The Math Teacher Is Dead

by Robert Manners

  Danny walked back to his original seat and was soon joined by Jeremy, who was excitedly debating whether to try out for Romeo or Mercutio. He nattered on for several minutes before noticing that Danny was sitting glum and silent with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “Which do you think I should try out for?” Jeremy asked, cocking his head to one side.

  “That would depend,” Danny smiled at him, the adorably cocked head lifting his spirits, “on whether you want to kill me or be killed by me.”

  “How so?”

  “Please don’t tell anybody about this,” Danny whispered confidentially, “But Mr. Oland wants me to play Tybalt. And if I don’t, my Aunt Claudia might renege on her promise to pay for the costumes.”

  “But that’s great!” Jeremy enthused, “I wish I had an aunt who would guarantee me a role.”

  “Your talent guarantees you a role, Jeremy,” Danny told him earnestly, “But everyone knows I couldn’t act my way out of a wet paper bag, and that I’ll be playing Tybalt because I’m a Vandervere.”

  “Wet paper bag,” Jeremy snickered at the phrase, “But I can coach you, nobody will care that you got the role because of your name, once you show them you really can act.”

  “We’ll be coaching each-other, then,” Danny smiled fondly at Jeremy and stroked the back of his hand, “I’m to teach Mercutio and Romeo how to fence for the sword-fight scenes.”

  “That’ll be fun,” Jeremy said with a certain lack of enthusiasm; he was not an athlete and found strenuous physical activity boring, “So, which role do you think I should audition for?”

  “You’d be wonderful in either,” Danny said thoughtfully, “but I think I’d rather see you as Mercutio. He’s not onstage as much, but he’s so different from your own personality; Romeo wouldn’t be enough of a stretch. And you’d have to kiss Felicia, which I don’t think you’d like.”

  “Is she that bad of a kisser?” Jeremy looked alarmed.

  “No, she’s a fantastic kisser. She might turn you straight, and then what would I do?” Danny poked him playfully under the ribs where he was ticklish.

  “Stop, someone will see!” he whispered, giggling.

  “So what if they see?” Danny was often mystified by Jeremy’s unwillingness to be public about their relationship. But Danny was a Vandervere, and had never been teased or bullied by a classmate in his entire life, so had little understanding of the risk most gay kids run by being obvious in high school.

  “People! People!” Mr. Oland drew the club’s attention again, this time to lead them in a discussion of lighting techniques, giving them examples of different moods, different colors for different actors, and how to use the lightboard. Though the actors would prefer to just act, and the crew would prefer to just deal with the stage, Mr. Oland believed that any denizen of the theatre should know about every aspect of a dramatic production: actors must know about stagecraft and crew should know how to act. Danny of course preferred the technical lectures, and was always embarrassed when he had to take part in dramatic exercises and improvisations; Jeremy found the discussion of lights pointless and tuned out, spending the whole hour thinking over what Danny had told him about playing Mercutio.

  3

  As usual after Drama Club, Jeremy and Danny spent the afternoon together, ostensibly to study but mostly just to be together for a little while without their peers watching them. Jeremy’s parents were very strict about their son’s time and didn’t like for him to go out after school; if it was anybody less than Danny Vandervere asking permission for Jeremy to stay out late on a Thursday afternoon, they would have refused — but one doesn’t refuse a Vandervere. So awed were they by a Vandervere taking interest in their son, they probably would have even approved of them dating.

  Vandervere High School, a grand turn-of-the-century brick edifice with a complex of newer wings and annexes sprouting from its back like a squid’s tentacles, sits on the edge of the old town, at the intersection of three main roads: Pine Street, which bisects the old town through the square; Lake Road, which leads not very surprisingly to Lake Augusta, a man-made body of water created by damming the Augusta River for electricity, which was surrounded by recreational facilities and a resort hotel, and on the western shore of which Danny’s family home stood; and Watertown Road, which led to the Vandervere Mills’ spring-water bottling plant and a subdivision of homes that had been built in the eighties to accommodate the new plant’s employees.

