“What’s it on?”
“The modern American novel. We’re going to read three or four that I consider important and discuss them.”
“Well, if you ask me it sounds like more work. I’m glad Frawley didn’t ask me to do it.”
“He didn’t ask me. I asked him.”
Ansel looked blank. “How come?”
“I’d been thinking about it for quite a while.”
“You mean it was your idea, this seminar, discussion group, whatever you call it? You never said anything about it.”
“I didn’t think I should till I talked to Mr. Frawley.”
“Yeah, well, it sounds like a lot of extra work.”
“I think it’ll be fun. And it’s only for six weeks. Tuesday and Thursday, four to five.”
“Aren’t many of these kids going to show up after four o’clock?”
“I don’t expect many. Five or six at the most. But I’ve got a few kids in my classes who are really bright, who ought to be reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald—”
“And Faulkner,” he said with a sniff. “I suppose you think they should read him.”
“Sure I do.”
“Wait’ll Dean Frawley finds out about that!”
“He’s already found out. I showed him my list and he approved it.”
“Bet he doesn’t know what he’s getting into. Bet he’s never read Faulkner.”
“You want to bet? We had a good talk about him. He drew the line at Light in August, but I wasn’t going to use that one anyway.”
“Hm. Well…” Dr. Ansel’s blotch was quite red. He stuck his hands in his pockets and made a couple of paces past her desk. “Who’s going to pay for the books? How many of these kids can afford—”
“The school’s buying them. We’ve already got them ordered.”
“Well! I’m surprised he’s lettin’ go of the money. He’s so tight with it.”
“He thinks it’s a good idea. It’s an experiment. If it works, he says maybe next year we can do one on Greek drama. I’m going to bone up on Sophocles and Aristophanes this summer.”
“Well, good luck.”
“Thank you.”
She didn’t tell him it was her mother’s idea. It had come up at Thanksgiving, when she was home for the holiday. “You know, I’ve been thinking,” Mother said, “there must be some way you could distinguish yourself in this job. Oh, I know you’re doing fine, I don’t doubt that for a minute. But I don’t want them to think of you as just another competent teacher. I want you to be noticed. Let them know you’re somebody special. And I think I’ve got just the thing!”
“What do you want me to do?” Allen said with some apprehension.
“Why don’t you start a discussion group!” Mother reared back from her pie-making with the rolling pin in her hand.
“You mean a community thing?”
“No, at school, as part of your job. A little discussion group after school in the afternoons.”
“Discussing what?”
“Well—something. We can work on that. Something that would interest enough of the students, add to their education. Your dean—what’s his name?”
“Mr. Frawley.”
“He ought to be impressed by that, if he’s as dedicated as you say he is.”
“He is. He’s a wonderful old man.”
“Well, then, I’ll bet if you went to him and talked it over, he’d help you set up a discussion session. It wouldn’t be too much extra work, would it?”
“Well, it would be some, but I suppose I could handle it.”
“Something you know a lot about. My goodness, that could be anything!”
“Now Mother, what do I know a lot about?”
“Don’t be so modest, Barbara Allen. Where’s your self-confidence? You read a lot of books, there’s got to be something you know more about than your students do.”
As a matter of fact, there was, and the more Allen thought about it, the more attractive it seemed. A discussion group wasn’t such a bad idea, after all.
But maybe she should have told Dr. Ansel whose idea it was. It wasn’t quite fair to take all the credit herself. Oh well. Her mother would never have suggested the subject she’d chosen.
With the exception of Dean Frawley, Dr. Ansel was the only man on the faculty whom she rather enjoyed. The dean was a scholarly old gentleman of great courtesy and an air of genuine kindliness. Now and then he dropped in on one of her classes and sat for a while, observing. This was his practice, as some of the other teachers explained. And all of them agreed that, rather than making them nervous, his presence was somehow reassuring.
During their friendly chat about her proposed seminar, he had told her that he was very pleased with her work. He felt it was his obligation to encourage young teachers, he told her. The conversation moved easily into their philosophies of education, and back and forth from teaching methods to favorite books, from primary sources as opposed to textbooks chosen by committee. A fine, satisfying talk. She went away well nourished and feeling quite scholarly.
The only other male of whom she took special notice was the men’s gym teacher, coach of the basketball and football teams. He was blue-eyed and beautiful, without a perceptible brain in his head. But in his presence she went all over self-conscious and gawky, a state easily changed as soon as he left the room.
He reminded her of a boy from her undergraduate days who had sat next to her in Sociology II—a blond sonofagun with a lazy grin who copied her answers and called her “kid.” She had longed for him till she feared she was giving off fumes like a Bunsen burner. He never so much as noticed, until one summer night when she ran into him on the way home from the library. He said “Want a Coke?” and after that, strolled her over to his fraternity house, now largely deserted during the summer session, and on through to the backyard, where they sat in the dark and he told her how she had affected him in sociology class. Even if she didn’t believe a word he said, it was nice to hear him say it. Then he started fumbling around till she decided she wasn’t so crazy about him after all. She figured that, since she had a few things to learn, this was as good a time as any to start. A halfhearted start, not quite consummated, but instructional all the same. And though that put an end to her crush, she thought of him now and then with a certain gratitude.
