Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  “Has anyone seen Patrick lately?” he said.

  Annabel saw Sophie flinch. She held the spoon over the stove, oatmeal dripping onto the element. “I saw him at the marina,” Sophie said. “I was talking to his mom. Patrick was down on the wharf, talking to a guy on a boat.” Her voice was steady. She held her hair back with one hand. “I made too much oatmeal,” she said. “I hope people are hungry.”

  “I miss Patrick,” Harold said. “I enjoyed our conversations. He isn’t avoiding me, is he, because of what happened? Perhaps he blames me.”

  “He doesn’t blame you,” Annabel said. “He’s not avoiding you.” Not for the reasons you think, anyway, she thought.

  “Well, if you happen to see him, invite him over for coffee or something,” Harold said. “Tell him I’d like to see him.”

  “I will,” Sophie said. “I will tell him, if I see him.”

  Annabel and Sophie, seventeen and fifteen years old, stood in front of the old mirror in the upstairs hall. Two Japanese girls who had never seen Japan. Olive skin, finely arched eyebrows, long black hair. They looked like twins; they even had identical shadows beneath their eyes, from lack of sleep. They were fine-boned and slender. Annabel was half an inch taller than Sophie. When they were little, strangers used to stare at them, Nori said. Strangers followed her down the street when she was pushing them in their strollers. Nori was afraid to take her eyes off them, in case they were stolen from her.

  Annabel looked more Japanese than Sophie did. Even Nori said so. Annabel resembled her grandfather, the famous orchestra conductor. She wasn’t musically gifted, not like her grandfather or Nori and Sophie, but she adored music. She heard music in her head at night, before she slept, and also words, beautiful words she tried to hold onto as they flew past, like bright, errant birds. Annabel drew a comb through Sophie’s hair. Then she braided it and wrapped an elastic band around the braid. In the mirror she could see the wall behind her. A ladder-back chair stood beneath a painting of wind-swept moors in some unknown country. She could see the window she climbed through to get onto the sloped roof over the porch. The window had a cracked pane where, in her haste, she’d struck it with her foot. No one had noticed. Her parents were too worried about other things to worry about her.

  Annabel could hear Nori downstairs on the phone, talking to Annabel’s grandmother. She was saying it was unlikely the school would reopen in the fall. No, she said, she really didn’t know what they were going to do. If she could borrow a small amount of money, just to get them through the next few months, she said. A small amount. Anything would help. “I hate to ask,” she said. “You know that. But at this moment, I don’t know what else I can do.”

  Annabel saw Sophie looking at her in the mirror. She gave a small shrug, almost a shiver. When she walked away, over to the window, Annabel had the dizzying sensation she’d peeled away from herself and become two separate individuals. She waited another minute, until her mother had finished on the telephone, and then she went downstairs. Nori was sitting in a rocking chair near the open French doors. Mika was sitting at her feet playing with her cloth doll. Harold was standing with his hand on the doorframe. He was wearing his work clothes, the plaid shirt he put on to do chores. He didn’t seem to see Annabel at the foot of the stairs. He must have overheard the telephone call, because he was saying, “How could you ask your mother for money, without discussing it with me first? How do you think I feel, when you go begging to your parents?”

  “I was not begging,” Nori said.

  “Yes, you were. I heard you. You know what your parents think of me. How gratifying for them to have their suspicions confirmed.”

  “I’m not listening to this,” Nori said. “I have better things to do than listen to your paranoia.”

  “Is that what it is? I’m paranoid?”

  “It’s just a loan,” Nori said. “We need the money. It would help pay for a fence.”

  If they built the fence, Nori pointed out, their problems would be solved; they could reopen the school. Harold said a chain link fence would be an atrocity. It would make Miramonte look like any institution, any school. He wanted the children to feel as if they were at home, not in jail.

  “If the school can’t be as I envision it, then there is no school,” he said.

  “Without the school, how are we going to live?” Nori said. “How are we going to feed our children?”

  “I don’t have an answer for you,” Harold said. “I just need time to think. If you’ll just let me think.” He pressed his hands to his eyes. Then he turned and went outside.

