The Coming Storm

by Paul Russell

  “I had some questions about this week’s reading,” Tim informed her. He settled uncomfortably into the chair before her desk. “That book we read. I don’t know. Something about it really bothered me.”

  “Essay,” Claire corrected, knowing that Tim would still be calling it a book when they discussed it in class.

  “Essay,” he repeated as she reminded herself dutifully that no one in his family had ever been to college. That his achievement was, in its way, as remarkable as Sharia Washington’s. “What really bothered me,” Tim went on, “is, well, I don’t really know how to say this, so I’ll just say it. She’s a lesbian, isn’t she?”

  Claire knew she had taken a chance in putting Adrienne Rich on the syllabus, even this late in the semester, when she had hoped, somehow, the class might be ready. She certainly hadn’t planned the course with Tim Veeder in mind.

  “I thought the essay made that fairly clear,” Claire said tersely.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Tim argued. “I’m not against the lesbians. It’s just that, I feel like if I was in the room with her, she wouldn’t even notice me. She wouldn’t even want me to be there in the first place. And that just bothers me. I mean, I love women. I go out of my way for women. But here Adrienne Rich is saying that men go around forcing women to like them. To me, it sounds like she’s just a really bitter person. I know lots of women who like men and nobody’s forcing them.”

  “We’ve been talking for a long time this semester about male privilege,” Claire said patiently. It was a failure of pedagogical nerve, she reminded herself, to give up on a student. “All Rich is suggesting is that women grow up under an intense, even overwhelming cultural pressure to identify not with other women but with men. To be heterosexual, in other words. And she wants us to ask the question, Can heterosexuality be called natural if it’s the product of a powerfully enforced cultural hegemony?”

  Talk like that made Tim’s eyes glaze over, and seeing her chance, Claire took it. “I’d really like to discuss this further,” she said, “but I’m afraid I do have to go. My husband’s hosting a reception at his school, and I need to be there.”

  “What school?” Tim asked her, always eager to turn from the political to the personal.

  “The Forge School,” she told him.

  “Fancy,” he said appreciatively. “Very fancy.”

  Instantly she regretted having divulged that bit of information, innocuous as it might be. The headmaster’s wife. Now he would know her for exactly what she was.

  She began to gather her papers, her books, and stuff them into her satchel, but the signal was lost on the young man. He remained seated in his chair, nervously tapping one foot on the floor. She stood to leave.

  “Did you get my card?” he asked hopefully. She looked at him and forced herself to remain expressionless.

  “I did,” she said evenly. It had come in the mail the day before, a Happy Hanukkah card inscribed, in his tiny, tortured script, Hey—you never know! But what did one never know? She didn’t think that asking him would be a particularly good idea.

  “I should tell you honestly, Tim,” she said, “these cards are not really, well, appropriate. I mean, I appreciate your thoughtfulness, but I think I’d prefer that you not send me any more cards.”

  He hadn’t stood up; he sat, his legs sprawled before him, and looked down at the floor. She told herself she should have mentioned something after the very first card; she should never have ignored the problem and hoped it would go away. Still, it was only lately that she had actually admitted to herself the repellent, altogether ridiculous possibility: that Tim Veeder, in his clumsy way, had a crush—and on the enemy, no less.

  He ran a hand through his hair. “Sorry, sorry,” he told her. “I’m always saying the wrong thing. Doing the wrong thing. Looking at people the wrong way when I don’t even know I’m looking. People take a dislike to me. Ms. Tremper, I don’t get it.”

  She had noticed his return address on all those cards: Pancake Hollow Road. His mother, he’d told her once, ran a beauty parlor out of the basement of their home. Class, she reminded herself, was the real marker in America.

  She spoke carefully, afraid to give too much to this young man from Pancake Hollow. “Tim, you have to pay more attention. You just can’t be oblivious.”

  He did not move.

  “Right now, for example,” she continued. “I’ve gathered up my books. I’ve told you I’m leaving. And there you sit.”

