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Authors: Carrie Brown
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onto the building’s landing above the flight of steps. The night sky, a red band at the horizon, opened up, star filled.
A knot of boys, shouting and grappling and roughhousing, their shirttails untucked and their ties loosened, passed her.
Hi, Mrs. van Dusen, someone said.
Hi there, she said. Careful!
She hung back against a column. The boys went past her down the steps and out into the crowd, disappearing into the evening’s darkness, headed toward the chapel.
The night air was a relief against her skin, as if she’d plunged her arms and face into a pool of cool water. It was always overheated in the dining hall, and her haste earlier in the evening, everything that had happened with Ed, had made her feel dirty. She liked being outside at night anyway, the vertiginous assertion of scale that always followed. Sometimes, she thought, it was a perfect relief to be an infinitesimal presence on the face of the planet.
She watched the boys passing her, aware as always of the extremes among them. Some of them were as beautiful asGreek statues, marble youths of classical antiquity with lambs borne across their shoulders. Another, unhappy group moved sullenly among these athletes and scholars, their manner simultaneously pained and aggressive, as if they understood how poorly they compared to their beautiful brethren and suffered for it.
She put her palm against the column on the landing and lifted her gaze. Tatters of night clouds floated near the moon. The stars seemed to be clustered high up in the darkest part of the sky. Something about their distant position was a reminder of the scope of the universe. Tonight, she knew, Peter would ask the boys to pray for Ed McClaren. He would tell them how lucky they were, every day the gift of an education laid at their feet, a hot dinner prepared for them at night, pancakes for breakfast, doughnuts on Fridays. A cheer would go up at the mention of the famous doughnuts.
Peter gave the same speech every year, absolutely earnest, and he meant every bit of it.
She knew he got on people’s nerves sometimes. He was mulishly tolerant, tiresomely reasonable and conciliatory. There was not much irony in Peter, and some people—bad people, she thought—just plain hated sincerity. But the school would never find anyone who loved it as much as Peter had, someone who loved it without care for his own regard. Tonight he would mention the beauty of the campus, the lovely old buildings and the playing fields planted in grass so green and soft you wanted to lie down and rest your cheek there. For Peter, the bloom of romance—the goodness of the school’s initial purpose, the grief of the parents who had lost their child so long ago and whohad wanted, in the wake of that loss, to help other boys—had never left his impression of the place. Ruth knew that some of the boys, especially the scholarship boys plucked from whatever misfortune had shaped their lives, would see it tonight as Peter asked them to see it. They would feel their luck, along with their shyness and their worry about being in a new place among strangers, just as she and Peter had felt their luck when they had arrived so many years ago.
It was for those boys especially that Peter worked so hard.
When she had weeded the flower bed this afternoon, the sunlight had been warm on the back of her neck and against her shoulder. But tonight in the air’s coolness she could feel the winter ahead. She had been thinking, as she always did at this time of year, of the poem by Keats, his season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Ever since she’d been taught this work in college, fragments of its lines had come to her as fall approached.
Bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run
…
while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
…
then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows
…
One didn’t want to hurry toward one’s end, she thought, and yet one longed nonetheless for the days
A knot of boys, shouting and grappling and roughhousing, their shirttails untucked and their ties loosened, passed her.
Hi, Mrs. van Dusen, someone said.
Hi there, she said. Careful!
She hung back against a column. The boys went past her down the steps and out into the crowd, disappearing into the evening’s darkness, headed toward the chapel.
The night air was a relief against her skin, as if she’d plunged her arms and face into a pool of cool water. It was always overheated in the dining hall, and her haste earlier in the evening, everything that had happened with Ed, had made her feel dirty. She liked being outside at night anyway, the vertiginous assertion of scale that always followed. Sometimes, she thought, it was a perfect relief to be an infinitesimal presence on the face of the planet.
She watched the boys passing her, aware as always of the extremes among them. Some of them were as beautiful asGreek statues, marble youths of classical antiquity with lambs borne across their shoulders. Another, unhappy group moved sullenly among these athletes and scholars, their manner simultaneously pained and aggressive, as if they understood how poorly they compared to their beautiful brethren and suffered for it.
She put her palm against the column on the landing and lifted her gaze. Tatters of night clouds floated near the moon. The stars seemed to be clustered high up in the darkest part of the sky. Something about their distant position was a reminder of the scope of the universe. Tonight, she knew, Peter would ask the boys to pray for Ed McClaren. He would tell them how lucky they were, every day the gift of an education laid at their feet, a hot dinner prepared for them at night, pancakes for breakfast, doughnuts on Fridays. A cheer would go up at the mention of the famous doughnuts.
Peter gave the same speech every year, absolutely earnest, and he meant every bit of it.
She knew he got on people’s nerves sometimes. He was mulishly tolerant, tiresomely reasonable and conciliatory. There was not much irony in Peter, and some people—bad people, she thought—just plain hated sincerity. But the school would never find anyone who loved it as much as Peter had, someone who loved it without care for his own regard. Tonight he would mention the beauty of the campus, the lovely old buildings and the playing fields planted in grass so green and soft you wanted to lie down and rest your cheek there. For Peter, the bloom of romance—the goodness of the school’s initial purpose, the grief of the parents who had lost their child so long ago and whohad wanted, in the wake of that loss, to help other boys—had never left his impression of the place. Ruth knew that some of the boys, especially the scholarship boys plucked from whatever misfortune had shaped their lives, would see it tonight as Peter asked them to see it. They would feel their luck, along with their shyness and their worry about being in a new place among strangers, just as she and Peter had felt their luck when they had arrived so many years ago.
It was for those boys especially that Peter worked so hard.
When she had weeded the flower bed this afternoon, the sunlight had been warm on the back of her neck and against her shoulder. But tonight in the air’s coolness she could feel the winter ahead. She had been thinking, as she always did at this time of year, of the poem by Keats, his season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Ever since she’d been taught this work in college, fragments of its lines had come to her as fall approached.
Bless with fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run
…
while barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day
…
then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn among the river sallows
…
One didn’t want to hurry toward one’s end, she thought, and yet one longed nonetheless for the days
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