Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

by Faith Sullivan

  “Laurence wants your legal rights protected.”

  Nell’s insides twisted.

  “A tempest in a teapot,” Juliet continued, closing her eyes as if the whole business didn’t bear thinking about. “People in villages need drama. You can’t talk about the weather forever.”

  A tempest in a teapot? If Nell lost her teaching position, her small bank account would dry up in a week.

  Juliet took Nell’s hand. “We’re not going to borrow trouble. I promise you this will come to nothing.”

  No, thought Nell. It will come to something. “I don’t mind for myself, but I don’t want Hilly hurt.”

  “He won’t be,” Juliet assured her, but not even a Lundeen could promise that.

  As Nell and Hilly were returning from Mass on Sunday, George and Cora stopped them on the street. From the buggy, Cora called to Hilly, “We’ve been hoping you could spend today with little Laurence. He’s been missing you.” Cora knew that a woman doesn’t want to moan and pace and wring her hands in front of her child, and so Hilly was welcomed into the buggy.

  Indeed, moan and pace and wring her hands was exactly what Nell did all that day. Beyond tea and toast—and the toast only half eaten—she could not remain seated long enough for a meal, even had she an appetite. Gnawing her cuticles and yanking her hair, she sat, rose, then sat again, only to leap up and pace.

  Late in the afternoon, she tried reading Balzac. In Milwaukee, studying for teacher certification, she’d heard a professor remark that reading, especially something deeply affecting, was a sure way to escape the moment. In the present case, this proved untrue. If she had something humorous . . . but, really, could anything fetch her away from this day while a knife tip of panic was driving her back and forth, back and forth?

  Monday night found Nell waiting, like a naughty pupil, on a bench outside Superintendent Brewster’s office. Both Juliet and Cora Lundeen waited with her, George and his father having carried Cora and the wheelchair up the stairway. Hilly was in Lizzie’s care for the evening.

  Sitting in the hall, the three women and George caught only scraps of debate as the all-male board argued her case. “This is madness,” Juliet declared at ten o’clock. She turned to Nell. “Whatever happens, you’re coming to our house for a whiskey when it’s over.”

  At that, the door opened to disclose a company of silent, grim-faced men. Last to emerge were Laurence Lundeen and John Flynn, wearing thin, remote smiles.

  “We’re heading to our house for whiskey,” Juliet said. “John, you’ll join us.” The shadowy halls of the school felt foreign to Nell as the group headed down the stairs, John Flynn carrying the wheelchair, George carrying Cora.

  No one spoke as the little party made its way under moonlight to the senior Lundeens’, where lamps were burning. Once inside, they settled in the larger parlor, and Juliet fetched whiskey and glasses.

  “Nell, you’ll need this,” she said, handing the woman a bourbon. “Cora, what’s your poison?”

  Preoccupied, Cora ran her hands back and forth along the arms of the wheelchair. “Sorry . . . I’ll have the same.”

  Laurence stood at the mantel and took a breath. Nell focused on him; they hadn’t discussed the outcome yet. “I can’t reveal who voted yea or nay, but here’s what happened: Nell, you’ll keep your position. John scared ’em, told ’em he’d sue if you were sacked.”

  Nell felt gratitude to both men but no elation. Another shoe was to drop.

  “But,” Laurence continued, “our side carried by one vote—always bad in a little burg. Very divisive. The others are talking about setting up a church school. We’ll see how far they get with that.”

  “I’m not worth this,” Nell said. “I’ll resign.”

  John Flynn rose from a wing chair. “No, you won’t. I understand your feelings, Mrs. Stillman, and I don’t want to make a martyr out of you. But we can’t encourage this nonsense. A town has to decide early the kind of place it wants to be.”

  Laurence broke in, “Don’t desert us, Nell. Superintendent Brewster isn’t any happier about this mess than we are.”

  Nell set her glass on the malacca table. “May I have a day or two to think it over?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I owe all of you a good deal.”

  “You owe us nothing!” Cora suddenly exploded, startling everyone. “You’re the victim here. We damned well ought to be kind.” She glanced around. “Pardon my vulgarity.”

