'Mr Freirs!' she said again. She waved in invitation.
Ah, well, the thin girl from the library wasn't coming, and Donna was nice too. Kind of exotic, in fact, and by no means dumb. Careful not to stumble over the rows of protruding feet, he threaded his way toward her through the darkness.
The woods were a patchwork of shadow and light. Beside her flowed the river, sunshine dappling the reeds. Wide-eyed, obviously dazed, the little girl stumbled down an uncertain path, following the river-bank as it skirted the edge of the forest. In her arms she clutched something small, white, and limp – a teddy bear, perhaps, or some other nursery toy.
The angle shifted, and Carol leaned forward to see. This was no toy. In her arms the girl was clutching a dead dog.
No one around Carol seemed surprised. They looked amused, in fact, or passive, or bored. Several were whispering to their neighbors, barely watching the film, and down the row to her left an unshaven youth was slouched back in his seat, his eyes already closed. The woman one row in front appeared to be taking notes, but when, after five minutes, she'd failed to look up, Carol realized that she was writing a letter.
The room was hot from body heat and foggy with cigarette smoke. Because the floor was perfectly flat and the screen too low, it was hard to read the sub tides from the bridge chairs in the back; people's heads kept getting in the way.
Carol hadn't dared leave the library until work ended, and Jeremy must have misjudged the time it would take her, because even with good directions she'd arrived here nearly twenty minutes late. She was already beginning to regret that she'd come; she couldn't find Jeremy in the darkness and was feeling uncomfortable and alone.
On the screen the little girl and a young peasant boy were performing a kind of funeral ceremony for the dead dog, which they'd buried in the earthen floor of an abandoned mill. Placing a primitive wooden cross atop the mound, the boy clambered up to the loft and, reaching into an owl's nest built high in the rafters, removed the tiny body of a mole. This he buried beside the other grave; that way, he said, the dog would not be lonesome. When the little girl contributed her rosary beads, he draped them solemnly over the cross.
Watching distractedly, Carol still felt herself touched by the scene; it awakened memories of her own childhood, and of the secret religious rituals she'd enacted without quite knowing why.
The rest of the film, unfortunately, was dominated by the adults, a slack-jawed, clownish lot. They were caricatures, all of them, and impossible to care for. Carol's back began to ache from leaning forward in her seat, and she found her attention wandering even more. Down the row the unshaven youth was still asleep, the film's shifting light playing over his features like the shadows of a dream. This same light was reflected in the glasses of a stout young man several seats farther ahead, sitting bolt upright near the wall, his legs swinging impatiently back and forth. Was it Jeremy? Carol strained to see him more clearly, but in the darkness it was hard to be sure. For a moment, as if responding to her thoughts, he seemed to turn toward her, though his eyes were concealed by the glare from off the. screen. But then a dark-haired woman sitting beside him leaned toward him to whisper something in his ear, and he turned away.
In the end, like lovers, the two children were parted, and Carol felt the customary lump form in her throat. The boy kicked over the crosses, trampled the mounds, and hid the rosary forever in the owl's nest, while, rigid with dread, the girl was led off like a prisoner and lost amid the crowds and confusion of a refugee center somewhere far away. Until this moment the story had been set within the rural isolation of a farm, and it had been easy to forget that, beyond the cornfields and the pastures, a modern world was speeding toward destruction.
She looked back at the young man near the wall – yes, she was sure now; it was Jeremy – in time to see him whisper something to his dark-haired companion. The woman turned to face him, smiled, and whispered something back. Her hand touched his shoulder familiarly. Carol felt a stab of disappointment so intense it made her catch her breath and look away. She saw that she'd been duped into coming here; she'd been a fool to have expected anything else. So much for her daydreams!
Moments later, in the front of the room, the screen was filled with Fin, like a gate slamming shut upon the characters' lives. By the time the overhead light came on, they had already receded into memory.
But Carol herself was already gone; she had gotten to her feet and slipped out the door before the film had ended.
She'd arrived in the New School with light still coloring the western sky. Departing now, she stepped outside and found herself in darkness broken only by the melancholy glow of streetlamps and a scattering of windows lit behind drawn curtains. Above the chimneys and the ventilator ducts a chip of moon looked small and far away.
After the heat and glare of the classroom, the cool night air with its solitude, its silence, brought a kind of relief. She walked listlessly, though, weighed down by a sudden feeling of fatigue and, beneath it, a dull unspoken loneliness. Several couples passed her as she made her way up the block – couples her own age, bound for a party, a disco, or a bar – and something in their voices made her feel painfully old. She was halfway to Sixth Avenue when, passing the doorway of an apartment house, she caught the smell of garlic, tomatoes, and cheese and remembered that she'd not yet eaten dinner. Her hunger had been forgotten for the duration of the film; now it returned with a rush.
Normally she'd have stopped at the all-night bodega at the end of her street to buy a package of spaghetti or a box of rice, but tonight the idea of cooking in that cramped, steamy little kitchen, with the ever-present roaches crawling just behind the stove, was too dispiriting to consider. When she reached the avenue, she paused. Tired as she felt, it was still too early to go home.
Home, in fact, seemed a rather dismal prospect, the more she thought about it. Rochelle would be up there with her new boyfriend tonight, the boisterous one who seemed so proud of his body and left coarse, dark curls in the sink and tub. The kitchen would be piled high with pots and dirty plates. The TV would be on – loudly, no doubt – but almost totally ignored; the two of them would be far more interested in each other. No doubt, too, they'd resent any interruption, though Rochelle would be more resentful than the boyfriend; he'd made one pass at Carol already. The television belonged to Rochelle and so did, in effect, the living room itself, since this was where she slept. Carol would be confined to her bedroom, trying to read or write letters above the sound of the TV's canned laughter and the less easily ignored laughter of the lovers.
Holding that image firmly in mind, she turned left on the avenue and headed toward the lights and crowds of Eighth Street, resolved that something good would happen to her before the night was through.
The night is growing dark now, but his mood is darker still. His wrinkled face is frozen in a scowl. From the shadowy recesses of an alley across the street he has seen the woman leave alone.
Something has gone wrong. Where is the man? The two of them are supposed to be together.
But perhaps it may still be arranged.
Stealthily he pads from the alley and into the street, moving toward the entrance of the school.
In the classroom on the third floor, Freirs and nearly a dozen of his students, some habitual sycophants, some who genuinely liked him, were still gathered near the front desk. After the film a far larger mass of them had surrounded him like a mob of petitioners, a few waving their papers at him, their excuses loud and earnest, others eager to get their reports back and quarrel over the grade. It had taken him nearly fifteen minutes to get them sorted out and, as it was the final class, to write down the addresses of the students whose papers he would have to mail back over the summer. His red book bag was stuffed once more with work.