The Jade Peony (22 page)

She also regularly read aloud letters from her brother, whose name she enuciated clearly for us: “John Wil-lard Hen-ry Doyle.” He was a fire marshal for his district of St. Martin’s, London.

“A fire marshal,” the General said, “is someone assigned to take charge of putting out fires caused by the bombing. But his main job, boys and girls, is to save lives, not buildings.”

She repeated her only and older brother’s full name so that we would not think, she said, that our own variety of names was any more unusual.

“A name is a name,” Miss Doyle emphasized. “Always be brave enough to be proud of yours.”

Bravery was a central theme in her class. I saw her brother in a fireman’s outfit climbing ladders and walking through flames.

In his world, bombs fell night and day, injured people were pulled out from under collapsed buildings, children were hurt but brave. Miss Doyle kept her brother’s picture in a small silver frame on her desk. He looked very young in the picture, very tall, and the small girl beside him, looking up at John Willard Henry’s big smile, was Miss Doyle herself.

Miss Doyle read us sections of her brother’s vivid letters, which thrilled us all.

I remember listening to how the smoke rose in furious clouds over a place called Pick-a-dill-lee Square; how in a place called Kensington Gardens, a statue of a boy named Peter Pan was not disturbed even an inch by the concussion bombs. There were ghastly smells coming from burning factories and houses, the awful weight of collapsed walls and twisted steel girders, the cries and screams from the mysterious dust-choking darkness beneath trembling beams. There was rescue and valour, and unending hope for the nightmare to end. “We will never surrender,” John Willard Henry wrote, quoting a man named Churchill, who, Miss Doyle emphasized, was a loyal friend of the King and Queen.

“When I was a little girl,” Miss Doyle said to the class, “my brother John used to read the story of Peter Pan to me. It is a book written by whom, Darlene?”

“Mr. J. M. Barrie.”

The letters inspired everyone in the class to believe in “the just cause” and bravery. We saved our pennies to help our families buy more war bonds. One day, when John Doyle noted that the bombs were coming closer and closer to St. Martin’s, I noticed the red-haired Darlene dropping her head to her desk, as if she were afraid. And Joe Piscatella tensely bit his bottom lip, following every word of the brave John Doyle.

“
Adventurous times, my dear Tinker,
” he wrote in one letter, using a pet name for Miss Doyle, “
but we’ll pull through.
”

At night, in bed, I prayed to Grandmama to keep John Willard Henry safe from the bombs. Some nights I dreamed of a tall man wearing a fireman’s hat, standing with the Old One, safely. I would learn to be as brave as Miss Doyle’s wonderful brother. Sometimes the gang would play rescue war games, but it never seemed as much fun as sky diving, blowing apart cities and torpedoing ships.

We pleased Miss Doyle when we were brave; that is, when we raised our hands to answer her questions, or ventured to speak aloud. Most of us knew the humiliation and the mockery—“Me wan’nee fly lice! Lot-see lice!”—the tittering, brought on by our immigrant accents. On streetcars and in shops where only English was spoken, people ignored you or pretended they didn’t hear you or, worse, shouted back,
“WHAT? WHAT’S THAT YOU SAY? CAN’T YOU SPEAK ENGLISH!?!”

Miss Doyle never ignored us, never tittered; she stood strictly at attention as if to compliment our valiant efforts when we spoke or read out loud, daring anyone to mock us.

We were brave, she said, just as the King and Queen, their framed portraits hanging separately above us, encouraged us to be. Miss Doyle pinned up on the cork board by the back cloakroom a newspaper picture of King George and his Queen talking to a group of British people; they were all standing in front of a bombed-out building as if it were an ordinary day for a chat.

“Their Majesties always enunciate perfectly,” Miss Doyle informed us, loudly.

Day after day, we absorbed her enunciated syllables, the syllables of a King and Queen. Without our fully realizing what was happening, our English vocabulary multiplied and blossomed. When I prayed to Grandmama, asking her again and again to help Miss Doyle’s brother, the fire marshal, I prayed more and more with English words, pronounced perfectly. Grandmama, in the other world, somehow could understand all languages.

Though every girl and boy found out quickly enough what irritated the General, no one was ever certain what, besides bravery, would really specifically please her.

