by John Bemrose
Joe was glad the lights had not been turned on in the deserted classroom. His face, his traitor face, was heating. He and the teacher were sitting side by side, in two student desks. Before Joe lay the twenty foolscap pages of his essay, “Hobos and Handouts, A Study of Charity in the Great Depression.” Mann had filled its margins with blocks of criticism, in his tiny, sawtoothed script. He’d given Joe a B, the worst mark he’d ever had for a history project.
“Sorry,” Joe managed, not looking at the teacher.
Mann waved his hand.
“Don’t apologize. It’s nothing personal. It’s just something, well — when you’re writing papers in university, you’ll have to use better sources than just your required reading. You didn’t use any of the books I recommended. Couldn’t you find them?”
“No,” he lied, feeling his embarrassment increase.
“I asked Miss Keynes to put a number of books aside.”
“I guess I didn’t look hard enough.”
Beyond Mann’s severely angled face, through the window, the narrow thicket of a Lombardy poplar burned orange. In the hall outside the classroom, the janitor’s broom hissed.
“What happened? Didn’t you leave yourself enough time? It felt hurried.”
“I guess it was.”
Mann waited. He gazed at Joe with unreadable calm. The teacher had said this matter wasn’t personal, yet Joe knew he was disappointed. And now his silence, a silence Joe felt Mann was perfectly comfortable with, had filled the room. In the corridor, the janitor’s wide broom hissed by again. A locker slammed. But here, the silence waited. Joe felt he owed this silence something: another apology, maybe, or some kind of explanation. He frowned, and pushed his essay around a little. As Mann had guessed, he’d written his whole essay the night before. He hadn’t thought it was so bad at the time. In fact, he’d congratulated himself on how smoothly and quickly it had gone. He’d made some clever points, he thought. But Mann had told him that “Hobos and Handouts” (how proud he’d been of that title, and Mann hadn’t even mentioned it!) contained far too few useful facts. As a result, he’d had to depend on speculative arguments that chased their own tails.
And the thing was, he’d known this at the time. In his rush to finish the paper, and even in the midst of his self-congratulation, he’d had an uneasy perception, he now recalled, that “Hobos and Handouts” was a bit of a con job. But he’d crashed on, drunk on his own forced optimism, ignoring the knowledge standing just outside his vision. He knew the truth was there, all he needed to do was turn his head and look at it. But he wouldn’t turn: he had fallen into the habit of living dishonestly.
He was still with Liz McVey. In spite of having promised himself, scores of times, that he would break up with her, he had drifted on as her “steady.” “Joe and Liz” had become one of the ongoing features of the school’s social life. They were coupled in the same breath by their friends in the North End gang. Even the teachers had grown used to seeing them come down the halls together, Liz with her head back, and Joe at her elbow, playing his role, but so much of the time secretly critical of her. He couldn’t stand the way she called him “darling” in her fake accent, or looked into people’s eyes as if they were more important to her than anything. She pretended an interest in history, or in poetry, but her opinions always sounded cobbled together, he thought, as if she had lifted them from a bin of approved opinions. She only grew truly impassioned when she was talking about herself.
So why was he still with her? Was it sex? There was something in her slim, round-shouldered body, and yes, in the searching of her babyish lips that he couldn’t get enough of. Sex with Liz always felt slightly off-colour and somehow desperate and illicit. But it was never satisfying. It only promised to be satisfying, endlessly. Whenever they finished one of their trysts, it seemed to him that the world had drained of meaning. He barely had the energy to put on his clothes — and at the same time, he couldn’t leave her fast enough. It was then that he felt most like telling her they were through: but he could never summon the nerve. It would have been unconscionably cruel, he thought, to make love to her and then announce he was going for good. So he postponed the moment for another time — and when the time came, his desire to make love to her superseded his desire to leave. And so he went in circles, like a goldfish in a bowl. He hated himself, for his weakness, for his inability to spare her from himself.
