The book is ambitious. It assumes, for instance, that teenagers care about the motivation of a murder committed over two thousand years ago, fictionalized and depicted in a play written over four hundred years ago. Already I can imagine the empty well of Mindy’s eyes when I tell her today that Shakespeare took liberties with the actual historical events surrounding the murder, that the play titled Julius Caesar is more about Brutus and Cassius than Caesar, that the work marks a turning point in Shakespeare’s development as a playwright. Before, he was more concerned with plot weaving, but now he turns his attention to the minds and motives of his characters. So says today’s lesson in the teacher’s manual.
The textbook writers were thinking deep adult thoughts, for motivation is something that interests grown-ups, not teenagers. What concerns teenagers is the act itself, not the motivation behind it. “Because I want to”—this is the motivation of the young. “Because I love”—though it may be claimed, it is not to be allowed, for love darts in and out of shadows, invisible to the eyes of the young. It delights in binding heart and mind with cords. When he finally wakes up, Gulliver finds himself incapacitated.
Through my apartment door, which has sometimes remained open since the installation of the new furnace, I have heard that Steve and Teri mean to keep Mindy separated from the boy she imagines herself to love. She has no car keys, she has no telephone, she has no computer. Teri guards her like a warden during the day. At night Steve takes over. He has told Mindy that if she chooses to sneak out of the house at any time, she will not be allowed back for the rest of her life. This is extreme talk. I try to imagine the fear in a father’s heart when speaking such words. He must rise every morning to wonder if she is still in her bed.
Furthermore, Steve has bought a dog, a young bulldog with a face and a bark that mean business. Steve has named him Stonewall after one of his Civil War heroes. Teri has observed that a stone wall is “what he looks like he ran into.” Teri’s nerves have been affected. She puts on a resolute face, but she talks and eats to excess. She has told Rachel that she feels “like a balloon ready to pop.”
Rachel has seen the boy driving up and down Edison Street. And we have all heard him. Whether the rumble of his car is due to age or to deliberate sound enhancement, I do not know. He comes at all hours, the black hulk of his car moving slowly, growling ominously. He has come in the dark of night, honking his horn and throwing glass bottles. He has done all the standard things. Once he splattered Steve’s truck with eggs. Another time he punctured a tire. Perhaps I should use the passive voice: A horn has been honked, bottles and eggs have been thrown, a tire has been punctured. These acts are laid by us to the boy’s account. According to Teri, Stonewall has barked wildly and clawed at the front door during these nighttime raids.
Through my open door I have also heard Teri’s reports of what Steve, built somewhat like a bulldog himself, has told the boy: In short, if he catches him on his property, the boy must be prepared to deal with drastic and permanent consequences. These are my words, not the ones Steve used. I cannot think that the boy cares to test his sincerity. I have also learned the boy’s name: Prince Cook. I have learned that he has no father. I try to imagine what kind of mother the boy has, if when she named him she had visions of a noble and handsome son. I have heard Teri describe him in unflattering terms: “mean as sin,” “scarecrow skinny,” “eyes like a snake.”
There is a tap on the side door, and I hear it open, hear footsteps in the kitchen, then see Teri and Mindy standing at the door of my apartment. “We’re here,” Teri says. She is wearing denim overalls and a yellow ball cap with the word Umbro stitched on it. She is carrying Veronica. Teri is not a tall woman. She won’t always be able to carry the child, but for now she holds her securely and possessively, as if born to do nothing else but bear such a weight. Veronica’s head lolls to one side, her mouth gaping. Teri walks toward me, saying to Veronica, “Look, sweetie, let’s see if Aunt Sophie’s feeder has any birds today.”
The sun appears to be attempting a brief showing after the hard morning rain, and though the feeder has no visitors, a large crow, lighting on a nearby tree branch, caws weakly and shakes its feathers. I have read that crows are smart birds, thriving by their wits, their toughness, their strong sense of community. I think of Steve and Teri calling upon all their resources to save their daughter and defeat a boy named Prince.
