Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  He had stood aside with a flourish to let them pass. Outside, Désirée had imitated Felix Curtis. She had gripped the lapels of her coat and strutted around, her feet squelching in the mud, saying, “Devilishly good; quite the man; quite the thing, old girl. Quite the bloody marvel.”

  They were on their way to get Loren from her nursery school. They were walking through this alien, beautiful landscape as if they belonged here, Alex thought. They were in Cambria. They were in the ancient land of Myrddin, who was Merlin, she believed, and of King Arthur, and of men with coal-blackened faces who lifted up their voices and sang as they walked home from the mines.

  Alex and Désirée didn’t meet Robin Pritchard at Grove’s End. They came upon him in a bookshop, by chance, one rainy afternoon. The name of the bookshop was Madog’s Corner, and the poet, about to read from his own work, was saying, “Madog, impartial protector and defender of all manner of poets, those significant and those highly forgettable. How suitable the name, is it not? This lovely bookshop, preserve of the wild-eyed poet.”

  “Good Lord,” Désirée said to Alex, under cover of a shuffling of feet and backsides on chairs and an appreciative wave of self-conscious laughter.

  Robin Pritchard looked, Alex thought, more like Rupert Brooke than Dylan Thomas. Alex had loved Rupert Brooke since she’d studied Literature at teacher’s college and had come across his picture in an anthology. He had died in 1915, after Gallipoli, and because of this she hated war and was a Pacifist, which to her meant being patient and kind and not raising her voice in anger. Robin Pritchard was not as handsome as Rupert Brooke, but he was good looking, she conceded, glancing at him covertly. His thick black hair curled over his high white forehead. His eyes were luminous, dark. She watched him while pretending oblivion, browsing through the cookbooks. Désirée, on the other hand, was plainly intrigued. Her eyes were bright, her lips parted in the slightest of smiles. Alex tightened her grip on a book of Welsh recipes. Teisen Nionod, she read, required two pounds of thinly-sliced potatoes and one pound of onion. Bara Sinsir was gingerbread with black treacle and brown sugar, although minus ginger. How curious, Alex thought. Loren tugged on her coat sleeve.

  “Yes, yes, in a minute, love,” she whispered to the child.

  She watched Désirée taking books from the shelves, opening them, shutting them, putting them back.

  “I want to go,” Loren said.

  “Yes, we will go,” Alex said. “We are going, right now.” Alex shelved the recipe book.

  It was warm in the bookshop. Loren’s face was flushed and her nose was running. Alex glanced at the women in their navy blue macs and tweed skirts perched on folding chairs in front of the poet. It seemed to her there were two groups of women in attendance, of different ages, one group middle-aged and attentive, the other young, dreamy, full of smiles, equally attentive perhaps, but more to the poet’s fine eyes than to his words. Very cleverly, by not taking a seat, by appearing not even to listen particularly, Désirée avoided joining either group. She simply leaned over one of the women while Robin Pritchard was reading and casually plucked a copy of his book from a stack on the table.

  “Excuse me,” Alex heard her say, while she held her hair away from her face. Wordlessly she paid for the book, tucked it under her arm, and then walked out of the bookshop with Alex and Loren trotting after her. They went down the street and got into Felix Curtis’s grey Hillman Minx, which they had borrowed for the afternoon.

  “Well. I am full of admiration,” Alex said to Désirée. Désirée smiled, shook her head a little, and bumped a front wheel up over the curb. “Whoops. Daydreaming,” she said. She pulled out into the road and shifted gears. “I beg your pardon, Alex?” she said. “What are you talking about now? Admiration for what?”

  “You know,” Alex said. “You know what I mean.”

  Later that same day, Robin Pritchard appeared in the dining room at Grove’s End, his hair dripping wet and hanging in his eyes, his shoes, which he had removed and was holding in his hand, soaked. “Good evening. Where shall I put these?” he began, and Felix Curtis, from his place at the head of the table, said, “Robin. Dear boy. Welcome, welcome. Put them on the radiator, there’s a good man, and do, please, join us. Have a cup of nice hot tea.”

