“I always do,” he said, with heat.
“Don’t get hot under the collar. But you might imagine you should be polite. Not offend me. Remember, my period as a teacher is over with, so I don’t sink or swim according to how good I am as a teacher. I don’t conceive of myself in that role, and I haven’t in years. But I’ve always wondered what effect I had. Naturally I tend to think—especially when I’m despondent—that I had no effect. Children are subject to so many outside chaotic forces.”
He listened to this set speech, knowing that she was fortifying herself against what he might say.
“Listen,” she went on, “I honestly won’t be offended.”
“That’s not the point,” he said. Leaning forward he kissed her troubled, rigid mount. It did not respond in the slightest. “To me it’s much more important than it is to you; it’s not you I’m thinking about.”
“Why?” she said.
“You were grown-up. You were formed.” He did not want to come out and tell her that she had been one of the great factors affecting his life. “Suppose I had been the worst student you had; what real difference did that make? You had a lot of other students. And it was only a year!” That irked him. Just a year to her, less than that since she had not taught the entire term. But to him at that time—a reality that continued indefinitely. What fifth grader can imagine the end of the fifth grade? It will be with him forever. “Thirty pupils but only one teacher,” he pointed out.
“Tell me,” she said, becoming upset, now.
He said grudgingly, “You represented a major worry in my life.”
“You mean that I made you unhappy several times. I suppose you were unhappy after we marched you down to Mr. Hillings’ office, that day we caught you peeping.”
“No,” he said, “it carried on. Not just an incident. I mean I always was afraid of you. What’s so complicated about that? You mean you hadn’t even thought of that? Don’t you remember the day that Jack Koskoff refused to come to school because he was terrified of you?”
She nodded slowly, trying to understand.
“For years you scared me.”
Angrily she said, “I only taught your class for a trifle over a semester!”
“But I remembered you.”
“I had no authority, absolutely none, over you, after you got out of Garret A. Hobart. Why, I never even saw you again.”
“I delivered your goddamn newspaper,” he said, trembling with unhappiness, now that he realized that she did not remember that.
“Did you?” Her face remained blank.
He said, “When you had that big stone house with the other ladies. Don’t you remember when you tried to get me to collect just once every three months, and I patiently explained to you that I might not be on that route in three months, and in that case I’d lose the money, and the next carrier would get it for not doing anything?”
“I dimly recall. Was that you?” She laughed nervously. “Did you tell me at the time?”
Come to think of it, he did not know for certain if he ever had. She had said hello to him, at the time, as if she had known him, recognized him. But she might merely have realized that she had seen him before, perhaps had him as a student, without identifying him as an individual. Or thought of his name. Or placed him, beyond that general recognition.
“Maybe I only thought you knew it was me,” he said. “But you said hello to me every time you saw me. Also, you asked me how my mother was.”
“Did I ever call you Skip?”
“No,” he said. Not that he could recall.
“I didn’t live there long,” she said.
He said, “Anyhow, I remembered you.”
“That was natural,” she said, sighing.
“This really upsets me,” he said. “Finding out that maybe you never recognized me, that time.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to—” He tried to explain it to her. “Get into the house.”
She burst out laughing. “I’m sorry. Like you did at Peg’s … you mean through a window?”
“I mean I wanted to be admitted and accepted; I used to walk along and see you all inside having tea or something.” It was hopeless to try to put across his former anguish to her.
“Not tea,” she said. “Do you want to know what that was the four of us used to drink in the afternoon, around five, especially in summer when it was hot? We used to mix ourselves Old Fashioneds, and we drank them out of cups. So if anybody—” She waggled her finger at him. “For just that reason. So if the paperboy looked in he’d say, ‘They’re drinking tea. How British. How refined.’ ” She continued to laugh.
At that, he could not help smiling himself.
“Criminals,” she said. “We had to be careful. That was 1949, and I was having all that trouble with the Montario school board. You could have come in; in fact you did. I remember. One month I didn’t have any change, and I told you to come in. It was winter. And you came in and sat down in the living room while I went all over the damn house searching for change. Nobody was home but me. I finally found a dollar and a half in somebody’s drawer.”
He remembered sitting there alone in the big empty living room with its piano and fireplace, while somewhere off upstairs Miss Reuben hunted for money. He had heard her cursing with exasperation, and he had felt himself to be nothing more than a nuisance. On the coffee table a book lay open … she had been reading. Interrupted by the paper boy, at seven-thirty in the evening. How can I get rid of him? Damn it, where’s some change? And, as he sat, he longed to summon up some bright conversation to use when she appeared again, some observation about the books in the bookcase. He examined them feverishly, but none of them were familiar. Just titles, seen through the perspiration and fright that kept him mute and stupid and unable to do anything when she returned but accept the money, mumble thanks and good night, and go out the door once again.
“I remember what you wore,” he said, with accusation.
“Do you? How interesting, because I don’t.”
He said, “You had on black trousers.”
“Toreador pants. Yes. Made of black velvet.”
“I had never seen anything so exciting.”
“That wasn’t exciting. I wore them around all the time. I even wore them gardening.”
“I tried to think of some way to say something interesting.”
“Why didn’t you just ask if you could sit around and talk? I would have been glad of company.” And then she said, “How old were you then?”
“Fifteen.”
“Well,” she said, “we could have talked about old times. But I’ll bet what you actually wanted to do was tear those tight black exciting toreador pants from me and assault me. Isn’t that what fifteen-year-old paperboys secretly want to do all the time? That’s just about the age when they read those paperbound books from the drugstore.”
He thought, My god. And now this woman is my wife.
Before going to bed that night, Susan filled the tub and took a bath. He accompanied her into the bathroom and sat on the clothes hamper watching her; she did not mind, and he felt a very stong desire to do so. He did not try to explain it or justify it.