After This (29 page)

She paused again. She seemed to have lost her train of thought.
Some of the girls wondered if they should open their notebooks. “I
don’t know,” Sister Lucy went on, “if my mother ever felt any of
Medea’s anger. Or if she considered what it would be like to deprive
him of this last child, the one still in her womb, the one he had
abandoned even before she was born.”

 

Sister Lucy leaned forward a bit, her hands on the edge of the
desk, and as she did, her right hand brushed her crutch and it began to
slide. Quickly, adeptly, she reached for it, steadied it. And then she
lifted it and placed it across her lap.

 

“Girls,” she said again, more forcefully, as if she were now girded
for battle. “The men who make our laws see women as being as
capable of murdering their unborn children as men have always been
of abandoning them. They see all women as equals to Medea, should
the circumstances arise. They are blind to women like my mother who
put their children above all else, who labor and worry and die . . .”—
she paused, her large round eyes seeming to search for the word, her
two hands clutching the crutch she had placed across her lap. Her
voice had not risen an octave. “Die tired,” she said finally, and then
raised her eyebrows as if she was surprised to discover that the word
she had searched for was such a simple one. She looked again to the
long wall of windows.

 

For a moment, they all listened to the rain. It hit the windows
without rhythm or pattern, as listless as tears. A few of them thought
of tears.

 

The light outside gave no indication of how much class time was
left, but Sister Lucy knew instinctively that the time was short and she
was losing the thread of what she’d meant to say.

 

She turned back to the girls’ faces. Some of them were looking
away, playing with their fingers or studying their pens. Two or three
were staring cross-eyed at the ends of their long hair. But more still
were watching her, their faces serious, lovely, still emerging from the
faces of their childhood, and raised toward her now as if to catch the
solemn rain.

 

“Iron or stone,” she said again, trying to remember the thread.
“That’s what they’ll say about you. A woman made of iron or stone.”
Sister Lucy looked down at her crutch. A few of the girls, only
partially attentive, tried to remember if that was good or bad, to be
iron or stone. Clare Keane thought that her mother had been like iron,
in the cold pew at St. Gabriel’s on the morning her brother was
buried. Clare knew she had been grateful for it, the cool stone of her
mother’s face and hands. The iron of her arm.

 

Barb Luce wrote in her notebook again. Clare glanced at the page.
It said, “Things are tough all over.”

 

Then Sister Lucy looked up again, dry-eyed.

 

“I realize we’ve gone off syllabus today,” she said softly.
“Sometimes circumstances make their demands. We’ll return to Saint
Augustine tomorrow. And Saint Monica, of course.” Nodding at
Monica Grasso, who suddenly raised her hand.

 

“Yes,” Sister Lucy said, expecting a question about this week’s
quiz, the paper due next Friday, expecting the obliteration of all she
had just said by the girls’ preference for practical priorities. “Yes,
Monica,” she said.

 

Her thick black hair, straight and silky and falling well below her
shoulders, caught the white fluorescent light, broad sparks around her
face. “When abortion is illegal,” Monica, the captain of the debate
team, said clearly, “women die.”

 

Kathleen Cornelius turned in her seat as if she’d been stuck with
a fork. “But babies die when it is,” she said. Two or three other girls
cried out in wordless agreement.

 

“You can’t legislate morality,” Monica snapped back. “Look at
Prohibition.”

 

Now the class was alert, and Sister Lucy saw that even the
indifferent students were interested: not so much in the substance of
the debate as in the joy of the rebellion.

 

Kathleen, having spent her rhetorical trove, looked rather
desperately back to Sister Lucy. The other girls looked to her as well,
some of them smirking, some anxious, others only curious. At their
age, Sister Lucy recalled, she had craved piety, undaunted innocence,
even naivete. Now, worldliness was all they wanted. Sophistication.
She held up a hand, put a finger to her lips. “Girls,” she said.
“We’re not here to debate.”

 

“No kidding,” she heard one of them say.

 

“Thousands of babies are killed,” another girl said.

