Alone in the Classroom Read Free Page B

Burns, neither young nor old, either ofthem. Whenever Parley patrolled the halls or visited the other classrooms, Miss Miller supervised his pupils.
    Parley. It was pronounced behind his back with the derisive respect reserved for the over-educated. Oh, he was aware of it. But that was nothing, nothing to how aware the three women were of him.
    They formed a classic school harem. Mary Miller, thirty-six, a plain woman but she dressed well, a different dress each week, usually navy with white piping or some white lace, four dresses in all rotated through the months. Very sensible shoes, owing to a back problem. Whenever Parley came to the door of her room, she blushed a most beautiful blush from the base of her throat to the roots of her hair - a surge of crimson, the rolling out of a red carpet that ebbed not in reverse, but all at once, if gradually. What fun it was to follow it with your eyes.
    Downstairs, Miss Fluelling, fifty-three, like a man wore the same suit day after day, a mustard-coloured wool suit with wide lapels and a straight skirt. Her thinning grey hair made a ratty bun. She scratched her head with the point of a pencil so frequently that you could see scribbles all over her scalp.
    Across the hall, lanky, athletic Connie Flood, eighteen, loped when she walked and dropped into a chair as if her limbs had given way. Five foot eight in high heels (she changed into flats at recess). White tailored shirt, straight black skirt, long wavy dark hair in a ponytail. The same build as my father, the same loose-limbed physical grace.The town doesn’t exist anymore. It rose overnight from whole grass into wooden sidewalks, railway station, grain elevators, houses, stores, churches, school. Then life rubbed the other way and the pattern disappeared. Nothing is left save a tiny chapel and the remains of a wooden sidewalk hidden by weeds. The buildings went to make granaries in the 1950s after the crops came back but not the people. A hundred years ago, however, they came from all over, from Ontario, the United States, Britain, Scandinavia, central and eastern Europe. Foreign tongues abounded. A child born in Ontario could grow up in Jewel, Saskatchewan, and travel the world and feel oddly at home. (The same child could go back to Ontario, an adult, and find herself crossing paths time and again with people she had known in the West.)
    Given what Parley Burns did and what happened to him in the end, Connie never tired of mulling over what kind of person he was deep down. He wasn’t handsome, she told me, but he was distinguished and very attractive to lonely women. Something fashionable, almost feminine in his manner unsettled and excited them - a sensitivity channelled into the dry-bed of bachelorhood. Yet he was far from dry. He was an intricately wired man. The smell of eggs turned his stomach.
    He smiled (when he smiled) by baring his teeth, then holding the grimace to a count of five. A long time; a very long time if you were suggestible.
    I picture them in the schoolyard, him and Connie, side by side. They’re watching the best-looking boy play ball and play well, but Parley accuses him of making a feeblethrow.”From
faible,”
he says to Connie, “meaning weak.”
    She would have returned his unnatural smile with something natural and he would have felt encouraged to go on, to say that the English forget that starting in 1066 the Court of England was a piece of France for three centuries. “Almost a thousand years have gone by and it’s as hard for the English to learn French as it ever was. Only an unusual person will take the necessary pains.”
    Her eyes had a way of crinkling when she saw through you. Parley reminded her of Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy, the same vanity and self-importance. She asked him where he had learned French, and he told her he had perfected his command of the language in
la belle France
. She egged him on. She asked about Paris. The shining city, he called it, a cultured world of