Passage

by Connie Willis

  Mr. Brown, that was the name of the PE teacher, not Mr. Black. No wonder the woman in the office had never heard of him. And that proved just how unreliable memory could be. The house the librarian’s husband had pointed out to her might be across from a warehouse or a Starbucks and flanked by fir trees.

  She turned onto Fillmore. Mr. Brown. If the house didn’t pan out, she could see if Mr. Brown was still at the high school. He had said he’d never retire, that they’d have to carry him out feet first. He would definitely still be there.

  And so was the house. It stood in the middle of the block, a three-story house with a wide porch. Joanna pulled the car over to the curb and stopped. The house was pale green, and that was definitely a weeping willow out front. It looked like a white fountain under its coating of snow.

  But that doesn’t mean Mr. Briarley still lives here, she thought, getting out and going up the sidewalk. And that was obviously the case. There was a bicycle on the porch, and when she rang the bell, a girl in jeans and a thin flannel shirt over a tank top appeared in the door. She was barefoot and had short, fair hair like Maisie’s.

  Mr. Briarley hadn’t been married. “Ms. Austen is correct in her comment regarding people’s assumptions about bachelors,” he had said when they read Pride and Prejudice, “but let me assure you that many men, including myself, are not in want of a wife. They move your books so that you cannot find them.” And anyway, this girl was far too young to be his wife, or anyone’s wife, for that matter. She looked about seventeen.

  “Can I help you?” the girl said warily. She had a fragile prettiness, but she was too thin. Her collarbones showed sharply above the tank top.

  “Does Mr. Briarley live here?” Joanna asked, even though it was obvious he didn’t.

  “Yes,” the girl said.

  “Oh . . . oh,” Joanna said, stammering in her surprise. “I—I’m a former student of his.” She’d realized in the course of saying this that the girl had made no motion to open the door, that in fact she was holding on to it as if Joanna were a salesman and she intended to shut it on her at any minute.

  “My name’s Joanna Lander,” Joanna said. “Mr. Briarley was my high school English teacher. Could I talk to him for a few minutes?”

  “I don’t know . . . ” the girl said uncertainly. “Is it something I could help you with?”

  “No,” Joanna said. “He was my teacher for senior English, and I need to ask him a couple of questions about the class.”

  “Questions?”

  “Yes. Oh, not about the grade I got on my term paper or anything. It’s too late for that,” she laughed, knowing she sounded like an idiot. “I work at Mercy General Hospital, and—”

  “Did my mother send you?”

  “Your mother?” Joanna said blankly. “No, as I said, I had Mr. Briarley as a teacher. I went to the school to find out if he was still teaching, and one of the librarians told me where he lived. I do have the right house, don’t I? The Mr. Briarley I’m looking for taught English at Dry Creek High School?”

  “Yes,” the girl said, “but I’m afraid he can’t—”

  “Is there somebody at the door?” a man’s voice called from the depths of the house.

  “Yes, Uncle Pat,” the girl shouted back, and Joanna thought, This can’t possibly be the right Mr. Briarley. She couldn’t imagine his being anyone’s uncle, let alone Uncle Pat.

  “Who is it?” the voice said, and this time she recognized the voice. It was Mr. Briarley. Uncle Pat.

  “Is it Kevin?” Mr. Briarley called.

  “No, Uncle Pat. It’s not Kevin,” the girl said, and to Joanna, “I’m afraid this isn’t a good—”

  “Tell him to come in,” he said, and Mr. Briarley appeared in the door. He looked exactly the same, his hair still dark with a little gray at the temples, his eyebrows still arched sardonically. Joanna would have sworn he was wearing the exact same gray tweed vest.

  The girl opened the door farther. “Uncle Pat, this is—”

  “Joanna Lander. I’m an ex-student of yours,” Joanna said, sticking out her hand. “I don’t expect you to remember me. I had you for senior English twelve years ago. Second period,” she added irrelevantly.

  “I have an excellent memory,” he said. “Kit, where are your manners? Don’t make Ms. Lander stand out in the cold. Open the door.”

