The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish

by Allan Stratton

  “Does this satisfy you?” Miss Bentwhistle inquired of the complainant.

  “I’d like her to apologize,” Clara simpered. “Also, to pay for my long-distance telephone call to father.” And it was so.

  In the days that followed, Miss Budgie struggled to keep her grip. She asked Clara to stay after school. The girl sat at her desk and stared at the ceiling as Miss Budgie tried to explain the importance of responsibility and respect. Clara yawned and rose. “I have to go now,” she said. “I’m expected at the soda shop.”

  “Sit down!” Miss Budgie ordered.

  Clara smiled. She opened her mouth and screamed, “Ow! Ow! Stop it, Miss Budgie! Help!”

  Miss Budgie fled the room.

  With Miss Brimley in command, students no longer bothered to pass each other notes. They simply wandered the aisles and struck up conversations. It was Miss Budgie’s fault. If she had motivated her students, there wouldn’t be a problem. Or so Miss Bentwhistle had said before Mary Mabel McTavish claimed to raise the dead.

  Ah, Mary Mabel, Miss Budgie’s one bright light. It had been difficult to forget that she was the daughter of Brewster McTavish, but the girl had been such a keen pupil that even that could be forgiven. Mary Mabel was the one student who hung on her every word. The one student who came to her outside of school hours to talk about books. The one student with the brass to stand up to Clara Brimley.

  “That resurrection tale!” Miss Bentwhistle had thundered, moments after the girl’s expulsion. “You’re to blame for her imagination! You and your creative writing assignments! You encouraged her!”

  “I understood motivation was my job,” Miss Budgie peeped.

  “Insolent toad! You’ve motivated her onto the street. You’ll join her, too, if you don’t shape up!”

  Of course, the headmistress changed her tune once association with Mary Mabel became desirable. Miss Budgie remembered the ceremony in the young woman’s honour. What a joy to know that happiness remained a possibility for a deserving few. And what a heavenly shock to hear herself praised from the podium.

  Yet despite Mary Mabel’s kind words, Miss Bentwhistle had sent her neither a card of commendation nor a toffee. Instead, after the function she’d upbraided her on the front lawn before a gaggle of young ladies. “Your collapse was a sorry spectacle. It embarrassed the assembly, set a poor example for our pupils, and ruined the festivities.

  Miss Budgie shrank as she watched her students titter and scurry off to gossip in the dormitories.

  She didn’t remember much after that, of the days leading to tonight, with her on the classroom floor dripping tears, covered in foolscap, surrounded by boxes. She had flashes only: of the air alive with paper airplanes, of thumb tacks slipped onto the seat of her chair, and of turning away to stare out the window. Memories of staying late to tidy up, of wiping lewd drawings from her students’ desks, of fretting how to hide the swear word carved on the door frame, and of covering it up with a doily.

  She also seemed to recollect that sometime — when? — she had been hit in the head with a flying piece of chalk, and had stood there like nothing had happened.… Nothing had happened … had it? And recalled the scene this morning, when her entire first-period class had staged a mock faint, all forty of them swooning to the floor en masse amidst a fit of giggles. She had an idea of herself weeping and of Clara Brimley batting her eyes and smirking, “Want a hankie?” Somehow she had ended up pressed against the blackboard, while Clara conducted her classmates in a chant of, “Boo-hoo, boo-hoo,” as they skipped out the door. There had followed the inevitable interview with Miss Bentwhistle. Why were her pupils roaming the corridors? What was the matter with her? And, by the way, where were the preliminary reports for the upcoming parent-teacher interviews?

  Miss Budgie remembered apologizing: she had been sure the period was over, there must be a problem with the classroom clock; as for herself, she was perfectly fine, and the reports would be on Miss Bentwhistle’s desk first thing in the morning.

  However the truth was that there were no reports. Since her students refused to do homework, Miss Budgie filled their class time with essays, tests, and work sheets. These had been collected every day since the beginning of the term. Unfortunately, none of them had been marked.

