Meanwhile There Are Letters

by Suzanne Marrs

  Everybody waited, watching his dog splash up the water. His noisy tongue looked purple under fluorescent light. Had Prof. Duling forgotten the class waited on him?

  With pencil lifted over her notebook, Justine was anxious for him to go on as before. Without really following him yet, but ready to find the clue, yet almost following him, she felt in the very evenness and the very reserve of Prof. Duling’s voice something pressing, a quality of suspense, like an undertone she was growing able to detect.

  As the days of class followed on one another, she wrote down “Cognitive Structures,” “Symbol Systems,” “Verbal Behavior,” and so on to the sober monotone of the teacher and the occasional and erratic, violent thumping of the dog’s tail coming from the floor, at his feet. Listening to his unvarying voice, listening for she didn’t know what, May felt more and more in a state of odd suspense. Once when the dog woke up [and] barked she found herself exchanging glances with the teacher.

  She was shocked all the more to get back her first test paper with a low mark on it. Indeed it was a failing mark—the first she’d ever received in her life. After all, she was a teacher. An English teacher at that. She hadn’t even suspected how little she had learned about linguistics. Had she alone failed? Prof. Duling, who had not until now singled a student out by name, requested that Miss Downing wait after class in his office.

  “Would you come into my office?”

  Behind his chair, many books were crammed onto the shelves behind glass doors. All those in front of me on his desk were Linguistics books, with paper markers hanging out of them like tongues.

  At a desk across the room sat another professor, smoking a pipe and going over papers, paying no attention to our low conversation. (This is Dr. Morrow.)

  He asked her in plain words why she was in this class. “Is it through some mistake in your assignment? Your test shows that you hardly came prepared for Linguistics e-409. I feel bound to ask you,” he said, “would you like to change your course? Would you like me to try to change it for you? Before we go any farther? It isn’t too late.”

  “It isn’t what I thought it would be.” She added without premeditation, hearing all her Presbyterian upbringing in her words, “I want to learn it because it’s hard for me.”

  He did not laugh. He bent his long, subdued, scholarly face—she saw it was patchy with sunburn—under the untidy hair. “Then I think we understand each other,” he said, and as if it followed, “Would you like an hour of fresh air?” The Collie had already begun barking as he reached for a leash in his pocket.

  Nell, with her book and notebook, sat among the books in the passenger seat. Mr. Paulding, on the sidewalk, lifted the dog in his arms. “All right Cuchulain.”

  “Cuchulain!”

  “I’d like you to hold him,” he said, “if you would.”

  He had to lift the dog bodily to get him inside the old unwashed Plymouth. Justine held him on the seat between them, to calm his strenuous trembling and struggling. If the car slowed down or stopped for a traffic light, he whimpered like a puppy.

  “Miss Downing won’t throw you out,” Prof. Duling said.

  “Cuchulain’s himself once he gets loose on the beach,” Mr. Paulding said. “He just doesn’t like riding in cars.”

  Lake Ponchartrain opened wide as a gulf, where Mr. Paulding drove directly to a spot on the featureless beach, and had hardly stopped the car when Cuchulain discharged himself from her lap and raced off over the sand, at large. Mr. Paulding, whose name she knew was Henry, led Justine to a strip of shadow inside the seawall, where she sat down. He himself shed his jacket, his shoes and socks, and then folded his spectacles and put them away in his jacket pocket. Then man and dog raced off along the beach. Cuchulain ran tossing his head back, giving arrogant challenging, youthful barks. Mr. Paulding, whose legs were long, could almost keep even. The Lake, too bright to be blue, brimmed at their heels. Out a little way, the water was churning beneath the surface, intensely bright, as though the sun were about to bring it to the boil. And the sky overhead was as brilliant with disorderly summer clouds. [. . .] I hadn’t sat on a beach very often. The sand seemed to me too hot for the bare skin to touch. I watched the teacher, with his scholarly face and his running body, and his dog with the Irish hero’s name reeling and spinning before him and behind.

  Cuchulain loose on the beach was another dog. Away from the fluorescent light of the classroom, his coat was almost red, his ruff salt white. The streak of white marked his nose with an arrow.

