No Dark Valley (65 page)

He glanced back out the window after he had put on his favorite sweatshirt—the one the drama kids had given him last year that said
TEACHERS ARE A CLASS ACT
—and saw Celia headed for her apartment, solemnly and slowly, carrying the neatly folded rug out in front of her. Put a crown on it and she'd look like an attendant at a coronation. He watched her struggle a little to get the door open with her hands full, then lift an elbow to hold the screen while she eased inside backward. On her face was the look of someone who planned to spend the rest of the day indoors doing important things like reorganizing her spice rack or checking through all her clothes for loose buttons.

Again it struck Bruce that the two of them were as different as night and day. If he ever did find a woman, it could never be somebody as starched and trussed up as she was. A woman had to know how to let down and have a good laugh. “Maybe you could help her learn how to,” he said out loud, then laughed. This was something he would never ever do again—try to help a woman become a different person. He had learned his lesson in Montgomery.

At the door of his bedroom, right before turning off the light, he thought about making his bed but talked himself out of it with an excuse the deceptive side of his brain often attempted on Saturdays: He would change the sheets later today.
Oh, sure you will
, his smarter schoolteacher side said.

32

Where No Tears Will Ever Fall

Nate Bianchi was only thirteen but almost as tall as Bruce and a good twenty pounds heavier, with jet-black hair parted smack down the middle and the hint of a mustache already shadowing his upper lip. With a different personality, the kid could be downright menacing, but as it was he was a marshmallow. Of all the Drama Club members, Nate was the least likely to stir things up, though Bruce could tell he secretly enjoyed seeing others do so, maybe even wished he had the courage to be a troublemaker himself.

“Hey, Nate, I want you to try something today,” Bruce said to him after school two days later. Bruce was standing outside the music room, where they were still having their
A Midsummer Night's Dream
rehearsals. After Christmas they would be moving to the auditorium to practice on stage.

He had zipped out of his classroom right away today, counting on Nate being the first one to rehearsal, as he usually was. He knew that his speech, if it was going to have any success at all, would have a better chance if delivered to Nate in private rather than during rehearsal with the whole cast present. He moved away from the door to stand over by the band lockers, and so did Nate, the look on his face saying, “Please don't ask me to do something weird in front of everybody.”

To a timid soul like Nate, the part of Bottom, the simpleminded weaver who imagines he is a donkey beloved by Titania, was already sorely trying. To make him utter lines such as “I must to the barber's, monsieur, for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face” almost seemed cruel, though Bruce kept reminding himself of one important fact: The boy had not only joined the Drama Club voluntarily, as had all the others, but he had also auditioned specifically for the part of Bottom.

The name Bottom had been met with snorts of laughter and had quickly degenerated, as Bruce had known it would, into various vulgar synonyms, to which he had responded with a sigh and feigned weariness: “Middle school humor is so predictable. At least you could try something a little more sophisticated, like Posterior or Derriere. Or something scientific like Glutei.” Thankfully, they had soon grown tired of the little game, probably because they had gotten no rise out of Nate.

Others had read Bottom's lines more expressively during tryouts, but after Bruce, with Elizabeth Landis's help, had shuffled the parts around so the strongest actors were given the biggest roles, the only reasonable match for Nate was Bottom. A big boy like him certainly wouldn't work out as Peaseblossom or one of the other woodland fairies.

And the very mention of fairies had also elicited plenty of wisecracks and giggles at first. Bruce had approached it all very matter-of-factly, however, suggesting that while some middle school students might be too immature to realize these were fairies in the folklore sense—miniature sprites like Tinker Bell and Tom Thumb who worked magic and pulled pranks—he was certain the seventh and eighth graders at Berea Middle School would be able to handle it. Surely they weren't so narrow-minded as to think that everything had always been the way it was today. So after Bruce had worked some magic of his own to soften them all up to the whole idea of Shakespeare, DeReese Pascoe—who had loudly declared early on, “I ain't bein' no
fairy
”—had soon embraced the coveted role of Puck. And Titus Oldenburg, who followed DeReese's lead in everything, was Oberon, king of the fairies.