Mindy seats herself at the round table, props her elbow on her textbook, and rests her chin on her fist in the attitude of one prepared to be bored. She gazes stone-faced toward the clock on the wall. She wears a dark brown jacket over a white T-shirt, tight pink pants, and slip-on shoes with thick heels. From her behavior over the past three weeks, I know that she will not remove her jacket and will not look at me during our hour together, thus giving every indication that she cares nothing about English grammar and literature nor for any ancient specimen associated with the teaching of it. Yet she is not insolent; rather, she seems completely indifferent, as if insolence would require more effort than she is willing to exert. Perhaps, at some level, she is too polite to be overtly rude. I do not know her well enough to say.
At the window Teri points to the crow and says, “He’s a big old fellow, isn’t he? See him, sweetie?” Veronica gazes vacantly toward the sky.
I rise from my chair, book in hand, and walk to the round table. Folded back on the tabletop is an old copy of Time magazine. “DIED. PETER FOY, 79, go-to man for flying actors on Broadway and beyond; of a heart attack; in Las Vegas.” I have never heard of a go-to man, but Time magazine tells me that Peter Foy took out patents on odd contrivances made of “wire, pulleys and harnesses” by which he sent people soaring above the stage in movies and television. I think of Peter Pan, of Sally Field in The Flying Nun, of Superman. I think of a man who could invent ingenious ways to keep actors aloft but who could do nothing for himself when death came.
“Well, we’ll be back in an hour,” Teri says, moving from the window. At the round table she lays a hand on Mindy’s shoulder. Mindy stiffens. Clearly she does not welcome the touch, but something keeps her from pulling away. Teri removes her hand, then says to me, “Will you be okay for an hour?” Yes, I almost say, I can endure unpleasantness as well as your daughter can. I only nod, however, and she leaves. In the kitchen she croons to Veronica, “You want a little nap, baby?”
I turn in the literature book to Julius Caesar. It falls open to act 4, and I see the words I underlined in pencil earlier today: “Our cause is ripe, the enemy increaseth every day.” Without knowing why, I read these words aloud now. Mindy gives no sign of having heard me. For no good reason I continue reading: “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries.” These are well-known words. Mindy glances quickly toward me, then as quickly away. “On such a full sea are we now afloat,” I add, “and we must take the current when it serves.”
Except for the slightest pursing of her mouth, Mindy could be a statue.
“Do you know what the passage means?” I ask her.
She shakes her head. “It wasn’t in the part for today,” she says tightly.
“You’re right,” I say. “We’ll get to it later.” I turn back to the beginning of the play. “Here is the first question for today’s quiz,” I tell her. “Of what does the soothsayer in act 1 warn Caesar?”
And without hesitation she answers: “The ides of March.”
“And we shall see,” I say, nodding, “whether Caesar sails through the ides of March like Peter Pan and Superman. Or whether the wires break and he plummets to his death.”
For the briefest instant Mindy’s eyes flicker to mine. Surely, she must think, this old woman is losing her mind. And perhaps she is right.
Chapter 23
What’s Gone and What’s Past Help
Cardinals hold the standard for monogamy among birds. Mates for life, they stay together year round, fe
eding and nesting up to four broods each season. They are known for the harmony of their singing, one bird trilling a melody which the other picks up and completes.
More than two weeks pass, and the calendar tells me that the real ides of March has arrived. It is late afternoon, but I have been awake since a troubling dream in the early hours of morning. In my dream Mindy tried to wrestle the sword away from Brutus in the senate house of Rome in order to save the life of Julius Caesar. She was gravely wounded and borne away, apparently dead, by an old man in a long white robe who called out over and over, “The argument of Time! The argument of Time! The argument of Time!” I slept no more but sat in my recliner and watched the sky grow light. I turned on the television and watched two episodes of All in the Family. I heard Archie Bunker and Meathead exchange many insults as the day dawned.