  There was an electric streetcar system that ran along these roads, connecting the old town to the subdivisions and the mills and plants, built in the 30s and maintained as a free service by the Vandervere Trust; but Danny and Jeremy walked, since Pine Street was only a little over a mile long, and their destination was at the other end from the high school: the original Vandervere mansion, a monstrous Gothic-and-gingerbread fantasia bristling with turrets and dormers, gables and cupolas and oriels, in which dwelt Miss Mathilda, Miss Myrtle, and Miss Maude Vandervere, collectively know as the Aunt Ems.

  These three unmarried and slightly eccentric old ladies, the sisters of Danny’s grandfather, were the only Vanderveres who actually loved Danny; they had taken him under their collective wing when he was twelve, overseeing his education as a “gentleman” by hiring extra tutors as well as music and dance instructors for him, teaching him etiquette and poise along with the more ceremonious social skills — Danny was probably the only sixteen-year-old in the county, perhaps even the state, who could bone a fish at table, dance every dance at a cotillion, and play a skillful game of bridge.

  Danny had been going to the Aunt Ems’ every day after school since the sixth grade, and though he never slept there, he had his own room in the mansion. He always met the mannish eldest sister Mathilda at the Town Library on the square, where she served as head librarian, curator, and official town historian; he walked with her the rest of the way up Pine Street to meet the younger two sisters, Myrtle and Maude, identical twins who still shared the same room at the age of eighty; high tea was then served in the shadow-cluttered music room by Oscar, a creaking butler so old he referred to himself as “colored.”

  After tea, Danny was taught piano and voice and dance under the eyes of the Aunt Ems, then retired with whatever academic tutor he was working under at the time to a dark-paneled study filled with the taxidermied remains of now-endangered or -extinct animals slain by his ancestors before the first World War; on Saturdays, he came into town with Mrs. Espinosa, his family’s housekeeper, to do the marketing, and spent the rest of the day with the Aunt Ems learning directly from them about family history, table-setting, flower-arranging, appreciating opera, and the various philanthropic duties that fell to the rich in service of the poor.

  Then at six o’clock, Oscar would drive Danny back to his parents’ house in the Aunt Ems’ bulbous old Cadillac limousine, not speaking one word the entire way until he opened the door to the car and said “Good evening, Master Marcus.”

  All of the Aunt Ems called him Marcus, which was in fact his name: Marcus Daniel Vandervere IV, though the rest of the family called him Marc-Daniel since the name Marcus had seemed too grandiose for a little boy, and he preferred to call himself Danny because he said the name Marc-Daniel sounded “like a Pekinese coughing”; but Marcus Daniel Vandervere II was the Aunt Ems’ father, and in the grand tradition of elderly maiden ladies they worshiped and venerated their father, so they considered the name Marcus a compliment of the highest order.

  Danny was devoted to the Aunt Ems, and they were the only feature of his day that he would not give up for his sexual pursuits. He did, however, start bringing friends with him on his after-school visits, and the Aunt Ems were not always enchanted with Danny’s varied fuck-buddies; but they were especially fond of the pretty, gentle Jeremy, and Aunt Mathilda lit up when she saw him accompanying Danny into the library.

  “Ah, Mr. Sinclair, how delightful,” Aunt Mathilda said in her oddly brusque voice, which made even the frothiest pleasantries soun
d like the bark of a drill-sergeant; she was dressed in one of her typical suits, the heathered blue herringbone jacket cut and draped exactly like a man’s suit and worn with a white shirt and a silk necktie, but with a three-quarter-length skirt instead of pants; her shoes were similarly ambiguous, highly-polished masculine wingtips with a curvaceous two-inch heel. She wore her thick iron-gray hair parted on one side and brilliantined, but with a heavy bun of coiled braids nestled at the nape.

  “Miss Vandervere,” Jeremy responded gallantly, shaking her hand gently and bowing ever-so-slightly, as Danny had taught him.

  “I have heard, Marcus,” Aunt Mathilda said to Danny as she settled her hat — a man’s gray felt fedora with a small curled pink feather and antique marcasite brooch on the band — and picked up her briefcase-like handbag, “that your Aunt Claudia has wedged her unfortunate nose into the Fall Play this year.”

  “Yes, ma’am; she’s offered to pay for the costumes,” Danny replied, taking his great-aunt’s gloved hand and tucking it into the crook of his elbow as they descended the library steps and continued up Pine Street.