  Uncertain, Juliet laughed, and then the men.

  On Monday morning, first-grade teacher Rhoda Cheney dropped a pencil as she stood beside her classroom door. By bending to retrieve it, she was able to avoid greeting Nell, who was crossing to her own room.

  Except for Diana Hapgood, the second-grade teacher, the rest of the elementary faculty also maintained its distance, unable now to afford association with a colleague touched by scandal. No more darning and mending club. Nell sympathized. Small-town teachers were a pitifully vulnerable lot.

  When she entered the classroom, Nell found the students scattered in knots and buzzing, full of the gossip they’d heard at home. They took their seats, looking both contrite and curious, glances passing back and forth among them. Would teacher say anything about the school-board meeting?

  Nell had spent hours considering this question, and her voice was full of trepidation as she told them, “I’m sure most of you have heard that the school board voted last night whether to keep me as your teacher.” Hands trembling, she sat down at her desk and opened the attendance book. “The majority voted that I should stay. I’m happy about that, and I hope you are, too. But your opinion is your own. You don’t have to share it with anyone, unless you choose.”

  From there, the school day went forward pretty much as usual. When the other children had filed out at three, Delilah Dempsey hung back, slowly gathering her books and papers. At last, she started for the door, but hesitated at Nell’s desk.

  “Mrs. Stillman?” She stared at her shoes.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I just wanted to say . . . well, I wanted to say that almost all the kids are glad you’re still our teacher. Including me.”

  Later, as Nell stood in Rabel’s Meat Market, eyeing the ring bologna, Gus came out from behind the counter, wiping his big hands on his apron. With a hand cupped beside his mouth, he said, “I’m not supposed to tell, but I voted for you, Missus, and I’m not taking little Gus out of the school neither.”

  But when Nell entered Petersen’s Groceries, Arvina Petersen swung about and headed to the back room, leaving the clerk to tot up Nell’s order.

  Over the following days, three letters appeared in the Standard Ledger complaining of a ‘heathen element’ in the school, and two ministers preached sermons decrying godlessness in public education.

  Nell walked on eggshells.

  “There may be children at school who don’t want to play with you—not because of you, but because their parents are upset with me,” Nell told Hilly. “Maybe I could get a job in another town.” She was not sanguine about that prospect.

  But the boy wept, “We know people here. We won’t know people some other place. And what if Elvira comes back and she can’t find us?”

  Nell thought it might be the final straw, though, when she received a stiff-looking letter one day. When she saw the embossed return address, she fled the post office: another sanction, and this from a woman of influence, Eudora Barnstable. Nell had never met Eudora, but Juliet had once referred to her friend as “the mother superior of the village.”

  Nell put off opening the envelope until she had set the kettle on the stove and changed into her housedress. A cup of tea and a ginger cookie from Petersen’s at hand, she slid a paring knife under the flap and extracted two sheets of creamy paper, written upon with a plain but firm hand.

  Dear Mrs. Stillman,

  I am appalled by the recent action of the local school board in bringing you to account for an unverified indiscretion by a young
woman with whom you shared your home.

  But what can one expect? Put two or three men in a room together, give each of them a title, and you have the makings of a silliness akin to that unnecessary horror called the Spanish-American War. We can only be thankful no lives were lost in this local folly.

  I have always believed that women should occupy school boards, since children are more generally their responsibility. Until we gain our rightful enfranchisement, alas, that belief remains a dream—but a dream to strive for.

  Sincerely,

  Eudora W. Barnstable

  When Nell next spoke with Juliet Lundeen, she recounted the letter. “It was so kind. Were you behind it?”

  Juliet laughed. “No. Eudora is a force unto herself. Nothing I could say would sway her if she weren’t already convinced.”

  Nell wrote Eudora a note of thanks, and kept the Barnstable letter on the kitchen table for those moments when she was most in need of assurance—moments which were not infrequent. Some people, both men and women, had made a point of turning away from her—even at St. Boniface, which in some way was hardest.

