Alone in the Classroom (23 page)

My father would say afterwards that Michael wasn’t good enough for Connie. A woman can’t marry a man less educated and younger than herself. But you fall in love with someone who welcomes every question. Michael took a run at whatever you asked him, and he had a way of seeing things and putting them, a turn of phrase, that you didn’t forget. He called our dog Professor and scratched his ears until Jet’s arthritic old bones melted into the carpet. Our dog reminded him of a dog he remembered very well, an old black Lab named Professor, who had slept on a rug near the wood stove when he was small. “The thing is, the dog died before I was born.”

“Then what were you remembering,” I said into the long silence, “when you remembered the old dog?”

“Well, now, there’s an easy explanation, but you have to be a little loose in your thinking.” His smile was infectious. “My uncle had a dog named Professor, and I was named after my uncle. I was having my uncle’s memory.”

I began to understand Connie’s interest in past lives.

I thought of my grandmother in me. I had her name and, according to my mother, her wretched personality; we were never a twosome, my mother and I, but a threesome, since I reminded her of a mother she couldn’t abide. Now I digested the possibility that it wasn’t always me who was remembering, it was me as namesake having my grandmother’s curdled reactions to the people and situations in her life.

“Show her,” Connie said to Michael. “Go on.”

He raised his pant leg on a long, purple, irregularly shaped birthmark. His uncle had died in a bar fight, it turned out, knifed in the chest and the leg. Michael said there was a theory afoot that birthmarks were wounds incurred in a previous life.

I told him we had competing birthmarks. I raised my pant leg and showed the big brown saucer on my knee.

“I
thought
we had a special bond,” he said, making himself even more irresistible.

“Michael, don’t you think she looks like Susan?”

He studied my face. And even though I wanted to hear what he might say, I said to Connie, “You’re making that up.”

The truth is I was probably too intrigued. Even though I was in my thirties, married and with two children, I was as suggestible as a child.

But she wasn’t making it up, she said. Other cultures were more open to such possibilities. She had heard about an Inuit child who refused to fly, terrified he would never manage to get out of the plane; at the time he was too young to know that he had been named after an uncle who died in a plane crash and was found inside the aircraft, directly in front of the door. “Syd told me that,” she said to Michael.

“Syd?” I said.

“My ex.”

“The sweetest man alive,” Michael said.

He stayed for lunch, but couldn’t be persuaded to stay for dinner, and during the time he was with us he rose to a fine pitch of sociability as solitary people often do. Over lunch we talked about northern summers, since my sister was about to return to her life in Mexico. She fondly described her childhood swing attached to the elm tree, the redcurrant bushes so close she could grab a handful of berries as she swung by, and the little summer house with its latticed walls deep in the woods where she had played and had tea parties with sugar water for tea. Michael went on a little riff about how summers end in the north - how the blue jay’s call gets harsher, how flies and insects come inside on currents of warm air, how the shade of green in the woods takes on an older, weather-beaten look, and foxes sit under street lights in the country and snap up the bugs and moths that get fried and fall.

We took to him and he to us. He remarked upon our large, admirably close family and said he was a loner. He sounded rueful, proud. That’s when I lifted the framed photograph of a family reunion off the wall to show to him, and he delighted in identifying Connie. “There she is,” he said. She was standing on the left, slightly apart, slim, stylish, wearing a turtleneck and slacks, her head high and aware of itself, her posture excellent. The rest of us looked scruffy, gangly, or squat.

I went to rehang the photograph - he and I were standing side by side - and he offered to do it for me. Then, “You’re as tall as I am.” And he stood back and let me do it.

All that amusement and chivalry in his eyes.

Something else about him. He commented upon my mother’s paintings. He asked who had done the big canvases, four feet by five, of arctic lichens on rock, splashes of bold, intricate colour - jewels. Then he went right up to them and said, “They’re beautiful, mysterious, and full of meaning.”

