[2016] The Practice House

by Laura McNeal

  He was still hungry, and eyed the platter at the center of the table. One pancake left and no one wanting to take it.

  “I don’t like church,” Neva announced to Aldine, her mouth full with pancake. “Do you?”

  Ansel didn’t have to see it. He could feel Ellie’s eyes rising and fixing on the girl.

  Aldine held her full coffee cup with both hands, the tendrils of steam lit up by the morning sun. “I love the singing,” she said. Luve, she said, making the word more powerful, original almost, as if she’d coined it.

  “Me, too,” he said before he knew it.

  There was a silence, and he took a big swig of coffee. He doubted the girl had money to turn around and go back. If she had money, she wouldn’t have come at all. He watched Ellie slice her own pancakes into small triangular chunks, hardly sweetened with plum syrup; then he let his gaze drift out the window to the slanted line the barn roof made against the blue sky. He could hear a small wind feeling its way through the cottonwood, finding the weak leaves. He closed his eyes for a moment and watched them fall free.

  “Look at the time,” Ellie said, and all at once was pushing back her chair and saying to Aldine, “You can come or stay as you like. There’s St. Anne’s, if you’d rather, but it’s in the other direction and you’d have to walk.” She was piling plates and untying her apron, tucking a strand of curly hair behind her ear.

  Ansel looked around. The buttery mushrooms in heavy cream were gone; the breakfast was over. The smallest kind of sadness but a sadness still. He said, “If she wants to go up to St. Anne’s, the Eckerts could take her. They’re Catholic.”

  “They’ve probably gone already,” Ellie said, pushing things ahead. Always, in her little ways, pushing.

  “Well, next time,” Ansel said.

  Ellie shot him a look that said there wouldn’t be a next time, but Aldine set down her cup, half full and no longer steaming, and said she wasn’t Catholic, anyway, and that she’d much rather see where they went, if they didn’t mind.

  “Of course we don’t mind,” he said, wiping his mouth and pushing back his chair as Ellie picked up Aldine’s cup of unfinished coffee and set it in the sink.

  “Don’t you drink coffee, dear?” Ellie asked, trying to keep her tone neutral, as if it didn’t bother her to see it wasted.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Aldine said. “It’s new to me, is all. At home, we drink tea.” She walked quickly to the counter, retrieved her cup, and swallowed the rest.

  Ellie told her that wasn’t necessary, but Ansel thought it probably was. Everyone at the table had noticed that she’d left plum syrup pooled shallowly on her plate. Wasting coffee would only have compounded the sin.

  Still, he thought, something almost boyish unfolding within him, sin can have its happy by-products.

  So when the girls went upstairs for hats and last-minute adjustments to their dress, he winked at Clare, grabbed the last pancake, and tore it in two. He handed one portion to Clare, and they swabbed their halves assiduously over the girl’s dish, sopping up the sweet syrup until her white plate gleamed.

  The wind whuffed at the windows of the Ford as it moved toward the church, but it was a mild wind, and the world looked newly hopeful to Ansel. He was proud of the new coat of paint on the Methodist church, which he’d helped apply last year. A white clapboard church circled by box elders with their leaves flickering yellow and orange was a good thing to show a foreign visitor. And the people they met going in were all the usual mix of Kansas-curious and Kansas-friendly, asking her name, shaking her hand. Mrs. Odekirk was the first, eyes bright and expecting the best, as she always seemed to do, and he heard himself say, “This is Aldine McKenna, who’s just come by train from New York to be our new teacher,” sealing his own fate as he said so, and Mrs. Odekirk saying, “Well, this is wonderful! We’re delighted to have you.” She turned, smiling, to Ansel and said, “You and your big ideas, Ansel Price. We will never doubt you again.” Ansel was fond of this tall, storklike woman. The lines in her face were symmetrical and handsome, like the comb marks in her tightly bound gray hair.

  “She’s a piano teacher!” Neva told her.

  Reverend Bakely turned round. She could play the piano, could she? It happened that Mrs. Tanner, the accompanist, was ill this morning. Did she know any Methodist hymns?