There weren’t that many chances for anyone living in Canada to be truly brave. Murderous bombs were not falling down on Vancouver as they were in London, though they fell down every day in Miss Doyle’s brother’s succinct, suspense-filled stories about rescue and valour.

Reading aloud from those three-folded onionskin pages, Miss Doyle told us about the darkest days of the Battle of Britain in the gentle light of her brother’s rescue stories. As she carefully folded each letter and returned it to its heavily stamped envelope, we could feel our backs stiffen with courage.

One of her brother’s rescue stories was so exciting that I told it to Jung. There were struggling baby noises coming from a dark bombed-out section of a hospital building, and John Willard Henry’s team of five men and a woman named Grace risked everything to reach the trapped child. When Grace poked her hand through a small cleared-out space to reach for the whimpering infant, the woman screamed, jumped back. The child was covered with hair. Finally, John Willard Henry reached in and pulled out a small frightened terrier.

“
I have the nipped finger to prove it,
” he wrote. “
Damn odd business, this risking your life for a puppy!
”

Miss Doyle even said the word damn, just like her brother wrote it.

Jung laughed, then waited until I finished laughing, too.

“Want to know something?” he asked me, carefully.

I nodded
yes,
thinking that he was going to tell me that story was probably made up, but I was ready to let him know that it was all in a real handwritten letter sent from England.

“You don’t know, do you, Sekky?”

“Know what?”

“Last Christmas—Miss Doyle’s brother—blown to bits.”

My mouth dropped open. I refused to believe Jung, who years ago had been in Miss Doyle’s class and hated her because she strapped him for pulling the fire alarm.

“Everyone knows he’s dead, Sekky,” Jung persisted. “His picture was in the
Sun.
Ask Kiam.”

I dared not ask Kiam, nor did I ask anybody in the class, not even Alfred Stevorsky or Joe Eng. After all, if John Willard Henry was really dead, why didn’t someone in the class say so? Why didn’t Miss Doyle say so?

Tormented all week, I did not even say a prayer to the Old One. No one knew I still talked to her. Grandmama should have warned me.

I waited after school to ask Miss Doyle about her brother. She had just put another of his airmail letters away and dismissed the class. We could hear Mr. Barclay’s class next door stampeding out like cattle, but everyone in Miss Doyle’s class left in the usual orderly fashion. Miss Doyle was busy cleaning off the blackboard.

I could hear Darlene’s braces clunking away.

“Sekky,” Miss Doyle said, turning around. “You’re still here.”

“Miss Doyle,” I began, “was Mr. Doyle blown to bits?”

She looked puzzled, then her eyes glazed over. Her face registered shock, betrayal.

I wanted to get out of the room. I abruptly turned and rushed to the cloakroom to get my jacket and hat.

“Sek-Lung,” Miss Doyle thundered my name, “come here.”

With my coat and hat in my hand, I walked slowly back to her. She had used me, tricked me, made me care for someone, made me pray for the safety of someone who was already dead.

Miss Doyle gave me a wide-eyed
YOU’D BETTER PAY ATTENTION
look.

“That first day,” Miss Doyle began, speaking to me as if I had forgotten to help Darlene with the water jug, “that day when I started to read my brother’s letters, you must
remember
that I...
oh, my God...
” she took my hand. “You were away that day.”

It was true. I had been away from her class one afternoon.

“Oh, Sekky, you went to the nurse’s office!” Miss Doyle’s voice suddenly went soft, as if she were once again the little girl in the picture. “I did. I told the class of John’s death. Yes... he is... dead...” And then Miss Doyle used Jung’s words, my words, a child’s words, in a whisper I could barely make out, “...
blown to bits.
”

In uneasy silence, I let Miss Doyle lift my arms and push them through my jacket; I let her half guide me to the front of the room. Passing her desk, however, I pushed against her and stopped to study the picture in the small silver frame.

In the picture, I could see how brightly the little girl’s blonde hair shone; her smiling face said,
Nothing in the world can ever go wrong.

I took my pilot’s cap from her hand and walked out the door. I knew I still liked Miss E. Doyle.

MISS E. DOYLE
made it a rule never to tolerate interruptions or careless behaviour in her class.

Not only did she prefer to stand at attention for most of the time she spent with us, she expected every boy and girl in her class to adopt her military bearing, her exact sense of decorum.