  It wasn’t that Miss Budgie hadn’t wanted to mark them. It was that she couldn’t. No sooner would she pick up her red pen than she’d find herself heaving into the toilet. Her students’ work was deplorable, incomplete, and covered in doodles. If she graded it honestly, the brats would have her humiliated. On the other hand, if she inflated the scores, she would humiliate herself. So she’d done neither. She’d simply bundled the assignments into cardboard boxes, resolving to do them tomorrow. Soon, so many tomorrows had turned into yesterdays that she didn’t know where to begin. Paralyzed with terror, she had attempted to hide the boxes on curtained shelves, in filing cabinets, and behind the closet door, in the desperate hope that somehow they’d disappear. Only they hadn’t. They’d grown into the monstrous stacks whose giant shadows now filled the walls.

  It was 2:00 a.m. Miss Budgie had yet to mark anything. She couldn’t manage to hold her pen, nor could she read. Words swam off the sheets in front of her. They floated in front of her face. What did they mean? Why wouldn’t they stay on the page? And how could she mark by lamp light? To impress parents, Miss Bentwhistle permitted her young ladies to use electricity at all hours, while, to cut costs, her teachers had been reduced to oil lamps!

  In mid-sniffle, a smile flickered across Miss Budgie’s face. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? It was the answer to her problems. She began to hum. She wasn’t sure if it was something she remembered or something she was making up. Either way, it was a cheerful tune and put her in a very good mood as she danced about, emptying her boxes into a paper mountain at the centre of the room.

  “Goodbye,” she laughed at the assignments.

  And lit a bonfire.

  Miss Bentwhistle was in her nightie, tucking into her fourth nightcap when the alarm was sounded. She’d felt rather toasty, but had put it down to the alcohol.

  “Good heavens,” she mused, hearing the tumult in the hall, “are there boys from the university on a panty raid?” She opened the door. Her rooms were immediately engulfed in smoke, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. It was the sight of her secretary as sooty as a chimney sweep.

  “Fire! Fire!”

  Miss Bentwhistle blinked. Why, so there was.

  “The school is lost!” Miss Pigeon cried. “We must save the girls!”

  “To hell with the girls!” Miss Bentwhistle bellowed. She covered her mouth with a pair of old knickers, shoved Miss Pigeon aside, and barrelled down the corridor to the Academy Dining Hall. Inside were a pair of documents as precious to her as life itself.

  Miss Bentwhistle Recuperates

  Miss Bentwhistle dabbed her lips with the best linen napkin of the Reverend Rector and Mrs. Brice Harvey Mandible. She had just completed an especially fine mid-morning breakfast of coddled eggs, sausage, cured ham, and crumpets with plum jam, washed down with a little tea and honey — a breakfast that had been delivered to her bed, here in the master room of the St. James manse, by Mrs. Mandible herself. The Mandibles had taken her in following the fire. They had given her full use of their home, including their very own bedroom.

  Sun poured through the casements and drenched the room, spilling over the twin easels sporting the Bentwhistle Coat of Arms and the Bentwhistle Family Tree. Thank heavens she’d rescued them from the Academy dining hall during the conflagration. The parchments, curiously, had been improved by the ordeal. The ornate gilt calligraphy and decorative seals of the Heralds’ College of Westminster still glittered, while the recent soot and singeing intimated ancient family lore and gravitas. God was smiling on her master plan.

  The headmistress had a little stretch, and settled back against the bank of fluffed pillows propped against the oak headboard. Another teaspoon of laudanum
and the world would be tickety-boo.

  It had been a challenging few weeks.

  Miss Bentwhistle’s tribulations had begun the night following the reception for Mary Mabel. She was prowling the corridors when she was overcome by a death stench coming from behind the door to the laundry room. Rat poison had been put down the previous week, but this smell signalled more than a dead rodent. Surely an army of raccoons lay putrefying under the tubs. Miss Bentwhistle entered the room and traced the stink to a clothes hamper. Using the end of a nearby mop, she lifted a crumpled sheet. Underneath was a beast all right, but of the two-legged variety. A big palooka in hunting gear. He was burrowed in a mound of undergarments, garters hanging from big red ears.

  Miss Bentwhistle was so outraged, she forgot to scream. “What are you doing in my laundry room?”

  “Nothin’. I was out for a stroll. Must of taken a wrong turn somewheres and got lost.”

  “I see.” Miss Bentwhistle noticed his shotgun. “Sorry to have disturbed.” She calmly dropped the sheet back on his head, fled to the hall, and locked the door.