So he went on being cheerful and helpful, to all appearances a contented young man. People remarked on his thoughtfulness to Liz McVey. What other boyfriend touched his girl’s hair so thoughtfully as they went down the hall together, or reached up to pick a bit of lint from her sweater. He had the reputation, even among the teachers (though he wasn’t sure about Mann), of being a real gentleman.
He went on enjoying the privileges Liz’s company brought: driving the Lincoln, lounging about her fine house, being one of the “in” crowd, the North End gang. There were solaces, after all, for being with Liz McVey, and not the least of them was seeing a great deal of Anna. He and Liz went out frequently on double dates with Anna and Brad. They travelled in the Linc, or in Brad’s Oldsmobile, to movies in Johnsonville, or to concerts in Hamilton or Kitchener. Every hour of those outings was sacred to him, because he was close to Anna. He felt they had entered an understanding. They were closer to each other, friends and perhaps more than friends, with a secret communication that cut below their loyalties to their respective partners. When they were out with Brad and Liz, he felt his actual pairing was with Anna. And perhaps she shared this view. “Oh, Joe and I are leaving,” she’d said once, in disgust at something Brad had said and Liz had seconded. And she’d put her arm through Joe’s and drawn him off a few steps, laughing, while Joe’s heart pounded. It was as if she was letting him know that she was waiving her old requirement that he keep a certain distance. Often he felt on the verge of asking her where he stood. But he was afraid of another rebuff.
His dishonesty with Liz had infected him. He could sense it, just below the surface of his life. He had caught himself adopting some of the same airs he disliked in her: calling her “darling,” and referring in bored, familiar terms to “the Linc” or to “J-ville,” her family’s name for Johnsonville. Increasingly he lacked patience, and rushed from one thing to another without finishing anything, almost angrily. He had developed a mania for speed. On the nights when he should have been working on “Hobos and Handouts,” he was driving the Lincoln down the highway, pushing the needle of the speedometer into the nineties, while Liz nuzzled beside him, saying languidly, “Be careful, Joe. You’ll kill us both,” and stroking his thigh as if she were half-attracted to the idea.
And now he saw the reflection of his entrapment in Mann’s gaze. Yes, the teacher knew. He had caught Mann watching him and Liz intently — disapprovingly — in the hall. And he was ashamed before his gaze, as he was ashamed before his own weakness. Now the teacher seemed to be waiting for him to confess all.
Mann broke the tension by looking away. “The important thing now is getting ready for the finals,” he said, frowning. “You’re going to have to prepare a lot more material than what’s covered in your history text. They’ll be looking for some kind of depth. I was thinking, if you wanted to brush up on the Depression, or any other topic — the two wars maybe — I’ve got some books I could lend you.”
“That’d be great.”
“Why don’t you come home with me now?” Mann said, bestirring himself. “I’ll see what I can root up.”
They went together down the hall, past the ranks of massed dull-green lockers. Exiting at the rear of the school, they found several students unloading cartons from a van. “Hot off the press,” said a boy with a high forehead and premature widow’s peak: John Butler. He had ripped open a carton and was holding out a folded copy of The Poet’s Quill, the school literary paper. While Mann examined the gift, John handed another copy to Joe. Anna had told him she had a poem in this issue. He was more eager to read it than if
he’d written it himself. He tucked the paper among the books under his arm and strode off with Mann, momentarily lifted by the thought of her.
In Mann’s upstairs study, under a slanted ceiling, several windows gave a view of the distant Shade. A scarred wooden table ran beneath the sills. There was a casual, slightly dishevelled look about the place, created by the stacks of books on the floor, the old New Yorkers scattered around the jute rug. Joe loved the room — its light, its books, its feeling of important work being done. Mann, he knew, was writing a history of Attawan. Parts of it had appeared in the Attawan Star.
He felt privileged to be here: privileged, and almost forgiven for his poor performance in his essay. He wanted to be an historian himself, and to come here was like being admitted to some secret, initiatory stage of the long process that would lead him forward. He was alert to everything, keen to make a good impression. He sat between the high arms of a low chair — the pink duster covering it seemed a bit incongruous, even shocking — sipping his tea and looking at the books the teacher took from the shelves and rubbed with a cloth, before handing them to Joe.