  Nori bowed her head. Her braided hair hung down her back like a rope just barely able to anchor her to earth. She was wearing jeans and one of her hand-knitted Icelandic sweaters. She picked up Mika’s doll and gave it a little shake, rearranging its yarn curls. She tied its sash and handed it back to Mika. Annabel went into the kitchen and toasted a slice of bread. While she’d slept, an idea had come to her. She and Patrick could live together while he went to school. She could work and study at the same time. They’d have this simple, uncomplicated life, learning and growing together. She thought of Wittgenstein, one of her father’s heroes, who’d given away his inheritance in order to teach at a progressive primary school in Austria. Like Harold, he’d believed in intelligence. Like Harold, he hadn’t believed in wealth. But a certain amount of wealth was essential. What could be worse than being poor? All her life so far her family had been poor, or at least they’d never had enough of anything. Her future would be different.

  Mika came into the kitchen. She dragged a stool over to the sink and turned on the tap, letting the water trickle into her palm. “What are you doing?” Annabel said. “We have to save water. The well is getting low.” She turned off the tap. It dripped into the sink. There were shadows under Mika’s eyes, as if she, too, were lying awake at night worrying about money. “Baby bags,” Annabel said, running her fingers lightly over Mika’s face. She looked like Harold. She had a light scattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her hair was light brown and naturally curly. It needed brushing.

  “How about if I make a chocolate cake?” Annabel said. Mika nodded. She hardly ever spoke. She spoke less than Sophie did. Harold said Mika’s thoughts were too deep for words. Annabel opened a cupboard door and got out a mixing bowl. She handed a wooden spoon to Mika. “You can stir,” she said. What could be more normal than baking a chocolate cake? If she could find the necessary ingredients, everything would turn out all right, not just with the cake, but also with Harold and Nori, with the school, with her and Patrick.

  She assembled two cups of unbleached white flour, six brown eggs, a can of powdered cocoa. She used the last of the butter and a full cup of sugar. She mixed powdered milk with water. She looked out the window. Harold was out near the barn, just standing there, his hands in his pockets, scanning the sky as if for signs of inclement weather, ominous clouds, a supplementary inrush of bad luck. But it was a fine, clear day. Here they were, teetering on the absolute edge of disaster, and yet the world was as beautiful as ever, the trees like spires, a few white clouds like silk sails racing across the sun.

  Annabel slid two cake pans into the oven. She wiped chocolate batter from Mika’s mouth. Nori walked into the kitchen. She looked at the empty egg carton on the counter. “You used up the eggs?” she said. “You used the butter?”

  “It’s okay,” Annabel said. “If the cake turns out, our bad luck will turn to good luck.”

  “You know that for a fact, do you?” Nori said.

  Through the window Annabel could see Harold furiously scything grass beside the footpath to the barn.

  “In Japan,” Nori said. “Well, let me begin this way. When I was seven years old, my father took me to Japan. My mother stayed at home, in Toronto, because my Japanese grandparents had no interest in meeting my father’s Norwegian wife. I missed her. I was lonely and frightened. One day, at dusk, my grandmother gave me a lighted paper lantern. It was August.
It was the Festival of Obon. We put my lantern in a river, where it became one of a flotilla of lanterns. My grandmother said the lanterns guided the spirits into their own world, where they’d be happier than if they were lost in our world, hanging around outside the kitchen door, waiting for scraps to eat.

  “I got the idea my soul was in the lantern. When I couldn’t distinguish my lantern from among all the others, I thought it meant I’d never see my mother again, that one of us was going to vanish, which shows what an odd child I could be, I suppose.”

  Abruptly Nori picked up a basket of clean laundry and carried it upstairs. Annabel heard her talking to Sophie. She heard Sophie laugh. Mika got down from the kitchen stool and followed her mother. Sophie came downstairs and went outside.

