Duet for Three (4 page)

There are thirty small faces to be met each day. The faces change every year, but they're all the same to her. Sometimes a middle-aged man or woman will stop her in the street and say, “Hello, Mrs. Benson (or Miss Hendricks, depending on who she had been at the time), do you remember me? I was in your class twenty years ago” (or thirty, forty). June hardly ever remembers, but will say politely, “Oh yes, and what are you doing now?” as if she did.

She would just as soon keep her distance from the children, even the ones who have grown up to look not too menacing. Children are scary little things, close to the ground, as if they keep their ears to it, picking up vibrations from the earth. They are passionate in their little feuds and friendships, but the causes of their passion are puzzling and unpredictable. A mood can change in an instant. Like animals, they sniff out vulnerability. They are cruel, children are, and primitive.

Like a trapeze artist or a lion-tamer, she has been dangling herself in front of them daily for forty years. She certainly never expected it to be for so long. If she'd known, she might have chosen something else; although in those days there wasn't much else a woman could do. Be a nurse, perhaps, but that would have been even worse. At least here the only blood she has to deal with is from a scraped elbow or knee, or maybe a nosebleed in the classroom. Life and death would be terrible things to be responsible for, and so much unpleasantness besides, with bedpans, and tubes going here and there in people's bodies.

It's not only the children: the teaching itself has become bewildering and far more difficult. It used to be that there were particular methods and particular lessons. Children memorized poems and multiplication tables, lists of prepositions and names of continents and countries. They might be mischievous, or disobedient, and even bad, some of them, but they could be punished. There used to be a chair in the hall outside her door, and a misbehaving child could be sent out there for a scolding or the strap. She intercepted notes when they tried to pass them, and read them aloud, which soon put a stop to that. Whisperers were told to speak aloud and tell the whole class what they had to say.

Now even the little ones sometimes grin openly at her, and she hears them giggling and whispering. She may no longer punish as she sees fit. She is told to be “creative” in her teaching, whatever that may mean. If they are interested, the principal has suggested, they will learn. He is much younger than she. Authority, she notices, has skipped past her: policemen she sees on the streets are just peach-cheeked babies, and the doctor, George Bannon, is only Frances's age. Even the other teachers are young, arriving eager and staying a while and moving on, like the children passing out of her classes. She is the only one who seems to be permanent.

Those other teachers behave like children, too, playing in the schoolyard, throwing baseballs around, running and shouting. There seems hardly any distance at all between them and the pupils. How do they keep order? Well, the answer of course is that they don't. Standing in the hall, she can hear shouts and laughter from other classrooms.

In the staff-room they talk about young things: buying clothes and houses and having babies. They lean toward each other over tables. She suspects that, when she comes in, they glance at her and feel sorry for her. Either that or they don't notice her at all.

June knows she is not one of the popular teachers. She knows quite well that, behind her back, pupils call her “old beaky-brain”, although it makes no sense to her and she has no idea what they mean by it. It's another example of their incomprehensibility: sounds, she supposes, that appeal to them, but meaningless, nonsense sounds, intending but not specifying insult.

It doesn't matter what they call her, if she does her job and they learn what she has to teach. She supposes some of them will remember her, for her thoroughness if nothing else. Beyond that, it should be of no concern.

There was a teacher, older than June, who was adored. She taught Grade 1, and little girls clung to her, competing for her attention and affection. They walked her home from school, jostling each other to be beside her, holding her hands. At recess, they showed off. “Look Miss Pearson, I can turn a somersault,” that sort of thing. When she retired, parents she had taught came with children she had taught to an enormous reception for her. The adults jostled each other to get close. And all Mabel Pearson ever did, as far as June could tell, was wear pretty dresses and smile a great deal, speak gently to her pupils, and allow her hands to be held by sweaty, sticky little palms.

What will be done when June retires? Nothing like that outpouring of affection for Mabel Pearson, who, even now, at seventy, can walk beaming down the street being stopped by forty- and fifty-year-olds still keen for her approval.

June can see herself at that stage, sailing along being greeted, if at all, with deference and perhaps a touch of fear. No one will clutch at her arm, which is just as well. She has often thought how unpleasant it must be for Mabel Pearson, being clutched at all the time.

Respect, that's something she learned from her father: the respect a teacher warrants. Certainly in his day that was recognized by other men, who, she saw, greeted him in the street with deference; even people like the banker tipped his hat to her father.

The inexplicable thing is how her honorable, upright father could have brought himself to marry Aggie, even granting that she may have been attractive at the time. It seems to have been his only lapse in judgment. June does not believe at all the things her mother says about him. And even if they were true, she knows herself — who better? — how aggravating Aggie can be.

FIVE

Ordinarily, Aggie likes sitting at the front-room window, where she has various ways to spend the day: reading, eating, and watching. She knows a great many things about a great many people in this town. Prepared to dislike it, and finding it strange when she came, she has grown fond with sixty years of familiarity. She knows so many stories, snippets of drama, that have originated here. Many of the people involved, of course, have left or are dead. It's lonely, to have so few people left with whom to share memories — or, if not memories, at least pieces of history, certain events. How many remember the First World War, even as remotely as she does?

