.

“How can that old maid be his Lee?” said Nadine. “They don’t have a thing in common.”

“They have a great respect for each other,” said Beverly, “and that counts for a lot.”

Again the class turned to study the message in Beverly’s blue eyes.

Miles called on Peter Gibbon, who took Nadine’s place at the lectern and reviewed
The Last Days of Pompeii
. He said that now the football season was over he intended to begin
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, which
he claimed (with a grin) was written by his Uncle Edward. In college he would major in ancient history and his ambition was to become a professor at a Big Ten university. Miles wondered what had made Peter the scholar he was. The only reading materials in the Gibbon house were his father’s coaching journals and Stella’s magazines, featuring the same subjects month after month: diet, movie stars, and breast cancer. He gave Peter an A.

Beverly Bingham, dressed in the blouse Miss McGee had bleached and laundered, reviewed
Gone With the Wind
. She said it was a combination of love and disaster, and it made her weep and hope at the same time.

“I’ve heard that’s a book only a female can love,” said Peter Gibbon. “Is that true?”

Beverly said she didn’t know. “Ask a man.”

“Is it a book only a female can love, Mr. Pruitt?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t read it.”

The class reacted with mock amazement.

Nadine Oppegaard asked Beverly what she thought of the ending.

“The ending is beautiful,” said Beverly.

Nadine said, “I think
Gone With the Wind
has the stupidest ending I’ve ever read.”

“Oh, no. It’s inspiring. ‘Tomorrow is another day,’ says Scarlett. That’s inspiring.”

“I say it’s melodramatic. Scarlett’s plantation is a ruin and her daughter is dead and her husband has run away, and we’re supposed to believe she’s hopeful about her future? She must be out of her mind.”

“No, she’s doing the only thing a person
can
do when everything goes wrong. She’s putting her faith in tomorrow and hoping that things will be better.”

“It’s melodramatic.”

“No, it’s not, damn it. It’s very true to life. It’s the only thing a person can do when everything goes wrong. You probably haven’t had anything go wrong in your life, Nadine. Well, I have, and that’s how I get through it. I say tomorrow’s got to be better.”

“And
that’s
melodramatic—for you to say that. What’s
so much worse about your life than mine? I think we all have the same degree of troubles. I’m living with something I’d trade for just about any other kind of trouble I can think of, and so is Peter, and I still say the ending of
Gone With the Wind
is stupid.” She was clearly referring with her customary frankness to her father’s affair with Peter’s mother.

“All right, listen, I’ll tell you what’s gone wrong in my life, because it’s been on my mind ever since I was ten and if I don’t tell somebody pretty soon I’ll go crazy. My father was sent to prison for murder, did you know that?”

Beverly’s voice was a desperate screech. Nadine lowered her eyes, wishing she had not probed.

“And did you know it was a murder he was innocent of? He had a trial in Berrington and he was convicted and sent to Stillwater, but he wasn’t kept in Stillwater very long. He was taken out of prison and put in a hospital, and that’s where he died about three years ago.” She was no longer speaking to Nadine but to the whole class. Her copper blush was vanishing, leaving her face the color of ash.

“He was convicted of killing a salesman who sold kitchenware to brides. It happened on our front porch when I was ten, and I know exactly what happened because I was standing on the porch when it happened and so was my sister, who was seventeen at the time and getting ready to marry Harlan Prentiss, who wasn’t a very good marriage prospect—even I knew that—but I admired my sister for finding a way to get off the miserable farm we lived on. The miserable farm I still live on. It was the middle of the summer and this salesman showed up at the farm not long after my sister’s engagement notice appeared in the
Staggerford Weekly
. He asked for my sister and I went in the house and got her, and he gave her a card with his name on it and said he was selling cutlery and kettles. ‘What will you do for pans when you are married?’ he asked my sister. ‘What will your new husband think if you have no pans or knives in the kitchen when you return from your honeymoon? Will you have the courage to say, “Tonight I will cook the first meal of our married lives, but first be a dear
and go to the hardware store and buy some pans and knives. Buy a frying pan, a double boiler, and two or three other pans of various sizes”? Will you have the courage to say that? “And get a bread knife while you’re at it, a carving knife and a paring knife.” Will you have the courage to say that? What will your new husband think if you don’t bring knives and pans to your marriage?’

“I was on the porch and my mother and father were standing in the front room listening through the screen door, and my mother was getting very impatient. ‘Get out of here,’ she said through the screen, but the salesman ignored her. ‘Who do you think brings pans and knives to a marriage if it isn’t the bride?’ he asked my sister. ‘The husband is not the one to plan what will be in the kitchen. The bride, by tradition, takes care of those things, and I have an idea that you are not aware of that tradition. Let me show you the samples I’ve got here in my bag.’