He wasn't listening. He was looming above me, the years between us swiftly reversed, while I sat, an unsure school girl, reciting a tentative lesson. My words never reached him; I could almost hear them drop, one by one, like so many pebbles against a closed window.
You know how you move under water, heavy and graceful? By this time I was standing. I had somehow got up. I remember how carefully I had placed the Delaney Book on the arm-desk of the chair, balancing it so that it should not spill out all those name cards. Disarmed now, empty-handed, I was standing before him. I became aware of the deserted building enclosing us, the empty room, the empty chairs, silent and abandoned as grave-stones; of scraps of paper, valueless now, scattered on the floor; of books leaning, top-heavy with words, on the splintered shelf; of papers on my desk, bulging with words. Slowly I began to step back; slowly he moved towards me, relentless as a shadow.
After a while I felt the wall at my back; there was no further place to go. I heard my words running down like a defective phonograph record, until there was silence. The drilling on the street had stopped again. He was very close. I looked at him, and with a mild shock of recognition, I saw him, as if I had known him only through photographs before, and now saw him in person. Yes, of course.
Someplace a car honked. I think he made a move towards me. Maybe not. I looked at him, and there were no words left with which to ward off feeling.
I reached out blindly. I touched his face. There were no words for the terrible tenderness. I wanted to comfort him, as if he were a child, for everything that had been done to him. I wanted to say, like Persephone in helclass="underline" My dear, my dearIt is not so dreadful here. I wanted to tell him, I wanted him to know. There were no words for this, only my hands on his face.
I don't know how long we stood, motionless, enfolded in silence. One moment his face was hard against my hands, the next, it seemed to shatter at my touch. He looked as if he were about to wrench himself away, but he didn't. Fists clenched, he watched me like a boxer poised to spring.
His eyes read me like Braille. This was the moment he had been testing me for. What was he asking me to do? Undo?
He had come for a purpose. He thought (he made himself think) it was my purpose too. It was the only way he knew to human closeness. It was also the way to diminish me, to punish.
His life outside this room was alien to me. I could not imagine or even guess it. Yet I knew him. His face told me all. The silent struggle, the clash of feeling on feeling: contempt and longing, helplessness and rage. All that he knew of good. The need to cling and to repel, to kneel and to defile.
He waited for a sign.
What could I say to show him that to survive, love was as strong as hate, and could be trusted? His world had taught him well, long before me.
Only my touch could speak. I care, it said, I do care.
His eyes grew hard. His lips moved.
"Damn you to hell"he turned and bolted out of the room. The door opened and closed behind him, and there was the drilling on the street, loud now, and the desk and the papers and time. For some reason, I looked at my watch.
Was he crying?
If he was, he will never forgive me.
But it was I who cried. I sat down at my desk; I put my head on my arms on the desk, and I cried.
Why?
The question and answer period will come later; multiple choice, True or False, my own "probing question"; and the explanations, the interpretations, the distortions I will inevitably make.
For already, hours later, I think that what I felt for Ferone, and what I am feeling now, and what I am putting down on this paper, and what you will see when you read itare all quite different.
"What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer. But jesting Sylvia will stay and jest the truth away. I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance. And distance, for all my apparent involvement, is what I had kept between myself and my students. Like Paul's lampoons, like Lou's ha-ha's, it insulated me; it kept me safe from feeling.
I will probably, in my very next letter, or very next paragraphsee once again "the funny sides"; I may allow memory to turn flippant. But for a moment, or hour, or whatever measure of time it takes to grow, we reached each other, Ferone and I, person to person.
For love is growth. It is the ultimate commitment. It imposes obligations; it risks pain. Love is what I wanted from all, from A (Allen) to W (Wolzow) in my Delaney Book; but I had never really loved back. Oh, love me, love me back! they all criedAlice and Vivian, all of them. And maybe now I can.
Ferone taught me. Our roles became reversed. He had reached me; I was the one who needed him, to make me feel.
What to do with it? I had once seen a girl's memo book on the Lost & Found shelf in the office, and on the covera warning in crayon: Do Not Touch!!! Or Look!!! Personal! Private! Penalty! The penalty for touching is too great. The burden of love for all the Ferones waiting for me in the classroom is not to be borne. Better by far to stand at a lectern and read my neat notes at Willowdale.
I am tired.
I had set out to tell you exactly what happened. But since I am the one writing this, how do I know what in my telling I am selecting, omitting, emphasizing; what unconscious editing I am doing? Why was I more interested in the one black sheep (I use Ferone's own clich) than in all the white lambs in my care? Why did I (in my red suit) call him a child? Am I, by asking questions, distorting something pure? The heart has its reasons; it's the mind that's suspect.
You've read my letters from the very beginning, from the first day of school. How callow I must have been, how impatient and intolerant and naive and remote and gullible and sure of myself. And how mistaken.
It is almost morning; the alarm is set for 6:30. I have been writing and writing. "Words are all we have," I once said. Wrong again. Whatever the name for love, and there are many, it can be as silent as an unspoken word, as simple as a touch.
I must try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is our topsy-turvy day, when teachers turn into kids, kids into teachers. A fitting climax.
All my love,
Syl
P. S. Did you know that 50% of the time I've been barking up all the wrong trees?
S.
52. Teacher for a Day Day
INTRASCHOOL COMMUNICATION
FROM: H. Pastorfield
TO: S. Barrett
Dear Sylvia
Isn't this fun?
Have you got a Teacher for a Day kid this period? I get a bang out of turning the classes over to the kids and pretending I can't spell cat!
Would you like to join the party in my room? Bring your kids! Wer'e having a "Tables Are Turned" ball!
Henrietta
INTRASCHOOL COMMUNICATION
FROM: 508
TO: 304
Dear Syl
How are you doing? You looked awful this morning! Don't let the tumult in the halls rattle you. The wild giggles, the dunce caps, the screams for late passes are mostly high spirits.
But some of it is malice. This is the day for vengeance. I understand Loomis got a zero in Math. One of his kids had spent weeks laying the foundation: a tough question he got from someone in Graduate Math Dept. at Berkeley.