by Peter Straub
Supper that night was potatoes and creamed corn. “You’ll eat no meat here,” Mather said, “unless you save up and buy it yourself. I’m getting the allowance to keep you alive, not to fatten you up.” I don’t suppose I ate meat more than six times at the Mather table, and that was all at once, when somebody gave him a goose and we had goose every day until there was nothing left of it. Eventually some of my pupils began bringing me ham and beef sandwiches—their parents knew Mather was a mean-fisted man. Mather himself ate his big meal at noon, but he made it clear that it was my duty to spend the lunch hour in the schoolhouse—“offering extra help and giving punishments.”
Because up there they believed in the birch. I’d taught my first day when I found out about that. I say, taught, but really all I’d managed to do was keep them quiet for a few hours and write down their names and ask a few questions. It was astonishing. Only two of the older girls could read, simple addition and subtraction was as far as their math went, and not only had a few of them not heard of foreign countries, one of them didn’t even believe they existed. “Aw, there’s nothin’ like that,” one scrawny ten-year-old told me. “A place where people ain’t even American? Where they don’t even talk American?” But he couldn’t go further, he was laughing too hard at the absurdity of the idea, and I saw a mouthful of appalling, blackened teeth. “So what about the war, dopey?” another boy said. “Never heard tell of the Germans?” Before I could react, the first boy flew over the desk and started beating the second boy. It looked as though he was literally set on murdering him. I tried to separate the two boys—the girls were all shrieking—and I grabbed the assailant’s arm. “He’s right,” I said. “He shouldn’t have called you a name, but he is right. Germans are the people who live in Germany, and the world war . . .” I stopped short because the boy was growling at me. He was like a savage dog, and for the first time I realized that he was mentally disturbed, perhaps retarded. He was ready to bite me. “Now apologize to your friend,” I said.
“Ain’t no friend of mine.”
“Apologize.”
“He’s queer, sir,” the other boy said. His face was pale, and his eyes were frightened, and he had the beginnings of a black eye. “I shouldn’t never of said that to him.”
I asked the first boy what his name was. “Fenny Bate,” he managed to drool out. He was calming down. I sent the second boy back to his desk. “Fenny,” I said, “the trouble is that you were wrong. America isn’t the whole world, just as New York isn’t the whole United States.” This was too complicated, and I had lost him. So I brought him up to the front and made him sit down while I drew maps on the board. “Now this is the United States of America, and this is Mexico, and this is the Atlantic Ocean . . .”
Fenny was shaking his head darkly. “Lies,” he said. “All that’s lies. That stuff ain’t there. It AIN’T!” When he shouted he pushed at his desk and it went crashing over.
I asked him to pick up his desk, and when he just shook his head, starting to slobber again, I picked it up myself. Some of the children gasped. “So you’ve seen or heard of maps and other countries?” I asked. He nodded. “But they’re lies.”
“Who told you that?”
He shook his head and refused to say. If he had shown any signs of embarrassment, I would have thought that he’d learned this misinformation from his parents; but he did not—he was just angry and sullen.
At noon all the children took their paper bags outside and ate their sandwiches in the lot around the school. It would be window-dressing to call it a playground, though there was a rickety set of swings in back of the school. I kept my eye on Fenny Bate. He was left alone by most of the other children. When he roused himself from his stupor and tried to join a group, the others pointedly walked away and left him standing alone, his hands in his pockets. From time to time a skinny girl with lank blond hair came up and spoke to him—she rather resembled him, and I imagined that she must have been his sister. I checked my lists: Constance Bate, in the fifth grade. She had been one of the quiet ones.