  When the cake had finished baking, Annabel put it on the table to cool. Then she picked up her sunhat and went outside, intending to look for Sophie. When she couldn’t see her, she kept walking until she got to the north end of the island. On one side of the road, driveways led down through the forest to summer cottages beside the sea. Once, many years ago, a famous Hollywood actress had owned one of these cottages. This, too, was a true story that Patrick told Annabel. His grandmother had been invited to a party at the actress’s house. She wasn’t his grandmother then, of course. Her name was Ruth, and she’d been scarcely older than Annabel. At the party she’d drunk a lot of whiskey for the first, and probably last, time in her life. She’d passed out on the sofa. The actress had covered her with a satin robe trimmed with downy marabou feathers. The actress, who possessed a heroic capacity for whiskey, was sympathetic. In films, she could still play the ingénue. She looked even younger and more beautiful on celluloid than she did in real life. So the legend went.

  The island was full of dead people. Every inch of it, it seemed to Annabel. Harold was always advising her to scrutinize the flora and fauna, and she did; she drew it and diagrammed it right down to the cells, the chloroplasts and the mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum, all the complex inner workings, but it was the strangeness of the human landscape that caught her attention. She pictured the actress riding off the ferry in a limousine driven by a chauffeur. The limousine would be loaded down with crates of food, tins of smoked oysters and caviar, suitcases stuffed with the actress’s splendid wardrobe. Annabel thought of Jane and Freddy watching from their garden as the limousine raced along Mariner Road, raising a cloud of dust. Perhaps the actress sent them an invitation for dinner. Annabel saw the three women clearly, sitting on a veranda at the cottage, gazing at the sea. It was a calm evening, arbutus trees framing a pale sky, the horizon lightly tinged with pink, the Coast Mountains blue as the sea. Freddy, Jane, and Ruth, who must have been there at the same time, couldn’t take their eyes off the actress. They had never seen anyone like her. The actress smiled, perfectly aware of the effect she was having. She was a wayward, selfish creature, with her whiskey, her money, and her men. Everyone coveted her, men and women; she knew it. She lit a cigarette. She hummed along to a record on the gramophone.

  Most people love music in one form or another, Nori believed. She was a classical pianist. She loved jazz. She liked rock and roll, and folk songs. She was happiest playing the piano, but she also liked teaching music. Randal had been the most promising pupil she’d ever had. He’d known instinctively that music was another language, an authentic human language: a purer means of communicating what was in the mind and in the heart. Beneath Randal’s skinny and often not very clean fingers, thirty-second notes cascaded like icy rain striking glass, a whole note maintained its integrity for the entire length of its being in the world, and then, like the beak of a songbird, closed and was heard no longer. But the vitality and beauty of the music must have weakened Randal. Nori should have known this. She knew he tired easily. He wasn’t a strong child. But more than that, the perfection of his playing seemed to frighten him. He would tremble and shut his eyes and sway as if about to topple over. She yearned to place her hand on his forehead, to hold him tight. Instead she said, All right, time to take a break.

  Randal was ten years old, but he had seemed younger to Nori. He was a very quiet boy. He found it hard to make friends with the other kids. Every day he begged Nori to phone his mother. “Please,” he said, “tell her to come and get me.”

  Nori phoned Randal’s mother and said, “Your son misses you. To be honest, I’ve never seen such a severe case of homesickness. Perhaps you should come and take him home.” Randal’s mother was always leaving on a trip — to New York City, to Dallas, to Riyadh. She was an executive with a petroleum importing company. Randal’s father was a movie producer. Randal lived with his mother. She said, “The thing is, if I give in, he’ll never learn. He has to learn, doesn’t he? That’s why I sent him to you.” She had another, older son, who was, she said, almost ridiculously independent and self-assured.

  “I hate to say it,” Randal’s mother said, “but Randal can be manipulative at times. You have to be firm with him, in my opinion.”

  Her older son had learned to read the way fish learn to swim, Randal’s mother told Nori. Randal could barely read a word.

  “Frankly, I don’t understand it,” his mother kept saying. “Because Randal is a really bright kid. He talked at ten months. He started playing the piano at two years of age. Look at the way he sight-reads music. So why can’t he read words?” Harold and Nori were her absolute last hope, she said. That was why Randal couldn’t come home. He had to stay where he was and learn how to read, now, before it was too late for him.

