Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

FOUR IN HAND

“I can't do it,“ he said at last. And he never would learn, he said. I told him it was easy, especially the four in hand. Just wrap it around and tuck it back up, under, and through. That is what I tied when I tied the tie he wore in his coffin. The tie was new and polyester. It will last forever, I thought. The department store pamphlet I have with directions for tying the different knots said that the four in hand was popularized by King Edward the VII. Think of that. I watched my father sometimes as he slipped a tied tie over his head. It ruins the ties to keep them tied. He slid the knot up the narrow end. He folded down his collar and flicked his fingers through his hair to fluff it up. He turned to me, and I straightened the knot snug at the collar. For a second, I pressed my hand flat on his starched chest beneath the two ends of the tie and made sure it all looked all right.

THE PRESIDENT'S MANSION

The story goes that the president's wife, brandishing a broom on the veranda, shooed away elements of the Iowa Cavalry sent to burn the college. The event is re-enacted each fall. The dragoons slump in their saddles, exhausted by the hard ride and the day's fighting. They watch a woman race back and forth on the porch above them like a carved figure wound up inside a cuckoo clock bursting from its doors on the hour, while their mounts, nearly blown, shit on the trampled flower beds in the formal gardens.

GORGAS HALL

They'll tell you that back then this brick building was the college commissary, and it was saved because the Yankees were hungry and thirsty after burning the rest of the college. Today, it's used mainly as a venue for fancy weddings where the young women in the bridal parties wear the antique hoopskirts and crinolines of the time before the war. Around back, next to the ongoing archaeological excavation, the wood privy is still intact, or has been reconstructed exactly, and the students working the site watch as a bride fits herself and her organdy train into the tiny neoclassical house beneath the magnolia.

THE OLD OBSERVATORY

That night, the flames from the college still burning brightly made any star in the sky impossible to see. The guidon bearer, bivouacked there, curried his horse beneath the cracked copper dome where the telescope, long before scrapped and melted for its metal, once stood. Even then, the college kept a little museum of curiosities there. The corporal ended up claiming as contraband a shard of iron like a chunk of grapeshot shrapnel that had, one night before the war, fallen from a very starry sky, striking a house in Pickens County and lodging, finally, in the headboard of the owner's bed while the owner and his wife lay there staring up at the ceiling.

THE LITTLE ROUND HOUSE

Legend has it that this Gothic octagon was the only building of any military value at the college. It was built as a guardhouse and lookout and seems, considering the destruction, to have failed miserably in both those roles. The federal troops used it as a surgery where today, still, a hand-lettered sign indicates the bloodstains of a half dozen or so hurried amputations. From the roof, the signal corps tethered one of their new balloons, which floated above the smoldering ground for weeks, its observer gazing over the green horizon for relief or reinforcements which, in both cases, failed to materialize.

THE WADSWORTH-LONGFELLOW HOUSE

Portland, Maine

1.

This most historic house in the State was built in 1785 by Major General Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of the famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who spent much of his life here.

2.

The Boy's Room was occupied by all the Longfellow boys at various times. Here the Poet wrote his first poem. Here also is the old trundle bed and the scarred school desk.

3.

The Rainy Day Room. Its chief interest is in the old desk on which the Poet wrote, in 1841, “The Rainy Day.“ “It rains, and the wind is never weary.“

4.

The Guest Room of the house contains the four-poster bed and rocking chairs of the General's wife, Elizabeth. To this room the Poet brought his bride, and here, later, the Poet's father died.

A

That year, Mr. Clark taught four sections of high school algebra. The classes met the first four periods of the day, finishing up before we juniors, who took the course, went to lunch in the basement cafeteria. Pretty early in the semester we noticed Mr. Clark, who is dead now, had developed a persistent and pervasive habit of speech.

Some of us were also taking speech and debate. The teacher there, Mr. Schultz, would have us do what he called a clapping speech. The clapping speech was meant to illuminate the little things we all say and do without thinking. Like saying “um“ or “you know“ or looking up at the ceiling when you are trying to think of the next word or licking your lips during the pauses between words in your prepared text. Mr. Schultz listened to us give a speech — mine was on “Harvesting the Riches of the Sea“—and while you were talking, he picked out a particular tic you were repeating — mine was fiddling with a shirt button, I think. And then he clapped his hands together, startlingly loud. You'd jump, but you would have to go on giving your speech, all the time trying to figure out what it was you were doing.

Mr. Clark said “for it“ at the end of his sentences. He did it so many times that you would be clapping all the time if he was giving a clapping speech. He didn't seem to notice. The “for it“ was kind of a vestigial phrase. “This is what you would do for it.“ It got worse as the semester wore on, to the point where he would chalk out an equation on the board, turn back to the class, and say simply “for it,“ pointing at the conclusion, the punctuation of some sentence he was speaking to himself. And then he began saying “for it, for it,“ sending my classmates, who had begun counting the number of for its, into fits of laughter. “Hey, what's so funny, for it?“ he asked. It was something. He retired the next year.

B

All the classes were driven to distraction by this. Everyone was keeping track. We would compare figures at lunch. Mark Maxwell organized the effort and designated an official counter for each class. At lunch each day, he posted the final tally on the cafeteria bulletin board — the aggregate numbers, the total daily accumulation. He kept running charts, the bars of the graphs in different colors, of the trends and averages, the correlation with the days of the week and the weather. There was a special category for the double for it and a place for a triple for it that never did come.

Mr. Clark commented often on our attentiveness. We hung on to his every word. We waited through his long string of explanations and proofs about squares and their roots to get to the periodic moment where he would conclude with a for it. We watched the scorekeeper in our class make another hash mark in his notebook. We looked for patterns at lunch. Did the frequency diminish over time? Increase? Some tried to cook the books, asking questions about the material designed to have Mr. Clark reflect meditatively. This made it all the more likely he would utter the formula.

X

Mr. Clark gave an assignment to create our own quadratic equations. We all used i and t as variables. At the board, Mr. Clark reduced and canceled our redundant integers, our camouflage of multiples. He drew the final = and solved for x . The answer was always the same: x=4it . He tapped the chalk on the board a couple of times, dotting the i , and turned to us triumphantly, “The solution is four eye tee , for it.“ We applauded.