Then, when I looked back at Fenny, I saw an odd-looking man standing on the road outside the building, looking across the school grounds at him, just as I was doing. Fenny Bate was sitting unaware between us. For some reason, this man gave me a shock. It was not just that he was odd in appearance, though he was that, dressed in old disreputable working clothes, with wild black hair, ivory cheeks, a handsome face and extremely powerful looking arms and shoulders. It was the way he was looking at Fenny Bate. He looked feral. And with the wildness, there was a striking sort of freedom in the way he stood there, a freedom that went deeper than mere self-assurance. To me he seemed extremely dangerous; and it seemed that I had been transported into a region where men and boys were wild beasts in disguise. I looked away, almost frightened by the savagery in the man’s face, and when I looked back he was gone.
My notions of the place were confirmed that evening, when I had forgotten all about the man outside on the road. I had gone upstairs to my drafty room to try to work out my lessons for the second day. I would have to introduce the multiplication tables to the upper grades, they all could use some extremely elementary geography . . . things of this sort were going through my mind when Sophronia Mather entered my room. The first thing she did was to turn down the kerosene lamp I had been using. “That’s for full dark, not evening,” she said. “We can’t afford to have you using up all the kerosene. You’ll learn to read your books by the light God gives you.”
I was startled to see her in my room. During supper the previous evening she had been silent, and judging by her face, which was pinched and sallow and tight as a drumhead, you would say that silence was her natural mode. She made it very expressive, I can tell you. But I was to learn that apart from her husband, she had no fear of speech.
“I’ve come to quiz you, schoolteacher,” she said. “There’s been talk.”
“Already?” I asked.
“You make your ending in your manner of beginning, and how you begin is how you’ll go on. I’ve heard from Mariana Birdwood that you tolerate misbehavior in your classes.”
“I don’t believe I did,” I said.
“Her Ethel claims you did.”
I could not put a face to the name Ethel Birdwood, but I remembered calling it out—she was one of the older girls, the fifteen-year-olds, I thought. “And what does Ethel Birdwood claim I tolerated?”
“It’s that Fenny Bate. Didn’t he use fists on another boy? Right in front of your nose?”
“I spoke to him.”
“Spoke? Speakin’s no good. Why didn’t you use your ferule?”
“I don’t possess one,” I said.
Now she really was shocked. “But you must beat them,” she finally got out. “It’s the only way. You must ferule one or two every day. And Fenny Bate more than the rest.”
“Why particularly him?”
“Because he is bad.”
“I saw that he is troubled, slow, disturbed,” I said, “but I don’t think that I saw that he was bad.”
“He is. He is bad. And the other children expect him to be beaten. If your ideas are too uppity for us, then you’ll have to leave the school. It’s not only the children who expect you to use the ferule.” She turned as if to go out. “I thought I would do you the kindness of speaking to you before my husband hears that you have been neglecting your duties. Mind you, you’ll take my advice. There’s no teaching without beating.”
“But what makes Fenny Bate so notorious?” I asked, ignoring that horrific last remark. “It would be unjust to persecute a boy who needs help.”
“The ferule’s all the help he needs. He’s not bad, he’s badness itself. You should make him bleed and keep him quiet—keep him down. I’m only trying to help you, schoolmaster. We have use of the little extra money your allowance brings us.” With that she left me. I did not even have time to ask he
r about the peculiar man I had seen that afternoon.
Well, I had no intention of doing further damage to the town scapegoat.
(Milly Sheehan, her face puckered with distaste, set down the ashtray she had been pretending to polish, glanced at the window to make sure the drapes were closed and edged around the door. Sears, pausing in his story, saw that she had left it open a crack.)
