Lives of Girls and Women Page 14

  Miss Farris was a native of Jubilee. She had gone to this school, she had marched up these longs stairs hollowed out in two places by the daily procession of feet, while somebody else played “The Turkish March” (because that must have been played since the beginning of time). Her first name was well known, it was Elinor. She lived in her own little house close up to the sidewalk on Mason Street, near where Naomi lived, and she went to the United Church. She also went skating, once a week, in the evening, throughout the winter, and she wore a dark blue velvet costume she had made herself, for she could never have bought it. It was trimmed with white fur, and she had a matching white fur hat and muff. The skirt was short and full, lined with pale blue taffeta, and she wore white dancer’s tights. Such a costume gives a good deal away, and in more ways than one.

  Miss Farris was not young, either. She hennaed her hair, which was bobbed in the style of the nineteen twenties; she always put on two spots of rouge and a rash, smiling line of lipstick. She skated in circles, letting her sky-lined skirt fly out. Nevertheless she seemed dry and wooden and innocent, her skating, after all, more of a school-teacherish display of skill, than of herself.

  She made all her own clothes. She wore high necks and long chaste sleeves, or peasant drawstrings and rickrack, or a foam of white lacy frills under the chin and at the wrists, or bold bright buttons set with little mirrors. People did laugh at her, though not so much as if she had not been born in Jubilee. Fern Dogherty, my mother’s boarder, said, “Poor thing, she’s only trying to catch a man. Everybody’s got a right to do it their own way, I say.”

  If that was her way, it did not work. Every year there was a hypothetical romance, or scandal, built up between her and Mr. Boyce. This was while the preparations for the operetta were going on. People would report that they had been seen squeezing up together on the piano bench, his foot had nudged hers on the pedal, he had been heard to call her Elinor. But all baroque concoctions of rumour crumbled, when you looked into her face, her little sharp-boned face, self-consciously rouged and animated, with flickering commas at the corners of her mouth, bright startled eyes. Whatever she was after, it could not be Mr. Boyce. Fern Dogherty notwithstanding, it could hardly even be men.

  The operetta was her passion. She burned with it discreetly at first, when she and Mr. Boyce came into the classroom about two o’clock on a blurry, snowy afternoon, when we were half-asleep, copying from the board, and everything was so quiet you could hear the water pipes gurgling, deep down in the insides of the building. Almost in a whisper she requested everybody to stand and sing, when Mr. Boyce gave the note.

  D’ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay

  D’ye ken John Peel at the break of day

  D’ye ken John Peel when he’s far far away,

  With his hounds and his horse in the morning?

  Mr. McKenna our teacher, the principal of the school, showed what he thought of this by continuing to write on the board. The Nile Valley was protected from invasion by three surrounding deserts, the Lybian, the Nubian, the Arabian. It didn’t matter what he did, in the end he would be helpless. The operetta would keep growing and growing, it would push down all his rules, his divisions of time, like so many matchstick fences. How tactful Miss Farris and Mr. Boyce were now, tiptoeing ceremoniously around the room, heads bent to catch the individual voices. It would not last. The whole operetta, at present, was contained in their two selves, but when the time came they would let it loose, it would belly out like a circus balloon, and we would all just have to hold on.

  They motioned gently for some to sit down. I had to sit, and so, I was glad to see, did Naomi. They made others sing again, and beckoned for the people they wanted to step out of line.

  Casting of the operetta was an unpredictable thing. With everything else, from carrying the wreath of poppies up to the Cenotaph on Armistice Day to putting on the Junior Red Cross program, down to carrying notes from one teacher to another through the strangely emptied halls, you could tell in advance who would be chosen most of the time, who would be chosen some of the time, and who would never under any circumstances be chosen at all. At the top of the list were Marjory Coutts whose father was a lawyer and a member of the Provincial Legislature, and Gwen Mundy whose father was an undertaker and proprietor of a furniture store. Nobody objected to their position. Indeed, given a free election for the officers of the Junior Red Cross, we unhesitatingly and with a graceful sense of what was fitting, elected them ourselves. Years of good will around them, in the town and at school, had in fact made them the best people to be chosen—confident and diplomatic, discreet and kind. The people not to be trusted, who would turn dictatorial in office or trip on the way to the Cenotaph, or read the teachers’ notes in the hall, in the hope of having something to tell, were the occasionally chosen, the ambitious and unsure—like Alma Cody, a specialist in sex information, like Naomi, like me.

