Saving Miss Oliver's

by Stephen Davenport

  “Do any of you live in a house like the one in the poem?” he asked the class.

  No one raised her hand. “No one?” he repeated. Usually there were several.

  “I do,” Joanna Perrine finally admitted. Her voice was tentative and shy.

  He knew from reading Nan White’s notes to the faculty about incoming students that Joanna had lost her brother in a skiing accident a few years before. “We live in New Hampshire too,” she added. She sat to Francis’s right, by the windows, across from Francesca. Under the table, her long legs reached out toward the empty space in the center of the room; she was almost as tall as Rachel Bickham. Everybody knew she was from New Hampshire; it’s not what she was trying to say. “The front door is at the foot of the stairs in our house too,” Joanna murmured.

  He needed to keep this safe for her; he had better be careful. But if she didn’t want to engage with this poem about a loss so like her own, from a house just like the one she lived in, she wouldn’t have raised her hand to answer his question. Maybe she’d found some solace in the poem, which she wanted to secure more deeply. At any rate, his heart went out to her. He would help her engage. He would bring her up to the front to help him teach. “Can you draw it for us, Joanna?” he asked.

  Joanna hesitated, not sure what he wanted.

  “The way the scene in the poem is laid out,” he explained. He turned, stepped to the blackboard behind him, took a piece of chalk from the tray beneath it, and held it up, inviting her, and she got up from her place at the table, moved across the space to him, took the chalk, turned her back to the class, and started to draw. She made a perpendicular line on the board and labeled it front door—as far away from the graveyard as she could get, Francis thought. Then, just to the right, a side view of a staircase ascending to the right. She labeled the top step landing. Then to the right of that, another perpendicular line, with a break in it, which she labeled window. To the right and below that window, she drew four gravestones, and next to them a little mound of earth—a child’s new grave without a headstone yet. She didn’t label those. Then she put the chalk into the tray beneath the blackboard and turned to him.

  “Exactly!” Francis said, and recited again:

  He saw her from the bottom of the stairs

  Before she saw him. She was starting down,

  Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.

  Joanna took a little step away from the front, from all these eyes watching her, toward her seat at the side of the room. He put his hand lightly on her elbow. “So, Joanna. Does the young husband stay at the bottom of the stairs?”

  “No, he goes up the stairs to her.”

  “To find out what she’s looking at?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does he find out?”

  “Yes. The grave where their child is buried in the family graveyard.”

  “Their only child, you think?”

  She nodded her head.

  “What makes you think so?” he asked her.

  “Because it’s so sad.”

  “All right.” Ordinarily he wouldn’t accept this answer; he’d make her go to the text, where the facts were. He’d make her find the words baby and first child as evidence that the young couple’s loss was complete. But she’d brought her own grief to the poem. So he said, “Yes, it’s very sad. They only have each other now.” He hoped she would take some comfort that though she no longer had her brother, she had her parents and her parents had her.

  “And does she stay at the top of the stairs?” he asked.

  “For a while, that’s all.”

  “Just for a while, yes, and then what?”

  “She ducks beneath his arm and goes downstairs.”

  “Where he was at the beginning?”

  “More than that,” Joanna said. “She goes right out the house.”

  “Hey, Joanna!” he said. “You’re a good reader.” He let go of her elbow.

  “Thanks.” She smiled shyly, and moved back to her seat. She was glad he had given her a second chance to raise her hand.

  He turned to the class then and asked, “What’s the husband’s reaction when he discovers what his wife’s been looking at?”

  Angela Nash had her hand up before he’d finished asking the question. She had black, curly hair and pale skin and looked younger than her fourteen years. “Angela,” he said, “you’re going to tell us?”

  “He’s kind of amazed,” Angela answered.

  “Amazed, yes, you’re right. It’s in the way he speaks, isn’t it? It’s in the tone of his words,” he said, rewarding her for leaping in, taking a chance with half an answer—the way a boy would. Angela smiled and nodded, proud of her success.

  “Amazed at what?” he pursued. “What is he amazed at? Surely he knew the graveyard was out back and his child was in it.”

  Angela hesitated.

  “Read the words,” Francis told her. Angela looked down at her book. She scanned the poem, looking for the passage, didn’t find it right away. Now a lot of hands were up. One of them was Sara Warrior’s. He called on her.

  “The wonder is I didn’t see at once,” Sara read. Her voice was quiet.

  I never noticed it from here before.

  I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.

  The little graveyard where my people are!

  So small the window frames the whole of it.

  Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?

  There are three stones of slate and one of marble,

  Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight

  On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.

  But I understand: it’s not the stones,

  But the child’s mound—

  Sara stopped reading, looked up from the book. He couldn’t read the expression on her face, had no idea what’s she was thinking.

  He was tempted to read the passage over aloud, because Sara had read it so quietly. But he wouldn’t risk her taking that as a put-down, for she was fragile too, a stranger in a foreign place. Instead he said, “Thank you, Sara,” and asked the question again, this time to the whole class. “What is it exactly that he is amazed at?”

