Читать книгу Known By Heart - Ellen Prentiss Campbell - Страница 10

Faith and Practice

Dorothy Shaw sat beside her husband Grayson, headmaster of Clear Spring Friends School, on the Elders’ bench at the front of the Meeting House. His long fingers gripping his knees warned her. He was about to speak.

“I am wrestling with Spirit. True witness to peace must go beyond prayer. Action is called for. Civil disobedience. This Meeting must join in the effort to send medical supplies to North Vietnam. We must defy the government.”

The members of Clear Spring Meeting disagreed over how far they should go in putting the Quaker peace testimony into practice; the Meeting was at war with itself. Grayson sided with the activists, the radical members of the Meeting. Although he was descended from one of Clear Spring’s founding families, Dorothy worried that his provocative stance could alienate weighty Friends. The school was already in financial distress and needed the continued support of the Meeting.

Eight years earlier in this same room, Grayson had issued a different kind of challenge: “We of this Meeting are called to found a school.” He’d persuaded Anna White, last in an old family, to donate her orchard and overgrown fields. At the regional Yearly Meeting, Grayson canvassed until enough money was promised to break ground. Clear Spring Friends School rose out of the fields across the road from the house where he had grown up, and where he and Dorothy still made their home.

At first, she’d just helped in the office. This role expanded into her present variegated one: admissions, counseling, discipline, surrogate mother to the boarding students. She could hardly tell where the job ended and she began. Peace in Vietnam was abstract compared to the welfare of the school. But Grayson was weary of the school’s daily demands, restless. He’d been offered a job with a new peace organization, a radical splinter from the established Friends Service Committee. Dorothy had insisted he turn the offer down, telling him it was wrong to abandon the school before it was stronger. “You could run the school without me,” he’d said. “No,” she’d replied. Even after seventeen years, she was still an outsider in Clear Spring.

Now a student stood up in the balcony—Todd, a boarder from Florida. “This place is a bunch of hypocrites. All this crap about peace. They kicked my friend out of school this week. He’s eighteen. He’ll be drafted. Go ahead, send medicine to the Viet Cong. Send my buddy to war.” He stamped downstairs and outside.

Todd’s friend had been suspended twice the year before, for smoking. This time it was marijuana. “Strike three,” Grayson had said, and expelled him. Dorothy was relieved to have him gone, though she hated losing his tuition.

There were nervous coughs as the Meeting settled back into expectant silence after the boy’s outburst. To quiet her mind, Dorothy studied the plain, beautiful room, looking up at the heavy beam across the center of the Meeting House ceiling where the partition between men and women had been two hundred years ago. How shocked Grayson’s ancestors would be at her students sitting in the balcony, holding hands. Across the room, the old glass in the windows warped the light, spreading it across the white plaster wall like a watermark on paper.

The benches creaked; the clock ticked. At the end of the hour, the clerk of the Meeting initiated the customary ripple of handshakes. Meeting was over; next came announcements.

“I’m driving down to the vigil,” said Bruce Williams, the biology teacher. “Several students have already signed up. If anyone wants to go, we’ll leave in the school van after coffee.” Bruce drove to the silent vigil in front of the White House every Sunday. Sometimes Dorothy joined him.

Grayson scoffed at vigils. He said they were cheap and easy, too passive to truly convey resistance. “So how would you suggest we teach the children to bear witness for peace? Pour blood on files? Immolate ourselves?” she retorted. No one in Clear Spring had known the Quaker who recently had set himself alight in front of the Pentagon, but the tragic gesture haunted her.

From the broad porch of the Meeting House she watched a phalanx of honking geese fly overhead. There was smoke in the air, burning leaves. Standing here last April, after the impromptu Meeting called the night Martin Luther King was killed, it had seemed possible to smell the bitter smoke of buildings burning in the riots just fifteen miles away in Washington. The next Sunday she’d accompanied Bruce and his vanload to the vigil, driving past charred blocks and looted storefronts. Then, two months later, Bobby Kennedy was killed. All year violence had continued and escalated.

Her husband’s cousin Sylvia joined them on the porch. “Do something about that boy. That’s no way to behave in Meeting.”

