“I won’t preach. When’s the next tutorial?” she asked, bustling off to the kitchen.
David heaved a sigh of relief. He suspected she knew more than what she was letting on. He tried to hide the aftereffects, but her gaze lingered longer than necessary when he fell silent, when his eyes clouded with memory.
“A week. Hien Due is confident there will be at least ten.”
David was less than confidant. When the minimum wage was barely above three dollars, who would come for English lessons? Beyond the cost involved, the Vietnamese community and the wider Indonesian community was an insular group. They feared discrimination, laughter, and worried about their own tenuous grasp of American culture and customs. Even Paris had an American ex-pat community. Seeking out one’s culture was normal.
“I’m sure you’ll have more than that. Just imagine you could create your own business here, teaching those that do not have access.”
“I taught English in Paris. I had my own business there,” David said.
He toyed with the frigid remains of the desiccated egg, the eggcup tinkled against the pitted wood of the dining table.
Doris froze at the exact moment David realized his slip. Soon enough she poked her head around the corner, eyes wide like a cat that has just cornered a mouse.
“Had a business?”
He could see the wheels turning in Doris’ mind, trying to piece together her last bit of knowledge with the statement and glimpse of anger on his face. The unasked questions hung in the air between them.
The answers sprung to the tip of his lips and he longed to share them, longed to make them real. He imagined telling Doris, letting the dark secrets of Paris spill out … her face would drop, blanch, and her eyes would grow dark. She’d stand in shock for a few moments and then soon enough she’d start on a malediction before storming out the house. The vision was horrifying. He blinked. Doris was still smiling kindly.
“It’s just a way to make money. I don’t have many other talents.”
“We are in need of a singer at church. One of our choir members moved to Chicago. You’re such a talent, David. It would be such a shame for you not …”
“No,” he said, stabbing the fruit with unwarranted venom.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“It was implied.”
“Nothing was implied.”
David threw her a cold look. It was just another way to try and lure him into their church, within their grasp and their purview.
“I’m off. I’ll bring more vegetables next week. You can tell me how the lessons went.”
“There won’t be anything to tell, so don’t get your hopes up. And I don’t need more food. There’s only one person living in this house. Not ten.”
Doris looked around the kitchen. David watched as her gaze shifted from the old appliances, to the sturdy table, to the worn but pristine floors. Her eyes grew distant as if she had seen a ghost.
“You’ll eat the food I bring you,” she said, coming out of a long reverie and walking toward the door. “Oh, and David, if I were you, I’d prepare for more than ten people.”
He listened to Doris’ soft footfalls as they echoed off the walls of the nearly empty house. One of his earliest memories was of listening to her float through the house, humming hymns as she flitted through rooms, wiping off dust and cobwebs and frowns. Their father rarely yelled at Doris. She was ethereal and pleasant and had a strange quality about her, which diffused tension and arguments. She never rose to a jibe or behaved in any other way than with a kind voice and a soft touch.
After she left, the kitchen was altogether too quiet, and he gathered up the dishes. Another vision of his mother, bustling around the table so many years ago, her wide hips swaying and the twinkle in her eye, flew across his mind. He was her favorite. He always had been. The baby. The one she could enjoy instead of sending out to the fields.
From the moment his arm parted company with his body, his mother rarely left his side. She taught him how to button his shirts, how to write with his left hand, how to roll out piecrust. For a week straight they worked on tying his shoelaces. He loved watching her tie her own arm behind her back, and he laughed with her as she laughed at the difficulty of it all.
In his mother’s eyes he was not handicapped; he was normal. Every ounce of independence he had, he owed to her. They figured out the best way to accomplish things one-handed, together. David sunk back against the chair and smiled. The kitchen was always her place; life was less demanding here. Raikes demanded perfection from everyone, but from him most of all. His mother had born the brunt of it.
A windowpane rattled loudly in the living room and his eyes snapped open. The scene disappeared. Since his return to this house, memories had assailed him at every turn, memories that refused to stay buried in the past. It was the height of futility; memories never stay buried.
David pushed the door open to his brothers’ old room. It had been stripped of all of the trappings of their early lives, just two twin beds and a small writing desk. The desk overflowed with papers, pens of four different colors, and half of his college textbooks on English. He sat on the chair, which creaked and listed to the left side. For a moment, he looked out to the fields beyond, frozen beneath the frost. Nothing had changed.
David pulled the papers closer to him, rifled the stack for what he was looking for and began to write feverishly. He pulled book after book out of the stack, flipped through the pages, wrote down a few notes on a yellow notebook, and moved on to the next book. The noon hour chimed but he continued on, filling vast stacks of paper with his work.
David looked up, annoyed. He could barely see the words on the page before him the blackness of their forms, merging into the white margins where they didn’t belong. With a huff, he bolted from the chair, turned on the light, and returned to his hunched position.
It was in much the same position that Doris found David the next morning, convinced that he would have worked through the night in preparation. Asleep he looked so much like the young boy she had held, whose tears she wiped, and to whose greedy ears she had told stories in the dead of night to distract him from the pain. She slipped a cup of steaming coffee in front of him, prayed it was up to his refined tastes, and swept silently from the room.
