*
At first he didn’t recognize her, when, three years later, Rachel Kranz signed up to his senior seminar on Shakespeare. The school had recently changed heads. The old guy, Hugo Bantling, also a baseball man, had been generally despised: he was not only a bully, but a drunk and a lech. His saving grace, in the opinion of men like Stu Englander, was, that in addition to all these things, he was lazy, and pretty much left his teachers to do their own work. Though it was true the females suffered under him, whether they were pretty or not, in different ways for either condition. Hugo’s single preoccupation was the baseball field. It was the only part of school life he took seriously, and kept in meticulous order: that diamond green, cut out in grassy chalk and surrounded by fresh earth, sweet with loose dust almost the colour of ripe peach.
There was a second English office on the eastern end of Bertelmeyer Hall, a small room heavily carpeted and lined with books, and mockingly referred to as the Winter Palace. Teachers occasionally used the deep foam couch for a nap in an off period; or sat back in the armchair by the window – to read, or pretend to read, or to remember the days when nothing seemed sweeter to them than the combination of a book and a chair and a window. You could see the baseball field stretched out below; and, after school, the boys looping the ball along the lines gravity sketched out across the green spaces. Sometimes, you heard the gunshot of leather on wood, or the duller percussion of leather on leather; or the unmistakable public disturbance of a base hit, a stolen second, a play at the plate. During fire drills, Bantling hated to see the diamond trampled on by hundreds of no-good slouchy kids, and used to parade along the third base line to keep them off the green – while the bells rang and the traffic of students jammed against the (supposedly) burning walls. Maybe it was just as well the guy was retired, though now the grass grew ragged round the basepaths, and on warms days kids lay together wherever they liked over the patchy infield, or threw those frisbees long and slow across the pitch.
Dr Betty Holroyd, the new head, a forty-something woman with tough dyed-blond hair, had decided to overhaul the place from scratch. Radical renovations were under way, architectural and human: a number of the older teachers had been asked to consider an early retirement. Luckily, Stu Englander had a passionate following among the higher-minded kids – one of the perks of teaching poetry; and so far, at the age of fifty-nine, he’d been spared. Which didn’t mean he wasn’t looking over his shoulder. The thought of retirement terrified him. His wife, Mary Louise, two years older, had already gone part time at the arts foundation that she helped to administer. Stu feared that he had lost the ability, the gift of youth, to fill days on his own; and his relations with his wife no longer prompted and sustained his interest in the world. Sometimes he felt their marriage had reached a kind of intellectual dryness so pervasive it felt like burning.
Mary Louise was a very fat woman with a certain formidable elegance, the shapeliness of a filled vase: one of those Southerners who, in the course of her adult lifetime in the city, without changing her accent or manner one jot, has become a real New Yorker. They shared a one-bedroom apartment high on the Upper West Side, not far from Columbia. Mary Louise maintained an impressive unflagging interest in the lives and enthusiasms of the young. Now she spent her idle afternoons sitting in coffee shops and getting into arguments with strangers, mostly students, who, Stu was amazed to note, rarely seemed to mind. They didn’t have a kitchen to speak of, and their bedroom seemed to have been bricked up around the double bed, but the sitting room stretched long and square with windows on two sides. These overlooked the traffic of Broadway on the one hand, and a few dirty trees on 117th Street. The room itself possessed what Stu liked to describe, among their rare guests, as ‘a carefully distressed appearance of order’. Aside from the books lining one wall, there was the clutter of Mary Louise’s sculpture collection. Mostly her own pieces – a rather disconcerting assortment of isolated limbs, heads, segments of all kinds – mixed with the work of some of her friends.