“He’s young,” Dorothy began, but bit back the defense. Sylvia sat on the Meeting’s Finance Committee. “I’ll speak with him.”

Dorothy and Grayson started home through the cemetery. Most of those buried beneath mossy stones were his kin; she’d lie here one day, too, beside him. He opened the gate to the path through the fields. Runaway slaves had hidden here among the corn stalks, helped along their way to Canada on the underground railway by his grandparents. Sometimes, now, young men came to stay with members of the Meeting on their way to Canada, seeking a different freedom. Last year the Peace Pilgrim had appeared at Meeting one Sunday. The elderly woman had been walking back and forth across the country for fifteen years, since Korea, carrying out her vow to remain a wanderer until there was peace in the world. She stayed the night with them. After she left, Grayson had said she was engaged in a pointless exercise.

At the spring from which the Meeting took its name, two students were necking on the bench beneath the trees. Grayson chuckled. “It’s not funny,” Dorothy hissed. Students lolled against each other everywhere, it seemed. On campus she had to keep the music practice rooms locked or they were used for other kinds of practice.

“You know the rules about public display of affection,” she called out in her sternest dean’s voice.

“It wasn’t public till you got here,” the boy said, standing up and shaking back his long hair. It was Todd. He’d ignored her dress code; velvet bell-bottoms dipped beneath his jutting hipbones. Bright but a lazy student, he was especially popular with the girls. It was just a matter of time until she caught him with pot, too. His father, a real estate developer, was always proposing a “significant gift.” The school had yet to receive a check or stock certificates. Was it a promise or blackmail?

The girl was Miriam Street. Dark hair and dark eyes, she looked like a gypsy in her long skirt made from an Indian bedspread. Her blouse was a skin-tight purple leotard, no bra. Dorothy would have to add underwear to the dress code; it seemed that nothing could be left to common sense or modesty.

Miriam was the child of another old Clear Spring family. Her mother, Garnet, had died that year. Garnet had been the first to befriend Dorothy when she moved from Philadelphia to marry Grayson. Soon the two women had been pregnant together, but Dorothy miscarried. She’d never conceived again; the friendship languished. Years later when Garnet became ill, Dorothy felt guilty, as though her envy of Garnet’s healthy child had caused the cancer.

Miriam’s father, Gil, a physicist, had recently lost his job with the Department of Energy over his participation in a vigil against biological weapons. Sometimes the price for bearing witness was too high. Since losing his wife and his job, Gil had been drinking and neglecting his daughter. Dorothy had convinced him to let Miriam come live on dorm, belatedly trying to make amends to the girl’s deceased mother.

“I’ll expect you both for Stewardship tomorrow,” she said to Todd and Miriam. Students were assigned extra chores as meaningful punishment. Sweat equity, Grayson called it.

The boy smirked and grabbed Miriam’s hand, lacing their fingers together. Dorothy itched to yank them apart. Insolent students infuriated her. Maybe it was just as well she’d never been a parent; at least she could leave the students and go home at night.

“It’s time the two of you were heading back. We’ll walk with you,” said Grayson.

No one spoke as they tramped in double file, older couple behind the younger one, through the woods. They arrived at the rail fence where the school property began.

“Come have a bite with us, Miriam,” said Dorothy. She’d rescue her from the predatory boy.

“Thanks, but I’ll just go on back to the dining hall.”

“I’ll call the dorm, excuse you from lunch.” The invitation had become an order.

“See you,” said the boy, climbing over the fence instead of opening the gate.

The couple, Miriam in tow, crossed the road. The sign beside their mailbox read Grayson Shaw, Cabinetmaker and Luthier.

“What’s a luthier?” asked the girl.

“Maker of stringed instruments,” said Dorothy.

Grayson had been a woodworker before he started the school. Former customers still called, but there was no time for cabinetry. “Running a school is like running with a wild woman,” he sometimes joked. He found time for his dulcimers only late in the day or at night. It was as necessary as breathing for him to be doing something with his hands.

