The Keyhole Opera

by Bruce Holland Rogers

  11. Parting Words

  We relight our candles and say the names again. Franklin and Madison. Gates and Burr. Men who were bigger than their times and men who weren’t big enough. We chant and dance our fathers’ fathers back into the earth, into history. As they go, we aren’t sure that we know ourselves any better than we did before. What was special about them, about their generation? What should we have learned? What is special about our generation, about us? Who are we? By the time we think to ask, it’s almost too late. Only Jefferson and Washington remain.

  Tom says, “Why ask us? Didn’t we say that the world belongs to the living?”

  George is more concrete. “Lean in at the plate,” he says. “Lean in.”

  The Main Design That Shines Through Sky and Earth

  1. For The Girls Who Have Everything

  During the drive, Heather says, “Aunt Sylvie, what’s for lunch?” She asks it just before we pass the last burger place, before the roads change from asphalt to gravel. She was along when I shopped for groceries: Oatmeal. Spaghetti. Rice.

  I say, “Apples and cheese. Maybe a tomato. Want to split a tomato?”

  “Okay.” She watches the burger place go by.

  I could afford to buy her a burger. By myself, I eat them whenever I want.

  Another few miles of dirt road and sagebrush, and we’re home. My house sits on ten acres of flat scrub. I have a bedroom, a sitting room, and a kitchen. I could have a bigger house somewhere else. But this is where Aunt Sylvie lives.

  My sister has an enormous house with fourteen rooms, green lawns, and stables out back for the girls’ horses. The girls take music classes, and gymnastics. They play soccer and softball. They have everything. Everything.

  Heather helps me cut apples so thin that before we eat each slice we can hold it up to see the light shine through. When I share the tomato with her, she cuts her half into small bites to make it last. She knows that a weekend with me is a long time. Aunt Sylvie is boring. On these weekends, the only way to not go crazy is to do one thing at a time. Cut the tomato. Smell it. Taste this bite.

  After lunch, there’s nothing to do but watch the clouds.

  2. First Day

  It’s your first day as a teacher, and all day, you’re remembering. You show them the coat room. Today, no one has a coat to hang up. It’s hot out. But you remember the red and blue reversible jacket you had and how you could stretch the tails out like a sail and lean into the wind. You believed you could fly, that you were always about to lift off.

  The number one pencils haven’t changed. You pass out the paper with solid and dotted lines for practicing letters. At the chalk board, you demonstrate writing the big O and the little o with a piece of chalk from a box that has never been opened before. Once, the smell of chalk dust was new.

  As you go from pupil to pupil, correcting how each holds the pencil, you remember the smell of Mrs. Wolff, your teacher back then. She smelled like strawberry Koolaid. You think of those colors and flavors, the green green of lime, the red red of cherry, purple color that you never saw on a real grape any more than you ever tasted that flavor in anything but grape Koolaid and Jello and lollipops.

  When your boys and girls say “One and one make two, one and two make three,” you remember that you once knew the personalities of numerals: the aggressive 2, the mysterious 5, the happy 8. You remember that the child who made these memories—why should this be so startling?—was you.

  3. Ms. Amante

  Biology One is being team taught this year. One teacher is Mr. Tott. The other is Ms. Amante. Ms. Amante has long legs and wears boots that grip her calves. Her lipstick is the color of blood. Sometimes when she pauses and thinks of what to say next, she bites her lip. Her full, red lip.

  During the unit on perception, Ms. Amante says that Helen Keller could tell one person from another by scent, and never mind perfumes. That’s not what Ms. Amante is talking about. She means the clean scent of skin, and the students can smell it, too, if they try. She says that a man may fixate on the way a particular woman smells, may pine for her as he holds a sweater that retains her scent. That day, she’s wearing a sweater.

  There’s something like spice and earth in the air on the days when it is Ms. Amante’s turn to teach.

