The Wives of Bath (18 page)

And then the skinny woman I’d seen the day Tory hurt herself—the woman who looked like a gorgeous blond fish—waved at our little group. She wore a Chanel suit with braided trim and an enormous pair of sunglasses in the shape of butterflies. We all stood up awkwardly.

“Oh, my darling girl. How super! To meet you at last!”

I looked at the other boarders to see who she meant; then her pink minnow mouth tickled my cheek.

“You have no idea how grateful I am to you for helping Tory the day of her accident. She’s my favourite child, you know. Even if I can’t get her to stick to a diet!”

“A diet?” I said stupidly.

“Oh, yes, you darling girl! You can’t be too rich or too thin, you know. Now, where is the silly child? Oh, yoo-hoo! Over here, you two!” Canon Quinn was walking toward us with a very tall boy whose pale, bespectacled face made me think of the giant pandas Morley and Sal and I had seen at the Detroit zoo. I’d got into an argument with Sal that day because she said the pandas were mean. Mrs. Quinn immediately threw her arms around the tall boy. “This is Jack O’Malley, the school projectionist,” she said. “We couldn’t do without him, could we, Bruno?”

“Do you ever show the movie
King Kong?”
I asked.

I don’t know how I had the nerve to ask him about Paulie’s and my favourite movie, but he seemed very pleased as he shook my hand with a funny, formal little jerk of his head and said he’d just shown it the week before. As far as he was concerned, it was the
greatest monster flick of all time—way better than
Godzilla
. And I said I’d never believed in
Godzilla
for a minute, even though the Japanese were wizards at special effects. And then I realized I was tendrilling right under the noses of Tory’s parents, and I shut up like a clam.

Tory’s mother giggled. “Well, well,” she said, and hugged me into her Chanel suit. She smelled comforting, the way I imagined a real mother would smell, of face powder and lily of the valley.

“You mustn’t be too free in front of the girls, Panny,” Canon Quinn said. He rested his hand on his wife’s shoulder in a possessive gesture that was totally unlike the way Morley touched Sal or me. “They like to think we’re old nincompoops.”

“Speak for yourself, my pet,” Mrs. Quinn said. She handed him a paper and motioned for the room to be quiet. Then she announced that the boarders from both schools who had blind dates arranged by the teachers should line up on either side of the rotunda. A long straggling line of us marched back out into the large hall. We stood on one side, next to a glass case that displayed a tiny silver woman on her knees reaching up imploringly to a tiny silver soldier on a horse. And the boys stood on the other side of the crowded room, next to a large doorway that led to the classrooms.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s having to go through with something you know isn’t going to work in the first place. People do it all the time, of course. Look at Sal and Morley. Sal goes to her bridge lessons every Thursday and comes back mad as a wet hen, because she hates Charles Van Goren’s rules for bidding. She doesn’t like to play cards by the book, she says. As for Morley, his whole life is something he doesn’t want to do, and does, over and over. So why should I mind when I have to put up with getting a blind date? I ask you. Why should I care if some finky boy likes me or hates me?

Still, I couldn’t see a way to avoid what was going to happen
next without dropping dead on the spot, so I trooped over to join the girls, and that is when I saw
him
standing outside in the courtyard by the statue of an old war hero whose sword was lifted to the heavens. I should say “her,” but Paulie looked so much like a boy in Lewis’s clothes that only the masculine pronoun will do. He was dressed in his hunting cap and navy windbreaker—the same clothes he’d worn on our outing to the Old Mill. He was smoking, of course, and shuffling through the leaves. As I watched, he stopped and stared at the school, as if he wished he were inside with us, and the next thing I knew I’d stopped breathing again. Not on account of Alice, but because of the longing I saw on Lewis’s face.

In the center of the rotunda, Canon Quinn was reading out a list of names, and, one by one, nervous-looking boys in navy blazers walked across the long hall and stood waiting with the principal for one of our boarders to join them. The boy and girl then shook hands while everybody stared at them. The teachers hadn’t attempted to pair them off according to height, and the boys’ line snickered every time a couple looked mismatched. I wanted to reassure Alice that we’d do okay, but I didn’t have the energy right then, so I closed my eyes and pretended I was back in Madoc’s Landing cutting onions for Sal because she didn’t like it when onions made her cry and I loved to bawl my eyes out when I could get away with it.

And then I heard my name. I opened my eyes, but I couldn’t make my feet move. Somebody in the boys’ line laughed and said, “You got a no-show, Perce!” Canon Quinn called my name again, and this time I walked slowly to the center of the room. I could feel the boys and girls looking at me, but I kept my eyes on my new wedgies. I felt a firm tap on my shoulder—the non-Alice shoulder.

