Is That You, Miss Blue?

by M. E. Kerr

  “Where was Sumner when Miss Balfour showed up? Couldn’t he warn them?” I said.

  “She sneaked up on them,” said Cute. “You know how sneaky she is. Now APE thinks they were trying to make out.”

  “The boy was just helping a damsel in distress,” said Lorimer Will Dibblee. “Hell, that woman’s got a dirty mind.”

  “Cardmaker is hall campused for six weeks,” Cute said, “and she’s lost her social privileges for the whole semester.”

  When we reached the Stonewall Jackson Hotel, I got my second glimpse of Cute Dibblee’s tall, beautiful cousin. He had on the same white ducks with the blue denim jacket, his long wrists jumping past the jacket cuffs. He had the longest eyelashes I had ever seen, and he was smiling, showing his dimples, standing in front of a long, violet-colored Lincoln Continental, the type with porthole windows and a steel tire case on the back end. Across the door were the gold-printed words LORIMERWILL DIBBLEE—Montani Semper Liberi. (Cute told me later that the Latin was the motto for the state of West Virginia: Mountaineers are always free men.)

  “This here’s my nephew,” said Mr. Dibblee. “He’s my sister’s boy, and my sister, Cute’s Aunt Hedda Fay, is a devout woman. She had herself three boys, then a girl, then another boy. She called them Matthew, Mark, Luke, Ann, John. This here’s John.”

  He stepped forward with his hand outstretched. “John Dowder. Howdy.”

  “Hi. Flanders Brown,” I said.

  He grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

  He was wearing something sweet-smelling and he had a blue cornflower in the lapel of his blue denim jacket. He walked alongside me as we went into the hotel, telling me he’d gone to Baptist church that morning because he was “a holy Baptist.”

  “Flanders, you’re going to feel your eyes almost pop outta your head if you order one of the hotel steaks,” he said as we crossed the lobby. “We ordered them last night and they come big as toilet seats!”

  I swallowed hard and looked around to see if anyone had heard John Dowder bellow out that remark. No one seemed to care, if it had been heard. Ahead of us, Cute and her father were laughing and joking their way into the dining room.

  “What do you do when you’re home?” I said.

  “I’m with the mine, same as Cute’s pappy, but not rich as him yet. Off time I tend to the corn and strawberries we got in our patch. We got thirteen acres in our patch, so I keep going. I honey hunt some, too.”

  Everyone ordered a steak, and during lunch John explained honey hunting to me. You had to hike through brakes of wild honeysuckle, or trek down flower-fringed valleys, watching for wild bees, following them until you found old honey-holding post oaks. Then you built smoke fires of damp leaves or bits of punk to stupefy the bees, and you chopped out portions of the honey.

  Mr. Dibblee was telling Cute a joke about a high Episcopalian minister who was always mistaken for a priest. The punch line was, “He’s no Father, he’s got four kids!” Mr. Dibblee said it loud enough for the whole dining room to hear, and a few people turned to look back at him.

  Then Mr. Dibblee and John fooled back and forth swapping stories and smoking these big brown strong-smelling cigars, and I kept right on watching John’s face. John was nineteen years old, the first older man I’d ever talked to that long who wasn’t somebody’s father or a neighbor, or someone who worked for my father.

  I was wondering if it was really possible to fall in love with a face, and for no other reason. I was thinking about all the old popular songs about faces, with lines like “…and then I saw your fabulous face,” … or “The first time ever I saw your face”…“Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you’re my favorite work of art.”

  The thing was, I was really moved by John Dowder, and I had been ever since I’d first laid eyes on him at the dance. Wheezing, short of breath, gasping for air, I’d seen that face across the gym and suddenly all that I’d heard about falling apart over someone’s face didn’t seem so impossible to believe anymore.

  I liked a lot of the rest of him, too, how tall he was and the neat silky look his hair had, the way he smiled, the long eyelashes, the long farmer steps he took, and his certain way of throwing back his head to laugh. For no good reason I could figure out, I even liked those big smelly cigars.