  Ms. Amante says, during the unit on arthropods, that the male praying mantis doesn’t know if he’s going to get lucky, get eaten, or both. She says this with a smile that makes the boys wonder if Ms. Amante can read their minds.

  Males compete. Red-winged blackbirds hurry north in the spring to scout locations the females will like. Big horn sheep make the mountains echo with the clash of horns. Deer lock antlers. Stallions rear and kick and bite. Some seagulls feed the females in courtship. Dinner first, then mating, says Ms. Amante. She says that humans like to pretend that biology somehow doesn’t apply to them.

  Her fingernails are as red as her lipstick. Her hips are wide.

  All that effort to bond, and what’s the result? Thirty percent of the chicks in a given nest are the offspring of another male, and it’s not just mama birds that are stepping out. Rabbit, elk, and ground squirrel females slip away for something on the side, and maybe on the other side, too.

  Ms. Amante is married. She never talks about her husband.

  A certain hormone called oxytocin inspires the urge to cuddle. And other things. An ovulating mouse that gets an extra dose of oxytocin will work twice as hard to get males to mount her. As she reports this, Ms. Amante enunciates. Her mouth makes an O when she says mount.

  The unit on vascular plants seems to be mostly about flowers. A male wasp sees the female of his dreams and copulates with her. Then he sees her sister—even better!—and has another go. But really, it’s two orchids. The flowers have duped him twice. He’s been taken advantage of, used up, and dropped off to walk the rest of the way home. And the students wonder, Does he mind? Such speculation is not officially part of the lesson plan. Ms. Amante won’t answer the question.

  Powdery anther. Sticky pistil. When Ms. Amante describes them, all the students, boys and girls alike, want to hear more, more, more.

  4. Guru

  Sam could have taken the number 15 bus. The stop was closer to his house, the route more direct. Walking two blocks out of his way for the 64 guaranteed that he’d be late, and being late could be one more thing that was wrong. One more thing in a long list. His house was a mess—dishes piled in the sink, floors that hadn’t been swept in recent memory and probably had never been scrubbed since he and Cheryl had bought the place. The diaper pail stank. Cheryl’s old cat had started peeing on the rug. Somebody ought to be taking care of all this, but Cheryl’s hands were already full as she juggled all the things that had piled up during her maternity leave. Sam and Cheryl didn’t have the money for a housekeeper on top of day care, not with the mortgage. On top of that, Sam worked for idiots. He didn’t know anyone who didn’t work for idiots, but his particular idiots were worse than most.

  When the 64 arrived, the driver was some woman. Sam stood on the bottom step and said, “Albert working today?”

  “Yep,” she said, “but he’s got the other 64.”

  Sam said, “I’ll wait.”

  It would cost him the fare of $2.50 plus another half an hour of waiting to ride Albert’s bus, but as soon as Sam saw the driver’s face, he knew it was going to be worth it. Albert was smiling at something a passenger had said as the bus doors opened. “Well, good morning!” Albert said.

  “Hey, good morning,” Sam said, paying the fare. The greeting was so warm and personal, but Sam doubted that Albert really remembered him. Sam had ridden with Albert only twice before.

  “How are you?” the driver asked.

  “Not so good,” Sam told him. “Life’s a mess.”

  “What kind of mess?” Albert said, still smiling. “What could life get to be, that you’d go calling it a mess?”

  Sam told him: the house, the new baby, the idiot bosses.

  “Well,
sure!” Albert said. “But life is good. That baby, I bet he’s beautiful.”

  “She.”

  “Aw, yes. Looks like her mother, don’t she?”

  “As a matter of fact, she does.”

  “Now,” said Albert, “you tell me, sir. Did you marry an ugly woman or a pretty one? Did you love her on first sight, or did you have to force yourself?”

  Sam laughed. “Sort of in between. I mean, I noticed Cheryl gradually. She’s beautiful.”

  “I see. Beautiful wife, beautiful daughter. Nice house, too, I bet. A job that makes all this possible. What am I forgetting?”

  Sam was smiling. He could have told himself all this, but coming from Albert, it had power.