  “Both of you like to run,” Caroline ventured, when Henry came and sat down to watch too.

  He looked at her; his kind, far-sighted eyes were dark-brown.

  “Yes, you can’t leave an animal this high-strung alone all day in an empty apartment. He’d be sure you were never coming back.”

  Cuchulain came up before the Professor and waited, his eyes large and shapely as a human child’s.

  Henry sat cross-legged, throwing his shoe for his dog. He did not speak the language of small-talk at all. Even on the beach, where they we sat within the sound of other people laughing and splashing, he was a still, contained man. Above his high, lined brow, his fair hair stood up, forked by the rising Lake breeze, measuring the time he’d forgotten to have it trimmed. Some gray hairs were starting through it.

  I thought how unlike home in Inverness, Alabama, this was. Life had brought me close enough to this man to know that the fine lines in his face almost surely had not come there from laughing, and yet know nothing about him, or about anyone a single step away from him. It was outside my experience to know somebody by himself, in no other way but as he was alone, and to be offered such undemanding silence, to know him in. I thought, if he came from anywhere in the South he would have seized advantage of this time off to talk about himself and his life and his whole family’s life, and I would most likely have discovered some parts of it [I] could take [my] clue from, have found a familiar name along the line somewhere, a possible connection. It would have emerged that some cousin of his had been best man in a wedding in Andalusia where my father is the pastor of the Presbyterian Church. Or even that his absent wife would turn out to be kin to me. Somehow I felt that the wife must be a Southerner. And if he’d been a Southerner, my name would have meant something to him, most likely the story everybody heard about my parents. But I knew from the start that what drew [me] to this self-contained man was that he was not connected. Here together on the beach not knowing each other. Both were mysteries.

  “You are smiling at my dog,” Henry said.

  “He’s tireless.”

  “He’s tired by the time he gets home,” said Henry. His kind, far-sighted eyes were dark brown. “So am I.”

  Reticent people need reticent people, she thought. Those who tell you you need the other kind have been wrong all the time. This hot, nearly untouchable beach by Ponchartrain, where we sat, though constantly tracked along by strangers [. . .], already seemed to me a place of not only privacy but safety; Henry Duling and I [our]selves might have silently assigned [our] mutual safety to it. The way it is now, [I] thought, is perfect.

  Pleased she rose and walked with them along the water’s edge. Her long hair was whipping across her eyes, completely out of its pins. They were caught in a dazzle as forceful as a downpour of rain. Cuchulain flashed his young teeth and his tongue as blatant as a flag, throwing back his head and barking in constant proposal to their faces. He streaked into the water and bounded back again, shaking his drops over their legs, sparkling. He ran close alongside Henry, setting his teeth in Henry’s wrist and holding onto it seriously, as if taking his pulse.

  The beach ahead was shadowed by a cloud as peremptory as a curtain drawn across a window. The thunder that followed had a household sound no further away than the slamming of a bureau drawer upstairs. Then the tops of their heads received heavy drops that felt too warm to be rain. Henry caught Cuchulain and forcibly got him back inside the car.

  Henry drove Justine back
to her boarding house with her clasping the wet, struggling Cuchulain, while Cuchulain licked at the sweat that was running down Henry’s cheek. They got through the steaming rush hour to the door of her boarding house just ahead of the downpour.

  “Thank you for your company,” said Henry.

  As the summer intensified, as her notebook filled, they went every weekday afternoon to Pontchartrain. It was always the same hour, scheduled in between linguistics and the rain, which from now on was punctual too, and always the same point on the beach.

  Only the library books in the car seat changed. Justine rode holding some of them, as well as Cuchulain at times, in her lap. The books were all on linguistics. One day she found herself making a place in her lap for a book on “Transformational Grammar,” exactly the subject of Henry’s lecture just over with. She was struck with surprise followed by anxiety for him that for all his conscientiousness he was apparently just keeping his own head above the water.

  One day on the beach, he said, “Linguistics isn’t exactly my field—it isn’t the course I would normally be giving. I hope you aren’t sorry you stayed with the course. But this summer linguistics happened to come my way when I needed it. I’m grateful for it.” [. . .]

