The Resurrection of Mary Mabel McTavish

by Allan Stratton

  Winched into her corset, Miss Bentwhistle waddled to the vanity table to complete her transformation to Dowager Empress. The only problem was sitting down, next to which breathing was a positive snap. She consoled herself that a wince of discomfort from corsets or gas can pass for displeasure and may actually be of assistance when dealing with the help.

  A heavy application of alabaster pancake to fill the crevasses, followed by a blush of rouge, a streak of mascara, a tease of lipstick, a dusting of lavender powder, and Miss Bentwhistle had made her face. It was a monument to authority, precisely the sort of countenance to squash a bug like Mary Mabel McTavish. There remained but the hair, a Brillo pad of light brown curls that suggested a chubby Harpo Marx. It vexed the headmistress to see new strands of grey around the temples. While too numerous to pluck, these could still be concealed with an artful application of shoe polish administered by means of a deft wrist and her favourite old toothbrush.

  But before the Merlin of makeup could work her magic, she was overcome. Eyebrows twitched, jowls shook, and tears poured down her cheeks, smudging, eroding, and generally playing havoc with her carefully constructed mask. Quite naturally, the waterworks flowed from the remembrance of her father. Not of his death, mind, but of the terrible secret she’d discovered in its wake. A secret that this Mary Mabel scandal threatened to expose:

  Miss Horatia Alice Bentwhistle was bankrupt.

  The Crash — more smelling salts — had destroyed not only the widows’ mites, but the Bentwhistle family fortune, as well. Horatio had concealed the ruin (“Deny and contain!”), the power of his reputation sufficient to mesmerize creditors. But with his death, Miss Bentwhistle had found herself alone, faced with a mountain of debt against which she had but her name and her Academy. Both were in immediate jeopardy.

  Privileges conferred by her name would disappear if she were known to be insolvent. Therefore, the Bentwhistle Academy had to be milked to pay down debt. At the same time, the Academy’s pedigree, the Bentwhistle name, had to be maintained, lest wealthy clients send their heirs to more reputable havens. Maintaining her name, in turn, meant maintaining a facade of wealth, which in turn meant increasing the flow of the very red ink she was desperate to staunch.

  The poor have no understanding of true financial need, Miss Bentwhistle thought, weeping. They require tens and twenties, while I require thousands. Life is so unfair.

  To forestall talk, she dropped references to foreign accounts, and hosted a dizzying array of occasions. She also embarked on a recruitment drive to enroll more students to generate more funds to pay for more parties to polish a name designed to attract more students to generate more funds and so forth. It was a vicious circle, all the more desperate as Hard Times had wiped out much of her potential clientele. Like Scarlett O’Hara, Miss Bentwhistle resolved to think about that tomorrow.

  London was too small a pond in which to fish for additional students, so Miss Bentwhistle poached in the exclusive waterways of Toronto. It was a daring long shot. The nation’s navel had an ample supply of private schools, capable of conferring social status without the financial drain obliged by boarding.

  Despite this drawback, Miss Bentwhistle pressed ahead. She knew from personal experience that the rich were habitually bored, and that bored rich adolescents had even more opportunity to get into trouble than their downtrodden counterparts. Consequently, she used her Toronto contacts to ferret out the names of well-heeled families with delinquent daughters. To these, she sent an illustrated brochure touting the Academy’s high moral tone and academic standards, as well as its commitment to Christian redemption and reasonable rates.

  Toronto’s troubled bloodlines took the bait. At the very least, ensconced a good three hours drive from the city, their adolescents would no longer embarrass the family by rolling in drunk at 4:00 a.m., sans panties, to throw up on the shrubbery. Here was a chance to ditch their headaches while keeping their heads held high.

  The Academy prospered financially. Its academic standards, however, sustained significant collateral damage. This could have been stickhandled without tears if only Miss Bentwhistle’s teachers had been as clever with their mark books as she was with her bank books. Unhappily, they were a linear lot who failed to grasp that while standards are all well and good, it’s the appearance of standards that counts.

