Claire of the Sea Light (14 page)

The two parents had only nodded at each other when they arrived that evening. Both looked equally exhausted after long days at physically taxing jobs.

“Why do you want to learn to read?” Louise asked each one in turn.

Henri’s mother, Odile, shrugged. “I don’t want people to take me for an imbecile,” she replied, her face a tight mask.

“For Claire,” Claire’s father, Nozias, said simply, “so I can help her with her lessons.”

“Those are both very good reasons,” Louise said, leaning back into the same rocking chair she had demanded that Max Senior provide for her to read to the children, in part to connect her reading to them with the porch-style storytelling sessions of their parents’ childhoods.

“I don’t want either of you to feel ashamed,” she added. “You didn’t have the opportunities that your children now have.”

Louise had prepared that little speech beforehand, before she’d even known who’d be there. She had also prepared to tell these parents about ancient civilizations whose indigenous populations never knew how to read or write but used hieroglyphs with which it was easy to recognize water as wavy lines, and a man or a bird as a drawing of such. And she reminded them both of the well-known saying “Analfabèt pa bèt,” or “Illiterates are not stupid.” But then she got tired of the whole thing and of herself and told them to go home.

On their way out, the two parents stopped by Max Senior’s office together to complain, each adding that they had, at Max Senior’s request, gone through a great deal of trouble
to get there and that Madame Louise had not properly addressed them.

“Tant pis,” Louise told Max Senior when he recounted their complaints to her in bed later that night. “Too bad.”

Louise and Max Senior had been sleeping together on and off since the Faculté. They had stopped while he was married and had picked up again after his divorce. Louise was not in love with him; she did not think herself capable of being in love with anyone. Being alone was simpler, the intermingling of lives too confusing and too messy, a fact confirmed for her on her radio show each week.

That night in bed, at her house across from Sainte Rose de Lima Cathedral, Max Senior held one of Louise’s hands under the sheets. She dangled the other over the side of the bed and, after a sudden rush of blood to her fingertips, felt them go numb. Lying there, she wished that she’d agreed, as he had suggested to her one night, to paint her bedroom ceiling in a glow-in-the-dark shade of fluorescent green. Max Senior had once confided to her how when he was a boy he had been deathly afraid of nights without lights, starless and moonless nights without any electricity, nights that he’d called “Ki moun sa a?” nights, or “Who are you?” nights, because it was hard to recognize anyone. It was so dark that when you opened your eyes, you saw the same inky gloom as when your eyes were closed, he said. At that time, she’d laughed and said no, she didn’t want her bedroom to look like the walls of a kindergarten classroom. But now she thought
she might reconsider the glow-in-the-dark paint. If she had a bit of luminescence to stare up at on nights like this, might it be easier to pretend that she was somewhere outside, with blades of grass tickling her cheeks?

“Je voudrais …” His words interrupted her thoughts. “I would like to talk to you about something,” he was saying.

He released her fingers to run his hand across her abdomen, tracing, in the dark, the baby spider birthmark that grew into a full-blown black widow when her stomach swelled during those days she was menstruating.

“What is it?” she asked.

“The school,” he said, moving his face closer to hers in the dark. She wanted to turn away, but instead she pressed her eyelids together so tightly that they made another kind of sky, a sky full of fireflies and tiny torches.

“You slapped one of my students the other day when you came to read,” he said. “One of the children of the parents who came to the class tonight.”

It was just like him to set her up by bringing those parents there and then try to make a lesson out of the whole thing. He had been that way since the Faculté, always eager to teach someone a lesson in a totally roundabout way.

“The children at our school are never hit on our premises” was often the theme of their school-related pillow talk. That and his insistence that she was a great teacher in a country with so few and that she should have been teaching for decades, and even now could still be teaching. And that she was
wasting her time on that show. It was useless for her to keep telling him that she thought she was “teaching” on her show.