  The one thing I didn’t like about him was the way he sometimes expressed himself. That made me cringe.

  After Sunday dinner, he excused himself from the table for a while. When he came back, he said, “I thought something’d gone sour in the gents’, till I remembered we all had asparagus for dinner.”

  He laughed very loud. So did Cute and her father.

  “Let’s face it,” Cardmaker told me when I visited her, after I got back to school, “he’s crude. The whole bunch is crude. Cute still hangs her underwear over the lampshades to dry, and it took all last year and a lot of demerits to get her to stop spitting. But so what? If you see something in him, what does it matter? You don’t have to marry him! When you’re thirty-six, he’ll be forty, anyway! You have to think of things like that!”

  “My skin crawls when he says some things,” I said.

  “Well, that’s good exercise for your skin,” said Cardmaker. “Anyway, I don’t want to hear about someone falling in love when I’m hall campused, a social leper, and on report to my father. My father is going to hear that I was caught in a gym john with a cadet undressing me.”

  “It’s lousy,” I said, “particularly because I saw France Shipp making out with Peter Rider out on the playing field.”

  “She made a dive for Peter Rider the minute she heard Agnes had chickened out. She’s so horny for Peter Rider it’s gross,” said Cardmaker. “Everybody knows they were making out all over the place. There’s no justice.”

  “But won’t your father believe you if you tell him the truth?”

  “I’d have to tell him I’d dyed my formal,” she said, “and I don’t want to tell him that. He’d feel bad because he knows I don’t have the clothes for this place. I told him my old costume for the Christmas pageant was just as good as any formal he could buy. Mom and I hate making him feel guilty because he can’t give us things. He knew in his heart I needed a formal, that the Christmas pageant costume wasn’t right, wouldn’t last long if it was!”

  I began to ponder the problem when Cardmaker said, “He’ll be upset because I’m in trouble, too. It’ll only reflect on him! And this is the wrong time for him to be upset, and for it to reflect on him!”

  She was pacing up and down her room on Hard Times in an old seersucker bathrobe which had once belonged to Reverend Cardmaker. It was a man’s knee-length which came to her toes. As she paced she wound a strand of her long blonde hair around one finger and told me there was a possibility her father was going to be moved to an even poorer parish in New Jersey. She said the trouble was he didn’t get along with a certain Right Reverend Thomas Baird, D.D., LL.D., who took the “right” in his title literally. Cardmaker’s father often pointed out things he was dissatisfied with.

  “Old R.R. doesn’t like any flak at all,” said Cardmaker. She flopped down on her bed. “I’ve made up my mind about something, Flanders.”

  “What?”

  “I’m now an atheist. God doesn’t give a damn and now I know it.”

  “If you know He doesn’t give a damn, you can’t be an atheist,” I said. “According to atheists there isn’t any God.”

  “There isn’t!” she declared. “There’s just a bunch of phonies living off stories of Jesus! Jesus was poor and he didn’t own anything and he didn’t even have a title, but look at the ones representing him today. Except for my father! They’re all hustling to get the rich parishes with the big houses and long black cars, and they want to be the Right Reverend this and the Holiness that, and they’re the most awful snobs you could ever see anywhere, Flanders! They all look down on my father because he’s not chic or rich or all the rest of the crap they consider important. Well, I’ve had them and any God who
lets them represent Him! I’ve had God!”

  She stretched out with her arms behind her head and stared up at the ceiling. I realized for the first time that there were tears in her eyes. She was fighting for control.

  She muttered, “Miss Blue’s in trouble, too. I heard APE giving her hell for putting up that picture of Jesus in the john. I was waiting my turn to see APE and I heard her really giving it to Miss Blue.”

  I felt lousy that I had been the one to tell APE. She would have found out who’d done it, no doubt, but why did I have to tell her?

  Cardmaker said, “That’s what I mean about institutional religion! The really religious ones like Miss Blue get pushed around by the moneymaking rabble like APE! What’s wrong with a picture of Jesus in the john?”

  I said, “I was the one who made fun of it.”