  “Claudia doesn’t ‘offer’ to do anything, Marcus,” Aunt Mathilda sniffed contemptuously, “She blackmails people into falling in line with her wishes by making a pretense of some minor concession. What does she want in exchange for the costumes?”

  “She wants me to be given a role in the play,” Danny responded miserably.

  “Danny — Marcus I mean — is going to play Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet!” Jeremy told her excitedly, still thinking this role was a signal honor.

  “How times do change,” Mathilda chuckled mirthlessly, “When Maude wished to appear in the school play as Lily Miller in Ah, Wilderness!, our sister-in-law — your grandmother, Marcus, who was just as much a blue-nose busybody as Claudia — made such a stink you’d have thought Maude was proposing to appear nude in public.”

  “Aunt Claudia seems to think that if a Vandervere is on the program, it must be in the cast rather than the crew,” Danny snorted, “I wanted to do set design and construction, not to act.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be a credit to the name whichever you do,” Aunt Mathilda assured him, “Are they doing the sword-fighting on stage in this production? That is a talent you legitimately possess and of which you are rightly proud.”

  “Mr. Oland asked me to coach the other actors in fencing,” Danny told her, “Which I am perfectly happy to do. But I am not an actor, it’s not something I’m good at.”

  “Marcus, you are good at so many things,” Aunt Mathilda’s voice took on the dangerous softness that signaled her expectation for one to take her next words to heart, “You have so many talents, almost everything you’ve undertaken has come easily to you. I think you should embrace this challenge and meet it head-on; it will be character-building to work hard at something that doesn’t come easily.”

  “Why is it,” Danny wondered in a stagey voice to show that he was joking, “that everything which builds character is either tedious or embarrassing?”

  Aunt Mathilda and Jeremy laughed obligingly as they ascended the stairs onto the mansion’s front porch and the ancient Oscar opened the front door to them.

  “Good afternoon Miss Mathilda, Master Marcus, Master Jeremy,” Oscar croaked in a voice that had once been an impressive basso profundo and now sounded like granite pebbles rattling around in a wooden box. He was well over ninety, possibly approaching a hundred, but refused to retire; the Aunt Ems had grown up with him in their home, first as the gardener’s boy, then as a driver, then as their butler, and were loath to part with him — so since he was remarkably healthy for his age and had all his mental faculties, nobody wanted to force him out of work.

  Aunt Myrtle and Aunt Maude were already ensconced in the music room, seated in matching balloon-back chairs with a tea-table groaning under the weight of cookies, petits-fours, scones with Devon cream, deviled eggs, and a glittering Edwardian garland-style tea service of over a dozen pieces. They remained seated as Danny and Jeremy kissed their hands, fluttering their lace handkerchiefs and fussing with their matching chiffon afternoon dresses, Myrtle in pale green and Maude in pale peach, as the boys complimented their appearance and Mathilda helped herself to black coffee and a plain butter cookie.

  After putting away two cups of Earl Gray, a scone, and four deviled eggs, Danny went to the piano and played some Chopin etudes, then inveigled Jeremy into singing some respectable old show-tunes to Danny’s accompaniment; at first Jeremy was too shy to sing to the old ladies, but Aunt Mathilda tartly pointed out to him that an actor cannot afford to be shy under any circumstances.

  With tea over with, Danny and Jeremy went up to Danny’s room to study; but they did no studying that afternoon: as soon as the door closed behind him, Danny pulled Jeremy into a long and intensively seductive kiss that eventually led to some hot and heavy making-out on the bed.

  “Wait, stop,” Jeremy gasped out after a while, putting his hand against Danny’s mouth and arching his pelvis back and away from Danny’s frighteningly huge erection. He had an infallible sense for when he was just about to give in and start pulling off his and Danny’s clothes, and was absolutely terrified of going past that moment.

  “Mmmph,” Danny’s protest was muffled against Jeremy’s hand, but he acquiesced to the other boy’s request and rolled off of him, though he kept his arms wrapped around Jeremy’s narrow chest.

  “I’m not ready,” Jeremy said for perhaps the fifteenth time; every time they started kissing, they would get more and more involved until Jeremy’s internal alarm went off; and every time he said he wasn’t ready, in exactly the same tone and tempo, as if he were parroting back something he’d memorized.

