“When we have to.”
“At school?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’ve read the Henty books, I suppose?”
“We’ve got some that used to belong to my uncle.”
“Good. They’re good stuff. Read any poetry?”
“When we have to.”
“What do they make you read? British? American? Any Canadian?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
He told my aunt that bringing civilization to children was like throwing rose petals at a moving target.
“Some of the petals stick,” she said. “I’m sure some do.” She looked at me, as if wishing I would stop dodging.
If optimism is the prime requirement for teaching, she was a born educator. Mr. Coleman seemed to attract defeat and may have been in the wrong line altogether, on several counts. For one thing, whatever the scope of his personal adventures, he absolutely hated small boys. But when my aunt unfolded his disgrace, or thought she had, small boys were on her mind. She wanted to know if he had ever made a clear, coarse suggestion while standing in her parlor, reeling off names of authors. I did not know what she was getting at, and was merely thankful to hear he was never coming back. Her assurance that his failure was God’s business meant that one more fragment of disorder had been added to the mess in Heaven.
“It may be for the best that it has come to light,” she said, encouraging me to speak up. It was her second attempt, after the dead try over cocoa fudge. This time I was pushing a lawnmower around the backyard, earning my allowance. She sat on the back step, on a straw cushion usually kept in the hammock.
“Are you just as glad?”
“What about?”
“About not having to see Mitchell Coleman anymore.”
I was just as glad, which condemned him. On his last visit he had sneered at her taste in books.
“She’s reading Depression novels,” he had said. “And now this thing.” He pulled it off the shelf. “ ‘The Case of Sergeant Grischa.’ Not a lady’s book. I’d like to know how it got here, right next to”—he paused to make certain—“ ‘To the Lighthouse.’ ”
“Leo Quale read it,” I said. “He says it’s the best book anybody ever wrote.”
“Do you know what it’s about?”
“Yes. He told me. They shoot him.”
“Your friend Leo?”
“No, the sergeant. He’s supposed to be a deserter, so they shoot him.”
“Don’t take it to heart. It’s only a story. Most of us die in bed.”
He sounded simpler, easier — too late. My side of the exchange closed down. It was all right with me if we hated each other, as long as my aunt didn’t know.
Better a reticent kid than one suddenly cold. He sensed the change — he was not a teacher for nothing — and began to speak at random, as if we shared the same tastes and the same age: “Arnold Zweig. I wonder if he and that other Zweig are brothers, like the two Manns.” Did he really think I could tell him? “She’s read it, too,” he said, showing me how the book fell open in his hands.
Later on, I discovered it opened to passages that my aunt, or Leo, may have liked in particular. The core of her mind, or Leo’s, contained more anxiety than anyone guessed. One of the two had lingered over the short truth that death means dying. Only someone with great denseness of spirit needs to be reminded, so I suppose the steady reader to have been Leo.
Released from eighth grade, Leo became free to carry groceries full time. He set a box down in our kitchen and made the remark that we seemed to live on cereal. His habit of uttering one pointless thing after the other had my aunt believing he had plenty to say but lacked a sense of direction.
“Your parents must be paying Catholic-school tax, Leo,” she said to him. “Why weren’t you in a Catholic school?”
“You have to take a bus. My sister Lily pukes in buses.”
“There are two Catholic schools here in the town.”
“They’re both French.”
“What of it? It isn’t too late for Lily to change. She could learn French, and she’d be with her own kind. We often see the little Chartrand girls going by, wearing their uniforms. They look so sweet, all in black.”
Leo stared at the demented lady who did not know there were Catholics and Catholics. He made a stab at saner conversation, and asked if this was an old house.
“Fairly old,” said my aunt, smiling. She did not want to make the tenant of a raw bungalow feel ill at ease.
“About a hundred years?”
“Perhaps more.”
“Did you always live here?”
“It was a summer home,” said my aunt. “But when I had Steven — I mean when Steven came to stay with me — I decided to bring him up in a house instead of an apartment.”
“We move a lot,” he said — I think with pride.
The Quales were not rich or poor enough to stay put. They kept packing and unpacking their bedsteads and their chamber pots and the family washtub. Each move was decided for the better, but they still had to pump cold water and cross a backyard to a privy. There was the same glassed-in cube of a veranda around the front door and storm porch at the back. The storm porch, a storage shed made of unpainted planks, was meant for brooms and pails, old newspapers, overshoes, rubber boots, stray scarves and mittens, jam jars without lids, hockey sticks. It was the place where the Quales shed snow from their outdoor clothes and where Leo sat down on a broken chair to take off his skates.
Sometimes when he got up in the morning, Mr. Quale would find a hobo sleeping on the floor, under a strip of carpet. “God alone keeps tramps from freezing to death,” he would say aloud, as he heated the rest of last night’s soup for the man. No one was ever turned away: the magic of retribution could transform any workingman into a vagrant. While the stranger drank his soup, Mr. Quale pretended to sort newspapers, so he wouldn’t make off with the bowl. If Lily came out, with her nightgown stuffed inside her woollen leggings, and her coat around her shoulders, on her way to the privy, Mr. Quale would order her back to her room until the man had disappeared. Sitting on the edge of her bed, she could hear them exchanging neutral opinions about good and bad times. The only thing Mr. Quale ever offered, other than soup, was a pair of old skates that hung by their tied laces from a rusty nail.
“Can you use these skates?” he would ask.
“I don’t think so. Thanks all the same.”
In every Châtelroux household there were skates that seemed to have arrived on their own, and that no one could wear. Ours were attached to the lock of a shutter. Every so often my aunt unhooked the skates and examined them. “Steven, are you sure they aren’t yours?”
“They’re miles too big.”
“Well, they certainly don’t belong to me.”
“Somebody must have left them behind.”
“I suppose so. I wish he’d come and take them back.”
She tried to fob them off on Leo. He took one look and said, “Gurruls’.”
“Girls’ skates, Leo? Are you sure? Perhaps your mother could try wearing them, or Lily. Lily would have to grow into them, of course.”
“Lily doesn’t wear black skates. Only white.”
Another day, she tried to get him to take home an assortment of piano scores, and seemed astonished to hear the Quales had no piano.
“Why not, Leo? Don’t you like music?”
“My dad likes that Gershwing,” he said, after a pause.
It is the only time I can ever remember my aunt’s seeming foolish to me. She was pink in the face, ready to lead him by the hand through Gershwin to Bach. I bring to mind her flushed forehead and the excitement in the room, tension I was still too young to be able to measure, generated by the presence of the town dunce, unteachable and dying to go to war. Mr. Coleman had been right about her reading; Leo entered her imagination on the same wave as the Depression. For a while she decided the poor were to be joined, or imitated, rather than tided over. Leo was not offended; he did not know he was poor. The Quales were better off than most of their neighbors.