Clair De Lune (10 page)

Amid a flurry of assent, Maxine wailed with regret that she couldn't go. She had a fitting this noon hour and Max was picking her up. “He's probably waiting out there this minute. I'm so sorry. You're so wonderful. I'd love to go. But I've really got to run.”

She rushed off with thanks and apologies. As the door swung shut behind her, Verna picked up her pocketbook. “It's late. Let's go eat.”

“Oh, who wants to eat”—Mae Dell sighed—“with all this excitement?”

“I do. And so do you.”

“Can we still go to the Bonne Terre?”

“Without her? Mercy land! We've got to save that for special occasions. We better go to the Show-Me.”

“We went there yesterday.”

“I know, but it's closer. Take your bumbershoots, everybody, it's going to rain.”

Nine

T
he students bent over their desks composing paragraphs. Later they would analyze the structure of their paragraphs, discuss the logic and development of their ideas. They would, if she could keep their minds on it. It was the last hour of the afternoon, when the kids were leaning toward four o'clock. And they were the dullest of all her classes. After the bright bunch in her Shakespeare class, these seemed very low wattage.

She opened another paper, homework turned in at the beginning of class. According to Lindsey Homeier's paper, he had got through high school by “hard studding.” It crossed her mind to throw the passage open to discussion. That would get their attention! But of course that wouldn't do. Nor would she do that to poor Lindsey. He had trouble enough. Impossible Lindsey, who had cropped up now in three of her classes. She circled the word in red, wrote “sp” in the margin, and let her thoughts wander back to the scene at noon in the ladies' lounge. Maxine with the ring on her finger, her blue eyes bright with happy tears. Maxine at the top of the hill, with kisses and diamonds, and down below Miss Liles of the English department with Toby and George. She looked down at Lindsey's paper and choked back a giggle.

“High school is not so interesting as college,” Lindsey wrote. “In college you're more grown up.”

Some of us are.

She closed Lindsey's paper and picked up another. But she couldn't get Maxine out of her mind. Pretty Maxine, a maiden pure of brow serene. Maxine was so … hygienic. Max too, from all you could tell. They were the couple on the wedding cake, forever garbed and garlanded, preserved in purity on tiers of sweetness. You could imagine them dancing and romancing and possibly some heavy breathing, but never anything as lowly as a roll in the featherbed. Max's going away only made it more properly romantic, the finishing touch of chivalry. Like Lovelace—“Loved I not honor more.” Indoctrination for ninety days might not be all that chivalrous. All the same, from her chaste breast to war and arms he flew.

In a pig's eye.

“Yes, Lindsey?”

“I've finished my paragraph, Miss Liles.”

“Already?”

“Yes ma'am. May I bring it up?”

“If you like.”

Pear-shaped Lindsey wallowed forward and laid the page lovingly on the desk.

“Thank you. We'll wait till the others finish before we discuss it.”

He lingered, smiling. The thick lashes over his gentle, slanty eyes made her think of butterfly wings laden with golden dust.

“Maybe you'd like to study your book while we wait,” she said. “You might like to go over those passages again, about paragraph structure.”

“Yes ma'am.”

She glanced briefly at the tidy paragraph written in Lindsey's rounded purple backhand. “My topic is spring. Spring is my favorite time of year. The reason is because in spring you are supposed to make up poems to your lady love.”

She laid it aside. How had the boy ever got this far? How did he get by at all? Because he was allowed to. You couldn't flunk Lindsey. That poor brain, that sunny temper, those dusty golden eyes, and all that hard studding. Lindsey tried. She picked up another piece of homework.

Through the big classroom windows she could see the rain coming down, as Verna had predicted. A hard green spring rain that bounced on the pavement and ran in streams along the curb. A cluster of kids stood in it, the Lord knew why, four or five of them crowded together under an umbrella with a broken rib. She could hear them laughing. George was among them, making some comic ado. George in his cracked yellow slicker and a poison green sweater, with his pants turned up at the ankle, the way the boys wore them. The kids stumbled up the walk and in through the side doors.

Doodling on a memo pad, she thought of Max again. Tall, manly, impeccably dressed. Max looked like an officer. And Maxine would be a proper officer's lady. She lost herself briefly in visions of waltzes and chandeliers, white gloves, sabers and gleaming boots, and glasses sparkling with champagne. But that was in another age and in the movies. And maybe Max would get no closer to the war than Texas. If the president meant what he said, he wouldn't. He would come home in ninety days and be promoted at the bank, and he and Maxine would settle grandly in a lovely house and raise lovely children and be upstanding citizens, pillars of the church, members of everything, a credit to the community and to the country club.

She scratched a big red
X
across the memo pad. She wanted no part of that. And yet, there was Maxine, creamy and clean and womanly and loved. And there was Max, manly and handsome and protective. She couldn't quite put down the feeling that she was missing something. (Nobody ever told
her
she was the promised breath of springtime.)

She stayed on after school, correcting themes, pausing now and then to gaze disconsolately at the rain and kids running through it toward home. Upstairs, the chorus drifted by fits and starts down Bendamere Stream, Maxine at the helm. During the frequent intervals her classroom seemed unnaturally still and lonely. Not even Dr. Ansel came in to chat. She stared at the work before her with distaste. Worn out words, lifeless sentences. How was she to explain the relation of sentence structure to life? How to make clear that verbs and nouns were common to Shelley and Popeye the Sailor (though perhaps not the same ones)? She heaved a great sigh and set her elbows firmly on the desk, bracketing her work. Holding the red pencil, she read on for several minutes before flinging the pencil down. It was no use. She was cross and unhappy, like a child left out of the game.

