Someone to Hold

The easels for his class had already been set up with chairs pushed neatly in front of them. The art supplies were arranged in orderly fashion on the table. The easels took up a good two-thirds of the room. In the other third, the desks had been arranged in two lines and pushed together, nose to nose, to make one long table, which was strewn with a great tumble of . . . stuff. The children were clustered about it, looking flushed and animated and slightly untidy. Miss Westcott—was it really she?—was in their midst, issuing orders like an army sergeant, pointing with a wooden ruler from the stuff to various children and back again. All the pupils seemed to be jumping to her commands like eager recruits, even the older ones, who often liked to behave as though life was just too much of a bore to be bothered with. Two five-year-olds were bouncing up and down with uncontained exuberance.

She was wearing a severe brown dress, which was high to the neck and had long sleeves, though they were currently pushed up to her elbows. Her hair had been dressed with a severity to match the dress, but it had suffered disruption in the course of the day, and one lock hung down unheeded over her neck while other escapees appeared to have been shoved haphazardly back into her bun. Her cheeks and even her nose were a bit on the rosy and shiny side. There was a frown between her brows and her lips were set in a thin line when she was not issuing orders.

She looked up and caught sight of him.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, as though she were issuing a challenge. “I trust everything has been set up to your liking. Children, those budding artists among you may proceed to your class.”

And his group, a few of whose members, he suspected, had opted for painting lessons merely to avoid whatever academic alternative the other side of the room was likely to offer, came meekly enough but surely without their usual enthusiasm.

“We went to the market this morning, Mr. Cunningham,” Winifred Hamlin told him, “and looked at all the wares on all the stalls and we wrote down prices.”

“But it was not as easy as it sounds, sir,” Mary Perkins said, cutting in, “because some things are so much each, and other things are so much an ounce or a pound or half pound, and some things are so much a dozen or half dozen. We had to look carefully to see what the prices meant.”

“The sweets lady gave us a toffee each,” Jimmy Dale added, his voice high pitched with excitement.

Tommy Yarrow cut in. “And she wouldn’t let Miss Westcott pay for them.”

Mary giggled. “Miss Westcott said we had better promise to eat our luncheon when we got back here or she would be in trouble with Cook,” she said.

“One lady give us some ribbon that was a bit frayed,” Richard said, “and a man give us some beads that was cracked. Another lady wanted to give us a rotten cabbage, but Miss Westcott said thank you but no, thank you—because we must always be polite no matter what. The cobbler give us some bits of shoe leather he couldn’t use. Miss Westcott brought some things from her house, and Nurse has let us have some pins and other stuff from her supplies that are a bit too old to use, and Cook give us some bent spoons and forks that she keeps for a rainy day.”

“But she wants them back, Richard,” Winifred reminded him.

“The verb give becomes gave in the past tense, Richard,” Miss Westcott said severely from the other side of the room. “And some beads were cracked—plural.”

“We are going to play shop tomorrow,” Olga screeched above the general clamor.

Joel held up both hands, palms out, but to no avail.

“We are to take turns being shopkeeper,” Winifred said, “two at a time. Everyone else will be a shopper with a list. And the shopkeepers will bring everything on the list and add up the total cost, and the shopper will have to work it out too to see if the two sums agree. And—”

“And the little ones who don’t know their sums well yet will be paired with older ones who do,” Mary added.

“Right,” Joel said firmly. “It sounds as though the vendors at the market will need a quiet afternoon to recover from your visit. And you will need a quiet afternoon if you are not to murder my ears and your teacher’s and if you are to get anything done that will astonish the art world with its brilliance. Sit down and we will discuss what you are going to paint today.”

His eyes met Miss Westcott’s as the children settled and a measure of peace and order descended upon the room. She looked thin lipped and belligerent, as though she were daring him to complain about the triviality of the morning’s outing and the organized chaos of the schoolroom. But the thing was that it was organized. There was no question that she was in control of the children, excited as they were. And it struck him, reluctant as he was to admit it, that she had hit upon a brilliant way to conduct a mathematics lesson and a life lesson at the same time. The children thought it was all a game.

He had hoped so much for her to fail early and hard. That was nasty of him now that he came to think about it. And he knew suddenly of what she had been reminding him since last week. An Amazon. A woman warrior, devoid of any soft femininity. And, having thought of that unflattering comparison and convinced himself that it was quite apt, he felt better and turned his mind to his lesson.

Two hours passed, during which he was more or less absorbed in the artistic efforts of his pupils as they took on an imaginative project—the landscape or home of their dreams—after first discussing some possibilities. Reality did not have to prevail, he had assured them. If the grass in their dream landscape was pink, then so be it. He helped a few of them clarify their mental images and helped others mix the color or shade they wanted but could not produce for themselves. Inevitably, the grass outside Winifred’s square box of a gray house was pink—the only concession she appeared to have made to the imagination. He taught Paul how to use brushstrokes to produce rough, cold water rather than the traditional smooth blue on the lake before his onion-shaped mansion.