The Best Thing for You (40 page)

One morning he recalled how, in his father’s office that day, beneath the perfume, an unpleasant camphorous odour had emanated from her clothes. This, too, he savoured.

At home he took fiercely to the piano, rattling off the exercises that had so recently bored him, fighting Bach, fighting Beethoven, fighting Chopin, fighting Debussy, until he caught his mother furtively listening, hiding in doorways, sitting once at the turn in the stairs just out of his sight, and this angered him past speech. Her shy encouraging smiles drove him to his room and his notebooks, where no matter how much he wrote he couldn’t clear his head. At night he dwelt feverishly on the girl from the fairgrounds, who merged in his imagination with the girl from the paper, until they were – for his purposes, at least – indistinguishable.

His new school, Aberdeen, was a sooty brick building with slits of windows, as though for archers. Inside students roamed in packs, sorted along the lines of race. There were girls everywhere. He had expected some immediate violence and was at first relieved.

At the office, where he had been told to register, they made him sit on a bench while they sorted some paperwork. After an hour he tapped on the window and the secretary’s voice, tiny and disjointed through the glass, said, Are you still here?

No one’s given me a room.

Two-o-seven, she said, without referring to anything. He thought she had made the number up on the spot.

The doors of two-o-seven were closed. He knocked.

Yes, a voice said.

The teacher was a woman, not old, with a bitter, pretty face, a wealth of carefully rolled blond hair, and a name, glimpsed on a metal plaque outside the door, he immediately forgot.

Yes.

Please, Miss, I was assigned to this class.

The room went quiet.

The teacher waited a heavy, deadpan beat before saying, Name?

Foster, Miss.

First name.

John, Miss.

Sit down, John.

Foster, Miss.

I beg your pardon, she said very quietly, and he saw she would be no help to him in the coming year.

I’m usually called Foster, Miss.

She took a minute to look at his clothes, moving her head so it was clear to those in the back row what she was doing. He was wearing last year’s uniform: slacks and blazer and tie.

Do I know you?

I’ve transferred, Miss.

From which school?

St. John and St. James.

Run out of money, did we?

He heard, in his mind’s ear, a ragged, surprised spasm of violins.

The teacher held up her left hand, palm towards herself, fingers splayed, and said, See this?

He wondered if she was going to hit him.

Learn my name.

The wedding ring, she meant, because he had called her Miss.

The lesson was French. Once he was seated and had been given a book he was able to relax a little. They were reviewing the parts of the family, mon père ma mère ma sœur mes frères ma tante mon oncle, and, for some reason, mes copains.

John, the teacher said. Combien as-tu de frères?

Je n’ai ni sœurs ni frères.

Again the class fell silent, down to the last fiddling and rustling of pages. His accent was better than hers.

Que fait ton père?

He hesitated.

Peter, she said. Que fait ton père?

Il est soldat.

Mario?

Il est magasinier.

Helen?

A Chinese girl said exceedingly softly, Mon père est malade. Il ne travaille pas.

The teacher met his eye again. Peut-ětre maintenant tu comprends la question. Que fait ton père?

Il est enquěteur.

En anglais. In English.

Private detective, he said.

The beating came during the lunch hour, behind the gymnasium. He recognized one or two of the boys by sight from the streets near his house.

Is she always such a battleship? he had asked one of them at the break, trying to be friendly. They had led him out back and kicked him until he couldn’t get up. He understood it was not about the teacher.

By afternoon she had moved on to someone else.

Jean, you are wearing lipstick.

No, Mrs. Borsky.

The girl’s real name, he surmised from her black and pink Italian prettiness, was not Jean, but something longer and prettier: Gianna, Giannina, Giovanna, Anna –

You are, Mrs. Borsky corrected. Where is your handkerchief?

They had been solving algebra problems, another class he found easy, though the others seemed to take it seriously enough, furrowing brows and breathing softly over the symbols, pencils poised but confoundedly still.

Here, Mrs. Borsky.

Wipe your mouth.

The girl dabbed her mouth with the cloth and held it up.

Wipe
your mouth.

She wiped a little harder.

I don’t allow sluts in my classroom, Jean, Mrs. Borsky said. Can you prove to me you’re not a slut?

Tears started running down the girl’s cheeks. She wiped until the wiping made her lips even more red than they were before, though the handkerchief showed nothing.

Go to the principal, Jean, Mrs. Borsky said.

The girl let out a howl, a few tumbling words not in English, and ran from the room. He touched the point of his cheek, gingerly, dabbed at it with his fingertip, feeling the lush bruise there.

After school they caught him again, this time for conversation.

Yes, Miss. No, Miss. Please, Miss. My father’s a private detective.

Well, he is.

Bullshit. Your father got fired.

He studied the boy who had spoken but could not place him at all.

My mother says your mother is a snotty bitch, another said. In a mincing voice: My son’s school, have you heard of it? My son’s piano teacher, do you know her?

He realized his family had a public existence in the neighbourhood he had never suspected.

What’s this? said a third, yanking at his tie. What’s this?

They found a game, pulling his tie round to the back and choking him with it. He experienced moments of pain accompanied by bursts of heightened hearing. As his vision started to swarm he distinctly heard a rhythmic chanting that did not correlate to the faces of the boys around him. He heard his own blood and systems.

Mackenzie, someone said, and they scattered.

He went home. His mother clucked over his face but asked surprisingly few questions. So she, too, had expected no less.

What are the academics like? his father asked him after dinner.

Fine.