  “Miss McKenna is from Scotland,” Ansel said. “That’s Anglican, right?”

  Aldine said no, that actually the Church of Scotland was Presbyterian (a mistake that made him feel like a fool) but she could sight-read, and she didn’t mind trying if they didn’t mind a mistake or two. So she sat at the piano in her pink dress and brown bow and looked slightly less lost, Ansel thought, when she didn’t have to speak or look at anyone. She played well. Even the most tin eared among them could hear that much, and as the congregation registered the surprise of this sudden wonder, he felt suffused with pride in the Scottish girl, and (it had to be admitted) in the fact that he, Ansel Price, had delivered her here.

  14

  On Monday night, the Prices sat listening to a radio show, some of the family more attentively than others. Mrs. Price stitched shut a hole in one of Mr. Price’s black woolen socks; Charlotte had a book on her lap that she read or did not read depending on her interest in the show; Neva played with one of Aldine’s knitting needles and leaned close to the big freestanding radio, staring at it as if there were strangers inside she could almost see; Clarence listened with nothing to do, it seemed, but look at Aldine or his knees; whereas Mr. Price sat back with a bemused expression, his interest in the show, as in all things, calibrated somehow.

  Aldine knitted. She had begun a blanket with Leenie’s baby in mind. She’d spent the day helping with the household work, though Mrs. Price’s standards were beyond her—she saw defects in Aldine’s cleaning that Aldine could not discern no matter how keenly she stared or studied the chair rung or window glass or chowder bowl in question—so that in the end Mrs. Price seemed to think her more a nuisance than anything else. Whereas Charlotte seemed glad for her company, especially when wiping and rewiping the dust from sills and surfaces with wet rags morning and afternoon. The wind here was horrid but the dust was worse. It got into Aldine’s ears and her nose. Her skin dried and cracked and when she asked Charlotte what she did about it, the girl had laughed and said, “Pray that we’ll leave!” Which, though Aldine laughed, did nothing to lift her spirits.

  The radio program featured a flat-voiced rich man who hoarded his money in his basement and who, besides his stinginess, seemed bland to the edge of flavorless. That did not, however, keep everyone in the radio audience from laughing at every word he said. Aldine couldn’t fathom it, and when Mr. Price began to stare off through the window so that now she faced only the scrutiny of Neva and Clarence, she fixed a smile on her face.

  The family was suddenly laughing, so she laughed as well, not too soft and not too loud, which seemed to satisfy Neva, but she knew for a fact that Mr. Price saw how lost she was, and what would she tell Leenie about him? That he seemed somehow two men? Well, she would not tell her about the one who was sturdy and tall and entered rooms headfirst, who was rugged-looking to a point just beyond routinely handsome, though he was, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said about married men, and he was forty, at least. His dark hair was receding but his arms were still thick with hair, and his rough fingers were hairy on top. No, she would give Leenie the other one of him, the one who was distant and gentle and full of big boyish hopes, sort of like their own half-daft Uncle Gus, who had no children and raised sheep in Perthshire and trained trees into odd shapes and once, not long ago, brought home in eleven great crates a rusted Ferris wheel that he put right and reassembled. And then when no mother at all would let her child board for the first ride, his barren wife—their sweet Aunt Kathleen—stepped forward and when Uncle Gus sent her around twice and then stopped her at the top, she had whooped in delight and exclaimed at the view, which, Aldine was dead sure, Mrs. Price would
never have done for Mr. Price, whatever contraption he might build. She might tell Leenie, too, that when the man stared off (he was doing it now), it was as if he could disconnect himself from the very world round him, but where he’d reconnected himself to in the meantime was the mystery she wished to pierce. And yet when he looked directly into her eyes, he seemed to offer her something—confidence, maybe, or hope—as if she were a prisoner and he had no other way to assure her that he was on her side. Because of that much she was almost certain. He was on her side. He hoped she could be contented.

  And then at this very moment, he glanced Aldine’s way, but only for a moment, as if he’d felt something on him and had now satisfied himself as to its source, which embarrassed her completely.