I was a loner, too, as a girl, given to solitary walks and drawn to berry patches, as patient with them as with the slowest-moving book. I had no patience at all with my family. I used to imagine myself as a cheering orphan heading to Boston to live with my aunt. My loyalties then were a mesh of simplicities and complications, and only understandable in the shade of my mother’s oak-like loyalty to my stern father and her expectation that I would be a good sport in all ways and at all times, and helpful besides. It has taken me a long time to reconstruct my loyalties, to redirect them towards my mother and my father, and to rest in that hard-won place. The first triangle in one’s life is always the father, mother, child. It sets the troubled tone.

Eight months after the Christmas I’ve just described, I left my husband and two small children in Montreal,
where they stayed with my mother-in-law, and took a run down to Connie’s summer cottage in Maine, an island house with veranda, sleeping porch, wild roses with huge hips. In those days I used to visit her every summer. This time I stayed only the weekend, and one night we didn’t go to bed at all, one of those warm August nights when your hands are full of what’s slipping through your fingers, namely, summer in all its glory.

My visit overlapped for an hour or two a visit by one of her former students, a freckled, adoring young woman with a steady laugh and a scanty top, who told me that Connie used to bring the woods into school with her and take her classes into the woods. She recalled one March day when, in their enthusiasm, a few small pupils, she among them, brought Connie a handful of bluish-pink baby mice they had found in a nest in the snow. The mice were warm in the palm of her hand, squeaking, soft,
breathing
. She felt the pounding hearts, stroked the velvety skin. “Ah,” Connie had said to them. “Well, now, we’ll have to put them back or they will die.”

Nancy was the young woman’s name. She told me that my aunt was the best teacher she had ever had. “I read newspapers because of you,” she said to Connie. “I read poets. Do you remember taking us into a farmer’s field to study the stars? I’ve never looked at the sky the same way. You opened up the universe to me.”

After Nancy drove away, heading back to Boston, Connie told me she worried about her. She was a promising girl from an unpromising family. Her parents hadn’t armed her with enough knowledge to know how to say
no and that made her easy pickings for the kind of man who cruises around targeting vulnerable girls.

“Vulnerable girls,” I said, thinking of my daughter, thinking of myself.

“Girls who aren’t especially popular and will be flattered by their attentions and sucked in and used for sex.”

We were sitting at the square wooden table in her kitchen. “And how do you say no?” I asked.

“Repeatedly, firmly, looking them in the eye. You don’t vacillate.”

“Vacillation.” I dwelled on that word too, applying it to my own recent circumstances. “But you vacillate because you’re vacillating in your mind.”

“I know.”

Then looking down at the table, I said to her, “This summer I became very attracted to a man.” And, just once or twice raising my eyes to her wise and lovely face, I told the story. How he had called me and said I had made a strong impression on him. That he was much older than I was. He had other women in his life, I was sure of that. I was glad he was so old, it was a lot easier to dismiss a man who had hairs growing out of his nose. But I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I thought of little else.

“Obsession.” Connie said the word as if she understood it all too well.

I said with a smile, “Passion.” Mocking myself, but serious. Passion goes further back than obsession. Much further back than the current neediness. (As if calling something neediness should make it easier to get over. It has nothing to do with anything that is easy to get over.)
I had been reading Homer and those passionate Greek playwrights I can never keep straight.

“You would pay such a price,” she said to me. “You have so much to lose. And you have to think of the effect on your children.”

I agreed with her. “But the behaviour that seems unforgivable to a third person doesn’t seem unforgivable when you’re
in
it. Hurting someone? It doesn’t matter.”

“I know. We become children again. It’s the ‘I’ wanting what it wants.”

Her kitchen was my favourite room in the house. It had the original dark pine panelling and large cupboards with multi-paned doors. I toyed with the salt shaker on the table, while she sat across from me, her measured self.

“I thought something was weighing on you,” she said.

“It could be any number of things. It doesn’t take much for me to feel weighed down.”

“What is the need in you that makes you respond to him?”

I considered this. She was having none of passion, she was boiling things down.

“Romance?” I ventured, although identifying a single need seemed impossible and beside the point. “Having someone attracted to me?”

“Couldn’t you satisfy that need within yourself?”

