Clair De Lune (6 page)

“Digadoo,” said the boy, straight-faced.

“Hello, George.” She smiled, grateful for being rescued and ashamed at having to be.

“Hammertoes,” he said with a jerk of his head toward the coach, who was going out the door. “He dances like the Scottish Rite Temple.” And with a tidy maneuver he twirled her around and spun her the length of the gym like silk off a spool.

So there went the coach and any glimmer of hope. Only Dr. Ansel was left, and the three Ladies who, except for her and Miss Boatwright, were the only faculty women. They were a homogeneous clutch, maiden and graying, their buttocks disciplined by girdles, their lives lived out in classrooms and rented bedrooms.

Miss Gladys Peabody taught French and Spanish. She was a large woman with bright black eyes and a wide smile that sometimes threatened to extend right off her face. Plump little Mae Dell Willette, the art and education instructor, had in her youth been blonde and pretty, and the manner was still there, the wide-eyed sweetness gone a little wistful now with her beauty fading. And there was Miss Ingersoll, Verna, of the business department, a brisk little body who marshaled the rest of them into line and saw to it that they wore their galoshes.

They were good women, gabby and friendly, ready to help if she needed help, and as keen to their small pleasures as they were numb to the scarcity of them. She could laugh with them in the faculty ladies' lounge and share their jokes. They lunched together in cafeterias, and sometimes on Saturdays they took the bus to Kansas City and went shopping and saw a play at the Music Hall.

Weekdays they did their work, Miss Liles as diligently as the rest. She graded papers, made lesson plans, attended meetings, and in January began conducting her seminar. She was punctual, cooperative, courteous, and conscientious, teaching her heart out as she was expected to do.

This was Miss Liles by daylight, all that fall and winter.

Five

B
ut the night, as Thoreau reminds us, is a very different season. And it was a different creature who—on those spring nights when spring had barely appeared, so shivering and dissembling that only the very prescient could tell it was there at all—ran down the steps from Miss Liles's apartment, leaving behind the trappings of the day. Down through the alley, past the fairy-tale houses with their catwalks and turrets mysterious in the dark, and on to whatever adventure beckoned.

She did not go adventuring alone. She had found some friends, two of them, who came often at nightfall, when the order of the evening was books and serious discourse. As the evening progressed, earnestness of purpose diminished as the laughter and merriment grew, till at last, overcome by their native high spirits, they left their books and ventured out into the night.

They might foray beyond one of the wrought-iron gates and snoop around an old house, or run to the bakery for a delectable something, fresh-baked. They might explore an unfamiliar street; on moonlit nights they might haunt a graveyard or take a hushed promenade through an empty church, in those times left unlocked. And after some of their explorations they'd have a beer or two at Sutt's Corner, a dingy saloon down by the stockyards. There was so much fun to be had in a world transformed by darkness. And Miss Liles, transformed from her daytime self, could find fun everywhere.

Had teaching been uppermost in her mind, had she found the friends less agreeable, and had she not lived in a neighborhood of half-deserted castles, she might have been more mindful of her actions. But she lived where she did; she had found kindred spirits; and in her heart it was foreordained that one day, not long away, she would depart from academe and embark on her intended life.

Meanwhile, life had become very pleasant indeed. She was comfortable with her new friends—these two bright, well-behaved boys—as with her brother. They were both intelligent, and seemed as interested in books as she was. And they were more good plain fun than anyone else she had ever met.

She had even begun to enjoy her work, especially the seminar. Now and then it crossed her mind that if she worked hard enough and stayed with it, she might become a teacher like a few of those memorable ones who had taught her. Scholarly, at ease with their learning, and skillful at passing it along.

All the same, she looked forward to the nights.

It had come about so seamlessly that they were friends before they knew it. The boys had walked into her room on an afternoon in January to enroll in her seminar—lanky, limber, happy-go-lucky George, along with Toby, who was not quite as tall as George. He was dark haired with a hint of a scowl and a wary look in his eyes. Second-year students, both had been in her English poetry class in the fall; both were good students, full of ideas and argument. George was quick to grasp and remark, Toby more deliberate and questioning. George was a prankster, Toby more serious, but the two seemed inseparable. There were only three others who enrolled in the seminar, three girls, one of whom, Maggie, seemed to be there solely to bask in George's presence. After the second session on the modern novel, the boys talked Allen down the hall and down the steps to the door. After the third they, along with Maggie, talked her all the way home. They stood on the landing, voicing opinions on this and that, until she was blue with cold. It was early February and already dark.

Finally she asked them in.

“Is it okay?” they said, hesitating.

“Why not?” She knew well enough why not. She was a teacher and young and alone. If it were known that she had invited male students into her apartment, well, there were those who would raise an eyebrow or two, at the very least. Mother, for one.
You behave yourself now, up there so private
. Well, let her. It was cold on the landing and the talk was good and they hadn't finished yet. “Of course it's okay. Come on in, I'll make some tea.”

And she did, as the wives of professors used to do when the Honors group met in their homes. Tea and polite little cookies, never enough. Soon the boys were in her kitchen every afternoon after class, sitting at the table with tea and cookies and talking about anything and everything. After two afternoons, Maggie, though she was cute and bright and very respectful of Miss Liles, didn't continue to join them after class. She hadn't quite caught the tune, and, in spite of Allen's efforts she was somewhat left out. She began leaving class promptly with some excuse or other. George never mentioned her, but Allen suspected she was not happy about his continuing to come to her salon, as she now allowed herself to think of it.