  “Oh, I know,” Albert said. “You ever try washing a dish for pleasure? You make the sudsy water hot, and the rinse water cold. Makes your hands tingle.”

  “Can’t say I ever tried that.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got a whole house full of pleasure waiting for you every day,” Albert said.

  Other passengers, Albert’s regular riders, nodded their heads.

  In spite of arriving late, Sam had what passed for a pretty good day at work. He rode the 15 home and got dinner started. He played with his beautiful baby while Cheryl finished dinner. After dinner, he loaded the dishwasher and then scrubbed the kitchen floor with warm water. It didn’t exactly make his hands tingle, but he found that if he was really paying attention to it, even scrubbing the floor could yield a sort of pleasure.

  Cheryl had put the baby to bed, and then she had fallen asleep on the couch. Sam lay down next to her and stroked her hair. That Albert, he thought, knew things. The man was a guru of simple truths.

  Albert, at the end of his shift, returned home weary. He had a beer to help him unwind. His face ached. It took something out of a man, being so damned sociable all day.

  At the supper table, his boys were in high spirits, cracking wise. His wife told them gently to settle down. They didn’t.

  “You two cut it out,” he warned.

  They were quiet, but then one showed a mouthful of chewed peas to the other. They both laughed.

  “Damn it!” Albert shouted. “Is a little peace and quiet in my own home too much to ask for? Go to your room! Both of you!” Then he threw down his napkin. It was already too late to enjoy his supper.

  5. The Great Poem of Latvia

  Foul weather began the misadventure which was to terminate in verse in a difficult tongue. The captain had hunted seals off the English and Spanish Maloons before, and he knew the islands thereabout, but in a heavy fall of snow and a swirling wind the island profiles were changed in their aspect. What seemed familiar was not, and the familiar lay hidden. Thus the captain, seeking safety on Swan Island, mistook some other rocks for a point that he must round for Chatham Harbor. He was confident of deep water, but the ship struck with great violence a ledge that was under the surface.

  Under the American captain were four sailors: a free Negro from New York called Henry Dodge, two young Englishmen of excellent character called Joseph Matison and Richard Kenney, and the Spaniard Tomaso Limero who had signed articles in Montevideo when the ship needed to replace an American crewman who must be put ashore there for reasons of severe ill health. It was this particular composition of crew that doomed the ship, for as the captain perceived how he might save his vessel, badly stove as she was, so did Tomaso Limero have his own contradictory notions. Limero had always claimed to know these waters better than the captain himself, and in this moment of extremity he asserted his knowledge and insisted that he knew how to bring the ship at least to a place where she might be grounded and her stores salvaged for the survival of the crew.

  For every order the captain gave, Limero interfered and gave a contradictory one. Matison took the captain’s part and argued for discipline, whereupon Limero argued that the captain’s orders were very foolish and should end in the extinction of all aboard. While these two nearly came to blows, Dodge and Kenney were thrown into a great confusion, obeying first this order and then the contradictory one. Either the captain or Limero might have prevailed as the ship’s savior, but neither set of orders was carried to completion, and the ship soon took on so much water that she must be abandoned in haste.

  They rowed the ship’s boat through a growing storm, and for some time they followed an iron-bound shore where even if they succeeded in landing beneath the cliffs they could not haul the boat up and prevent her being dashed to pieces in the night. At last they espied a shelf that suited them, and they spent a wretched night soaked through, with the boat whelmed over on the rocks as their only shelter.

  In the morning they sought the ship, but she had utterly foundered without trace. The men despaired of their continued existence. However, for their physical continuation they had tools that might serve even through winter if the men did not lose their wits. They had the boat for going among the islands, which the captain now recognized in clear weather. They had knives, some iron tools, and a quantity of cut saplings carried aboard the ship for the making of seal clubs. They had steel and flints for fire.

