by Nick Fonda
That’s what I remember of my first meeting with Joseph Mulroney. I didn’t really meet him again until after my final exam, so that he was the first person I saw in that school, and the last. In between, I hardly saw him at all. Once or twice I caught a glimpse of him at the end of a hallway, or crossing the lobby, but he didn’t seem to be around the school very much, which was fine with me. He had been perfectly nice with us. It had not been an interrogation at the hands of the Serbs. We hadn’t been beaten or threatened with rape and disfigurement. I told myself that first impressions can be misleading, but I never quite erased that first image I had of him, as a stern, grey-clad Serbian officer.
On Monday, when we went to the school, my mom and I were met by Mme Ducharme, who was the vice principal, and who turned out to be very nice. The first couple of days, I saw her several times in the hallways and she always smiled and stopped to ask how I was doing: was I finding my way around? Was the Math similar to what I was used to? Had I met one student or another? It was Mme Ducharme who arranged things to allow me to write all my O-Levels at the school, instead of going to Montreal, where I had to go to do my Art exam.
My mom stayed with the secretary to fill out some papers while Mme Ducharme walked me around part of the school and introduced me to a couple of teachers we met in the hallways: to Mr. Nichols, who taught Math, and whom I really came to like in the short time I had him, and also to Miss Normandin, who was the first and only gym teacher I had in my entire high school career. Then the school started filling up with kids and she brought me to my homeroom where I met Mrs. Mulroney.
I had no particular feelings about Mrs. Mulroney when I first met her. I certainly had no visceral reaction to her. Of course, after I’d been in her class a while, that changed. Looking back, I see her as a reincarnation of Lady Macbeth, a twisted soul driven by the desire to see her daughter crowned.
It was Manon who told me that Magdalene was the Mulroneys’ daughter.
“Didn’t you know?” she asked me, coming out of English class one day. Her tone of voice, the look she gave me, the shrug of her shoulders, all made me feel naïve. But it wasn’t me she was mad at. This was not very long after I arrived. Much as my first day of high school in Canada made me feel like the foreigner I was, it didn’t take long for me to feel as if I’d been there almost forever. Although there were still surprises, and finding out who was related to whom was certainly one of them.
At Miss Wallace’s, the entire school body had probably been only marginally greater than the number of kids in one of my classes here. But at Miss Wallace’s, we were from all over the place—I was the only Canadian but there were three Americans, several Brits, and kids from half a dozen countries in Europe and the Middle East. Here, it seemed that every other kid turned out to be someone’s second cousin. There weren’t any family resemblances that I could notice, but it figured that Magdalene (who was called Maggie by everyone except her mother) would turn out to be Mrs. Mulroney’s daughter.
Mrs. Mulroney wasn’t just my home room teacher. Except for Math and French—and Phys Ed—she taught all the other Grade 11 courses, so I saw a lot of her, and her daughter.
I don’t think it’s necessarily easy for a teacher to be fair, to be equitable. In fact it’s not easy for anybody to be fair. We all seem to be born with a bias or prejudice of some sort, even for seemingly inconsequential things. I’ve read that red and yellow cars are more likely to be stopped for speeding than cars of any other colour; that sports teams with black uniforms draw more penalties; that tall men rise up the corporate ladder more easily and quickly than their shorter colleagues. Yet, there are certain professions of which we expect fairness. For example, we expect judges to be fair and we expect teachers to be fair.
So far, thank goodness, I have had no experience with judges, so I can’t say from personal experience; although my optimism on that question is guarded. I have been told by a few people that it’s a wise thing, regardless of the dispute, to settle it without going to court. And of course, there’s that charming English expression: The Law is an Ass.
As for teachers, well, they’re human. I speak with firsthand knowledge. I did a fifth year at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design because I thought it wise to have a profession to fall back on. I never became an Art teacher, but I do have some classroom experience. I did some supply work a decade ago and more recently I’ve been going into classrooms as an invited (and paid) guest to do workshops and talk about my day job, which is illustrating children’s books. I’ve met a lot of teachers, and many of them I see as admirable people. I’ve no doubt that most of them strive to be fair. But there are exceptions.
