The Tight White Collar (7 page)

“Nobody on College Road makes love without an audience of at least four,” they warned.

Christopher Pappas moved his family into No. E16 College Road on a hot, wet Saturday in August and Lisa took one look at the drab, uniformly painted cream-colored walls, the old-fashioned icebox complete with galvanized drip pan and the two-burner electric plate, then she sat down on a packing crate and burst into tears.

“I'll never be able to stand it here!” she wept against Chris's shoulder. “It's so ugly.”

And even Chris, who was wildly enthusiastic about starting his courses, had to agree to that. Over Lisa's head he could see out the window to the bare gravel space between the barracks in which he would live and the one opposite. There was no grass, not a single bush or flower.

“It's ugly all right,” he said to Lisa. “But listen, honey. This is the beginning for us. Time will pass quickly, you'll see, and in no time at all I'll be a teacher and we'll move away to some place beautiful with lots of grass and trees and flowers.”

But the years of Chris's education were slow, painful ones and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on “college life” before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girlfriends? The answer was simple, realized Lisa. College life as she had dreamed and read of it was lived in the big fraternity and sorority houses on campus by people not much younger than she who were not tied down with College Road apartments, husbands, bills and children.

But the years did pass and by the time Chris was a junior at the university, Lisa had found a sort of escape from reality for herself. She discovered that if she read all the time and concentrated on what she read her brain would not stray into the uncomfortably real ugly world of College Road. She had started on murder mysteries but she had soon tired of violence and sameness and then she had begun on what Miss Huntoon, the head librarian at the university library, called “the Classics.”

While she drank her morning coffee, Lisa read. She left the dirty breakfast dishes on the table and went into the living room where she lay on the sofa and read. Sometimes, at noon, she felt it difficult to stop reading long enough to warm up a can of soup for Midget and Chris and she resented having to leave a book for all other duties.

I have a very good mind, Lisa told herself. I'll bet I could write a book if I had the time. I should have had a career of some kind. I'm much too intelligent to be a slave to a sinkful of dirty dishes.

When she was not reading, Lisa sat still and stared into space. She imagined herself as a brilliant authoress, ballet dancer, opera singer, artist, and in all her daydreams the wonderful, talented people of the world sat at her feet and looked up at her in adoration. Then, inevitably, something would happen. Midget would come crashing into the room, or a neighbor would poke her head through the door or Chris would come home from class and Lisa was back in her cream-colored living room with the space heater that balked and the secondhand furniture.

I'm trapped, she thought angrily. Trapped with a husband and a child and poverty, and I can't get out.

Lisa began to wonder about things that she had always taken for granted, like sex. She read countless stories in which women experienced indescribable joy during the act of love and she wondered why she never felt this emotion with Chris.

In the beginning, it was one thing, she thought. Then it was new and different and that's all that made it exciting.

At first, when she had realized that Chris no longer excited her she had blamed it on the fact that perhaps she had inherited her frigidity from her mother, but now she looked at her husband with new eyes and fastened a new label on him. Unsatisfactory. She was not to blame. Chris had very little imagination and he was unsatisfactory.

It seemed to Lisa that her whole life hinged on one sentence and that sentence was, “When Chris graduates and starts teaching.”

Well, what of it, she thought. What then? Teachers don't make any money. We won't be a hell of a lot better off than we are now.

By the time Chris was a senior the situation was almost unbearable to both of them.

“I don't know what's got into you,” Chris shouted, “but whatever it is, you'd better get rid of it and fast.”

“Don't you talk to me like that! Just who do you think you are?”

“I'm your husband, goddamn it, and I'll talk to you any way that I find necessary. I don't mind your trying to improve yourself, but I'm damned if I'll let my wife sit on her backside all day while my daughter goes hungry and the house goes to pot.”

“There are things vastly more important to me than housework,” cried Lisa. “I've never been anything but a slave to you since we got married. I never realized before that I have a brain. Well, now I do and I intend to use it and I should think you'd be proud of the fact that I'm trying to keep up with you instead of letting myself get into a rut.”

“Listen, Lisa,” said Chris and made an effort to lower his voice, “I loved you before you went on this learning kick. You're smart enough for me. All I want is for you to be the way you used to be.”

“I'll bet!” said Lisa. “You loved it when you were the sun and the moon and I was nothing but the good old solid Earth that revolved around you and whatever you wanted.”

“For Christ's sake, you don't even know what the hell you're talking about!” shouted Chris and stamped out of the apartment.

I'll leave him, thought Lisa. I'll take Midget and walk out of here right now.

Walk out to where? Back to Cooper's Mills and Irene and the beer bottles and the gossip? Never. Well, where then? Lisa knew the answer even before the questions were complete in her mind. Nowhere. I'm trapped.

A few weeks later, she discovered that she was even more trapped than she had thought. She was pregnant and weep and rage as she might, she stayed that way. Little Chris was born two weeks before Chris graduated from the university. The afternoon of the graduation exercises was the first time Lisa was able to go out after the birth of the baby and as she stood in the warm June sun and watched Chris, she began to hope again. She heard his name, Christopher Pappas and she heard the words of the hard-earned degree, Bachelor of Arts and she heard the special words,
magna cum laude
and she thought:

Now things will be better. We'll be able to get away from this wretched place and start again. Little Chris must have been an omen. A new baby, a new diploma and a new life.

Christopher Pappas was offered and accepted a position to teach social sciences in a town called Devon, and after he and Lisa had seen the town there was something like enthusiasm between them for the first time in years.

“It's lovely here,” said Lisa.

And it was. They rented a small house and met their new neighbors and settled down to live.

“Live!” cried Lisa a few weeks later. “Is that what you call it? Living? I'd like to see anybody else in this town living on twenty-five hundred dollars a year!”