 

Under the sudden ringing of the bell, Monica cried, “Thousands
of grown-up babies died in Vietnam. Why didn’t they pass a law
against that?” There was laughter. Barb Luce looked quickly at Clare.
When the bell stopped, echoing, there was only the familiar
sound of the whole school population, four hundred girls, stirring,
standing, pushing back chairs, picking up books. They shook out their
skirts and pulled up their kneesocks and flipped their hair. Sister Lucy
watched them as they passed her desk, the crutch across her lap.
Monica Grasso, ever mindful of her grade, said, “Good discussion,
Sister.” And Sister Lucy nodded, smiling, disdainfully perhaps.
Clare Keane, passing by, glanced briefly at the nun. Unlike so
many of the teachers at Mary Immaculate, Sister Lucy had never
before spoken about her life—her parents, her childhood, her time
outside of school. Never a word about her crutch and her limp. It had
lent her a certain dignity, her reticence. Clare thought it gave
her a kind of professionalism. Now she wondered, glancing briefly at
the nun, if Sister Lucy would take it all back if she could. If, given the
way the girls were shaking off her story—her mother’s poor life, her
father’s, all that sadness—laughing, moving on, following the bell,
Sister Lucy now wished she had kept it to herself. Instead of turning it
into a single day’s lesson for a bunch of heedless teenage girls.
Joining the crowds in the long hallway, Clare checked the books in
her arms. She was headed for geometry. This year, much to her own
surprise, it was the one class where she felt sure of everything.
H
ER HUSBAND
was exquisite. Ginger-haired, as the British would
have put it, but the two American girls would have said ginger
as well—although not for the color but the taste: gingersnaps,

 

gingerbread, ginger ale. Some mild and easygoing spice that

 

nevertheless prickled the tongue.

 

He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by

 

wineglasses. He wore brown corduroy pants and a shirt that was a

 

soft, autumn-evoking shade of gold, an ascot—a pattern of greens and

 

browns—tied loosely at his throat. His ginger hair curled over a broad

 

forehead that might have been deeply tanned earlier in the year but

 

was now faded and freckled, a burnished ginger itself, as were his

 

cheekbones, his handsome man’s dimpled chin. His eyes were brown

 

or dark green, the whites bright against his skin.

 

“Loo paper,” he said by way of greeting. And held up a single

 

sheet. “The cheapest kind. Nothing like it for getting lint off the

 

crystal.”

 

Professor Wallace had a hand to the small of their backs, ushering

 

them in. “David,” she whispered, reverentially, bending to place her

 

cheeks beside theirs, as if David were some distance away, on a

 

pedestal perhaps, and, like his namesake, carved out of white marble.

 

“My husband.” And then, straightening, raising her voice. “Two more

 

of our American students.”

 

Gracefully, he stretched out his legs and stood, sweeping up two
of the glasses in one hand, the faint sound of a bell ringing. He studied
their faces carefully as they introduced themselves. He was not as tall
as he’d seemed sitting, not as tall as his wife, but it made no difference
to the girls, who were just now noticing the long apricot lashes. “Some
wine?” he asked. “We have a lovely Chianti.” And then turned to a
sideboard, marble-topped and piled with books. And then turned back.
Asked over his shoulder, “Or do you American women prefer
whiskey?”

 

“Wine, thank you,” Annie said, but Grace pushed her glasses up
her nose with her index finger and said, “Whiskey.”

 

Annie bowed her head as she accepted the glass of wine, afraid
that if she met his eye, her hand would tremble. “My dear,” he said,
handing it to her. And then to Grace, “I’ve got just the thing.” He
reached for a square decanter. “Straight up or on the rocks?” he asked
and Grace said, shuffling a bit, “On the rocks.” There was a silver ice
bucket and silver tongs.