It seemed it was often the good-for-nothings who attracted her. The rotters had most of the charm. There was a long precedent for that, going back to Satan. Since Genesis, when he appeared as a serpent, very few (not Milton and not Goethe) who cast him in human form had managed to make him wholly repulsive. Wholly evil, of course—of repulsive deed—but magnetic in himself, seductive and clever, “more knowing than any man,” according to Burton (who, being a clergyman, must have known quite a lot about Satan).
It was doubtful that the coach could “perceive the causes of all the meteors and the like,” but he was a bit of a devil and he sure as hell was magnetic. Trouble was, he was not often present. Since, like Miss Boatwright and Mr. Delanier, he divided his time between college and high school, he skillfully avoided meetings. It was a rare occasion when he showed up for anything except gym classes twice a week.
He had danced with her once, at the Halloween party. She was a chaperone, along with Miss Peabody and Mr. Lord and Dean Frawley, and chaperones, providing they knew how, were allowed to dance with the students. She was having a jolly time with a freckled freshman when the coach cut in and put her in such a dither she went into instant aphasia.
“How’s it goin’?” he said, not giving a damn.
“Fine.” Well, that was one word.
He danced her around, looking over her head.
“I didn’t know you were here,” she said.
“Just got here. Got to show up once in a while and keep Frawley happy. You come to these bops very often?”
“Oh yes! I’m nearly always here.”
“Zheesh!” he said in condolence.
“They’re not so bad�
�I mean, it’s only the kids, but—”
He was grinning down at her lazily out of one side of his mouth.
“Well, somebody has to,” she said, “somebody has to chaperone. It’s just one of the duties. And I really don’t mind it too much. I’d rather be doing this than—” Oh, shut up. Whatever she said wouldn’t change it. She came to these dances because nobody asked her to any others. She danced with the kids, and what’s more, she enjoyed it.
“You like the fights?” Coach said idly.
“The fights?”
“Prizefights.”
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen one.”
“You haven’t?”
“Do they have them around here?”
“In this burg? Kansas City’s the closest place.”
“Do you go up there to see them?”
“Sometimes,” he said, adding offhandedly, “May go up tomorrow.”
Was he asking? She thought he was. She waited, dry of mouth.
But he danced her along in silence as if he’d forgotten that she was there at all. She might have been a coat slung over his arm.
“I’d love to see one sometime.”
Now she was asking and she could have cut her throat. She turned with relief as one of the bright boys from her English class cut in.
“Digadoo,” said the boy, straight-faced.
“Hello, George.” She smiled, grateful for being rescued and ashamed at having to be.
“Hammertoes,” he said with a jerk of his head toward the coach, who was going out the door. “He dances like the Scottish Rite Temple.” And with a tidy maneuver he twirled her around and spun her the length of the gym like silk off a spool.
So there went the coach and any glimmer of hope. Only Dr. Ansel was left, and the three Ladies who, except for her and Miss Boatwright, were the only faculty women. They were a homogeneous clutch, maiden and graying, their buttocks disciplined by girdles, their lives lived out in classrooms and rented bedrooms.
Miss Gladys Peabody taught French and Spanish. She was a large woman with bright black eyes and a wide smile that sometimes threatened to extend right off her face. Plump little Mae Dell Willette, the art and education instructor, had in her youth been blonde and pretty, and the manner was still there, the wide-eyed sweetness gone a little wistful now with her beauty fading. And there was Miss Ingersoll, Verna, of the business department, a brisk little body who marshaled the rest of them into line and saw to it that they wore their galoshes.
They were good women, gabby and friendly, ready to help if she needed help, and as keen to their small pleasures as they were numb to the scarcity of them. She could laugh with them in the faculty ladies’ lounge and share their jokes. They lunched together in cafeterias, and sometimes on Saturdays they took the bus to Kansas City and went shopping and saw a play at the Music Hall.
Weekdays they did their work, Miss Liles as diligently as the rest. She graded papers, made lesson plans, attended meetings, and in January began conducting her seminar. She was punctual, cooperative, courteous, and conscientious, teaching her heart out as she was expected to do.
This was Miss Liles by daylight, all that fall and winter.
Five
But the night, as Thoreau reminds us, is a very different season. And it was a different creature who—on those spring nights when spring had barely appeared, so shivering and dissembling that only the very prescient could tell it was there at all—ran down the steps from Miss Liles’s apartment, leaving behind the trappings of the day. Down through the alley, past the fairy-tale houses with their catwalks and turrets mysterious in the dark, and on to whatever adventure beckoned.
She did not go adventuring alone. She had found some friends, two of them, who came often at nightfall, when the order of the evening was books and serious discourse. As the evening progressed, earnestness of purpose diminished as the laughter and merriment grew, till at last, overcome by their native high spirits, they left their books and ventured out into the night.