Clear Spring’s original music teacher, a young woman from South Carolina, had introduced the school to the lap dulcimer and inspired Grayson to try making one. “Can’t carry a tune in a bucket,” he said but attacked the project with enthusiasm and an engineer’s precision. He gave that first instrument to the teacher and she praised his gift for finding the voice in wood.

One morning Dorothy discovered an anonymous note in her mailbox in the faculty room. Keep an eye on your husband the music lover. She’d started to tear it up, but then tucked it beneath the blotter on her desk. At the end of the day, she passed it to Grayson across the supper table.

He read, rubbing his crew-cut hair. “Oh, for pity’s sake. It’s dulcimers I’m interested in, not that skinny little teacher.”

Dorothy had looked around at faculty meetings. Who wrote the note? The music teacher left after just one year. Whatever else was true about what had happened, it was lonely at the school for a single woman.

The summer after, Dorothy and Grayson went dancing every weekend at the amusement park in Glen Echo. The prescribed steps, the physical closeness, eased the lingering wariness she’d felt. On the drive home she would rest her hand in Grayson’s lap and sometimes they would end the evening making love. They won the waltz competition at the end of the summer, dancing with a sheet of paper pressed between them, paper pressed thin as the remaining shadow of her doubt. Grayson installed a wall of mirrors in his workshop, making it their private dance hall. They didn’t use it now; after dinner most evenings there were meetings, student emergencies, paperwork, bills. But he still played the dance records when he worked on his dulcimers. Yesterday evening she’d come to the workshop to say good night and found him listening to a waltz as he stroked tung oil on the dulcimer with his softest brush (special ordered, made from the ear hair of Asian oxen). She’d thought for a moment of inviting him to dance, but it was too late, and it had been so long since they had been partners in that way. Grayson was right; the school was ravenous and absorbing. Not like a wild woman, but a demanding tribe of needy children. It was funny, that their shared work sometimes drew them together and other times pushed them apart. Perhaps parenting would have been like that, too.

“Show Miriam the dulcimer,” Dorothy said now.

The workshop was fragrant with sawdust and varnish, Grayson’s scents. Almost finished, the instrument lay gleaming on the bench. He used black walnut for the backs of his dulcimers, and spruce or red cedar for the tops, taking care to pair the slices of wood in book-matched sets, twin grains side by side, like open pages of a book. On this one, the top was red cedar. She thought spruce was prettier, but Grayson preferred the sound with cedar. Rich as chocolate, he said.

“The way it shines, it makes you want to touch it,” said Miriam.

“Go ahead. It’s the ruby shellac,” he said. “Like rouge on a face.”

Miriam traced the heart-shaped sound hole. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

“Let me show you what’s inside.” He always inscribed a fragment of verse in each instrument, beneath the sound hole. The poem had to be brief, the letters tiny, to fit. “You can read it if the light shines in just right,” he said, holding the dulcimer up. “Can you make it out?”

The girl and the man stood side by side.

“The little rift within the lute by and by will make the music mute,” the girl read.

Tennyson. Was he alluding to the intervals of distance between them? There was an intermittent, insidious fissure, a rip that had first opened years ago, after the failed pregnancy. For a long time afterward, making love seemed a dangerous obligation, freighted with the longing and the fear of conceiving again, which never happened. Eventually, she’d come to terms with being barren, her regret mitigated by taking care of him, and then of students. She’d comforted herself with the realization that there was at least sometimes a special closeness possible for childless couples.

The music teacher had ripped open the seam between them again. Though the ambiguous incident became woven into the warp and woof of the years, it left a flaw in the fabric. Recently, it had been his turn to be angry when she insisted that he stay on at the school. But over any long marriage, there were bound to be periods of equilibrium and disequilibrium, seasons of warm and cold.

“Why’s it called a dulcimer?” asked Miriam.

“Latin,” said Dorothy. “Dulce means sweet. Like the sound it makes. There’s one in the house you can try. Please come help me with lunch.”

“Give a shout when you’re ready,” said Grayson.

Autumn sunlight reflected off the kitchen’s heart of pine floors. She kept the windows bare to see the trees in the orchard. But now the school had put the valuable land up for sale; it would be bulldozed for a housing development. She’d made her last batch of applesauce and stored it on the shelves Grayson had built for her in the cellar.

