Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

Our turncoat, as we sometimes call him in jest, counts among the unwritten pieces that he may yet write as supplements to his few brief published works a fictional account of certain events from his twenty-second year, one of them being his meeting up with a certain dark-haired young woman who, if ever he had tried to compare and to quantify the differing looks and features of all the dark-haired girls and young women he had taken note of, would have been one of the first among them. At the time of their meeting, he was a teacher in a primary school in an inner suburb of the city where he had been born. He worked conscientiously as a teacher but he was planning to resign at the end of the year, when his contract would have expired. He intended to work afterwards at menial jobs that would cause him none of the nervous stress, as he called it, that his teaching caused and would allow him to spend much of his free time writing poetry. He had no girlfriend at the time. He had had a girlfriend for a few months several years before, but he had bored her with his talk of books and poetry and he resented her wanting to go to dances or to cinemas. He felt much in need of a girlfriend but he could never have approached any of the young female teachers at his school, who talked in the staffroom mostly about television programs. He looked forward to acquiring a girlfriend from among the young female poets who would attend one of the literary gatherings that took place, so he had heard, at the time of publication of each number of the quarterly magazine to which he sent most of his poems. All of his poems had been politely returned to him by the editor of the magazine, but in the margin of one of the poems the editor had written a favourable comment. He, the young poet, expected soon to have one or more of his poems published and to meet at the literary gathering soon afterwards a female equivalent of himself and to begin with her the discussion and the exchanges of letters that would lead to their becoming boyfriend and girlfriend.

On a certain day towards the end of what our turncoat, so to call him, intended to be his last year as a teacher, the principal of his school brought to the door of his classroom the dark-haired young woman mentioned previously, introduced him to her, and told him that the young woman was an expert in the teaching of drama and would spend a half-hour in his classroom during each of the next four weeks teaching dramatic skills to his pupils.

Long afterwards, the teacher and poet came to understand the circumstances behind the unexpected appearance at his classroom door of the most noteworthy of all the dark-haired female persons he had met up with or had observed from a distance or whose images he had kept in mind. She had arrived from England not long before. She was entitled to put after her name a series of letters that intimidated the teacher-poet when he saw them during her first session in his classroom but which failed to intimidate the director of primary education after the young woman had gained an interview with him soon after her arrival from London, where she had completed the courses that had entitled her to put the series of letters after her name. She probably expected the director of primary education to appoint her at once to the staff of one or another training college for teachers as an expert in drama, but he allowed her only to visit one or another primary classroom each week for four weeks, to have charge of the children there for a half-hour each week, and then, during the fourth week, to demonstrate to the local district inspector of schools her skills as a teacher of drama. The school selected for her trial was the school where the young unpublished poet taught a fifth grade. He supposed, long afterwards, that the principal of the school would have approached several or, perhaps, all of his fellow teachers but that these would have refused to allow into their classrooms the pushy young Englishwoman with the fancy letters after her name, as they would have called her. He, the young teacher of a fifth grade, would not have thought of refusing the young woman, even if she had not seemed to him at once the most fetching of all the dark-haired female persons that he had admired or had kept in mind. He was not opposed to having visiting teachers lighten his own teaching duties. As well, he was at that time still far from developing the antipathy that he later developed towards live theatre, so to call it. He even supposed sometimes that he might compose, after he had established his reputation as a poet, such a poem as could be performed on stage as a poetic monologue, which was a phrase that he liked to hear in his mind.

He remembers nothing of what she taught, or tried to teach, to his pupils. He learned, some years afterwards and by chance, that she had later been on the staff of a teachers’ training college, although he could not know whether this was a direct result of her dealings with his class. He remembers nothing of her final session in his class, when the district inspector of schools would have been present to assess her. (He suspects that he might have spent the time in the staffroom rather than watch her ordeal.) He remembers that she thanked him often and profusely for his help. When she left his class on each of her first three visits, she asked if he would rehearse with his pupils during the coming week some or another routine. This he did faithfully, as he would have done for any visiting teacher, and she always seemed overly grateful afterwards. They addressed each other always as Mr and Miss , which was not unusual for that time and that situation, and the nearest that either of them came to familiarity was her calling him a brick when they said goodbye after her last visit.

Not once did he think of her as a possible girlfriend. He supposed that she must have been a year or two older than he in order to have acquired so many letters after her name. That alone would have excused him from thinking of her romantically, as another sort of writer might have written. But even if he had wanted to meet with her during a weekend or an evening, he could only have foreseen the two of them sitting in a coffee-lounge or a cinema and himself feeling out of place or even wretched. He spent most of his free time at his desk in the rented room where he lived or in the Reading Room of the State Library. On several weekday evenings he drank beer, mostly alone, in a shabby hotel in the city, in a back bar frequented by people he considered bohemians. His solitary reading and writing and drinking seemed to him not so much a hardship as a sort of apprenticeship leading at last to his becoming a published poet and somewhat the equal of female persons with dark hair and memorable faces and many letters after their names.

Given what is reported in the previous paragraph, I need hardly report in this paragraph that he felt no more that a mild annoyance a few hours after her last visit when he found among the books and papers on his classroom table an envelope with her name typed on the front. She had sometimes spread pages of notes on his table, and he assumed that the envelope had spilled out of her large bag during her last visit and had been later overlooked. His annoyance came from his having to try to return the envelope to her when all he knew was her name, but when he handled the envelope he found it to be unsealed, and when he had opened the envelope he found inside a single typed page with the letterhead of a famous jeweller whose shop was in a fashionable quarter of the city. At the upper left of the typed page was the name of the young woman, although the series of letters was missing, and below the name was her address, which was in a suburb near his own. Much of the page was occupied by a list of items of jewellery owned by the young woman together with the estimated value of each item for the purpose of its being insured. Below the list was the signature of the valuer of the items. After he had read the page with the letterhead of the famous jeweller, he was relieved that he would be able to return the misplaced letter to its owner simply by inserting it into a larger envelope and then posting both to the address of the young woman, together with a few words explaining the matter. He recalls these events clearly, even more than fifty years later, and if ever he were to include these events, or a version of them, in a piece of fiction, he would have the narrator of the fiction assure the reader that the chief character of the fiction entertained at the time no possibility that the young woman with dark hair and the many letters after her name had not genuinely misplaced the letter from the famous jeweller, although he supposed briefly that a young man very different from himself might have dared to suppose otherwise.