“It got a little weird,” she said.
Things also got weird for Mrs. Bell and Mr. Blanco; so weird, in fact, that he had to go teach at another school for a few years until the conflagration finally died out.
“Julia?” Ms. Hempel cried in dismay. She loved Julia Bell.
“This was ages ago. Long before you came to us,” Mrs. Willoughby said.
“But Daniel?” Ms. Hempel cried. “I thought maybe he was gay.”
“Oh no. No. What ever gave you that idea? He’s just Spanish.”
And, incredibly, the former lover of Mrs. Bell. With his pointed goatee and his funny little vests? It was very hard to picture. Perhaps, in a younger version, what Ms. Hempel found vague about his sexuality was actually dashing, irresistible. So much so that Julia Bell—a teacher blessed with pluck and humor and sense—risked everything to be with him.
“This was before the boys were born?” Ms. Hempel asked.
“Wally was two, I think, and not yet in school. But Nathan had already started kindergarten.” Mrs. Willoughby raised her eyebrows. “It could have been a real mess.”
Unthinkable, Julia making a mess. Which was exactly why Ms. Hempel adored her: the serene, amused, and capable air; the way she kept an easy sense of order among even the most fractious children; the affection that her sons heaped upon her, tackling her in the middle of the hallway. She also had a plume of pure white hair growing from her right temple, like Susan Sontag if she had gone into eighth-grade algebra. Her husband taught math, too, at the state university; they had fallen in love during graduate school. And all this—her world of boys and equations and good cheer—had been hazarded.
And then recovered.
Now she could sit in faculty meetings with Daniel Blanco and not show the slightest sign that he was in any way different to her from all the other staff members assembled around the room. If it weren’t for the older teachers like Mrs. Willoughby, who remembered, there wouldn’t be a trace left of that strange and perilous affair. Ms. Hempel couldn’t decide which amazed her more: the sight of Mrs. Bell and Mr. Blanco talking amiably by the coffee urn or the thought of them locked in an ancient, urgent, hopeless embrace.
LEAVING THE LIBRARY, Ms. Hempel was surprised to see Ms. Duffy standing alone in the vestibule, her hands resting lightly atop her belly. She seemed to have lost her entourage somewhere along the way. She was looking at the enormous bulletin boards that lined the walls and displayed the latest projects generated by the younger grades. Only a year ago she had been responsible for filling such a board, which required judiciousness (for not every child’s hieroglyph could be hung) and a protracted wrestle with crepe paper and a staple gun. But now she was free of that. What an escape! She gazed at the artwork with the cool eye of an outsider.
“Beatrice,” Ms. Duffy said, and Ms. Hempel gave her a hug. The belly turned out to be as hard as it appeared.
“Have you seen this?” Ms. Duffy asked. She was studying one particular display. “They’re overlapping. You can’t read them. And he put a staple right through that kid’s name.”
He being Mr. Chapman, Wall Street trader turned teacher, called in to replace Ms. Duffy for the year, and now, it seemed, quite possibly for good.
“How are we supposed to know who drew the Minotaur?” She pointed at the bulletin board. “A child spent hours—hours!—working on this, and you can’t even read her name.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” Ms. Hempel said, peering. “But you’re right. The name is kind of obscured.”
“My god,” Ms. Duffy muttered. “This isn’t rocket science.”
She reached up and pinched the staple between her thumb and forefinger. With a worrying motion of her hand she extracted it, and then flicked it to the ground like a cigarette butt.
“There,” she said.
The child’s name was Lucien Nguyen.
“Much better,” Ms. Hempel said, and smiled. She wanted to leave, her curiosity deadened; now that she knew Ms. Duffy wasn’t harboring a little half-Yemenese baby, she no longer felt a strong need to talk with her. But she didn’t like the way Ms. Duffy was still eyeing the display. And Ms. Hempel’s tendency to suggest precisely the opposite of what she actually wished, in the vague and automatic hope of pleasing someone, asserted itself.
“Do you want to walk to Izzy’s and get a bubble tea? My treat?”
For a moment it looked as if Ms. Duffy was about to agree. But just as she was turning away from the displays, she inhaled sharply and wheeled back around to stare at the bulletin board.
Her finger landed on a pink piece of paper and circled a single word with baleful vigor. “Did you see this?”
Ms. Hempel stepped closer to read the text, printed in a computer’s version of girlish handwriting: Persephone picked up the pomegranate and ate four of its’ seeds. She winced.
“Oooph. Not good.”
Ms. Duffy held the word pinned beneath her finger. Or could it even be called a word? It didn’t rightfully exist outside of the grammatical underworld, but Ms. Hempel knew from her own observations (in newspaper headlines! on twenty-foot billboards!) that these crimes were spreading. Rapidly. And evidently unchecked.
“They’re kids,” Ms. Duffy said. “They’re learning, they make mistakes. But how are they going to know that they’re mistakes if their teacher hangs them up on the fucking wall? I mean, does he make them do drafts? Does he correct anything?”
Ms. Hempel shrugged weakly. Her own alertness to error had wavered over the years. But maybe all it took was some time away, some time abroad, for one’s acuity to be restored, because now, by simply standing beside Ms. Duffy, she could feel her powers beginning to return, she could see the mistakes leaping out at her, the bulletin board lighting up with
