Staggerford

by Jon Hassler

  Now, it would be unfair to say that Patty Hawk’s wedding was the cause of Miss McGee’s contempt for the modern world. After all, Miss McGee had caught sight of the approaching Dark Ages and had considered retiring long before Patty Hawk got married, or engaged, or even pregnant. It was simply that Patty’s wedding settled the matter.

  Patty was married in front of her parents’ cabin on Birch Lake, and Miss McGee drove out there in Miles’s Plymouth. Patty wore a red pants suit—a maternity pants suit, for she was eight months along. The bridesmaids, too, wore red. Later, the article in the Weekly said they wore rust, but Miss McGee saw with her own eyes that they wore red. Besides a pregnant bride, the wedding featured a foul-mouthed bridesmaid, a drunk from Sioux City, and a cold wind off the lake. Furthermore, the father of the bride had a black eye.

  Most of the guests were from out of town, and when Miss McGee walked among them on the beach after the ceremony, she found scarcely anyone to talk to. Finally Mrs. Hawk came to her rescue and said, “Oh, Miss McGee, we’re so glad you’re here. Wendell and I have always said that you were one of the very best teachers Patty ever had, and Patty has always said so too. Isn’t that right, Wendell?”

  Wendell Hawk was standing at his wife’s side in a new suit the color of a banana. Miss McGee shook his hand and tried not to notice his black and purple eye, which was surrounded by a fine network of inflamed arteries.

  “Don’t mind this shiner, Miss McGee,” he said heartily. “Last night I slipped on a rug in the living room and went down like a ton of bricks and hit my head on the magazine rack. I hit my head right here above the eye and I bled like a stuck hog. There isn’t a bit of flesh under a person’s eyebrows, so you tell me where the blood came from. Feel your own eyebrow, Miss McGee, there’s nothing but bone underneath, is there. But let me tell you, bone or no bone, I bled like a stuck hog. And do you know what caused me to slip? My good wife here had waxed the floor. She had the place all waxed for our guests and I came walking through the room last night and the rug we have by the fireplace went right out from under me and down I went like a ton of bricks. Would you believe there’s six stitches under this scab? My good wife can vouch for that. She took the stitches with her own needle and thread.” He laughed and slapped his wife on the back, and his wife laughed too, but not happily. Her laugh was shallow, and the look she gave him was lacerating.

  “Please excuse us,” she said to Miss McGee, “we have to get back to the reception line.”

  One of the few people Miss McGee recognized was another former student, Jennifer Molstad. Jennifer was Patty’s maid of honor. She was twenty and had been away at college. She was standing under a cottonwood tree by the water’s edge, talking to a middle-aged man with a goatee. Jennifer and the man had one cup of punch between them and they were both sipping from it as the wind furled and unfurled Jennifer’s red pants around her long legs. The man with the goatee was so engrossed in what Jennifer was telling him that Miss McGee stopped at a respectful distance and waited her turn to speak. She looked about her at the convivial crowd of guests, whose chatter was carried first toward her and then away from her on gusts of wind, and she was overcome by a feeling of self-consciousness. It was not, to Miss McGee, a familiar sensation. Ordinarily when she went out in public she went with a certain eminence, attracting the nod of the head and the smile of respect that a small town pays to forty years of virtuous example, and her slightly eccentric habits of dress (the lace hankie pinned to her lapel, the sturdy black shoes) were her marks of distinction. But here on the beach, among strangers, she felt both odd and old. She wished she had not worn her high, round hat, for the wind was catching at it, and having to cling to its brim was making her tired. She wished she had worn a coat, for the wind was turning chilly. She wished her heels didn’t keep sinking into the sand, making her feel shorter than she really was. She wished, most of all, that she had mailed her gift and stayed home.

  Jennifer and the man with the goatee moved to higher ground as the gray-green waves licked at their high heels, his and hers alike, and Miss McGee took this opportunity to break into their conversation.

  “How nice to see you, Jennifer,” she said. “You look so lovely.”

