“Oh for crying out loud,” she said finally. “That’s enough.” She could feel cool dots of sweat on her forehead. A warm weakness spread over her limbs like a balm.
“It’s true, I swear, Mrs. Avery.”
“Mrs. Belou!” several of them said.
“It’s utter nonsense. Let’s move on. Why does Tess claim they live on a blighted star?”
The clock spooled out its remaining minutes as she led them through the thicket of their own language, through Tess’s first recorded day and into the dawn of the next when, delivering the load of beehives her drunken father could not, she falls asleep while driving the cart and kills the family’s only horse.
The bell reverberated at their feet. Vida marveled at how easily they shut their books, stuffed them brutally back into their bags, their minds having moved on to the algebra test or a crush in the hallway or an urge for a particular candy bar inside the vending machine. Vida bid them good-bye from her perch on the desk, unable to dismiss the image of the girl in the narrow lane beside the family horse, trying to stem with her hand the strong stream of blood spurting from its chest. She had always balked at Hardy’s heavy hand, the way he put Tess on a conveyor belt of tightly orchestrated events that led to her destruction. But Vida could not find that resistance now. Hardy had all but disappeared, leaving this inexperienced girl to carry on alone.
Peter left without a glance, in a cluster of boys, their voices like the low grunts of large animals, their laugh on the stairs sharp and sinister. Then they were gone, and silence, having been kept at bay for forty minutes, rushed back in.
As she turned to erase the board for the next class, she was aware of the thoroughly irrational hope that this time it would turn out differently for Tess. When she reread tomorrow’s forty pages, Tess might not meet Alec the fake d’Urberville, or fall asleep in the bed of leaves he gathered for her, or allow him to lie beside her. And in a week or so, perhaps Angel Clare would not mind about her past, would not reject her for so long with such dire consequences.
Her seniors came in, the boys with their size 12 feet, the girls in their mothers’ expensive blouses, slapping down their copies of The Sun Also Rises on their desks. She was grateful for the shift to Hemingway, to Spain, to characters who would remain characters, silly drunken characters who mattered nothing to her.
Vida picked up the eraser. At eye level were the words MRS. BELOU. With one stroke, they were gone.
At break she went down the two flights of back stairs to get a cup of coffee. Once the servants’ pantry, the teachers’ lounge, with its buckling linoleum squares and wall of tin sinks, was not the coziest in the mansion. There was a couch and an end table and some desks and chairs for the math and science departments, who could easily correct their multiple-choice tests in the midst of gossip and complaint, but it needed a rug and standing lamps for real comfort, and most teachers only lingered for a few minutes to read their mail or wait for yet another pot of coffee to brew. Today, however, the place was jammed. Faculty crowded around a card table, loading flimsy paper plates with smoked salmon, croissants, muffins, and cubes of fruit. It was the time of year, a month and a half before first-semester grades came out, that the mothers of less than stellar seniors grew frantic and tried to bribe the faculty with expensive food and a little place card in the center of the table declaring, above their carefully written names, their deep appreciation for all the teachers at Fayer.
Vida’s first impulse was to sneak down to the cafeteria kitchen, where she knew Marjorie and Olivia would have a pot on, but the smell of baked sugar sucked her in with the rest. She’d just slip in, fill up her mug, grab a muffin, and get back to her office.
“Vida Belou!” Brick Howells bellowed from the middle of the room, the great boom of his voice mostly unimpeded by the minibagel halfway down his throat. He placed his pile of food on the table, swallowed, and made for her, carrying his weight as if he were a larger, taller man. His arms reached out for her well before she was within reach. Over the years Brick had tried to fix her up with various men: his wife’s brother at a Christmas party, his college roommate at a faculty-trustee luncheon, and his freshly divorced physician at an athletic banquet. And then, a few years ago, having given up on his friends, he licked her on the neck while she was pouring rum into their Cokes in this very room during a Valentine’s dance they were chaperoning together. She’d twisted out of his grasp and said, “C’mon, Brick, you can do better than me.” He was drunk — they both were — but her words seemed to sober him and he withdrew in agreement.
But here he was now, ready to gather her up in a public, avuncular hug. Thinking fast, she clasped his hands in hers, keeping him two arms’ lengths away but preserving the facade of a strong collegial bond. Her fellow teachers cheered. Vida flushed in anger — hadn’t the applause at assembly been enough? — which they took for embarrassed thanks, prompting them to clap even louder. Heads of curious students appeared in the door’s small window.
“Stop,” Vida said, more harshly than she would scold a rambunctious class, but to no avail.
After the clapping, she was unable to escape the warm wishes, the hugs, the dreamy smiles. A new teacher, one of the many young hires this year, tossed up Vida’s unclipped hair and said, “I like it. Get married and let it all hang out.”
They had, every one of them, misunderstood her entire life. She had never yearned to marry as these people apparently thought she had. Brick Howells was hardly the only person to have attempted the fix-up. How many times had she accepted a dinner invitation from one of them, only to find in their living room some recently devastated fellow wiping his palms on his slacks? You have so much to offer, she was often told, as if she had a tray of cigarettes and candy perpetually strapped to her waist. But these setups had stopped a few years back. Vida realized now, from their relieved, astonished expressions, that they had all given up.
Her life with Peter had been enough. It had. Why had she tinkered with it? She felt incapable of piecing the events of the last five months into any fluid, comprehensible sequence.
“So, you married your fighter pilot,” Paul Gove said to her at the coffeemaker.
Men chose the strangest ways to debase each other. Tom had trained in the air force, but by the time he got to the Pacific, the Korean War had ended and after a few weeks they sent him home to resume his work with his father at Belou Clothiers. Exactly how Paul had gleaned this information about Tom was a mystery to Vida.
“I did,” she said, with far more conviction than she’d had in the past twenty-four hours. Paul always had this effect on her. His confidence with women made her defiant. In all the years they’d taught together, she’d felt like a horse he was trying to break. Her falling in love with him seemed to be his prerequisite for friendship. She had never complied, thus they had never been friends, but now he wanted to play jilted suitor, not because he had loved her, but simply because she had not loved him.
“Short courtship.” He took a sulky bite of a chocolate croissant. “You pregnant?”
It should have been funny — a woman her age having a shotgun wedding — but she couldn’t muster a small retort or even a smile, and she turned away from him with her coffee to the plate of banana muffins, her throat inexplicably twisted shut.
She felt Paul’s hand on her arm. “I wish you and Tom the very best. I really do.”
“Good God. All these best wishes. You all make me feel like I’m entering a battle armed with a feather.” She tossed a muffin onto a napkin and climbed back to her office on weakened legs, glad for this free period before another set of seniors.