Oh, it is shameful, ignominious, to end up an old woman peeing the bed.

It is both more of a disaster that it has happened again, and less of one. Worse because now it is no longer a single, arguable lapse; and better because the second time it is almost familiar, not such a shock. She had no trouble identifying what was wrong, and spent no time trying to think of what to say to June, because clearly there was nothing to be said.

She is eighty years old, and of course things must be breaking down. What could she expect? She has rewarded her body with pies and cakes, and punished it with flesh. There are fires in her belly some days. There are times when it feels as if it may erupt.

If she has to die, she would prefer to explode. Mere disintegration is a horror. The best way would be to eat one cookie, one muffin, one cupcake too many and just blow up, with the taste of the last treat still on her tongue.

But she doesn't want to die.

She doesn't want to be an old woman peeing the bed, either.

And George will come, poking and probing, and Lord knows what June has in mind.

How queer and frightening, not to know what to do. There was a time when she was full of ideas. She was the one, back home, who suggested games, and found an old curtain to turn into a dress for Edith to wear to the church young people's meetings. She was the one who led the others up the rungs of the ladders into the hay mows, and leaped from away up there into the soft heaps of straw, while they hung back, peering at the distance down. She was the one who climbed high into a maple tree and hung from a limb, catcalling at her younger brothers, who could not reach so high. Later on, she may have been, for all she knew, the only one whose body sometimes burned, wanting — something or other. Even with so much work to be done, she had time and restlessness left over.

“What do you want, Aggie?” her mother demanded. “Why can't you be still?”

Well, but it got to be time for things to happen. Some secret things already had begun.

She went to church young people's meetings, and with her parents on Saturday evenings visiting neighboring families, or with her brothers and Edith on a community hay ride, and regarded the boys. They were as familiar to her as, oh, boiled potatoes, or lemon pies.

What happened was, the girls of the area married the boys of the area (who were called the boys, distinguishing them from their fathers, until they married and began to produce another set of boys) and moved onto nearby farms and began to recreate in those fields and kitchens and bedrooms what they had known in their mothers' homes.

It was a matter of waiting until the one involved made himself evident. Then there would be a period of courtship, involving a degree of chaste romance, and then the day, and freedom. She would have her own house, would make her own decisions about what to cook and bake. It would be her own floors she would be cleaning, and her own clothes, and her husband's, she would be washing. She would have her own children. Her life would be her own.

Meanwhile there was a kind of jigsaw puzzle of a man, made up of bits and pieces of familiar men, broad-shouldered and hefty, too young to have grown beefy yet, with well-muscled arms and calves (and there was no dreaming above, to thighs and hips and other mysterious parts). He had no face yet.

She talked about the wedding dress she would have, and described the rooms of her house. “It'll be bright, and I'll have all new dishes.” The old dishes in their house were marked by tiny, intricate surface cracks. “I'll have everything my own way, in my own house,” she boasted.

“You know, Aggie,” her mother said, “sometimes I wonder if you'll be satisfied.” She did not, however, explain what she meant, or what alternatives there might be.

Her mother's knack was to praise different aspects of her different children. Edith was the best cook, and Sylvia the best at sewing. One son was a hard worker, the other the most practical, and the oldest was a martyr to his country, a hero and a memory. His attributes and Aggie's were the hardest to pin down. “It's a good thing to have spunk,” her mother warned, “but don't always expect things your own way.” Aggie could see no reason not to. She only expected what everyone had.

Almost everyone. Because there was an alternative of sorts, although it was more something unfortunate that might happen, or fail to happen, than a choice. It was to cross that line between being an unmarried girl and spinsterhood; the difference between having a future and not. If marrying was to recreate and have purpose, spinsterhood was to be at the mercy of other people's creations and purposes. A spinster was the aunt, the dependant who would look after aging parents, or live at various times with various sisters and brothers, scrubbing floors, doing laundry, changing diapers — perhaps loving the babies but having none of her own, and knowing there was no amount of work that could pay off the debt of being unwanted, unloved, unlovable, and unattractive. A spinster thinned and dried, and her mouth grew little disapproving lines. As if marriage were a skin cream, and she aged too fast without it.

“You're getting a bit long in the tooth, my girl,” Aggie's father teased, but he was a little serious. She had turned nineteen.

“Really, Aggie,” her mother said impatiently, “I don't know what you want. Nobody's going to come along on a white horse and sweep you off your feet, you know.”

Aggie didn't think she was waiting for any white horse. It was just that in her bed she pictured things. There was something she wanted, if she could pin it down, and, having pinned it down, could pick it out from among the round boyish faces with their tanned, toughened skin.

In the event, it was no knight on a white horse who appeared, but certainly something different.

His name was Neil Hendricks, he was from England, and it was his first year of teaching in Canada. It was the custom for unmarried teachers in the one-room country school to board in the homes of pupils, and Aggie's smallest brother was still in public school.

Aggie's mother, who had met him at a school concert, said he seemed a nice smart young fellow, if a bit different, probably due to being English. “Oh boy, he's really strict,” said her little brother. Aggie and Edith speculated about his character and appearance. He was to be with them for the winter and spring terms, arriving in the new year. They thought at least it would make a change.