  Kit opened the door all the way, and Joanna stepped into the narrow hallway. “Come into my library,” Mr. Briarley said, and led the way into a room that looked exactly like Joanna would have expected. Three entire walls were covered with books from floor to ceiling, and on the fourth, between the windows, hung engravings of Westminster Abbey and the Globe Theater. There was a mahogany desk and two dark red leather chairs, both piled with books, and there were books stacked on the end tables, on the wide windowsill, on the floor.

  Kit scurried to move the books off one of the chairs and motioned Joanna to sit down. She did, and he sat down opposite her. Kit stood next to his chair, still looking wary.

  Now that Joanna had had a chance to look at Kit, she wondered if she were as young as she’d first thought. There were faint bluish shadows under her eyes, and unhappy lines around her mouth. Behind her, on one of the bookcases, was a picture of her carrying a stack of books and standing in front of University Hall at DU, and one of her and a young man. The Kevin Mr. Briarley had thought was at the door? Kit looked twenty pounds healthier in both photos and considerably happier. What had happened since they were taken? Anorexia? Drugs? And was that why she was living here? Somehow she couldn’t see Mr. Briarley as a rehab counselor, but then again, she couldn’t imagine him as being anyone’s uncle, and there had been her odd, sharp reaction when Joanna had said she worked at Mercy General.

  “I really appreciate this,” Joanna began. “I would have called but I didn’t have your phone number. I went over to the high school, hoping you still taught there, and they told me you’d retired. When did you retire?”

  “Five years ago,” Kit volunteered.

  He glared at her. “Kit,” he said, “don’t just stand there. Offer our guest some—”

  “Tea,” Kit said, too eagerly. “Ms. Lander, can I get you a cup of tea? Or coffee?”

  “Oh, no, nothing,” Joanna said.

  “Tea,” Mr. Briarley said firmly. “ ‘And sometimes counsel take,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘and sometimes tea.’ ”

  “The Rape of the Lock,” Joanna said, delighted that she remembered. “Alexander Pope. I remember your reading him out loud to us,” Joanna said. “And ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Coleridge. That was my favorite. ‘Water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink—’ ” she said and paused, expecting him to say the next two lines.

  “Coleridge,” he muttered, “overrated Romantic,” and then turned abruptly to Kit and snapped, “Where’s my tea?”

  It was the tone used to a servant. Joanna looked at him, and then at Kit, in surprise, but Kit merely said, “I’ll get it right away,” and started for the door.

  “And I want the water boiled,” Mr. Briarley snapped, “not heated to lukewarm in that ridiculous—”

  “Microwave,” Kit said. “Yes, Uncle Pat.”

  “And don’t take all day, Kit. Kit,” he repeated contemptuously, turning to Joanna. “What sort of a name is that? It’s a label for a box full of first-aid bandages, not a name for a person.”

  What was going on here? Joanna wondered. Had she walked in on an argument? She remembered Kit’s reluctance to let her in. She glanced up at her, expecting her to look sullen or angry, but she looked wary, or worried, the way she had when she opened the door, her reactions all wrong for the situation.

  “Go on, Kit,” Mr. Briarley said, emphasizing the name nastily. “I want to speak with my student.”

  “I’ll only be a minute,” Kit said with a last worried glance at Joanna and disappeared.

  I hope that doesn’t mean he’ll turn on me now, Joanna thought, but when she turned back to Mr. Br
iarley, he was smiling benignly at her. “Now then,” he said. “What can I do for you? You said you’d been to the high school—?”

  “Yes, looking for you,” Joanna said.

  “I don’t teach there anymore,” he said in an odd, uncertain tone, as if he were trying to convince himself. “ ‘Neither fish nor fowl, neither out nor in.’ ”

  He must miss it, she thought. “It looked so different, I hardly recognized it. I don’t know if you remember the class I was in, Ricky Inman was in it, and Candy Simons—”

  “Of course I remember,” he said, almost belligerently.

  “Good, because I need to ask you about something you said in class about—”

  “The tea will only be a minute,” Kit said, appearing in the doorway with a tray. She’d slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops. Joanna cleared a stack of books off the little table, and Kit set the tray down. “I brought the cups and saucers, and the sugar,” she added unnecessarily.

