Home Schooling

by Carol Windley

  Désirée wrote to Tom asking for a little more time. She told him everything. She said, I don’t want to hurt you, my dear, dear Tom. Don’t give up on me, please. Tom read portions of these letters to Alex. Sometimes he let her read them herself. Then he took them back and tore them up and burned them.

  I’m so afraid, Désirée wrote to Alex, that if I come home I won’t be able to paint and I won’t be happy ever again. It is too late. I think I am happy here, Alex; I do think I am.

  Alex had her own ideas, her own fears, and has them still: that Désirée unwittingly made herself noticeable to one of those incandescent jealous gods, the kind with a keen eye for anyone who dares to set herself apart. Hiking in the mountains of Snowdownia with Robin, Désirée became lost. Or rather, both she and Robin became lost. It began to snow. This was in early spring, the weather cruelly changeable. Robin decided that he would go on alone, in the hope of sighting the shore of a certain lake, which he thought would help him get his bearings. Désirée must have got tired of waiting, or had begun to feel frightened, desperate, perhaps, and had tried to make her own way down the mountain. The storm worsened. Snow could be completely disorienting; it transfigured the landscape almost at once, Robin wrote. Désirée walked, Robin theorized, until she was more lost than ever and simply too tired to go on. She found a place to rest and in resting was overcome.

  Alex knows all this because Robin wrote to her. He wrote several letters, heartbroken and strangely lyrical, full of descriptions of snow and frost. Alex felt as if she were reading a fairy tale.

  How can she believe that Désirée’s life ended in the monochromatic white noise of a snowstorm, all colour and warmth drained from the world around her? Of course she can’t. She prefers to think of Désirée (and why shouldn’t this be true?) living under an assumed name in a comfortable cottage somewhere in the Welsh countryside, her vision clear, unclouded, persistent. At the end of each day she cleans the paint from her brushes and sets them neatly aside, in preparation for the next day’s labour. The air smells of linseed oil and turpentine and lilac. (A lilac tree grows outside the windows, Alex is sure.) Désirée has given away every single thing that mattered to her so that she can work in peace. She paints from pure memory, her colours light and clear. Outside her cottage is a grove where Welsh gods, all of whom bear a startling family resemblance to Felix Curtis, sleep curled at the roots of ancient trees, clutching to them the gift of individual immortality.

  The idea comes to Alex that she and Désirée have shared a life between them. This idea slips perfectly, unexpectedly, into her mind as she walks around the gallery again and looks perhaps for the last time at Désirée’s paintings. It is, Alex thinks, as if she has taken up the life Désirée set aside, the life Désirée abjured. She is a practical and, she hopes, graceful custodian. Linked, she and Désirée have managed to discover joy, more than separately they deserved or could have achieved, its strength and radiance running through the delicate yet reliable veins of one singular form.

  THE READING ELVIS

  THE DAY BEFORE Graham and Sarah were to fly to Costa Rica for spring vacation, Graham received word that his mother had died peacefully in her sleep. The news wasn’t entirely unexpected, yet to Graham it seemed profoundly in error, the wrong message for the wrong person. He found himself waiting for a second call that would confirm a mistake had been made, but that call didn’t come. Sarah got her two dogs out of the boarding kennel and cancelled their flights and hotel reservations. Graham went to the nursing home where his mother had lived for the last seven years of her life — seven years to the month, like one of those nonnegotiable spells in a fairy tale — and began cleaning out her room. A few romance paperbacks, books about reincarnation and life after death, a jumble of cosmetics, cheap jewellery: the possessions of an optimistic, determined teenager. He gave her television and her walker to the nursing home. Her clothes he could donate to some charity. But did anyone wear that style of dresses anymore? Dresses with gauzy ruffles around the neck and tiny rhinestone-encrusted buttons, frothy layers of chiffon, silk that was friable and papery to the touch as dead leaves.