  It was true. Jennifer was a stunning girl. Her golden hair was even more lustrous now than it had been in the sixth grade when Jennifer was elected, on Mayday, to crown the statue of Mary Queen of the May.

  “Oh, hello, Miss McGee,” Jennifer said. She turned again to the man with the goatee and took up her story where it had been interrupted.

  “When I think of how I waited for him every Wednesday and Sunday night—Wednesdays and Sundays were his only nights off—sometimes I would wait for him till one, two in the morning.”

  Miss McGee did not understand that she had been dismissed. She continued to stand, listening, at Jennifer’s side.

  “… and do you know what he was doing all that time, till one, two in the morning before he came over to my place? He was out with other chicks. And you know in whose car? In my car.”

  The man with the goatee shook his head gravely.

  “… he was using my car because his license plates were out of date, and he was out with other chicks in my car. And these other chicks would leave their shoes and purses and shit in my car. I mean even their pantyhose. Only he would always put their stuff in the trunk before he came to pick me up, so I never knew. But one day I was out driving—big deal, driving my own car—and I saw my friend Dorie Burkhart standing by the side of the road trying to flag down help and I stopped. Dorie had a flat tire and she didn’t have a tire wrench. She asked me if I had one, and I said, ‘You tell me, I don’t know what a tire wrench looks like,’ and I got out and unlocked my trunk for the first time since I bought the car and there were all those shoes and purses and shit belonging to all those other chicks he had been taking out. Well, screw him.”

  Jennifer and the man moved off in the direction of the punch table, leaving Miss McGee hanging on to her hat and squinting into the wind. She was stunned. Jennifer, she knew, had been brought up to know better than that. When Jennifer was twelve she had crowned Mary Queen of the May. That was the horror of this new generation: They had all been brought up to know better. But they were reverting, one after another, to the perverse savagely that the human race had been liberated from ages ago. They were going under a flood of immorality. Nowadays (thought Miss McGee) as soon as children outgrew their childhood innocence, they became foul-mouthed and disobedient. They became robbers and dope addicts. They became murderers, perjurers, prostitutes, and embezzlers. Men became rapists and women aborted their babies. Every morning in the Minneapolis Tribune you could read what these people were up to, and every suppertime on TV you could see their pictures. What was the use of teaching Christian standards to twelve-year-olds, if they were going to throw them to the winds by the time they were twenty? What was uglier than the foul language women were using these days? It was uglier, in its way, than Wendell Hawk’s purple eye. This new generation was sapped of all the momentum that had carried civilization ahead for a thousand years—and now in the last quarter of the twentieth century the world waited once more on the threshold of the Dark Ages.

  Thus, standing under the cottonwood tree at Patty Hawk’s wedding, Miss McGee despaired. She decided to go home and call Father Finn and tell him she was resigning her teaching position. She circled the crowd on the beach and walked toward the driveway where she had parked the Plymouth. She passed the gift table and the guest-book table and was almost past the punch table when she was suddenly seized by the wrist. It was a fat man she had never seen before who held her. With his other hand he was stirring the punch.

  “Like a snort?” he said.

  “No, thank you. I must be on my way.” She had tasted the punch and knew that it was heavily spiked with gin. Floating on the surface now was a bottle cap.

  “Oh, come on, just a little snort for the road.” The fat man tightened his grip on her wrist and continued to
stir the punch. He was stirring it with a twig.

  “No, thank you,” she repeated. She tried to retain her composure by turning her back on the man, and with her free hand she straightened her hat.