His was one of a few schools in the region with a no-hitting philosophy, which some of the parents welcomed and others detested. Most other schools carried out some type of corporal punishment, from ruler taps on the hand to cowhide straps on the legs and flat-board taps on the bottom. But Max Senior felt that corporal punishment was archaic, even barbaric, and he kept close watch on everyone, especially any teachers accused of abusive practices, to make sure they didn’t take place at his school.

“Henri’s mother wants to meet with you and me tomorrow afternoon after school.” His voice was tight, distant. And without saying anything more, he turned his back to her so that they were now facing opposite sides of her room.

“Must I go?” she asked, knowing, in spite of having one of the most listened- to voices in town, that she now sounded like a child who was being sent to the headmaster’s office. “I’m not even a teacher at the school.”

“This must be resolved,” he said. “And I hope you will grant me and this boy and his mother that courtesy.”

It wasn’t meant to be a slap, just the flutter of her hand, like a conductor guiding members of an orchestra, each with the same goal in mind, but different instruments in hand. Mazora
Henri, or Toothless Henri, as even the other children with missing teeth called him, had long legs, which he constantly knocked together, and a loud, jumpy laugh.

Of all the children she had ever read to, he interrupted the most, both with his clamorous laugh and by reaching over, whenever her back was turned, to grab, pinch, or shove the other children. Whenever she tried to keep him still, by making him stand alone in the back of the room, he mumbled a long list of audible curse words under his breath. She should have discussed the situation with Max Senior from the beginning, but she had thought herself capable of handling him.

The particular morning of the slap, she was reading out loud to the class a poem called “Le Soleil et les Grenouilles,” “The Sun and the Frogs,” by the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. Given that the town, like many other coastal towns, no longer had any frogs—something that the French herpetologists had linked to the increased possibility of seismic activity and freak waves—and since the children were already familiar with their parents’ or older siblings’ accounts of the summer a decade ago when the frogs had disappeared, Louise thought it might be instructive to share the poem, one of her favorites, with them.

As she read aloud, she became completely enthralled, as she did on the radio, with the sound of her own gravelly voice. Rising from the rocking chair, she walked back and forth between the evenly spaced benches, stopping now and
then to accentuate a certain part of the poem for a particular row or child.

For a while, she ignored Henri, who was mimicking her facial expressions and lip movements and grimacing to distract the others. But the more Henri was ignored, the more animated his impersonation became, until most of the children stopped listening to laugh at him. Or really to laugh at her.

She couldn’t tell when it started, but at some point while she had her back turned, Henri had yanked a ribbon from one girl’s hair, then had walked (or jumped) to the next row and pulled a handful of barrettes from Claire Faustin’s hair. The sight of Claire’s stoic face and the barrettes, spread out now like so many dead aphids on the floor at her feet, enraged
Louise, who put the book down and slowly walked toward Henri.

As she approached him, he straightened his body and looked ahead. Even as she was standing beside him, she had not yet decided what to do. Should she send him to the back of the room? Send him home?

She had meant only to accentuate whatever command she gave him by pounding on the notebook in front of him with her open palm. But as she stood before him, a toothless smirk came across his face. She wanted to erase it, the way one might erase words and numbers from a blackboard.

She realized that she’d hit him only when she heard the other children gasp. Henri rubbed the side of his face. There were no finger marks that she could see, no blood streaming past his lips. He didn’t cry. Instead, he went on smiling, his toothless gap growing wider, until Louise walked back to her desk and continued reading.

That night, Max Senior left her house without saying a word. It was likely that he wouldn’t even speak to her again unless she attended the meeting with the boy’s mother and all of this was resolved.

Louise spent the next morning in bed, writing. She had been wrong to hit the boy, she knew, but it wasn’t the end of the world. He needed it. In fact he deserved it. This is what she planned to tell his mother. Or maybe she wouldn’t.
This, she knew, was what was worrying Max Senior the most: that she might not show any remorse.

