Staggerford (23 page)

At this point Sister Rosie said to Father Finn, “There’s only one person who will teach sixth grade for four thousand dollars and do a creditable job of it and that’s Agatha
McGee. We’re out of options. You’ll have to talk her into coming back.”

“But we had a farewell party for her,” said Father Finn, “and her picture was in the paper, and the alumni gave her a watch. How could she go back to work after all of that?”

“She’s duty-oriented. Tell her she owes St. Isidore’s one more year. Tell her there’s been a groundswell of sentiment in the parish to have her back.”

“What I think we should do is combine fifth and sixth grades under one teacher.”

“What kind of an option is that? Two grades in one room went out with the country school. Where have you been? Call her up and remind her that she quit on short notice and left us in the lurch. She’ll give in. She’s duty-oriented. Tell her there’s a petition going around to have her back.”

“I’ll tell her no such thing. If I call her I’ll tell her the truth. I’ll tell her we’re desperate.”

The next morning when Father Finn called to say he was desperate, Miss McGee was not at home. She was visiting, by invitation, the Senior Citizens’ Club. She had received the invitation in the mail from a certain Mr. Lutz and she assumed that the Senior Citizens were holding open house for the community at large, and since it was a sunny, windless morning she put on her high, round hat and walked the four blocks to the Community Center.

Some years earlier Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had come to Staggerford in the form of this Community Center, a three-story hulk of windowless concrete in which there were (besides a Senior Citizens’ Room) a Teen Room, a Physical Fitness Room, a Community Planning Room, a Bake Sale Room, and a row of ten offices occupied now and then by ten civil servants with incomprehensible titles. Printed on the door of one such office was the word
OUTREACH
. On another were the words
FORCED AIR CONSULTANT
. A third door said
EQUALIZATION
. This was Miss McGee’s first visit to the building and once inside she got lost. Outside, the lines of the building were square, but inside they were crooked. Corridors met each other at
oblique angles, and some of them sloped up and down. Miss McGee opened dozens of doors. There were three-sided rooms and five-sided rooms and split-level rooms, all of them empty and all of them plastered with what looked to her like textured mustard. Water pipes and electrical conduits hung from the ceilings, giving her the illusion that she had dropped down a manhole. She passed through the furnace room and an empty kitchen and a room that reeked of soiled gym clothes. She found a room with a large bay window that gave her a view of a room containing a mimeograph machine and a broken piano. After opening all these doors, Miss McGee, who had not voted for Lyndon Johnson, began to suspect that the Community Center was purposely designed as a maze to throw the intruder off stride, to demoralize her, to conceal—like the passages in a pyramid—the secret that lay at the center of things; and thereafter, with each room she looked into, she half expected to come upon the sarcophagus of a king.

From behind an unlabeled door on the second floor, she heard an excited cackle. She knocked and the cackle stopped. “Yoo hoo,” she called, and she heard whispering. She opened the door and looked into an enormous five-sided room that might have been a ballroom. In it were thirteen old people sitting on thirteen folding chairs. They were sitting in two groups and they were all staring at her. One group consisted of four women who had been making tulips out of egg cartons. They sat around a table on which were several jars of tempera paint, some scissors, a stack of egg cartons, and a bottle of Elmer’s glue. The other nine people were clustered in the center of the room and had obviously been visiting together before she interrupted them. A humpbacked woman was coiled in her chair like a withered stem, and to look up at Miss McGee she had to point one ear to the floor. A man in a lumberjack shirt had two hearing aids and one eye. The woman next to him wore a fur coat and bedroom slippers. There was a man showing a great distance between his socks and his cuffs and exposing the lengths of dingy underwear that covered his shins. They all sat with their hands in their laps and
looked expectantly at Miss McGee, as though she had come to announce doomsday, or lunch.

“Why, it’s Agatha McGee,” said a voice from the group of nine, and Miss McGee saw that it was Lillian Kite, knitting. She went over and sat down beside Lillian on a folding chair.

“We thought the bride was coming in,” said Lillian. “We’re having a mock wedding here this morning and we thought you were the bride.”

Through the door now came a young man in a checkered suit. He was carrying a small tape recorder, and Miss McGee decided at a glance that he was a simpleton. He pushed aside the egg cartons to make room on the table for the recorder and he pressed a button that caused it to play Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” As it played, he giggled and pulled busily at a hair growing out of a mole on his chin. When the music stopped, he rewound the tape and started it over again just as Vera Collins came through the door.

Miss McGee knew Vera Collins. She was the widow of the blacksmith Varner Collins. She was the mother of eleven children and the grandmother of twenty-eight and the great-grandmother of four. She was wearing her wedding dress.

“What
is
this?” said Miss McGee.

“It’s our mock wedding,” said Lillian. “Isn’t Vera lovely?”

There was nothing lovely about her. The wedding dress had taken on the color and smell of the attic in which it had hung for fifty-five years, and Vera Collins herself was emaciated.

“Stand up everybody,” said the Simpleton, switching off the music. “Get over here, Harry. You agreed to be the groom and it’s too late now to back out.”

The one-eyed lumberjack came forward with Vera Collins, and they stood before the Simpleton, who raised his eyes to the pipes running along the ceiling and said, “Lord, we are gathered here today to unite these two children of yours in Holy Matrimony. If anyone knows of any reason
why these two should not be joined together, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.” Having said this, the Simpleton scanned the faces in the room and noticed for the first time Miss McGee.

“I never saw you here before,” he said.

“I was invited by a Mr. Lutz, I thought it was open house.”

“I’m Lutz. Ozzie Lutz. I send out invitations to everybody in town who retires. I’m the director of this Community Center. Call me Ozzie. And be sure to sign in downstairs before you leave. I have to keep a record of everybody who uses this building. I hope you’ll keep coming. We have fun.”