  Miss Budgie, the long-suffering English teacher, was the first to be summoned to her office. A nervous sort given to rashes, she blamed her doomed love life on Miss Bentwhistle’s edict that single female staff could only socialize with the opposite sex on Sunday afternoons, chaperoned. This had something to do with “setting an example,” though what sort of example Miss Bentwhistle refused to say. (“If it’s something I have to explain, it’s something you wouldn’t understand.”)

  The moment Miss Budgie entered the office, the headmistress pounced. “The average English mark has dropped twenty percent this term. Our parents don’t pay good money to get these results.”

  “Miss Bentwhistle, the students didn’t do their work.”

  “Don’t make excuses. You were hired to inspire. If you’d done your job, the young ladies would have done theirs.”

  “Not this lot. They’re juvenile delinquents.”

  “Are you questioning the admission standards at the Bentwhistle Academy? Our young ladies come from the best Toronto homes. Homes where names such as Budgie are unknown.”

  “Nonetheless, they don’t want to be here.”

  “And do you want to be here?”

  Miss Budgie gasped.

  “These marks will be raised by this afternoon.”

  Parents were thrilled to see improvements in their children’s test scores. “It’s a miracle,” they raved to friends with similarly troubled teens; enrollment rose as quickly as the marks on incomplete assignments. Nor did provincial examinations threaten Miss Bentwhistle’s shell game; teachers collared cheaters at their peril.

  Thus, four years after her father’s death, the Academy appeared to flourish and Miss Bentwhistle to reign supreme, monarch of all she surveyed. “I am the Virgin Queen,” she joked with staff. Too frightened to bell the cat, they stroked in public and mocked in private, a sad packet of neutered mice.

  Miss Bentwhistle didn’t care. She had no need for friends, as she commanded the company of an extensive stock of wine bottles. Ostensibly on hand for parent events, crate after crate found its way to her boudoir. They proved good friends, providing sympathy during late-night tipples, and courage on those occasions when she called upon the services of her odd-jobs man, Brewster McTavish.

  Brewster McTavish. A man with the sort of essence encountered in the novels of that wicked Mr. Lawrence. Thin as a pipe cleaner and covered in boils, his face was set in a permanent leer that Miss Bentwhistle liked to pretend was facial paralysis brought on by a childhood bout of diphtheria. When he’d arrived on her doorstep, Mary Mabel in tow, she’d been looking for someone to cut her grass. McTavish swore he was aces at yard work, and would swab the floors, bully the boiler, and deal with infestations of rodents — all for room, board, and pocket money. Delighted at the bargain, the headmistress snapped him up.

  He was soon her darling, not for his janitorial services, but because of his grasp of theatrical lighting, a hobby he’d picked up from a Milwaukee matron devoted to little theatre. To Miss Bentwhistle’s elation, Mr. McTavish introduced coloured gels to the auditorium’s incandescent lamps. In the past, she’d suffered through assemblies under the ruthless glare of white light. Now she was radiant, her charms enhanced thanks to the glow of a soft pink front and an amber behind.

  Oh, Mr. McTavish! Oh, oh, oh! Was ever a man such as this? A hard worker devoted to his child! An artist devoted to her interests! A common man worthy of her compassion!

  Soon she was looking for reasons to call Mr. McTavish to her office and to see him after hours about one project or another. She professed to be astonished at the number of things that needed to be screwed in and out, and at t
he surprising array of nooks and crannies needing his manly attention. How she’d managed to live without him was quite beyond her.

  Londoners noticed a change in the headmistress, but refused to contemplate the obvious. The image of Mr. McTavish and Miss Bentwhistle engaged in animal husbandry was simply too grotesque. Moreover, Miss Bentwhistle wisely included Mary Mabel in their outings. “How our Horatia dotes upon that little gumdrop,” remarked Mrs. Herbert C. Wallace, secretary-treasurer of the St. James Ladies Auxiliary Bridge Club. “She’s an example to us all.”

  One Sunday, inspired by the Reverend Mandible’s homily on charity, Miss Bentwhistle visited the McTavishes bearing an orange. “This orange is especially for you, my dear,” she beamed at the girl, breasts swelling with the special joy that comes from giving. “From now on, you may be pleased to call me your ‘Auntie’ Horatia.” Mary Mabel looked up sweetly. “Thank you very much,” she said, “but I have more aunties than I can remember. If it’s okay, I’d like for you to just be a grownup.” Miss Bentwhistle chewed her dentures. Determined to teach the child some manners, she set her to work in the laundry and kitchen.