  For a while Nori slept on a cot in the boys’ dormitory, so that she could be near Randal. Before the boys went to sleep she read to them from Treasure Island and The Odyssey and The Last of the Mohicans. She left a light on at the end of the room where Randal slept. But Randal crept out of bed and came and stood beside Nori’s bed. He complained of stomach pains, headache. He shivered convulsively. His hands were like ice. She taught him to knit. She put her arms around him, her hands over his holding the knitting needles. Together, they knitted a scarf. This had started a craze for knitting among the other students. For a while, everyone went around wrapped in scarves of different colours. As they’d hurried down the path from the dormitories to the school, they’d looked to Nori like autumn leaves swept up in a windstorm.

  No one at Miramonte was allowed to say anything mean to anyone, but Nori had caught some of the children taunting Randal. They called him a crybaby and a mommy’s boy and told him to grow up and act his age. She was furious. She’d said, “What do you mean: act his age? We are all the age we are, no older and no younger. Isn’t that so?”

  She’d made hot chocolate in blue stoneware mugs for her and Randal. They drank it at the kitchen table, so that Randal couldn’t see the piano or start playing scales under the table, on his arm. She told him about her childhood. She told him about the hours she’d had to spend practising. Always other children were outdoors playing. Not her. She’d wanted to be two children: one at the piano doing her Czerny studies, while the other played hopscotch on the street outside. Her parents were strict. Her father was a renowned orchestra conductor. Her mother was an opera singer. Her mother’s parents were from Norway. Her father was born in the city of Osaka, the third son of a professor at Kansai University.

  Nori told Randal she’d met Harold at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts, in Cupertino, California. Harold had somehow got past the security guards to her dressing room door. He didn’t have flowers to give her, or anything. He’d stared at her in a disconcerting manner. One minute he seemed shy, then brash. She didn’t know what to make of him. He said he’d been overwhelmed, captivated by her inspired interpretation of Schumann. She’d had the feeling he didn’t know all that much about Schumann. Later, when they were seeing more of each other, he’d confessed it was her waist-length black hair and her Nordic blue eyes that had truly enthralled him.

  A miracle, she’d said, that you could see the colour of my eyes from where you were seated.<
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  That night she’d worn her favourite dress, burgundy chiffon, with a full skirt, a wide satin sash tied around her eighteen-inch waist. “I was twenty years old, ten years older than you are,” she told Randal. She laughed. She said she’d known right away that this man was going to mean something important to her. What she hadn’t known was that he was going to change her life irrevocably. She hadn’t known she’d have to give up her career completely and move to this isolated island, where, even though the house was practically in a swamp, the well ran dry in the summer.

  “How could I have known?” she said to Randal. “No one knows their life in advance. It’s the same with music. Even when you’ve practised a piece a million times and committed it to memory, you can only really only know one note at a time. Your heart has enough room for one note at a time, doesn’t it? One note and then another.”

  Sometimes, when she was at the piano, she believed he was right there beside her, itching to push her hands aside, so he could place his own on the keyboard. “You have a remarkable gift,” she had told Randal. “You just need to learn the one thing that really matters, which is how to survive such a gift.”

  Randal had been a beautiful child. His hair was a rich chestnut brown, his eyes hazel, more green than blue, flecked with gold, long-lashed, dreamy. She’d tried to keep him safe, but she couldn’t watch all the children every minute of the day and night, could she? She remembered a thin froth of cocoa and milk on his upper lip. His hands lay motionless on the kitchen table, quiescent, his fingers raw from biting at his nails. He was a skinny, undersized, unhappy boy, but he had also been, Nori now understood, very strong, full of power. When he died he took everything with him: their chance at happiness, their future, their luck.

  The first year they lived on the island, Harold had paid Patrick to tutor Annabel and Sophie in chess. Annabel remembered the first day he came to the house. This was in the summer, when Patrick was home from university. When he knocked on the door, she got there ahead of Sophie. She let him in. In the kitchen the three of them sat at the table. Patrick set up the chessboard. His hands trembled slightly.