Mary Mulroney was an exception. She was such an exception that, in retrospect, I think if I’d known the situation I might have opted to sit with the Grade 10 classes, or perhaps even chosen to go to the French school ten kilometres away.
When I was quite young, I was surprised when one of my brothers told me one day, “Dad will never operate on you. He’ll never operate on any of us. If we ever need an operation, we’ll go to another surgeon, not Dad.” This bit of information made me cry. I took it to mean that my father didn’t care about us.
The truth was just the opposite. “It’s because I love you that I would never operate on you,” my father explained. “Doctors never treat members of their own family, let alone operate on them. When you love someone, when you’re emotionally attached to someone, you lose your objectivity; your judgment can become clouded. You can make mistakes, serious mistakes.”
“Imagine what could happen if I were operating on your heart. I could start thinking that this was your heart. Not any heart, but your heart. I might get tears in my eyes. My vision would be blurred. I wouldn’t see what I was doing. I could make a mistake. Instead of saving your life, I could end up taking your life. Your heart is very special to me, so special that I wouldn’t be able to see just your heart. I’d be seeing all of you and thinking of you. I wouldn’t be focussed on the operation. I could make a mistake. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Mrs. Mulroney had the blurred vision my father had spoken of, and it wasn’t at all corrected by her stylish glasses. The only kid in the classroom she ever saw was Magdalene. Or maybe that’s not quite right. The only person in the classroom that she cared about was Magdalene. The rest of us she saw as either beneficial or harmful to her daughter. In all of Mrs. Mulroney’s classes, we sat in groups of four or five. Maggie’s group was always at the front of the class, to the right of her mother’s desk. You could tell how you stood with Mrs. Mulroney by where she assigned you to sit. If you were one of the three or four kids at Maggie’s table, it was because you were seen as potentially helpful to Maggie, although you probably had more friends if you sat anywhere else in the class.
Where I noticed it most, and noticed it first, was in English, which here they called Language Arts—a term I still find pretentious. As far as I could tell, it paid little attention to language and none to art. At least, that was the way Mrs. Mulroney taught it.
Just as colour on a canvass can be made darker by placing a lighter tone beside it, I think I saw Mrs. Mulroney as an absolute horror because at Miss Wallace’s, for the last two years, I had had Mr. Nado for English. We called him Mr. Nado but his name really was Peter Nadofanskovich, and despite the Russian name, he was from York, in the north of England. He was married to a very beautiful woman who was working in Sarajevo as a translator. He was trying to write poetry and was teaching half days at Miss Wallace’s to “pay for the candles” as he put it. He was relatively young. Sometimes, we thought he was a little strange, but he was without a doubt a phenomenal teacher.
He was very meticulous about vocabulary, about the nuances between words. For example, he’d challenge us to define the difference between synonyms, like joy and happiness. Sometimes, he’d write a word on the board and talk about it for half an hour, not just about what it meant, but the origins of the word and how its meaning had evolved�
��like the word awful which originally meant wondrous or inspiring and then came to mean horrible but, now changed to awesome, it again has a positive connotation. When we got back our written assignments, there would often be pointed questions in the margin, “Is this really the word you want?”
He gave life to ideas. Like most kids, I had no particular interest in parsing sentences, but with him, learning English was genuinely interesting. He made it into a game of sorts, a puzzle to sort out and put together. He often talked about the solidly constructed sentence, and the phrase still brings to mind the cross-braced two-by-fours of a house under construction, which he once drew on the blackboard.