  Two weeks after the school-board meeting, Nell made a confession, not because she felt guilt concerning whatever sin Elvira might have committed, but because she hoped for a sympathetic ear from the priest.

  Spring’s chill was gone and the Saturday-afternoon sidewalk was pleasantly warm beneath Nell’s leather soles. Within St. Boniface, only a handful of parishioners waited beside the confessional. Genuflecting, Nell slipped into the backmost pew to wait.

  When her turn came, and when she had confessed her transgressions, among them anger at the school board and at those who shunned her, she waited for Father Gerrold to comment or at least to assign penance. Instead, he was silent.

  “Father?”

  “Yes?”

  “My penance?”

  “Isn’t there something more you’d like to tell me?”

  “Something more?”

  The silence between them was a widening moat. Finally it came to her: he was waiting for her to confess a sin of omission. She had omitted vigilant oversight of Elvira, and because of that, the girl had been led into sin.

  “There’s nothing more,” she said.

  With a heavy sigh, the priest said, “Five Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys. And use the coming days for an examination of your conscience.” So briefly was he able to dismiss her.

  Nell escaped, not pausing at the holy-water font nor saying the Our Fathers and Hail Marys but fleeing home to read again the note from Eudora and to praise Hilly who, as she had asked, waited alone, reading a little book of Kipling poems that Elvira had found at the Water and Power Company.

  Village memory is prodigious. Though summer intervened, when school reopened in September of 1905, Nell’s prediction to Hilly was borne out. As the Christmas holiday drew near, Diana Hapgood’s second graders began decorating colored-paper tree ornaments, gifts for their parents and for one another. From his twelve classmates, Hilly received just five presents. At home, his mother was always quiet, a silence that shut him out. She’d been that way for a long time. To fill the void, he “played” the harmonica.

  Then one blustery day in mid-December, Diana Hapgood stopped by the apartment with her grandfather. “Hilly says he has a harmonica,” she told Nell. “If he wants, Grandpa will teach him to play.”

  And so lessons with Grandpa began. Every Saturday morning through the remaining winter and coming spring of 1906, the old man came to instruct Hilly and to play duets. Hilly applied himself with severe discipline, and late in May, Grandpa Hapgood told Nell, “I’ve taught the lad as much as I know. It’s been a pleasure. He’s a deep little fellow, not like some scamps I could name—that butcher’s kid for one.”

  Hilly and Mr. Hapgood were friends now, two old men together. Hapgood taught the boy to fish with a cane pole on Sioux Woman Lake. If Hilly caught anything worth carrying home, Grandpa cleaned it and sent it along to Nell.

  That following June, after months of keeping her head down, Nell encountered Juliet Lundeen in the lobby of the Water and Power Company.

  “Can you come for whist Saturday night? There’ll just be the four of us—Laurence and I and you and John Flynn. You have no objection to cards with John?”

  “Heavens, no. How could I?”

  The florid widower was solid and shrewd, according to Cora Lundeen, who a day later wheeled across Seidman’s Pharmacy to waylay Nell, paying for aspirin at the counter.

  “You’ll like John,” Cora said sotto voce as Elsie Schroeder, the perpetual pietist, passed them on her way out the door. “He’s good company. An easy man. But keen as a new knife.”

  “I’m predisposed to like someone who saved my life,” Nell assured her.

  Cora’s face clouded. “A horrid affair. I am sorry for what you’ve been through.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Cora murmured something under her breath, then said, “Since you’ll be playing cards Saturday evening, send Hilly to us. He can spend the night. He’s teaching Laurence how to play checkers.”

  As they parted, Cora grasped Nell’s hand. “Please have fun.”

  But, at 3:30 a.m. Saturday morning, in her sleep, Nell strained to scream, squeezing out only a wordless whimper.

  In her dream the night was solid black, bereft even of gaslight, as she felt her way home from school along Main Street. Something brushed her arm, and she pressed her back against the window of Blankenship’s Hardware. In the clotted darkness, eyes flashed. Pinpoints at first, but growing bolder. Across the street. At the corner. In front of Reagan’s Saloon and Billiards. She spun around. But there they were, inside Blankenship’s, peering out at her.