  Every evening, Justine sat at her study table in the boarding house bedroom and applied herself to her work.

  This was a boarding house where some of the other teachers in the class were living too. They, at night, would often go out sampling the Quarter. One night, late, she heard the teacher next door, the one who had wanted to act out the parts of speech, throwing up in the bathroom. She was aware that she was considered stand-offish when she didn’t join the gang. Her friendship with Henry was outside their knowledge; she heard them laughing at his wife’s having run out on him, and said he tried to teach his dog linguistics. Yet they seemed to be getting linguistics. They had taken to it. As Cuchulain took to Lake Ponchartrain.

  Her lecture notes daunted her in the evenings when she couldn’t hear Henry’s voice making quiet logically ordered statements. There was of course the textbook. If something was down in a book, she could master it. That was what Henry was doing. She would pass his course. But she didn’t know her way in the subject, really. Just as, while she now recognized the names of a number of streets in New Orleans, she remained lost in the city. The old streets followed the curve of the river—it was hard to straighten out their north and south. She seldom knew exactly where she was, was never sure of her bearings. Without Henry to drive her in his car, she would not have trusted herself to find her way from the campus to the Lake and back to this boarding-house.

  It came to her, waking in the night after she’d gone tired to bed, that linguistics wasn’t the subject that had grown large in her mind. Linguistics was only its distraction, perfectly devised.

  On the afternoon of the last class, Henry did not bring Cuchulain. Then had his wife at last returned? He had not mentioned her since the day he had told the class of her temporary absence from home. He gave an extra-long lecture, reviewing the course. He reminded them that the examination was scheduled for the next morning at eight.

  After dismissing his class for the last time, Henry shook hands with all of them as they filed out and waited at the door for Justine.

  “It occurred to me that you might prefer a walk down Royal Street to the Lake—if you’re not busy this evening?” he said.

  “It’s my last night,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  That last afternoon, the one when they didn’t go to the beach, two young people running along it were struck down and killed by a bolt of lightning. Justine read about it in the (Picayune) as she watched for Henry’s car. But when she greeted him with the news, he didn’t seem to be listening. His face had the concentrated look it wore in the lecture room, as if he must keep his mind on the evening ahead of them.

  Henry parked his car on a sidestreet so they could go into the Quarter on foot.

  The only sound they made between them came from the click of her high heels on the uneven stones of the sidewalk—a small-town sound.

  The night itself was flying with city sounds turned loose, the clanging bells and sirens and blares and hoots, the shriek of a streetcar, and now and then the clap of running feet that overtook May and Henry and passed them fast.

  Then like the stroking of velvet, notes from an old slide trombone playing “Mood Indigo” reached out through an open door just off the sidewalk somewhere in the vicinity of the Cathedral. “Listen,” May said. As she spoke the word, he touched her elbow and guided her through a doorway inside. The rigidity and the peace of their summer’s routine was left behind them.

  La Lune first appeared to be in total darkness. There was a square hole, about the size of a kitchen table top, in the roof, its lid raised to the night and propped open on a step-ladder. It was as simple-looking as a mousetrap. The moon, the real moon, was supposedly to shine down through that hole onto the dancers.

  The table they were guided to was so close to the source of the music that they could never hope to hear each other’s voices. The bandstand could be made out—scarcely larger than the podium where Henry had lectured on linguistics. The spotlight beam took in the sleeve and caressing movements of the trombonist and the lady’s purse and paper grocery bag on top of the upright piano. And for an instant the pianist’s uncompromising face as she let them have the words over her shoulder, like handfuls of scraps she threw over the fence to her yard full of chickens.

  “Good man! . . . (Get better song)

  Hard to find! . . .

  Always get! . . .

  Other kind! . . .

  He stood and bent down to her, though at first she couldn’t believe Henry was asking her to dance. He led her onto the floor into the thick of the crowd. He danced his own way—moving to the music belatedly, as though it were coming to him from a great way off. And she followed him easily. All the alarms of the street accident might have waited until now to catch up with her, turning with him she was partner in his immunity. They had little by little turned the complete circle on the floor, stepping off the dimensions of an island to which he had invited and taken her, bounded it all the way around.