  She’d flustered him. He looked at her with alarm. “Sorry,” he said, leaping to his feet and dropping, in the sudden move, his pen, his notebook, his copy of the Adrienne Rich essay, which glided onto the floor underneath her desk. “Shit,” he said. Then, “Sorry,” as, on his hands and knees, he felt for the fugitive pages. She watched his threadbare navy blue sweater ride up on his back as he stretched to reach the essay, the beltless jeans low on his haunches, the swath of pale skin coming into view. With distaste she looked away.

  “Got it,” he told her, brandishing “Compulsory Heterosexuality” triumphantly in case she didn’t believe him. “Now I’m out of here. Thanks for speaking with me.”

  “Certainly,” she said, realizing he had not heard a word.

  Whatever had he been thinking, sending her all those cards?

  Low, coppery sun slanted through the tall windows of this, the most pleasing and historic of the Forge School’s buildings. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century from local bluestone, Washington Irving Hall, as it was now known, had housed a military academy for three-quarters of a century before falling on hard times. After the war, Jack Emmerich had rescued it from dilapidation and made the renovated edifice the centerpiece of his fledgling campus. Around it, over the years, had sprung up the half-dozen other, mostly unexceptional halls, modern, no-frills boxes of brick and glass.

  The large central foyer, with its double staircase and antique Venetian chandelier, throbbed with the pulse of conversation. Waiters moved through the throng, balancing on their shiny platters an array of vivid hors d’oeuvres or trembling flutes of champagne. Looking grown-up and elegant in their dark blue blazers and red ties, those boys whose parents had been able to come to this end-of-the-semester gathering mingled comfortably with the adults in the room. Louis, who was usually such a curmudgeon about public events, nonetheless managed to rise so well to occasions such as this that Claire had to suspect his ordinary misanthropy was just a guise, some armor of self-protection he donned to combat his various professional anxieties. And as for guises, she had assumed her own for the occasion as well. For the space of two hours, she would be the Headmaster’s Wife.

  But it was only a role (she had put on her conservative blue dress and necklace of pearls). Surveying the crowded reception from the second-floor gallery, she relished the idea that no one there—with the possible exception of her husband—had any idea who she really was. Just yesterday she had received in the mail the off-prints from her latest published essay: an extended meditation, in a well-respected journal of women’s history, on the meaning—the semiotics, as she called it—of Pocahontas’s sojourn in the England of King James I. What had particularly seized her imagination was the historical fact of the Native American’s attendance at a court masque meant to celebrate the triumph of civilization over savagery. At the end of the masque, the bower of Zephyrus had opened to expose, to the monarch’s delighted gaze, his beloved Duke of Buckingham, a long-legged and, as far as Claire could tell from the historical record, entirely fatuous young man who was James’s current favorite. But what had Pocahontas seen? About that, the historical record was silent. Nevertheless, this intersection of two worlds—the colonizer and the colonized, the fondly gazed upon and the silenced—was rich with inflection, and Claire had attempted to tease out, in fifteen pages of carefully argued speculation, its somber ironies.

  She had no illusions about her general importance as a scholar. She was a humble foot soldier in the trenches. But such work pleased an
d engaged her. And no one could have been more surprised by her gradual evolution than she. After years of her own silence, she had learned to ask questions, not flippantly, the way she had at Barnard, but with increasing acuity. No longer believing most of the things she had been brought up to believe, she saw clearly the extent to which her education had been little more than a skillful indoctrination. Only last week, Tim Veeder had raised his hand and said, in response to certain doubts she had expressed about current events on the world stage, “But Ms. Tremper, the simple fact is, capitalism works.” She had startled them all—herself included—by answering, without blinking an eye, “Yes, but for whom does capitalism work? It may work for you, but ask a homeless person how well capitalism is working, and they might not think it’s working very well at all.”

  Perhaps she made them uncomfortable, this feminist who looked like nothing so much as their safe and gentle grandmothers, but more and more she found herself trying to provoke them into intellectual discomfort. “You have to examine what kind of privilege informs your view of the so-called facts,” she told them. “Depending on where you stand, the facts can look very different.”

