“Yes, I have. Are you angry? I surely hope not, for it will make me feel bad if I have done anything to make you angry. There is always the fifteen minutes to put in, you see, and I never seem to know anything about the problem, or even how to begin solving it, and so I got the idea of using the time to write these notes to you, instead of wasting it. When you didn’t object after the first one or the second one, I thought it would be all right if I just kept on, and so I have.”
He looked at her sharply to see if he could detect in her expression the note of mockery that was incredibly absent from the tone of her voice. But she was looking at him gravely, in all apparent simplicity, and he felt, noting somewhat parenthetically the delightful thrust of her small breasts against her sweater, an acceleration of prickliness.
“No,” he said, “I’m not in the least angry. However, I think you have posed a problem, quite outside the area of trigonometry, to the solution of which we must now apply ourselves. Two heads, in this case will be better than one, I’m sure. Not now, though. You have another class coming up, and I mustn’t detain you any longer. I shall be free after three o’clock this afternoon, and I shall expect you to come to see me as soon thereafter as possible. Do you understand?”
“Oh, yes. Perfectly.” Her mobile face of lights and shadows expressed such delight that he thought for a moment she was going to jump up and down and clap her hand like a small girl. “Three o’clock. I’ll be here right on time. You can depend on it. You must not forget and go off yourself, either. I’d be rather disappointed if you did.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ll be here. And now you had better run along to your next class. I trust that you will be better prepared there than you were here.”
As she went out, he watched the delightful play of contiguous nates. Then, seating himself at his desk with a free period to spend, he spent a brief part of it wondering how old she was, guessing twenty and giving her, actually, the benefit of five years and, not actually but in a valid sense, the immensely greater benefit of immeasurable eons, for she was, in this latter valid sense, as old as any age one would care to select from a geological table.
After a couple of minutes, he unfolded her paper again and began to read the note she had written while the rest of the trigonometry class had been attempting to discover the height and the length of a side of the base of the Great Pyramid of Gizeh, Egypt. Before vandals, that is.
Dear Professor Cannon, he read, I find it remarkable and interesting that vandals would actually steal the top 31 feet of a pyramid, and I can’t understand why they would have wanted to do something like this, which doesn’t seem to make much sense. But I suppose there have always been certain people, even away back then, who would go to any trouble to do something that someone else wouldn’t want them to do.
I understand that pyramids are built of great blocks of stone that weigh tons and tons apiece, and I must say that taking off the top 31 feet seems to me to be even a greater waste of time and effort than putting them up in the first place.
I’m sorry that I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I hope you don’t feel that it is your fault, that you weren’t a good teacher or anything like that, because it is my own fault entirely in that I don’t seem to be able to care much about trigonometry or how big a pyramid was.
The truth is, you are the very best teacher I’ve ever had in anything, and it is a pleasure to listen to you talk and watch you show how to do things on the blackboard, even though I don’t quite understand what you are saying or showing.
I suppose I shall be put out of the class at the end of the term for not having learned anything, but I hope you will let me stay until then, at least, because I enjoy it so much for the reasons I have mentioned. Sincerely, Margaret McCall.
Refolding the paper, he leaned back and smiled, making a little tent of fingers tip to tip above his chest, elbows braced on the arms of his chair.
He conceded that Maggie McCall was nothing short of a remarkable phenomenon — altogether the most interesting specimen of college life that he had uncovered as a pedagogue. Or, for that matter, as anything else. And this covered a considerable area, to tell the truth, for Brad was especially sensitive to the enchantment of female students, as well as females in other categories, and it was one of his secret regrets that his particular forte was mathematics, inasmuch as enrollment in his classes was thereby rather severely limited. If he were teaching in another department, say English or Education, his sensitivity would have been exposed to a much more numerous and varied collection of stimulants.
This brought him, in his reflections, to one of the more curious matters relative to Miss Maggie McCall. How the hell, he wondered, had she ever managed to get into his trigonometry class?
It was assumed, naturally, that anyone enrolled in trig had satisfied certain essential prerequisites, such as algebra and geometry, but there was not the slightest evidence that Miss McCall knew any more about the latter than the former, which was about as much as you could teach a cat in three easy lessons. It was certain that her record had been checked upon enrollment, however, which indicated that these essential subjects were on her transcript, if not in her head.
Brad, who possessed his share of professional cynicism, was reasonably certain how this had come to pass, and it could be safely deduced from the evidence that Miss McCall, although abysmally ignorant in certain areas, was by no means stupid, and that she was, on the contrary, master of a technique for acquiring unearned credits that was palpably admirable and probably exciting.
Feeling again the pleasant prickliness, Brad got up and walked over to the windows and assumed his former position, hands holding each other at the base of his spine.
Using a short focus, he examined briefly his own reflection, taking note of the thick brown hair parted cleanly at the side and worn rather long over the ears in order to display the dusting of gray that made such an intriguing contrast with his boyish face.
He was a handsome man, no question about that. He had, in fact, often been compared in appearance with the late Ronald Coleman, and there was indeed a genuine resemblance, except that he, Brad, wore no mustache and had the added attraction of dimples. He looked a good ten years younger that he was, and he felt in certain respects ten years younger than he looked.
Lengthening his focus, he sought the red squirrel among the walnut trees and could not find him.
Releasing his right hand from his left, he looked at his watch for no good reason except that he was restless and rather bored with the prospect of classes until three o’clock, which was, suddenly, an hour of the day that he was impatient to have arrive.
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Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3989-8
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3989-3
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