  Nell’s whimper woke her and she sat up in bed, cold and shaking. With hands that seemed not her own, she thrust aside the quilt, felt for matches on the bedside table, and lit the lamp.

  chapter twenty-one

  “YOUNG LAURENCE IS LEARNING to play checkers, I understand.” The boy’s namesake poured Nell a glass of wine.

  “Cora said.”

  “Well, it beats all. I don’t know which of the boys is smarter: Laurence, for learning at age three, or Hilly, for teaching him.”

  “Hilly has the patience of Job,” Juliet observed.

  Footsteps sounded on the front steps. “Here’s John.” Juliet left the others standing by the hearth and went to the door. “Come in. We’re having a glass of wine.”

  “D’ya have beer?” the lawyer asked, entering. “I’ve got a powerful thirst, and I’d soon go through a bottle of wine.”

  Laurence guffawed. “There’s beer in the root cellar. I’ll fetch it. Come in and say hello to Nell.”

  “Mrs. Stillman, a pleasure. Sorry to come busting in begging for beer, but I’ve been out on the lake all afternoon, trying to catch a few miserable bullheads. Skunked, I was. Too hot. Should have gone early morning.”

  “My Hilly went early with Grandpa Hapgood. We had fish for supper.”

  “Shown up by a boy.”

  “A six-year-old boy,” Juliet added.

  The party moved out to the screened gazebo in the backyard. The women carried lamps though the sky was still light enough to see the cards. As they passed outside, Juliet had thrust a platter of cheese and homemade crackers at John. “It’s humid, so they may have gone soft.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.”

  A table, chairs, and scorepad were already in place, and now the players cut the deck for partners, Nell and Laurence pairing for the first game. As they took their designated seats, Nell leaned against the back of the chair and closed her eyes. She had grown bodily stiff from tiptoeing through the past year.

  “Anything wrong?” Laurence asked.

  “Absolutely nothing. I was only thinking how fortunate I am to be sitting in this lovely spot on a beautiful evening and in such fine company.”

  “It’s a good and rare thing to realize when we’re happy,” John said. He and Juliet won the f
irst game, and all cut for partners again. This time John and Laurence played together, and the women won.

  “I haven’t played whist since I was a girl,” Nell said. “I’m surprised I remember how. Da liked whist. Sundays, after dinner, he, Mam, my sister, Nora, and I played all afternoon.”

  Later, while Laurence poured more wine and beer, Flynn said, “Saw George and Arnie Kolchak out fishing today. My God, but your boy is gray. Seems like overnight he turned.”

  “More like over a year,” Laurence said.

  “What is he, twenty-nine?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  John shook his head. “Funny how some folks go gray early. Well, it’s distinguished looking, I’ll say that. Gives him gravitas.”

  Night was gathering. To anyone observing, Nell thought, we must appear a floating island of well-being. She savored being seen in this way—not as a disgraced teacher, but as someone well regarded, if that was the word. She sorted the cards John had dealt.

  “Have you used the bookcase in the Water and Power Company yet, Mrs. Stillman?” Flynn asked.

  “Every week. And please call me Nell—especially if we’re going to discuss books.” He eyed her closely and nodded.

  “I’m reading The American,” she continued. “And you?”

  “The Mill on the Floss. But I’m only ten or fifteen pages into it so, for God’s sake, don’t quiz me,” John paused. “Excuse my profanity. I’m too used to men.”

  “Since I doubt God will take offense, why should I?”

  Night was full-on now, and, save for the light of stars and an apricot moon, the darkness bordering the Lundeens’ yard was as black as an undertaker’s new suit.

  An apricot moon . . . Nell drifted in reverie.

  She had been twelve. The late summer day had been warm, and she had completed her morning chores.

  “Girl,” Mam said, “we need sorghum. Y’ll have t’ walk t’ town.”

  As Nell tramped into the raggedy Wisconsin village, the eastbound train stood at the station, snorting like a wounded bull. Nell lingered on the platform, captive to the stories she suspected the train was transporting—stories exotic, romantic, maybe even wicked and thrilling.