Clair De Lune (2 page)

“I'm very sorry,” the woman said tersely. Without looking at Allen, she bent over the papers on the table.

Her hair was gray, thick and coarse, with a slight wave and pinned at the back into a heavy coiled knot. Allen cast another glance at the photograph.

“Now then…” Mrs. Medgar looked up.

What had happened to harden that other face into this one?

“Your application says that in your last position you taught a class in modern dance. Just what is meant by that?”

Allen hesitated. A definition acceptable to Mrs. Medgar wouldn't come off the top of her head. “Well, as an undergraduate,” she began, “I had taken interpretive dance. That's one of the regular courses in physical education—”

“Yes, yes, I know that. But modern?”

“You might call it a form of interpretive,” Allen said, groping. “It's somewhat different. More of an art form. The great modern dancers, like Martha Graham—” She saw that this was not the right approach. “It's wonderful exercise!” she assured her. “So I asked if I might start a class—in addition to my regular classes, that is. It was quite a good class and we—”

“Have you considered starting such a class here?”

The idea had not occurred to Allen and she felt she had better say so.

“Well, I certainly hope not,” said Mrs. Medgar. “This is a serious college. Our emphasis is on academic subjects and our standards are high.”

And so on and on for another ten minutes. And just after she'd been dismissed, and was rising to leave, there was one thing more. “Your name is Ellen, I believe? Here it's spelled with an A. A typographical error, I assume.”

“It's not a typo. My name is Allen, as it's spelled there. With an A.”

Mrs. Medgar looked up with a hint of disapproval.

“I was named for my father. He's dead,” she added, as if that explained everything. “My full name's really Barbara Allen. After the song, you know? My father used to sing it to me. But nobody ever called me anything but Allen.”

Mrs. Medgar studied the résumé for another moment, tapped the papers neatly together, and looked up. “Well then, Miss Allen Liles, I must thank you for your time and assure you that your application will be taken under consideration…” etc., etc.

Allen left in despair. She had had such hopes, and so had her mother. Positions such as this didn't open up every day, not to her, at any rate. She might as well face it: in spite of her Phi Beta Kappa key and all the warm recommendations, her teaching credentials were flimsy. (If her mother's reputation hadn't burnished her, and if her mother hadn't made a special trip to see them, the state board of education wouldn't have bent the rules to allow her to teach in the first place.)

As it turned out, however, she had not failed. She was given a contract, whether over Mrs. Medgar's dead body or not.

Two

S
he had not intended to become a teacher. She became one by force of breeding, through a long line of women—aunts and great-aunts, her own mother—who entered classrooms for lack of alternative, except to marry; who married later and, perhaps, returned in their widowhood to teach again. Some of necessity, some also out of love; there were those, like her mother, called to it as to fate.

But Allen felt herself to be the variant, the break in the line. Though subject to the same necessity, the same narrow choices, she had other ideas, like many others of her time. She wanted to live in New York City and write books. Not a very practical longing. She was country bred, awed and bewildered by even Kansas City. She wrote poetry, and one of her stories, sent by an English professor to a national contest, had won an honorable mention. But you didn't live on poetry unless you were Edna St. Vincent Millay, and honorable mentions didn't pay the rent. She had student loans to repay and a loan from her brother. She could not think of any possible way to earn money and live in Greenwich Village, which at this point was much, much farther away from southern Missouri than it measured on the map. She would get there someday, she promised herself. She wanted to be where books were published, among other writers and actors and painters and musicians, all of them trying as hard as she and some who had already got near where they were going. Three years, five at the most, and she would take her place among them. Meanwhile, she must earn the fare in the only way she knew. She must teach.

Moreover, her mother insisted on it. Mother often insisted, and Mother was usually right. Or at least she thought she was. “You will be a very good teacher,” she assured Allen, “and I just know you'll love it as much as I do.” Mother had taught her whole life, except for those ten years after her brother and then Allen were born.

“And you enjoyed it too, didn't you, honey, those two years you taught in high school?”

“Yeah, I guess I did. More or less.” Allen sat in her mother's kitchen with the Daisy churn between her knees. She had come home for the few weeks between the summer session and her new job at the junior college. She was now in possession of an official master's degree.

“I know you always talked about doing something else, writing or acting and all that.” Mother laughed. “Oh, you had your head in the clouds, all right. Just like your father. Always fancied what was far away, never saw much glory in what was before his nose. But I always knew you would see that teaching was for you, same as it was for me. You come by it naturally. And you're a good teacher. I could tell, that time you substituted up here in the high school. That was a bad winter, when we couldn't send you back to school. I was dead set on it, but there just wasn't enough money.”

“Don't feel bad about it, Mother. Those were hard years.”

“Still are, in some ways. But not as bad as it was in 'thirty-six and 'thirty-seven. Anyway, I got you through school, and now you have a wonderful new job in a college. What more could a girl hope for! We've done well, haven't we?”

Mother paused with the measuring cup in her hand and beamed with such pride that Allen looked away, feeling guilty. “Yeah, I guess we have.”

“I was sorry not to go with you when you went to your interview last spring, not to drive you down there in the car.”

“I didn't mind the bus.”

“I hated to think about you down there all by yourself, having to be assessed by all those people.”

“But Mother, you couldn't have gone with me to the interviews anyway.”