  “It’s OK,” Danny said for the fifteenth time, relaxing against the boy and letting his breathing return to normal, “I don’t want to push you. But I want you to know I’ll still love you either way.”

  “Do you really love me?” Jeremy turned his head and looked Danny in the eye.

  “I really do love you,” Danny equivocated: he wasn’t in love with Jeremy, but he did feel a certain kind of love for him — the same kind of love he felt for his horse, and for Henry, and for chocolate pudding.

  “Do you see other people?” Jeremy asked suddenly after a long companionable silence.

  “Where did that come from?” Danny stalled.

  “I see how people look at you,” Jeremy was no longer looking into Danny’s eyes, but rather at some point between his lip and his chin, “You can get anyone you want. And I see you looking at them, and I wonder if you are getting them.”

  “I’m not dating anyone else,” Danny said carefully, choosing his words with legalistic precision. He never told any of his partners about any of his other partners, partly due to his code of honor which forbids kissing and telling, but also from a desire to not be seen by one and all as a ravening slut.

  Jeremy gave him a long, searching look, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and extricated himself from Danny’s embrace, saying, “This is such a beautiful room.”

  It was a beautiful room, octagonal since it was situated in one of the house’s two towers, the one at the front overlooking the cul-de-sac around the grandiose fountain at the end of Pine Street. It had four tall Italianate arched windows heavily draped in pale lettuce-green damask, a coved ceiling centering a bronze chandelier crawling with Chinese dragons, and a pale green-veined white marble fireplace fitted with a beautifully ornate bronze Franklin stove; the walls were covered with silvery-green silk patterned with linden leaves above the carved green-gray pickled pine wainscoting, hung with lithographs of botanical illustrations in ornate silver-gilt frames, and the glossy hardwood floor was mostly covered with a circular Chinese rug featuring gold bats and white flowers scattered on a grass-green background.

  The furniture, as in almost every other room of the house, was original: heavy, masculine Renaissance Revival pieces chosen by Danny’s great-great-great-grandmother in 1880 when the hou
se was built, upholstered in new but historically authentic cut velvets and embroidered satins in shades of pale green and silvery gray; the bed was regal and surmounted by a high half-tester draped in the same damask as the windows; there were gorgeous and valuable knick-knacks scattered liberally over every surface, ticking bronze clocks and gem-inlaid boxes, photographs and watercolor miniatures in intricate silver frames, little green Sèvres vases filled with fresh flowers and carved jade bowls on rosewood stands.

  There was electricity, of course, all of the old gas fixtures and table lamps had been wired at the turn of the 20th century, the wiring updated in the twenties and again in the sixties; a heavy 1930s Bakelite telephone with a rotary dial stood on the table by the bed, and there was an electric button by the fireplace to summon servants; Danny had brought in a CD player that was hidden from view in the tall secretary desk, which also housed a laptop computer and a cellphone charger; but at first glance the room had not changed much in the hundred and twenty-three years since it had been decorated as the principle man’s guest bedroom.

  “Isn’t it?” Danny agreed, wondering what had brought on the non-sequitur, “I feel very honored the Aunt Ems gave it to me, it’s one of the most important rooms. Three governors and five senators have slept here.”

  “That must have been quite a party!” Jeremy joked.

  “Not all at once, smartypants,” Danny reached out and grabbed Jeremy by the waist, tickling him until he fell in a helpless heap on the floor. And once incapacitated, Danny lay down on him and started kissing him again, taking turns between sucking on his mouth and gnawing on his neck just below the collar of his shirt, making him squirm and moan.

  Before Jeremy had a chance to tell Danny to stop, they were interrupted by Oscar knocking quietly on the door to tell them that it was almost six o’clock and the car would be brought around to take them both home. Danny thanked Oscar without opening the door, and he and Jeremy spent a few moments straightening their clothes and quietly exchanging ideas about weekend plans; they headed down the operatically grand mahogany staircase, with its deep red Persian runner and tall stained-glass bay window at the half-landing, into the dark and strangely creepy front hall and onto the front porch. The Aunt Ems had already retired to their rooms to dress for dinner, so Danny didn’t say goodbye to them, nor was he expected to; he and Jeremy slid into the back seat of the old Cadillac and waited for Oscar to shuffle around to the front and start the car.