  What to do now? A call to the police was out of the question; word that armed brutes prowled her corridors would empty the school. On the other hand, the intruder couldn’t be set free. Nor could he be kept as a house pet. If only she could have stuffed his mouth with a mop, trussed him in sheets, and cemented him behind some pipes.

  There was no more time to think. Inside the laundry room, her gentleman caller had removed the pins from the door hinges. A mighty heave and the portal ripped from its moorings. The beast stood before her in a cloud of plaster dust. He had a shotgun under his arm; a skinning knife hung from his belt. “No more hide-and-seek, woman. Where’s Brewster McTavish?”

  “Ah! So you’re here for Mr. McTavish?”

  The woodsman was confused. Normally people didn’t ask questions. They spilled the beans and screamed for mercy. “Yeah,” he said warily. “We’re old pals.”

  “I might have guessed. Sorry to say, your friend’s left town for parts unknown. I suggest you do likewise.”

  The hunter fingered his trigger. “Where’s his young’un, Mary Mabel?”

  “Do you live in a cave?” At a glance, perhaps he did. “Miss McTavish is off saving souls, my dear. Her itinerary is posted in the Free Press.”

  “You’d best be telling the truth,” the hunter said, “or I’ll be back to shoot your girlies.” With that, he blasted out the nearest window, hopped through and disappeared.

  If Miss Bentwhistle had been upset to have her school invaded, she was outraged to have it burned to the ground.

  Trust Miss Budgie. The little snip had been the only fatality, count your blessings. Still, her funeral was a trial. All those hankies to clean. Finding something nice to say had been no picnic, either. Miss Bentwhistle made a dozen false starts on the eulogy. “Miss Budgie was a teacher who fired up her students.” Perhaps not. “Miss Budgie was a special favourite of the janitorial staff.” Hmm. “Miss Budgie was well-known for the liveliness of her classes.” Yes, well. She settled on the theme: “Gone, but Not Forgotten.”

  The St. James Board of Session had sent flowers and arranged for Miss Bentwhistle to stay at the rectory. Over the generations, her family’s tithes had contributed mightily to the church’s good fortune, and the session thought its act of charity would be a useful down payment on favours yet to come. The Mandibles were upset at being evicted from their matrimonial bed, but who paid the bills?

  London had opened its heart, as well. Churches immediately offered to rent their Sunday school classrooms to the Academy, while community-minded citizens eagerly invited the young ladies into their homes in exchange for the school’s boarding fees. “Vultures,” Miss Bentwhistle fumed privately. Publicly she expressed gratitude. She and her students would move in forthwith, though naturally she couldn’t discuss money matters while mourning her dear friend, Miss Budgie.

  Unhappily, association with Miss Budgie became increasingly awkward. At first the schoolmarm had been hailed as a martyr. However, the morning of the interment, officials announced that the source of the inferno was her very own classroom, and asked pointed questions about kerosene and a peculiar mountain of ash. As well, reports suggested that on the night of the blaze, a bevy of young ladies had wakened to the smell of smoke and someone cackling opera. They ran to the cricket pitch from which they saw Miss Budgie dancing from window to window like a latter-day Mrs. Rochester, setting fire to the curtains with flaming sheets of foolscap. Gossip spread faster than influenza. Memories stirred of her infatuation with the unspeakable Mr. Fontaine. Overnight, it was common knowledge that the Academy’s teaching staff was a collection of arsonists, perverts, and sexual hysterics.

  Miss Bentwhistle was aware of the rumours. Not that anyone said anything to her face. Rather, she knew from the increasingly smug tone of her sympathizers. Mrs. Mandible was particularly solicitous. “It must be so difficult to check references,” she commiserated. More telling was the sudden and precipitous drop in the school’s enrollment. Within days, the only girls left were those whose parents preferred they risk immolation than darken the family door.

  It didn’t help that these delinquents were now loose in the community. Churches providing space to the Academy reported trashed Sunday schools, defaced hymnals, and cigarette butts in the choir loft. At St. James, the Reverend Mandible’s vestments went missing, only to be discovered in shreds, plugging the toilets. Worse, someone absconded with the cathedral’s silver candlesticks and chalice, and its nineteenth-century European oil paintings: The Annunciation, The Beheading of John the Baptist, and The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian.