  The room was much too warm. He shifted his mother’s clothes and blankets to one end of the bed and sat down. He read a letter she’d left for him, in which she set out instructions for a funeral mass in the Orthodox Russian tradition. Dear Graham, Go to the Church of St. Michael the Archangel, she wrote. There’s enough money set aside for this. I’ve already talked to the priest. He came to see me. He doesn’t care I’m not very religious. He cares about me, who I am, and about my Immortal Soul. All my love to you and Sarah — Renate.

  The funeral was held a week later. Recumbent in her white and gold coffin, a phaeton minus the wheels, his mother resembled the ancient remains of a once-beautiful queen, a comparison that would have pleased her, except for the ancient part. The priest, Father Dimitri, a slender, bearded young man with luminous brown eyes, informed Graham and Sarah that the church observed a period of remembrance lasting forty days, the length of time the soul remained on earth, close to those it loved. When Graham heard this, a shiver raced down his spine and he took an involuntary step back. He wanted to tell Father Dimitri that his mother had never loved him and had never forgiven his father for deserting her and Graham. The only thing she’d seemed to believe in, as an article of faith, was a story that her own mother had, as a girl, worked in the household of the last tsarina and had bathed her forehead and held her hand in childbirth. Also, for as long as Graham could remember his mother had treasured a fake Fabergé egg on a little stand of its own, and a set of garishly painted Russian nesting dolls she’d got from a mail-order catalogue. But rather than causing offence, these facts would no doubt have made the priest’s beautiful eyes moist with compassion. As it was, he gently blessed Graham and Sarah and sent them out into a light rain that cleaved like oil to the face and hands.

  His mother’s death, and the funeral liturgy, which seemed to take place in a richer, more festive time than the present, affected Graham in ways he hardly understood, and when he returned to the classroom he felt as if he’d been somewhere far more distant than Costa Rica. In his absence there had been changes: the principal had gone on stress-related sick leave, and the acting principal was Kathleen Shaw. No one had warned him. He walked into the staff room and there she was. She was peeling an orange and the smell took him back to the interior of the church of St. Michael the Archangel, where, near the altar, a bowl of overripe oranges perfumed the still air. Once again he was approaching the coffin to gaze on his mother’s beautiful, ravaged face, a paper ribbon printed with a prayer affixed to her forehead, like a child’s party favour.

  Kathleen stood and took his hand. She offered her condolences. He thanked her warmly, his voice unsteady. After touching her hand, he, too, smelled of oranges. He asked her how she was and she said, “Oh, well, you know, I’m on the bridge, I’m ready for action. You know me.” He did know Kathleen. This new reality, however, Kathleen once again in his life, was almost too much for him. He was in a fragile state. His emotions were all over the place. As he went around his classroom checking homework assignments, he thought he saw his mother watching him, her hair arranged on top of her head like the round, braided loaf of bread at the church, which, according to Father Dimitri, symbolized eternal life. A shock went through him. He felt faint. Then he saw it wasn’t his mother. Of course it wasn’t. It was the overhead lighting reflecting off a poster of a young Elvis Presley seated on a porch swing outside a vine-draped antebellum mansion, reading The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner. “The Three R’s: Rock and Roll and Reading,” read the caption. Graham’s grade sevens generally saw through this at once, or thought they did, the ones who knew who Elvis was, and there were fewer of those every year, it seemed. Elvis didn’t sit around reading, they’d say scornfully. He didn’t waste his time on books. Graham would say, “Well, people, here’s some Elvis trivia for you: Elvis was a reader. The story is, he was in the bathroom read
ing when he died.”

  “That’s gross,” the kids said.

  “No,” Graham said. “It’s not gross. It’s human. Reading is a human activity and so is dying, when you think about it.”

  Of course, he suspected Elvis didn’t read a lot of William Faulkner, in spite of their both being Southerners who’d achieved a sort of immortality. Faulkner more so than Elvis. Or was it the other way around?

