Read Alone in the Classroom for Free Online Page B

like the performance of
Tess
in that prairie school, when all the teachers and all the students were conscripted to play one role or another.

6
Tess
    Parley wrote his own version of
Tess
, based on the play he had seen three years earlier in London, England. Yes, he announced, he had seen this very play performed at the Barnes Theatre on a rainy April afternoon with Thomas Hardy himself in the audience, looking very small and old.
    Parley Burns reminded Connie of a rarity her father had spoken about, the single white pine that stood in a patch of aspens near the confluence of the Saskatchewan and Bow Rivers. One Pine, it was called, for no other pines grew within sixty miles of it. Parley, too, stood alone and inspired superstitious respect and awe.
    She watched him turn the school into a theatre and it started on his blackboard. He brought everyone into his classroom on the second floor and there they stood knee deep, all grades crowded together, while he wrote
D’Urberville
at the top of one column and
Durbeyfield
at the top of another, then listed below the former numerous French words and place names, and below the latter, English bastardizations. He spoke this last word,
bastardization
, with the precise enunciation of a trained actor, and stared down the sniggerers. A lesson in language and history, the drama of both, and how they played into the drama at hand of Tess, the beautiful maid who murders the rogue who seduced her; “who deflowered her,” he said deliberately, and again he stared them down. The only sound was the gurgle of Miss Miller’s stomach followed by the noisy hush of her crimson face.
    “Our version will be short and basic,” he went on, “and consist of nine scenes with narration in between.” He listed them on the board: Knighthood, Strawberries, Dance, Lost Letter, Wedding, Separation, Eviction, Murder, Stonehenge. “We will need to manufacture blood,” he added, a glint in his eye.
    Connie’s classroom had the school’s battle-scarred piano, scorched around the edges of its varnished top by hundreds of cigarette butts balanced there over the years. Loose keys, but a lively sound familiar to anyone who attended school concerts and dances. Hers was the biggest classroom, the one normally used for school productions of any kind. Parley, measuring tape in hand, scouted out the space as she was having Michael do extra work after school.
    “Is he making any progress?” he said.
    “He is. He has an excellent memory.”
    Parley folded his arms and leaned against her desk,unhurried, implacable. “He knows how to memorize. That’s his crutch. He needs to know how to read. Take away his crutch,” he said.
    He reappeared as she closed her classroom door, and they headed outside and walked to the road.
    “You like the boy,” he said.
    She lifted her hand. Of course.
    “But you don’t like men, if observation serves.”
    She stopped. Her workbooks were folded into her chest. It had been a long day.
    “What kind of thing is that to say to me?”
    She felt the bones in her head being re-knit - un-knit and re-knit - by these sly questions that weren’t even questions. She resumed walking.
    “You are so dedicated,” he said to her next.
    “I’m not so dedicated.”
    “You’re much too modest.”
    But she wasn’t that either.
    They passed Graves Hardware, a deep and narrow store with dark corners and high shelves. In the summer men sat on a bench outside the door. In the winter, around the stove inside.
    He said, “There’s a concert on the radio tonight. You might care to join us. Mrs. Wilson’s radio. You’re someone who would appreciate Brahms.”
    Her mother had loved Brahms.
    That evening she would sit in his landlady’s wallpapered living room, listening to the many-knobbed radio that sat on a table next to a window full of geraniums. Why is it, she wondered, that for every slow movement you get two fast movements, instead of the other way around, when the slow movements are