Comparable to the work you were doing last year?

Maybe a little easier.

It’s only the first day, his mother said. They’re just reviewing.

Any societies or teams? Did they make an announcement about clubs day yet?

At his old school, boys would set up tables in the gymnasium one afternoon during first week, advertising the various school activities – Math club, fencing, Drama club, rugby, and so on. You got to skip class, to go and watch demonstrations and sign up.

Maybe Aberdeen does things a little differently, his mother said, when he didn’t respond.

I know your mother won’t like to hear me say this, his father said. But it’s important, these first few days, you give back as good as you get. That way they’ll learn to leave you alone.

His mother said nothing.

How’s work? the boy asked.

There was no question of going to visit him in his office, the way he used to. He understood his father was experiencing some difficulties. He was distracted these days, and disinclined to talk.

His father shook his head. Coutrell’s giving me grief, he said, addressing the boy’s mother, as though she had asked the question. About those days I need off for the trial. He has to give them to me by law, but he’s not happy about it.

When?

Starting Monday. They think it’ll go all week.

All week, the boy said.

Why do they need you? his mother said. When they’ve got –

When they’ve got Jim Hammond? Good question. Why does anyone need anyone when the world has got Jim Hammond?

Ben.

You know what he’s got me doing, Coutrell? The little camera he’s given me? The marriages I’m hired to break up?

Ben.

They’re going to crucify that little girl, his father said. They’re going to make me drive in the nails.

I don’t want to hear about it, she said harshly, and to the boy: Go to bed.

Slowly, because of the pain, he got himself under the blankets. His back ached, and he couldn’t lie on his accustomed right side because of the tenderness around his swollen eye. He tried to summon up his usual fantasy, of the mysterious dark house and the girl with the limp, but it had evolved, with a kaleidoscope twist, into something at once darker and more familiar. This time he was in a grocery store, behind the butcher’s counter, watching the girl from the newspaper walk toward him. Every moment she was near some new aspect of her broke over him like a wave – the brooch at the throat of her blouse, in the shape of an elaborately scrolled flower (borrowed from his mother), the length
of the eyelashes (borrowed from pretty Jean), the hat (its shape painfully reconstructed from the blur of a newspaper photograph), the smell of camphor (most intimate of details, because it was the only one he owned). Though he savoured these things individually, they did not add up to a totality; he could not, in his mind’s eye, look her full in the face. When he tried to roll over, some time later, and give himself to sleep, the pain brought tears to his eyes.

Every day at lunch and after school his classmates led him back behind the gymnasium, scattering only when some authority was sighted, some teacher. He would walk back home, after: alone and weak and milky, a walking aggregate of injuries. They would have to stop soon; they would never stop. It was absurd; it was deeply familiar.

On Monday morning he walked to school and then kept on walking. A few heads turned in the yard but no one cared to stop him. The pack had its habits, and mornings he was left alone.

He walked to Hastings Street, to his old stop, and waited with the businessmen for the number seven. He had never taken the streetcar this late before, and the light in the street seemed different, fatter and more sullied, disappointing. He touched his wristwatch through his sleeve but did not look at it. It started to rain.

What happened to you? someone asked him.

On the streetcar he dozed fitfully. He was sleeping badly for the first time in his life, and a warm, scraped, numb feeling often scrambled his consciousness so that he would come to at odd times throughout the day, belatedly realizing he had been gone.

Granville and Georgia, the conductor called, startling him so badly he wanted to cry. It was his stop.

It was raining in cold driving threads. By the time he reached the courthouse steps his chest and shoulders were dark with wet.
Dapper men, lawyers, hurried up the steps and through the doors.

Coming in? one of them called to him, holding the big door.

The first thing he saw, in the main hall, was his father and Mr. Hammond talking with two other men.

Which case? asked the man who had held the door for him.

He put a hand to his face, rubbed his forehead, turned away as much as he could. Mumbled: Pass.

Ah.

The murder case.

And are you with the bride or the groom?

Now the four men were moving off, up the curving staircase. He dropped to his knees, bowed his head over his shoelaces.

Yes, do that, the lawyer said amiably. I’ll just be a moment.

The four men were gone. He watched the lawyer approach one of the big, uniformed men standing by the clerk’s desk and ask him a few questions.

Room three-o-three, he said when he came back. I don’t think they’ll let you in, though.

Don’t they have to?

What happened to your face?

The lawyer’s expression was absolutely pleasant and careless. Foster said, Why won’t they let me in?

What school do you go to?

St. John and St. James.

That’s a fine school. Why aren’t you there?

Why won’t they let me in?

Right, the man said, unruffled. Well, for one thing, there are probably a lot of reporters and rubbernecks there ahead of you.

Foster thought about the word, a new one to him, then said, I’m not a rubberneck.

No, I don’t think you are. For another thing, you’re rather scruffy. The sheriffs, they’re the men in the brown uniforms,
like that one over there, they might look at you and think you look like trouble. Are you trouble?

The boy shook his head.

Three-o-three, the lawyer repeated, looking at his wristwatch. I have to go. You give it a try, though. You came all this way.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

He watched the lawyer trot towards the stairs, then followed him up to the third floor, where there was a thick crowd. He shouldered his way through, in the wake of the friendly lawyer, right up to the door of room three-o-three, where the man spoke a few words to the sheriff and was allowed in.

Full up, the sheriff said to the boy, barring his way. Through the open door he caught a glimpse of a crowded, restless, silent room. Just before the door closed the lawyer glanced back and winked.