Five years ago Bruce might have slung an arm around Nate's shoulder to talk to him, but he had stopped doing that after an ugly lawsuit four years earlier down in Montgomery, where a parent had accused a male teacher of touching her son inappropriately. It had been splashed all over the front page news for days and talked about in every teachers' lounge in the state of Alabama, not to mention in faculty meetings, where principals had been very pointed in their warnings about physical contact with students. Except for one small slipup, the time he had yanked that Hardy Biddle kid up off the floor over at the high school science fair—and thankfully nothing had come of that—Bruce had kept his hands to himself. He had learned more than one lesson about physical contact in Montgomery.

As was his custom now in delicate situations with students, Bruce put his hands in his pockets and looked down at the floor as he addressed Nate, facing him squarely but glancing up only for the briefest moments at well-timed pauses to assure the boy that he was indeed speaking directly to him but that he didn't want to make a big deal out of any of this. Bruce had very carefully planned what he was going to say to Nate, down to exact word choices.

“You've got one of my favorite roles in this whole play, you know,” he started out. His first quick look at Nate's face told him the boy was listening closely. “Bottom is a magnificent character—not very bright, but so dignified in his own way and unshakable and good-hearted. Such a noble and likable character.” Another glance. Nate was frowning a little, as if he wasn't sure he liked the idea of being not very bright but noble. Probably he was thinking of the way DeReese got to leap about the stage and say things like “Up and down, up and down, I will lead them up and down” and “What fools these mortals be,” while he, Nate, had to lumber about and
be
one of the mortal fools, with lines like “O night, O night! alack, alack, alack” and “Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.”

“Yet so
funny
in his own way,” Bruce continued. “One of the best comic roles in all of Shakespeare. I can't imagine this play without the character of Bottom. It would lose so much of its . . . vim and vibrancy.” Though he pretended to be speaking spontaneously, this was all carefully scripted. Bruce liked the sound of
vim and vibrancy
, and besides that, he was attempting a little flattery by suggesting that he was sure Nate had not only heard of those words but also actually knew what they meant. And he
was
sure—Nate was a smart boy. His lowest test grade so far in Life Science had been ninety-eight percent.

No response from Nate now, but none was called for. His lips were firmly pressed together, his black eyes unreadable as he waited to see where this was headed. Bruce even wondered if maybe the boy knew he was playacting, that every word was premeditated. Maybe he was standing there thinking, “Ooh, way to go, Mr. Healey, I'm exceedingly impressed with
vim
and
vibrancy
.”

Bruce forged ahead. “Bottom is a key figure in two of the three plots in the play, but no doubt you already know that.” And it was true. Bruce knew Nate probably had a better overall view of the play than anybody else in the cast. For starters, he had clearly been paying attention the day Bruce had introduced the storyline and characters of the play, the same way he paid attention in class instead of goofing around the way so many boys did, laughing and making bathroom noises, boys for whom school was no more than a slightly advanced form of day care. Anything they happened to learn was purely by accident.

That very day in Nate's class alone, for example, Bruce had stopped one boy who was deeply engrossed in drawing the torso of a naked woman on the palm of his hand with a ballpoint pen, and not two minutes later he had confiscated a watch from another boy who was aiming its face in such a way as to make little circles of light dance all over the wall and ceiling. Yet another boy had taken bites from his homework paper and was chewing them into little soggy wads. Bruce had calmly walked back to his desk with the trash can and motioned for a deposit. All of this while Nate sat listening carefully to Bruce talk about the respiratory systems of amphibians and reptiles.

“So Bottom has to be played by someone really intelligent, see,” he continued now, “which illustrates one of the many ironies of drama. Only a smart actor can convincingly pull off a simpleminded character like Bottom.”

Nate cocked his head ever so slightly, as if measuring the logic of what Bruce was saying.