  Meanwhile, female teachers were not so delighted with the new janitor. The third schoolmarm to lodge a complaint was that well-known rabble-rouser Miss Budgie, she with the fetish for “standards.”

  “I don’t know quite how to put this,” Miss Budgie began, “but whenever I pass Mr. McTavish he starts to play with his fly. And he leers at me.”

  Miss Bentwhistle was understandably appalled. “How dare you attack a poor victim of diphtheria!”

  “Miss Bentwhistle, he stares at my breasts!”

  “And what do you do to provoke him?”

  “Nothing! And I’m not the only one to complain. Miss Lundy has spoken to you already. Miss Brown too. He pressed them up against the broom closet and invited them down to the boiler room to see his toolbox.”

  “That is their point of view,” Miss Bentwhistle acknowledged with a thin smile. “Mr. McTavish has quite another.”

  “Are you saying our word can’t be trusted?”

  “I’m saying that Miss Lundy is a hypochondriac, and Miss Brown a known hysteric. Everyone has an agenda, Miss Budgie. Everyone. I, however, am the headmistress. It is my duty to rise above agendas.”

  For once, Miss Budgie was not to be cowed. “I have witnesses!”

  “What need have I for ‘witnesses’? Are you suggesting I’m afraid to deal with Mr. McTavish.”

  “No. Just that you haven’t.”

  “Tell me, my dear,” Miss Bentwhistle asked, as sweet as jam tarts, “are you in any position to make waves?”

  Miss Budgie trembled. “Are you threatening me?”

  “No. I believe I’m asking a question.”

  Miss Budgie hesitated. “I’m not trying to make waves. It’s just that Mr. McTavish … well … he makes it hard for me to do my work.”

  “Well you make it hard for me to do my work. I have a school to run, Miss Budgie. I haven’t time for tattletales. If you are unable to do your job without vilifying your colleagues, I shall find someone who can. I expect a letter of apology on my desk by this afternoon.”

  Miss Bentwhistle’s decision to betray her staff for Mr. McTavish was not the result of romantic infatuation. Rather, the charges implied that she had employed a lecher, a lapse in judgment that threw into question her moral discernment. In light of this, the headmistress saw the accusations for what they were — an attack against her person.

  There was also every chance that the little backstabbers were delusional. Mr. McTavish’s essence was undeniable, and it would not in the least surprise her if Miss Budgie and her conspirators had picked up the scent and were indulging themselves in lurid sexual fantasies. Was she to sacrifice Mr. McTavish to satisfy a coven of sexually obsessed deviants?

  In any case, even if the Academy janitor had been indiscreet, what of it? Men are well-known to be slaves to their dangly bits, especially men of common breeding. As members of the fairer sex, it was up to his detractors to comport themselves so as to discourage propositions. Why, if anyone was to blame, it was they! The trollops must be punished! And they were — Miss Budgie was humiliated in front of her students for allegedly stealing chalk from the office supply cabinet.

  Still, Miss Bentwhistle fretted about the charges. At last, she confided them to her handyman. He denied them outright, allowing that at most he may have given his accusers a well-intentioned smile, which they no doubt misunderstood on account of his facial paralysis. Miss Bentwhistle stroked his sweet, beleaguered brow. Poor Mr. McTavish. How she would comfort him tonight.

  It occurred to her that, having saved his skin, she had him in her debt.

  A remembrance of this debt was at the forefront of Miss Bentwhistle’s mind as she completed the reconstruction of her face. At this morning’s confrontation, she’d call upon Mr. McTavish to force his daughter to recant the miracle. Miss Bentwhistle knew that nothing short of a denial would keep this scandal from her door.

  After all, what kind of headmistress employs a publicity hound who claims to raise the dead? How could she discipline her students if she couldn’t control her staff? Toss in a Pentecostal freak show and Miss Bentwhistle’s head reeled with nightmares of a convoy of limousines emptying the Academy of its young ladies. Then what? The Academy collapsed, her debts unpaid, and her family name disgraced, it would be a mere hop, skip, and a jump to the poorhouse.

