Zimmerman apparently has been waiting for him. The hall is all but empty; Zimmerman sidles from the stage entrance to the auditorium. “George.”
He knows.
“George, have you been worried about some tickets?”
“I’m not worried, it’s been explained to me. I marked them Charity in the books.”
“I thought I had spoken to you about it. Apparently I was wrong.”
“I shouldn’t have gotten the wind up. Mental confusion, is what they call it.”
“I’ve had an interesting talk with your son Peter.”
“Huh? What did the kid tell you?”
“He told me many things.”
Mim Herzog, he knows I know, the goose is cooked, it’s out in the open and can never be put back. Never ever, it’s a one-way street we’re on, ignorance is bliss. The tall teacher feels whiteness fill his body from his toes to his scalp. A weariness, a hollowness and conviction of futility beyond anything he has known before seizes him. A film too thick to be sweat makes pasty his palms and brow as his skin struggles to reject this seizure. “He didn’t mean to cause me any trouble, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue,” Caldwell tells the principal. The pain, the tireless pain, itself seems weary.
Zimmerman sees as if through a rift in clouds that Caldwell’s glimpse of Mrs. Herzog is at the bottom of his fear and his mind exults, fairly dances in the security of being on top and able to maneuver. Expertly he skims, like a butterfly teasing a field, above the surface of the dread in the knobbed drained face opposite him. “I was struck,” he says glidingly, “by Peter’s concern for you. I think he believes that teaching is too great a strain on your health.”
Here comes the ax, praise be to God for little blessings, the suspense is over. Caldwell wonders if the dismissal slip will be yellow, as it was with the telephone company. “Is that what the kid thinks, huh?”
“He may be right. He’s a perceptive boy.”
“He gets that from his mother. I wish to hell he had inherited my weak head and her beautiful body.”
“George, I’d like to speak to you frankly.”
“Shoot. That’s your job.” A wave of dizziness simultaneous with an immense restlessness overtakes the teacher; he yearns to swing his arms, twirl around, collapse on the floor and have a nap, anything but stand here and take it, take it from this smug bastard who knows it all.
Zimmerman has risen to his most masterly professional self. His sympathy, his cadences of tact, his comprehensive consideration are exquisite. His body almost aromatically exudes his right and competence to supervise. “If at any time,” he says in gentle measured syllables, “you feel unable to go on, please come to me and tell me. It would be a disservice to yourself and to your students to continue. A sabbatical could be arranged easily. You think of it as a disgrace; you shouldn’t. A year of thought and study is a very common thing for a teacher in the middle of his career. Remember, you are only fifty. The school would survive; with so many of these veterans returning, the teacher shortage is not what it was during the war.”
Dust, lint, spittle, poverty, stuck-together stuff in gutters- all the trash and chaos behind the made world pours through the rent opened by this last subtle prick. Caldwell says, “Christ, the only place I can go if I leave this school is the junkyard. I’m no good for anything else. I never was. I never studied. I never thought. I’ve always been scared to. My father studied and thought and on his deathbed he lost his religion.”
Zimmerman lifts a benevolent palm. “If my last visitation report is bothering you, remember that it is my duty to tell the truth. But I tell the truth, to quote St. Paul, in love.”
“I know that. You’ve been damn good to me these years; I don’t know why you’ve babied me along, but you have.” He bites back the urge to tell a lie, to blurt out that he didn’t see Mim Herzog coming out of his office mussed. But that would be nonsense. He did see her. He’d be God-damned if he’d beg. The least you can do is walk in front of the firing squad on your own two legs.
“You’ve received no favors,” Zimmerman says. “You’re a good teacher.” On this amazing statement Zimmerman turns and walks away, with not a word about Mim or dismissal. Caldwell can’t believe his ears. Did he miss something? He wonders if the ax fell and was so sharp he didn’t feel it, if the bullets just passed right through him like a ghost. What had Zimmerman, underneath it all, said?
The man turns back. “Oh, and George.”
Now here it comes. Cat and mouse.
“About the tickets.”
“Yeah.”
“You needn’t mention it to Phillips.” Zimmerman crookedly winks. “You know how fussy he is.”
“O.K. I got your meaning.”
Zimmerman’s office door closes, the frosted glass opaque.
Caldwell doesn’t know if it is relief or a symptom of disease that is making his kneecaps tingle and his hands feel numb. The time has arrived for him to use his legs again and they are slow to obey. His torso swims down the hall. Rounding the corner, the teacher surprises Gloria Davis the hopped-up bitch leaning against the wall allowing young Kegerise to rub his knee between her legs. With his I.Q. he ought to know better. Caldwell ignores them and pushes into the auditorium past some Olinger High grads, Jackson is one of them and he can’t recall the other’s name, standing there with their mouths open looking down at the game. Living corpses, they didn’t even have the sense to stay out once they got out. He remembers Jackson always coming to him after class whining about special projects and his love of astronomy and making his own telescope out of mailing tubes and magnifying glass lenses and now the poor bohunk was a plumber’s apprentice at 75¢ an hour and sopping it up in beer. What in hell are you supposed to do to keep them from ending like that? He shies away from these his old students, the hunch in their shoulders reminds him of the great whole skinned carcasses hung on hooks in the freezer of a big Atlantic City hotel he once worked for. Dead meat. In veering away Caldwell comes face to face with old Kenny Klagle the auxiliary cop with his white brushed hair and baffled pale eyes and tender grandmotherly smile, solemnly tricked out in a blue uniform and paid five dollars a night to be on the premises; he stands beside a bronze fire extinguisher and they are two of a kind, in an emergency both would probably just sputter. Klagle’s wife left him years ago and he never knew what hit him. Never even knew enough to drop dead.
Waste, rot, hollowness, noise, stench, death: in fleeing the many visages which this central thing wears Caldwell as if by God’s grace comes upon, over in the corner, leaning against the stacked folding chairs beside Vera Hummel, Reverend March in his clerical black and backwards collar.
“I don’t know if you know me,” Caldwell says. “My name is George Caldwell and I teach general science here in the school.”
March has to leave off laughing with Vera to take the offered hand and say, his smile pointedly patient under the curt mustache, “I don’t believe we have met, but of course I’ve heard of you and know you by sight.”
“I’m a Lutheran so I guess I’m out of your flock,” Caldwell explains. “I hope I’m not interrupting you and Vera here; the fact is I’m badly troubled in my mind.”
With a nervous glance at Vera, who has turned her head and might slip from his side, March asks, “Oh. What about?”
“Everything. The works. I can’t make it add up and I’d be grateful for your viewpoint.”
Now March’s glance travels everywhere but into the face opposite him as he looks through the crowd for some rescue from this tousled tall maniac. “Our viewpoint does not essentially differ from the Lutheran,” he says. “It’s my hope that someday all the children of the Reformation will be reunited.”