  They at first killed sea-elephants only for their blubber, which served as fuel. In time, as they exhausted their hard tack, they began to eat the lean of those creatures. They also hunted seal and wild fowl. The birds of the Maloons were so unaccustomed to man that they might be killed rather easily by stoning, and foxes that made bold to raid the larder also made easy prey.

  The shipwrecked crew built a shelter of stones. They dried the skins of fur seals, rubbed them soft, and sewed them with a sail needle and thread ravelled from the boat’s sail. They roofed their shelter with fur seal skins, and fashioned Moccasins from the tougher skin of hair seals. When Macaroni penguins arrived and made a rookery among the albatross, the men feasted on eggs.

  All of this bespeaks their efforts to remain strong of body, but the greatest danger was to their minds. For the short season when they might eat fresh penguin eggs, the men had brief respite from ordinary fare so vile it could be swallowed only with the sauce of immense hunger. The fox, rook, and seal flesh were often only half cooked over the spitting fires of blubber. The smoke of those fires made the skin of the five men all of one sooty color. When there was no blubber, fires made of dried Tushook grass were even smokier, more bitter, and less effective for roasting. Every day made the men more wretched.

  The captain thought the circumstances of the wreck best forgotten as the matter now was of survival. Limero and Matison, however, regarded one another in enmity, and either one might erupt at any moment in insults for the other. By the light of a smoky fire one night, Matison beat Limero about the legs with a seal club and said that he would kill him for a mutineer. The captain intervened, but later Matison and Limero each sought out Kenney and Dodge to propose a murderous alliance. The captain ordered a truce but did not know what else he could do.

  The next night, Henry Dodge began to mutter in rhyme. The words, as far as the others could tell, were nonsense, but when questioned, Dodge averred that they were a poem in the Latvian tongue. The poem was an epic of that nation, taught to Dodge by a sailor with whom the Negro had once shipped. And as he muttered, the other men grew restless to know the story of the poem. Dodge allowed as he could remember the story only in the Latvian tongue, but he would teach the words and their meaning to the men a few lines at a time, if they were agreeable.

  Winter followed on with snows so heavy and deep that betimes there was nothing for the men to do but remain in their pinched shelter, chewing on the roots of Tushook grass and repeating lines of the heroic poem that Dodge taught. Now when disputes broke out, they were mild and about the poem, about how a particular line went. Dodge was a poor teacher as he often remembered a line in complete contradiction to how he had taught it only the day before. The men often remarked that Latvian was a queer tongue and took Dodge to task for his poor recollection of it. But through the winter, the poem grew more intelligible and satisfying to teac
her and students alike, and the men took turns reciting it. Spring returned at long last, and a Nantucket whaler one day was seen and signaled with smoke, and the men were saved. Henry Dodge signed articles aboard that ship, and the other men were put ashore at such ports as suited them. None of them ever saw any of the others again.

  The captain returned at length to sealing, taking pains to teach the men under his command a most strict obedience in nautical matters, and teaching them also the poem which gave him and many sailors under him a curious comfort in stormy seas. He learned only in his retirement and upon meeting a scholar from the city of Riga that the epic was only the most absolute nonsense in Latvian or any other language, which made the captain cease to teach it, but also to take all the more comfort and amusement in reciting it.

  6. Legacy

  Starting in her sophomore year, Karen tried three times to register for Dr. Laurel Black’s section of EDU 455, Methods of Secondary Instruction. The closest she got was the seventh spot on the waiting list, and that wasn’t close at all. The few, the lucky few, who managed to get enrolled in Dr. Black’s section were unlikely to drop and make room. So Karen had to take Methods from Dr. Ryerson instead.

  Dr. Black’s fans—and they were numerous among the education majors—insisted that ending up with Ryerson was just short of disaster. The man wasn’t a bad teacher. But in Black’s section, students got the skinny on how to thrive as a high school teacher.

  “Like what?” Karen asked.

  “Philosophy of teaching stuff,” said one friend. “Questioning assumptions. Working the class, not the front office. Putting the student first. The real student, not the student you imagine.”