“Masturbation?”

“But is it just a physical need?”

“It’s not even a need I knew I had. It’s inseparable from the man who ignited it. I just want to see him walking
towards me. I just want to see him again. And when I see him, sometimes he bores me to death.”

“So what does this man, who bores you and attracts you, what need in you does he fill?”

Here was the cautious amber of a seriously independent woman. But she was seventy-two and I was thirty-seven.

“Tell me about you and Michael,” I said.

She shook her head a little, there was so much to say. But all she said was, “We couldn’t stay away from each other. He’s a very sexy man.”

This last remark filled the room, and for a while we said nothing.

“But you’re telling me to satisfy my need in some other way.”

“He didn’t make me happy, Anne.”

It sounded as if he had made her very happy.

“I mean,” she said, “he often made me happy. But he’s too wrapped up in himself. And there were always other women, and sometimes he married them. The marriages didn’t last very long.” Then, reading my expression, no doubt, she said, “Who are we talking about?”

I felt the heat rise in my face. Not all love is incestuous, but a great deal of love has incestuous overtones or undertones or anti-tones as we find ourselves drawn to family resemblances, or the opposite, to men and women who bear no resemblance to any of our kin. Or to a man who has wooed the aunt you admire and wish you were. You want to be in the same atmosphere, to have the same effect, and failing that, to be so affected.

You can’t compete, but you want to be a part of it.

“Anne.”

It was a tone I hadn’t heard before, a rather sharp classroom tone expressing disappointment. It brought me up short.

“You mind. You disapprove.”

“How can I not mind?” She had turned her gaze on me, a level regard.

I saw myself with her eyes. I saw myself dropping a mouse at her feet, my derivative, copycat love. It was stupid of me to think she might have been pleased. I had taken admiration too far. It didn’t matter that the love she had with Michael wasn’t possessive or exclusive. It was theirs. It wasn’t mine.

I had reconnected with him in May at a friend’s party near Wakefield. It had been a warm and sunny afternoon, breezy enough to keep away the flies. I greeted my friend in her kitchen, then stepped onto the deck, and there he was, his hands resting on the railing on either side of him, his face in the sun, a man in his sixties, more youthful than most fifty-year-olds, yet no mistaking him for anything but a man getting old. He wore summer pants and a summer shirt and we recognized each other. He stretched out his hand to shake mine. “We met at Christmas. You’re Connie’s niece.”

We talked until someone else, a woman I knew a little, addressed me. I turned to her as she spoke to me about writing and teaching, things unrelated to Michael.
Nevertheless, he leaned towards us and added his own comment, and I felt his not impersonal interest in me. Later, he sought me out and told me about some of the nature books he had illustrated, and he asked me how I kept the creative process alive, which led us to the subject of memory.

“We forget nothing,” he said. “It’s all there, waiting to be triggered. By a death, for instance.”

“If only we remembered what we learned,” I said.

“But that doesn’t matter. The facts don’t matter.” He swept his hands around. “It all blurs and merges and contributes to a way of seeing the world.”

Someone else, a musician, joined in to say that we remember nothing unless it has an emotional context. He will ask girls in his choir to memorize a long piece of music and they’ll profess their inability. Then he’ll ask how many pairs of shoes they have. They’ll think and say, Fourteen. “Describe them.” They describe each pair in detail. “And why do you remember so well that blue pair with the strap at the back?” Oh, well, I wore them to a certain party.

It’s true. I remember exactly what I wore that day: black sandals, light-blue cotton pants, and a checked shirt whose top three buttons weren’t buttoned up.

He phoned a week later. “You remind me of Connie. I don’t mean you look alike. But there’s something.”

Why was that so seductive? I felt folded into an area of amorousness, drawn in, because whatever he loved in her, I had an echo of. He said he and Connie had had a wonderful relationship that started when he was in his
twenties and she was older, and lasted for many years, and they still sought each other out from time to time. She was a successful woman, he said, you could see it in the way she carried herself, and they had worked together on educational material for children with learning disabilities and so on and so forth.