Two tall pines somewhere to our left inadvertently touched branches, the sound of a madman’s prosthetic limbs.
“Someone’s coming!” Jade whispered.
We raced down the hill, past silent Graydon, and the basement of Love Auditorium, and Hypocrite’s Alley, where the music classrooms with their long windows were vacant and blind like Oedipus after he hollowed out his eyes.
“I’m scared,” she whispered, tightening her grip on my wrist.
“I’m terrified. And freezing.”
“Have you seen School of Hell?”
“No.”
“Serial killer’s a Home Ec teacher.”
“Ow.”
“Baking 203. Bakes the students into soufflés. Isn’t that sick?”
“I stepped on something. I think it went through my shoe.”
“We have to hurry, Retch. We can’t get caught. We’ll die.”
She broke away from me and skipped up the steps of Loomis, yanking on the doors covered with dark, leafy announcements for Mr. Crisp’s production of The Bald Soprano (Ionesco, 1950). They were locked.
“We’ll have to go in another way,” she whispered excitedly. “Through the window. Or the roof. I wonder if there’s a chimney. We’ll pull a Santa, Retch. A Santa.”
She grabbed my hand. Taking cues from movies featuring cat burglars and silent assassins, we circled the building, crunching through the shrubs and pine needles, trying the windows. Finally, we found one that wasn’t latched, which Jade forced open into a narrow space of inward-leaning glass leading into Mr. Fletcher’s Driver’s Ed classroom. She slipped through the opening easily, landing on one foot. As I went through, I skinned my left shin on the window catch, my stockings ripped, and then I crashed onto the carpet, hitting my head on the radiator. (A poster on the wall featuring a kid wearing braces and a seat belt: “Always Check Your Blind Spot, on the Road and in Life!”)
“Move it, slowpoke,” Jade whispered and disappeared through the door.
Hannah’s classroom, Room 102, was located at the very end of the rootcanal hallway, a Casablanca poster taped to the door. I’d never been in her classroom before, and inside, when I opened the door, it was surprisingly bright; yellow-white floodlight from the sidewalk outside radiated through the wall of windows, X-raying the twenty-five or thirty desks and chairs and flinging long, skeletal shadows across the floor. Jade was already perched cross-legged on the stool at the front desk, one or two of the drawers hanging open. She paged intensely through a textbook.
“Find any smoking guns?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, so I turned and walked down the first row of desks, staring up at the row of framed movie posters on the walls (Visual Aid 14.0).
In total, there were thirteen, including the two in the back by the bookshelf. Maybe it was because of the eggnog, but it only took a minute to realize how odd the posters were — not the fact that every one was foreign, or an American movie in Spanish, Italian or French, or even that they were each spaced some three inches apart and straight as soldiers, a level of exactitude you learned never to expect from the Visual Aids caking the walls of a classroom, not even one of Science or Mathematics. (I went up to Il Caso Thomas Crown, moved back the frame and saw, around the nail, distinct pencil lines, where she’d made the measurements, the blueprint of meticulousness.)
With the exception of two (per un Pugno di Dollari, Fronte del Porto), all the posters featured an embrace or kiss of some kind. Rhett was there grasping Scarlett, sure; and Fred holding onto Holly and Cat in the rain (Colazione da Tiffany); but there was also Ryan O’Neal Historia del Amoring with Ali MacGraw; Charlton Heston clutching Janet Leigh, making her head fall at an uncomfortable angle in La Soif du Mal; and Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting a great deal of sand in their bathing suits. In a funny way too, I noticed — and I didn’t think I was getting too carried away — the way the woman was positioned in each of the posters, it could very well have been Hannah embraced from there to eternity. She had their same fine china bones, their hairpin, coastal-road profiles, the hair that tripped and fell down their shoulders.
VISUAL AID 14.0
It was surprising, because she’d never struck me as the dizzy type to surround herself with firework displays of untold passion (as Dad called it, a “big to-don’t”). That she’d so meticulously assembled these Coming Attractions that had come and gone — it made me a little sad.
“Somewhere in a woman’s room there is always something, an object, a detail, that is her, wholly and unapologetically,” Dad said. “With your mother, of course, it was the butterflies. Not only could you ascertain the extreme care she took in preserving and mounting them, how much they meant to her, but each one shed a tiny yet persistent light on the complex woman she was. Take the glorious Forest Queen. It reflects your mother’s regal bearing, her fierce reverence for the natural world. The Clouded Mother of Pearl? Her maternal instinct, her understanding of moral relativism. Natasha saw the world not in blacks or whites, but as it really is — a decidedly dim landscape. The Mechanitis Mimic? She could impersonate all the greats, from Norma Shearer to Howard Keel. The insects themselves were her in many ways — glorious, heartbreakingly fragile. And so you see, considering each of these specimens, we end up with — if not your mother precisely—at the very least, a close approximation of her soul.”
I wasn’t sure why, at this moment, I thought of the butterflies, except that these posters seemed to be the details that were Hannah, “wholly and unapologetically.” Maybe Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr getting sand in their bathing suits were her ardor for living coupled with a passion for the sea, the origin of all life, and Bella di giorno featuring Catherine Deneuve with her mouth hidden was her need for shiftiness, secrets, Cottonwood.
“Oh, God,” Jade said behind me. She threw a thick paperback into the air and it fluttered, crashing against the window.
“What?”
She didn’t say anything, only pointed at the book on the floor, her breathing exaggerated. I walked over to the windows and picked it up.
It was a gray book with the photograph of a man on the front, its title in orange letters: Blackbird Singing in the Dead of Night: The Life of Charles Milles Manson (Ivys, 1985). The cover and pages were extremely tattered.
“So?” I asked.
“Don’t you know who Charles Manson is?”
“Of course.”
“Why would she have that book?”
“A lot of people have it. It’s the definitive biography.”