It takes no prophet to unravel my dream, for I looked at the calendar on my wall before going to bed last night, taking note of the fact that the next day, today, would be the ides of March. In my sleep I revised the death scene of Julius Caesar to include my pupil, and then, unable to let her die, fused the play with another, The Winter’s Tale, in which Hermione is thought to be dead for sixteen years but is revealed in the end to be alive. The old man, designated as Time in the play, is a curious character among Shakespeare’s colorful troupe, for he is meant to be symbolic.
It is my hope that Time will revive Mindy well before sixteen years have passed. She has already come and gone for her lesson today. We have now finished the study of Julius Caesar, have read Frost’s “The Death of a Hired Man,” and today concluded the discussion of two stories from the literature book: James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat” and “That Evening Sun” by William Faulkner, the first exploring the element of humor, the second dealing with terror. Though I still hold to my opinion that the book is overreaching its audience of high school students, I believe Mindy has understood more than she pretends.
I believe, for example, that she came close to smiling today when she read aloud a paragraph from the end of “The Catbird Seat” in which Mrs. Ulgine Barrows raves like a madwoman and tries to tackle the mild-mannered Mr. Martin, who has devised the perfect foil for her plan to reorganize his department at work. “If you weren’t such a drab, ordinary little man,” Mrs. Barrows bellows, “I’d think you’d planned it all.” One thing I said to Mindy after she read the paragraph was this: “Never underestimate what drab, ordinary little men are capable of.” To this she gave no response; indeed, I cannot explain why I said it. It is over now. Mindy came and Mindy left.
It has been a quiet day, the ides of March, a day as warm as June, though it is not yet spring. The children who live in the house behind Patrick’s are jumping on their trampoline. March is a fickle month in Mississippi, rain and wind appearing alone or together in varying quantities within a forty-degree span of temperature. Today there is wind but no rain. The children, three of them, squeal and tumble together on the trampoline.
For a while the smallest one, a girl wearing a bright red cap, does a jumping jack with each upward leap until one of the boys upsets her balance. She scrambles back to her feet and begins again. A ball appears on the trampoline, and they begin kicking it to one another, and then at one another, both games necessitating many trips to the ground to retrieve it. I think of the amount of energy being expended on the trampoline. I try to imagine what it would feel like to be so small and to bounce so high.
A strange coincidence: One of the boys grabs his sister’s red cap from her head and throws it high into the air. She looks up and reaches with both hands to catch it as it comes back down. And then I hear faint music on the television and someone singing. It is a song I have heard many times: “Who can light the world up with her smile?” I look at the screen and see a swift succession of vignettes: Mary Tyler Moore walking beside a lake, Mary Tyler Moore shopping for meat in a grocery store, Mary Tyler Moore on a crowded city sidewalk spinning around and tossing her hat into the air, then reaching up to catch it. “You’re gonna make it after all.” With these words the song ends.
I look at the clock. It is half past four o’clock, and on the television screen Mary Tyler Moore is walking into the newsroom in her short skirt, her long dark hair as springy as the children on the neighbor’s trampoline. She is about to encounter some small problem in her orderly world, and at the end of the program, before the kitten meows from the MGM logo, the problem will have been humorously solved. This is the way things happen on television.
I wonder how old Mary Tyler Moore is now, if she could still fit into such a skirt. I wonder if at the end of this day, today, she will feel that she has taken a nothing day and turned it into a worthwhile one. I wonder if she feels, looking back over her life, that she has “made it after all.” I wonder if she ever watches herself on television and marvels that she used to smile so much. I wonder if she laughs at how insignificant her television problems were compared to the real ones she has. For this is a certainty of life: If Mary Tyler Moore is still alive, she has problems.
I think of what my own life would have been like on the day this program first aired. I would have been a married woman at the time, a teacher by day, a typist for my husband by night. I would have imagined myself happy. I wouldn’t have known at the time, though all the clues were there, that my husband thought of me not as a wife but as a housekeeper and secretary. I would not have known what the drab, ordinary little man who was my husband was doing in his study at night, perhaps at the very moment this program was on television. I may have been in the kitchen clearing the table after cooking and serving a late supper, which was his preference. I may have been hoping that his desire would be turned toward me later in the night, that he would sleep in the bed with me instead of in the guest bedroom, where he claimed the mattress was more comfortable.