“So much of it is the timing of the lines, of course, and the . . . well, the sincerity of them. I remember when I was in this same play in high school, the guy who did Bottom never did get it quite right. He did try, I'll give him that, but you could always tell that underneath it all he was worried about looking stupid, especially since Bottom loses both Titania and Thisbe in the end. He was a big handsome guy like you but was all hung up on being cool and suave. I think he was afraid the role would ruin his image with the girls.”

There was the faintest beginning of a smile in one corner of Nate's mouth. Very observant of others, Nate Bianchi no doubt knew exactly what kind of boy Bruce was describing, could identify several at Berea Middle School by name, a couple of whom were even in Drama Club.

“So I just want to suggest something for you to consider,” Bruce said. “Maybe it'll help, maybe it won't.” He shrugged as if it didn't much matter to him one way or the other. “You know your lines really well already”—actually, Bruce suspected that Nate knew everyone's lines by now—“and you've got a great sense of timing, but I want you to try . . . well,
pretending
a little more today that you really are a dimwit. Try having fun being somebody who's the total opposite of yourself.”

Bruce took his hands out of his pockets and pointed an index finger at Nate. “
You've
got the biggest challenge that way, you know. I mean, DeReese really is kind of puckish already, right? And Jonathan, ladies' man that he is, doesn't have to strain too hard to play the love-struck Lysander. But you have the hardest role. You have to push yourself to the other end of the spectrum from where you naturally are, and then somehow make yourself not care that you're foolish—or maybe it would be better to say
not aware
.”

He paused again and looked straight into Nate's eyes, holding his gaze for several long seconds. “Does any of this make sense?” he said. “Can you try to forget the rest of us are watching Nate Bianchi and just let yourself become poor old slow dumb Bottom?”

Nate started to speak, then cleared his throat and started again. “Well, I think so, yes. Yes, sir, I'll try.”

Though it was a gradually diminishing courtesy among kids, even here in the South, to say, “Yes, sir” and “Yes, ma'am” to their teachers, and though Bruce knew it had to be further proof that he was getting old, it nevertheless always pleased him to hear it. He nodded and smiled. “Well, give it your best shot today, and let's see what happens.” He looked down the hall. “Ah, here comes the lovely Titania now with Mustardseed and Hermia. Things are about to get cranked up.” He moved toward the doorway. “Say, Nate, can you give me a hand in here? Let's move those two stacks of chairs over by the windows.”

Ten minutes later almost everybody was there, all of them talking at the same time. It always amused Bruce the way middle schoolers could carry on conversations in which everyone was talking and no one was listening. Roomfuls of women had this talent also, but they could do it sitting still. With middle schoolers, the talking was always accompanied by the same teeming movement of certain pond specimens he had observed under the microscope. Bruce often praised his classes for learning so well those two important babyhood skills of walking and talking. Then he would follow up with a line for which he was now famous at Berea Middle School: “Okay now, all you overgrown tots, time to play the quiet game. Dip your hips and zip your lips.”

Elizabeth Landis came in just as Bruce got everybody settled down to start. With her was a girl Bruce assumed was the new seventh-grader who had moved to Berea from Rhode Island. Elizabeth had told Bruce about the girl. She was interested in being in the Drama Club and wondered if there was anything she could do in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. Sure, bring her to rehearsal, we can always use another fairy, he had said. Provided she's not too big, he had added. Oh no, not at all, perfect size for a fairy, Elizabeth had said, and he saw now that she was right. In fact, this girl would probably be the smallest fairy of them all.

For such a little girl, she didn't seem in the least intimidated to be in a new situation. She was wearing a blue chambray shirt and a pair of overalls, with one hand in a back pocket. As she and Elizabeth came up front and sat down in two empty chairs, her eyes were busy trying to take in everything—the other students, the high ceiling, the green linoleum floor, the piano in one corner with the crepe paper cornucopia and turkey sitting on top of it, the pictures of composers on the bulletin board, an old record player on a rolling cart. After she sat down, her feet barely touching the floor, she zeroed in on Bruce, who was in the process of reviewing the new cuts they had made in act 5 and reminding Puck of his new cue to enter for his important closing lines. Hardly anyone was listening, however, because all eyes were on the new arrival.