"Couldn't I see him during class time?"
"No."
Tony glanced at the office. In spite of the stubborn and obdurate facts of learning, the place had for him a galling sense of unreality. A case of athletic trophies stood against one wall but this seemed to be the only note of permanence. Presently he was let into the principal's office and given a chair.
"You've failed first-year French twice, Tony," the principal said, "and it looks as if you're going to fail it again. Your parents expect you to go on to college and you know you have to have a modern-language credit. Your intelligence quotient is very high and neither Miss Hoe nor I can understand why you fail."
"It's just that I can't say French, sir," Tony said. I just can't say any French. My father can't either. I just can't say French. It sounds phony."
The principal switched on the squawk box and said into it: "Could you see Tony now, Miss Hoe?" Her affirmative came through loud and clear. "Certainly." "You go down and see Miss Hoe now," said the principal.
"Couldn't I see her after class tomorrow, sir? I'm missing football practice."
"I think Miss Hoe will have something to say about that. She's waiting."
Miss Hoe was waiting in a room whose bright lights and pure colors did nothing to cheer him. It would soon be getting dark on the playing field and he had already missed passing and tackle. Miss Hoe sat before a large poster showing the walk of Carcassonne. It was the only traditional surface in the room. The brilliant, fluorescent lights in the ceiling made the place seem to be a cavern of incandescence, authoritative in its independence from the gathering dark of an autumn afternoon; and the power to light the room came from another county, well to the north, where snow had already fallen. The chairs and desks were made of brightly colored plastic. The floor was waxed Vinylite.
"Sit down, Tony," she said. "Please sit down. It's time that we had a little talk."
She might have been a pretty woman-small-featured and slender-but her skin was sallow and in the brightness of the light one saw that she had a few chin whiskers. Her waist was very slender and she seemed to take some pride in this. She always wore belts, cinctures, chains or ribbons around her middle and she sometimes wore a girlish ribbon in her brown hair. Her mouth, considering the strenuous exercise it got in French vowels, was very small. She wore no perfume and exhaled the faint unfreshness of humanity at the end of the day.
She lived alone, of course, but we will grant her enough privacy not to pry into the clinical facts of her virginity or to catalogue the furniture, souvenirs, etc. with which her one-room apartment was stuffed. As a lonely and defenseless spinster she was prey to the legitimate anxieties of her condition. There were four locks on the door to her apartment and she carried a vial of ammonia in her handbag to throw into the eyes of assailants. She had read somewhere that anxiety was a manifestation of sexual guilt and she could see, sensibly, that her aloneness and her virginity would expose her to guilt and repression. However, the burden of guilt must, she felt, be somewise divided between her destiny and the news in the evening paper. It was not her guilt that had caused the increase in sexual brutality. She had come to feel that some disorganized conspiracy of psychopaths was developing. Weekly, sometimes daily, women who resembled her were debauched, mutilated and strangled. Alone in the dark she was always afraid. Since she frequently dreamed that she was being debauched by some brute in a gutter she had to include guilt along with terror.
"When were you born, Tony," she asked.
"May twenty-seventh."
"Oh, I knew it," she said. "I knew it. You're Gemini."
"What's that?"
"Gemini is the constellation under which you were born. Gemini determines many of your characteristics and one might say your fate; but Gemini men are invariably good linguists. The fact that you are Gemini proves to me that you can do your work and do it brilliantly. You can't dispute your stars, can you?"
He looked past her through the window to the playing field. There was still enough light in the air, enough color in the trees to compete with the incandescence of their cavern; but in another ten minutes there would be nothing to see in the window but a reflection of Miss Hoe and himself. He knew nothing about astrology beyond the fact that he thought it to be a sanctuary for fools. He supposed that she might have read in the stars (and he was right) that it was her manifest destiny to be unloved, unmarried, childless and lonely. She sighed and. he was suddenly conscious of her breathing, its faint sibilance and the rise and fall of her meager front. It seemed intimate-sexual-as if they lay in one another's arms, and he moved his chair back suddenly, scraping the legs on the Vinylite. The noise restored him.
"I've talked this over with Mr. Northrup, Tony, and we've reached a decision. Since you seem unable to manage your own time with any efficiency we are going to give you a little assistance. We are going to ask you to give up football."
He had not anticipated this staggering injustice. He would not cry but there was a definite disturbance in his eyeducts. She didn't know what she was saying. She knew, poor woman, much less about football than he knew about French. He loved football, loved the maneuvers, the grass work, the fatigue, and loved the ball itself-its shape, color, odor and the way it spiraled into the angle of his elbow and ribcage. He loved the time of year, the bus trips to other schools, he loved sitting on the bench. Football came more naturally to him than anything else at his time of life and how could they take this naturalness away from him and fill up the breach with French verbs?
"You don't know what you're saying, Miss Hoe."
"I'm afraid I do, Tony. I've not only talked with Mr. Northrup. I've talked with Coach."
"With Coach?"
"Yes, with Coach. Coach thinks it will be better for you, better for our school, better perhaps for our football team if you spent more time at your studies."
"Coach said this?"
"Coach said that you were enthusiastic but he doesn't think that in any way you're indispensable. He thinks perhaps that you're wasting your time."
He stood. "You know what, Miss Hoe?" he asked.
"What, Tony," she said. "What, dear?"
"You know I could kill you," he said. I could kill you. I could strangle you."
She stood, hurling her chair against the walls of Carcassonne, and began to scream. Her screaming brought Mr. Graham, the Latin teacher, and Mr. Clark (science) running. She stood at her desk, her arm outflung, pointing at Tony. "He tried to kill me," she screamed. "He threatened to kill me."
"There, there, Mildred," said Mr. Graham. "There, there."
"I want a policeman," she screamed. "Call the police." Mr. Clark called the office through the squawk box and asked for the secretary to call the police. Mr. Clark picked up Miss Hoe's chair and she sat in it, trembling and breathing heavily but sternly as if she were about to upbraid an unruly class. Tony simply stared at his hands. Then in the distance they heard the sound of a police siren that seemed, excited and grieving, not to come from the autumn twilight but from some television drama in which they were the actors or combatants, playing out nothing so simple as poor French marks and a mistaken threat. Tony was Miss Hoe's long-lost brother who had just returned from his travels with the news that their beautiful mother was a well-known communist spy. The science teacher would have been Miss Hoe's husband-a dreary failure whose business misadventures and drinking bouts had brought her to the brink of a nervous breakdown-and Mr. Clark came from the FBI. Thus, juxtaposed for a moment by the sound of the siren, they seemed about to have their dilemma interrupted by an advertisement for painkillers or detergents, until the police came in, asking, "What's up, what's going on here?" Vandalism had been their guess, although it was the wrong time of day-but vandalism was the usual complaint. Why did kids want to rip the lids off desks and break windows. Miss Hoe raised her head. Her poor face, shining with tears, was ugly. "He tried to kill me," she said. "He tried to kill me."