Toby read the newspaper assiduously and listened to news on the radio, much concerned about what was going on in Europe. He had wanted to join the Lincoln Brigade after he graduated high school, but his parents would have none of it. Instead he had been a counselor at Scout camp. “That was my last time at camp,” he said. “My folks made me go every summer and I never did like it much. First time I went, I made up my mind I never wanted to join things. The Lincoln Brigade was different. You weren't tying silly knots all day or parading around with your hand on your heart. You were driving dynamite trucks through the mountains at night.”

George whooped. “Rover Boy in Spain! You just wanted to be Robert Jordan!”

“Go to hell.”

Like all students, they discussed their courses (none of them hers, except the seminar) and commented at length on the teachers. They were particularly entertained by Dr. Ansel, the Holder of the Third Degree, as they liked to call him. That, or the Phud. They talked about chorus class (conducted by beautiful Miss Boatwright) and the orchestra, and mostly, of course, about themselves.

George lived on the east side of town, he and his mother and a sometimes-married sister who was in and out. His father traveled, selling pianos. (Not very successfully, she gathered. These days there wasn't too much money around for such refinements.) Since he covered territory from Wichita to Chicago, he was away most of the time and turned up home whenever he had a mind to. His mother worked nights in the telephone office. On alternate Saturdays George worked in a neighborhood store.

Other Saturdays, he took the bus to Kansas City for his music lesson. George was a gifted pianist. He intended to study at the Juilliard School in New York. Meanwhile, he would settle for the music school in Kansas City. Just like her, he longed for the larger world of the arts, but was making do with gathering his resources where he could. With the help of his teacher in the city and Mr. Delanier at the college, he had applied for a scholarship. It had looked very promising, but he couldn't expect to hear anything before April or May. “If I don't get the scholarship, I don't go. Even if I do, I'll be livin' on beans. My Dad says he'll help, but I don't know what with.” Even so, he was hopeful and practiced four hours every morning without fail before his college classes began. George wanted to play in Carnegie Hall. He and Allen sometimes fantasized their future lives in New York City, where musicians and writers abounded.

Toby didn't know what he wanted to do. He only knew what he didn't want to do.

“Murdstone's got it into his head that I'm going to be a chemical engineer or some damn thing.”

Allen said, “What does a chemical engineer do?”

“Hell, I don't know and I don't want to find out. Even if there is a great future in it. So he says. I'm not even sure there's going to be a future.”

Toby lived only a few blocks away, in a big, square white house with green shutters and a deep front porch, screened in. He'd lived there all his life. The man he called Mr. Murdstone was his stepfather.

Toby's parents had divorced when he was four years old. His real father went off to California, he thought, and after that to Argentina. “He was in the blood-and-guts business, one of those big meatpacking companies. He used to send me postcards, but then he stopped. I don't know where he is now.”

She thought Toby a very sad young man. He seemed lonely and not optimistic about his future, though he was bright as could be, and as voracious a reader as Allen. He often borrowed her books, her precious
New Yorker
magazines (an extravagant and much-appreciated Chrismas present from her brother), and returned them with more ideas to discuss.

Toby's parents were quite social, and much more well off than George's. Murdstone worked as a research chemist for a mining corporation. “Something to do with munitions. He won't say much about it, but that's what I think. They've sent him to Washington a couple of times.”

Nevertheless, Toby seemed envious of George, and his passion and talent for music.

When she asked Toby what he might want to do, he said, “I don't know. Read books, I guess. Be a reporter. Or a whiskey drummer. I know I'll end up being called up soon, one way or another.”

Allen insisted that they weren't going to get into the war, but Toby was better informed than she, and insisted they would, and he would go.

“Maybe it won't be so bad,” Allen said. “Maybe you'll get sent to Italy, Even as a soldier, wouldn't it be wonderful to walk on Italian soil and smell Italian smells and taste Italian food? I've always wanted to go to Italy. Don't you?”

“Not now I don't,” Toby said.

“Not
that
Italy. The
real
Italy,” said the Romantic. “Where the Brownings went, and Shelley and Keats.”

“It's gone,” he said.

“It'll come back.”

After her seminar ended, in early March, the boys began to drop in some weekend evenings after supper. Sometimes the three of them went to the movies and back to her place afterward for scrambled eggs. They listened, with questions and many comments, as she talked about books and art and other enchantments of that nature, even of the philosophers—Spinoza, of whom she had read a little; Nietzsche, of whom they had read a little; Plato and the ideal form; and Aristotle's
Poetics
. She had learned enough in her time to know how much was left to learn, but it surprised her that she knew as much as she did. The boys seemed to draw it out. Perhaps because she wasn't intimidated by them. She had the upper hand—she was the Teacher. A little authority and a salary gave one a heady sense of oneself.

But the boys knew a thing or two, themselves. Both of them read, though Toby had the wider range. Reading haphazardly—Conrad or Thomas Wolfe, Francis Parkman, Melville, Darwin—he had covered a good deal in his nineteen-going-on-twenty years. And George knew so much about music, educating her to the excellence of Mozart, the strict form of the sonata, and the unexplored pleasures of more modern music. He had introduced her to Debussy. She allowed herself one new record out of every other paycheck, and on George's recommendation, had bought “Clair de Lune,” which she listened to over and over again.

The three of them settled into a pattern. The boys came after school some days, some weekends after dinner. They brought each other presents: limericks, passages from books, records to play on her phonograph. Having recently read
For Whom the Bell Tolls
in her seminar, the boys frequently obscenitied in the milk of something or other. Such as chemistry tests or Wednesday morning assemblies with speeches by local dignitaries. They disapproved of the Selective Service draft. But she assured them they needn't be so suspicious of it, that they had nothing to worry about.