He came during a storm, after dark, carrying a suitcase in each hand, cold and wet, red-faced, and bundled up in coat and scarf and hat and heavy boots. To be honest, right off the bat Aggie thought he was a pretty miserable sight, and then wondered why she was disappointed.

“You poor boy,” said her mother, “you must be perished.”

He wore tiny gold-rimmed glasses that steamed in the heat of the kitchen. Once the cold wore off, the flush went with it and he turned out to be pale. He sat in the kitchen hugging himself, and they thought he was still chilly.

How different he was! So thin. Aggie and Edith hovered at the edges of the kitchen as their mother made tea and served him cookies. How, Aggie wondered, would someone like this shovel snow or split wood or toss hay into a wagon? His hair was also thin, and blond, and when he dipped his head to the tea it was apparent he was balding, wisps of pale hair over pale scalp. He seemed an unlikely figure to be sitting at their kitchen table.

(Could he really have been as unattractive as she remembers? She is sometimes startled, when Frances comes to visit, that she is not as beautiful in the flesh as Aggie has envisioned in her absence.)

How thin his wrists were. How narrow his features. Such pale blue eyes, with lashes so blond they were almost invisible. He leaned toward people when they spoke as if he couldn't hear properly.

There were other things, though. His voice; well, not his voice precisely, but his accent. There was a kind of foreign lilt, some parts of words more drawled and others more clipped. Also there seemed to be more grace in his slenderness than in the bulk of her father and brothers.

Too, he had to have some kind of toughness, if not the obvious sort of strength, because he had been brave enough to come here alone and begin a new life, so far from what was familiar.

“Imagine how lonely he must be,” Aggie thought.

People were of two minds about a teacher. On the one hand, it seemed a failure of masculinity for a man to be concerned with book-learning, which was nothing like real work and certainly not essential. On the other hand, he would know things. He would contain a vast store of secrets, or at least things other people didn't know. It made him a little mysterious, gave him an edge. People had some respect for what they didn't know, even if they knew all they actually needed to.

Aggie, watching the blond head bobbing around their house, wondered what it contained that hers did not. She wondered if his brain looked different from hers, more stuffed and crammed. If it were split open, would little facts and thoughts fall out, rolled up neatly like bits of paper? When he looked at her family, at her, what did he see? Did he see things they didn't, because of what he knew? Could he tell secrets about them because of the way he saw?

Her mother said, “Now, Aggie, I want you to look after him especially, talk to him and make sure he's not lacking for anything and make him feel at home, because I don't have time.” The hint could not have been much plainer. “But don't be forward.”

She found that conversation, in the beginning, was mainly up to her. His place at the supper table was set between her and her little brother, who was too ill at ease in his teacher's presence to speak. The teacher himself seemed to have a streak of shyness, or just silence.

“You're from England, Mr. Hendricks?”

“Yes, near London.”

“And do you have family there?”

“My parents. I was their only child,” and he looked around the noisy table with some astonishment.

“You must miss them.”

“I do, but this is where the opportunities are, or so they say back home.” He dipped his head and smiled. His lips, she thought, were narrow, but not entirely unappealing.

“Is it very different here, then?”

“Well, the customs are, I suppose. The way people live. It's not quite what I expected.”

“How did you think it would be?”

“Oh,” and he waved a hand vaguely, a slim hand with long fingers, smooth instead of rough, pale instead of reddened, with clean fingernails and little blond hairs on his knuckles — everything about him different, down to his fingertips — “I didn't realize how cold it could get or how far apart people lived. I didn't think of education not being so important, that students just don't turn up at school if they're wanted at home.”

She couldn't imagine it any other way, but nodded encouragingly.

“Some of them are quite bright, too. Still, I suppose I can try to make them want to learn. There's nothing to stop a farmer from reading, after all.”

How ignorant he must find them all, how work-worn and dull, scrabbling at their rocks. For a moment she saw them from his point of view, and was ashamed.

Still, when he shrugged her attention was drawn to the spareness of his shoulders, and she had a naughty vision of her big healthy head rolling off them.

“And you?” he asked politely. “You went to school here?”

“Yes, but not very far, only to seventh grade.”

“Do you like books? Do you still read?”

Of course not. There were far too many things going on to sit with your nose in a book. Reading was a school activity, and leaving school, you closed the books. “Well, we don't have many here,” she hedged. “Only some school readers, and the Bible.”

“But are you interested?”

“Oh, of course.”

They said the way to a man's heart was through his stomach, but she thought that with this man, that was not likely the case. He was just picking at his food, but now he turned to her with interest. “I have books upstairs, you know. Would you care to borrow some?”

“Yes, I'd like that,” and she lowered her eyes, well schooled in the maidenly arts, however strong she might in fact be. Why, she could carry pails of ice water or lemonade away out into the fields for her father and brothers to drink; she could twist sheets so hard all the soapy water just drained right out of them. Eyes down and moving her hands a little helplessly, as if they'd never done anything harder than touch a flower, she added, “although I wouldn't know where to begin, really.”

“Perhaps I could help you.”