The Confessions of Frances Godwin
Read The Confessions of Frances Godwin Online
Authors: Robert Hellenga
To the Memory of my mother,
Marjorie Johnson Hellenga,
high school Latin teacher.
Transit umbra, lux permanet
.
The layout is important. And the feast.
Rock bottom basis: please remember these
procedures by which feasting’s managed. Here
I mean the rule of strict conversion: dirt
turned into green beans, green beans set
upon a fine white dish, the dish itself
scorched earth, stone crushed to powder.
Layout of spread platters. Who will eat and
What and in what sequence: dirt to grass,
grass to calf, calf to the sharpened edge
of slaughter. Taking turns is important.
We share the room, its white-flecked space,
blue vaulted ceiling, wainscot of woods’ frilled
branching, founded in stone and sea.
The layout is important. Proportion,
consonance of form and formal interchange.
Good manners. Dinner plates rise out of
ground. Our table’s rooted in the lives
of trees, the cloth upon it meadow
weave. We take our seat. A place is set
for each in turn. Earth is our banquet,
our hall; the feast, richly concocted of desire,
limitation, murder, serves us all.
—Lisa Ress, “Setting the Table, Eating What Is Served”
Contents
Before I begin let me say that I seriously considered writing these confessions—which are really a kind of spiritual autobiography—in third person so I could get a little ironic distance on myself, could see around myself, know more than I know myself. But that would have been to create an illusion. All narrators are first-person narrators. You can’t get ironic distance on yourself, can’t see around yourself, can’t know more than you know. So what’s the point of pretending? Besides, I’m an old—well, older—woman now. Is it likely that the police will come knocking at my door again with their warrants and handcuffs and Miranda rights, or that the Vatican will come down on me like a ton of bricks, the way Pope Gregory VII came down on the Henry IV at Canossa? In the unlikely event that either of these things happens, I’ll just say I forgot. I’ll just say that I made it all up.
Do Not Resuscitate (2006)
At the end of May 2006—my last Commencement—my students marched across the stage at Galesburg High School. I watched them throw their hats into the air even though Mr. Walters, the principal, had made it perfectly clear that they were not to do so. And afterward we said good-byes. I would miss the students, most of them, I would even miss the obligatory school functions—the faculty meetings, the parent-teacher conferences, the endless round of games and band concerts, and the union meetings (I’d been the steward for five years)—that had been my life after my husband’s death. The students were looking ahead, I was looking back; they were letting go, I was hanging on. But now I had to let go too. The Latin program was being “phased out.” I’d protested, organized demonstrations, clipped articles about the Latin Renaissance in the United States and articles about the successes of our own program, which had strong enrollments and which was regarded as one of the best in Illinois. But to no avail. The state was more than a million dollars behind in its payments to the school district and cuts would have to be made.
I had several weeks to clear out my classroom, but I wanted to get it over with, so I started in on Monday. This classroom had been my home, my second home, for forty-one years. Everything in it had a story to tell. Every object whispered to me. The window ledges and the long tables in the back of the room were crowded with models of Roman buildings—enough to recreate the whole city of Rome, at different eras, and half of Pompeii before Vesuvius. We’d started, years ago, with a jigsaw puzzle of the Roman Forum and Capitoline Hill and moved on to three-dimensional puzzles of the Colosseum, and the Baths of Caracalla, still standing (glued, varnished, repaired with packing tape), and then, with the help of George Hawkinson, who taught physics, and Dan Phillips, the ingenious shop teacher, we’d moved on to more substantial models: bridges, arches, a Roman villa, even a model of the Pont du Gard aqueduct that could actually carry water for about half an hour before it started to leak.
The walls were crowded with pictures of Rome and famous Romans from Scipio Africanus to Marcus Aurelius; pseudo-Latin quotations from
Harry Potter
were flanked by a
Spartacus
poster and pictures of neoclassical architecture, including the old Galesburg city hall, and by Doonesbury cartoons of the president, invisible but wearing a Roman military helmet as he jousts with reporters about weapons of mass destruction, about Abu Ghraib, torture, the war, Colin Powell, Hurricane Katrina.
