Burning with mortification, Miss Mendtzy began our first lesson, which was an exercise in neatness — the care of our pencil boxes and schoolbooks. There was a happy material interest in this, for the pencils were all new and smelled of cedar, and we went in turn to sharpen them at the teacher’s desk. Our erasers — promises of foreordained smudges of error — showed a tiny diamondlike glisten if we held them in a certain way to the light of the window. If we chewed upon them, little gritty particles deliciously repelled our teeth. Our schoolbooks cracked sweetly when we opened them, and the large, clear, black type on the pages held mystery and invitation. We became absorbed in toys which were suddenly now something more than toys, and our cheeks grew hot, and we were happy, and we forgot to want to go to the bathroom. I was hardly aware of it when the door opened again before Madame de St. Etienne. Late, but earnestly, we scrambled to our feet, as she said,
“Which is Richard—?” giving my full name.
“Pray come with me, Richard,” she ordered, ignoring Miss Mendtzy entirely. “Bring your boxes and books.”
A stutter of conjecture went along the aisles at this, which Madame de St. Etienne, gliding on her way to the door, suppressed by pausing and staring above the heads of everyone as though she could not believe her ears. Quiet fell, and in quiet, with my heart beating, I followed her out to the hallway. She shut the door and turned me with a finger to walk ahead of her to her office at the entranceway inside the pillared portico. I wanted to ask what I had done to be singled out for her notice, which could only, I thought, lead to punishment.
But it appeared that she had enlisted me as an assistant. In her office, John was waiting, under guard of the principal’s secretary. He was sitting on a cane chair holding a glass of water, half full.
“Finish it, John,” commanded Madame.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“Hot water to drink is the best thing for anyone who is upset,” she answered. “It is the remedy we always give. Finish it.”
Raising a humble wail, he drank the rest of the hot water, spilling much of it down on his chin, his Windsor tie, his starched collar.
“You are John’s friend?” she asked me.
“Yes.”
“Who are his other friends?”
“I don’t know.”
“Has he none, then?”
“I don’t think so.”
John watched my face, then the principal’s, turning his head with jerky interest and rubbing his furry hair with his knuckles in pleasure at being the subject of interest.
“You brought him to school?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“And you will take him home?”
“Yes, Madame. After school.”
“I have spoken on the telephone with his mother, to arrange for him to go home. She prefers not to have him come home until the end of school after lunch. Until then, I will ask you to stay here in my office with him. You will both eat your lunches here and I will see that you are not disturbed. Tomorrow you will be able to return to your classroom.”
“With John?”
“No. John will not be with us after today.”
John nodded brightly at this. Evidently the principal had given an ultimatum to Mrs. Burley over the telephone. I can imagine the terms of it — careful avoidance of the words abnormal, special case, impossible to measure up to the progress of other boys his age, and such. With arctic, polite finality, Madame de St. Etienne would have read John out of the human society where his years put him but where his retarded mind and disordered nerves, so clearly announced by his rough, doglike appearance, must exclude him. Gail Burley’s despair can be felt. How could she ever again pretend even to herself that her child, if only thrown into life, would make his way like anyone else? How could she love anything in the world if she could not love the son who was mismade in her womb? What a bitter affront it was to her famous good looks of face and body, her hard brightness of mind, her firm ability to govern everything else that made up her life, if she must be responsible for such a creature as John. How to face a lifetime of exasperated pity for him? How to disguise forever the humiliation which she must feel? The daily effort of disguising it would cost her all her confident beauty in the end.
“Why don’t we go home now?” I asked.
“John’s mother thinks it would look better if he simply came home like the other children when school is dismissed this afternoon.”
Yes, for if they saw him come earlier, people would say once again what she knew they were always saying about John. I knew well enough the kind of thing, from hearing my own father and mother talk kindly and sadly about my playmate.
Let him come home after school, like everyone else, and tomorrow, why, then, tomorrow, Gail Burley could simply say with a shrug and a speckled smile that she and Howard didn’t think it was really just the school for John. There was something about those teachers, neither quite nuns, nor quite ordinary women, which was unsettling. The Burleys would look around, and meantime, John could be tutored at home, as Gail herself had been one winter when she had gone as a little girl with her parents to White Sulphur Springs. Leaving the school could be made, with a little languid ingenuity, to seem like a repudiation by her, for reasons she would be too polite to elaborate upon for parents of other children still attending it.
The day passed slowly in the principal’s office. At eleven o’clock there was a fire drill, set off by a great alarm gong which banged slowly and loudly in the hall just above the office door. The door was kept closed upon us, but we could hear the rumble and slide of the classes as they took their appointed ways out of the building to the shaded playgrounds outside.
“I want to go, I want to go!” cried John at the window. “Everybody is there!”
“No,” said Madame de St. Etienne, turning like an engine in her swivel chair, “we will remain here. They will presently return.”
John began to cry.
The principal looked to me to manage him and calmly turned back to the work on her desk, placing a pince-nez upon the high bridge of her thin nose with a sweep of her arm which was forced to travel a grand arc to bypass her bosom.
But at last, when the clock in the office showed twenty-five minutes past two, she said,
“Now, John, and now, Richard, you may take your things and go home. School is dismissed at half-past two. Perhaps it would be prudent for you to leave a little before the other boys. You will go straight home.”
“Yes, Madame.”
She gave us each her hand. To John she said,
“May God bless you, my poor little one.”
Her words and her manner sent a chill down my belly.
But in a moment we were in the open air of the autumn day, where a cold wind off the lake was spinning leaves from the trees along the street. John capered happily along and when we reached the candy store, he remembered how we would stop there. I wondered if stopping there would violate our orders to go “straight home,” but the store was on the way, and we went in.
John enjoyed shopping. He put his stubby finger with its quick-bitten nail on the glass of the candy counter, pointing to first one then another confection, and every time he made up his mind he changed it, until the proprietor, an old man with a bent back in a dirty grey cardigan, sighed and looked over his shoulder at his wife, who sat in the doorway to their back room. His glance and her return of it plainly spoke of John’s idiocy.
“There!” said John finally, aiming his finger and his hunger at a candy slice of banana, cut the long way, and tasting, I knew, of cotton mixed with gun oil. The candy banana was white in the center with edges stained orange and yellow.