“You can set the table,” said Dorothy. “Silverware is in the drawer of the sideboard in the dining room.”

She telephoned the dorm advisor, one of their best young faculty, one they might lose next year to the higher salary of public school. “Miriam’s having lunch with us,” she explained. She arranged cold fried chicken from the evening before on a Blue Willow platter and poured applesauce into a pressed glass bowl.

“Which dishes should I use?” asked Miriam.

“The ones with the yellow flowers.” The dishes had been part of her trousseau. Use pretty things or you’re in bondage to them, her mother had said.

Miriam had seconds of everything: applesauce, devilled eggs, chicken. “Thanks, this was delicious.”

“Thee must join us again,” Grayson said.

Dorothy was startled. He rarely used the old Quaker form of address, except sometimes with her. It did feel right, having Miriam there. Without her, Dorothy might have criticized what he’d said in Meeting, accused him of further endangering the school. They would have quarreled. What if Miriam were to come live with them? It would reduce the cost of her scholarship to the school, and the girl would be safer here. They’d be safer, too.

“Lend me a dishtowel,” said Grayson after lunch. Linen was best for rubbing in the final coat of carnauba wax. “And one of your nail files.” Nothing better, he’d told her once, for getting around the curves on the body of the instrument. He left for the shop.

“Here’s an apron,” Dorothy said, tying her own. The apron’s strings were getting shorter; she was thickening. She felt heavy beside the slender girl. “Why don’t you wash, I’ll dry and put away. There are rubber gloves under the sink.”

Miriam plunged her bare hands into the soapy water. “I used to do the dishes with my mother. Dad lets them go till we run out.”

“Your mother was my first friend, when I moved here.”

“I miss her so much,” said Miriam.

Dorothy was tempted to reach out and embrace the girl, but held back, always mindful of the necessary boundary between herself and students. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

They worked side by side in easy silence. When the dishes were almost done, Dorothy forced herself to speak. “You must be careful, with Todd.”

“We were just kissing.”

“It’s easy for things to get out of hand.”

“It’s no big deal, really. Are you going to tell my father?”

“No, I just want you to stop and think.”

“I tried to talk to her about the boy,” Dorothy said that evening, brushing her hair. “Keep an eye on her when you’re on campus. I don’t trust him.”

“Too pretty for her own good. Just like her mother, when she was seventeen,” said Grayson from the bed. He’d grown up with Garnet. Though it was foolish, Dorothy felt something like jealousy.

She crawled into bed beside him and reached for the Meeting’s handbook, Faith and Practice. Tonight’s passage spoke to her concern about Miriam, and the climate of casual physical affection between the students. The culture was so intemperate, lascivious.

“Listen to this. Maybe you could use this book in your class. It talks about sex in such a simple, good way.”

Grayson taught Quakerism every fall, required of all new students. The course was really about his philosophy of life—how to mow a field, sand a board, how to find the Divine through work. He’d wanted to change the course this year, call it Activism. Dorothy persuaded him not to do that. But she had been encouraging him to include something about what the public schools euphemistically called Health. “The students look up to you,” she’d said. “They might listen.”

Now she read aloud. “Love is a relationship between people. The sexual encounter can be love and consecrate or it can be lust and desecrate.”

“We don’t use books in my class,” he said.

She turned out the light; they did not reach out for each other, even in the dark. It was lonely in the bed without the weight of his arm across her. Sometimes they fell asleep on their separate sides of the bed and over the course of the night rolled close, warm animals seeking familiar comfort. But she knew even before closing her eyes that would not happen tonight.

The next morning Dorothy lay in bed, puzzling over the fragments of a dream. There had been a door in the bedroom opening to a secret room in the house. Lutes and viola da gamba hung from low rafters. A half-finished harpsichord stood in the corner. Maybe it was Grayson’s dream slipping into her sleep, the way she sometimes found a stray wood chip from his hair on her pillow. He’d never made a harpsichord, never had the time. Perhaps he could, if he quit the school, took the job with the activists. If he were happier, would it set things right between them?