We were an unruly, untidy mixed bunch of immigrants and displaced persons, legal or otherwise, and it was her duty to take our varying fears and insecurities and mold us into some ideal collective functioning together as a military unit with one purpose: to conquer the King’s English, to belong at last to a country that she envisioned including all of us.

After morning prayer, in a carefully modulated stage whisper, Miss Doyle told us to open our eyes and keep our bowed heads before her, then “carefully and quietly” to put our fingers under our desktop ledges and lift. A single whoosh sound filled the room as the tops of desks moved up-ward, like so many wings. Books and pencil boxes came clattering out, and desktops fell back down. We were now to remember to keep our feet flat on the floor.

When we were all ready, she would say, “Excellent.” That was the signal to be “at ease.”

In training us, she never hesitated to use her desk ruler repeatedly on our burning backsides, nor was she slow to engage the leather strap on our stinging bare hands. And few of our poverty-raised, war-weary parents or guardians expected a teacher, male or female, to do any less.

Once, from the back of the room in the unnatural silence that was the miracle of her careful training of her troops, we heard a delinquent pencil box crash to the hardwood floor like a bomb.

We all turned to look: on the floor, in the middle of the back aisle, sat an absurdly large
Grand Dutch Coronas
cigar box the size of Miss Doyle’s Holy Bible. The lid was held tightly shut by thick-knotted yellow twine.

Some of us stared straight at the leather strap hanging on the wall, afraid even to blink. Some of us turned to see Tammy Okada in a grubby flowery dress, pale with fear, her dirty knees shaking.

Tammy Okada, of mixed parentage, had tightly braided brownish pigtails and wore obvious hand-me-downs; her English was terrible. None of the girls wanted to play with her, not even those who were more or less her own kind, the Japanese girls. Tammy Okada was a stupid girl, thick-waisted from a poor diet, not much blessed with looks. She always had to borrow someone else’s pencils because she could never untie her own twine-knotted box. Yet she was too proud to let anyone help her undo the twine.

For some reason, Miss Doyle had never forced Tammy to open her pencil box; instead she always commanded one of the other students to lend Tammy a ruler or an eraser or whatever. And now the cigar box had slipped off her desktop and banged onto the floor.

The eagle-eyed General could see right away whose stupid makeshift pencil box it was.

Miss Doyle walked straight up the aisle, bent down and snatched up the cigar box. The box immediately broadcast a rolling noise, as if it held no more than a tiny solitary item: a single steel marble, perhaps, or maybe a small round ball of foil, rolling inside... round, round, round. We could all hear the loud rolling hiss coming from the box as it was held in mid-air, frozen in Miss Doyle’s surprised grip. Now everyone knew: a box almost ten inches square and three inches high, and it was practically empty!

Empty!
This absurd discovery caused three or four of the girls in the class to trade smirks across the aisles. Florence Chan giggled. Elizabeth Brown threw her head back. Alfred Stevorsky snorted. Joe Eng started to guffaw, but thought better of it when the General’s blonde head did not move. The classroom grew still, waiting, watching. Tammy Okada instinctively held her hands over her scalp as if she expected Miss Doyle, her grey eyes glistening, to take the box and break it over her head.

For a long, long moment, the big woman did nothing. Miss Doyle’s stillness also warned the rest of us that her uncanny radar was
O-N.
The slightest hint of another giggle or snort, or even a misplaced sigh, would mean the strap. We held our breath.

The General loudly cleared her throat:
Ahem!

In three seconds, like disciplined soldiers, we sat up, hands folded, feet flat on the floor, eyes front, staring at the Map of the World. Still, I couldn’t resist turning my head a little, straining the corner of my eyes to sneak a look: General Doyle, unsmiling, still held the knotted box in her enormous grip. She focussed her steel-cold eyes on Tammy Okada.

“Take out your books and put them in a pile,” she said to Tammy, each word clear and sharp as a warning bell. She stood silently watching, as the brownish-haired girl, eyes edged with tears, dropped her shaking hands and nervously emptied her desk.

Miss Doyle put her hand out, gripped Tammy’s shoulder, walked up the aisle and stopped before the one remaining empty front seat.

“
Here,
Tammy Okada,” Miss Doyle carefully enunciated each syllable, “you will be able to pay much better attention,
yes?
”