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Authors: Jack Hodgins

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BOOK: The Master of Happy Endings
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“The McQuarrys fought long and hard to get their farm removed from the Agricultural Land Reserve,” Mrs. Montana explained, “then sold it for several million!”

Thorstad laughed. It was preposterous—an old rundown farm. “Not millions, surely.”

But Mrs. Montana assured him the McQuarrys had been handed a cheque for several million dollars. “Now they're living in a waterfront penthouse and spend most of the year on cruises.” She reduced their speed, perhaps so he could admire the transformation of McQuarry's dairy farm. “My partners and I developed this—despite protests from the usual lunatics.” A sigh for the inconvenience. “If the McQuarrys had sold it as farmland it wouldn't have brought them a tenth of what they got.”

And he would not, he supposed this meant, be riding in a top-model silver Jaguar. Platinum Jaguar, rather. She'd made sure he knew the colour was nothing as ordinary as silver.

As they pulled away from the gas station, Mrs. Montana offered to drive him past his former home before they returned to the highway. But Thorstad declined. He certainly didn't want to discover that Elena's sprawling villa had been demolished and replaced by an ugly condominium or a big-box store, as everything in just the past few miles had convinced him it would be. Neither did he want to see his mother's tall old Victorian house, which he knew had been converted to a restaurant long ago, with a suite of law offices upstairs and its backyard paved for parking.

While his former homes could be avoided easily enough, he knew his former place of work could not. Returning to the highway meant passing the high school he'd attended as a student and later taught in for the length of his career. As the Jaguar carried him into this part of town, he was not surprised by the sudden knot in his stomach, the sweat between his shoulder blades— identical to his reaction as he approached this building on his first day of teaching. The long two-storey structure with its flat roof and rows of tall identical windows appeared to be largely unchanged. He could count windows down the first floor to find the classroom he'd taught in the first few years he'd worked here.

“Ugly fifties architecture,” Mrs. Montana said.

Thorstad felt a brief stab of resentment, though of course she was right. “It looked pretty good to us when it was new—while I was a student.”

“And yet you returned a few years later to teach there, I understand?”

There was a hint of challenge to this, if not an accusation.

Of course it had looked rather dull and unimaginative when he'd returned from university—already a drab example of uninspired utilitarian architecture, as Mrs. Montana had suggested. But it was not for the building he had returned.

Lisa Svetic had advised him not to judge by first impressions, yet Thorstad knew that first impressions could overshadow and even erase all impressions that followed. How easily his first students could be recalled even now, despite the several hundred that succeeded them. Youthful faces, one behind the other down the rows just inside those windows. Freckled Andrea Thompson's nervous tic beside one eye. Eleanor Morrison's too-long curly hair, a hank of it always in her mouth. Rory Deakin's chin propped on a fist, eyes closed to listen hard. David Minnow's long nose following the passing traffic.

Amongst those in his first English class was the young Cindy Miller who sat in the front row and tended to hide her face behind a fall of long brown hair, fingers occasionally pushing open an inverted V through which she could keep one melancholy eye directed upwards upon the teacher. Whenever she was inspired to jot words that would eventually lead to a poem, she allowed this triangular doorway to fall closed and wrote with no need to see, apparently, except with an inner eye. Thorstad soon learned that, from her point of view, his purpose in life was to read, admire, and comment upon these poems, though he'd soon have reason not to read between the lines.

Like this homely building and those first students, his earliest colleagues had also made impressions that survived despite all that had happened since. To think of Andrzej Topolski now was to see him as he appeared in the doorway between Thorstad's classroom and his own that first morning: the expensive suit, the sharp blue eyes, the pencil-thin moustache, and the smile that could appear and disappear in an instant as though flicked on and off with an electric switch. “If they tie you up and gag you, stomp your feet and I'll come to the rescue.” Behind his back he was known as the “Polish Prince,” he said. “It happens that I'm in line for only a duchy—and only if the Russians retreat—but the local peasants are better behaved if they think you're royalty.”

