Book Read Free

Duet for Three

Page 4

by Joan Barfoot


  Respect, that’s something she learned from her father: the respect a teacher warrants. Certainly in his day that was recognized by other men, who, she saw, greeted him in the street with deference; even people like the banker tipped his hat to her father.

  The inexplicable thing is how her honorable, upright father could have brought himself to marry Aggie, even granting that she may have been attractive at the time. It seems to have been his only lapse in judgment. June does not believe at all the things her mother says about him. And even if they were true, she knows herself — who better? — how aggravating Aggie can be.

  FIVE

  Ordinarily, Aggie likes sitting at the front-room window, where she has various ways to spend the day: reading, eating, and watching. She knows a great many things about a great many people in this town. Prepared to dislike it, and finding it strange when she came, she has grown fond with sixty years of familiarity. She knows so many stories, snippets of drama, that have originated here. Many of the people involved, of course, have left or are dead. It’s lonely, to have so few people left with whom to share memories — or, if not memories, at least pieces of history, certain events. How many remember the First World War, even as remotely as she does?

  Oh, it is shameful, ignominious, to end up an old woman peeing the bed.

  It is both more of a disaster that it has happened again, and less of one. Worse because now it is no longer a single, arguable lapse; and better because the second time it is almost familiar, not such a shock. She had no trouble identifying what was wrong, and spent no time trying to think of what to say to June, because clearly there was nothing to be said.

  She is eighty years old, and of course things must be breaking down. What could she expect? She has rewarded her body with pies and cakes, and punished it with flesh. There are fires in her belly some days. There are times when it feels as if it may erupt.

  If she has to die, she would prefer to explode. Mere disintegration is a horror. The best way would be to eat one cookie, one muffin, one cupcake too many and just blow up, with the taste of the last treat still on her tongue.

  But she doesn’t want to die.

  She doesn’t want to be an old woman peeing the bed, either.

  And George will come, poking and probing, and Lord knows what June has in mind.

  How queer and frightening, not to know what to do. There was a time when she was full of ideas. She was the one, back home, who suggested games, and found an old curtain to turn into a dress for Edith to wear to the church young people’s meetings. She was the one who led the others up the rungs of the ladders into the hay mows, and leaped from away up there into the soft heaps of straw, while they hung back, peering at the distance down. She was the one who climbed high into a maple tree and hung from a limb, catcalling at her younger brothers, who could not reach so high. Later on, she may have been, for all she knew, the only one whose body sometimes burned, wanting — something or other. Even with so much work to be done, she had time and restlessness left over.

  “What do you want, Aggie?” her mother demanded. “Why can’t you be still?”

  Well, but it got to be time for things to happen. Some secret things already had begun.

  She went to church young people’s meetings, and with her parents on Saturday evenings visiting neighboring families, or with her brothers and Edith on a community hay ride, and regarded the boys. They were as familiar to her as, oh, boiled potatoes, or lemon pies.

  What happened was, the girls of the area married the boys of the area (who were called the boys, distinguishing them from their fathers, until they married and began to produce another set of boys) and moved onto nearby farms and began to recreate in those fields and kitchens and bedrooms what they had known in their mothers’ homes.

  It was a matter of waiting until the one involved made himself evident. Then there would be a period of courtship, involving a degree of chaste romance, and then the day, and freedom. She would have her own house, would make her own decisions about what to cook and bake. It would be her own floors she would be cleaning, and her own clothes, and her husband’s, she would be washing. She would have her own children. Her life would be her own.

  Meanwhile there was a kind of jigsaw puzzle of a man, made up of bits and pieces of familiar men, broad-shouldered and hefty, too young to have grown beefy yet, with well-muscled arms and calves (and there was no dreaming above, to thighs and hips and other mysterious parts). He had no face yet.

  She talked about the wedding dress she would have, and described the rooms of her house. “It’ll be bright, and I’ll have all new dishes.” The old dishes in their house were marked by tiny, intricate surface cracks. “I’ll have everything my own way, in my own house,” she boasted.

  “You know, Aggie,” her mother said, “sometimes I wonder if you’ll be satisfied.” She did not, however, explain what she meant, or what alternatives there might be.

  Her mother’s knack was to praise different aspects of her different children. Edith was the best cook, and Sylvia the best at sewing. One son was a hard worker, the other the most practical, and the oldest was a martyr to his country, a hero and a memory. His attributes and Aggie’s were the hardest to pin down. “It’s a good thing to have spunk,” her mother warned, “but don’t always expect things your own way.” Aggie could see no reason not to. She only expected what everyone had.

  Almost everyone. Because there was an alternative of sorts, although it was more something unfortunate that might happen, or fail to happen, than a choice. It was to cross that line between being an unmarried girl and spinsterhood; the difference between having a future and not. If marrying was to recreate and have purpose, spinsterhood was to be at the mercy of other people’s creations and purposes. A spinster was the aunt, the dependant who would look after aging parents, or live at various times with various sisters and brothers, scrubbing floors, doing laundry, changing diapers — perhaps loving the babies but having none of her own, and knowing there was no amount of work that could pay off the debt of being unwanted, unloved, unlovable, and unattractive. A spinster thinned and dried, and her mouth grew little disapproving lines. As if marriage were a skin cream, and she aged too fast without it.