“Why not?” She paused, as she often did when she was reminded that her daughter was now a grown woman. “No, I guess that wouldn't have done, would it? Anyway, you did just fine without me. But I would have taken you down there, if it hadn't been so near time for the baby to come.” The baby was her new grandson, second child of Allen's brother Dalton and his wife, who lived on the family farm. “I wanted to be here to help Gwennie. And see to it that they didn't give him some outlandish name.” Mother laughed again, her big cheery laugh. “'Course, they did it anyway.”

“What's so outlandish about Terence? I think it's a lovely name.”

“Oh, it's all right, I guess. But there's never been a Terence in our family, nor any other around here that I know of. Someone your dad knew up in Liberty. Don't you think it sounds a little uppity?” she sighed. “Well, at least I got his grandfather's name in there. Terence Edwin sounds nice; I've always liked the name Edwin.”

“Howdy, folks.” Allen's brother walked in through the back door. “Here's your mail.”

“Oh, thank you.”

“Long as I was at the post office, thought I might as well pick it up.” He hung his big farm hat on a chair knob and scrubbed a hand through Allen's hair. “How you doin', Curly, workin' hard?”

“Can't you see me sweat?”

Mother was picking through the envelopes. “Oh, here's a postcard from Violet. From Greeley—no, it's from Estes Park. Doesn't it look pretty! ‘Dear Sis and family, Up here for the day with Mamie and Ted.' Mamie's her friend she used to teach with. She married some fellow from Denver. Guess they drove her up there. ‘Summer school's fine,' she says. ‘So am I. Hope all of you are too. Love, Violet.' Well, I'm glad to hear from her again.”

Mother handed it over and laid the rest of the mail on the table. “How's my little Edwin, that sweet, cute thing?”

“Terence gained a pound since you were out the other day. If he keeps on like this, he'll be lifting feed sacks by the time he's two.” Dalton took a jar of cold water out of the refrigerator. “Boy, it's hot out there.”

“And always hotter downtown,” Mother said. Downtown was a single long block with a scatter of stores on either side, a filling station at one end, the post office at the other, and Chalfont's Feed Store around the corner. “There's some of that cherry pie up there in the cupboard.”

“Thanks. I could use a piece.”

“Put some of that heavy cream on it. In the blue crock in the icebox, second shelf. You want a piece, Allen?”

“Not right now.”

“What's the matter,” Dalton said, “afraid it'll ruin your girlish figure?”

“Never has yet. No, I'm going to have a glass of fresh buttermilk.”

“That sounds good too.”

“Well, you can have some,” Mother said. “Allen, get one of those big ice-tea glasses off the top shelf. It's an awful good pie. I could always make good pies. These are some of those cherries Gwennie picked this summer. Sure was nice of her to bring us so many. What's she doing today?”

“Picking pole beans, when I left.”

“Out there in all this heat? That Gwennie!”

“She feels fine. Nanette's out there helping her, or thinks she is.” Nanette was their first child.

“She's a baby doll, she is. Tell 'em we're coming out and see 'em this afternoon.”

“Not me,” Allen said. “There's some reading I have to do.” Dalton said, “Shakespeare again, I reckon?”

“Uh-uh. A book about words.”

“What is it, the dictionary?”

“It's a book about language—word derivations and usage and why we favor certain words over others.”

“Sounds like work to me.”

“Oh, she enjoys it,” Mother said. “Don't you, honey? Just like me, you love to think about language. Every teacher does. Maybe you can read me some of it after supper. I wouldn't mind learning more about it, myself.”

“Why don't you-all stay for supper with us?” Dalton said. “I might even talk Gwen into making ice cream.”

“That would be nice. And I'm putting a cake in the oven right now. I'll bring it along. And we'll pick up the ice. If you take it now it'll melt before we can use it.”

“Okay, if it isn't too much trouble. Thanks for the grub.” He picked up his hat and grinned at Allen. “You're in good practice with that churn—we'll let you turn the freezer.”

“What a thrill.”

“Well, I better be gettin' on back. I'll tell Gwen you're coming.”

“We'll be there,” Mother said. “And tell her to use that recipe of mine for the ice cream. It always turns out best. Remind her.”

Dalton said he would and winked at Allen as he went out.

As soon as lunch was over and the dishes done, Allen went into her room and read a couple of chapters of her book while Mother had a nap. Later they packed up the cake and drove down to Chalfont's Feed Store, where they bought the ice. With a fifty-pound chunk wrapped in a gunnysack in the trunk, they set out for the farm, four miles away. The rest of the afternoon they snapped beans, watched the baby sleep, and hung diapers on the line. Toward sundown Allen and Nanette wandered off to the creek. Allen held the child on her lap and told her a story about a princess who lived with her kind father on an island, with good fairies all around. The little girl sat very still. She might, Allen thought, hear the music creep past them on the waters.

The child said, “There's a bug on my nose.”

The story changed then to a tale of a tadpole who lived under a rock.

“What's his name?”

“Roddy. Now Roddy was a rather tiresome tadpole who didn't know how to laugh. Till one day—”

“I know how to laugh.”

So they had a giggle contest till it was time to go back.

Then there was supper, with ice cream and cake, and Mother and Allen drove back home through the late dusk.

They sat in the backyard, as they often did, talking into the darkness, sometimes comfortably quiet, each occupied with her own thoughts. This night, after they had sat for a while, Mother said, “I do love to be out like this on a summer night. And it's so much nicer when you're here with me. I'm always sorry when you have to leave. I do miss your company. But I know you have to. And your accomplishments give me such pleasure.”

“They don't amount to much yet.”

“But they will, I haven't the slightest doubt. You are my great joy, little Allen.”