There was never enough of anything. Lisa had to plot and scheme for a whole month to find enough money to buy one pair of shoes for her children. She had to scrimp on food and clothing and neither she nor Chris had been to a dentist in over five years. But Chris was happy. The Devon high school was small but well equipped and as far as he was concerned, he'd have been contented to spend the rest of his life there. Neither the members of the P.T.A. nor the principal interfered with his teaching methods and there were enough bright students enrolled in the school to make his job exciting to him. If it hadn't been for the money, he and Lisa might well have remained in Devon, but at the end of his second year there, the school board at West Farrington offered him a position teaching fewer classes for more money and Chris, weary of watching his wife pinch every penny and hopeful that a few hundred dollars would help ease things, accepted.

He knew from the first day he began to teach at West Farrington that he would never make it through the year.

“I'm hamstrung,” he told Lisa. “I can't teach with both hands tied behind my back and lies rolling off my tongue.”

At first Lisa, remembering the hard-earned degree and the miserable years at the university, argued with him. “Go along with them,” she said. “How can that hurt? Just say yes and humor the damned board and keep your job.”

Chris just looked at her hopelessly. “I can't,” he said, and one Friday afternoon, after he had been teaching for three months, he came home and said, “Let's start packing, Lisa. I've had it.”

Lisa was too tired to fight. “All right,” she said.

They left West Farrington the next morning and arrived in Cooper's Mills that same afternoon.

“Ha!” said Costas Pappas, not bothering to conceal his triumph. “So you fin'ly got sick of wearin' a tight white collar, huh? Was chokin' you a little, huh? Come on, Mr. Schoolteacher man, cheer up. Come on out back and I'll give you a little drinka oozu and you're gonna feel better. I'll even give you a job ina store.”

“No thanks, Pa,” said Chris quietly. “I'm not going to work in the store. Tomorrow I'm going to get a job in the mills.”

“You was always a goddamn fool,” said his father. “Go ahead. Go get a job in the mills. Go ta hell if you want. I don't give a damn no more.”

Lisa and Chris rented a house from Eben Seton and Chris began a new job at the factories. He had been there for six weeks when a call came from the head of the State School for the Feeble-Minded at Marmington.

“You'll never be able to stand it,” argued Lisa. “You're not trained to teach idiots.”

“The teachables aren't idiots,” said Chris. “And anyway, it's teaching, no matter what they are. I can't stay in the mill, Lisa. It's either teach or starve. It's all I want to do.”

“Well go ahead then,” said Lisa angrily. “But you'll hate it worse than West Farrington, you'll see. At least there you were dealing with adults. Maybe they weren't too bright, but at least they were adults and not feeble-minded kids.”

During the weeks that followed Chris thought often of Lisa's words and there were times when he was sure that he'd never stick it out, for at Marmington he had come to what must surely be the most despairing moments of his life.

It was the end of a long day and Chris began to pick up scattered balls and bats from the baseball field at the state school. A few feet away, a group of ten boys ranging in age from eleven to nineteen years stood and watched him.

Ten of them, thought Chris. Ten boys. Too many of them for one team and not enough for two so that one kid always has to watch the others. I wonder what goddamned nitwit thought up this system.

At the State School for the Feeble-Minded, it had been decided that ten pupils at a time were all that one sensible adult could manage. The system had been inaugurated many years before and it had never occurred to anyone that there were times when the pattern was wrong. Except to a few teachers, of course, and in the eyes of the trustees, teachers, for the most part, were notorious idealists with no idea of system, pattern or efficiency.

Chris had once spoken to Cyril Haskell, the head of the school, about the way things were run.

“Sir,” Chris had said, “it seems to me that it would make more sense if a few more children were allowed in the classrooms and on the playing fields. The way it stands now, I get to help only ten kids a day while for those ten, eighty or ninety others have nothing to do but hang around the buildings all day long. I've noticed a good many of these children trying to organize games of their own but they have no supervision, and—”

“Pappas!” roared Mr. Haskell. “That's enough! Sit down!”

That good old-fashioned schoolteacher ring of authority, thought Chris. I wonder if I'll ever have it.

“Pappas,” said Mr. Haskell more gently as soon as Chris had seated himself, “there are a few things that you'll have to learn if you're going to get along here.” He held up one forefinger. “Number one,” he said. “The people here to whom you refer as kids, children, pupils and students are none of these. They are patients. They are sick, weak, mental deficients, mostly unteachables, so get that through your head.” He held up a middle finger. “Number two. The places you refer to as buildings and houses are neither. They are wards.” His ring finger joined the other two. “And number three. While you are working here stop referring to yourself as a teacher. You are here as a rather well paid keeper and that's all. That fancy degree of yours from the university doesn't amount to that in this place.” He snapped his fingers and then his hand came down and he put it in his pocket as if storing it away until it was needed for further use. “A keeper, Pappas. I guess that's why, as far as teachers go, we don't get exactly what you might call the cream of the crop around here.”

A keeper, thought Chris wryly. Well, I asked for it. Nobody is going to forget West Farrington in a hurry. And yet, I know I was right. Maybe I shouldn't have just walked out as I did, but basically I was right.

“I don't imagine that I have to remind you that you're lucky to have a job in any branch of education,” said Mr. Haskell.

“No, sir,” said Chris. “You don't have to remind me.”

Chris finished picking up the baseball equipment. Just a little while longer, he thought doggedly. Just a little while longer and then I'll be able to get the hell out of this place.

One of the boys, a huge hulk eighteen years old, followed Chris as he walked toward his car.

“Papp,” he said, “Papp?”

Chris turned to look at him. The boy walked with his enormous head jutted forward, his big shoulders hunched. He had very heavy, loose lips and they were always wet and he had an IQ of fifty-nine.