  Secure as Marjory and Gwen, in another way, were the never-chosen—a great fat girl named Beulah Bowes, whose bum overlapped her seat—boys stuck pennibs into it—and the Italian girl who never spoke, and was often absent with kidney disease, and a very frail, weepy albino boy whose father had a little grocery store, and who bought his survival, all through school, with bags of gumdrops and chicken-bones and licorice whips. Such people sat at the back of the room, were not asked to read aloud, were not sent to put arithmetic questions on the blackboard, received two Valentines on Valentine’s Day. (These would be from Gwen and Marjory who without fear of contamination could send cards to everybody.) They passed from year to year, grade to grade, in dreamy inviolate loneliness. The Italian girl would be the first of us all to die, when we were still in high school; then we would remember with consternation, belated pride.

  “But she was in our class.”

  A good singing voice may be found anywhere. It was not found in Beulah Bowes, or in the Italian girl, or in the albino boy, but it might have been; it came that close. For who should be borne away, between Miss Farris and Mr. Boyce, like some sort of trophy, but the boy who sat behind me, a boy I would have put near the very bottom of the list of the sometimes-chosen; Frank Wales.

  I should not have been surprised. I could hear him behind me every morning, in “God Save the King” and once a week, during Mr. Boyce’s visits, in “John Peel” and “Flow Gently Sweet Afton” and “As Pants the Hart [for a long time I thought it was heart] for Healing Streams, When Heated in the Chase.” His voice was a still-unbroken soprano, unself-conscious, in fact hardly human, serene and isolated as flute music. (The recorder, which he later learned to play for his part in the operetta, seemed like an extension of this voice.) He himself was so indifferent to the possession of such a voice, unaware of it, that when he stopped singing it was completely gone and you did not think of it in connection with him.

  All I knew about Frank Wales, really, was that he was a terrible speller. He had to pass his spelling up to me to be marked. Later he would go to the board, docile but unperturbed, to write the words out three times each. It did not seem to do him much good. It was hard to believe such spelling was not perversity, a furious stubborn joke, but nothing else about him showed how this could be true. Apart from spelling he was neither smart nor dumb. He would know where the Mediterranean was, most likely, but not the Sargasso Sea.

  When he got back I wrote on my ruler, “What part did you get?” and passed it back as if to lend it to him. The classroom was a truce area, where neutral, but hidden, communication between boys and girls was possible.

  He wrote on the other side of the ruler: Pide Pieper.

  So I knew the operetta we would be doing: The Pied Piper. I was disappointed, thinking there would be no court scenes, no ladies-in-waiting, no beautiful clothes. Just the same I wanted badly to get a part. Miss Farris came to choose the dancers for the “Peasants’ Wedding Dance.”

  “I want four girls who can hold their heads up and have rhythm in their feet. Marjory Coutts, Gwen Mundy, who else?” Her eyes we
nt up and down the rows, pausing on several, and on me too where I sat with my head up, my shoulders straight, my expression bright but noncommittal for pride’s sake, my fingers violently twisted together, under the desk, in my private sign for luck. “Alma Cody and—June Gannett. Now four boys who can dance without making the curtain fall down—”

  I was in pain then. Suppose I only got to be a member of the crowd, pushed to the back of the stage? Suppose I never got on the stage at all? Some members of the class would not; they would have to sit on tiered benches below the stage, on either side of the piano that Mr. Boyce played, with those from the lower grades picked for the chorus, all uniformed in dark skirts and white blouses, white shirts and dark trousers. There I had sat for three years, through The Gypsy Princess, The Kerry Dancers and The Stolen Crown. There the Italian girl, the fat girl, the albino boy would sit, expectedly, through The Pied Piper. But not me! Not me! I could not believe in injustice so terrible as to keep me off that stage.

  Naomi had not got a part either. We did not talk about this on the way home, but made fun of everything connected with the operetta.

