The Lesson (8 page)

Then, in the room, a deep quiet as of distance. One could shout, for instance, at the edge of a vast park, and not be heard within. In this way was the tiny room sealed within itself. On the bed, the boy lay and a slight rasping sound came as his hands moved against the bedspread. Everything in the room had been there so long that the weight of each object had settled and things were as though joined. Lying there, the boy's weight began also to settle. Although the window was open, no sound of any kind reached the bed. It was as though horse messengers were continually setting out across the steppes where in the folds of such indescribable cloth, they would lose their way and perish.

Loring went down to the kitchen and put water on to boil. She got out a teapot, and a little metal basket that divided to open and close again perfectly. This apparatus was joined to a chain that ran to a little weight with an hourglass on it. The hourglass, of course, would tell one when the tea was appropriately steeped.

She filled the tiny basket with tea leaves, shut it, and set it in the teapot. Then she went to the window.

Below, in the field, the teacher's class was again playing.

Things must be bad in the schoolhouse if they are forced out of doors on every possible occasion, thought Loring. For the children did not look like they wanted to be out of doors. They were sitting in a line in the grass, trying to read from a book. Every other child had a book. While the one was reading, the other was looking over the shoulder. Each of those other ones wrote in a notebook occasionally with pencils that were tied to the notebooks with string.

And yet, the teacher was the very picture of gaiety and joy. In a loose dress with her limbs bare, she ran back and forth in the field, calling to the children, as if to tempt them away from their work. Yet not a one went to her. There must be some secret punishment at work, and she is testing their resolve, thought Loring approvingly.

The pot shrieked from above the flames, and Loring attended to it, and to the remaining preparations of the tea. From the pantry she took some sort of cookie or cake, from a cabinet, two cups, from elsewhere, milk, sugar, spoons of overmastering delicacy, and with all such things assembled on a tray, went back upstairs, slowly negotiating the steps, and passing in the process, the eighty-three episodes of Goya's
Los Desastres de la Guerra,
framed plates placed in order up and down the staircase. No. 51 caught her eye,
Gracias á la almorta
, the brutalized, impoverished figures huddled around a bowl of millet in a dimly unknowable place of suffering. She felt they were so cheerful, these drawings. One couldn't help but smile. Is that how it is? Must brutality point to kindess, lack to plenty? Or does one just grin willfully at one's tormentors, even when it seems they are not present, they have long gone away.

When she opened the door to the bedroom, Stan was asleep. She set the tray down on a high table by the bed and went to stand there over him. He had taken the jacket off and covered his face with it. He was lying there, with the jacket over his face.

Loring moved so that she stood sideways to the bed. Her eye could now regard it only in the edges. She looked again and saw a figure, lying in the bed, half covered in a grey jacket, of a sort she knew well.

She stood there quietly, the pleasure of this small but persistent, until at length the boy awoke.

—What is that? asked the boy cheerfully.

—Tea, said Loring. Tea and a bit of something to eat.

—Can I have some?

—It's for you, of course. Come over here.

The light had changed a bit in the room. So, too, had the sound. With her entry, the noise of wind and the limbs of trees battering against one another and against the house.

—It is nice to be in a small house, observed Stan. Then you have the outside as well.

—That's so, said Loring. The main thing is—that you can feel the weather. If you can ignore it entirely, your life is a bit sadder—which is something no one would have predicted.

The boy began to eat. Loring poured his tea and added sugar and milk for him.

—Do you like tea? she asked.

—I must, he said. Because the smell woke me up, and I was in the middle of a good dream.

His voice sounded fuller and richer. It sounded, in short, much more like her husband's. Loring listened carefully. She shut her eyes, trying to hear every bit of it.

—What was the dream? she asked.

—I was reading a book of myths last night. I think it came from that.

Loring nodded.

—I was at a kind of doorway between one kingdom and another. There was a long wall stretching in either direction. I had a little house…

—A hut?

—Yes, a hut, on top of the wall. When people came, I was supposed to ask them questions. This was my dream.

—What kind of questions did you ask?

—Well, there was a list, but I didn't read it. I knew the ones I liked.

—Were they difficult questions?

—I remember the ones I asked—there were four of them:

—Did you have money to pay them if they agreed?

—I didn't have anything at all. Just a broom to sweep the top of the wall, and a little barrel of food. Someone would come on horseback every now and then to give me more.

—What if someone came who was to be turned back? How would you do it?

—I don't know, he said. It doesn't sound like a very good system, does it?

—It sounds like an excellent system, said Loring. I wouldn't mind doing that job.

—Well, it is a good system for the one who stays there, but I just don't know what it does for the kingdom, said Stan.

He took a bite of a black-colored cake.

—It wouldn't be the same kingdom without the person at the end, would it? said Loring. You could almost say that you serve both kingdoms—the kingdom that employs you, and the other kingdom on the other side of the wall, because you make the difference between them clear. It is an impossible difference to know or understand, but you make it clear.

—The tea is good, said Stan. I like tea, and also black cake.

—Finish your cake, because we have three things left to do today before you leave.

listed neatly:

—In the dream, asked Loring, when you were at this hut atop this wall in the midst of this wasteland, waiting there with your broom and your barrel of food: did anyone actually come to the gate?

—No, said Stan. No one came.

—Chess is many things, but one thing it IS not is a game that is played on a board. Make no mistake, good chess is played entirely in the head. And that is why it is no difficulty at all for masters to have a game wherein they simply announce the moves to another and never look at a board at all.

—But doesn't that become confusing very quickly?

Stan was sitting on the floor underneath the table. He had discovered a hole of some kind, possibly a mousehole, in the wall by the near table leg. He was trying to peer into this hole, and at the same time was listening very carefully, one supposes.