  She knitted vigorously, eyes down until the comedian on the radio induced further laughter.

  Charlotte looked up from her book. The Harvester, the book was called, and as she read, she pinched several locks of her springy blonde hair into a sort of paintbrush and swept her lips with it.

  Neva said, “I hate it when the show’s over. But at least it comes on again Wednesday and that’s only two days.” Then she said, “How do you do that without looking?” and it took Aldine a moment to realize that the girl was talking to her, about her knitting.

  “Oh it’s the easiest thing,” Aldine said slowly. “I could do it eyes closed in a coal hole.”

  Aldine thought this might be the moment to excuse herself to go upstairs and write her letter. But as she began to gather her needles and yarn, Mr. Price leaned forward and cleared his throat to say, “I was up to Cyrus Motherbaugh’s today.”

  His seriousness seemed to signify something; his family turned toward him.

  “Cyrus no longer owns the fiddle I thought we could get for Miss McKenna,” he said. “Sold it last year.” Mr. Price tilted his head and lowered his voice. “His father’s own fiddle.”

  The family found this regretful, but, to be truthful, Aldine felt relief. Mr. Price had mentioned the fiddle when it turned out there was no longer a piano at the schoolhouse and Aldine had acted pleased, but really she wasn’t sure how she’d use it. Would she play for the children while they read?

  “For how much?” Charlotte asked.

  Mr. Price shook his head and said he hadn’t asked.

  Something came into Mrs. Price’s face then—Aldine saw it. A careful kind of slyness. “Aldine doesn’t really need accompaniment,” she said. “She can sing a cappella at school.” She fixed her gleaming eyes on her. “I was looking at your letter of application today, dear. You mentioned that you sang a cappella.”

  Neva asked what a cappella meant, and while Mr. Price patiently explained it to the girl, Aldine felt the color rising in her neck and cheeks. She hadn’t sung alone, she said. It was in a choir. And they were only a cappella because the organ bellows had failed beyond repair.

  “Couldn’t you try by yourself, though?” Neva said, and Mrs. Price (really, it was more than she’d said to Aldine the whole day long) said, “Yes, dear, you could just try, couldn’t you?” and Neva added, “A real true Scotland song!”

  Something had begun unfurling within her then, a feeling that she would just as soon have suppressed, but now, having it coaxed from her (and with spiteful intent!) brought with it a prideful pleasure, just as she had felt, though she cringed to admit it, when she had allowed Dr. O’Malley to look upon her, because she knew (Aunt Sedge’s house had mirrors after all) that what she was about to reveal was not without its agreeable aspects. Just as now, though she didn’t like to sing alone in front of others, she knew her voice to be quite good, at least within a certain range, so she bowed her head and composed her nerves and then, when she was perfectly ready, began softly to sing: “By yon bonny banks, and by yon bonny braes.” As she sang she felt the old trembling want that music dug out of you, a longing that you could finally express and that you dug out of other people as you sang. “Where the sun shines bright on Loch Lomond.” They listened, Charlotte with her book folded over her finger, Neva with a broad gap-toothed grin, Clarence with a still, beholding look that, she couldn’t help it, put her in mind of Dr. O’Malley, and Mr. Price with face tilted toward the window, eyes closed in an attitude close to reverence. Only Mrs. Price seemed indifferent. She watched for a while, then, as if unimpressed or possibly even disappointed, turned to the basket beside her and withdrew another of her husband’s socks in need of mending.

  15

  On the first day of school, Aldine and Neva had walked in early so that Aldine could get her bearings, and now she had thirty minutes to plan the day.

  The building itself was nothing like the upright stone school, two stories high, in which she’d spent her own school years. Stony Bank’s country school was just one large room, white on the outside like the Price house, unpainted within, an ancient blue stove in the corner, a blackboard in the front, wooden desks hooked together in rows like immovable sleighs. She studied the portraits of two unsmiling men, one with a white wig, beneath the American flag (it seemed worrisome that she didn’t know who they were). If there was one pleasant surprise, it was the relative absence of dust. Someone had been in to clean recently; she could detect the faint scent of soap and ammonia.