  Mr. Briarley looked the tray over irritably. “You didn’t bring any—”

  “Spoons,” Kit said, darting out to the kitchen. “I forgot the napkins, too.”

  “And the milk,” Mr. Briarley called after her. “How difficult is it to make a cup of tea? I was wrong,” he said to her as she came back, carrying a pitcher and the silverware. “The name Kit suits you admirably. As in mess kit. Don’t you agree?” he asked Joanna.

  This was not the way Joanna remembered Mr. Briarley as being at all. He had been sarcastic, yes, and sometimes even cutting, but never spiteful. He would never have humiliated Ricky Inman the way he had just done Kit.

  “Here’s the tea,” Kit said, coming in again with a teapot. “You take milk and sugar, don’t you, Uncle Pat?” she asked, already adding them. She handed the cup to him.

  Joanna was afraid he would complain about the amount, or, after she’d taken a sip from the cup Kit handed her, the temperature. In spite of Mr. Briarley’s snapped orders, it was obvious Kit had used the microwave. The tea was barely lukewarm. But he seemed to have lost interest in the tea. And in Kit’s shortcomings, and her name. He leaned back in his chair, the cup and saucer on his knee, and gazed pensively at the rows of books.

  “It was so nice of you to come visit Uncle Pat,” Kit said, taking the half-drunk cup from her as if the visit were over.

  “I didn’t just come to visit,” Joanna said to Mr. Briarley. “I came to ask you about something you talked about in English class, something you taught—”

  “I taught a good many things,” he said. “The definition of an adverb, the number of metric feet in blank verse, the difference between assonance and alliteration—” Mr. Briarley said. “You will have to be more specific.”

  Joanna smiled. “This was something about the Titanic.”

  “The Titanic?” Kit said sharply.

  “Yes, I don’t know if you read it out of a book or if it was in a lecture you gave,” Joanna said. “I work at Mercy General Hospital—”

  “Hospital?” he said. The teacup clattered on the saucer.

  “Yes. I’m working on a project that involves memory, and—” She could tell by the look on his face that she was explaining herself badly. “I’m working with a neurologist who—”

  “I have an excellent memory,” Mr. Briarley said, glaring at Kit as if holding her responsible for Joanna’s being here.

  “I’m sure it is,” Joanna said. “In fact, that’s what I’m counting on. I’ve forgotten something you taught us or read to us, and I’m hoping you remember what it was. It was about the Titanic. One of the parts I remember was about people standing out on deck after the collision. They were in their night-clothes, and they didn’t know what had happened. They’d been awakened by the engines stopping.” She leaned forward, holding her cup and saucer. “Do you remember talking about that? Or reading something to the class about it?”

  “I remember,” he said contemptuously, “that I scarcely had time to teach Dickens and Shakespeare, let alone a book about the Titanic.”

  “I don’t know that it was a book,” Joanna said. “It might have been an essay, or a lesson—”

  “A lesson? On what? The onomatopoeia of the iceberg scraping along the side? Or an exercise diagramming the passengers’ drowning cries? What on earth does a shipwreck have to do with the teaching of English literature?”

  “B-but you talked about it all the time in class,” Joanna stammered, “about the band and Lorraine Allison and the Californian—”

  “I realize, of course, that nowadays English classes teach everything but English-rope-skipping rhymes and Navajo tribal chants and deconstructionist drivel. Why not maritime disasters?”

  “Uncle Pat,” Kit said, but he didn’t even hear her.

  “Perhaps the Titanic and Toni Morrison constitute what is taught nowadays, but in my classes I taught Wordsworth and Shakespeare.”

  “Uncle Pat—”

  “You asked me when I retired,” he said. “I’ll tell you when. When I could no longer bear to cast my pearls of English literature before my swinish students, when I could no longer tolerate their appalling grammar and their stupid questions.”

  Joanna’s cheeks flushed with anger. Was this how he’d been the last few years he’d taught? If so, she could see why they’d egged his house. She set her cup and saucer down and stood up. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she said stiffly.