3
Sears James, pausing in his story and thinking with annoyance that Milly’s eavesdropping was becoming less subtle every month, was unaware of an event which had occurred that afternoon in town and would affect all of their lives. This was unremarkable in itself, the arrival of a striking young woman on a Trailways bus—a young woman who stepped out of the bus on the corner of the bank and the library and looked around with an expression of confident satisfaction like that of a successful woman returning for a nostalgic look at her home town. That was what she suggested, holding a small suitcase in her hand and smiling slightly in a sudden fall of brilliant leaves, and you would have said, watching her, that her success was the measure of her revenge. She looked, with her long handsome coat and her abundance of dark hair, as if she had come back to rejoice discreetly over how far she had come—as if that were half the pleasure she felt. Milly Sheehan, out shopping for the doctor’s groceries, saw her standing by the stop as the bus rolled away toward Binghamton and thought for a moment that she knew her; as did Stella Hawthorne, who was having a cup of coffee beside the window of the Village Pump restaurant. Still smiling, the dark-haired girl strode past the window, and Stella turned her head to watch her cross the town square and go up the steps of the Archer Hotel. Her companion, an associate professor of anthropology at the nearby SUNY college, named Harold Sims, said, “The scrutiny one beautiful woman gives another! But I’ve never seen you do it before, Stel.”
She, who detested being called “Stel” said, “Did you think she was beautiful?”
“I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t.”
“Well, if you think I’m beautiful too, I guess it’s all right.” She smiled rather automatically at Sims, who was twenty years younger than herself and infatuated, and looked back at the Archer Hotel, where the tall young woman was just negotiating the door and disappearing within.
“If it’s all right, why are you staring?”
“Oh, it’s just—” Stella closed her mouth. “It’s just nothing at all. That’s the sort of woman you ought to be taking to lunch, not a battered old monument like me.”
“Jesus, if you think that,” Sims said and tried to take her hand beneath the table. She brushed his hand aside with a touch of her fingers. Stella Hawthorne had never appreciated being fondled in restaurants. She would have liked to have given his paw a good hard slap.
“Stella, give me a break.”
She looked straight into his mild brown eyes and said, “Hadn’t you better get back to all your nice little students?”
In the meantime the young woman was checking into the hotel. Mrs. Hardie, who had been running the Archer Hotel with her son since the death of her husband, emerged from her office and came up to the lovely young person on the other side of the desk. “May I help you?” she asked, and thought how am I going to keep Jim from this one?
“I’ll need a room with a bath,” the girl said. “I’d like to stay here until I can find a place to rent somewhere in town.”
“Oh, how nice,” said Mrs. Hardie. “You’re moving to Milburn? Well, I think that’s real sweet. Most all the young people here nowadays just can’t wait to get out. Like my Jim, he’ll take your bags up, he thinks every day here is another day in jail. New York is where he wants to go. Would that be where you’re from?”
“I’ve lived there. But some of my family lived here once.”
“Well, here are our rates, and here’s the register,” said Mrs. Hardie, sliding a mimeographed sheet of paper and the big leather-bound register across the counter to her. “You’ll find this a real nice quiet hotel, most of the folks here are residential, just like a boardinghouse really, but with the service of a hotel, and no loud parties at night.” The young woman had nodded at the rates and was signing the register. “No discos, not on your life, and I have to tell you straight off, no men in your room past eleven.”
“Fine,” the girl said, turning the register back to Mrs. Hardie, who read the name written in a clear elegant handwriting: Anna Mostyn, with an address given in the West Eighties in New York.
“Oh, that’s good,” said Mrs. Hardie, “you never know how girls will take that these days, but”—she looked up at the new guest’s face, and was stopped short by the indifference in the long blue eyes. Her first, almost unconscious thought was she’s a cold one, and this was followed by the perfectly conscious reflection that this girl would have no trouble handling Jim. “Anna’s such a nice old-fashioned name.”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Hardie, a little disconcerted, rang the bell for her son.
“I’m really a very old-fashioned sort of person,” the girl said.
“Didn’t you say you had family here in town?”
“I did, but it was a long time ago.”
“It’s just that I didn’t recognize the name.”
“No, you wouldn’t. An aunt of mine lived here once. Her name was Eva Galli. But you probably wouldn’t have known her.”