“Shake hands with Percy Longfellow, Mary Beatrice!” Canon Quinn said.

From the boys’ line, I heard somebody whisper, “Perce struck
out!” And another boy whispered back, “Longfellow’s got a hunchback.” I looked down. Percy Longfellow was three inches shorter than me and covered with zits. Blushing, he shook my hand. It was even wetter than mine.

We silently made our way over to the group of boys and girls now matched into pairs. Beside me, Percy Longfellow swayed strangely and shuffled his feet. He had a headache, he whispered. “Here, take this,” I whispered back, and gave him an aspirin from the bottle in my purse. But he only shook his head, and I knew the worst had happened, the way it always does, and I felt a flat, sad feeling all mixed up with relief, because the worst is what I know how to manage best.

I looked back out the window again. Lewis had changed his position. He stood now on the tall base of the military statue, looping a roll of toilet paper around its head and shoulders. Below, a girl in a raccoon coat stood, watching. It was Tory. I didn’t recognize her out of uniform. She looked foreign—like a day girl. Then Lewis jumped down, and the two of them walked slowly out of the quad, Lewis waiting as Tory took little hobbling hops on her crutches. I mean, they just looked totally happy and absorbed—the way Lady looks when she begs for date squares. Behind them, the threads of toilet paper on the statue blew backwards in the slight wind. I felt so moved by the sight of them together, with Lewis looking so patient and kind, that I didn’t notice the girls and boys around me banging on the window. One of the boys was swearing, and then one of the masters rushed out of the room, and another boy ran after him, and now I saw Lewis and Tory looking our way with startled faces, and then Tory put her hand on Lewis’s cheek, and Lewis kissed it very tenderly and then ran off as fast as he could through the quad, while Tory just stood on her crutches watching him go. I knew just how Tory felt, because it’s how I feel after Morley pats me on the cheek and drives off in Blinky. And that’s when something happened that made all of us forget Lewis. Down
the hall I heard a radio, and a woman cry out, “Oh my God! Who would do such a thing?” Canon Quinn opened the tall wooden door of the reception room, his batwing brows flaring. Mrs. Quinn stood in the doorway, looking sad.

“Somebody has shot the president of the United States!” she said. “A madman has shot him!”

“President Kennedy has been shot?” one of the masters asked.

I forgot all about Percy Longfellow’s headache and cried, “It’s a mistake! I don’t believe it!” Canon Quinn only nodded, very gravely, and boys and girls around me started to say they didn’t believe it, either. And you know the rest. Except for this: I’d seen the world of men, and nobody there was as nice as John F. Kennedy. And he was dead.

A few weeks before the end of term, Paulie and I ducked out of games and hid near the ravine fence. Not far from us the janitors were digging a pit to bury the mysteriously poisoned pigeons, whose corpses now sat in the little cart attached to Willy’s tractor. And down on the empty basketball courts, a few day girls were hitting a tennis ball back and forth. You had to hand it to them—I’d never have had the energy to exert myself like that. I didn’t even have the energy to keep up with the boarders, huddled into little groups, walking around the hedge, their heads down against the wind. Basically, you understand, it was my unfav time of year—late November—and the leaves were off most of the ravine trees, blown into the school hedges, where they clung like tufts of badly matted brown hair. I was sitting next to Paulie in Virginia Woolf’s hiding place, although old Virginia would have wanted to do herself in then and there if she’d seen how desolate it looked now. One glance at the dead asters and withered grass all silver from the frost and she’d have waded as fast as anything out into the river Ouse with her stone-packed pockets. Poor Virginia. I like to think she might have picked out a stone as smooth and pancake-flat as a Lake Huron skipping stone and zinged it across the surface of the water,
zip-zip-zip
, before she did her Ophelia number. I was feeling pretty low that afternoon, because Sal had written with disappointing news about my Christmas holidays.

I was angry with Sal for going away at Christmas, so her feelings about our mutual hero felt like a phony gesture. Maybe I was growing up. Maybe Sal had always been like that—good at confidences, so you thought you were thick as a pack of dogs (to use one of her sayings). And then, just when you least expected it, she’d do something that showed you didn’t mean a thing to her. Like sending you off to school when you didn’t want to go. Or leaving you behind on a holiday she’d promised was partly yours. Sal’s confidence didn’t say anything about her feelings for you. Her secrets just meant she liked telling secrets.