“YOU’RE EARLY,” THE LIBRARIAN said. “You aren’t scheduled until six o’clock.”
David looked up; from the thick stack of papers he was trying to wrangle into a more secure position in his arm, studying the woman now staring at him. It was quite impossible to tell her age. She wore glasses, the black rims had faded on the corners, an overlarge brown skirt, and wrinkled cream blouse. She was careworn, the eyes told as much. A woman cut down in the prime of her life, perhaps by an overbearing husband or sick parents or infertility, but a woman cut down nonetheless.
“You should go to Paris,” he said and swept by her, his satchel smacking repeatedly against his thigh with muffled thuds.
She stared at him until a man at the reference desk coughed discreetly. She shuffled off, with her usual pinched expression.
David catapulted himself into the study room and shut the door with a snap. He turned around to face the poorly proportioned room and set off in a flurry of motion. After ten minutes, he looked upon his handiwork. Four rows of desks with four chairs each all faced the blackboard and a small lectern. He picked up the stack of papers he’d placed by the door, setting out the carefully marked papers in small stacks. David looked over his new domain; his fingers drummed the wood before him, bud bud bud-duum. With a startling realization, he groped deep into his satchel.
“Where the hell are you?” he cursed, and groped angrily at the satchel, trying to root out his prey. In frustration he took to pounding the pockets of his trousers, then his blazer.
“Ah ha. Petits diables.”
He moved around the tables, placing the diable pencils on the left side of each piece of paper on the desks. But he couldn’t keep still, he moved from the back to make sure
the students could see the board, to the front row to see if it was too close. Every twenty seconds he looked up at the clock, and at five minutes past six he began to worry. Not worry, obsess. Every conceivable premise for his students not to show up began to run through his exhausted mind. Then, with a bang that sent him jumping off the desk he was sitting on, Hien Due flung open the door and shouted his name. Which drew the considerable ire of the dowdy librarian.
After looking sheepishly over his shoulder, Hien turned to David in ecstasy.
“A hundred. David. One hundred.”
David stared, sure that Hien Due couldn’t mean what he thought he meant. His heart thumped wildly and he couldn’t quite settle it.
“What?”
Before he could extract an answer, Hien Due flitted out of the room, bouncing on the balls of his feet as he passed stack after stack of nonfiction books on farming. It wasn’t more than twenty seconds before Hien Due rounded the corner once more followed by student after student in a stream that wound beyond the stacks and the orange doors.
Hien Due beamed as he held the door open as they passed into the meeting room. David couldn’t think. Already they had passed twenty, and he hadn’t made more than fifteen copies of any of his papers. Even as he tallied the time it would take to make copies, more kept coming through the door. Men smiled at him, women said “bonjour” or “bonne soirée”, and moved to find space in the rapidly crowding room.
It felt like an eternity watching them all file past Hien Due. It was an eternity that set David to smiling, as he hadn’t done since his last wine-soaked dinner with Catherine. The empty and broken heart was alive again.
When Hien Due finally shut the door, and David blinked away some of his shock, he pulled at the collar of his shirt and watched as everyone removed their coats, moving as little as possible, and held them demurely in their hands. The sixteen chairs had been filled by the oldest and frailest.
“One hundred. We are ready to learn, Mister David.”
David turned to face Hien Due, nonplussed.
“I don’t’ have enough paperwork for all of you,” he said, falling into French.
Hien Due turned toward his wife, who sprang into action. It became quite evident that she knew everyone. She walked among the prospective students, whispering to them, asking questions. David watched as she chatted with some, and shared knowing smiles with others. When she starting walking back toward the front, Hien Due conferred with her for a moment before rushing back to David, if it could be called rushing through the thick mass.
“We will split into groups. Different days. Will that work?”
David looked from Hien Due’s thrilled face to the mass of faces turned intently to him, expectant faces, hanging on every word, leaning forward as he spoke. Their hope radiated from their very skin, bursting out of them in spontaneous smiles. Their futures were in his hands, for who would come along to teach them what they needed to know if he did not? David shifted through his stack of papers until he found a yellow writing pad.
“What days work best?”
“Wednesday through Saturday.”
David turned to address the waiting crowd.
“I have a piece of paper for the days you have indicated. As you leave today, I’d like you to write down your name on the sheet of paper with the corresponding day that works best for you.”
Heads nodded in every direction.
“Well, we shouldn’t waste the evening,” David said, and began to lecture.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
2 February 1980
“WE NEED A DIFFERENT location,” David said.
They were walking back through the library at the tail end of the smiling mass of students. Hien Due rubbed his hands quickly together as though he was trying to start a fire of ideas. David stared at hawk-like librarian. She scowled from her post, but said nothing, rendered speechless from the influx of Vietnamese in her quiet library.
“We do not want to pay for a location. That would not be fair to you,” Hien Due said, his voice cracking with emotion.
“I’ll find a place”
“So many!” Hien Due said after a moment. He gave a little shriek and clapped his hands.
“Weren’t you expecting them?”
“A hundred? Heavens no. Mai babysits for some of the families while the parents work. She must have spread the word. To have so many, I did not expect that.”