  The Academy’s credibility, like its woodwork, was up in smoke. It had no securities with which to rebuild. There were no revenues to pay for the rented classrooms. The room and board money had already been spent. Gossip foreclosed fundraising. And insurance monies would be stripped by past creditors.

  As for Miss Bentwhistle, she was living on the charity of church mice. How long before they turned to rats? The wolf might not be at the door, but one could smell him from the verandah. She began to plan for the inevitable day of judgment.

  The headmistress knew it was time to put her plans into effect when Mrs. Mandible brought her this morning’s breakfast tray. Coddled eggs, cured ham, sausage, crumpets, and plum jam had replaced the customary boiled egg and toast. What unexpected kindness. She’d better watch her back.

  “The mayor was wondering if you’d be up for a delegation of well-wishers,” Mrs. Mandible enquired. “Say around ten?”

  “I’d be delighted. Say around eleven.”

  They meant to humiliate her, of that she was certain. Let them dare. She polished off her breakfast, reviewed her strategy, and placed a call to her secretary. “Gird your loins, Dolly. The enemy is at the gates.” Then, dressed in style and fashionably late, she floated down the rectory staircase, into the parlour, past her visitors, and onto the Mandible’s finest floral wingback at the head of the room.

  She gazed around the circle of starched collars, reserving a special nod for Mrs. Mandible, simpering by the tea trolley in the back corner. “And what can I do for you, gentlemen?”

  The men shifted their weight, fiddled with their trousers, and cast sideways glances at the mayor. His Worship rose. “Sorry to trouble you, Miss Bentwhistle, but, uh, over the past couple of weeks there’ve been problems around town.”

  “In that case, you had best deal with them.”

  Pause. “Yes. Well, uh, that’s why we’re here. You see, these problems, well, they seem to involve your young ladies.”

  Miss Bentwhistle stared at the centre of the mayor’s forehead. He shuffled. He dabbed his brow with a handkerchief. He sat down.

  “What Herb means to say,” said the town clerk, “is that ever since the Academy moved into our Sunday schools, there’s been theft and vandalism at the churches.”

  “What makes you suspect my young ladies?” Miss Bentwhistle bris
tled. “Why not an insurrection of local Bolsheviks?”

  “London doesn’t have any Bolsheviks.”

  “Oh, doesn’t it, though. I know a Ukrainian grocer when I see one,” she said with a withering glance at Alderman Cole, formerly Kulesha. “Nor let us forget the bog Irish in our midst.”

  The room leaped to its feet. “And who do you suppose is raiding our liquor cabinets?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” sniffed Miss Bentwhistle. “Perhaps your wives?” A sea of bobbing Adam’s apples. “Come, gentlemen, half of you are married to known tosspots. I’m sure they’re only too happy to use my girls as window dressing for their debaucheries.”

  The town clerk shook his fist. “It was your little vixens, and none other, whom I found in my living room playing strip poker with the neighbour boys!”

  Miss Bentwhistle gasped. “How dare you have left them unsupervised!” She swept the crowd with an eyebrow. “I have entrusted to you the flower of this nation’s youth. And what have you done? By your own admission, surrendered them to booze, boys, and bedlam! You ought to be sued for breech of trust, reckless endangerment, and contributing to the delinquency of minors!”

  “No one’s looking for trouble,” the Reverend Mandible soothed. “It’s just that we’re going through hell providing for your Academy, without a penny of compensation.”

  “So that’s it!” Miss Bentwhistle sneered. “Money! It always comes down to money with your sort. For generations, this town has been sustained by my family’s generosity. More recently, my girls have spent their trust funds in your shops. Now, in our darkest hour, as we mourn our dead, you seek to beggar us! You seek to extort recompense for your self-confessed derelictions of duty!”

  “We seek nothing of the kind.”

  “Do you take me for deaf? Your effrontery is beyond preposterous! It is an outrage! I will not have it! No! I will not allow the good name of Bentwhistle to be spat upon by ingrates! Better that the Academy should fold than suffer mob attack! Indeed, I shall shut its gates forever and forthwith!”