  “If you’re like me, lady, you could probably use a snort. If you’re like me, you probably came a hell of a way to see this wedding, and it turned out to be the damnedest wedding you ever saw. I mean they have everything at this wedding. In the first place they have the wedding outside in a goddamn windstorm, and in the second place they have the wedding party dressed up in red overalls, and in the third place they have a knocked-up bride, and in the fourth place the father of the bride was cold-cocked last night by the mother of the bride. Now I know Wendell Hawk has been going around telling everybody that he hurt his head by slipping on a rug. In fact he even tried to tell me that he slipped on a rug, but I’m a cousin of his wife’s and I got the story from her this morning before Wendell was out of bed. I drove up here early this morning from Sioux City. What happened was that Wendell went out with the boys last night and he came home drunk and when his wife said he ought to be ashamed of himself he slapped her face. And you know what she did? She’s my first cousin. She took a bottle of salad dressing and she cracked him in the eye with it. She cold-cocked him with a bottle of French dressing. So now you know.”

  Miss McGee said that she believed she would have some punch after all, and when the man let go of her hand in order to pour her a cup, she fled. When she got home she called Father Finn and told him that she was retiring as soon as school was out.

  “You’re not serious,” he said.

  “Father, I have just returned from Patty Hawk’s wedding and I have seen my teaching come to nothing.”

  “Why? What did you see?”

  “It wasn’t only what I saw. It was what I heard as well.”

  “Why? What did you hear?”

  “Unspeakable things. The world is in ruins, and I’ll not teach another year. My teaching has come to nothing.”

  “Agatha, you’re an alarmist.”

  “I know, and with good reason.”

  Miss McGee called the principal, Sister Rosie, whose only reaction to Miss McGee’s announcement was to sigh into the phone, indicating that she thought Miss McGee was bluffing (St. Isidore’s pension plan was lousy) and she was waiting for Miss McGee to talk herself out of her decision. But Miss McGee, who had very little time for Sister Rosie, hung up.

  The following week when the school year ended, Father Finn and Sister Rosie began looking for Miss McGee’s replacement. There were in the parish three housewives certified by the State of Minnesota to teach sixth grade, but one of them had a new baby and the other two, when they heard that their salary would be four thousand dollars for the entire year, laughed out loud. Sister Rosie called the placement directors at seven colleges and Father Finn advertised in parish bulletins throughout the diocese. Sister Rosie alerted her mother superior in St. Paul, who, out of nuns, alerted the archbishop; but the only unemployed teachers the archbishop uncovered were as amused by the four thousand dollars as the two housewives had been.

  At this point Sister Rosie said to Father Finn, “There’s only one person who will teach sixth grade for four thousand dollars and do a creditable job of it and that’s Agatha McGee. We’re out of options. You’ll have to talk her into coming back.”

  “But we had a farewell party for her,” said Father Finn, “and her picture was in the paper, and the alumni gave her a watch. How could she go back to work after all of that?”

  “She’s duty-oriented. Tell her she owes St. Isidore’s one more year. Tell her there’s been a groundswell of sentiment in the parish to have her back.”

  “What I think we should do is combine fifth and sixth grades under one teacher.”

  “What kind of an option is that? Two grades in one room went out with the country school. Where have you been? Call her up and remind her that she quit on short notice and left us in the lurch. She’ll give in. She’s duty-oriented. Tell her there’s a petition going around to have her back.”

  “I’ll tell her no such thing. If I call her I’ll tell her the truth. I’ll tell her we’re desperate.”

  The next morning when Father Finn called to say he was desperate, Miss McGee was not at home. She was visiting, by invitation, the Senior Citizens’ Club. She had received the invitation in the mail from a certain Mr. Lutz and she assumed that the Senior Citizens were holding open house for the community at large, and since it was a sunny, windless morning she put on her high, round hat and walked the four blocks to the Community Center.