“You won’t want all of these,” Mann said with a grin. Inexplicably, the teacher was blushing. “At least I’m getting my books dusted.”
Mann handed him a large format book with a dark board cover, and knelt with cracking knees beside the chair as Joe opened it. The book was full of black-and-white photographs from the First World War: wagon wheels fattened with mud, ragged files of grinning soldiers, the lifeless common of no-man’s land. Reaching over into Joe’s lap, the teacher leafed through the pages until he found a picture of several soldiers in a trench. They all had dirty faces, and had paused in various activities — eating out of mess tins, cleaning their rifles — to smile at the camera.
“That fellow there,” Mann said, tapping on the page to indicate a figure sitting on a crate, his soup-plate helmet pushed straight back from his blackened forehead. “My brother, Gordon.”
Joe looked at the figure and caught a hint of Mann’s own square face and dark eyes, circled with dirt or fatigue. “Vimy Ridge,” Joe read.
“Not long after they’d captured it.”
“He was at Vimy?” Joe said with excitement. The name of the great German strong point successfully stormed by the Canadians — after British and French forces had failed for years to take it — was a mythic name to him, and as with all such names, it came as a surprise to discover that someone he knew, or at least a relative of someone he knew — an actual human being — had been there. It was like finding a ladder into a world that was bigger, brighter — infused, somehow, with immortality.
Again Mann tapped the page. “Look at those grins. They’re always grinning in these pictures. It shows their youth — what good boys they were. They were living in hell, but they still couldn’t help going on their best behaviour when a camera appeared. It tells you a lot, I think, about how well disciplined they were — I don’t just mean as soldiers, but as social creatures. They were so eager to please. I always find it sad.”
Joe studied the picture, and was moved by a curious sense that he knew what it was like to sit there, in the cold mud in France, eighteen years old, with his friends.
“Maybe they’re just happy to be alive,” he said quietly.
Mann studied him for a moment. In his brown eyes was something moist, searching — entirely too intense. Joe had to look away.
Mann went on kneeling beside Joe as they examined the photographs. The teacher’s left hand hung on his shoulder. Joe shifted away, a little uncomfortable. He could sit in a crowded church pew beside his own father and hardly notice that their legs were touching. But with Mann he became increasingly self-conscious. He became aware of the chapped back of the teacher’s free hand, which was trembling a little, and the white flecks in his nails, and always the man’s unpleasant breath, like the smell of a machine. Mann, he remembered, was retiring at the end of the year; he was old.
When he left, Joe felt immediate relief at being outside, in the mild bright evening. From a lawn a robin sent out its shivering cry. He hurried to Shade Street, and along to the corner of Banting, where he sat on a low wall of cut limestone and took out his copy of The Poet’s Quill, hunting through its newsprint pages until he found her poem.
WHIRLPOOL
Eyes
in the green whirlpool
looking up at me,
blinking and darkening and letting go.
Eyes of water
emerging, submerging —
the eyes of some vast green beast
who knows it must only lazily
circle
until I fall —
devoured by my hunger for looking.
Then you
standing by the grey rock,
a land-man, not of the river
with your startled love-look
beyond mere looking.
I was more afraid of you than the river,
more afraid of you than death.
Your eyes offered something more complicated than water,
wilder than the turquoise river.
Let me go
back to the pleasures of looking.
Let me drown on the bottom with my words.
— Anna Macrimmon
He read it several times. Was he the “land-man”? Yes, surely he was the “land-man”! And he remembered the day he had driven with Anna, Liz, and Brad to the whirlpool: saw again the wild water, surging past the rock where Anna had stood.
What was she telling him? “Let me go/back to the pleasures of looking.” Was she telling him to leave her alone? He looked up, scarcely aware of the cars streaming past, or of the Bannerman mansion across the road, its grey stone warming in the late sun. She was telling him to let her go. But she wouldn’t tell him that, would she, unless he had a power over her — more, maybe, than he had guessed?