What I’m most grateful for is that he taught me to write. Looking back with adult eyes that have seen a few classrooms, I realize that Mr. Nado had an immeasurable advantage compared to almost all teachers in Canada. He had only five of us doing O-Level Composition at Miss Wallace’s and only four doing Literature. Still, he gave us interesting things to write about, and we wrote a lot. Sometimes, he’d start class by pulling something out of his pocket, or out of his briefcase; we’d look at it and then write about the strange stone or odd pencil sharpener or whatever it was that he’d brought in. He’d give us unusual writing assignments. For example, he’d write some words on the blackboard and we’d have to incorporate all the words in a short paragraph on some odd topic or theme. Or he’d have us imagine ourselves to be an inanimate object, or an animal, or a character in a book and write as that thing or person.
What really came home to me, when I was in Mrs. Mulroney’s Language Arts class, was the way that Mr. Nado corrected our work. Any time you got your paper back, there were always tons of comments in fine black ink in Mr. Nado’s small, neat script. It was as if he was beside you and reading your paper with you. There would be questions in the margins or remarks on one thing or another. Sometimes, he’d end up writing almost as much as you’d written. But one thing he didn’t do, or at least, he didn’t often do, is grade the work. Sometimes he might say, “That could get you a 1,” or “Make errors like that and you’ll be lucky to get a 6.” What he would do, really, was tell you what you’d done well and then tell you where your work might improve, and how to start to improve it.
Unlike Mr. Nado, Mrs. Mulroney was stingy with her comments. She might write “Good!” at the end of your paper, or “Watch your handwriting” or “Check your spelling,” but you always got the feeling that, at best, she’d skimmed over your work without really reading any of it. Yet everything was graded—your percentage boldly circled in red ink.
We didn’t do that much for her, at least not compared to what I was used to doing, and as I said, I can understand that. I’ve seen oversized classes and I can understand how a teacher, especially an English teacher, would be inclined not to give many assignments. Correcting a paper can be a lot of work and Mrs. Mulroney was certainly not the only teacher in the country to skim through student assignments superficially and cavalierly.
Being with Mrs. Mulroney was like suddenly finding myself plodding along on a narrow, dusty track on an aged donkey after having pranced through open fields on a thoroughbred. I remember Mrs. Mulroney as someone who talked a lot but said little. Mostly, she talked about herself. In her stories, others were always asking her advice, or perhaps ignoring her advice, but inevitably, her advice was golden. The individual who approached her was either munificently rewarded for heeding her words or fell into ruin for failing to do so.
In class, she was a teacher who had what those in the profession call “good discipline.” She did not smile easily, and when she did it was an artificial smile. Her facial muscles rarely went beyond the range of stern to serious. She had a strong voice which vibrated with the tone of unquestionable authority. It was also an unpleasant voice, like an especially raucous crow. She wielded great power in her classroom and you could tell that she enjoyed flexing her metaphoric muscle. Born in Bela Palanca or Cuprija, she would have been equally intimidating as a Serbian prison guard.
Magdalene wasn’t one of the first kids I noticed in class. She was sufficiently nondescript that, in a sea of new faces and personalities, hers hadn’t stood out. I think the first thing I noticed about her was her favoured status. She’d been called on to respond to some silly question and was given an inordinate amount of praise for spouting out what sounded like a banal answer. My first impression of her was that she was a well-dressed, middle-class girl of my age who—when I learned who they were—bore little resemblance to either of her parents.
Her favoured status, or the degree to which she was favoured, was made clear to me towards the end of year. When I arrived, I’d been placed at one table and then a couple of weeks later, I’d been moved to Maggie’s table, to start what Mrs. Mulroney announced as the last and most important assignment of the year. Mrs. Mulroney’s assignments were always collaborative efforts. Each table was a team and the team worked on the assignment together. In this case, we had to prepare a “response” to a book the class had been reading for the last two months. (I don’t remember the title, but it was a pulp novel, one of those “best sellers” that’s predictable to read and easy to forget.) We had to document our exploration of the book, which meant we had to take notes and prepare short drafts that we’d pass around and peer edit and so accumulate what was called a portfolio. The idea was to hand in a manila folder filled with a paper trail that led from initial discussions to a formal response, which was nothing more than a short essay.
