Lily King: The English Teacher

They passed through the stone pillars, Scientia carved into one and In Perpetuum into the other, and followed the slow-moving line of station wagons up the hill. She hadn’t been part of this carpool convergence for sixteen years. She glanced over the girls’ field to their old house and the path that ran across a ridge to the school. When he was younger, Peter had a small red canvas backpack that was never filled with more than a pencil and a few exercise sheets. He’d run ahead of her on that path to school, the nearly empty backpack bobbing behind him, stopping only to scoop up something from the ground and drop it into her hand, the soft brown ball of a frightened caterpillar or a long, sticky worm.

There was no ancestral tug as the mansion came into view. There never was. The oversized house, with its bays, turrets, and copper-plated mansard roof, was a school to her, just as it was to everyone else creeping up the long driveway this morning.

Vida pulled into her faculty spot beside the cafeteria. Through one window, a few students from Peter’s class hunched over their notes, cramming for something, and through another Marjorie and Olivia in their white uniforms and nurses’ shoes were already setting up for the lower school snack.

They sat for a moment in the stilled car.

“You have a test today?” she asked.

“Quiz.”

“History?”

“Yeah.” He was poised to bolt. He didn’t like to be seen walking into school with her anymore.

She could tell he was worried, but she couldn’t brush his bangs out of his eyes or lift his chin toward her. She couldn’t do that anymore, if she ever had. He was changing so fast and she was too scared to look at him for any length of time. “Did you get a chance to study last night?” she said gently.

He gave some sort of stifled snort through his nose and shook his head. It was rude — the snort, the aversion of his eyes, the lack of words. She wasn’t used to rudeness in him. But before she could correct him, he got out and slumped away around the building to the front entrance where he would blend in with the rest.

How dare he be disillusioned already. She slid her bookbag from the backseat onto her lap and shoved open her door. Screw it if he didn’t like it. He’d gotten what he asked for. Welcome to life and all its shitty little tricks. Her irritation at him rose, chafing hard against her affection. This was the nameless emotion she felt most in life, this abrasion of love meeting anger.

She walked up the scrubby knoll to the basement entrance, her tight fists bared to the cold, her head leading her body like a sledgehammer. She was a hard woman. Yet Tom said last summer, when he first kissed her, that she was like a heron, with her long neck and delicate bones.

In the vestibule outside the auditorium there was a bronze bust of her grandfather. No delicate man, he. His wild wiry eyebrows, suspended at the edge of his enormous brow, and his thick, nearly detached jaw belonged in a natural history museum. He had the childlike impatience of an old man who did not want to sit for a sculptor, who did not care about his house being transformed into a school, despite all the undeserved credit bestowed upon him. He’d been forced to sell because his only child, Vida’s mother, had married a dreamer who’d whistled through the family’s money within a decade. Though she had no memories of ever having visited this house, she did remember him, a crooked branch of a man, speechless from strokes, tufts of white hair growing from the tops of his ears. He was the one who named her. He hadn’t spoken for months but when her mother placed her in his arms for the first time, saying, “It’s baby Vivian, Grandy,” he smiled so wide her mother said she heard his face crack, and he said eloquently, seemingly proficient in a language no one had known he knew, “No, mi amor, su nombre es Vida.” Another crack, then “Life!” That was his final word, though it took him several more years and the loss of his house to die. When Vida left Texas all those years later, without a map or a plan, nothing surprised her more than finding herself in Fayer, at the enormous front door of her grandfather’s house. No one had told her it had become a school. Within a few weeks she had a job as a substitute English teacher, and by the next fall she’d been given a full-time contract and the gardener’s cottage.

Though she’d requested high school, they started her with the sixth grade and she’d had to push her way up a grade a year until she’d secured herself a spot in the English department of the upper school. Since then, she’d turned down every promotion offered to her: English chair three times, dean of students, dean of faculty, curriculum director, and assistant head of school. The only thing Fayer Academy had offered her that she’d accepted, above and beyond a teaching contract each year, was the Hutchinson Prize, chosen and awarded at graduation by the senior class for superior teaching, which she’d received four times, most recently last June. She didn’t know then, as she rose to accept another sparkling silver bowl, that a man named Tom Belou was seated in the seventeenth row. What she did know is that she was a fool at the podium, fighting back tears of all things, tears for the senior class with whom she’d formed a special, unexpected bond, and tears for her dear friend Carol whose son, she had learned that morning, had committed suicide. She’d pushed out a few platitudes of thanks and hurried back to her seat beside Peter, raw and embarrassed. At that moment, Tom claimed, Vida became the first thing since the death of his wife to disturb him, to make him anxious for the passing of time as one senior then another then another rose from a folding chair, ambled self-consciously across the grass to the lectern, received a diploma, and ambled back.

By the end of the ceremony he’d worked his way to her row of seats and was the first to congratulate her on her award. He was the godfather of one of the graduates, he told her. Could she join them for dinner? She didn’t like thinking back on this day and the breaks in her voice at the podium. What could he have seen in her then? Perhaps it wasn’t her at all but that crazy senior class whom she’d loved, who’d risen and hooted and whooped as she walked to the lectern, as if she were not a teacher but a stripper in nothing but high heels and tassels. Was it simply the energy of that moment, such a contrast to the wake of death he found himself bobbing in? Here was life, he might have said to himself; seize it now. Oh she would disappoint him. She was not life. They were all wrong about that.

Assembly had already started. On stage, Greg Rathburn, the history chair who took every world occurrence personally, was explaining the events in Iran. Vida remained in the doorway instead of taking her seat with the juniors across the room. Greg asked for a moment of silence for the ninety Americans being held at the embassy. Vida bent her head but did not shut her eyes or think of the hostages. It was hardly silence with the irrepressible hum of four hundred and twenty-four students who had been separated for a whole weekend. It lasted a long time. After a while, she raised her head in impatience. As always, Brick Howells and Charlie Grant, headmaster and sidekick, stood at their podiums bathed in their own private spotlights. When Greg solemnly thanked the school, Brick jerked his head up like a choirboy feigning prayer while Charlie kept his head bowed for a second too long, as if the interminable moment had not been quite long enough for all of his good thoughts. Phonies to a man, she thought.

“On a much happier note,” Brick said, glancing down at his notes as young Greg, heartthrob, former Fayer swimming star, swung himself off the stage. “A little bird has told me that our very own Mrs. Avery was married this weekend.” Bursts of applause as surprised heads craned toward her usual seat and then, after a struggle, found her at the door. The applause was stronger now, accompanied by repetitive grunts as if she had made a touchdown. Vida endured the attention, wishing she could see through the heads of the upperclassmen to the front where Peter sat with the rest of the tenth graders. What expression would he have on his face? Why had he been so angry this morning? Brick spoke through the clapping: “You will be courteous enough to call her Mrs. Belou from now on.” More cheers, as if replacing your identity were some great achievement.