Mary Louise was a member of the Art Students League and had been for thirty years, almost since they first moved to New York together after college. She had majored in Fine Arts, and had asked around for a space to work in – they didn’t have much money – and somebody had mentioned the League. Free for amateurs and professionals alike; Stu couldn’t say a word against it. The studios were in a Gothic marble-faced building squeezed between high-rise office blocks south of the Park. ‘Unless I paid for it,’ Stu sometimes said, ‘I don’t think I’d get up the get up and go to make it but twice a year.’ Partly exasperated; not without admiration. It was the kind of venture Stuart quickly grew out of: useless and improving at once. Something would come up, and he’d let the ease of not going persuade him that not going was what he wanted to do. But Mary Louise went every Saturday morning, ‘come hell or high water’: she was strict about attendance. In life, in general, she liked to say, she was strict about attendance. Attendance never struck Stu as such great shakes. He winced a little when she said it, one of his wife’s less refined nuggets of wisdom; and from time to time, when they might have made other plans, he tried to unpersuade her. Sometimes they had nothing else to do and he didn’t want her ‘honourable busyness’, which is what he acknowledged it was, to make him feel slack. Even so, on the odd sunny morning, Stuart used to wander down through Central Park to meet his wife for lunch. Both her persistence and the way she ‘hung on to her artiness after college, unlike some’ (as she put it) were sources of pleasure to him.
But the sculptures themselves occasionally oppressed Stu. Their careful, frozen disarray seemed a poor compensation for childlessness. They had never decided to be childless; at least, Stu hadn’t. (Another instance, perhaps, in which his wife had proved stronger, more persistent, less liable to let things drift.) It seemed to have happened in spite of them, with the inevitability of time’s progression. They had ‘gotten’ childless in the same way they had gotten old, by imperceptible degrees. As Mary Louise had often declared, in her bright unflappable drawl, ‘We’ll have a new baby when we have a new bedroom.’ They had a life in which it was impossible to put a child.
*
When Rachel Kranz lifted her white and dutiful hand to signal attendance, Stu marked her ‘present’ without a second thought. He was particular in these matters, and carried his green-bound attendance book, tucked under one arm, to every class. He spent the first minute of instruction calling out names, sharply and clearly and without distinguishing among favourites, and lightly recording the answers on soft paper with a thin-nibbed pen. Of course, she had grown up a little; her top lip no longer swelled with the irregular pressure of steel tracks. But she still wore her hair lightly curled down to her shoulders, and she had retained that stillness, that old-fashioned prettifaction, the air of someone gently preserved, which had struck Stuart so forcibly three years before. He noted her at last at the end of class, as she filed her way unhurried to the door – not afraid to catch his eye, and ready to smile, however briefly, at him. She might have been a girl from any age, he thought; it wouldn’t surprise him to unclasp a locket and see her oval face in it, dimly photographed, smiling back. To see her picture, etched in thin lines, on the wafer-thin frontispiece of a novel by Walter Scott, in some marbled and heavily bound Victorian edition. But he did not answer her look; it surprised him too quickly into melancholy.
In the seven-minute breathing space between that class and the next, he tried to puzzle out the source of it. For one thing, he suspected that her careful preservation came at a price; no doubt she laboured under the rather heavy burden of someone else’s sense of her virtue. What he read as her willingness to please struck him as an unhappy gift. He’d be curious to meet her father. That reflection led him easily to the next, and he remembered his old friend Roger Bathurst. Shortly after the little incident in the English office – with the girl and the book and his swollen red eyes – Roger had failed to show up for work. It was the Tuesday following the long
Easter weekend. They asked Stu to call him at home, and when he didn’t answer the phone, or show up again the day after, he took it on himself to stop by Roger’s flat. (Not, of course, that they had been particularly close; only no one else on the faculty seemed to know Bathurst any better.) Roger lived near the school grounds, in a two-bedroom apartment carved out of one of the neighbourhood’s Victorian gabled cottages. Roger used to walk his two black labs early in the morning before school along the kerbless roads, smoking a cigar and pretending the day didn’t have to happen. Occasionally, coming uphill from the subway station, Stu ran into him. They would stop and talk; Stu liked to feel the carelessness of the dogs in his hands before heading into the office.