“Oh,
nuts
to Maxine!” She rose and went to the window.

The rain was tapering off but the sun had not come out. Still, it was spring and there was a luminosity in the air. In the pale sheen everything glowed—grass, green shrubs and masses of leaves, the black, wet trunks of trees and the red brick of the house across the street. She looked at it in despair. Such an exultation of light, and she with no urge at all to exult. What
did
she want?

She turned suddenly and walked out of the room. The sound of the chorus in her ears, she went up the hall and entered the rustling quiet of the library. Nodding to the librarian, fierce little Miss Pettit, she went into the stacks, down the rows of books, lingering on the way, her glance like a caress along familiar names—Chaucer, Donne, Keats, Milton. She took down a book and opened it.

Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden…

The flesh on her arms tingled. She stood in the narrow aisle, secure in an environment beloved and comforting. Here, she was at home.

Many of the authors were among the books on her own shelves. Many were here whose acquaintance she had yet to make. She moved quickly back and forth, pulling down books. Shaw and Dante, John Donne,
Songs of Innocence
. Yes, and Voltaire, she must have that one too. How many would Pettit let her take out? Already there were more than she could carry. She put back Shaw and Voltaire.

Up front the door swung open, letting in the sound of the chorus. Engaged or not, Maxine was still hard at work. Allen reached for another book, feeling benevolent now, having found her way home again. This was her world. Maxine could have hers and welcome to it—husband, house, children and all. But she paused with her hand still on the book. What if Maxine were denied all this? What if Max did have to go off to battle and what if he did not come back?

She stood there guiltily, as if her envy alone could bring it about. Well, she didn't envy Maxine
that
much. And she needn't worry about Max. Somehow, Roosevelt would keep the country out of the war.

And yet… She stood for another moment, her arms full of poetry, then slowly put it all back.

There were other books that she had better read.

She tiptoed down the aisle and around to the history section, where she stood in bewilderment. What had she done when she studied such subjects? Memorized, that's what, just enough to get by. Memorized, and remembered nothing. She was as dumb in such fields as Mae Dell. And where to begin now? To understand Hitler's war she must understand the kaiser's. To understand that, then the wars before that, and the treaties and trade and conquests that divided the globe into separate kingdoms, and what led to what, and on back and back, until if you were to understand everything you had to start with Attila the Hun.

Well, she might as well be at it. She leafed through a few volumes and read tables of contents. Settling on three that seemed likely, she checked them out and, bidding Miss Pettit good night, carried them home through the soaked afternoon with a weighty sense of purpose.

Under the reading lamp the books looked plump and promising. She glanced at them with satisfaction as she passed back and forth at the evening chores—the wastebaskets, the sudsing, and supper. She had a bowl of soup, some lettuce, a cupcake and a glass of milk, eating slowly as she read
The New Yorker
. The door stood open to the landing, letting in the cool, damp rain-scented air. Leaving the dishes, she pressed a skirt and had a bath. Then in pajamas and robe she settled herself among the cushions and took the top book off the stack.

She read the title page and the preface, jumped up and put a record on and sat down again. Two or three pages into the text, she stopped and started over. After a time the words began to make sense. She plowed on doggedly through the first chapter, rereading, skipping a page here and there. She was well into the second chapter when there came a faint familiar sound from outside.

She looked up, listening. The sound came from the stairs, a light scuffle of feet, muffled laughter, then a tap at the door. The origins of the kaiser's war landed on the rug.

From the darkness of the kitchen she could see them on the landing, silhouetted against bright moonlight.

“Come with us,” they said, “the sky is falling.”

Ten

S
he went down with them to the alley, sinking waist-deep into clouds. Overhead the night glistened. The moon was full and the sky clear as ice. But the ground smoked with thick white fog, streams and billows of fog, rising from the rain-soaked ground. They waded through it down the alley, watched it wash around the great houses, their turrets and slate shingles obscured. There had never been such a fog, not in their lifetime. They called it foam and soup of the evening; hell had cracked, the smoke seeped through; they called it shaving cream and meringue. They groped through the fog, stumbling over the curb, and climbed to the door of the Presbyterian church, where they sat in the clear, watching the fog lap the bottom steps. The church spire shone in the sky like the samite arm.

“We're sinking into the sea!” said Allen. “It's Germelshausen. It's the froth of heaven!”

“It's cold air flowing over a warmer surface,” said Toby.

“Spoilsport.”

“Steam fog. The condensation of moisture around specks of dust. Or maybe it's radiation, when the air cools below a certain point, and heat radiates from the ground. The cold air falls and the warm air rises and fog forms where they meet.”

“You makin' this up as you go?” said George.

“I read a book. About advection and cirrostratus and fractostratus and how weather forms in the upper air.”

“You understand it?”

“Not all of it. But I like the sound of the words.”

“They're good words,” Allen said.

“I like weather. Clouds and wind currents and all that.”

George said, “You and Dean Frawley ought to get together.”

“We did—that time he called us in, remember, when we were raisin' hell in the hall? I don't know what he said to us—”

“He dressed us down a little.”

“—because I was looking at all those instruments on his walls.”

“All those thermometers and things,” Allen said. “What does he do with all those?”

“Looks at them, I guess. I wish he'd call us in again.”

“I think we could arrange it,” George said.

“Oh, hey,” said Toby, reaching into a pocket, “I brought us something.” He pulled out a thin brown bottle.