—Yes and no, said Loring. In fact, people have been known to play not only blindfold, but also simultaneously. That is to say—if I showed up in a town and had no money to pay for my dinner, I might be convinced to give a simultaneous exhibition wherein I would play ten or fifteen people at the same time, going from board to board and making my moves. Now, a blindfold simultaneous exhibition, as you may imagine, is a little more difficult. There, one goes from board to board and is simply told the last move that happened.
You are at board three. Your opponent played pawn to c3. What is your move?
This may seem entirely impossible, but players do it, and have done it, playing blindfold simultaneously against more than thirty master-strength players. Of course, it takes its toll on the mind. In fact, that's why it has been outlawed in certain countries. The sense is, it shortens the careers of the best masters. It ages you, mentally, which is an awful idea.

—Can you do it? asked Stan.

—I have only done it with three or four games going on at once. Ezra gave an exhibition once where he did twenty boards.

—Did he win?

—He won fifteen, drew four, and lost one.

—To whom did he lose?

—To me. It was a trick. The organizers switched me in for the amateur that was supposed to be playing. He, of course, recognized it at once, but it didn't help. Here, let me show you the moves.

Stan climbed up into his chair, leaving his perhaps-mouse-hole behind somewhat regretfully.

She showed him the moves of the game on the chessboard.

—And here he is forced to resign. He'll lose his knight no matter where it moves. Any of these pawn moves lose immediately also. That's called zugzwang.

—Shall we play a game without a board, asked Stan.

They tried, but it soon proved impossible. Stan could not remember which piece was where and kept trying to move knights that were hiding elsewhere or rooks that had already been taken off the board.

—Don't worry, said Loring encouragingly. It comes in time. Let's play our weekly match.

While they played, many things happened all around them. Loring thought about the open window upstairs and that it should be shut. She thought about the photograph that was lying on the bureau in that same room. She thought of the teacher that she had seen instructing the class, and of the dog that had been barking early that same morning. Mostly, though, she thought of standing in the bedroom and looking at her husband out of the corner of her eye.

—What have you been thinking about, Stan? she asked after he lost all four games in a row, quite badly.

—I was thinking about what you told me.

—What is that?

—About imagining things that might happen or might have happened. About trying to pretend that those things are real, in order to see what might be true about them. You said I should, if I felt the edge of something, I should follow it and see where it leads.

—And what were you imagining?

She sat up.

—Well, there came a knock at the door, and when you went to check, it was my father, only he looked different than the way that he usually looks.

The boy told Loring a story then, in which she was included as a character. They were sitting there, at lessons, as always, and a knock came at the door. Loring went to answer it, but there was no one there.

—A hermit always longs for visitors, said Loring, until they come, and then he wishes them gone.

—Are you talking about my dream?

—No, no, just speaking to myself. It is what old people do. You remembered those dreams very clearly, didn't you?

—I have been trying to. I remember them partly, and make it up partly—make up what happened.

—I see, she said.

She looked at the boy in front of her. He was looking at her very closely; she felt herself being looked at. Who is it, she wondered, who is looking at me? If it is you, please put your hand out and touch my arm.

The boy sat and did nothing.

A moment passed.

Put your hand out and touch my arm.

But nothing happened. Loring was suddenly seized with a grave fear. Was it all a cruel trick? She stood up and rushed out of the room. The boy jumped up and followed after her. She stopped in the pantry, leaning against the shelves. Was she crying?

—Are you all right? asked Stan.

She knelt down next to him.

—I'm all right, she said.

—Will you tell me a story?

—I will.

And now it had been such a long time, such a very long time, and the mother must be arriving, might already have arrived—couldn't possibly not be nearly to arrive.

—Shall we wait outside for her? asked Loring.

—All right, said Stan.

They went out to the steps and sat with the door shut and locked behind them.

—It is a nice thing, Loring said, to lock your door behind you when you sit on the stoop. Then, when it happens that the mood strikes you to rush off somewhere, you are totally prepared for it. Also, you have the complete freedom of your surroundings. If the door isn't locked, then you, positioned in front of it, are in some sense defending the door. If it is locked, however, then you are a sort of sortie, sent out of the gates to some unknown end. Do you know to what purpose you have been sent out?

—To do the Knight's Tour? asked Stan.

—Have you gotten it yet?

—I think so, said Stan, but I'm not sure.

—We can check it next time on the board, with you crossing off squares.

Then, a girl named Valerie showed up. She was like that, apparently. She would just show up and then she would be somewhere.

—Hello, said Valerie. I came to get Stan.

Stan looked at her a bit distrustfully.

—I'm your sister's friend. Don't you remember me?

Stan shook his head.

—Well, said Valerie, in that case, it will have to be kidnapping. Ms. Wesley, if you don't mind I'm going to have to kidnap this boy.

—Don't let her, shrieked Stan, suddenly seeming like he was actually afraid.

His face had become red. Afraid, really! And I believe he was, after all a five-year-old may cry about anything at all.

For some reason, Loring decided to continue the joke. Perhaps it was because she was tired, perhaps because he hadn't touched her arm when she gave him the invisible request.

—Oh, take him away, she said. For all I care. But be sure to stuff something in his mouth or he'll call for help.

Stan began to cry. It was just too much for him. He wasn't at all prepared to be taken away by someone he didn't know.

—But you know me, Valerie kept saying. You know me. You know me.

As is obvious, this is a pretty worthless thing to say if the other person doesn't believe it.

Finally, the two of them walked Stan the whole way home. It was exhausting for Loring, for she was very old, and not given to sudden exertion. They had to stop many times, and by the end she felt the thinness of her old bones. As soon as she got out of sight of the house, she collapsed on a short wall, actually collapsed. Her body gave out. She fell onto her hands and hip and the stone cut her fingers in places.