  Graham had come across the poster years ago, rolled up with an elastic band and stashed behind some AV equipment in a supply cupboard, and he’d immediately claimed it as his own, although he was really more of a Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen kind of guy. The poster was amazing, though. What a find. There was Elvis, in jeans, an open-necked white shirt, loafers with white socks — so sixties, Graham had thought fondly — looking insolent, sexy, iconic, and young, so young. The scene was fabricated, no doubt, and by the time the poster was printed Elvis must have been dead for decades, yet Graham felt a deep sense of peace emanating from it. He’d pinned the poster up in his classroom and, magically, Elvis’s soulful dark eyes had sought him out wherever he stood. He was just about to call Kathleen to see this phenomenon, when she walked in. In those days, they’d taught at the same school, and her classroom was just across the hall from his.

  “Where did you get that?” she’d demanded. “You can’t have it. It’s mine.” She’d left it behind last summer, she said, and the janitor must have put it away in the supply cupboard. She yanked out a thumbtack and a corner of the poster snapped up, tearing the paper a little.

  “Hey, you can’t do that,” Graham had protested, and she’d said, “I certainly can, it’s mine, I can do what I want.” She’d tried to shove him away. He took hold of her wrist, gently, astonished anew at the tensile strength of her, her steadfast resistance to him, to any form of persuasion. She backed away. She pushed a chair under a desk and shelved a misplaced science textbook. Her colour was high. He’d yearned to hold her, but they were assiduous about not showing affection at school. He said if the poster was hers, she must take it. She’d said, no, if it meant that much to him, he could keep it. He couldn’t win. He knew the dispute over the poster was merely an outward manifestation of a long-standing grievance. The problem was that Kathleen thought he neglected her in favour of his children. She’d said he let them run his life and that he was overprotective and cloying, as a parent. Her remark had stung. Even if true, it was surprisingly mean-spirited, coming from Kathleen. He’d told her rather stiffly that when Annette had died he’d promised himself his girls would have a normal, happy life, and if that made him cloying, so be it.

  “I want someone I don’t have to share,” Kathleen had said, on another occasion, when he was at her apartment. She had leaned away from him into the clasp of her own thin arms. “If it’s not your daughters,” she said, “it’s your mother. It’s just never me, is it?”

  He remembered staring at the pure angles of her neck and shoulders, the intransigence of her. A desire to offer comfort and an urge to say something hurtful had warred in him briefly, neither winning, in the end. What could he say? You’re wrong. You demand too much, I’m only human.

  He’d opened the apartment door — Kathleen was wearing a silk robe, her hair fanned out around her shoulders, her eyes were cold yet beseeching — and he’d stepped almost against his will into the hall, where a patterned carpet seemed to ascend and descend simultaneously, like a trick staircase in an Escher print, so that he didn’t know what to do, keep going or turn back to Kathleen. That remedial moment had existed, it could have been grasped, but he’d kept walking, his crepe-soled teacher-shoes catching on the illusory steps he was either climbing or descending, he couldn’t tell which, and if he couldn’t tell, who could? He assured himself Kathleen would get over this and they’d grow together, as couples did. He rode the elevator down to the car park. He remembered an autumn storm, rain battering the windshield, leaves skidding across the road. It seemed a miracle when his house, its lighted windows sailing eerily through utter darkness, was suddenly there, in front of him. His daughters had baked chocolate brownies, although he’d asked them not to use the oven when he was out, but when did they ever listen to him? Their homework books were spread out on the kitchen table and the radio was on. He turned it off and helped himself to a brownie, then he ran upstairs. He found the girls in Debbie’s room, which reeked of ammonia because Debbie had just dyed her hair a surreal magenta shade. Marty was painting her toenails. She told him that Grandma had phoned six times, maybe more, and was she ever mad at him.

  “We told her you were at a staff meeting,” Debbie said.

  He sat on the edge of the bed. “You were trying to be helpful, I know. But you shouldn’t tell lies,” he said.

  “We didn’t lie,” Marty said.

  “No, technically, we didn’t,” Debbie said. “You were with Kathleen. And you’re both teachers, aren’t you? So it was kind of like a staff meeting, wasn’t it?” She ran a comb through her wet hair. She was older than her sister by eighteen months. She was the one who looked like him. She had his mouth, the shape of his eyes. Marty looked like her mother. Every year he noticed the resemblance more and took comfort in it, even when it made his heart ache.

