teacher.
As seventh graders, our fantasies about their conversation were naive.
'Maybe he told her she had great tits,' Jerry offered.
My response: 'Maybe she stared down at his crotch.'
We agreed it couldn't have happened that way.
'Then how did it happen?' Jerry asked.
I scratched my head. 'They talked about Robin and Mark, what great little guys they were. Maybe she told him she was worried how, with the divorce and all, they weren't getting the kind of fathering boys need.'
'So then-?'
I improvised. 'He told her they were doing great, but he was available if they needed extra help… like coaching, tutoring, and such.'
'What about sex?'
'They didn't get to that. They were attracted, but they were smooth about it. By offering extra help, Mr. Jessup signaled he was interested in coming out to the house.'
'Right. So if she took him up on it, he'd figure she was interested too.'
'Yeah!'
Now standing where Tom and Barbara stood that day, by the fountain in the paved school courtyard bounded by the Common Room and classroom wings, I imagine the play of their eyes, their searching looks, the unspoken yearning each sensed and felt.
Perhaps Barbara, being a vibrant, sensual woman, felt a sudden, unaccountable animal hunger for this attractive young man standing so straight and attentive before her – fresh, lean, clean-cut, the very opposite of the stout, lined, jaded quasi-gangster with whom she'd had slimy sex earlier that afternoon.
Tom, I think, would have been shattered by her beauty and entranced by her sultry gaze. No other mother that day had looked at him like this. No other mother exuded such pure and forceful sexual energy. Since starting at Hayes, his life had been consumed by boys. He'd had no time to date, no opportunity to meet young women. Now, suddenly, here was a person in whose eyes he could read desire.
Whatever they said to one another – and it was probably fairly close to what Jerry and I imagined once we got over our first crude fantasies – it was the silent dance of their eyes that pierced those secret places in human hearts where attraction and love are suddenly born. This eye-ballet would have been further enhanced by their surroundings – spring air scented by flowers and freshly mowed grass, a special slant of golden afternoon light, most of all the warm air bath that raised an attractive gloss from their sun-washed skin while releasing those aromatic attractors Mr. Butterfield, our science teacher, told us were called pheromones.
I'd like to draw them as they stood together that day, two gorgeous, silent, poised about-to-become lovers facing one another just outside the jabbering crowd. But it's getting late, the light is failing, I may not have the skill… and also, I have an appointment I must keep.
Hilda Tucker taught art at Hayes for thirty years. She was already in her forties when I entered the school in the first grade, a patient, nurturing buxom woman, who, from the first day, recognizing a slim talent, took me under her gentle wing.
'Work hard on your drawing, David,' she would tell me. 'Drawing is the basis of art.'
I believed her, worked hard on my drawing, ending up not the painter she'd hoped, but a glib draftsman specializing in eyewitness portraits and, my latest incarnation, rapidly drawn courtroom caricatures.
She still lives in the small tract house just two miles down the road from Hayes, from which she would bicycle to and from school every day, except during snowstorms when she walked. Driving up to the house, I distill an image of her from my schooldays, not crouched over the handlebars of her bike the way people ride today, but sitting upright in the traditional manner, pedaling proudly, cheerfully oblivious to passing cars.
'David…!' She embraces me at her door with the same warm, welcoming expression she always displayed when greeting me at school. 'I've been looking forward to this all week!'
She ushers me into a small living room dominated by a baby grand piano covered with framed photographs of former students. The paintings clustered on the walls are not at all conventional – brilliant color-filled landscapes reminiscent of the French Fauves. I gaze at them and then at Miss Tucker and then at her canvasses again, executed on her annual summer trips to France where she'd set up her easel in a field or by the side of a road, then proceed, as she used to put it, to ‘paint the light.'
'Your paintings still move me.'
'So kind of you to say that, David.'
'The large one over the mantle – didn't it used to hang in your classroom beside the door?' She nods. 'Now seeing so many together, I understand what you were doing. Why, I wonder, didn't I see it before?'
'Simple, David. You were a child. Now you're an adult, an artist, too.'
She leaves me with her pictures while she retreats to her backyard garden to fetch her companion, Helen Slater. Miss Slater, also retired, taught music for years at Ashley-Burnett, the private school for girls in Van Buren Heights attended by my sister, Rachel.
A couple minutes later Miss Tucker returns.
'Helen'll be in soon. Still got some weeding to do. I do miss our summers in France, but the garden's a great joy. Not quite so glorious as our bicycle trips through Provence…' she smiles, 'but nearly so.' She pauses. 'You know, David, back when you were in school, people called our relationship, Helen's and mine, a ‘Boston marriage.’ Times have changed. Now we're just ‘those two old dykes across the road.’'
She skakes her head when I protest. 'We really are old,' she says. 'But I don't regret a thing. Not even giving the better part of my life to the art education of little boys. Students like you, who took up art as a career, made it all worthwhile.'
'I'm not really an artist,' I remind her gently. 'Just an illustrator.'
'I wouldn't care if you drew comic books. You've chosen to live in the realm of art.' Her gentle brown eyes settle upon me. 'It pleases me to think I had something to do with that.'
She had much to do with it. She also instilled in me standards according to which I came to understand, my second year at Pratt, that I was never going to be a serious painter. For one thing, I wasn't interested in conceptual art or in using artwork to explore theory. For another, I was fascinated with character as revealed in portraits. Yet the prospect of painting flattering commissioned portraits of social and corporate types filled me with despair. Better, I thought, to use whatever skill I had to explore the dark side, to draw kidnappers, murderers, and rapists.
'I've been recalling Tom Jessup ever since you phoned,' Miss Tucker tells me. 'It's been years since I've thought of him. I was probably his closest friend on the faculty. Those old Hayes teachers didn't take kindly to new blood. You had to put in ten years of drudgery before they'd accept you as a peer. Tom was sweet, innocent, almost naive. He didn't understand their coldness. ‘What's their problem, Hildy?’ He always called me that. ‘Why won't they help me out?’ Tom wanted to be a great teacher. He thought of teaching as a calling. He couldn't understand why those old farts wouldn't mentor him a bit.'
'Was he really so innocent?' I ask. 'After all, he went into that affair.'
'Yes… of course… but for me that's the proof. A more sophisticated man would have had the good sense to stay away from a woman like that. She was too rich, too beautiful, much too high above his station, plus she was older and the mother of two of his students. You don't come new into a school like Hayes and start sleeping around with your students' parents. Barbara Fulraine, as we all later found out, had been around the block a few times. Just the sort of woman who could bring ruin upon a young man. Once she tired of Tom, and sooner or later she would, she'd have left him miserable if not destroyed. So, you see, I think it was innocent of him to get involved with her. I'm sure it was loneliness that drove him to it. And her guile.'
Guile: You don't hear a word like that too often these days, but Hilda Tucker employs it straight-faced. It's clear she still feels distaste for Barbara Fulraine and blames her for everything that happened.
'No one hated Tom,' she says. 'No one wanted him dead. It was her they were after. And since he was with her, they killed him too.'
I don't tell her that for a while I actually did hate Tom Jessup, that, even after he was dead, when I found out
