The Kingdom of Childhood

me properly mourn her, because mourning is the beginning of moving on.

“Martinmas was her favorite festival here,” I said. “She loved the fall, and watching the little kids go on their nature walks, and the way the air smelled. She loved the excuse to pull out all those big crazy sweaters she used to make. I want to honor her tonight. Not to cry or even talk. Just to make this evening a recognition of what she means to us, and to the school. What she meant to us, I mean.”

“That sounds wonderful,” said Sandy, and as she tightened her hug around my shoulders, I tried to pretend she wasn’t patronizing me.

At dusk the children gathered in the school parking lot with homemade lanterns aglow, bundled up in thick wool sweaters and handknit mittens that reminded me, immediately, of Bobbie. My class had made their lanterns a few days before, gluing colored tissue to glass jelly jars and wrapping wire around the tops for a handle. With a tea light inside, the tissue—orange and yellow and red—glowed beautifully. The entire school community turned out each November to walk the few neighborhood blocks near the school, stopping at a few homes to offer a loaf of banana bread or a few cookies, before returning to the parking lot for cider and popcorn.

I loved it with all my heart. It was peaceful and cozy and blessedly free of any commercial attachment whatsoever. Some years—not every year, but often enough—I would look over the gathering of happy faces and feel as though I were reaching back through time, thousands and thousands of years back, to connect with the most ancient meaning of the word tribe. I needed that this year more than ever, and not only because of Bobbie. I needed to forget all about the stupidity that was Russ and my own roiling heart and my fears for the future of the school. Martinmas was simple: fire, happy children, shared food. I would place myself fearlessly in the present moment and think nothing of the dark surrounding world.

I held a lantern left over from when Scott was a child, and I walked. Neighbors, who had watched this procession for many years, came out on their porches to wave. The youngest children held their lanterns with gravely serious expressions, taking the adults at their word when they warned of the responsibility that came with carrying fire. The older children tried to make the light dance on the pavement in interesting ways. They looped around the block and made their way back to the parking lot, where a few of the teachers had set up an enormous kettle of cider on top of a charcoal grill. The scent of its embers rose wildly into the night air.

I set my lantern on the ground beside the building and stood, my hands folded respectfully, as Dan moved to the center of the crowd and began his little speech about Bobbie. He had known her for less than a year, and his words had a generic ring to them, like a pastor speaking at the funeral of someone whose name he had memorized on the way in. I knew so much more about her than he could ever say, and as he spoke, my mind, and gaze, began to wander. As it did I caught a movement at the corner of my eye and knew immediately, without even fully seeing him, that it was Zach. I turned just enough to view him. He wore a black sweatshirt with its hood up and black jeans, and he was easing himself down to sit on a concrete barrier at the end of a parking space. In his hand was a paper cup of cider. Fairen stood nearby, talking to another girl, but at the moment he was alone.

He nodded a greeting. In return, I waved hesitantly. I wondered whether his nod was meant to be curt or only covert. There was a sudden rush of arms rising into the air as Dan began to offer a toast to Bobbie, and Zach disappeared behind the waving limbs; I drank, then cut my gaze sideways again. Zach drained his cup, glanced around, then rose and walked toward me.

“Hi, Teach,” he said.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But his smile was free of irony, and I said, “You seem to be in a good mood.”

“So do you.”

“I’m always glad to see you happy. You know that.”

His smile broadened. “Speaking of which, what’s the difference between the president and the Titanic?”

I raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“They know how many people went down on the Titanic.”

I grinned. “You’re awful.”

He stuffed his hands into the front pocket of his sweatshirt. “Sorry. I’ll work on it.”

Dan circled around a group and came toward me. I reined in my smile, and Zach moved past me, walking over to the curb where a group of his friends were playing Medieval Judo. He ducked an airborne kick and retaliated by lunging forward to grab his friend around the waist. I crouched down to meet Aidan, who approached me with his lantern held high and glowing with yellow candlelight, his father’s large hand firmly wrapped around his free one.

“Did you show your father the beautiful job you did?” I asked.

He nodded and twirled the lantern to show me the way the orange tissue transformed the simple fire into a warm inward glow. I admired his work before letting my gaze drift over his shoulder to Zach, still good-naturedly play-fighting with the other young men, all grace and lean muscle and hidden sexuality. And as I looked I felt the victorious joy, the intoxication of pure possession. For here was this beautiful creature whom others would look at and desire, and I was one of the few who knew him secretly, whom he had allowed to be intimate with him. Never had I felt so much power in a secret, and never had I guarded one so jealously.

I rose to stand, lifting my lantern, and I thought: as surely as one of these lanterns can light the next, so has the fire in him rekindled the fire in me. Where once I had died down to nothing, I was alive again, and all was his doing. I was afire with him, and for once the thought was not terrible.

When the gathering was over, I collected the lanterns into a box and carried it back to Sandy’s classroom, navigating down the hallway with my chin lifted above the height of the box. I joggled the doorknob with two fingers and, after the door swung open, carefully plunked the box onto the counter beside the craft closet. The room was dim; the gaps between the window blinds showed a few small lights distantly flickering, as children walked away from the school clutching a lantern in one fist, a parent’s hand in the other. To my right, above the blackboard, the legend unfurled: Man is both a fallen God and a God in the becoming.

I swung open the doors of the supply cabinet and, quite unexpectedly, pulled in my breath. There on the top shelf were all of Bobbie’s things from her classroom, crammed in together without care or curation of any sort. At the front stood her coffee mug with the rainbow on the side, perched on a smiling cloud; wadded beside it, the lilac-colored cardigan that had often hung beneath the middle monkey. There was a ball of yarn with a crochet hook jammed into it, a few rows of work hanging loosely from its pink stalk, and her soft-edged copy of Steiner’s The Kingdom of Childhood, its bottom edge so well-thumbed that it rose like the edge of a wing.

I pulled each item toward the front, handling them, peering at them, in dreadful wonder at how Bobbie’s things had been so unceremoniously shoved into a closet and forgotten. Sandy had done this, perhaps, or Dan; and it