To think now of the beautiful Oonagh Farrell on that first week was to see her standing outside her classroom door to welcome her students with a musical rise and fall of words and hefty bursts of laughter—wearing a full-skirted dress, her sleek black hair pulled back to emphasize her cheekbones and long straight nose. “My mother's mother was a tinker on the roads of Connemara.” She often kicked off her shoes and taught barefoot, her unique beauty made all the more remarkable by the unlikely surroundings. Not even her recent photographs on the covers of checkout magazines could fully replace the Oonagh of fifty years ago, three doors down the hall, welcoming students to her room, though he was not at all surprised at the direction her life had taken since.

As for Barry Foster, despite the newspaper photos of the man on his way to prison, it was enough to think of his long morose face in order to recall their first conversation, in which the man had expressed his hatred for the classroom, as well as his contempt for administrators, colleagues, and especially the students, all of whom he believed were stupid.

While he could summon up his first students and colleagues at will, his classroom had been so familiar already as to be almost outside his awareness. He had attended the school when desks were still free of initials, its toilets innocent of obscenities. Seven tall windows looked out across the front lawn to the Lombardy poplars beside the street, the bottom sashes sliding up far enough to climb through if this were necessary. By noon of his first day as a teacher he had calculated how long it would take to throw up the nearest window and race across the grass to the parking lot where his green Pontiac stood waiting. Never, as they say, to be seen again.

This fantasy had more to do with expectation than reality. He'd been very young, after all. He was waiting for his students to behave as some of his own classmates had behaved towards teachers, many of whom had quit in despair. Miss Earley, it was believed, had been committed to the provincial mental hospital on the mainland. Mr. Barr had walked out halfway through Pythagoras's theorem and found a job as a newspaper reporter in Saskatoon. Mr. Woods had taken early retirement and withdrawn to a tiny lake in the mainland Interior, where apparently he lived alone and welcomed no visitors. It seemed that every year at least one teacher suffered from a form of classroom shell shock and pulled out in what may have been the nick of time.

He'd wondered when he would turn to write on the board and find a baseball bouncing off the surface just inches from his head. Would he, like Miss Earley, fling it into the midst of the class and rush out of the room in tears? When would he open his desk drawer to find, as Mr. Barr had found, dog excrement smeared through the pages of the attendance register? Would he explode with rage, as Barr had done, and go up and down the aisles ripping pages from student notebooks, tearing the pages into pieces and tossing them over their heads? And when would someone refuse to read the next stanza aloud and challenge him to a fist fight, as Donnie London had done to Mr. Woods? Would he, like Mr. Woods, be foolish enough to agree? Probably not, but what would he do instead?

To his own surprise, his most natural response to challenges, defiance, and distracting nonsense had defused most problems. He discovered that he was capable of a steady stare that somehow combined disappointment, disbelief, and disapproval with just a hint of sympathy for the impulse behind the behaviour. It was useful, he saw, to have a sense of humour even when there was little that could be considered funny. He suspected, too, that it was useful to be both young enough to identify with the students' need to resist and old enough to see this as just as endearing as it was foolish. “One day you'll remember today and your face will burn with embarrassment. Now take my attendance sheet to the office—it will give you time to think about what you just did.”

He'd been only vaguely aware of rejoining the highway, the sprawling high school left behind. Mrs. Montana and her platinum Jaguar had not only achieved the posted speed limit but continued to accelerate in order to catch up to a large freight truck with

ON THE MOVE WITH JOEY KEUVE

announced across its rear. An additional surge of speed sent them flying past Joey Keuve, who was less aggressively “on the move” than Mrs. Montana. With Joey Keuve somewhere behind them, she informed him that something had recently come up that could lead to a change of plans. “But I will leave that to Travis to explain when we get there.”

Though he'd become almost unconscious of his throbbing forehead, “a change of plans” gave it fierce new life. A change of plans had not been mentioned at the ferry dock or in the drop-in clinic. “You waited to tell me
now
?”

She laughed, her hand dismissing an old man's alarm. “An opportunity of a lifetime is how Travis will put it. For him, that is. I don't presume to know how it will look to you.”

She would not tell him more. It would be up to Travis himself to explain.