  “I’ll see you out,” Kit said, standing up, too, and looking distressed.

  “No, thank you, I can find my own way out.” She started for the door.

  “Perhaps if you had paid more attention in class, Ms. Lander,” she heard him say as she went out the door, “you would not have found it necessary to—”

  She shut the door behind her, and walked blindly out to her car, some part of her mind that wasn’t furious registering that it was late, that the afternoon light was fading. She opened the door of the car, fumbling for Vielle’s keys.

  “Wait!”

  Joanna looked up. Kit was on the porch. She ran down the steps, the tails of her flannel shirt flapping behind her. “Don’t leave! Please!” She caught up to Joanna. “Please. I wanted to explain.” She put her hand on the open car door. “I’m so sorry about what happened just now. This was all my fault. I shouldn’t have—” She stopped to catch her breath. “I don’t want you to think—”

  “I had no right to come barging in without calling like that,” Joanna said. “He had every right to be angry with me.”

  Kit shook her head. “It wasn’t you Uncle Pat was angry at.”

  “Well, he gave a pretty good imitation of it,” Joanna said. “It’s all right. I’m sure it’s very irritating to have ex-students bothering him and asking him about—”

  “You don’t understand. He didn’t know what you were talking about. He suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. He’s got severe memory loss. He—”

  “Alzheimer’s?” Joanna said blankly.

  “Yes. He didn’t know who you were. He thought you were a doctor-he’s afraid he’ll have to go into a nursing home. That’s why he was so angry, because he thought I’d asked you to come examine him.”

  “Alzheimer’s,” Joanna said, trying to take this in. “He has Alzheimer’s disease?”

  Kit nodded. “The anger’s part of the disease. He uses it to cover the fact that he can’t remember. I didn’t think that would happen. He was having a good day, and . . . I am so sorry.”

  Kit’s hesitation when Joanna had said she wanted to ask Mr. Briarley a few questions, her finishing of his sentences, the alarm he’d shown at the mention of the word hospital. Alzheimer’s. “But he was able to quote The Rape of the Lock,” Joanna said, and remembered he hadn’t continued with the quotation from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” “How bad is it?”

  “It varies,” Kit said. “Sometimes he only has trouble remembering a few words, other days it’s pretty bad.”

  Pretty bad. That was hardly the word. Alzheimer’s was a form of death by i
nches as the person lost his memory, his ability to speak, his control of bodily functions, descending into paranoia and darkness. She remembered one of her NDE subjects whose husband had suffered from Alzheimer’s. In the middle of the subject’s interview, he had stood up suddenly and said in a frightened voice, “What’s that stranger doing in my house? Who are you? What do you want?” and Joanna had started to try to explain, but he hadn’t been talking to her. He’d been talking to his wife of forty years.

  “And you live with him?” Joanna asked. “You take care of him?”

  She nodded. That was why he retired, Joanna thought suddenly, and not because the district offered an early-retirement bonus. Because he could no longer teach. She remembered him in class, reeling off pages and pages of Macbeth and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from memory. Dates and plots and poetic meters. Conjunctions, couplets, quotations. The Briarley Anthology of English Literature, Ricky Inman had called him. Unable to remember the word for “spoons.”

  “I didn’t want you to think he’s the way he was in there,” Kit said, shivering. She had to be freezing in that tank top and those flip-flops.

  “You’d better get back inside,” Joanna said. “You’ll catch your death.”

  “I’m okay,” she said, her teeth chattering. “I wanted to tell you not to give up, that sometimes he remembers things out of the blue, and other times he’ll answer a question you asked days, even weeks before, as if his mind had been searching for the memory all that time and finally found it. So he still might remember. You said it was something to do with the Titanic?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. “He said something, or he read something out loud—”

  Kit nodded. “He is—was—a huge Titanic buff. If he remembers, or says anything about it, I’ll call you. I can reach you at Mercy General, right?”

  Joanna nodded. “I’ve got an answering machine. Just leave a message and I’ll call you back—or is that a problem?”