  Désirée said, “Pour Robin a cup of tea, Alex.”

  Alex had been buttering bread fingers for Loren to dip into her soft-boiled egg. She wiped her hands and poured the tea. It was black and not very warm. She handed it to him. All roads evidently led directly to Grove’s End. All poets, writers, artists, stonemasons too, for that matter, she shouldn’t be surprised, ended up here. Felix Curtis, patron of the arts, gathered them in and found them a warm pile of straw.

  Robin Pritchard said hadn’t he seen Alex and Désirée earlier, in the bookshop? “I saw you with your little girl,” he said to Alex, and, before she could correct him, Désirée began saying how much she’d enjoyed listening to him. “I bought your book, by the way. I love poetry. I’m going to read it tonight,” she said.

  “I think we shall have to persuade Robin to give us a private reading,” Felix Curtis said. He was feeding his dog scraps of meat under the table. The dog’s jaws kept snapping shut with loud cracks, like breaking crockery.

  “It would be an honour,” Robin Pritchard said, smiling at Désirée and turning his teacup around in its saucer.

  Seven of Désirée’s paintings in the Seattle exhibition were completed during that summer at Grove’s End, and were actually referred to, in a pamphlet Alex picked up at the front door, as The Grove’s End Paintings. There are also some pencil sketches from the same time, and a few oil pastels of Loren, which are Alex’s favourites, and which, it seems to her, ought to belong to Loren.

  The pamphlet also points out that, sadly, Désirée didn’t produce a great deal in her brief life, her tragically short life, and Alex thinks wryly that yes, that was true enough, Désirée’s life was brief, but not, she thought, tragic, and if she hadn’t produced a great deal, it had as much to do with her habit of tearing up or otherwise destroying her work if it didn’t please her, as with anything else. In fact, the wastebaskets and dustbins at Grove’s End were always brimming over, and not only with Désirée’s discards. Artistic dissatisfaction was greatly in vogue, it seemed to Alex, in 1957. No one was ever pleased with what she accomplished. There was always some writer or poet striding maniacally around the low-ceilinged rooms or else slumped, greatly despondent, in an armchair.

  Désirée had said to Alex: “Oh, God, what am I doing here? I’m surprised I haven’t been kicked out already. Alex, I’m a dabbler, a dilettante, an amateur.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Alex said automatically. She said again, with more enthusiasm, “You are definitely not a dabbler.” She picked up some sewing. She was mending the hem in one of Loren’s dresses. Loren was sitting on the floor, taking the apron off a doll in Welsh national costume that Felix Curtis had given her. It occurred to Alex that she had learned to absorb Désirée’s rages and doubts as placidly as if she were a pool of water, the same pool into which Narcissus had stared with such devotion, such need. This was her role in life; it was a role she had willingly taken upon herself, immersed herself in. Désirée needed her; Loren needed her. But perhaps she was the one being too intense, too analytical. Perhaps she was simply here. She squinted, trying to thread her needle.

  “Do you want to go home?” she said, knowing what the answer would be, and Désirée, purged by now of her distress, replied, “No, I don’t. You’d like to, wouldn’t you? But I’m not ready to give up yet. It’s just that it’s so hard. You have no idea, Alex. It takes everything, all the strength I’ve got, which is never, ever enough.”

  Alex and Désirée had been friends long before Désirée married Tom. They were friends at school. They lived in the same town. They were intent on experiencing everything possible, as quickly as possible — why else were they alive, Désirée had said — including fast cars, cigarettes, hard liquor
, haunting love affairs with men who would be almost strangers to them, and in whom, indeed, they’d profess more interest than they felt. At least, they had dreamed of these things. Mostly, they had driven up and down the coastal highways in Désirée’s battered red mg. And then they began making detours in order to call on Désirée’s friend Tom, who managed his parents’ nursery on several acres of former farmland in Washington State, overlooking Puget Sound. This was where Désirée wanted to paint, she’d said at the time. This was her landscape. She wanted to try to capture the fog shrouding the opposite shore, its reflection a milky stain on the water. And then the sun suddenly breaking through and the rain-drenched air gold and silver, the finest, noblest of elements.

