Jesse Ball: The Lesson

The book that she was reading at that time was called The Miraculous Indifference of the Eleventh Century . It was about how, for whatever reason, during the eleventh century A.D., there had been several severe bouts of indifference, documented in cultures geographically remote from one another. The meaning of this was unclear, and the historian did himself few favors. Nonetheless, the book was terribly funny, although not meaning to be, and this caused Loring much grief, for when she would begin to laugh, she would be placed back in the room where she was sitting, and the hollow sound of her laugh coming off the wooden ceiling, floor walls, the glass of the windows, it made her feel that she had no one to whom to tell anything, that no matter how much comedy might be found in a passage, it was useless beyond what it might avail her directly. Even should she come upon the most tremendously wonderful thing that had ever been written, she could not say it and have someone useful hear.

Of course, this situation had not come about for lack of trying other options. Do you believe that she did not write letters to him after he was dead? Oh, certainly she did, reams and reams of letters, buried in a box. She wrote him a hundred letters, two hundred letters, a letter a day, and buried them in the ground by his grave. She sat on the grass there and spoke to him. She lay awake in their room and whispered, feeling that somehow whispers travel farther than things said outright.

No proof came that he had heard any of this, that he had read any of the letters. But, of course, neither did there come any proof to the contrary.

She sat at her desk in the evening time, and began to write a letter. It was not the first letter she had written concerning the boy.

e.

He came again, this time for the lesson. I watched him very carefully, and put your sweater in the way, on the chair where he was to sit. When he moved it, he put it on the table on the far side of the room — which is what you always did. I don’t know what that means. Is that just the place where sweaters should go? Or something more?

I asked him to say your name and he said it the way it used to be said — not the way it is pronounced now. But did I perhaps say it that way unwittingly? I can’t remember.

Why am I even writing to you? If it is true, and something of you is in him, then is any part of you elsewhere, receiving such missives as these?

There is no chance of it, I suppose. Then what is this writing? What is it? Is it less purposeless than some other fragile thing?

I feel there can be no good out of it — out of any of it. But then I feel something else, a certainty that through his eyes you will look at me, and see me, and that I will see you the same. Such a moment — for that I would give the rest, all the rest, all these useless rags, buildings, people.

Being old is being useless, and having things be useless to you. Because: the world is what is still to come. It isn’t what is or what was.

For me that what-is-to-come, well, you know, you know what it is, my love. I am reaching out towards you in your narrow space.

yours,

l.

When she had finished writing the letter, she looked at it carefully. She held it in her hands, looking at it carefully, and then she tore it up. The torn-up pieces she left there on the table, as if they might do something for one another in such a state.

Just at the strike of nine, the boy arrived. Loring had left a note on the door. It said,

LET YOURSELF IN. I AM UPSTAIRS.

The boy came into the house. Two shoes faced him in the narrow passage, two shoes in the very middle. As many things seem hostile when arrayed in strangeness, so one might imagine the dark hall of this house with its shuttered windows to frighten him, but he was not frightened. He stepped over the shoes, went straight through and found the stair and climbed. These were steep steps, of the sort in old colonial houses. He was by no means assured of an easy time, and stopped halfway up at a little window carved in a half-moon. The glass was warped and the street below was bent into an impossible shape. He sat looking through for quite a while until the voice came from above.

— Stan?

— Here on the stairs.

He went up the rest of the way.

Loring was sitting in a room off to the left. At the top of the stairs were three rooms. One was the bedroom, one a workroom, and the third, well, she was in it. That room was for nothing at all, and never had been. Loring and Ezra had never liked the room. There was something wrong with it, but they couldn’t say what. They would occasionally put things in there because they felt something would happen. The things that happened were never anything that one could really know about.

The room was at this time empty save for one chair, and a little table by the window. On that table, sat a box. It was shut, closed with a tiny clasp over which wax had been dripped. The wax was unbroken.

— Hello, said the boy.

Loring looked at him and thought, If you are listening, when I ask you this question, you will respond to something else I have said.

— Did you finish the problems I left you with?

— Is this the room you were talking about?

— What did I say about it? asked Loring.

— You said that it was almost like the room was in this house and in another house, and that was why it didn’t really work to put anything in it, unless you felt like the things in it would also be elsewhere.

It took him a little while to say this and he got it wrong the first time, but the second time said it straight through with a very serious expression.

— That’s right, she said. That’s what I said.

— But why would you sit in a room like that?

She didn’t reply.

— Anyway, I can’t feel it. It just feels like a room.

— The…

— What is in that box?

It was an ordinary question, and of course, one that troubled Loring to no end. In all the time since her husband’s death, she had puzzled over nothing so much as this. Of course, the permission to open the box had long been received. That it could have been opened at three months is clear. Three months had been the agreement for quite a while before he had suddenly changed it, and in some ways it would make perfect sense to honor the previous agreement. The year’s permission was also long gone, for had not one year, then two, three, four, five, all come and gone? Why then was the box still there, still unopened?

The truth was this: as long as Loring did not open the box, some mystery still remained, some hint of life, a secret kept — an act still continuing in its efficacy, on the part of Ezra. And so in preserving the shut box, she preserved his living nature, and whenever she pondered opening it, she played with his living will that it be opened, and with what his expectations had been for what she would feel upon opening it. Now necessarily, in order for this to work at all, she had to actually permit herself the possibility of breaking, and opening the box. And so it was, that once a month, she would sit with the box and decide whether or not the time had come to open it, and each time she did so, she did not know whether or not it would be opened.

Such days were special, and she would dress especially for them. She would close all the shutters of all the windows, and turn all the photographs and portraits to face the wall, even Ezra’s photograph in the parlor.

She would take off her shoes and put them by the door, pointing out. And then she would walk backwards up the stairs, and into the little room, and there sit in the chair and observe the box. She would do this all at the hour of dawn, leaving the whole day to sit and think.