(Ricky’s wife, sitting alone in the restaurant, suddenly snapped her fingers and exclaimed, “I’m getting old.” She had remembered of whom the girl had reminded her. The waiter, a high-school dropout by the look of him, bent over the table, not quite sure how to give her the bill after the gentleman had stormed off, and uttered “Huh?” “Oh get away, you fool,” she said, wondering why it was that while one half of high-school dropouts looked like thugs, the other half resembled physicists. “Oh, here, better give me the bill before you faint.”)
Jim Hardie kept sneaking looks at her all the way up the stairs, and once he had opened her room and put her suitcase down offered, “I hope you’re going to stick around a good long time.”
“I thought your mother said you hated Milburn.”
“I don’t hate it so much anymore,” he said, giving her the look which had melted Penny Draeger in the back seat of his car the previous night.
“Why?”
“Ah,” he said, not knowing how to continue in the face of her total refusal to be melted. “Ah, you know.”
“I do?”
“Look. I just mean you’re a goddamn great-lookin’ lady, that’s all. You know what I mean. You got a lot of style.” He decided to be bolder than he felt. “Ladies with style turn me on.”
“Do they?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. He couldn’t figure her out. If she was a nonstarter, she would have told him to leave at the beginning. But though she let him hang around, she wasn’t looking interested or flattered—she wasn’t even looking amused. Then she surprised him by doing what he had been half hoping she would do, and took off her coat. She wasn’t much in the chest department, but she had good legs. Then, entirely without warning, a total awareness of her body assaulted him—a blast of pure sensuality, nothing like the steamy posturing of Penny Draeger or the other high-school girls he had bedded, a wave of pure and cold sensuality which dwindled him.
“Ah,” he said, desperately hoping she would not send him away, “I bet you had some kind of great job in the city. What are you, in television or something?”
“No.”
He fidgeted. “Well, it’s not like I don’t know your address or anything. Maybe I could drop in sometime, have a talk?”
“Maybe. Do you talk?”
“Hah. Yeah, well, guess I better get back downstairs. I mean, I gotta lot of storm windows to put up, this cold weather we got . . .”
She sat on the bed and held her hand out. Half reluctantly, he went toward her. When he touched her hand,
she placed a neatly folded dollar bill in his palm. “I’ll tell you what I think,” she said. “I think bellboys shouldn’t wear jeans. They look sloppy.”
He accepted the dollar, too confused to thank her, and fled.
(It was Ann-Veronica Moore, thought Stella, that actress at John’s house the night Edward died. Stella allowed the intimidated boy to hold her fur coat. Ann-Veronica Moore, why should I think of her? I only saw her for a few minutes, and that girl really didn’t resemble her at all.)
4
No, Sears continued, I was resolved to help that poor creature, Fenny Bate. I didn’t think there was such a thing as a bad boy, unless misunderstanding and cruelty were to make him bad. And that you could redress. So I began a little reclamation program. When Fenny tipped over his desk the next day, I righted it myself, much to the disgust of the older children; and at lunchtime I asked him to stay inside with me.
The other children filed out, buzzing with speculation—I’ m sure they thought I was going to cane him once they were out of sight—and then I noticed that his sister was lurking in the dark rear corner. “I won’t hurt him, Constance,” I said. “You can stay behind too if you wish.” Those poor children! I can still see both of them, with their bad teeth and tattered clothing, he full of suspicion and resentment and fear and she simply fearful—for him. She crept into a chair and I went to work to try to straighten out some of Fenny’s misconceptions. I told him all the stories of explorers I knew, about Lewis and Clarke and Cortez and Nansen and Ponce de Leon, stuff I was going to use later in class, but it had no effect on Fenny. He knew that the world went only about forty or fifty miles out from Four Forks, and that the people within this radius were the world’s population. He clung to this notion with the dogged stubbornness of the stupid. “Who in the world told you this, Fenny?” I asked. He shook his head. “Did you make it up yourself?” He shook his head again. “Was it your parents?”