  “You be Miss Farris, I’ll be Mr. Boyce. Ah, my true love, my little hummingbird, this music of the Pied Piper is making me mad with passion, when will I clasp you in my arms until your spine cracks because you are so painfully skinny?”

  “I am not painfully skinny I am incredibly beautiful and your moustache is giving me a rash. What are we going to do about Mrs. Boyce? O my love?”

  “Do not distress yourself my sweetest angel I will lock her up in a dark closet infested with cockroaches.”

  “But I am afraid she will get loose.”

  “In that case I will make her swallow arsenic and saw her up in little tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet. No I will dissolve them with lye in the bathtub. I will melt the gold fillings out of her teeth and make us a lovely wedding ring.”

  “O you are so romantic, O my beloved.”

  Then Naomi got picked to be a mother who has to say, “Ah, my lovely little Marta, how you would dance about in the mornings when I would try to braid your hair! And I would scold you so! Ah, if only I could see you dance now!” And in the last scene she says, “Now I am so thankful, never will I tell a tale on my neighbours or be a gossiping stingy woman again!” I believed she had been picked because of her short, rather chunky figure, which could easily be made to look matronly. I had to walk home alone; people with speaking parts stayed to practise, after school. My mother said, “How goes the operetta?” meaning, did I have a part?

  “They’re not doing anything yet. They haven’t picked the parts yet.”

  After supper I went down to Mason Street and walked past Miss Farris’s house. I had no idea what I meant to do. I walked up and down, not making any noise on the packed snow. Miss Farris did not pull her blinds; it would not have been like her. Her house was small, almost like a playhouse; white with blue shutters, a peaked roof, a tiny gable, scalloped boards over the door and windows. She had had it built for herself, with the money she got when her parents died. And though in the movies one often saw houses like this—that is, houses which set out to be charming, whimsical, which looked as if they were designed for play, not life—they were not seen yet in Jubilee. Compared to the other houses in town, hers appeared to have no secrets, no contradictions. What people said was, “It’s such a pretty house, doesn’t look real.” They could not explain more than that, what there was not to trust about it.

  There was nothing I could do, of course, and after a while I went home.

  But the next day Miss Farris came into the classroom with June Gannett in tow, marched her straight to my desk, said, “Up on your feet, Del,” as if I should have known to do that without being told— she was getting more of her operetta manner—and made us stand back to back. I understood that June was the wrong height but did not know if she was too short or too tall, so I could not stretch or shrink accordingly. Miss Farris put her hands on our heads, moved them off heavily. She stood so close I could smell peppery sweat, and her hands trembled slightly; a tiny, dangerous hum of excitement ran through her.

  “You’re half an inch too tall, June dear. We’ll see what we can do about making you a mother.”

  Naomi and I, and others, exchanged studiously bland looks; Mr. McKenna swept a sharp frown around the room.

  “Who did you get for partners?” whispered Naomi later, in the cloakroom, when we were scrambling for our boots. We had to march out, by rows, and get our outdoor clothes and bring them in again, put them on at our seats, in the interests of order.

  “Jerry Storey,” I admitted. I was not very happy about the allocation of partners. It seemed meant to be apt. Gwen Mundy and Marjory Coutts got Murray Heal and George Klein, who were more or less their male counterparts in the class, being bright, athletic and, where it counted, decently behaved. Alma Cody got Dale McLaughlin, the United Church minister’s son, who was tall, loose-limbed, idiotically audacious, with heavy glasses and one rolling misdirected eye. He had already had sexual intercourse, more or less, with Violet Toombs in the bicycle shed behind the school. And I got Jerry Storey, his head covered with childish curls, his eyes popping with unabashed high-voltage braininess. He would put up his hand in Science period and in a boring nasal voice describe experiments he had done with his chemistry set. He knew the names of everything—elements, plants, rivers and deserts on the map. He would know where the Sargasso Sea was. All the time we practised this dance he never looked in my face. His hand sweated. So did mine.

  “I pity you,” said Naomi. “Now everybody is going to think you like him.”