  As we broke, I looked into his face.

  “My wife taught me to dance,” he said.

  And when he was guiding her back to the table, she saw under the spotlight that he was wearing an old pair of leather easy slippers: he had never really left home. Yet while they’d been moving so restrainedly on the floor she’d once been reminded of riding in the car with her arm laid along the youthful back of Cuchulain at any minute capable of springing into the air.

  As the music started again now he tried to look at his watch. Then he made his voice heard, “Cuchulain’s hungry. Would you like to run by home and let me see what I can find for his supper?”

  “Of course,” she nodded, readily realiz[ing] that he didn’t remember that it was they who hadn’t had supper yet. Actually, he hadn’t noticed when the drinks had arrived on the obligatory order when they had gained their table, and were now left behind untasted.

  As they came out the door of La Lune, in front of pulsing blue and red lights, whistles, running feet, approaching sirens, loud arguing voices—a crowd had converged at a street intersection. She saw Henry give it his distant glance, before he took her arm and they pressed unhurriedly through the crowd, walking the other way.

  He was driving through the city in concentrated silence; she didn’t know in what direction.

  It was a while before he came to a stop.

  “One of our class said that the reason you can’t see the Mississippi River anywhere is because it’s behind the wall of the levee and running above our heads,” she said. “Is that true?”

  “How could you have escaped the river? I can show it to you any number of places. And you can hear it from our house.” He cut off the engine. “Listen.”

  A distant hooting reached them.

  “The ferry to Algiers. Al
l night long,” said Henry.

  They had reached a shell-paved street that seemed to end just ahead of them in a scattering of palm trees. Some two-story white frame houses stood visible under the streetlight, not far back from the sidewalk, most of them dark-windowed by now. Henry led her through an ornamental wire gate and over squares of paving stone set in monkey grass, around to the side of the last house. There was an outside staircase leading to the second floor.

  “We live upstairs.”

  We came up the staircase [. . .]. He opened the door, and Cuchulain was throwing himself against Henry’s chest.

  Light came from a doorway at the back. Now Henry turned on some lamps in here and they were standing in a living room. When had there been a wife here? When Henry took Cuchulain out, after he’d seated her, she thought she’d never been in a room so wifeless. There was pleasant enough furniture—a rather grand highboy against a wall; and beyond it a table, with a book lying on it—she saw there was a dining room beyond, with a bare round table in its center. Perhaps it was the lampshade that made her feel how bereft it was with [its] silk that had turned to tobacco brown long ago. Or was it the fine sifting of sand over the floor. She felt grains of it in her chair, through her thin dress.

  They were back, Cuchulain skidding and sliding down the cross-hall and Henry followed. It was missing a kitchen smell, but she heard a spoon against a pan back there, beneath Cuchulain’s clamor, a clattering of the dish.

  “The first time I saw him,” Henry said, returning and taking the armchair facing hers, “he was wandering the streets. Starving. I saw him standing on the streetcar track in the middle of St. Charles, with the streetcar coming. So weak that when I got him home I had to carry him bodily up the steps. Even now, he suffers if he’s left by himself.”

  “I think he’d been thrown out of a moving car,” said Henry. He had not yet eased back in his chair.

  Cuchulain, showing off, paraded in with a sock of Henry’s and then a ball. Henry threw the ball for him.

  “You wouldn’t care to smoke?” he asked. “Though I’m afraid we—But may I offer you an after-dinner drink?” I quickly said yes, or he might suddenly realize that we had not had dinner. All the floorboards sang underfoot as Henry walked across the room toward the open door of a room that was in darkness; the uneven floor met it with a little step up. Over the doorframe had been taped, not recently, a small cardboard square on which was written in a large, childish backhand, “DUCK.” And as he stepped up he did as the sign teased him to do and ducked his tall forehead. He didn’t turn on a light in the room, but the streetlight shone through the window and dustily lighted it; the palm tree just outside, lighted as well, looked like a piece of furniture on the other side of a bed. Henry was opening the door of what appeared to be a large armoire. He came out bringing a bottle, while Cuchulain followed behind him carrying, this time, a slipper.