Alone in the Classroom (22 page)

“Because I’m afraid I’m getting more and more like him. More like him, less like my sister. He was quiet and I’m getting quieter.”

He was coming down with the flu, although he didn’t mention it, and although he got sick, he wouldn’t get as sick as my daughter; he didn’t miss a meal.

“We never got along,” he said. “We tolerated each other. He wasn’t any good at sports. He couldn’t catch a ball if you gave it to him on a silver platter. I was disgusted with him, to tell the truth.”

An honest man, my father. I love that about him. “You’ve always been quiet,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong with that. You move between being quiet and being the centre of things.”

He shrugged. His eyes - the pouches under them - were as soft as petals. Or pastry after it’s been in the oven ten minutes or so, a certain shininess to those soft, thick folds.

“He was a rotten farmer, too. And why he married Zoe.” My father shook his head and stared at the floor. “She was a terrible stepmother. After that Connie stopped coming home.”

He looked not only tired but much older, as did my mother.

The next morning Connie had pulled into the driveway, and my father was transformed. Her methods were invisible. She didn’t make overt efforts to question him or include him in conversation, but he said more in an hour with her than in a month with anyone else. She was the only one who called him Jimmy.

Outside, as I write, a slow blush is working its way down the maple tree next door. Over the course of two weeks it has descended from forehead to cheeks, face, neck,
shoulders, knees: the reverse of what happened to Miss O’Connor and Mary Miller. With some people the dead giveaway is the blush. With others it’s the teeth, the telltale teeth nervously clicked or strenuously sucked. In my family it’s the eyes. We have no control over our eyes. You would think we were all heart, the way we cry.

After our walk in the snowy woods, and before my Boxing Day dinner was served, we gathered in the living room with the poems we had written to my oldest brother, who had turned forty in the fall. I have a picture of Connie from that evening. She was seventy-one, and the expression on her face is calm, aware, inviting. I knew none of the intricacies of her romantic life, not then, except that she had been married once and briefly to a Jewish man, and had not converted, which might have been part of the problem, my parents thought.

This was the first time all of us had managed to get together since my brother’s birthday in October. He sat in the rocking chair and we gathered around. My mother began first with her poem, and after two lines her eyes filled and her face quivered, an uncontrollable working of mouth and jaw. “Here, Daddy,” she said. “I can’t.”

My father took my mother’s poem, but read his own. He got to the end of his. My mother’s effort he passed on to my sister, who passed it on to me, and I handed it to Connie, barely equal to reading my own verses, let alone my mother’s. We leaked and dabbed and quivered and choked up, while my brother listened with embarrassment and pleasure. The poems were not sentimental, let me hasten to say. But there was something about trying
to express our love for my sweet-tempered oldest brother, even humorously, that made us dissolve.

“Thank you, Daddy,” my mother would say at the end of a long car trip, when my father had brought us safely home. “You’re a hero.” She would pat his arm, having over the course of the long drive rested the back of her hand, palm up, on his knee. On hot summer days, eating our lunch on the back piazza, as my parents called the flat outcropping of rock at the far side of the house, my father would run his hand up her dress and stroke her upper thighs. She had a series of sounds for that, low warbling purrs of acquiescence and contentment. Just as she had a series of sounds whenever tension and irritability left their moorings and floated freely about the room. Then her throat would turn into a babbling brook that relied upon a dry near cough and the beginnings of a soft laugh merging with a hum. Awkward silence or conflict or too much feeling of any kind, and she would run to the piano in her throat and play a tune.

On the night of the birthday celebration, she stopped her eyes from overflowing by raising her hand and whacking herself on the side of the head. Whack, whack. First one side, then the other.

Connie read my mother’s poem. She got to the end without shedding a tear, then she gave my brother a hip flask engraved with his name.

She represented everything that was worldly, relaxed, at ease with itself. It’s rare to meet anyone with such presence and a gift when the person is your aunt and therefore a part of your being, but the better part, the part you aspire to.

While everyone else did the dishes, my mother went to my six-year-old daughter, who was lying under blankets on the chesterfield, to take her temperature. She had been too busy to give her much attention until now. My mother loved Christmas, but it drove her out of herself because there was so much to do and she did everything. I can’t say I appreciated this at the time. I was too taken up by the contrast between my mother and Connie, who had arranged her life to be free of such tonnage.

“I’ll have you know,” my mother said, shaking down the thermometer, “that I am a registered nurse. Past tense.” And my daughter giggled, very pale against the pillows. My mother perched beside her on the edge of the chesterfield. “Under the tongue,” she said, and slipped in the thermometer, as gentle as she always was with our dogs, and sometimes was with children if they weren’t making any demands. “You, my dear, have a temperature of 102.”