  Several hands went up. One of them was Amy’s, though she only put it up halfway—and took it down as soon as she remembered how bored she was.

  “Amy!” he said. “Tell us.”

  Amy sighed.

  “You don’t know?” he said, laying his little trap: If she didn’t answer, she wouldn’t appear above this; she’d just look dumb.

  “He’s amazed that he had to look out the window to find out, that he didn’t know all along what his wife keeps looking at,” she finally answered.

  Francis waited for more.

  “He wonders why he didn’t look out the window too every time he went by it.”

  “Your evidence?” he asked. “The line?”

  “I must be wonted to it,” Amy quoted, quick as a flash, without looking at her book.

  “And how does his wife feel?”

  “That he shouldn’t be amazed. I mean, his kid is dead,” Amy said, and almost added “for Christ’s sake” to get back to being negative, but she didn’t dare.

  Francis didn’t answer, just stood there and waited as if she hadn’t answered yet. Now she was thinking hard in spite of herself. He looked away from her to ask someone else, and then, just in time, it came to her, the precision he was demanding. “Oh, all right,” she said, as if he were just quibbling. “Her point’s not that he shouldn’t be amazed. Her point is he shouldn’t get used to his kid being dead.”

  “Good catch, Amy,” Francis said.

  “Well, it’s obvious,” she said, and checked out again, returning to her slouch.

  Francis scanned the room and asked another question: “What does the wife do now, the woman named Amy?”

  Sara answered. “His wife, Amy, tells him to stop talking, and then she ducks under his arm and goes down to the bottom of the stairs.” Francis nodded a
nd recited aloud to confirm her answer:

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried.

  She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm

  That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;

  And turned on him with such a daunting look,

  He said twice over before he knew himself:

  “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”

  As he recited, he moved across the space in the center of the room to where Bridget Younger sat at the right-hand row of tables, blond head down, taking notes. She’d written pages of notes in the classes they’d had so far but hardly said a word. He reached across the table and pointed to the lines in Bridget’s book in which the husband answers his own question:

  God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,

  A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.

  He said the lines out loud while he kept his finger on them. Now Bridget couldn’t write in her notebook because his arm was across it. “Bridget,” he asked, “can you read her answer?”

  Bridget looked up at him. He could see how anxious she was, how afraid of failing, and knew she hadn’t even begun to know the pain of the young couple in the poem; all she knew was that if she wrote down everything her teacher said, she would be safe. And all he knew was that he wanted to give her poetry, the skill of reading it that engenders the love of it that would last the whole of her life. “Give it a try, Bridget.”

  “You can’t because you don’t know how to speak,” Bridget read.

  “Right!” he said and her face brightened just a little, some of the anxiety melting. “So go on.”

  Bridget read:

  You could sit there with the stain on your shoes

  Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave

  And talk about your everyday concerns.

  You had stood the spade up against the wall

  Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.

  Francis interrupted her here and said the husband’s lines:

  I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.

  I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.

  Bridget looked up at Francis, encouraged. She resumed:

  I can repeat the very words you were saying.

  “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day

  Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.”

  Think of it, talk like that at such a time!

  What had how long it takes a birch to rot

  To do with what was in the darkened parlor?

  You couldn’t care!

  He stopped her there. “Good work, Bridget,” he said. “So what is it exactly that Amy finds indefensible in her husband’s behavior?” he asked her, throwing her this softball to build her confidence.

  Lots of hands went up. But not Bridget’s. Her hand was holding her pen above her notebook, poised to write down whichever of her classmates’ answers Francis would approve. “Bridget?” he said.

  Bridget looked up at him but didn’t answer, and now Francesca was waving her hand, dying to answer. “Bridget will answer,” Francis said. He reached across the table, put his fingers around Bridget’s pen, gently removed it from her hand. He held it in his own and waited. He repeated the question. “What does she object to, Bridget?”

  “That he can think of things like birch rotting when his child’s just dead?” She was still eyeing her pen in Francis’s hand.

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “All right. That’s what she doesn’t like.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said, and Bridget smiled. He put the pen down on the table in front of her. But when she reached for it, he put his hand over it until she took her hand away, and left the pen alone. Then he turned to the class. “Let’s see how it comes out,” he said. “We’ll act it out.” He wanted them to see how dynamic the poem was, the action, the movement up and down the stairs, the changing of places. “Yes, we’ll act it out,” he said. He was looking straight at Amy.

  She shook her head; she knew what was coming next.

  “Amy?”

  Amy didn’t answer.

  “We need you to play the young mother’s part,” he said. “You’ve got the same name as she does.”

  Amy put the collar of her jacket up. “Not me,” she said.

  He waited.

  Amy shook her head again, scrunched her chin even further down in her collar.

  He moved his gaze to Joanna.