The way to Roger’s place was just unfamiliar enough that Stu had to check the road signs sticking out of the grass in the corner yards. Heavy oaks cut off most of the bright spring sunshine; nothing but dusty drifts of it fell through the fingers of the trees. Stu felt the sharpness in his stomach; he was supposed to be eating lunch. Schooldays left you vulnerable to the power of routines. He rang Roger’s bell and while he waited, sat down among the leaves and twigs on his stoop, and looked out on the road. He thought, if Roger were dead, I’d be hearing the dogs now. He listened. Only the intricate movements of a spring breeze; a car turning slowly in the lane ahead. From where he sat he could just make out the broken wire fence of the school football field, a dirty square of grass on raised grounds just outside campus. Mr Arbus, the Computer teacher who doubled as the Lacrosse coach, was leading his boys through drills. Where Stu grew up in small town Ohio, nobody played lacrosse; the only thing that really mattered was football. Not that Stu played football either. It astonished him how little he had changed. His patience, his delight in outward views, in wasted minutes; in this powerful spring loneliness and flowering silence. Unless it was only perceptions, very particular, that refused to change, being too pure, while everything else aged around them. Including the people perceiving. Stu used to be such a lean and hungry youth; now he’d got fat, fat as Mr Arbus with the whistle round his neck, though not as fat as his wife. He stood up painfully to ring the bell again.
And again sat down to wait. It seemed to him then that the answer to broader questions than the whereabouts of his colleague was being deferred. It consoled him greatly that he still had recourse to these pleasant moments; he lived, as he put it to himself, more and more for the minutes offstage. He thought of De Quincey on discovering his sister’s death. How he stared out their bedroom window across the broad English fields of summer, and imagined himself briefly, in the sunshine, running through it – indifferent to his present loss, the girl dead in the bed beside him. Or perhaps Stuart misremembered the passage; occasionally his own experiences entangled themselves with the books he had read, grew inextricably together. And the line ‘welcome summer with thy sunne soft’ ran through his thoughts. Yes, he was ready for the fullness of the year. He repeated it now, under his breath, ‘welcome summer with thy sunne soft’. These echoes wakened in his thoughts throughout the day, like leaves briefly roused by the passage of wind. He had lived a very plain life, yet very rich in literary additions. Well, Roger wasn’t home. Stu stood up now and walked slowly down the neighbourhood street, in and out of shadows, letting go his loneliness bit by bit, till the clamouring schoolhouse rose before him.
By the next day, everyone knew what had happened to Roger Bathurst. He’d run off with a girl, one of his students, just turned eighteen. God, the little spice of envy in the air in the faculty lounge, how it sharpened these recriminations. The women, of course, took the matter solely as an affront; only the men harboured mixed feelings. Stuart himself said at one point, ‘Well, he’s gone over to the other side’ – hoping, by such subtle vagaries, to say what he wanted to say about his old friend without getting caught. People nodded; yes, it was a sick thing to do, there was no turning back. Though what Stuart meant, of course, was that Roger had gone over to the side of youth – to the hungry unruly majority, who had their long wide lives before them, who swelled the hallways and the cafeteria and the baseball field and had their way everywhere but the quiet classrooms where age presided. Only the Biology teacher, Howard Peasbody, had caught his meaning, and gave him a sharp look. He’d been particularly disgusted by the affair. ‘I taught the girl,’ he said. ‘Clumsy, too tall, not particularly bright. Always breaking Petri dishes. It required every ounce of such scholarly mercy as I possess to give her a C – for effort, as they say. I don’t suppose he’ll find her company enlightening.’