Later that day while taking a prospective student and his family on tour, she saw Grayson and his Quakerism class on the lawn in front of White Hall. He’d spread out an array of forked branches: peach, apple, pear. Students wandered across the grass like sleep walkers, branches held in stiff, outstretched arms.

“What are they doing?” asked the boy’s mother.

Dorothy hesitated. This was the sort of thing people from outside misunderstood.

“Dowsing for water.”

“What?” said the father.

“It’s an old practice. If someone has the gift, the branch dips when you pass over underground veins of water. Watch, he’s letting a student try with him.”

It was Miriam. Today her leotard was peacock blue, but at least a vest covered her bosom. Grayson extended the branch; she grasped one fork, he the other. Holding hands, yoked together by the branch, they crossed the lawn. The stick writhed down.

“Cool,” said the visiting boy. His father looked at his watch.

“This way,” Dorothy said. “We’ll visit biology now.” The family wouldn’t complete the application. Faith and mystery, and Grayson, were the heart of the school but their combination made it vulnerable, too. She should have known better than to linger here.

It was almost dinner time when she started home, taking the long way, around the pond and through the orchard. Last year students had sneaked in the night before the spring dance and ripped down blossoming branches. They smuggled the limbs back to decorate the cafeteria, transforming the ugly room into an enchanted forest. She’d overlooked the mischief since the trees were doomed anyway.

She heard waltz music from the workshop. Grayson must be finishing the dulcimer. She would ask him to dance, push herself across the gap between them; make peace. Dorothy opened the door.

Grayson pressed Miriam against the workbench, kissing her.

Adrenaline propelled Dorothy across the room. She pushed them apart; picked up the dulcimer and slammed it down.

Her husband groaned as the dulcimer cracked and splintered. She tossed the ruined instrument on the floor.

“Come with me,” she ordered Miriam. The girl cowered behind him.

“Dorothy,” said Grayson. “It’s me at fault here.”

“I know that. Come.”

Dorothy had never intentionally destroyed anything before—except at the demolition derby at the county fair, soon after she’d married. Grayson bought her ticket; dared her. She’d swung the sledge hammer, smashing the car’s windshield. Wrecking the car, such meaningless destruction, had been disgraceful but exhilarating. Grayson cheered from the sidelines.

At day’s end, Dorothy liked to step into their quiet house but tonight, the tidy kitchen felt hollow and cold.

Miriam fidgeted with the cluster of wooden animals on the kitchen table.

“Leave those alone,” Dorothy told her. The black walnut lion and the curly maple lamb had been Grayson’s gift to her the first Christmas they were married. “Our peaceable kingdom,” he had said. Every Christmas since he’d added to the couple’s perennial centerpiece, carving animals from scraps of wood; this year’s addition had been a basswood elephant.

“He was only going to show me how to dance. Are you going to tell my father?”

Dorothy imagined the smirks, the gossip in Meeting. Another humiliation, like she’d endured with the music teacher. Worse: this would be a scandal the school could ill afford.

“No, I’m not telling your father.”

“Thank you,” said Miriam.

Dorothy felt ashamed. Don’t thank me, she should say. Don’t listen to me. Don’t lie.

“I’ll walk you back to dorm.”

After leaving the girl, Dorothy went to her office and sat at her desk, trying to collect her thoughts; trying, as Friends said, to reach clarity. But nothing was clear. The pain was worse now than when she’d discovered them—the way a burn hurts more after the initial shock. She locked herself in the faculty bathroom, turned the tap on full blast, and wept. Afterward, in the glare of the bare bulb over the sink, she stared at the mirror. How had she failed to notice that she’d grown old? She’d never tempt anyone again. Grayson and the school were all she had, all she’d have.

On her way home, Dorothy heard a car. Stepping into its path would give obliterating relief but she hesitated in the rough grass and the car swished by. Near the house she smelled smoke and discovered Grayson tending a small bonfire in the back yard.

“What are you burning?” she asked.

“The dulcimer. What’s left of it.”

The fire snapped and crackled between them.

“Perhaps it’s time for you to take that job with the activists.”

“You’re sure, you’re clear? That’s what thee wishes?”

She stared at him across the flames. The heat of the blaze separating them felt good. That much at least was clear.