  Désirée kept saying, jokingly, that Tom was perfect for Alex. He was quiet, home loving, honourable — oh, yes, a truly honourable individual — with an abiding, innate love for the soil, the family, the community, his country. “A real square,” she had said, laughing. “Exactly your kind.”

  Alex had to agree; he was her kind. She respected Tom’s honourable nature. She liked him very much. This did her no good, however; she knew that, when Désirée was there, and she always was there, Tom didn’t see her at all.

  “It’s you he likes,” Alex said. “If he does like me, as you say, it’s a shame,” Désirée said. “He’s wasting his time.” She wasn’t getting serious about anyone, she said; in fact, she planned never to marry. Once a woman married, she didn’t have anything of herself left over. You had to choose: was it going to be a career as an artist, or was it going to be marriage? In her opinion one excluded the other, and she’d made her decision: she was wedded to her art. “Oh, yes?” Alex said, laughing. Was it possible, she sometimes wondered, that Désirée believed the things she said? Did she even hear what she was saying?

  They spent a lot of time that summer hanging around the nursery. They volunteered to help out. They learned to pinch back the growing tips on geraniums, and to transplant tender young seedlings from flats into pots filled with vermiculite and peat moss, which they mixed together according to Tom’s instructions, and at the same time they watched Tom as he worked at the far end of the greenhouse. He was tall, lean, with fine, light-brown hair and the slightest limp, acquired not in the war (he had enlisted several months before the war’s end, on his eighteenth birthday), but from an injury to the ligaments of the knee in a football game the previous fall. They knew that he liked fried chicken, vanilla ice cream, and preferred coffee to tea. He admired — how was this possible, Désirée and Alex laughingly asked each other — John Foster Dulles. He thought Doris Day was cute.

  “Well, she is cute, I suppose,” Désirée said. “Cuter than John Foster Dulles, anyway.”

  “Ask him if he has any snapshots of himself we could have,” Désirée said. “No, you,” Alex said.

  “No, you,” Désirée said. They laughed and chased each other, spilling a bag of potting mixture on the floor of the greenhouse. Tom pretended he couldn’t see or hear them. He pushed a wheelbarrow piled high with flats of petunias out of the greenhouse. “Piers Plowman,” Désirée said. “You’re evil,” Alex said. “You’re just plain evil.”

  The thing was, artists had to experience every thing that life had to offer. That was what Désirée began to say. Why should this or that way of life be considered superior? Maybe she needed to consider that point of view, for a change. The true artist was able to make use of everything, including love, marriage, even children. She certainly didn’t want to be an old maid living in a boarding house and going around with dried paint under her fingernails and one of those beret things stuck on her head, did she?

  When Désirée married Tom, Alex was her bridesmaid. And exactly a year later she was godmother to Désirée’s infant daughter, Loren Alexandra. On the day of her baptism, the baby lay stiff as a china doll in Alex’s arms. Then she took a gulp of air and began to shriek. She cried all the way home from the church, and for a good part of every day and night in the weeks that followed. Alex walked up and down with her; she patted her back and tried singing to her.

  Désirée couldn’t cope. She cried more helplessly than the baby. “Babies do cry a lot, at first,” Alex said. “But they get over it.”

  “No, they don’t,” Désirée said. “They just go from one thing to another. I think she’s coming down with a cold now. I don’t know what to do with her. She doesn’t even like me.” Désirée used to throw herself down on the floor in the living room after Alex had finally got Loren to sleep. She would say that she couldn’t survive. “I’m so tired,” she said. “This isn’t natural. I must be sick. I must be dying. I’m so tired I wouldn’t care if I died.”

  “Don’t say that,” Tom said, trying to pull her up from the floor. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  Leave her alone, Alex wanted to say. Leave her alone; she’ll get fed up with herself. Instead, she offered to stay and see to the baby during the night, and Désirée said, Oh would you Alex, are you sure you don’t mind? I truly don’t mind, Alex had said. I truly don’t.