  “You’re getting a bit long in the tooth, my girl,” Aggie’s father teased, but he was a little serious. She had turned nineteen.

  “Really, Aggie,” her mother said impatiently, “I don’t know what you want. Nobody’s going to come along on a white horse and sweep you off your feet, you know.”

  Aggie didn’t think she was waiting for any white horse. It was just that in her bed she pictured things. There was something she wanted, if she could pin it down, and, having pinned it down, could pick it out from among the round boyish faces with their tanned, toughened skin.

  In the event, it was no knight on a white horse who appeared, but certainly something different.

  His name was Neil Hendricks, he was from England, and it was his first year of teaching in Canada. It was the custom for unmarried teachers in the one-room country school to board in the homes of pupils, and Aggie’s smallest brother was still in public school.

  Aggie’s mother, who had met him at a school concert, said he seemed a nice smart young fellow, if a bit different, probably due to being English. “Oh boy, he’s really strict,” said her little brother. Aggie and Edith speculated about his character and appearance. He was to be with them for the winter and spring terms, arriving in the new year. They thought at least it would make a change.

  He came during a storm, after dark, carrying a suitcase in each hand, cold and wet, red-faced, and bundled up in coat and scarf and hat and heavy boots. To be honest, right off the bat Aggie thought he was a pretty miserable sight, and then wondered why she was disappointed.

  “You poor boy,” said her mother, “you must be perished.”

  He wore tiny gold-rimmed glasses that steamed in the
heat of the kitchen. Once the cold wore off, the flush went with it and he turned out to be pale. He sat in the kitchen hugging himself, and they thought he was still chilly.

  How different he was! So thin. Aggie and Edith hovered at the edges of the kitchen as their mother made tea and served him cookies. How, Aggie wondered, would someone like this shovel snow or split wood or toss hay into a wagon? His hair was also thin, and blond, and when he dipped his head to the tea it was apparent he was balding, wisps of pale hair over pale scalp. He seemed an unlikely figure to be sitting at their kitchen table.

  (Could he really have been as unattractive as she remembers? She is sometimes startled, when Frances comes to visit, that she is not as beautiful in the flesh as Aggie has envisioned in her absence.)

  How thin his wrists were. How narrow his features. Such pale blue eyes, with lashes so blond they were almost invisible. He leaned toward people when they spoke as if he couldn’t hear properly.

  There were other things, though. His voice; well, not his voice precisely, but his accent. There was a kind of foreign lilt, some parts of words more drawled and others more clipped. Also there seemed to be more grace in his slenderness than in the bulk of her father and brothers.

  Too, he had to have some kind of toughness, if not the obvious sort of strength, because he had been brave enough to come here alone and begin a new life, so far from what was familiar.

  “Imagine how lonely he must be,” Aggie thought.

  People were of two minds about a teacher. On the one hand, it seemed a failure of masculinity for a man to be concerned with book-learning, which was nothing like real work and certainly not essential. On the other hand, he would know things. He would contain a vast store of secrets, or at least things other people didn’t know. It made him a little mysterious, gave him an edge. People had some respect for what they didn’t know, even if they knew all they actually needed to.

  Aggie, watching the blond head bobbing around their house, wondered what it contained that hers did not. She wondered if his brain looked different from hers, more stuffed and crammed. If it were split open, would little facts and thoughts fall out, rolled up neatly like bits of paper? When he looked at her family, at her, what did he see? Did he see things they didn’t, because of what he knew? Could he tell secrets about them because of the way he saw?

  Her mother said, “Now, Aggie, I want you to look after him especially, talk to him and make sure he’s not lacking for anything and make him feel at home, because I don’t have time.” The hint could not have been much plainer. “But don’t be forward.”

  She found that conversation, in the beginning, was mainly up to her. His place at the supper table was set between her and her little brother, who was too ill at ease in his teacher’s presence to speak. The teacher himself seemed to have a streak of shyness, or just silence.

  “You’re from England, Mr. Hendricks?”

  “Yes, near London.”

  “And do you have family there?”

  “My parents. I was their only child,” and he looked around the noisy table with some astonishment.

  “You must miss them.”

  “I do, but this is where the opportunities are, or so they say back home.” He dipped his head and smiled. His lips, she thought, were narrow, but not entirely unappealing.

  “Is it very different here, then?”

  “Well, the customs are, I suppose. The way people live. It’s not quite what I expected.”

  “How did you think it would be?”

  “Oh,” and he waved a hand vaguely, a slim hand with long fingers, smooth instead of rough, pale instead of reddened, with clean fingernails and little blond hairs on his knuckles — everything about him different, down to his fingertips — “I didn’t realize how cold it could get or how far apart people lived. I didn’t think of education not being so important, that students just don’t turn up at school if they’re wanted at home.”

