While he sat studying the picture he saw beneath it, in microscopic print, the names of the students. Sure enough, there was his name: Bruce Stevens. However, Susan did not notice. She had started recalling other events and was no longer interested in the page.
“I never should have given up teaching,” she said. “But I just wasn’t suited for it. I used to come home shaking from head to foot. The noise and confusion. It always gave me a headache. Children running in all directions. Pete said I had no aptitude for dealing with children. He said I was too neurotic. Maybe he was right. That’s one of the reasons why we split up. We couldn’t agree on how to raise Taffy.”
“What’s he doing now?” he asked, turning the page to obscure his name.
Susan said, “He’s in Chicago. I don’t have any idea what he’s doing. He was an engineering student when I met him. I was twenty-six and he as twenty-five.”
“How old were you when you started teaching?” he said.
“Let’s see,” she said. “I started in Tampa, Florida. In 1943. I remember, because the Battle of Stalingrad was going on the month I first had a class of my own. I was nineteen.”
“What about when you first started at Garret A. Hobart?”
She said, “It was 1945, so I was twenty-one.”
So she was exactly ten years older than he. She was thirty-four, now. About what he had thought.
“I’ve never seen any of those little people since,” Susan said. “They just vanished. Thirteen years ago … they must be almost grown up by now. My lord, they would be grown up; they were eleven or so then, so they’d be twenty-four years old now. Married, and some of them with children.” She got a pensive expression on her face. “Some of them could have children starting to school. That would be stretching it, though. But it makes you stop and think.”
“It’s a long thirteen years between eleven and twenty-four,” he said.
“Very important. But when I look back it doesn’t seem to have made very much difference as far as I’m concerned. Twenty-one to thirty-four. But I shouldn’t say that. Here I have Taffy, and I’ve been married and divorced twice! So I don’t mean that. But I feel the same. I don’t feel I’ve changed much inside during that period. I suppose I look different.” She turned back to re-examine the picture of herself taken in 1945.
“I don’t think you look much different,” he said. And certainly she did not.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s a very nice compliment.”
“I mean it,” he said.
She closed the scrapbook. “I feel so discouraged,” she said. “I don’t mean right now; I mean in general, these last few years. When two marriages have failed … you always wonder if it’s you. I know it was me. Pete said I did nothing but brood and worry, and Walt didn’t tell me that, but he might as well have; he said I treated everything as a crisis. He said I have a crisis mentality. I fear calamity any moment. Like Henny Penny. The sky is falling … do you recall?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And they both feel I’m imparting it to Taffy.” Turning toward him she said urgently, “That’s why I need somebody around me who’s cheerful and easy-going and takes things in his stride. Like you.”
“I don’t think necessarily you’re imparting anything like that to Taffy,” he said, thinking that after all she had terrorized him for a year, left a permanent impression in his mind, and yet he had emerged, survived it, arrived at adulthood in an optimistic mood. Was that not proof that she had done no real harm? Of course, he thought, maybe I’m just lucky. And he also thought, Maybe there is damage to me, down under the surface. I just don’t know it. I haven’t seen it.
At eleven-thirty Susan said good-night and went off to the bathroom to take a bath and go to bed.
Alone, he sat in the living room, watching an old movie on the TV set.
I have moved back to Montario, he thought. No, not exactly to Montario. This is actually Boise. But to him it was the same; it was the place he had come from.
However, it did not discourage him. It was so different. Nothing could be further from the old days, his life as a high school student folding up newspapers and flinging them onto porches … or, before that, playing marbles after school, watching “Howdy Doody” on the ten-inch TV screen in the family living room, while his older brother Frank messed about on the back porch with pond water for his microscope.
That made him meditate about Frank.
His older brother Frank now worked in Cincinnati for a chemical company, as a research chemist. He had gone through Wayne University, in Detroit, on a scholarship granted by a soap company. Frank was married and he had a child three years old. How old would Frank be? Twenty-six or so. And he owned—or was paying on—a house and car. So Frank was a success, by any standards; he held a professional job, doing what he had enjoyed all his life … he was talented, alert, skilled, and one day he would be publishing in scientific journals. He had a great future; in fact, he had a great present. In school Frank had been popular. Bruce remembered him striding about in his tennis shoes and slacks, his hair combed back and oiled, his skin shining and blemish-free, waving at everyone, being good at school dances, being elected to this and that. Going steady with Ludmilla Meadowland, the blonde whom the senior class had elected Miss Montario for the JC pageant of 1948. In the parade, on June tenth, she had coasted down Hill Street on a float made of potatoes, carrying a banner reading WIN MONTARIO HIGH WIN WIN. The Principal of Montario High had shaken hands with both her and Frank, and the picture of the three of them had appeared in the Gazette, the newspaper which Bruce had trudged along with, folding and tossing, folding and tossing day after day, for two whole years.
All his life everyone had dropped it in his ear that his brother Frank was the bright one.
Evidently, he thought, it was true. Look where Frank is. Look where I am.
But, try as he might, he could not drum up a feeling of discouragement. I like this, he thought. I’m getting a deep charge out of this … it really appeals to me. There is something satisfying about it, a kind of order. A unity. That someone from his early life could have the power to pull him over backward this way made him feel that all those years had not after all added up to nothing. In those days he had naturally been powerless to help himself. He had done what everyone else did. They shot marbles after school, so he did so, too. They went and stood in line for the kiddies’ matinee at the Luxury Theater on Saturday afternoon, so he did so, too, whatever crummy film might be showing. Those repetitious and futile years had been so tiresome that, now and then, he had despaired. What was it all about? What did he get out of it? Nothing, apparently.
Practically the only moment in his first fifteen years that had meant anything to him at the time had shown up by accident. The Gazette had run an offer to mail out phonograph records of great symphonic masterpieces for coupons clipped from the daily paper. Since he was a carrier, he had access to the coupons, and he had gathered a batch and sent them off to Illinois, and after a month or so he had received in the mail a flat package wrapped with brown paper and tape. Opening it, he had found three twelve-inch records bundled up in cardboard. The labels on the records were blue and read only “World’s Greatest Symphonies.” The names of the orchestra and the conductor were not given. This particular set of records—it had no album, only paper sleeves—turned out to be the Haydn Symphony Number 99. He played it on his table-model phonograph, which he had gotten as a Christmas present during junior high. Up to then his musical taste had run to Spike Jones, and after that it more or less still did. But that particular symphony had had an enormous impact on him; it had affected him to the soles of his feet. He played the three records until they turned white and wore away into noisy hissing.