  “That’s your privilege,” Cardmaker said. “Anyone who flaunts her religion all over the place has to take the chance someone else might not be tickled to death with the idea, but she should still have the right to flaunt it.”

  Cardmaker sat up and punched her palm with her fist. “I’m going to form an atheist club. Do you want to be a charter member?”

  “I don’t know. I have to think about it.”

  “If you have to think about it, I don’t want you to be a charter member. I don’t want any charter members who have to think about it.”

  “Then good luck,” I said. “I have to get back to my room before Quiet Hours.”

  Cardmaker waved her hand at me like she was brushing debris out of the air.

  I had a few minutes before Quiet Hours, time enough to make myself feel less to blame because I’d told APE who put up the picture of Jesus. I ran all the way to David Copperfield and knocked on Miss Blue’s door.

  “Yes, come in. Come in,” she called out. “You’re expected.”

  I tried the door but it was locked.

  “Come in,” she said. “I recognize you.”

  “I can’t. The door’s locked.”

  There was a moment’s pause. Then she said, “Is someone there?”

  “It’s Flanders, Miss Blue.”

  After a few seconds, she unlocked the door, but she did not step back to let me enter. Over her shoulder I could see a small narrow room, unadorned and neat like a nun’s cell, with an even larger cross than the one she usually wore hanging over an iron bedstead like the ones in the infirmary.

  “What is it, dear?” She seemed disappointed about something.

  “I just wanted to say I never really minded the picture you put up in the john.”

  For a minute her eyes blinked rapidly. I could smell the gardenia fragrance. She said, “It’s no longer in the W.C.”

  “I know. But I didn’t mind it.”

  “It won’t be put back, either.”

  “I wouldn’t care if it was.”

  “It won’t be.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Blue.”

  She gave me one of her quick little automatic smiles, the sort that was more of a twitch than a smile. Then she closed the door gently while I was still standing there.

  As I walked back to Little Dorrit, I wondered who she’d been expecting, or who she thought she’d recognized. I had never seen her in the company of other faculty members except in assembly or leaving a meeting. At night you often saw faculty members returning from the Star movie house in town, but Miss Blue was never among them. I had never heard her speak of a family or friends. I supposed that it had hurt her pride badly to be ordered to take down the picture. Perhaps she had also believed that Agnes or I had gone to APE about it.

  By the time I got to Little Dorrit, I was so down I almost didn’t see the black triangular sign hanging from Agnes Thatcher’s doorknob. The door was closed. Across the sign were large gold initials:

  E. L. A.

  Cardmaker had told me that when E.L.A. members recruited new people it was always done on Sunday during Quiet Hours. Two E.L.A.-ers simply walked to the prospect’s room, hung the sign on the door, entered, and began whatever ritual was involved in soliciting someone. All of it was top secret, like what the initials stood for.

  I sat on my bed and began a letter to my father just as the CLANG—DONG DONG began the hours officially. From my window I could see Miss Horton on her way to The Caravan for a smoke, and I believed that I could hear France Shipp’s laughter coming from Agnes’ room. I remembered its sound from breakfast the other morning.

  I heard the sounds that Agnes made when she laughed, and I began to feel an intense dislike for the E.L.A., even though I was glad, I supposed, for Agnes’ sake. Maybe it would make her feel more a part of things at Charles School.

  But what right did they have to ruin Quiet Hours for everyone else by choosing that time for their membership calls? No one was supposed to talk during Quiet Hours, not even roommates! And what right did France Shipp have to make out with Peter Rider in the playing fields, on her honor not to go there for any reason but to let him have a smoke, while Cardmaker was in such trouble over a misunderstanding.

  And most of all, what right did the E.L.A. have not to ask me?

  Ten

  MISS BLUE’S SCIENCE CLASS was the last class of the day. Only Miss Blue could hold anyone’s attention at that hour, and her way of doing it was not as much teaching as it was dramatizing.

  Take the afternoon in early November, for example, when Miss Blue began by walking across to the window, staring out for a while as though she’d forgotten we were there, and then without turning around to face us, she said, “On a cloudy, rainy day exactly like this one, in the year 1896, a Frenchman put something away in a drawer, until a sunny day should come along.”