He was finally letting her go. She sensed this, though he’d not said it out loud. Now she would no longer have the children to read to, including that devil of a boy Henri. And that luminous child Claire. Now she would not even have Max Senior. She had long felt him slipping away, the intrigue of her biblical affliction waning as she moved deeper into middle age.

In the beginning, he had liked the taste of blood in her mouth. He would describe it to her in great detail as though his tongue were not inside
her
mouth.

“It is salty,” he would say. Then he would add, “It is sweet.” He was convinced that the taste was based on her moods, and she would let him go on and on about it, expressing the same thoughts with different words. And she would daydream of other things as he spoke and she would daydream of how free she would feel without this affliction and she would marvel at how some things could destroy a person’s life, like being housebound for a few days when you were bleeding out of your mouth and you had trouble remembering when you had not. And all of a sudden, the past was your haven and the time you felt freest was when you least understood your body, when you were like Henri Désir’s favorite victims, when you were a little girl. And this is one of the reasons that Henri Désir had to be stopped. Because boys like him became anguish-causing men, men who felt like they could freely ravage and maim, and they had to be
stopped. This is why she would never regret slapping him. She would even slap him again, even more purposefully this time, if she had the chance.

Odile and her son were in Max Senior’s office that afternoon, just as he said they would be. Sometimes when Louise walked into a place like that, a place bursting with old things—dusty ledgers and educational manuals, creaky desks and chairs, things that could easily be fixed or changed or discarded but were kept as if out of a nostalgic reverence for the past—she felt as though she too were a relic. Everything was old in that room except the boy, Henri.

Max Senior was sitting behind his cracked desk. He seemed relieved to see her, letting out a loud sigh when she came in. Again Odile was wearing her uniform and apron. It was as though she wanted to show the entire town that she had a job. She and her son were sitting across from Max Senior in a pair of tall wicker chairs, one of the boy’s feet hanging off the edge. An extra chair had been brought in for Louise and had been placed halfway between them.

Max Senior appeared torn between his roles, his eyes swerving back and forth to look at each of them. Louise could see that he was choosing his words carefully. Finally he simply said, “Allons. Let’s begin.”

Odile sprang up and massaged her buttocks, where the chair had left a damp sweat crease. Louise also rose up from her chair and then Max Senior did too.

Everyone was standing now except Henri, who gripped the sides of his chair with clenched fists while tapping his sneakers against one of the footholds without making any noise.

“Madame?” Odile took a few hesitant steps toward Louise. “They say you slapped my son?”

Odile kept moving closer, until Louise could feel and smell Odile’s warm breath on her face, could almost describe, if pressed, what she had eaten for lunch.

Odile reached toward Henri’s chair and, without taking her eyes off Louise, grabbed him by the shoulders and plopped him between herself and Louise. He was, she observed with a cool disinterest, uncharacteristically obedient, flaccid; his arms hung limply at his sides.

“My son has always told me,” Odile said, “what a good person you are. He told me you are like none of the teachers here, that even if we are poor, you treat him like all the other children and that you have read many wonderful things to him. I said to myself, ‘My son has much to learn from this woman, this big, famous woman.’ Am I telling a lie, son?” Odile grabbed her son’s chin and pushed his face forward, toward them. Henri shook his head no. His mouth was closed, but his lips trembled, and it seemed to Louise that, for the first time since she’d been around him, he might start to cry.

“Let’s all sit down now,” Max Senior said, his fingers drumming his desk.

“You see, Msye.” Odile turned her attention now to Max Senior. “I know your school does not strike children. I was
told this the first day you accepted him here. I am a poor woman. Still you accepted him. I thank you for that. But I can’t thank you for the rest. If my son did something wrong, I would give you permission. I would put my cross on a paper, if I have to, to let you punish him the proper way. But I would never let anyone slap my son on his face, like he was some type of chimè, some brigan, or some criminal. Non, non. That is not correction. It is humiliation.”