  Never mind. The operetta was the only thing at school, now. Just as during the war you could not imagine what people thought about, worried about, what the news was about, before there was a war, so now it was impossible to remember what school had been like before the excitement, the disruption and tension, of the operetta. We practised the dance after school, and also during school hours, in the Teachers’ Room. I had never been in the Teachers’ Room before, and it was odd to see the little cupboard with its cretonne curtains, the teacups, hot plate, bottle of aspirin, the lumpy leather couch. Teachers were not thought of in connection with such ordinary, even shabby, domesticity.

  Unlikely sights continued to present themselves. There was a manhole in the ceiling of the Teachers’ Room, and one day when we came in to practise we discovered Mr. McKenna, of all people, Mr. McKenna, wriggling his dusty brown-trousered legs and bottom out of the manhole, trying to find the stepladder. He brought down cardboard boxes, which Miss Farris relieved him of, crying, “Yes, that one, that one! Ah, what have we got, let’s see if we’ve got riches here!”

  She broke the string with a strong jerk, and spilled out red and blue dyed cheesecloth, trimmed with loops of the same gold and silver tinselled rope you hang on Christmas trees. Then crowns, covered with gold and silver foil. Rust-coloured velvet breeches, a fringed yellow paisley shawl, some court gowns of dusty, papery taffeta. Mr. McKenna could only stand by unthanked, slapping dust off his trousers.

  “No dancing today! Boys out, out and play hockey.” (It was one of her fictions that whenever boys were not in school they were playing hockey.) “Girls, stay, help me sort out. What have we got here that will do for a village in the Middle Ages, in Germany? I don’t know, I don’t know. These dresses are too grand. They’d fall to pieces on stage anyway. They saw their best days in The Stolen Crown. Would the breeches fit the Mayor? That reminds me, that reminds me—I have to make a mayor’s chain! I have to make Frank Wales’s costume, too, the last Pied Piper we had was twice as big around. Who was it? I even forget who it was. It was a fat boy. We picked him solely for the voice.”

  “How many different operettas are there?” That was Gwen Mundy, comfortable with teachers, taking her polite, kind, tone.

  “Six,” said Miss Farris fatalistically. “The Pied Piper. The Gypsy Princess. The Stolen Crown. The Arabian Knight. The Kerry Dancers.
The Woodcutter’s Daughter. By the time we work round to the same one again we have an entire new crop of performers to pick from and the audience we trust to heaven has forgotten the last time.” She picked up a black velvet cloak, lined with red, shook it out, put it around her own shoulders. “This is what Pierce Murray wore, you remember, when he played the Captain in The Gypsy Princess. No of course you don’t remember, it was 1937. Then he was killed, in the Air Force.” But she said this rather absently; after he played the Captain in The Gypsy Princess, did it matter so much what else happened to him? “Every time he put it on he would swing—like this—and make the lining show.” She herself made a swashbuckling swing. All her stage directions, dancing directions, were wilfully, splendidly exaggerated, as if she thought to amaze us into self-forgetfulness. She insulted us, she told us we danced like fifty-year-old arthritics, she said she would put firecrackers in our shoes, but all the time she was hovering around us as if we contained possibilities of lovely, fiery dancing, as if she could pull out of us what nobody else, and not we ourselves, could guess was there.

  In came Mr. Boyce to get the recorder he was teaching Frank Wales to play. He saw the swing.

  “Con brio,” he said with his self-possessed English surprise. “Con brio, Miss Farris!”

  Miss Farris continuing the spirit of the swing bowed gallantly, and we allowed her this, and even understood, for that moment, that the blush absorbing her rouge like sunrise had not a thing to do with Mr. Boyce, only with the pleasure of her action. We got hold of con brio, we planned to tell. We did not know or care what it meant, only that it was absurd—all foreign words were in themselves absurd— and dramatically explosive. Its aptness was recognized. Long after the operetta was over Miss Farris could not walk down the hall at school, could not pass us on her way up John Street hill, singing lightly and encouragingly to herself as her habit was (“The Minstrel Boy—good morning girls!—to the War has gone—”) without this phrase floating slyly somewhere in her vicinity. Con brio, Miss Farris. We felt it was the final touch to her; it wound her up.