  Aldine studied the names in the book Mr. Price had given her. He said she was to keep the record book up to date for the superintendent, who came around to all the schools on surprise visits, and who would examine the book when the term ended. Miss Pike had used the book for a year and a half, and Mr. Geoph for the whole previous spring. There were not as many students as she expected.

  Berenice Josephson

  Emmeline Josephson

  Melba Josephson

  Jerry Pierce

  Geneva Louise Price

  Jack Reynolds

  Yauncy Tanner

  Buster Watson

  Harlon Wright

  Hector Wright

  Phay Wright

  What were their ages? Was Phay a boy or a girl? Would they all show except Yauncy? The last thing Mr. Geoph had written about Hector was, Won’t come. She would ask Neva about the boys when she came in from playing on the schoolyard.

  What was missing was the list of the children’s Master Lessons. On the desktop, where Mr. Price had told her she would find just such a thing, she saw nothing more than a Webster’s Dictionary and Roget’s Thesaurus. In the drawers she found only a ruler, a compass, and a small calendar with x’s marked through April 22, 1932, the end of the previous term. A ruled sheet of paper was labeled Inventory of Books, with each one listed by title and condition. At the bottom Mr. Geoph had signed his name. Otherwise there was nothing except a much smaller piece of paper on which Mr. Geoph had written: Recitation Program: Ari. Study Group 1: Ari. Study Group 2: Ari.

  Was this it? Could this possibly be the list of lessons? And if so, what in the world did it mean?

  She felt a kind of panic rising within her. Twenty-two minutes. She scanned all the flat surfaces of the room, looking for a folder or anything suggesting more thorough plans. A Master Lesson list, Mr. Price had called it. She tore into cupboards. Odd sets of three or four books, a broom, a pole for the transoms. Heavy paper in different colors. A huge spool of stout string. A rolled American flag on a stick. Boxes of old rulers, pencils, erasers. But no lesson book at all.

  Fifteen minutes remained to her, according to the clock, and she had no idea how she might lead the classes. Why hadn’t she come sooner to prepare? She’d had nearly two weeks to herself and what had she done with them? Nothing except help with the household work. Why hadn’t she studied the children’s texts, written herself notes? What had she imagined? But she knew what she’d imagined. She’d returned to it often enough, the picture of herself knitting while the children worked at their lessons, quietly, heads bent over their work, a fire in the woodstove, antelope grazing outside the window. A perfect daftie she’d been. The very embodiment of.

  She returned to the page where Mr. Geoph had written his Su
mmary of Term and Inventory of Books. She tried to match up his numbers with the little row of books on the shelf, saw that only three of the books were new and the rest were just fair or poor, and decided to read the spines. Only one seventh-year reader, one sixth, one fourth, and five third. A red cloth Riverside Shakespeare, just like the one at the Price house, but dustier. Single books on physiology, geography, history, agriculture, and civil government. It was entirely possible that she had overstated her teaching abilities. Lied, even, if you looked at it in a certain way.

  Through the window, Aldine could see Neva drawing in the dirt. She made a zigzag, then a curling line, then a V. Her name, of course.

  Three boys stood huddled in the corner of the yard, hands in pockets, shoulders low in attitudes of resentment.

  Seven minutes.

  At the end of the shelf she found a slim book called The Modern Music Series Primer. Songs were arranged by subject in the table of contents, and her eye skipped past Work and Play to Rain.

  Maybe they could do two things at once: summon rain and learn to sing.

  At two minutes before nine, three girls appeared on the road to school, their feet scuffling dust. Two had long hair like Neva and looked to be seven or eight. The third one carried a satchel and was tall and regal-looking, with her hair cut in a bob that made her face seem a series of elegantly arranged straight lines. Aldine had seen this girl at church on Sunday, had seen Charlotte catching up to her, and Aldine had wondered whether she herself had been the subject of their conversation—twice Charlotte and the girl had glanced over at her as they talked.

  Neva saw them coming and threw down her stick. “Bernie! Melba! Emmeline!” she shouted. “Come see who our new teacher is! She’s from Scot-land!”