  It was the vision of that grim future that had caused Miss Bentwhistle’s explosion of tears. She’d seen herself shacked up in the hobo jungle at the outskirts of town, a sad old derelict with nary a penny to wash her drawers. Imagined herself shuffling up for a ladle of broth at the St. James soup kitchen, cowering before Mrs. Herbert C. Wallace, Reverend Mandible, and the rest.

  Well, it wasn’t going to happen. As God was her witness, by the time she’d finished with the McTavishes, Mary Mabel would be on her knees. She’d issue a public proclamation that the Beeford boy was never dead, but merely stunned; she’d seen him move and helped him to his feet. She was a young woman wronged by fabrications of the press, an innocent whose life within the halls of the Bentwhistle Academy had taught her to place integrity, honour, and dignity before all else.

  There was, of course, the awkward detail of the death certificate, but that was small potatoes. Dr. Hammond wouldn’t admit to signing death certificates for the living; it would scare away his clientele. Besides, it wasn’t in London’s interest to have its hospital seen as a happy-go-lucky loony bin shipping healthy out-of-towners to the morgue; that would be bad for tourism. In the end, the death certificate was just a piece of paper waiting to be misplaced by an underpaid clerk.

  She made her way to the wardrobe. Selecting a frock was easy; she’d been wearing black since her father’s death. The decision, a sly cost-cutting measure, had proven good for business, a constant allusion to the Horatio Algernon Bentwhistle Memorial Fund. “Funerals provide such a dignified excuse to pass the hat,” she observed.

  All that was left was to steady her nerves. Miss Bentwhistle took two tablespoons of laudanum, a homebrew she concocted from the lifetime supply of opium she’d found in her father’s effects. (He’d acquired it during his tenure as chairman of the Middlesex County Hospital Association. When the drug was outlawed, he’d generously overseen its disposal from the county’s repositories.)

  Miss Bentwhistle washed the laudanum down with a glug of brandy, the smell of alcohol contained by a peppermint drop, and glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock. Battle stations. She stood in front of the mirror and repeated the mantra “I am a Bentwhistle, I am a Bentwhistle, I am a Bentwhistle.” With that, the regal barge navigated to the door and floated forth to rendezvous with destiny.

  In the Lion’s Den

  The instant Timmy Beeford resuscitated, the assembled Pentecostals erupted with whoops of joy, cartwheels, and grand huzzahs for Jesus.

  “We’d best be off,” Mary Mabel whispered to Brew
ster. She grabbed him by the arm, and made for the door.

  “Wait!” Mrs. Wertz called after. “We have to celebrate!”

  “I’d love to,” Mary Mabel sang over her shoulder, “but I have to be up at four.”

  In bed, Mary Mabel couldn’t sleep for the silly grin on her face. Her mama’d had a reason to send her to the bridge: it was to get her to the hospital to save that boy. She gave thanks and promised to follow her mama’s guidance forever.

  Soon it was time to rise and shine. By five the stove was stoked, the tables set. By six, milk, porridge, and scrambled eggs were on the serving trays. By seven, she’d ladled breakfast to the Academy’s young delinquents. And by eight, she was up to her elbows in dirty dishes, when the porter arrived. “You’re to report to Miss B. immediately.”

  “She’ll have to wait or there’ll be no clean plates for lunch.”

  “Don’t worry about that. Miss Budgie’s been assigned the wash-up before her morning class.”

  Mary Mabel couldn’t figure what could be so important. It hadn’t occurred to her that her miracle might have altered her relations with the world. Not that there hadn’t been warnings. On the way home, her papa had gaped like a goldfish, and Miss B.’s young ladies had lined up for breakfast as slack-jawed as a row of pithed frogs. Still, it wasn’t until she hit the office that she realized the enormity of things.

  Two police officers were hauling off a scruffy man in a trench coat. The secretary, Miss Dolly Pigeon, a wizened rat terrier with small breasts and big hips, was beside herself. “You’re the cause of this!” she yipped at the girl. “I hope you’re satisfied!”

  “Are you her?” the man demanded as he was dragged out. “Are you Mary Mabel McTavish?”

  “Who’s he? How did he know my name?”

  “He’s from the Free Press. There’s more at the gates.”