"Rapio, rapere, rapui, raptum,"said Mr. Erskine. "‘To seize and carry off.' The English wordrapture comes from the same root. Decline."Smack went the ruler.
We learned. We did learn, in a spirit of vengefulness: we would give Mr. Erskine no excuses. There was nothing he wanted more than to get a foot on each of our necks-well, he would be denied the pleasure, if possible. What we really learned from him was how to cheat. It was difficult to fake the mathematics, but we spent many hours in the late afternoons cribbing up our translations of Ovid from a couple of books in Grandfather's library-old translations by eminent Victorians, with small print and complicated vocabularies. We would get the sense of the passage from these books, then substitute other, simpler words, and add a few mistakes, to make it look as if we'd done it ourselves. Whatever we did, though, Mr. Erskine would slash up our translations with his red pencil and write savage comments in the margins. We didn't learn very much Latin, but we learned a great deal about forgery. We also learned how to make our faces blank and stiff, as if they'd been starched. It was best not to react to Mr. Erskine in any visible way, especially not by flinching.
For a while Laura became alert to Mr. Erskine, but physical pain-her own pain, that is-did not have much of a hold over her. Her attention would wander away, even when he was shouting. He had such a limited range. She would gaze at the wallpaper-a design of rosebuds and ribbons-or out the window. She developed the ability to subtract herself in the blink of an eye-one minute she'd be focused on you, the next she'd be elsewhere. Or rather you would be elsewhere: she'd dismiss you, as if she'd waved an invisible wand; as if it was you yourself who'd been made to vanish.
Mr. Erskine could not stand being negated in this fashion. He took to shaking her-to snap her out of it, he said. You're not the Sleeping Beauty, he would yell. Sometimes he threw her against the wall, or shook her with his hands around her neck. When he shook her she'd close her eyes and go limp, which incensed him further. At first I tried to intervene, but it did no good. I would simply be pushed aside with one swipe of his tweedy, malodorous arm.
"Don't annoy him," I said to Laura.
"It doesn't matter whether I annoy him or not," said Laura. "Anyway, he's not annoyed. He only wants to put his hand up my blouse."
"I've never seen him do that," I said. "Why would he?"
"He does it when you're not looking," said Laura. "Or under my skirt. What he likes is panties." She said it so calmly I thought she must have made it up, or misunderstood. Misunderstood Mr. Erskine's hands, their intentions. What she'd described was so implausible. It didn't seem to me like the sort of thing a grown-up man would do, or be interested in doing at all, because wasn't Laura only a little girl?
"Shouldn't we tell Reenie?" I asked tentatively.
"She might not believe me," said Laura. "You don't."
But Reenie did believe her, or she elected to believe her, and that was the end of Mr. Erskine. She knew better than to take him on in single combat: he would just accuse Laura of telling dirty lies, and then things would be worse than ever. Four days later she marched into Father's office at the button factory with a handful of contraband photographs. They weren't the sort of thing that would raise more than an eyebrow today, but they were scandalous then-women in black stockings with pudding-shaped breasts spilling out over their gigantic brassi ¨res, the same women with nothing on at all, in contorted, splay-legged positions. She said she'd found them under Mr. Erskine's bed when she'd been sweeping out his room, and was this the sort of man who ought to be trusted with Captain Chase's young daughters?
There was an interested audience, which included a group of factory workers and Father's lawyer and, incidentally, Reenie's future husband, Ron Hincks. The sight of Reenie, her dimpled cheeks flushed, her eyes blazing like an avenging Fury's, the black snail of her hair coming unpinned, brandishing a clutch of huge-boobed, bushy-tailed, bare-naked women, was too much for him. Mentally he fell on his knees before her, and from that day on he began his pursuit of her, which was in the end successful. But that is another story.
If there was one thing Port Ticonderoga would not stand for, said Father's lawyer in an advisory tone, it was this kind of smut in the hands of the teachers of innocent youth. Father realised he could not keep Mr. Erskine in the house after that without being considered an ogre.
(I have long suspected Reenie of having got hold of the photographs herself, from the brother who was in the magazine distribution business, and who could easily have managed it. I suspect Mr. Erskine was guiltless in respect of these photographs. If anything, his tastes ran to children, not to large brassieres. But by that time he could not expect fair play from Reenie.)
Mr. Erskine departed, protesting his innocence-indignant, but also shaken. Laura said that her prayers had been answered. She said she'd prayed to have Mr. Erskine expelled from our house, and that God had heard her. Reenie, she said, had been doing His will, filthy pictures and all. I wondered what God thought of that, supposing He existed-a thing I increasingly doubted.
Laura, on the other hand, had taken to religion in a serious way during Mr. Erskine's tenure: she was still frightened of God, but forced to choose between one irascible, unpredictable tyrant and another, she'd chosen the one that was bigger, and also further away.
Once the choice had been made she took it to extremes, as she took everything. "I'm going to become a nun," she announced placidly, while we were eating our lunchtime sandwiches at the kitchen table.
"You can't," said Reenie. "They wouldn't have you. You're not a Catholic."
"I could become one," said Laura. "I could join up."
"Well," said Reenie, "you'll have to cut off your hair. Underneath those veils of theirs, a nun is bald as an egg."
This was a shrewd move of Reenie's. Laura hadn't known about that. If she had one vanity, it was her hair. "Why do they?" she said.
"They think God wants them to. They think God wants them to offer up their hair to him, which just goes to show how ignorant they are. What would he want with it?" said Reenie. "The idea! All that hair!"
"What do they do with the hair?" said Laura. "Once it's been cut off."
Reenie was snapping beans: snap, snap, snap. "It gets turned into wigs, for, rich women," she said. She didn't miss a beat, but I knew this was a fib, like her earlier stories about babies being made from dough. "Snooty-nosed rich women. You wouldn't want to see your lovely hair walking around on someone else's big fat mucky-muck head."
Laura gave up the idea of being a nun, or so it seemed; but who could tell what she might fall for next? She had a heightened capacity for belief. She left herself open, she entrusted herself, she gave herself over, she put herself at the mercy. A little incredulity would have been a first line of defence.
Several years had now gone by-wasted, as it were, on Mr. Erskine. Though I shouldn't saywasted: I'd learned many things from him, although not always the things he'd set out to teach. In addition to lying and cheating, I'd learned half-concealed insolence and silent resistance. I'd learned that revenge is a dish best eaten cold. I'd learned not to get caught.
Meanwhile the Depression had set in. Father didn't lose much in the Crash, but he lost some. He also lost his margin of error. He ought to have shut down the factories in response to lessened demand; he ought to have banked his money-hoarded it, as others in his position were doing. That would have been the sensible thing. But he didn't do that. He couldn't bear to. He couldn't bear to throw his men out of work. He owed them allegiance, these men of his. Never mind that some of them were women.