How foolish the little dreams of Sophie Hess now seem to me, an old woman gaining on eighty-one, sitting in a house that is not my own, passing my days in a recliner, entertaining no illusions concerning happiness. I try to think of what I have accomplished in fourscore years, and a favorite phrase of my father’s comes to mind: “A great big zero with the ring rubbed out.” This I often heard him say when he and Mother were talking about money.
I cannot claim the hundreds of students I taught as accomplishments. Only a few faces come into focus. I see my third-grade pupil Starr, her black eyes shining. But I know the truth: Neither Starr nor any other student I taught remembers my name today or spares me a thought. I accomplished no more in the classroom than I do in my recliner. If I had not taught my pupils arithmetic and verb conjugations, someone else would have. And later, in college classrooms, all those hours of instructing against vague pronoun reference, comma splices, murky topic sentences—they were but an echo in a canyon, an uncertain sound fading to silence.
So what worthy achievement would I choose if it were in my power? I can think of only one: A child of my own. Again I see Starr, her face upturned and laughing. Some other woman’s achievement, not mine. But what of it? I say sternly. I will not give in to regrets. Life is what it is, not a thing to be shaped by desire. “What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.” These are Paulina’s sensible words in The Winter’s Tale. How unlike the play is my life, however—no grieving husband, no surprise reunion with a lost daughter, no joyous blessing at the end: “Go together, you precious winners all.”
I turn up the volume to see what obstacle Mary Tyler Moore is facing this time. It seems that she has been given the task of writing obituaries for prominent local figures. In the event that they die, Mr. Grant tells her, the station will already have something on file. I watch the entire episode, in which a local celebrity named Chuckles the Clown does in fact die. I take note of the fact that much humor is derived from the subject of death.
I suddenly remember something: While on the back side of Patrick’s house children are jumping on a trampoline, on the front side cars are no doubt pulling into the parking
lot at Wagner’s Mortuary. Tonight there will be a visitation from five until seven, with the funeral to follow tomorrow.
Three days ago I heard Patrick read the account of the woman’s accident from the newspaper, and then the next day, after she died, he read the obituary aloud. Tillie Flower was a woman my own age. Oddly, it was a name I felt I already knew when Patrick first spoke it, though I could not say why. The woman suffered a mishap in her car at a stop sign on Arnold Street; rather, that was the point of initiation. She was quite a distance from the stop sign at the moment of impact. According to her husband, who was in the passenger seat and sustained only a broken foot and cracked ribs, Tillie Flower had stopped the car, unfastened her seat belt, and reached into the back seat to get a tissue from her pocketbook to wipe a smudge off the rearview mirror. Such details the man reported.
“She was bad to take her foot off the brake,” her husband also told the newspaper reporter, and when he “let her know the car was rolling forward,” she accidentally “stepped on the gas instead of the brake” and “couldn’t manage to get her foot up off of it.” At some point in the article, he was quoted as saying, “She always did have a real heavy foot,” a fact that a better reporter would have omitted.
Though her husband didn’t relate this part of it, I can guess that his shouting only served to rattle her further. Witnesses spoke of the car jumping curbs, hurtling across lawns, and finally colliding head on with a mail truck idling down the street. The mailman, fortunately, was not in the truck, having walked up to hand deliver a package to someone’s door. This is the kind of accident I can imagine young people making jokes about. The day will come when they will know the fear of being unable to control their own bodies. But for now they laugh as if growing old is a television comedy show and they are the audience.
There is a flash of red at my window, and a male cardinal lights on the bird feeder. From what I have read about cardinals, I know the female is not far away. And then I see her, sitting patiently on a branch of a nearby forsythia, cocking her head this way and that while her mate feeds. My bird book tells me that part of the cardinals’ springtime courtship ritual includes feeding, the male presenting the female with morsels of food, which she takes from his bill as if they are kissing.
Winter Birds Page 23