44
A WEEK LATER Joe and Brad drew up Anna’s sloping drive. It was the evening of the Spring Frolic — a clear, fragrant evening, unseasonably warm. With a slight stiffness, ever the wounded athlete fresh from hockey or basketball wars, Brad, resplendent in his tux, left the Olds and took a jogging step or two as he crossed the lawn to her house. Joe got out and climbed into the back seat with the tiny carton that contained Liz’s corsage. He couldn’t stop thinking about the oversized black shoes he had borrowed from his father — clown shoes, surely, their toes stuffed with newspaper — shoes that seemed to broadcast his father’s current difficulties, as if their shine betrayed the loss of his job, his unhappiness deepening through the house like an unpleasant odour. Joe had not wanted to wear them, but he owned only brown shoes himself. Staring at Anna’s front door, he was aware his hands were shaking. Then the door opened and he saw Anna in a coat he hadn’t seen before, a beltless white coat that came to her knees but did not entirely cover the long, pale skirt flexing below it as she picked her way across the lawn. “Joe,” she said, smiling at him as she got in. He had to remind himself that she didn’t know he’d read her poem — the new issue of The Poet’s Quill wouldn’t be distributed until next week — and this helped him subdue his nervousness.
A few minutes later, the Olds swung into the McVeys’ drive, stopping with a lurch behind the sky-blue Lincoln. As he plodded to the door, Joe could hear Brad’s laughter in the car behind him. He felt barely composed, a just object of mockery, the evening already fraying beyond control.
And yet, and yet: she was here. On the short drive to the school, the world seemed to survive only by grace of the sleek head in front of him. Inside, gusts of music swept through the dimly lit corridors. Couples in fancy dresses and suits, in tuxedos and evening gowns, with hair creamed and combed, bouffanted and permed, paraded towards the gym with a sound of whisking cloth and tapping shoes. Joe glimpsed Sandy, looking entirely different from the person he still went out of his way to avoid. She was wearing what looked like false eyelashes and a puffy, Popsicle-green dress, and she was clinging to
the arm of Sid Miller, a North End boy with a reputation. There was an excitement in the warm air, almost an anarchy, as though some long repressed power was nearing its point of release. Two teacher-chaperones, watching from the shadows, seemed out of place.
They climbed the stairs to the classroom serving as a cloakroom. Fluorescent light fell harshly over the desks heaped with coats. Helping Liz off with her wrap, Joe stared past her at Anna. She, too, had just shed her coat, and he was mesmerized by her appearance in her simple, white, form-fitting dress with its square neckline that mirrored the cut of her bangs and left her arms completely bare. He was made breathless: by her naked arms, by her rebirth, once again, to newness, by the beauty of her face, smiling across the desks as she discovered him. She wore no jewellery.
They went down to the gym and sat at the little table reserved for them. A candle fluttered in its bottle, signalling to the dozens of other flames winking around the perimeter of the vast room. The floor was crowded with dancers, their heads and shoulders touched with the racing moths of light reflected from the multifaceted globe turning overhead, above a ten-foot high model of the Eiffel Tower, its girders wrapped in aluminum foil. On stage, the Morganaires had stood up in their pale-blue, silver-trimmed blazers, leaning forward to release the deep voices of their horns. The outside doors were open and the mild night air stole in and mixed with the warmer, perfumed air inside, making the candles flicker.
Liz drew Joe onto the floor. She hooked her bare arm over his shoulders and drew in close, possessively. Her body seemed uncannily thin to him, and hungry, pressing at him as if to staunch a wound in her midriff. They turned among the other couples in a slow, shuffling drift. Her hair smelled of a new perfume, a flowery scent he found too sweet. He pushed her away a little, and tried to dance more energetically, aware that Anna might be watching: wanting her to know he was ready to break with Liz.
“Anna looks nice,” Liz said, closing with him again. He grunted something noncommittal and twirled Liz. She came back to him, her face with its gash of red lipstick expressionless in the blizzard of light.