“Why?”
“Many of my countrymen have had less than cordial, encounterswith Americans. It’s unfortunate. Simple prejudice. I was not sure they would come. I did tell everyone you were more French than American,” Hien Due said with a laugh.
David laughed as well, wondering what Jeanne would have said to such a pronouncement. He enjoyed Hien Due’s easygoing demeanor, and the honesty with which the man dealt with those around him.
“I hope I live up to your standards.”
“Didn’t you see the smiles on their faces as they left. They were all impressed.”
Hien Due pulled David over to his car and pulled a few bills from his coat pocket.
“Your twenty-five dollars.”
“Hien Due, I didn’t give a full lesson. Not a lesson that I would consider payment for. I insist, please don’t pay me for tonight.”
“I have all your worksheets. This took a long time, I can tell. You must allow us to pay. It’s only honorable.”
An air of pain was about Hien Due as he spoke, the lightness in his eyes dimmed, and he suddenly grew much older.
“Mes excuses.”
David dropped his head and gave a conciliatory smile. It perked Hien Due up at once. The smaller man gleefully pressed the bills into David’s unresisting hand.
“My wife tells me you must come over for dinner. I shall let you know when.”
Hien Due ran around to the driver’s seat of his blue 1970 sedan, waving at his daughter who was sitting in the back. David stood as the car drove away, and the brisk spring air became a swirling mass of darkness. He contemplated finding something to eat, sitting down to a croissant, fingered the truck key in his pocket, running through the cafés near his apartment. The loud backfire of a tractor shattered his dream. There was no café close by, and it was not his apartment that he was going back to.
But that evening as he sat hunched over some day-old bread, tea, and some cold cuts of meat, he felt lighter. The air in the house didn’t seem as thick or oppressive. He went to sleep easily that night, dreaming of teaching.
ON MONDAY MORNING, WHOLLY unrested, David sat blinking in the weak midwinter sunlight. He lifted his hand to rub a sore spot on his neck and force an idea from his mind. Two days on from last week’s lesson and he’d still not come up with a suitable location. David chuckled. What had been an intimate weekly tutoring had now turned into a small school.
“I’d like to make an appointment to see the principal,” David said.
He breezed into the reception area of Bunker Hill’s small elementary school, full of zeal. The secretary looked up at him, her eyes then dropped slowly over his missing arm.
“I do believe Principal Williams is free, one moment.”
The short, plump woman walked toward a set of doors beyond her desk, entering the third.
How long had it been since he’d walked these halls? The building was cramped, even with its recent renovations. The ceilings, rooms, and their connecting doors seemed much smaller.
“You can go back,” the secretary said.
David smiled and made his way to the office. The door was open. A woman sat behind the desk. She looked up from her paperwork and smiled. She was thin and wrapped in a thick, black sweater, her brown hair tied into a bun at the base of her neck.
“I’m sorry,” he sputtered.
“David, it’s so wonderful to see you. Please come, take a seat.” When he didn’t answer, she continued on, eager to break the confusion, “I used to be Angela Simms. We were in school together.”
David blinked and sat in
the proffered seat.
“Yes, Angela. Excuse my rudeness.”
“You weren’t expecting a female principal.”
“I am sorry. My thoughts were elsewhere and so my manners are lacking. It’s wonderful to see you again. My congratulations on your position.”
“Thank you, David. You look exceptionally well. I am surprised to see you here. The last I heard, you were living in France.”
David blinked; thrilled she had begun the foray herself. They wouldn’t have to waste valuable time with small talk.
“Yes, in Paris. I’ve been teaching English for the past twenty years.”
“Twenty years, in Paris! What brought you back?”
“I am quite fluent in both languages by now,” he said, pausing as she laughed. “It’s actually why I have come to see you today.”
“Yes?” she said, leaning forward, and resting her forearms on the battered and dinged desk.
“As a means of supporting myself, I’ve begun teaching English again. My sister-in-law put me in contact with a man named Hien Due, a Vietnamese immigrant who runs an organization that serves Indonesian immigrants,” David paused, taking note of Angela’s interested expression.
“Hien Due and his people face an uphill battle with the English language. Most are too old to be enrolled in school and cannot afford traditional college classes. Therefore, they cannot properly learn our language or customs, which again hampers their ability to find employment. They cannot fill out simple applications, nor can they move beyond minimum wage jobs; if indeed they are lucky enough to get them.”
“It’s a difficult position to be in, I’m sure.”
“This is where my skills can be of help. I taught their first lesson two weeks ago and only four people came. Of the four, three were Hien Due’s family. Yesterday, I had one hundred people come to the public study room at the library.”
“One hundred people?” Angela said, her mouth agape.
“One hundred, and Hien Due expects that there will be even more next week. I charge a small fee for the classes. Now,” he said, steadying himself, “this is my predicament. I cannot fit, even twenty-five people, comfortably, in the room at the library. It really can only sit about sixteen students. I would like to ask if it would be possible to use an empty classroom four nights a week from six to eight p.m. I will reimburse the school district for the trouble, of course.”
Lives Paris Took Page 24
