by Sara Dillon
It was Miles who made me say long after, even more than thirty years after, that everything wonderful in my life was frontloaded. What happened that winter made me think that I could have everything, as I said. This notion lasted a very long time, and stood up against much evidence to the contrary.
He had just finished a Master’s degree in history, something about the Puritan consciousness. He could only have been twenty-four at the most, it’s not clear to me now, but he was young enough to be forgiven.
When I remember myself at that time, I see myself as I am now but he as he was then; it is bizarre how we can transpose ourselves, unchanging, though of course I must look so different, perhaps unrecognizable, though I cannot see the difference. I can’t imagine that I was only fourteen, though then everything was before me and now pretty much everything is over and gone.
It was that fall that my brother Jack got married. Or should I say, had his first marriage. He was really too young to marry, and there was all the fuss of a 1970s wedding; the bridemaids with their hair in curls and matching clothes with an autumn motif. Una and I were bridesmaids. We looked ridiculous in wide brown cummerbunds and ankle length skirts. Jack, who had driven long distance buses rather than study during his first years in college, was joining the Navy in lieu of the Vietnam draft. Gramma was dead set against the marriage and took to her bed with headaches.
Jack always rather enjoyed that kind of opposition and went around asking us why our mother was against the marriage; could we believe she was doing this. He stomped, and hit one fist on the other palm. After the wedding was over, I had another bout of feverish longing for separation, determined to reign over only what I wanted, what was joyful. It was a theory, a pledge, and related to everything I did or thought. At least that’s how I recall the coherence of the time.
I took out my notebook in study hall and wrote, I know it could never happen; I could never have Mr. Bradford. It’s hard to know what I was asking for. Every walk down the path into the school became suffused with a sense of crisis and a kind of anticipation that made me wary of every car and every shadow. Seasonal forces were coming together; from fall to winter, a passe-muraille.
It seemed to me that Mr. Bradford had taken a long look down the sweep of history and come back with some great answer that made him laugh and laugh; a strange kind of laughter full of fatigue and compassion. He showed us grainy old film footage from World War I and World War II; the Russian Revolution, Lenin, and then Stalin, giving speeches and refugees everywhere on the move. He talked about All Quiet on the Western Front and Quiet Flows the Don. He knew so much, and he knew it so well. He knew it set to music.
Perhaps he was out of his mind, as they tried to convince me long afterwards, but even now at this remove I don’t think so. I was almost fifteen and he was just twenty four, and he couldn’t stop himself from looking for something in the pile of paperbacks on his desk, and in me, and in staring for long periods of time out the window with his long grey Viking eyes. You couldn’t call it pleasurable, but that early winter had the unmistakable feel of the inevitable, and even then, I couldn’t fail to recognize it as such.
I don’t know which of the films it was. Undoubtedly, it had to do with the endless wars and the endless winters in early twentieth century Europe; the burnt villages and the summary executions. The class was over, and I wandered down the hallway and over the glass bridges linking one building of the high school with another. It was autumn, real autumn, late autumn. I got as far as the main lobby, alien territory, then turned around and walked quickly back up all the ramps, like climbing a mountain in stages.
As I re-entered the upper zone, I saw him walking towards me; the green sweater with a small hole near the shoulder. He was smiling in an angry, sad way, leaning slightly forward. We both stopped and looked at each other in the mid-day crush of students at the top of one of the complicated staircases.
I was looking for you. I had to find you, I said. It was daring, but I said it.
Mr. Bradford turned me around to walk me back with him towards the history wing at the top of the hill. He seemed to think something about me very amusing, as if he knew what I was going to say before I said it, and I was simply confirming what he already knew.
He said something like, I was looking for you, too, but not quite as clear as that, I think. So here you are, or Yes, here we are.
We walked all around the school for an hour or more, all the way to the end of each darkening corridor. We walked past unknown zones, banks of typewriters, the food preparation wing. We talked about the film, and even Jack’s wedding. I told him about my piano lessons with Madame Celeste and he said he wanted to hear me play.
We had been looking for each other, clawing the air. Mr. Bradford and I were thoroughly lost, walking up and down the tiers and sections of the huge building with its bridges and sudden dead ends. We were probably thinking of the film we had seen, the pathetic wartime figures in black and white, stepping stiffly out of their real time, their villages razed and burnt, refugees on wagons, rural Ukrainians; Holocaust victims looking out through the fence at us.
I had to see you, I said.
Yes, Mr. Bradford was wearing his green sweater, the one with the moth hole at the elbow, and a button-down shirt; and those corduroy trousers. It was fall, really fall now. In Vermont, that tipped quickly into winter. Spring and fall were short.
I want to hear you play the piano, he said.
We walked past the room, empty now, where I had my French classes. I thought of mentioning the passe-muraille, the story we had read in French class, though I didn’t like straining after a metaphor like that, even back then. I knew better than to bring a metaphor into the conversation.
And so Mr. Bradford made me think that I could have anything I wanted. He confirmed my childhood belief that through some special blessing I was walking along a path ringed round with a kind of aura, an aura of white birches or maybe olive trees, depending on the motif. I would sit still and wish for everything, and everything would be mine.
