Benediction

30

TWO MONTHS AFTER Alene introduced the principal to her mother in a Denver restaurant, she was buying groceries on a Saturday morning in the little town where she taught school. She was standing in the produce section when a short black-haired woman in nice clothes came up to her and without warning reached up and slapped her in the face.

Wait! Alene said. What are you doing?

But she recognized the woman. She’d never met her before, but she’d seen her picture in the newspaper once, showing the principal with his wife and their two children.

The woman began to scream. You’re filthy! You’re just a whore! I won’t let him go! I won’t ever! She raised her hand again, but Alene caught her wrists and shoved her away. The woman fell back in her high-heeled shoes and good dress against the stand of oranges and knocked some of them rolling out across the floor.

Oh! You shoved me! You can’t do that.

People were watching them now. Housewives, old single men, the stockboy. The woman rushed at Alene and tried now to hit her with her purse, swinging it. Wait, Alene said. Stop it.

Oh, don’t speak to me. Whore!

Then the grocery manager came hurrying up. What’s going on here? What’s this?

She’s sleeping with my husband. She wants to steal him. She’s a whore.

Here now, he said. Stop this. Let me help you. He put his arm around her and she tried to slap him too, but he caught her arms and pinned them to her sides. Whoa, he said, let’s just go outside. Come with me.

He held her tight and half carried her out the door. Alene and the others watched them out in the parking lot. The manager opened the car door and she got in. She appeared to be calmer now, as if she suddenly were exhausted. He stood talking to her, and then he shut the car door, she started the engine and drove off. The manager came back in the store and walked up to Alene. Aren’t you a teacher in the grade school?

Yes.

What are you doing? he said and shook his head.

I’ll just go, Alene said. She left her grocery cart and went outside to her car into the cold day. She drove home and on the following Monday she returned to her classroom of young children. Everyone in town knew what had happened in the grocery store and nevertheless there she was, still teaching.

The principal of her school called her into the school office and said they could not have this behavior, she’d have to be on probation now, and one more thing like this, if anything happened again, they’d let her go. She was a good teacher, he said. They didn’t want to lose her. But they couldn’t have this.

In the other town the man, the principal, almost lost his job too. The district school board met with him in executive session in the school’s library. The board chairman, a retired insurance agent, said, In the name of Jesus, what were you thinking of? Didn’t you know you can’t do that?

Yes. I knew.

Then why did you?

Oh, we all know why, said one of the other board members, a young man. Why did you think you could get away with it? That’s what I want to know. I thought you grew up in a place like this.

Yes. It was about this size.

Then you would know you can’t do anything without everybody else in town hearing what happened before you even got home. Whether you broke your leg or your thumb or some woman’s heart on the other side of the county there.

I know that, the principal said.

So what were you thinking of? Tell us.

He didn’t answer. He looked around the room at them, in the school library with the reference books collecting dust on the shelves and the school librarian’s desk located in the place where she could keep watch on everything, and the bright posters on the walls.

He wasn’t thinking, one of the others said. That’s the point of all this. You weren’t thinking, were you. It wasn’t about thinking. Thinking didn’t have a thing to do with it.

He didn’t answer that either.

All right, the old chairman said. You can never mind that. You will have to at least answer this, though. Are you done with her?

The principal looked at him for a moment. I am, he said.

You’re finished.

Yes.

You promise us that.

Yes.

Never mind what you promise your wife. You have to be sure, what you tell us. We won’t put up with this kind of thing. We’re not like your wife might be, we won’t take you back.

I said it was over.

All right. The chairman looked around the room. Anything else concerning this issue here today?

None of them spoke.

All right then. I don’t like this way of doing things. Talking out here in the open about what ought to be kept back secret behind closed doors. This isn’t good. I don’t like it.

She never met the principal again. She did not even have a final talk or a final hour with him in a café or a last night in a rented bed in a hotel room. She only ever saw him once again, and that was from a distance at a meeting when he crossed in a hallway fifty feet away, wearing a suit and tie. Then in the summer she heard that he and his wife and children had moved to Utah.

She phoned three times during those months, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t take her calls. She wrote him a letter but she never knew if he received it, or if he simply refused to answer. She decided finally that he was a kind of coward for that. That was the word that came to her mind. She herself stayed and taught for years in the same little town. She believed she had to do that. It took a kind of courage. She was marked and known. It was how you paid for love. But over time that was lost too. She became part of the history of the town, like wallpaper in the old houses — the aging lonely isolated woman, the unmarried schoolteacher living out her days among other people’s children, a woman who’d had a brief moment of excitement and romance a long time ago and afterward had retreated and lived quietly and made no more disturbance.

The principal only ever came to visit her in dreams that were never satisfactory and from which she woke in tears, with an ache that wouldn’t be healed or soothed.

She had a picture of him that she had taken herself. And one of them together in the hotel lobby that the desk clerk in Denver had taken that first winter. A black-and-white picture which didn’t show how red their cheeks were, coming in off the cold street, before they rode the elevator up to the room to undress and lie down in bed together.