An “opportunity of a lifetime” could be anything—a visit to the manned space station. He could be asked to chaperone a weekend camping trip with fifteen adolescents of both sexes, their vehicles loaded down with booze, their radios blaring long after midnight—bears raiding the tents, cougars dropping onto necks, and the police charging him with the corrupting of minors. Had he left his island for an encounter with the complex and confusing ethics of modern juvenile sex?

“I think,” he said, as calmly as he knew how, “I would like you to stop.”


Here
? I can't stop
here
.”

“There is a wide enough shoulder. Unless you'd rather I threw myself out.”

She laughed, but did not slow down. “I'm sure there'll be a public washroom ahead somewhere, if that is what you need.”

“I don't need a washroom, Mrs. Montana. What I'm suggesting is that I can find my own way back to the ferry. I've hitchhiked before. I can do it again.”

“Don't be foolish!” Her hand dismissed the foolish one's request. “Anyway, hitchhiking's illegal on this highway.”

“An old man with a bandage on his forehead will not have long to wait. An accident victim, they will think.”

She drove on without slowing. Joey Keuve would not be given the opportunity to catch up. “For heaven's sake, why would you go back now?”

“Because I've obviously made a mistake. You mentioned a change of plans.”

“Oh
that
!” She seemed genuinely relieved. Her voice took on a reasonable tone. “Please trust me, Mr. Thorstad. You'll see a great improvement over what you'd expected. A privilege, really.”

Since she obviously had no intention of stopping the car and he was not about to throw himself out onto the gravel shoulder at this speed, he folded his arms in a manner that suggested, if she should notice, resignation without pleasure.

While a world of strip malls and used-car lots and occasional stretches of lumber continued to flash by in a blur, he made an attempt to think of compensations. It was a city he was going to, with a university that would sponsor visiting speakers. Neighbourhood libraries could be within walking distance. There was bound to be a symphony orchestra, and a concert hall, an opera company as well. He would be living in a family home with comforts that were taken for granted by city people. And, most important, he would have someone looking to him for help with his studies—which was, after all, what he had hoped for, putting himself back into his own best notion of Life.

Mrs. Montana's right hand rooted around inside the red leather purse and eventually brought up a small cellphone that she unfolded and held up where she could see it while using her thumb to punch in numbers. Then she held it to her ear. At first there was only “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Another hour or so,” and then a good deal of listening before she spoke again, adopting an authoritative tone. “Tell him he's full of it. Nobody else will offer him that. Remind him of that swamp we'll have to drain.” With her one free hand she manoeuvred the car around the flattened body of a racoon. “Tell him exactly how much it will cost to put in a proper road. Make sure he knows that his house will have to be demolished, in case he thinks it's an asset we might sell where it stands.” Silence. “Unh . . . No, of course not.” Silence again. “Well, tell him he's welcome to do that but it won't make any difference.”

Elena would have been shocked to learn that he hadn't driven past the house they'd lived in for most of the marriage. She'd often claimed to have designed the building herself, he recalled, though in fact she had only pestered the architect into giving her everything she'd wanted—the sprawling villa of a Spanish aristocrat set down between temperate rainforest and the sea. She would see his refusal to drive by as a lack of courage, and would not of course be wrong.

His courage was something she had remarked on shortly after they'd met, at the reception that followed the Topolski-Farrell wedding. This was shortly after he'd completed his first year of teaching, and was already looking forward to more. The exotic dark-haired girl in a pale green dress had been pointed out to him and described as a wickedly flirtatious and talented pianist who'd flown from Paris (in exile from her home in Madrid) to attend her cousin Topolski's wedding. He'd watched her laughing as she danced, he'd seen how she flirted with one dance partner after another but refused to dance with any a second time. She was clever too, it seemed, and confident: he overheard her successfully argue a pair of History teachers down in a conversation about the causes of the Second World War, though they may have given in out of gentlemanly regard for her feelings and less-than-gentlemanly regard for her charms. Eventually he worked up the nerve to ask her to dance, then led her out onto the polished floor to whirl about the crowded room, where she laughed at every surprise turn, and shook her head (her dark eyes gleaming) when he tried out steps he had only seen executed by others. “You are a man of courage, I think,” she said, “or simply reckless,” and rewarded him later with a second dance. “I have been told you are a teacher but I see you have the hands of a musician.”

BOOK: The Master of Happy Endings
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