They might foray beyond one of the wrought-iron gates and snoop around an old house, or run to the bakery for a delectable something, fresh-baked. They might explore an unfamiliar street; on moonlit nights they might haunt a graveyard or take a hushed promenade through an empty church, in those times left unlocked. And after some of their explorations they’d have a beer or two at Sutt’s Corner, a dingy saloon down by the stockyards. There was so much fun to be had in a world transformed by darkness. And Miss Liles, transformed from her daytime self, could find fun everywhere.
Had teaching been uppermost in her mind, had she found the friends less agreeable, and had she not lived in a neighborhood of half-deserted castles, she might have been more mindful of her actions. But she lived where she did; she had found kindred spirits; and in her heart it was foreordained that one day, not long away, she would depart from academe and embark on her intended life.
Meanwhile, life had become very pleasant indeed. She was comfortable with her new friends—these two bright, well-behaved boys—as with her brother. They were both intelligent, and seemed as interested in books as she was. And they were more good plain fun than anyone else she had ever met.
She had even begun to enjoy her work, especially the seminar. Now and then it crossed her mind that if she worked hard enough and stayed with it, she might become a teacher like a few of those memorable ones who had taught her. Scholarly, at ease with their learning, and skillful at passing it along.
All the same, she looked forward to the nights.
It had come about so seamlessly that they were friends before they knew it. The boys had walked into her room on an afternoon in January to enroll in her seminar—lanky, limber, happy-go-lucky George, along with Toby, who was not quite as tall as George. He was dark haired with a hint of a scowl and a wary look in his eyes. Second-year students, both had been in her English poetry class in the fall; both were good students, full of ideas and argument. George was quick to grasp and remark, Toby more deliberate and questioning. George was a prankster, Toby more serious, but the two seemed inseparable. There were only three others who enrolled in the seminar, three girls, one of whom, Maggie, seemed to be there solely to bask in George’s presence. After the second session on the modern novel, the boys talked Allen down the hall and down the steps to the door. After the third they, along with Maggie, talked her all the way home. They stood on the landing, voicing opinions on this and that, until she was blue with cold. It was early February and already dark.
Finally she asked them in.
“Is it okay?” they said, hesitating.
“Why not?” She knew well enough why not. She was a teacher and young and alone. If it were known that she had invited male students into her apartment, well, there were those who would raise an eyebrow or two, at the very least. Mother, for one. You behave yourself now, up there so private. Well, let her. It was cold on the landing and the talk was good and they hadn’t finished yet. “Of course it’s okay. Come on in, I’ll make some tea.”
And she did, as the wives of professors used to do when the Honors group met in their homes. Tea and polite little cookies, never enough. Soon the boys were in her kitchen every afternoon after class, sitting at the table with tea and cookies and talking about anything and everything. After two afternoons, Maggie, though she was cute and bright and very respectful of Miss Liles, didn’t continue to join them after class. She hadn’t quite caught the tune, and, in spite of Allen’s efforts she was somewhat left out. She began leaving class promptly with some excuse or other. George never mentioned her, but Allen suspected she was not happy about his continuing to come to her salon, as she now allowed herself to think of it.
Toby read the newspaper assiduously and listened to news on the radio, much concerned about what was going on in Europe. He had wanted to join the Lincoln Brigade after he graduated high school, but his parents would have none of it. Instead he had been a counselor at Scout camp. “That was my last time at camp,” he said. “My fo
lks made me go every summer and I never did like it much. First time I went, I made up my mind I never wanted to join things. The Lincoln Brigade was different. You weren’t tying silly knots all day or parading around with your hand on your heart. You were driving dynamite trucks through the mountains at night.”
George whooped. “Rover Boy in Spain! You just wanted to be Robert Jordan!”
“Go to hell.”
Like all students, they discussed their courses (none of them hers, except the seminar) and commented at length on the teachers. They were particularly entertained by Dr. Ansel, the Holder of the Third Degree, as they liked to call him. That, or the Phud. They talked about chorus class (conducted by beautiful Miss Boatwright) and the orchestra, and mostly, of course, about themselves.
George lived on the east side of town, he and his mother and a sometimes-married sister who was in and out. His father traveled, selling pianos. (Not very successfully, she gathered. These days there wasn’t too much money around for such refinements.) Since he covered territory from Wichita to Chicago, he was away most of the time and turned up home whenever he had a mind to. His mother worked nights in the telephone office. On alternate Saturdays George worked in a neighborhood store.
Other Saturdays, he took the bus to Kansas City for his music lesson. George was a gifted pianist. He intended to study at the Juilliard School in New York. Meanwhile, he would settle for the music school in Kansas City. Just like her, he longed for the larger world of the arts, but was making do with gathering his resources where he could. With the help of his teacher in the city and Mr. Delanier at the college, he had applied for a scholarship. It had looked very promising, but he couldn’t expect to hear anything before April or May. “If I don’t get the scholarship, I don’t go. Even if I do, I’ll be livin’ on beans. My Dad says he’ll help, but I don’t know what with.” Even so, he was hopeful and practiced four hours every morning without fail before his college classes began. George wanted to play in Carnegie Hall. He and Allen sometimes fantasized their future lives in New York City, where musicians and writers abounded.
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