All this took the better part of two weeks. When we got our papers back, all of us at our table had marks in the mid-seventies—except for Maggie. She got back a paper with ninety-six percent circled in red. I was startled because, during all the time we’d spent on the assignment, she hadn’t really done much of anything. She hadn’t said anything insightful and the drafts she wrote were as dull as anybody else’s.
I found it a bizarre exercise. With Mr. Nado, writing had been about personal engagement. It was about articulating a thought. In Mrs. Mulroney’s class, writing was a team activity. It was composition by committee; but the compensation was by consanguinity. The grading was blatantly biased.
I was an outsider. It didn’t concern me. It was the end of the school year. And if I had noticed this, so too must have many others. My grandmother listed all the reasons that it was best to quietly accept my situation. “It’s too bad,” she said. “It’s very sad to see nepotism. But the best thing you can do is to focus on your own work. You’re lucky because this doesn’t really affect you. This woman won’t be grading any of your exams.”
As it turned out, thanks to Mme Ducharme, I was able to write almost all my exams at my new school. “Your A-Level Art you’ll have to do at Marianopolis in Montreal,” she explained. “But we can administer all the O-Level exams right here. While your classmates are writing their exams, you’ll be in the same place but writing exams of your own.”
What I remember about the last few weeks of school was that almost everybody was all worked up by the thought of the graduation prom. If the high school leaving exams were a concern, it was only to the teachers. As for the kids, the exams were no big deal. Almost everybody seemed to take it for granted that he or she would be in Cégep in the fall or at work on a farm or in a factory.
What everybody was going on about was the prom. At a certain point, Manon approached me and asked me if I was interested in going.
“I know you just got here,” she said, “but if you’re shy about going because you don’t have a date, I know a boy who’d be happy to ask you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I may not be here at the end of June.” The youngest of my three big brothers, Charlie, was graduating from Oxford at the end of June. I knew that mom and I would be going to the ceremony for sure. Besides, our lives were still speckled with lots of uncertainties. My dad had come to Canada for a week and then flown back to England, even though, the way my parents had talked, it seemed that we might be staying here in Canada.
So I was being truthful when I said I really wasn’t sure if I would be around for the prom.
But Manon was partly right. I wasn’t at all sure that I’d feel comfortable going to a prom. As Manon had said, I’d just arrived. I was still a stranger. These kids, if they weren’t related, had been together in the same class, some of them, since they’d started kindergarten. More than that, for almost everybody, it was an event for couples, and I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go on a first date, almost a blind date, wearing heels and a strapless gown.
In the end, I had a couple of reasons not to go. The Friday of the prom, the second last Friday of the month, was also the day I had to be in Montreal to do my A-Level Art exam. Then, a day later, my mom and I would be flying to London for Charlie’s graduation, among other things.
The incident that brought me back into Joseph Mulroney’s office happened on Thursday, the day before the prom. It was a very hot afternoon and I was writing my very last O-Level exam which was French. I had made the mistake of declining my grandmother’s offer of a ride to school. Normally, the walk—less than twenty minutes—was invigorating. I was wearing sandals and a simple, light summer dress, but the sun was much hotter than I’d thought. I was annoyed because I’d worked up a sweat. Then, as I was approaching the front doors of the school, going up the steps that lead to them, I somehow stumbled and, even though I didn’t know it then, I broke the baby toe of my left foot. (Several hours later, a doctor confirmed it was broken and told me that it would have to heal itself.)
My exam was to start at 12:30 and end, at the latest, at 3:30. The others were writing math, from 1:15 to 3:15. I hobbled into the small gym which was filled with rows of desks and chairs. Mr. Nichols was supervising because he was the Grade 11 math teacher. He noticed I was limping.
“I hope you’ll be ok,” he said, and because he was trying to make me feel better, he joked, “At least it’s not your right hand.”