  This, he thought, was the true way the dead returned, gently, obliquely, without warning. At university he’d read something by Nietzsche, in a book that didn’t belong to him, but to his roommate, and — it was, if he remembered correctly, that God was a vicious circle. How grimly satisfying he’d found those words. He was nineteen, with shoulder-length hair, two pairs of jeans and three sweaters to his name. He smoked, he drank, he wrote impassioned political tracts for an alternative student newspaper on a rickety old typewriter and signed them Aravin, which was not Russian, as he’d thought, but Georgian, for “no one.” Aravin was no one because his father had vanished when Graham was a child, for a reason his mother had never articulated to him. His mother had kept him in the dark and it was a big darkness, it took over. Time was infinite, while individuals were finite and appeared repeatedly. Again and again he makes himself necessary to himself. So said Nietzsche. Graham’s father, however, had slipped into a wormhole of time. Or, rather, he’d transferred to his company’s head office in Toronto. That was all Graham knew. He’d thumbed through phone books and directories at the public library — this was long before the Internet — until he turned up a possible home address for Rice, C. R., in Brampton. But he did nothing. Wasn’t it, he thought, up to his father?

  In the end, Graham had written a brief note in which he said he’d be very pleased to hear from his father. The note had sounded paltry and insufficient, like a veiled threat or a request for money. He did get as far as buying a stamp at the post office, and while there had seen a job posting for temporary letter carriers. He applied and got hired. He met Annette, a permanent, full-time employee. She had the uniform, the cute Canada Post shorts, woolly socks, hiking boots. She had cornflower blue eyes and masses of unruly hair she tucked up under her peaked cap. She’d loved working outdoors and chatting to everyone she’d met. At the end of her shift a taxi had picked her up and then had swung by to collect Graham when he’d finished his route. He remembered how she’d taken off her cap and rested it on her tanned knees. She’d smelled of the summer wind and sunlight. She was twenty years old. They fell in love. They got married. They were happy.

  Graham found he could talk to Sarah about Annette. He could tell her what pretty people they were, how young and strong. They only got stoned on weekends. They were hippies, flower children, with the additional security of an income from his teaching job. He and Annette were married twelve years. Then a terrible thing happened. Sarah told him it was good for him to talk about it rather than brood over it. He wasn’t sure if this were true or not. It hurt him afresh, either way. He told Sarah that Annette was driving home from the store and there was a collision. Never could he forget the circumstances surrounding the accident, the way they accumulated and bore down one on
the other with a terrible inevitability: the sudden heavy rainfall, the slick roads, the chip truck with bad brakes, the two-lane highway that, back then, didn’t have a left-hand turn lane. He kept asking himself: Why hadn’t he been the one? Why hadn’t he gone to the store in Annette’s place? He felt such a burden of guilt. Sarah said it was not unreasonable for him to believe he’d had a choice. Not at all unreasonable to think he could have saved Annette. Sarah had lost people, too. Her parents; a man she’d loved. She understood grief was bitter and tenacious and necessary, sometimes the only true thing left.

  He’d taken a six month leave of absence. He stayed home with Marty and Debbie. He prepared meals, made school lunches, drove the girls to piano and ballet lessons and orthodontist’s appointments. He learned to do French braids and where to shop for hair ribbons and leotards. Without Annette, time had no measure or quality; seasons loped past like small fleet animals. First one year passed, then two, then three. Marty and Debbie got older and needed him a little less. It wasn’t true that he got over what had happened. He never would. It just began to seem okay, at some point, for him to ask Kathleen out. He didn’t tell Sarah about Kathleen. He didn’t know how to tell her. It was such a dismal, failed affair, in the final analysis. He remembered the time Kathleen had invited him to go skiing with her at her parents’ condo at Whistler. Her whole family was going to be there, she’d told him. They were so excited about getting to meet him, at last, she said. This was planned for the long Easter weekend, and of course he’d had to say he couldn’t go. “But I want you to,” she’d kept saying. “It’s important to me.” He said he couldn’t possibly leave his daughters alone on a holiday weekend. What were they supposed to do, cook their own turkey dinner? Hide their own Easter eggs?