The students got extra credit for translating the dialogue into Latin. Some were quite difficult, maybe too difficult, but they did a good job and we took
Id adfer
as our motto.
Bring it on.
How could the administration object to that?
I had to laugh at the cartoons, which had caused a certain amount of trouble. I left them tacked up on the bulletin board. The principal and some members of the school board had wanted them down, but the students had kicked up a fuss, invoking the first amendment.
Bits and pieces from our last
Roman Republic
tournament were still scattered on three game boards in three different corners of the room. I sorted out the faction cards and the statesman cards, the forum cards, the event cards, the scenario cards, the province cards, the war cards, the Talents (marked in Roman numerals), the chits and markers and personal treasury boxes. I could see that the late-republic game had ended in defeat for all the players because four active war cards had come into play at the end of the combat phase.
Game over.
At the end of the wars the advanced Latin students had given me a used copy of the Warwick
Vergil Concordance
that had once belonged to a Miss Allison Connolly of London, Ontario. Paul and I had driven past London more than once on our way to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and I pictured Miss Connolly in her classroom, a classroom much like mine, the big red concordance open on her desk as she looked up a word. I felt sad for Miss Connolly and sad for myself, too, as I ran my finger over the names of my students, who had signed their names on the half-title page. But the inscription made me laugh:
hanc ego de caelo ducentem sidera vidi;
fluminis haec rapidi carmine vertit iter.
I recognized the lines from Tibullus’s “To Delia”: “I have seen her draw down the stars from the sky; she diverts rapidly flowing rivers with her spells.” And I recognized Jason Steckley’s bold handwriting. And his sense of humor: the woman in the poem is a witch who can not only draw down the stars from the sky and divert rapidly flowing rivers with her spells, she can make the earth open up and lure spirits from their tombs; she can chase the clouds from the sky and make it snow in summer! She can make old men who used to mock young lovers put their aged necks in the halter of Venus! Well, it was all fine with me.
It was almost four o’clock, time to shift some boxes. I had left a lot of books that would have to be discarded, and had already packed the ones I wanted to keep in banker’s boxes: my dark blue Oxford Classical Texts, my red and green Loebs—green for Greek, red for Latin. I thought I might take up Greek again, read
The Odyssey.
I’d probably have to learn the language all over again, but that was all right. Maybe this time I’d master the optative mood, which was worse than the subjunctive in Latin. It was one of these banker’s boxes that did me in. It was too full to handle easily and too heavy with the weight of the big concordance, which I’d put on top. Or maybe it was just too heavy with the weight of memory. Whatever it was, I felt something tear inside me as I tried to lift it. I thought it was my heart ripping in two, but it was part of my abdominal wall. My internal organs were trying to get out. I tried to push them back into place, exerting gentle pressure. But it was like trying to force the lid down on the books in the banker’s box.
I got to the pay phone in the lobby and called my neighbor, Lois—my oldest friend (and enemy)—who brought me home. She wanted to go out and buy a truss at Burgland Drugs. But I said no, even thought my insides were protruding. I kept caressing the protrusion, as if it were a baby.
My doctor saw me that afternoon, late. Lois took me. He poked and prodded and palpitated. It was not an emergency, but even so, two days later I was on the operating table.
Just before the anesthesiologist came to administer the anesthetic, the nurse handed me a sheet with a long list of boxes to check. Liability precautions, I suppose. They don’t give you much time to think it over, but I looked over the list and checked a box that said “Do not resuscitate.” I wasn’t looking forward to having loads of unstructured time on my hands, but I wasn’t depressed or suicidal. On the contrary. It’s just that at that particular moment I thought my story had come to an end, and that it would be appropriate to exit the scene quietly and unobtrusively. I didn’t really care one way or another. There was nothing coming up on the horizon that I wanted to deal with: a library board meeting on Thursday; a fund-raiser for the animal shelter on Saturday afternoon; a hair appointment sometime the next week.