Joan Hess - Dear Miss Demeanor

She then swung into a more familiar routine of club meetings, unsigned tardy slips, and illicit behavior in halls and rest between classes, all of which made her tidy little world go round.

I went to the teachers’ lounge for a shot of caffeine. As I entered, Evelyn caught me by the arm and pulled me back into the hallway. “I need your help,” she whispered. “We’re going to get Pius. The filthy slime has gone too far, and I’m going to expose his nastiness once and for all. Now that Weiss is no longer around to protect him, Pitts will get exactly what he deserves.”

It was mystifying, but certainly more interesting than Miss Dort’s announcements or the watery coffee in the lounge. Evelyn was flushed with anger; her dark eyes sparkled with an expectancy that bordered on mayhem. Once I had nodded my acquiescence to whatever she had in mind, she hurried into her classroom and returned with her student teacher. The quivering girl was told to go into the ladies room in the lounge and make a production of checking her lipstick and hair in the mirror.

“Is Pitts in the ladies room?” I asked.

“Worse. I’ll show you where the beast is-and what he’s doing.”

She led the way around the corner into the dark area of the hallway where I’d had the conversation with the Latin pedant. We entered the custodian’s door and tiptoed through a labyrinth of paper towels, murky mops and buckets, odoriferous boxes of disinfectants, and the other paraphernalia necessary to combat youthful slovenliness.

Beyond the storage mom was Pitts’s private domain, a dismal room with a chair, a coffee table, and a sagging cot covered with a tattered blanket. Yellowed pinup girls gaped over their exposed anatomies, pretending astonishment at having been snapped in such undignified poses. The calendars below were from former decades, but I supposed Pitts hadn’t noticed.

In one corner was Pitts himself He failed to notice our entrance, in that he had one eye and all of his attention glued to a hole in the wall. Evelyn glanced back at me to confirm my perspicacity as a witness, then crossed the room and tapped his shoulder.

He spun around, his lips shining moistly in the dim light. “Why, Miz West! What’re you all doing in here?”

“The more important question is: What are you doing, Mr. Pitts?”

“Nothing. Gitting ready to mop the hall like I always do on Monday morning. Then I got to repair a broken window in Mr. Weiss’s office and see about the thermostat in the girls’ gym. Don’t want those girls to get cold in them skimpy gym suits, do we?”

“Imagine all that work. Wouldn’t it be more entertaining to peek at the women teachers in the ladies room?”

“Now, Miz West,” he began in an awful whine, “I don’t know why you’d say something like that. I wouldn’t never-”

Evelyn brushed him aside with one finger and put her eye to the hole. “What a delightful view, Pitts. I’d always presumed you received your jollies smoking dope with the sophomore boys, but now I see you’ve branched out into visual amusements as well. I am going upstairs to report this to Miss Doff, the superintendent of schools, the head of custodial maintenance, the school board, and anyone else who will listen.”

“Now, Miz West-”

“You will be dismissed, Pius, and it will be a day of celebration for the entire school. A holiday, with dancing in the halls, followed by a touching ceremony in which you will be literally booted through the back door, never to be seen here again.”

“I didn’t make this hole. I jest found it and was trying to see where it went is all I was doing, Miz West. That’s the honest-to-gawd truth-I swear it.” He ducked his head and shuffled his feet in a cloud of dust. I waited to see if he actually tugged his forelock in classic obsequiousness, although it would have had to be unglued first. He settled for the expression of a basset hound put outside on a cold night.

Evelyn gave him a cold look as she joined me in the doorway. We left the room and made our way back to the hall, Pitts’s sputters and whines drifting after us like a breeze from a chicken house.

“Brava,” I murmured. It had been impressive.

She was shaking with anger, but her expression held a hint of satisfaction. “I meant every word of it. That filthy man is finished at this school and at every other school in the system. He can go clean sewers, which is what he deserves. On the other hand, I deserve a medal, a bouquet of long-stemmed roses presented by a lispy, angelic child, and a year’s sabbatical to Paris to brush up on my vocabulary.”

“When did you notice the hole?”

“This morning, but I have no idea how long it’s been there. It almost makes me ill. Not only could he watch us adjust panty hose and hike our skirts, he could probably hear every word said in the lounge when the door was ajar. Lord, I feel the need of a shower, or at least a rubdown with disinfectant.”

I was in the midst of agreeing with her when the bell rang and students exploded into the halls. I retreated to the journalism room to meet my first-period class. Said group was silent and soberly watchful as I entered the room and sat down behind the desk. It took me a moment to recall that they were freshmen- and we all knew whom the freshmen had chosen as their candidate for Weiss’s murderer.

After some deliberation, I decided to let things stand as they were, It did keep the class under control, in that they seemed to feel it necessary to watch me for signs of imminent attack upon their persons. I tossed over the roster book and leaned back to think about the murder, since I, armed with the wisdom of age and the inside track, knew the freshman class was mistaken.

I had reached no significant conclusions when the bell rang and the class galloped away. The second-period class came, milled around quietly, and left at the bell, as did I. The lounge was empty, which suited me well, and I was dozing on the mauve and green when the sound of water in the kitchenette roused me.

A Fury entered the main room, a porcelain cup and saucer in hand, and offered me a timid smile. Tessa Zuckerman had not been seen since her collapse during the distasteful events of the potluck, and Mrs. Platchett was difficult to confuse with anything except, perhaps, a bulldozer. Therefore, I deduced that it had to be Mae Bagby. And Caron swears my mental capacity is changing in inverse proportion to my age.

“How is Miss Zuckerman?” I asked. “Has she recovered?”

“She’s still in the hospital, and the doctor wants to keep her a few more days. She hasn’t been well for several years, you know, because of female problems, and her strength isn’t what it ought to be.” The Fury perched on the edge of a chair, her back rigidly erect, her knees glued together, and her ankles crossed at a proper angle. She looked dreadfully uncomfortable, especially to someone sprawled on a sofa. “We are taking up a collection to send her flowers,” she continued in a thin waver, “although you certainly wouldn’t be expected to donate anything since you hardly know her.”

“But I would be delighted,” I said. It was one of the perils of aligning oneself with any group, from secretarial pools to construction workers’ unions. Someone’s always being born, married, or buried-all of which require a financial contribution from coworkers. “Is there also a collection to send flowers for Mr. Weiss’s funeral?”

Mae Bagby turned pale, and the teacup began to rattle as though we were in the early stages of an earthquake. “Bernice is taking care of that, I’m sure. Bernice is very efficient about that sort of thing. You might inquire in the office later in the day, or wait until there is a mimeographed note. There is one almost every day during sixth period. The collection for Tessa is a more personal gesture from those of us who frequent this lounge, our little group.”