It took a very long time for me to stop believing that. I did, though, eventually.
Mr. Bradford and I knew how to find each other in the hallway after that, on dark afternoons. It seemed to be telepathic, directed from somewhere over our heads.
In the mornings, I would often run into him on his way into school, carrying the heavy bag that made him veer sideways. He would ask me to come along to his office, where he brewed coffee straightaway. A few students were usually milling around, waiting to talk with him, wanting to run by him their ideas on the last days of the Romanovs, or Erich Fromm on Marx. I stayed for a few minutes and then left abruptly, without any explanation. That was how I did things. I would always run into him later, even on days when I didn’t have his class.
He assigned us each a book to analyze and report on; funny enough, mine was The Puritan Dilemma, a biography of John Winthrop, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On the day of my report, I remember him sitting riveted, staring at me as I said, What the book makes me consider is the question John Winthrop wrestles with: How to do right in a world that does wrong. Mr. Bradford took this up as a theme, the world that does wrong, and even told Gramma on parents’ night what a splendid job I had done with my report.
One day after class he handed me a large, heavy envelope filled with typed pages.
Take it away with you and read it, he told me.
I went into my bedroom at home, sat on the brass bed that was so large it nearly took up the entire room, and opened what he had given me. There were so many pages they hardly fit in the envelope.
I am here in Saint Johnsbury, at my wife Alma’s house. Her family is in the next room; I’m out on the porch in the cold with a blanket over my head. They keep asking me to come back in, but I can’t go in. This is it, Catherine. Unequivocally it. It is up up up or downhill all the way.
His letter went on in that manner, about how he got drunk on the day of his own wedding and pass
ed out, remembering nothing. About going to the Democratic National Convention in 1968 and being beaten senseless, about Alma’s paintings, and Doctor Zhivago (Alma is Tanya, he wrote).
Either it is up, he repeated, or it is downhill all the way.
And so Mr. Bradford in some way declared himself. He was sitting alone, in Saint Johnsbury, not so far from where I was spending Sunday with my parents at Aunt Olive’s in Hyde Park, with a blanket over his head, refusing to come out, hoarding the typewriter. Alma, exasperated, looking through the glass door at him.
He wasn’t laughing as he handed me the letter. He turned away quickly, as if he wanted me to read it, but out of his sight and hearing, as soon as possible.
As the fall faded away, Mr. Bradford began to look scruffy. He wore the same green sweater for several days at a time. His straight, wheat colored hair hung down at a sharp angle on one side. He smelled of cigarettes and looked tired.
He wrote words all over the chalkboard.
He read to us on Blaise Pascal’s wager and the leap of faith. He would begin to laugh and drop the chalk into its tray. The students waited patiently as Mr. Bradford leaned his back against the chalkboard and closed his eyes.
From November, it was the snow season. My mother bought me a coat at her department store that looked like a Russian army officer’s, dark blue with grey trim at the cuffs and hem. I loved it, though I realize I could hardly pull off that look today. I might try, if tempted. On the day of the first big snowstorm, they closed the high school in the early afternoon.
It was rare for school to be called early. The Vermont kids spilled out of the doors, jackets hanging open, lighting up before they reached the end of the path. I walked back towards the corridor that went past our classroom; the lights were turned out now and the only brightness was from the falling snow outside the window. Not surprisingly—in fact I was anticipating it—Mr. Bradford was walking toward me from the darker end of the corridor, smiling as if he had personally caused the snowstorm.
Even now, I can trust Mr. Bradford. From beyond the grave, his, I can trust him. He is there, walking toward me as expected.
He won’t disappoint; he will not fail to appear.
We went into the empty classroom together. I sat in one of the desks and Mr. Bradford stood by the window.
Well, what are we going to do, Catherine? he asked.
The snow fell in that wonderful, endless way it can, when there is no thought for what happens when it stops, but rather you want it to fall all night, on and on until it causes ecological catastrophe.
We stayed in the classroom until everyone had left the school. Mr. Bradford pointed to a long white car. All on its own in the parking lot, slowly being covered with snow.
I’ve inherited that from my grandmother, he said. It’s a Cadillac. A 1960 Cadillac! He began to laugh, and put his hands up to his eyes.
May I offer you a lift home, Catherine? I think he asked. As I recall, I hardly said anything. He asked me if I would call him Miles, and I said no, I couldn’t do that.
Outside, the streetlamps threw down a yellow light into the parking lot. We could hear snowplows out on the road. I helped brush snow off the car and then climbed in next to him on the green plastic-coated front seat.
Can you believe I drive this? he said.
Driving was more like gliding that evening, or riding in a big slippery boat through the dark. I have no idea how the car moved forward; several times we nearly spun into snowdrifts on the side of the road.
Please don’t bring me all the way home, I said to him.
Where do you want me to leave you?
Here, here is fine, anywhere, I said. I knew that I could handle any drifts of snow, however extreme, with ease.
He stopped the car, or it slid to a halt. No one else seemed to be out. He looked at me. I believe he reached out his hands to hold me.
I love you, Mr. Bradford, I said absurdly, then jumped out into the snow and started off for home as fast as I could.
