Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

I leaned over to John and whispered,

“It’s your turn, John. Go on. Go on.”

He went lower in his seat and began to buzz his lips against his thumbs, terrified of rising before a crowd of small strangers, who were now beginning to nudge each other and whisper excitedly at the diversion. I heard someone whisper, “John, John, the dog-faced one,” and I could not tell whether John heard it. But, a professional, Miss Mendtzy heard it. She smartly whacked her ruler on the flat of her desk. It was like a nice pistol shot. Silence fell.

She put on her face a look that we all knew well at home — that look of aloof, pained regret at unseemly behavior.

“I must say I am surprised,” she said quietly, “that some of us are not polite enough to sit silently when we see someone in a fit of shyness. Some of the finest people I know are shy at times. I have been told that our bishop, that humble, great man, is shy himself when he has to meet people personally. Now I am going down from my platform and down the aisle and” — she glanced at her seating plan of the classroom — “I am going to bring John Burley up here myself as my guest and help him over his shyness, and the only way to do that is by helping him to do the same things everybody else has done. So.”

She went to John and took his hand and led him to the platform and stood him where each of us had stood, facing her, in profile to the rest of the room. Speaking as though he had just come there by his own will, she said,

“Good morning, John. I am Miss Mendtzy. We are pleased that you are with us,” first giving us a sidelong glare to command our agreement, and then, like a lady, holding forth her hand to John, with a slightly arched wrist and drooping fingers.

John put his hands behind him and buzzed his lips and looked out the window.

“John?”

“John, John, the dog-faced one,” again said an unplaceable voice in the rear of the classroom, softly but distinctly.

“Who said that!” demanded Miss Mendtzy, going pink and trembling until her lenses shimmered. The very first day of school, she seemed to say, and already there was an unfortunate incident. “I simply will not have bad manners in my room, and I simply will not have one of my boys treated like this. Whoever said that is to stand up and apologize instantly. I think I know who it was” — but clearly she did not — “and if he apologizes now and promises never, never to do such a rude thing again, we shall all be friends again as we want to be. Well? I am waiting.”

The silence and the tension grew and grew.

John stood with head hanging. I saw his hands twitching behind his back. He was trying not to clasp them over himself in front.

“One more minute,” declared Miss Mendtzy, “and then I will do something you will all be very sorry for.”

Silence, but for a clock ticking on the wall above her blackboard.

John could not bear it. Moving as fast as a cat, he threw himself forward to Miss Mendtzy’s desk and swept her vase of flowers to the floor where it shattered and spilled.

All the boys broke into hoots and pounded their hinged desktops upon their desks, making such a clamor that in a moment the door was majestically opened and the principal, always called Madame de St. Etienne, who came from nobility in France, heavily entered the room. Even as she arrived, someone in the rear of the room, carried on by the momentum of events, called out, “Crazy, lazy, John’s a daisy.”

The principal was a monument of authority. Above her heavy pink face with its ice-blue eyes rose a silvery pompadour like a wave breaking back from a headland. Her bosom was immense in her starched shirtwaist. Over it she wore a long gold chain which fell like a maiden waterfall into space below her bust and ended in a loop at her waist where she tucked a large gold watch. Her dark skirt went straight down in front, for she had to lean continuously forward, we thought, if the vast weight and size behind her were not to topple her over backward.

She now glared at Miss Mendtzy with frigid reproach at the breach of discipline in her classroom loud enough to be heard down the hall, and then faced us all, saying in a voice like pieces of broken glass scraped together at the edges,

“Children, you will rise when the principal enters the classroom.”

She clapped her hands once and we rose, scared and ashamed.

“Now who is this?” she demanded, turning to the tableau at the teacher’s platform.

“This is John Burley, Madame,” replied Miss Mendtzy, and got no further, for John, seeing the open door, bolted for the hall and freedom.

Madame de St. Etienne gave another queenly, destructive look at Miss Mendtzy, and said,

“Pray continue with the exercises, Miss Mendtzy.”

She then left the room, moving as though on silent casters, for her skirt swept the floor all about her short, light steps, amazing in a woman so heavy and so enraged.

Burning with mortification, Miss Mendtzy began our first lesson, which was an exercise in neatness — the care of our pencil boxes and schoolbooks. There was a happy material interest in this, for the pencils were all new and smelled of cedar, and we went in turn to sharpen them at the teacher’s desk. Our erasers — promises of foreordained smudges of error — showed a tiny diamondlike glisten if we held them in a certain way to the light of the window. If we chewed upon them, little gritty particles deliciously repelled our teeth. Our schoolbooks cracked sweetly when we opened them, and the large, clear, black type on the pages held mystery and invitation. We became absorbed in toys which were suddenly now something more than toys, and our cheeks grew hot, and we were happy, and we forgot to want to go to the bathroom. I was hardly aware of it when the door opened again before Madame de St. Etienne. Late, but earnestly, we scrambled to our feet, as she said,

“Which is Richard—?” giving my full name.

“Pray come with me, Richard,” she ordered, ignoring Miss Mendtzy entirely. “Bring your boxes and books.”

A stutter of conjecture went along the aisles at this, which Madame de St. Etienne, gliding on her way to the door, suppressed by pausing and staring above the heads of everyone as though she could not believe her ears. Quiet fell, and in quiet, with my heart beating, I followed her out to the hallway. She shut the door and turned me with a finger to walk ahead of her to her office at the entranceway inside the pillared portico. I wanted to ask what I had done to be singled out for her notice, which could only, I thought, lead to punishment.

But it appeared that she had enlisted me as an assistant. In her office, John was waiting, under guard of the principal’s secretary. He was sitting on a cane chair holding a glass of water, half full.

“Finish it, John,” commanded Madame.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Hot water to drink is the best thing for anyone who is upset,” she answered. “It is the remedy we always give. Finish it.”

Raising a humble wail, he drank the rest of the hot water, spilling much of it down on his chin, his Windsor tie, his starched collar.

“You are John’s friend?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“Who are his other friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has he none, then?”

“I don’t think so.”

John watched my face, then the principal’s, turning his head with jerky interest and rubbing his furry hair with his knuckles in pleasure at being the subject of interest.

“You brought him to school?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“And you will take him home?”

“Yes, Madame. After school.”

“I have spoken on the telephone with his mother, to arrange for him to go home. She prefers not to have him come home until the end of school after lunch. Until then, I will ask you to stay here in my office with him. You will both eat your lunches here and I will see that you are not disturbed. Tomorrow you will be able to return to your classroom.”