“Is that bad?” my daughter said.

“No, that’s good. It means your body temperature has risen to kill all those germs. When it gets to 105, then we’ll call the ambulance.”

My daughter smiled. Her grandmother’s voice was playful and full of knowledge.

“Shall I do this properly and take your pulse?” My mother took my daughter’s wrist between her fingers. “Uh-oh. No pulse. Get me a feather … get me a feather, as King Lear said.”

My daughter giggled again, and I explained that years
ago they would hold a feather over your mouth to determine if you were still breathing, still alive.

My mother went on in the same musing, gentle, heartbreakingly gentle tone, “Poor King Lear. He lost his favourite daughter.”

And then my other brother came into the room, the brother who had been so ill. The brother who had always been the star of the family with his clever poems and easy wit and high marks and remarkable smile. Ted came into the room and I realized how much my parents had aged and why. My mother didn’t move from the side of her grandchild, but she turned with a different kind of worry to look at her son, and I saw her there holding her life in her hands - a childhood when she lost her beloved father and always received the neck, a youth when she had to share the bed of a fretful mother, a marriage in which she manoeuvred and mothered and finally made time for herself, an old age so diffident she didn’t know how to ask Ted without offending him, how to ask without seeming to pester, if he was feeling better or worse, this son, my brother. I saw her life spill out of her hands like water. The quality of her love washed away all questions, not just hers, but mine.

The next day the doorbell rang and someone answered it, my father, perhaps. At the sound of the visitor’s voice, Connie stood up and sat down again. She stood a second time and went to the top of the stairs - in my parents’
house the living room was on the second floor. She looked down at the figure below and I saw her centre of gravity shift: she was still with us, but she had entered another room.

She put her hand on the railing and descended, moving easily and looking twenty years younger than she was. It’s fat that packs on the years and makes us unrecognizable. Fat, stiffness, hair loss, brain loss. And child-bearing. Connie had no children.

I went to the top of the stairs and looked down. She was speaking to a man no taller than she was, but he seemed taller. His voice was outsized too - a carrying, open-air, woodsy voice, unlike any other. He raised his eyes and held my glance. I was startled by his good looks. He was in his sixties, I would learn, yet he seemed to be in his prime, and not only to me.

Connie brought him upstairs and introduced him as her friend Michael Graves.

“Graves,” I said.

He had been shaking my mother’s hand and now he reached for mine.

“The name of the girl in the fire,” I said.

“You mean my sister.”

“Susan Graves.” Since either you back away from a faux pas or you stare it down.

He held on to my hand, and his blue eyes, more faded than a young man’s, took me in. Then he let my hand go and said to all of us, “I was Connie’s worst student.”

“Don’t boast,” she said.

I had never seen sex mow everything down before.
His eyes stayed on her face, assessing, measuring, saying everything for her benefit, waiting. She was like a moon-rise in her black dress - her wavy hair like silver, her unperturbed skin.

Years before she had used my bedroom to change her blouse and revealed in the process a black lace brassiere and ample, spilling breasts. Such things were foreign to my mother’s chest of drawers (and chest).

She was silver and ivory. He was dark hair and ruddy cheeks. (My mother’s father was almost the same age when he lay in his coffin, not a grey hair on his sixty-three-year-old head.) They were two halves of something tremendously exciting. Her composure and his youthfulness. Her chaste raciness, and his blue eyes and manly charm.

Questions are an erotic tool, I was going to say. But even as I have the thought and write the words, I wonder whether I know what I’m talking about. I suppose I mean that the right question opens the other person up, and sometimes the right question is the one no one else will touch. A bit later, when Connie and my mother were in the kitchen, and Michael and I were alone in one corner of the living room, I asked him how his father had lived with himself after the fire. It was brazen of me, even more than I realized, but the story was so fresh in my mind and I was full of questions.

“My father.” He narrowed his eyes. He had taken the armchair beside the fireplace and he was sitting forward, almost on the edge of the seat. I was on the sofa a couple of feet away, close enough that I could imagine no one else heard me.

He said, “The key to her room was in his pocket, and he was in the store.”

It sounded like a nursery rhyme. His small laugh was bitter, and he began a slow rocking of his upper body. Strong-looking shoulders and arms, something of a belly.

“She had an oil lamp in her room,” he said. Then, “You don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“We have them at the lake.”

“My father believed she set the fire. He blamed
her
as much as himself. Then ten years later, he was dead. Highway 60. Don’t drive when you’re drunk. And so on and so forth.”

“Michael.”

“Connie, Connie, Connie. I should take my own advice.”

She was hovering a few feet away and now she steered the talk to safer ground. But I gathered from what Michael had just said that he was fond of the bottle, too.