  Then she turned and looked at us. “And because of just such a day as this, and because the Frenchman didn’t know that he wouldn’t need sunlight for what he’d planned, we had a discovery. What was it?”

  “Was it radium?” Ditty Hutt asked.

  “Not yet. It was a step in that direction.”

  “It was radioactive material,” said Ditty, the only one who knew what Miss Blue was leading up to (because her father was a scientist); “it was Antoine Becquerel who put a piece of uranium ore in his desk drawer. He thought it was phosphorescent, and he wanted to see if when he exposed it to sunlight, he could use its light to make a photograph.”

  “Correct,” said Miss Blue. “Becquerel put his carefully wrapped photographic plates into the desk drawer with the uranium ore. When a sunny day came, he took them out … and what did he discover?”

  “He found the plates all fogged,” said Ditty, “as if they’d been exposed to sunlight. He realized some kind of radiation was coming out of the ore, and it didn’t matter if the ore had been exposed to sunlight or not.”

  Miss Blue then ran to the blackboard, her cross swinging back and forth across her bosom, while she drew the outlines of two large heads, a man’s and a woman’s. These were associates of Becquerel.

  “They took over where he left off!” Miss Blue shouted excitedly. “Who will fill in their names?”

  Before the hour and a half was up, there were not only the names of Pierre Curie and Marie Sklodowska Curie across the faces, there were formulas and dates drawn in various colors of chalk, and there were other outlines of faces, other names like Sir J.J. Thomson, Sir Ernest Rutherford, et cetera, and suddenly I knew about atoms and about alpha, beta, and gamma rays, and I’d even forgotten it was Miss Blue up there, crazy Miss Blue from the closet on David Copperfield, making me, hater of science and dunce about all things scientific, actually making me interested in all that.

  It wasn’t the first time it had happened. She’d also hooked me into listening about Newton’s system with my mouth hanging open in wonder, as well as the theories of Copernicus, Galileo, and Archimedes. I wasn’t the only one under Miss Blue’s spell in the classroom; most of us came away with that sort of full, silent feeling that you have after you’ve seen a really good movie and you have to walk back out into the real worl
d again.

  My first view of the real world after that particular class was Cardmaker and Agnes Thatcher walking ahead of me. I couldn’t figure out the two of them anymore. They spent a lot of time together. That was mostly due to the fact Cardmaker was hall campused, which meant she couldn’t even leave Hard Times to go to Sweet Shoppe Queue after school, to go to town on Mondays…or for any reason. And Agnes didn’t like to go to town, didn’t much like a lot of socializing, so they spent their time in Cardmaker’s room on Hard Times. You could hear the raucous noises Agnes made when she laughed way down on Little Dorrit, when the two of them were together, and Agnes seemed to forgive Cardmaker anything.

  Sometimes, for a joke, Cardmaker would reach out and suddenly pinch Agnes: in a class, in chapel, anywhere the atmosphere was placid. Agnes would always grab the spot where she’d been pinched and make a thunderous noise of protest like a banshee wailing. Whenever APE questioned her about it, Agnes always denied that she knew who the culprit was.

  One time Cardmaker put a coat of colorless nail polish over Agnes’ soap. That night when Agnes went in to take a bath, there were distinct sounds of frustration as she was unable to work up a lather, followed by angry noises growing louder, before the soap came flying across the bathroom. Cardmaker sneaked down to see it, bent double with laughter. When Agnes realized it was Cardmaker’s trick on her, she only laughed along with Cardmaker.

  If I had done it, it would have been worth several of her best bruising punches.

  I had forgotten all about something Cardmaker had mentioned, and only that night in chapel did I notice something strange which brought it to mind.

  I was standing beside Sue Crockett.

  Cardmaker had become friends of sorts with Sue Crockett as well as Agnes. I saw Sue in her room sometimes after Sue came from town on Mondays. She would bring Cardmaker Milk Duds and Mallomars and bags of Fritos for snacks.