  She couldn’t imagine it any other way, but nodded encouragingly.

  “Some of them are quite bright, too. Still, I suppose I can try to make them want to learn. There’s nothing to stop a farmer from reading, after all.”

  How ignorant he must find them all, how work-worn and dull, scrabbling at their rocks. For a moment she saw them from his point of view, and was ashamed.

  Still, when he shrugged her attention was drawn to the spareness of his shoulders, and she had a naughty vision of her big healthy head rolling off them.

  “And you?” he asked politely. “You went to school here?”

  “Yes, but not very far, only to seventh grade.”

  “Do you like books? Do you still read?”

  Of course not. There were far too many things going on to sit with your nose in a book. Reading was a school activity, and leaving school, you closed the books. “Well, we don’t have many here,” she hedged. “Only some school readers, and the Bible.”

  “But are you interested?”

  “Oh, of course.”

  They said the way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, but she thought that with this man, that was not likely the case. He was just picking at his food, but now he turned to her with interest. “I have books upstairs, you know. Would you care to borrow some?”

  “Yes, I’d like that,” and she lowered her eyes, well schooled in the maidenly arts, however strong she might in fact be. Why, she could carry pails of ice water or lemonade away out into the fields for her father and brothers to drink; she could twist sheets so hard all the soapy water just drained right out of them. Eyes down and moving her hands a little helplessly, as if they’d never done anything harder than touch a flower, she added, “although I wouldn’t know where to begin, really.”

  “Perhaps I could help you.”

  “That would be very kind. If you’re sure it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

  It was not. He came down to the kitchen after supper the next night with a book, and began to teach her. Which, as it turned out, was what he liked to do best. Her brothers giggled, as their mother hustled them out of the way.

  Aggie and he made various kinds of progress. To her surprise, she did rather enjoy the lessons. She could see how there might be something to this, trying to understand, like a game or a puzzle. It was humiliating to know so few words. “Read it to me,” she asked him, and he seemed pleased to do so. By watching closely, she could learn.

  She was released from after-supper housework. “No,” her mother said, “you spend the time at your lessons,” and told the teacher, “Aggie’s so bright, it’s a shame she had to leave school. It’s nice, you helping her this way.”

  Peeling potatoes, Aggie memorized poems. Her brothers teased her. “Eyes on the teacher, that’s what.”

  “Call me Neil,” he told her. “This isn’t a classroom, I’m not Mr. Hendricks here.” She thought that gracious and informal.

  He said, “I’ll pick out what you should read,” and handed her small volumes of poems, about flowers and sunsets mainly. “You have to be careful, you know, what things are suitable.” She would have liked stories. After a while, she got a little tired of flowers and sunsets, but he explained they must move cautiously. Some books, some words, he said, should not be exposed to women. Or women to them. She was never clear if his care was for the purity of learning, or the virtue of the female. Possibly both.

  She was pleased that when he read aloud, his voice deepened with authority. He said he was pleased with her progress. It was true that she was a keen pupil, likely the best he had, since she was aiming for more than his other students: the man himself.

  “Now,” he would say, finished reading, “what do you think the poet is trying to say?” A teacher’s dream, she must have been, someone bright he could train from scratch.

  “It’s important to speak properly,” he told her, correcting mistakes in her grammar. “Language, i
f it’s used precisely, provides precise communication. Proper use of words enables us to know exactly what another person means.” Could that really be true? If so, it would certainly prevent a lot of misunderstanding.

  One thing it did mean was that she now spotted mistakes of speech other members of her family made. It seemed to open a space.

  Her fantasies shifted. Now she saw the two of them, in some other house. He would be reading and working at the kitchen table, and she would be sewing, cooking, and preserving. He would talk to her about a poem while upstairs, chubby, rosy, dark-haired children would be asleep. It was a warm picture, although it didn’t raise much heat.

  Looking at him, so different from the man she had envisioned, she began to consider bones instead of flesh.

  But then there was also what she taught him. Sometimes after a lesson they went for walks out into the snowy fields where cold air bit at their throats. Out there, that was where she knew things. They went through the stable, where cows’ breath made steam in the air and the bull stood stamping, held to a post by a rope through a nose ring. Above, in the barn, she showed him the hay mows and the trapdoors through which the feed was shovelled into troughs below. He walked behind her cautiously, unfamiliar with the smells and the spots where the floor might disappear beneath his feet, and the huge animals he seemed timid of, although she told him they were gentle, with the exception of the bull.

  When spring came, they walked in the fields, along the lane and by the creek, watching the water flood the banks as the snow melted. “It feels dangerous to me,” he confided. “There’s so much space and emptiness.”

  She listened carefully. He didn’t often speak about what he saw or how he felt, except to do with poems.

  “We had such a little garden at home, compared with this.”

 

‹ Prev