 

Professor Wallace’s face wore the expression Annie would have
liked to wear, or would work at wearing in the future. Under Professor
Wallace’s long nose, her mouth was a thin, wry grin. Her small blackbrown eyes were warm and understanding and forgiving. They said
she understood that Grace had probably never had whiskey before in
her life and would probably not like it when she had it, but that an
attempt was being made here, at worldliness, at sophistication. An
attempt on Grace’s part to undercut the stumpy body and the dowdy
clothes and the reputation she had already secured, six weeks into the
term, as the smartest but dullest of the fifteen American students
studying this year at the university. An attempt to promote the
impression that beneath the cliché of smart and plain and studious
was something like uncharted depths, even danger. Whiskey, indeed,
Professor Wallace’s smile

 

said. Well, yes, of course, go ahead, her smile said. You will not be the
first unhappy girl to seek to transform herself here, go ahead.
As if the injunction had actually been spoken, Grace stuck her
nose into the stubby glass as soon as it was in her hand and took a
large gulping swallow, sliding the ice cubes into her lip and knocking
the rim of the glass against the bridge of her glasses. Coughing a little
as she swallowed, of course.

 

Mr. Wallace, David, was either the most gracious man on earth or
simply oblivious to the pretense and the struggle. He took Grace’s
elbow as if this were only one of many evenings in which they had met
for a drink and a chat—as if, Annie thought, Grace were an old, dear
friend in elbow-length satin gloves, a tapered cigarette holder in her
left hand rather than the trademark (already) crumpled bit of Kleenex.
He led her to the couch. “Do sit,” he said and then held his hand out
to Annie, indicating a red velvet chair with brown fringe. “My dear,”
he said again, warmly, as if she were indeed.

 

There were piles of books beside the chair as well—old books
with dark covers, the room was scented with them—and as soon as
she sat, a dark Siamese cat curved around the pile to her left and
brushed itself against her legs. “That’s Runty,” Professor Wallace said.
She herself was wrapped in a large velvet shawl, as black as her
lecturing robes but spotted with gold beads, trimmed with a bit of
lace. She had lifted her glass from somewhere—another crystal goblet,
only half full of the nice Chianti—and now held it beside her ear as
she stood, looking down on the cat, one arm across her middle, the
other resting its elbow in her hand. “So named for the obvious
reasons,” she said. “Bozo’s around here somewhere. And Tommy, the
tiger-striped.”

 

Both girls added to their growing list of things to love about
Professor Wallace the fact that her cats had nonliterary names. “But
Runty,” she said, “is the sycophant.”

 

And that she did not ask them, as an American professor might
do, if they knew the meaning of the word.

 

Six weeks ago, the American students had stumbled out of
Professor Wallace’s first lecture with their breaths held, tripping over
one another to be the first to say, out of earshot of their humorless
British counterparts, “My God, the Wicked Witch of the West,” to
imitate her accent as she said, trilling it, “Edmund Spencer’s
The Faerie
Queen.”
But six weeks into the term, they were all enchanted. She had
only to turn up a corner of her thin mouth in the middle of a lecture,
or to raise a single eyebrow as she recited, or to touch her hand to her
breast as she made some aside
(“As You Like It”
she had said, “not,
necessarily, my dear ones, as I like it”) to get them all grinning,
clutching the edges of their small desks, leaning to see that the other
Americans in the lecture hall had gotten it too, the wry pun, the witty
reference, the experience they were all having, basking in her
brilliance, growing literary and worldly-wise, nearly British.
When they discovered, on a bulletin board crowded with Carnival
flyers and club schedules, tutorial appointments and reading lists, a
small index card that said Professor Wallace is home every Thursday
evening, followed by brief directions—the bus number, the shop on
the corner, “fourth house in, red shutters”—it had taken some time for
any of them to get the courage to take her up on what the English
students told them was simply an opportunity to have a nice meal. But
one of the American boys—Caleb, a bit of a sycophant himself—had
gone along with a pair of African students in the third week of the
term and returned to tell the other Americans of curry and Sauternes
and incredible conversation. One by one, the others made plans to go,
Annie knowing that she and Grace would have to go together since it
was Grace who had

 

sat beside her on the flight from Kennedy. Grace with whom she’d
eaten dinner and watched the movie and exchanged biographies with
blankets up to their chins and their faces turned to each other like
lovers. Poor Grace who, it sometimes felt, had slipped her hand into
the crook of Annie’s arm during those five hours and kept it there ever
since. Her own private Pauline.