  At such moments, Claire was acutely conscious of Sharia Washington’s alert, famished presence in the overcrowded classroom. Sharia nodded eagerly, her eyes alive with approval, and sometimes Claire had to wonder: was she perhaps creating a monster? The day might well come when Sharia would lead a revolution—not with a machete, but with the tools Claire had given her. Someday Sharia would put everybody in this elegant old reception room, parents and students and teachers alike, up against a wall.

  Including, Claire thought ruefully, that tired old white lady Ms. Tremper. For she knew there was a sense in which Sharia had her teacher’s number. Claire’s attempts to bridge the gap, to forge an alliance across race and class, had failed. Had she tried too hard? Had a white woman’s privileged eagerness been all too off-putting for a black woman who cleaned toilets by night in order to attend school by day?

  She had wanted a connection there; she had failed. Nonetheless, it was for the Sharia Washingtons that she would continue to teach, whatever the cost. It was not about her own satisfaction, she reminded herself.

  From her vantage point in the relatively uncrowded gallery, Claire could see her husband intent in conversation. Looking up, as if he could feel her gaze on him, with a nearly imperceptible nod of the head he indicated that she should come join him where he stood, champagne flute in hand, in the company of a father and his son.

  The son was not one of the boys she happened to know. She had to some extent, in recent years, withdrawn herself from the life of the school, allowing her place to be filled by Douglas Brill’s energetic young wife (she nodded to Mary Ann Brill as she passed her on the stairs). They were a couple straight out of the fifties, so uncomplicated, so dreary, in many ways perfect for the school. Meat and Potatoes, Louis called the Brills privately, on the rare occasions when he found it necessary to refer to them at all. But then, that was what he presumably liked about them: that they rarely ever needed referring to one way or another; that they ran themselves, so to speak.

  “My dear,” Louis said smoothly as she interjected herself into their circle of conversation, “I’d like you to meet Mr. Noah Lathrop. His son, Noah the Third, is doing quite splendidly with us.” She recognized that tone, but hardly considered Louis’s sleek, discreetly managed fawning any kind of hypocrisy. A headmaster who failed to be alert to the presence before him of wealth and privilege would, after all, be sorely neglecting the interests of his school.

  The senior Noah Lathrop was striking, if not exactly handsome. His shock of glossy black hair, his sparkling, ambitious eyes, a deep tan, all seemed to murmur Riviera, Costa del Sol, Morocco. She could tell at once he sailed yachts, drank pastis in the afternoon, basked on secluded beaches when the rest of the world lay buried in winter. He had gambled in casinos and raced expensive cars. He had slept with countless women, all of them beautiful. He had broken hearts. He had reached the stage where hunger for money had turned into jaded indifference. He was not a nice man, probably he was soulless—but in the right circumstances, he could no doubt be absolutely compelling.

  As recently as a decade ago she might have been stirred by him. Given her upbringing, her motion through the world, she would have had little choice in her response. Now her dislike of men like him was instant and powerful. Though of course she was perfectly capable of keeping her dislike entirely to herself.

  Pityingly, she turned her gaze on his son. “Hello,” the younger Noah said. His voice was flat, inflectionless. His light hair had been cut very short, and despite his name, there was something in his features, some steeliness or severity, that seemed vaguely slavic to her. She saw him as a boy gunner in some desperate World War II battle in the snow. He was sad but headstrong. His blue-gray eyes were lusterless. He shook her hand with the requisite firmness—he’d been well trained—but that firm grasp unsuccessfully concealed a deeper indifference. He really did not care to be meeting her. He really didn’t care to be here at all. He was deeply miserable; powerfully, even dangerously, volatile. Then he released his grip. But she already thought she knew him. She would have to ask Louis about him later.

  “And how were your classes this semester?” Louis prompted.

  The younger Noah shrugged. “I like my English class,” he said.

