"Offhand," he said, "can you recall anybody I might know who's signed up? It would give me confidence if I knew somebody in the class."
"I'd have to look in my book," she said. "Do you want to step inside and wait while I look?"
"Surely," he said.
Mrs. Keitelbein passed down the corridor, into the room at the end. When she did not reappear he followed.
The size of the room surprised him; it was a great drafty empty auditorium-like place, with a fireplace that had been converted to a gas heater, an overhead chandelier, chairs pushed together in a group at one end, and a number of yellow-painted doors on one side and high wide windows on the other. At a bookshelf, Mrs. Keitelbein stood holding a ledger, the kind bookkeepers usually used.
"I can't find it," she said disarmingly, closing the ledger. "I have it written down, but in all the confusion--" She gestured at the disorderly room. "We're trying to get it set up for the first meeting. Chairs, for instance. We're short on chairs. And we need a blackboard... but the grammar school has promised us one." Suddenly she caught hold of his arm. "Listen, Mr. Gumm," she said. "There's a heavy oak desk I want to get upstairs from the basement. I've been trying to get somebody all day long to come in and help Walter -- my son -- get it upstairs. Do you think you could take one end? Walter thinks that two men could get it up here in a few minutes. I tried to lift one end, but I couldn't."
"I'd be glad to," he said. He took off his coat and laid it over the back of a chair.
A gangling, grinning teen-ager ambled into the room; he wore a white cheer-leader sweater, blue jeans, and shiny black oxfords. "Hi," he said shyly.
After she had introduced them, Mrs. Keitelbein herded them down a flight of dishearteningly steep, narrow stairs, to a basement of damp concrete and exposed wiring, empty fruit jars matted with cobwebs, discarded furniture and mattresses, and an old-fashioned washtub.
The oak desk had been dragged almost to the stairs.
"It's a wonderful old desk," Mrs. Keitelbein said, hovering critically about. "I want to sit at it when I'm not at the blackboard. This was my father's desk -- Walter's grandfather."
Walter said, in a croaking tenor voice, "It weighs around one-fifty. Pretty evenly distributed, except the back's heavier, I think. We can probably tip it, so we can clear the overhead. We can get our hands under it okay; I'll get hold first with my back to it, and then when I get my end up, you can get your hands under it. Okay?" He already had knelt down at his end, reaching behind him to take hold. "Then when it's up, I'll get my grip."
From his years of active military life, Ragle prided himself on his physical agility. But by the time he had raised his end of the desk waist-high, he was red-faced and panting. The desk swayed as Walter got his grip. At once Walter set off for the stairs; the desk twisted in Ragle's hands as Walter climbed the stairs.
Three times they had to set the desk down on the stairs, once for Ragle to rest, twice because the desk failed to clear the top and had to be taken in a different grip. At last they had it up and into the big drafty room; with a thump the desk dropped from their stiff fingers, and that was that.
"I certainly do appreciate your kindness," Mrs. Keitelbein said, emerging from the basement and switching off the stairlight. "I hope you didn't hurt yourself or anything. It's heavier than I thought."
Her son was contemplating him with the same shyness as before. "You're the Mr. Gumm who's the contest winner?" he asked.
"Yes," Ragle said.
The boy's kindly face clouded over with embarrassment. "Maybe I shouldn't ask you this, but I always wanted to ask some guy who wins a lot of money in a contest... do you think of it as luck, or do you think of it like earning a big fee, the way a lawyer gets a big fee if he's got something on the ball no other lawyer has? Or like some old painters whose paintings are worth millions."
"It's a lot of hard work," Ragle said. "That's how I think of it. I put in eight to ten hours a day."
The boy nodded. "Oh yeah. I see what you mean."
"How did you get started?" Mrs. Keitelbein asked him.
Ragle said, "I don't know. I saw it in the paper and I sent in an entry. That was close to three years ago. I just drifted into it. My entries won right from the start."
"Mine didn't," Walter said. "I never won once; I entered around fifteen times."
Mrs. Keitelbein said, "Mr. Gumm, before you go I have something I want to give you. You wait here." She hurried off into a side room. "For helping."
He thought, Probably a cookie or two.
But when she returned she had a brightly-colored decal. "For your car," she said, holding it out to him. "It goes on the back window. A CD sticker; you dip it in warm water, and then the paper slides off and you slide the emblem on the car window." She beamed at him.
"I don't currently have a car," he said.
Her face showed dismay. "Oh," she said.
With a braying, but good-natured, laugh, Walter said, "Hey, maybe he could paste it onto the back of his coat."
"I'm so sorry," Mrs. Keitelbein said, in confusion. "Well, thank you anyhow; I wish I could reward you, but I can't think how. I'll try to make the classes as interesting as I can; how's that?"
"Swell," he said. Picking up his coat he moved toward the hall. "I have to be going," he said. "I'll see you Tuesday, then. At two."
In a corner of the room, on a window seat, somebody had built a model of some sort. Ragle stopped to inspect it.
"We'll be using that," Mrs. Keitelbein said.
"What is it?" he said. It appeared to be a representation of a military fort: a hollow square in which tiny soldiers could be viewed at their duties. The colors were greenish brown and gray. Touching the miniature gun-barrel that stuck up from the top of it, he discovered that it was carved wood. "Quite real," he said.
Walter said, "We built a bunch of those. The earlier classes, I mean. CD classes last year, when we lived in Cleveland. Mom brought them along; I guess nobody else wanted them." He laughed his braying laugh again. It was more nervous than unkind.
"That's a replica of a Mormon fort," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "I'll be darned," Ragle said. "I'm interested in this. You know, I was in World War Two; I was over in the Pacific."
"I dimly remember reading that about you," Mrs. Keitelbein said. "You being such a celebrity... every once in a while I come across a little article about you in one of the magazines. Don't you hold some sort of record as the longest contest winner of any of the newspaper or TV contests?"
"I suppose so," he said.
Walter said, "Did you see heavy fighting in the Pacific?"
"No," he said candidly. "Another fellow and I were stuck on a hunk of dirt with a few palm trees and a corrugated-iron shack and a radio transmitter and weather-measuring instruments. He measured the weather and I transmitted the information to a Navy installation a couple hundred miles to the south of us. That took about an hour a day. The rest of the day I lay around trying to figure out the weather. I used to try to predict what it would be like. That wasn't our job; all we did was send them the readings and they did the predicting. But I got pretty good. I could look up at the sky and that plus the readings gave me enough to go on, so my guesses worked out more times than not."