  “You want me to be the wife?” Joanna asked. She thought he’d given up on Amy.

  He shook his head. “I want you to be the husband.”

  “No, you,” Joanna answered. “You’re the only man in the room.”

  “That’s immaterial,” he said. “You can take another’s part.”

  “I’ll be the narrator,” Francesca said. Her hand was way up, waving again.

  “Good, Francesca!” For he wouldn’t refuse her again. He was delighted that she understood how different this was from many poems in which the poet does all the talking. He would get them to think about that tomorrow. “You can read the narration from your chair,” he went on. “But I’ll not be the husband,” he added, hoping that Joanna would relent. To give her time, he told the class how he loved to walk in New England woods, where a hundred years ago there was pasture, and find the little graveyards behind the cellar holes.

  “Can we do the poem now?” Francesca interrupted.

  “Oh, all right, I’ll do it!” Amy announced, relenting, as if she were doing the class a favor, and stood from her chair, moved around the square of tables to the front of the room.

  “All right, Amy!” Francis said. “Joanna?”

  But Francesca couldn’t wait any longer. She cleared her throat. “Home Burial,” she announced.

  “Wait a minute, we need the husband,” Amy said, looking at Joanna. Francesca stopped.

  “Okay, I’ll be the husband,” Joanna said.

  Francesca was so eager she started again before Joanna got to the front of the room:

  He saw her from the bottom of the stairs

  Before she saw him. She was starting down,

  Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.

  “So where’s the window I’m looking out of?” Amy interrupted. Francis didn’t answer. He just raised his eyebrows, and then left the front of the room, moved to the seat that Joanna had occupied, and sat down.

  “Behind you,” Joanna said, standing next to Amy. She took Amy’s hand, and turned her so that her back was to the windows of the classroom. “You’re on the landing now,” she said. “And here’s the window you are looking through back over your shoulder to the graveyard.” She pointed to the classroom windows. Then she backed away from Amy, facing her, toward the other side of the room. “Here’s the foot of the stairs,” she said, “and the door is right behind me.” Her staging mirrored her drawing on the blackboard. She reached behind herself to touch an imaginary doorknob. Francis allowed himself a smile as Francesca began to read:

  She took a doubtful step and then undid it

  To raise herself and look again. He spoke

  Advancing toward her:

  Then Joanna read the husband’s question:

  “What is it you see

  From up there always—for I want to know.”

  And Joanna, the young husband now, took her hand off the latch of the door behind her, tilting her head up toward Amy on the stairs, and everyone saw the young husband moving up the stairs to his wife, then climb past her to the window and discover the grave she’d been staring at.

  The three students rode the poem until, near the end, Amy’s hand was on the latch. She read the wife’s concluding lines:

  Friends make pretense of following to the grave,

  But before one is in it, their minds are turned

  And making the best of their way back to life

  And living people, and things they understand.

  But the world’s evil. I won�
��t have grief so

  If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!

  Then Amy mimed pushing the door wider open, stepping backward, away from her husband and out of the house, and Joanna read the last line:

  I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!

  And then it was over. The stairs melted away, the front door disappeared. The two stood, looking at each other, surprised to be who they used to be again, and sensing they were not.

  After a while someone asked, “Do you think she ever comes back?”

  The students looked to Francis, waiting for him to answer. But of course he didn’t. He was still in Joanna’s seat, as if he were one of the students. Joanna and Amy still stood up front. It was their class now, more than his.

  “Naturally she comes back,” Joanna said. “You think he’s going to just let her walk away?” She was very sure. After all, she ought to know, she had just played the part. “It says right here: He’s making the best of his way back to life and living people and things they understand.”

  “And that’s good, you think?” Francis asked. “That’s what he should do?”

  “Oh, yes,” Joanna said.

  “I do too!” he said.

  Nevertheless, an argument ensued about whether Amy comes back. Some of the girls insisted the poem was too sad for a happy ending. Finally, one of them asked Amy: “How’d you feel just now, when you played Amy in the poem?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy said, shrugging to show she didn’t give a damn, wanted to get back to her disengagement. None of her classmates believed her. They stared and waited.

  “Answer the question, Amy,” Francis said from Joanna’s seat.

  Amy turned to Francis, keeping her mouth shut. She wasn’t used to being ordered around.

  “Your opinion, Amy,” Francis demanded again. He’d keep her there forever if he had to, to make her answer.

  “She comes home,” Amy said, giving in.

  “Why?”

  “Because she has no other place to go,” Amy said, thinking quickly. For she was damned if she was going to admit she thought the bereaved young mother comes back to her husband out of love. “The woman needs a house like everybody else,” she said. “She has to eat.” Amy knew damn well marriage as an economic contract and a trap wasn’t what Frost was getting at, but it was a smart answer. She could tell by the look on her classmates’ faces she was the only one who had thought of it. Now she had her persona back to go with her black clothes and spiked hair. Francis had to admit he liked her answer; it showed how smart she was.