  This was a boy, she imagined, who didn’t smile a lot. But she thought she might like him. If he was at the Forge School, it was almost certainly because he’d failed somewhere else.

  “That would be Tracy Parker,” Louis said. “He’s one of our finer teachers.”

  “Was he the one you were telling me about?” Noah Senior asked his son. He was an information man. Information was power.

  The son was naturally evasive. “He might have been,” he said, clearly regretting anything he might have said. “He’s pretty cool. Doesn’t put up with bullshit.”

  “Then I’m surprised he’s not on your case all the time,” said the father—who was, along with everything else, a bully.

  “Maybe he is,” the son told his father.

  “Oh,” he replied. “Then I’d like to meet the guy.”

  “Unfortunately,” Louis said with barely concealed annoyance, “he couldn’t be with us this afternoon.”

  Claire was surprised. She’d thought they were supposed to go to Tracy’s for dinner after the reception; it had been on the calendar for weeks and weeks, a fixed date of some importance. Tracy had been strangely insistent.

  In response to her quizzical look, Louis took her sleeve and said, sotto voce, “He had to make an unexpected run to the train station. It seems this mystery guest we’ve been hearing so much about went and missed the train he was supposed to catch.”

  That promise of a mystery guest had had Louis agitated all week. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised,” was all Tracy would say by way of explanation, and though she’d wanted to take him aside and tell him that Louis was seldom pleasantly surprised, that there was nothing he hated more than a mystery, she decided it was best not to meddle.

  They were late, as she’d phoned Tracy to warn they might be. The reception had lingered long past seven, but Louis was always loath to disappoint any of those parents who might want to chat with him. Long after everyone else had drifted off, as the caterer carted away the remains of the reception and the waiters tidied up, a small, neurotic mother—her son nowhere in evidence—continued to pour her torrent of anxieties down on a surprisingly patient and sympathetic headmaster’s head.

  “I thought that would never end,” Claire told him by way of sympathy as they walked along the snowy path toward Tracy’s.

  “Our students didn’t used to come from such damaged families,” Louis mused. “It’s true what they say. This country really is coming apart at the seams.”

  Snow had come early to the Hudson Valley: mid-December, and already the ground had been solidly blanketed for two we
eks. It had caught her unawares: no chance to mound the roses, and the poor lilacs, their brown leaves unshed, had splintered under the weight of that first wet snowfall. Still, the campus looked resplendent all in white. Under a clear, star-pricked sky into which a half moon was climbing, the ground actually seemed to glow.

  “Perhaps we should have brought wine,” she said as they mounted the front steps to the white frame house.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Louis muttered. He’d always thought that a reprehensibly bohemian habit, but she rather liked the gesture, especially when, as tonight, there might be some question about their host’s choice of wine. Did young people know anything about vineyards and vintages these days? Her students at the community college—her colleagues too, if the truth be told—seemed ignorant of anything but the most appalling jug wines. One plastic cupful at the departmental Christmas party had left her the next morning with the worst headache.

  In his sock feet, Tracy greeted them at the door. They paused on the threshold, clumsily, to remove their snowboots. Accommodatingly, he’d put out two pairs of slippers for their feet. Louis seemed a bit startled—she’d forgotten to warn him that Tracy kept Japanese house. Nonetheless, he submitted to the eccentricity with more good grace than she might have expected. Far from wearing him down, the reception seemed to have cheered him.

  On the living room’s white sofa—a new sofa, she remarked, flanked by new end tables—sat a gaunt-faced young man. He looked up languidly from the magazine he had been reading. She did not recognize him but he, clearly, recognized her. He wore khaki trousers and a loose-fitting white shirt half open down a chest so skinny she could see the bone of his breastbone, his ribs. His copper-colored hair was slicked back from a high forehead. Looking for some cue, she glanced at Louis and was surprised to see an unmistakable look of perturbation on his face. Hand extended, an unreadable smile flickering across his thin lips, the young man moved unerringly toward her husband. Louis stepped half a step back, seemed to steady himself, then took a step forward.