  Alex was good with babies, even babies as ornery — Tom’s word — as her godchild. Alex had always been able to get by on very little sleep. She enjoyed helping out where she was needed. That was what she told herself. She tried very hard not to covet what Désirée had. The truth was, when Alex had first seen Loren, only an hour or so after the birth, her heart had become molten. Tears had sprung to her eyes. She had lightly, reverently, brushed her fingers across the baby’s head, along the side of her face. In the shape of her eyes, the dimple in her chin, the fine brown hair, she was a small replica of Tom. She had to force herself to hand the baby back to Désirée. “Be careful, don’t drop her,” she had actually said. What was happening to her? She wanted this baby and she wanted Tom and she wanted Tom’s house — a white house with green shutters at every window — and she wanted the view of Puget Sound, and the smell of the sea and the soft grey fog manifesting itself all at once in place of the clear sky. She wanted to be a nurseryman’s wife. Yes, let her be honest: she wanted all this, and at the same time she felt horribly ashamed and impatient and angry with herself. She kept thinking, But what shall I do?

  Soon after they’d arrived at Grove’s End, Désirée enrolled Loren in a Montessori kindergarten in the village and then sent her off every morning with Alex. The teacher was Mrs. Clara Fradkin. The children called her “Mama Clara” and happily followed her around the schoolroom like ducklings. Loren, who even at the age of four still cried easily and often, as if this was, for her, the most natural form of expression, cried when it was time to go home.

  “This is the exact opposite of what usually happens,” Mrs. Fradkin said severely, removing Loren’s hands from her skirt. “Usually the child wants to go home to its mother. This is a very unusual situation. Do you have good rapport with Loren?” she asked of Alex, who explained once again that she was not the child’s mother, she was only a friend, a close friend.

  “I’m an aunt, really. I’m Aunt Alex, aren’t I, Loren?” she said. “I am her godmother,” she said.

  Loren buried her face in the folds of Mrs. Fradkin’s substantial skirts. Mrs. Fradkin wore black cloth slippers and print dresses under voluminous aprons and her plentiful grey hair was twisted in thick braids around her head.

  “Perhaps the mother should come for Loren, then,” she said to Alex.

  Alex agreed. She thought Loren would like very much to have her mother come to the school. She imagined Désirée would be delighted to have a closer look at this schoolroom, with its long wood tables and its easels and paint pots and flowers in jam jars and its scarred wood floor. Surely, if Désirée could see Mrs. Fradkin as Alex saw her, she would immediately reach for her paintbrushes. She would have Mrs. Fradkin sit with her feet in a bucket of steamy water. Or knitting, with a fluffy cat asleep on her lap. She would have her sit in the cold blue light from a window reading an antique leather-bound book. The furrows in Mrs. Fradkin’s intelligent, sensible
face would be accentuated. The mole beside her upper lip would be pre-eminent. Alex, seeing this painting in her mind, became quite excited. She wanted to pick up a brush and begin work on it herself.

  “Loren’s mother would come for Loren if she could, but she is very busy,” Alex explained, trying to grasp Loren’s hot, damp hand in hers and discretely disentangle her from the teacher. “She’s at Grove’s End,” she reminded Mrs. Fradkin, but Mrs. Fradkin, unim-pressed, merely said, “I think the mother should at least on some occasions call for the child. It is the child that matters, after all.”

  “Mrs. Fradkin does not approve of you,” Alex later told Désirée.

  “The club is always looking for new members,” Désirée said. “Let her join. It’s not exclusive, believe me.” She was sitting on her bed, drinking a glass of red wine. She had a letter from Tom in her hand and she waved the sheets of paper at Alex. “He wants us to come home,” she said. “Well, he wants me and Loren to come home, I don’t suppose even Tom would presume to make the same demands of you. He misses me. He’s offering to take me on a holiday if I come home now, this minute. Mexico, Jamaica. He says he thinks I’d probably enjoy painting or sketching in the Caribbean, from what he’s heard of it.” She let the letter slide from her hand to the floor.