  Some years earlier Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society had come to Staggerford in the form of this Community Center, a three-story hulk of windowless concrete in which there were (besides a Senior Citizens’ Room) a Teen Room, a Physical Fitness Room, a Community Planning Room, a Bake Sale Room, and a row of ten offices occupied now and then by ten civil servants with incomprehensible titles. Printed on the door of one such office was the word OUTREACH. On another were the words FORCED AIR CONSULTANT. A third door said EQUALIZATION. This was Miss McGee’s first visit to the building and once inside she got lost. Outside, the lines of the building were square, but inside they were crooked. Corridors met each other at oblique angles, and some of them sloped up and down. Miss McGee opened dozens of doors. There were three-sided rooms and five-sided rooms and split-level rooms, all of them empty and all of them plastered with what looked to her like textured mustard. Water pipes and electrical conduits hung from the ceilings, giving her the illusion that she had dropped down a manhole. She passed through the furnace room and an empty kitchen and a room that reeked of soiled gym clothes. She found a room with a large bay window that gave her a view of a room containing a mimeograph machine and a broken piano. After opening all these doors, Miss McGee, who had not voted for Lyndon Johnson, began to suspect that the Community Center was purposely designed as a maze to throw the intruder off stride, to demoralize her, to conceal—like the passages in a pyramid—the secret that lay at the center of things; and thereafter, with each room she looked into, she half expected to come upon the sarcophagus of a king.

  From behind an unlabeled door on the second floor, she heard an excited cackle. She knocked and the cackle stopped. “Yoo hoo,” she called, and she heard whispering. She opened the door and looked into an enormous five-sided room that might have been a ballroom. In it were thirteen old people sitting on thirteen folding chairs. They were sitting in two groups and they were all staring at her. One group consisted of four women who had been making tulips out of egg cartons. They sat around a table on which were several jars of tempera paint, some scissors, a stack of egg cartons, and a bottle of Elmer’s glue. The other nine people were clustered in the center of the room and had obviously been visiting together before she interrupted them. A humpbacked woman was coiled in her chair like a withered stem, and to look up at Miss McGee she had to point one ear to the floor. A man in a lumberjack shirt had two hearing aids and one eye. The woman next to him wore a fur coat and bedroom slippers. There was a man showing a great distance between his socks and his cuffs and exposing the lengths of dingy underwear that covered his shins. They all sat with their hands in their laps and looked expectantly at Miss McGee, as though she had come to announce doomsday, or lunch.

  “Why, it’s Agatha McGee,” said a voice from the group of nine, and Miss McGee saw that it was Lillian Kite, knitting. She went over and sat down beside Lillian on a folding chair.

  “We thought the bride was coming in,” said Lillian. “We’re having a mock wedding here this morning and we thought you were the bride.”

  Through the door now came a young man in a checkered suit. He was carrying a small tape recorder, and Miss McGee decided at a glance that he was a simpleton. He pushed aside the egg cartons to make room on the table for the recorder and he pressed a button that caused it to play Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March.” As it played, he giggled and pulled busily at a hair growing out o
f a mole on his chin. When the music stopped, he rewound the tape and started it over again just as Vera Collins came through the door.

  Miss McGee knew Vera Collins. She was the widow of the blacksmith Varner Collins. She was the mother of eleven children and the grandmother of twenty-eight and the great-grandmother of four. She was wearing her wedding dress.

  “What is this?” said Miss McGee.

  “It’s our mock wedding,” said Lillian. “Isn’t Vera lovely?”

  There was nothing lovely about her. The wedding dress had taken on the color and smell of the attic in which it had hung for fifty-five years, and Vera Collins herself was emaciated.

  “Stand up everybody,” said the Simpleton, switching off the music. “Get over here, Harry. You agreed to be the groom and it’s too late now to back out.”

  The one-eyed lumberjack came forward with Vera Collins, and they stood before the Simpleton, who raised his eyes to the pipes running along the ceiling and said, “Lord, we are gathered here today to unite these two children of yours in Holy Matrimony. If anyone knows of any reason why these two should not be joined together, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.” Having said this, the Simpleton scanned the faces in the room and noticed for the first time Miss McGee.

  “I never saw you here before,” he said.

  “I was invited by a Mr. Lutz, I thought it was open house.”

  “I’m Lutz. Ozzie Lutz. I send out invitations to everybody in town who retires. I’m the director of this Community Center. Call me Ozzie. And be sure to sign in downstairs before you leave. I have to keep a record of everybody who uses this building. I hope you’ll keep coming. We have fun.”