Stuart didn’t answer at first. There’d been a time he thought they might deepen their acquaintance into friendship. His own father had taught Science in middle school; Stuart naturally admired the clinical mind. And Howard Peasbody possessed a wide frame of reference, exact tastes. Once, during a faculty seminar, Howard had quoted Ashbery at him. Dr Holroyd, the new head, wanted to say a few words to some of the older staff, on what she called the Challenge of the Younger Generation – the new crop of teachers, some of them hired fresh out of college. A source, occasionally, of envy, of irritation. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘they make mistakes, they learn, and it’s your job to give them a hand. But don’t forget they have something to teach you, too.’ She was appealing to them for renewed commitment, replenished passion. ‘Ask yourself,’ she said, ‘am I running on fumes? Do I really care any more?’ This was just the kind of talk Stuart hated; he muttered, yes, and no, to himself, in answer. And Howard, sensing a kindred spirit, had leaned over and whispered: ‘A look of glass stops you and you walk on shaken: was I the perceived? Did they notice me, this time, as I am, or is it postponed again?’ Stuart smiled: very apt, this is just what he liked, the way art lent style to the boorishness of life. But somehow nothing came of such comradely intimations. Perhaps, he was too competitive; Stuart feared being outdone; but he heard, in his wife’s voice, a kinder judgement given: Howard was a cold fish; he was a warm one. The younger man’s remark on Roger’s ‘defection’ seemed to confirm this intuition; and amidst his heavier regret, Stuart acknowledged, with an internal gesture as slight as a nod, the forfeit of their chance at friendship. His allegiance was clear; and he answered Howard coldly at last, ‘We all find our enlightenment where we can.’
Stuart remembered talking to Bathurst about Dickens earlier that year, after a department meeting. The English faculty had just decided to keep Great Expectations on the junior syllabus, preferring it once more to the longer, heavier David Copperfield. Roger had collared Stuart afterwards; he wanted to unload, and he put his arm around Stu’s shoulder, a rare gesture of fraternity, and led him to the Winter Palace. Roger was furious, in mid-rant; and Stu stood up to watch the end of baseball practice, leaning against the cold of the shut window. The coach was knocking flyballs back, with a runner on third waiting for the catch, and the outfield shallow preparing for the throw home. An early-spring day, a little brisk. Clouds came and went overhead, interrupting the sunshine with pearly shadows. Only the coach and the base runner had worked up a sweat and removed their warm-up tops. It always delighted Stuart to see the elaborate patience of the ball descending; the unhurried pace of gravity bringing it down, and then the instant human fury after the catch. Roger began to declaim passages from David Copperfield, bending the book beneath his heavy thumb. He had the gift of reading without changing tone; he simply used the stuff of his ordinary speech: his thick New York accent, his full-tongued mouth, his exasperated insistence. Stuart hardly listened; it seemed to him that Roger’s indignation was only an excuse for a subtle form of boasting. They amused him, such high pedagogical passions, such vain opinions.
Well, and now Roger had disappeared. To his own surprise, Stuart felt a little lonelier because of it. At the end of the fraught, mostly wasted day (spent in hastily convened assemblies, in faculty meetings, in fruitless and emotional discussions of the affair with his several classes), Stuart repaired to the little English office, grateful to have a minute to himself. He pulled the copy of
David Copperfield from the shelf and sat back heavily on the foam couch and began to read. Cloud cover darkened the windows – in that grey light, Stuart could see the fine grain in the old glass – and eventually gave way to rain. The first spit of water on the panes made him blink. ‘You must think of me at my best, old boy,’ Roger had read. ‘Come! Let us make that bargain.’ Stuart guessed now that Roger had been trying to tell him something; Roger had wanted to talk. Secret lives exert great outward pressure; he had wanted at least to make himself known, in some fashion, he had wanted at least to utter certain relevant sentiments. Of course, in the end Steerforth ran off with Emily; and Roger Bathurst himself eloped with one of his students. Surely, Stuart thought, we live our lives in books; though he, for his part, had been content to stop short at their pages.
A month later, he got a letter from Roger, postmarked in Santa Fe. It included a photograph. He had shaved off his beard, and, in the bright glare of red hills, almost looked the part of a prematurely balding, disreputable young hippy: in cut-off jeans shorts and high-strapped sandals, with his hairy arm around the sun-burnt shoulders of an otherwise pale, rather big young woman, trying hard not to smile too broadly. ‘I tell you something,’ the letter read, ‘if I weren’t so damn happy I’d be a miserable bastard, wouldn’t I?’ The girl had her palm on the head of a black dog, keeping it still. Stuart hadn’t taught her himself; and over time the image of her faded in his mind, replaced by that of Rachel Kranz leaning across their line of vision to pick a book from the shelf. That was the moment, as he remembered it, when things started to go wrong.
Either Side of Winter Page 12