Vera Collins and Harry the lumberjack exchanged vows and exchanged rings, and the Simpleton said, “By the power invested in me by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, I now pronounce you man and wife. I hope you’ll be very happy. I have to go now and fix the slot machine in the teen room.”

The lumberjack, with a wrinkled pucker, brushed the bride’s wrinkled cheek, and Miss McGee was the only witness not transported by the sight. Everyone else was smiling tenderly, and there were tears in the eyes of Lillian Kite. The senior citizens lined up to kiss the bride, and the first woman in line, the one in bedroom slippers, said, “Where are you and Harry going to be living?”

Miss McGee was horrified. She hurried out the door after the Simpleton and said, “Do you realize there are certain people in that room who believe they have just seen a real wedding?”

“I know it, that’s half the fun.” Ozzie Lutz was behind schedule. He walked very fast along the corridor and spoke over his shoulder to Miss McGee, who fell behind. “That’s why the oldsters are more fun than teens. Teens are almost impossible to entertain, but oldsters will believe anything. Last week we had a mock funeral in that room, and one of the oldsters asked me why the newspaper didn’t print an obituary. I tell you, once an oldster gets into the swing of this program, nothing can keep him home. Oldsters think
the world of this program. They’re here in the morning waiting for me to unlock the building. Just give the program a chance and you’ll see. We have fun. Right now we’re in the middle of a contest to see who can make the most tulips out of egg cartons. On your way out, sign the book. My office is the one by the front door. Tell the girl at the desk that I told you to sign the book.” Ozzie Lutz spoke these last words while disappearing up a dark curving stairway.

So this was what awaited one who retired, thought Miss McGee: putting on sham weddings and making tulips out of egg cartons. She recalled Patty Hawk’s wedding, which to Miss McGee’s way of thinking was as great a hoax as this one, and she felt trapped between the moral wasteland of the younger generation and the stale slough of senior citizenship. Which was worse? She had to face one or the other, and by retiring she had chosen the latter.

She did not sign the Simpleton’s book. She went straight home and called Father Finn.

Now Father Finn was a prayerful man. Every day he was conscientious in his reading of the Divine Office—not the new, abbreviated version, but the old edition, tedious and beautiful. He read his Office because he believed in its efficacy before God and because the hour he spent in his favorite vinyl chair was more soothing than milk to his ulcer. In a drawer of his desk, Father Finn kept a list of favors that had been granted him through prayer. Some of them, such as finding a box of lost cigars, he had to admit were small potatoes; but others, such as his sister’s recovery from cancer and the fantastic mileage he was getting out of his Montgomery Ward tires, bordered on the miraculous. Such was Father Finn’s faith that he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that one of his prayers had moved a mountain. He was astonished, however, at the speed with which today’s prayer moved Miss McGee. He had just begun offering up one of the penitential psalms for the intention of her return to the classroom when the phone rang.

“If you have not yet found my replacement, I will come
back in the fall and teach,” she told him. “I am not ready to become a senior citizen.”

“My prayers have been answered,” he said. “The Spirit is at work.”

“I am not ready to attend mock weddings,” she said. “I am not ready to attend mock funerals, I am not ready to spend the rest of my days making tulips out of egg cartons.”

“God bless you,” said Father Finn.

WEDNESDAY
 
 
N
OVEMBER
4

A
FTER A NIGHT OF
fitful sleep, Miles looked into the mirror and barely recognized himself. His left cheek was swollen and his left eye appeared higher than his right. He was pale and shaky and his mouth was crooked. He looked like a portrait in chalk, smudged.

He called school and left word with Wayne Workman’s secretary that he was taking another day of sick leave.

He called Doc Oppegaard and described his trouble.

“You’ll be fine by noon,” said Doc. “The inside of the mouth heals fast.”

It was another clear, golden morning. Miles dressed and took his coffee and his briefcase out the back door to the lawn chairs under the bass wood tree. He opened his briefcase and felt in his pocket for his red pen. He had left it upstairs, luckily. He closed the briefcase and drank his coffee. He said good-by to Miss McGee, who walked down the alley toward St. Isidore’s. When he finished his coffee he moved to the flat chaise longue and fell asleep.

In a few minutes the ringing phone drew him out of a dream, and he went into the house to answer it.

“I can’t have you missing another day, Pruitt.” It was Wayne Workman.

“But I have no choice, Wayne. I’m in bad shape. I had this tooth pulled yesterday and—”

“I don’t care what your excuse is. If you are alive you’ve got to come to school. Mrs. Horky took your classes yesterday and she had a devil of a time with your second hour and with your study hall. She came back again this morning, and she’s in your classroom right now with first hour, but she says she will not under any circumstances be in that room when it comes time for second hour, nor will she go upstairs at two o’clock and take over your study hall. She says at two o’clock she’s going home.”

“Now wait a minute, Wayne. When people sign up to be substitute teachers, don’t they agree to take the bad with the good? They’re
paid
to take the bad with the good. I’m in no shape to be teaching today.”

There was a long pause. Perhaps Wayne was paging through the Faculty Handbook for the solution to this problem. When he spoke it was at a higher pitch. “Pruitt, are you refusing to do what I say?”

“Yes.”

Another long pause. Perhaps he was chewing his mustache. “Pruitt, second hour begins in ten minutes. If you can’t be here for second hour I will understand. Ten minutes wouldn’t be enough time for you to primp for the young ladies in your classes—”

“What do you mean by that?”

“…  but if you aren’t here to take your study hall at two o’clock—that’s almost five hours’ warning I’m giving you then we shall see what we shall see.” Wayne hung up.