We were used to snow up there; it was usual, familiar to be in deep snow back then. I knew that Mr. Bradford was turning his car around; I saw its lights disappear and the massive white boat of a car was gone.
At some point, I did begin to think of him as Miles, or perhaps Miles Bradford, but I really didn’t call him by any particular name at all. For my birthday in late November, he gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse Five, inscribed, With the best wishes and interests of a Chum.
Come to my house, meet me there this afternoon, he said.
I took the bus downtown and found the apartment building he had described. It was almost right across from the department store my mother worked in. I ran up his block, up the desolate front steps and opened the front door with the spare key he had given me. It was silent inside, the most pervasive silence I had ever heard. It was a heavy old apartment, with grand sliding doors and large panes of glass. Alma’s paintings were on the walls, tiny trees stuck in great fields of snow. She seemed to have a thing about sunsets. Sunsets on snow, not my cup of tea.
I saw her slippers in the corner. How quiet they were. Miles Bradford and Alma had a young son, Miles Jr, one apparent cause of their marriage. I saw his crib in a corner of the back room.
The grand piano Miles had told me about was in the living room, also inherited from his grandmother. Make some coffee, he had joked at school, but I actually did make some. The coffee maker hummed and buzzed. I could see the huge clock on the steeple of the Unitarian Church just outside the front window. Finally, Miles drove up to the house, looking unconcerned, even unaware that anyone was in his house.
I guess now I should say that something awful happened, that Miles frightened or hurt me, or that I ran from the house in horror, but nothing of the sort took place.
No such thing happened. They tried to make Miles out to be a madman, but at least with me, in those days, nothing of that kind happened.
Miles came in and stamped the snow from his shoes, smiled at me, and drank his coffee. And we played Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words on the piano. Miles played better than I did, to tell the truth, but he liked my playing, it made him smile almost to the point of laughing, another of those great private jokes of his as he watched and listened.
It grew late; I knew that Alma would be coming home from her job at the art supply store. Miles had to go and pick up Little Miles, Milesy I think they called him.
And then he reached out his arms and held me. He held my face down into his sweater, held me as the dark fell on the snow and the light rose up from the snow to meet it. He stood completely still in the room and held me, and that is all that happened.
That’s all. Miles sat in one chair and I sat in another. It was beginning to get dark. Alma would be back. Alma was Tanya.
I had read Zhivago, but decided to read it again.
Miles put on his jacket; it looked like a bomber jacket, a little silly. I put on my Russian army officer’s coat. We held each other in the middle of the big old room with its heavy doors, and then I was gone, leaving first, racing down the street, avoiding the store my mother worked in, hopping a bus on Church Street, one that would return me to the neighborhood of trivial little boxes, ours dark grey against the new snow.
My mother got me a job in the department store, gift wrapping for Christmas. She thought I would be thrilled, they always thought I wanted pocket money, or responsibility. In fact, I spent most of the time hiding in the back because people I knew came into the store with some frequency. I still remember the smell of the wrapping paper and the ribbons, new and Christmasy. I was clumsy at it; the customers pitied me.
Miles found out about the job and he would stand at the front door of the store, peering in, laughing at me. Twice or so he ventured in, walking past as if he didn’t know me.
——
Mary Magdalene
It isn’t clear when my parents began to hear what was going on; I think it was a teacher from the high school who came to find Gramma in the
store and let her in on it. Just when they thought I was being perfect and good, it turned out I was spending a lot of time with my history teacher.
Your brother and sister are just humiliated. Gramma tried this approach; it was the one she knew best. And imagine how I felt, hearing this from someone who cares about you so.
Daddy didn’t say much; he didn’t like to get involved in such things. In his own way, he seemed sympathetic to me.
I didn’t want them to know. I didn’t want to crusade for Mr. Bradford. I didn’t want to keep him and fight for him; there was no reaction that seemed right. I just wanted to meet him, and have no one know. On Sundays, I would still go to Aunt Olive’s in Hyde Park with them. I didn’t want to hear any weeping and wailing about Mr. Bradford, and what was I thinking.
The teacher who told my mother conceded that Mr. Bradford was charming, and very clever.
In the New Year, I kept meeting Miles at his house, but I felt myself in danger; I felt watched. It was risky to come home late. My mother could be set off at any moment about how well I was doing in my classes, and how shocked everyone was, and disappointed, and how embarrassed she was to see people.
My piano teacher, Madame Celeste, didn’t know, and that was a relief. She continued to tell me never, ever to wear jeans, a subject on which I needed little convincing. Wear velour, she said, rubbing her hand down along her thigh. She said that I could be a concert pianist as she had wanted to be, but that her father forbade her, and then her first marriage came. She had to flee Paris during the war with her little son; she had lost everything at the railway station. But well, I couldn’t imagine telling the person next to you on the platform, as she had, Mind this for a few moments, will you? Leaving the family jewels with a stranger when the whole world was going to hell? I mean, really. I listened to her as I ate one of her special mayonnaise sandwiches after my lesson. She told me how the same seagull visited her yard year after year, and she always made him lovely treats.
