And the Substitute thought: Oh no. They were right.
'Frank,' she said again, in a faraway, failing voice, and it was the voice of a little, little girl, calling for a story.
Dr. Lyman, his fearsome host, glared at the Substitute and raised an eyebrow and clucked with his tongue and shook the reins, and the coach swept around in a gracious circle. With the wheels spinning faster, making patterns across each other's faces, the coach sped away down Poyntz.
The Substitute turned and walked back toward the classroom. It was nearly dark now.
Was it his fault? It must have been his fault. He thought of his cigar and his stories and leaning on the desk, and he felt like a fool, a fool of a show-off actor. Damn, he murmured. Damn. And he needed the money, too.
He walked back into the classroom. It was silent and smelled of children and warm, dead wood. He gathered up his hat and his umbrella and sighed and opened the door to go. He looked back to check if he had left anything behind. On the desk there was a piece of paper.
He picked it up and read it again, and he was sure; he knew that he had been right, that the child had told the truth. He read it and telt the pit open up under his feet.
'Oh, mercy,' he said aloud.
A place where no one ever laughed except to frighten or to crow victory, a place without love, a child who had no love, except when she dreamed that she still had a dog.
'How could they?' he said aloud, looking about him in anger. She was telling the truth and they were all determined not to believe her. The horror of it rose up and choked his gentle soul. 'I wish I could do something, Dorothy,' he whispered. 'I wish there was something I could do.'
He stared at the piece of paper and nearly let it drop. Then he folded it up and put it in his pocket with its names-Dorothy, Em, Henry, Toto. He picked up the red book of Osmanli, the language of Oz. Then he moved on. The door closed behind him and his footsteps echoed down the Kansas corridor.
Comdale, Ontario, Canada-November 1956-Spring 1957
In his later years, Jonathan would look at old photographs of the house in Corndale. There would be a kind of electric jolt from the photographs, a cattle-prodding of memory. The photographs were surprisingly small, cracked, rather greasy-looking, with crinkle-cut edges like tiny pies.
In the photographs Jonathan would see his father's old drinking mug and Jonathan would remember its rich brown color and the black etchings of highwaymen printed onto its surface. It was silver around the rim and made everything taste slightly of beer. He would see the wicker basket in which logs were kept next to the fireplace. He would suddenly be able to feel in his fingertips the smoothness of the wicker-work, with its suddenly harsh edges. He would remember how dismayed he was as a child when the basket was displaced from its corner by a new desk.
He would see a brass elephant bell, and he would remember its sound and he would remember the shelving it had been kept on. It stood in a glass display case built into the wall next to the front door. The case went through the wall; its outside was frosted glass. Standing on the front steps, you could see all the treasures kept inside it: a brass ice bucket; a porcelain squirrel that was a souvenir of Algonquin Park. They would be seen as if through a mist.
In the photographs Jonathan would see his parents when they were young. He would see his mother, standing on a pile of dirt in high-heel shoes in the early 1950s. His mother was the picture of Canadian elegance, her yearning for style and urbanity revealed in immaculate hair and dress and the angle at which her cigarette was held. His father was standing beside her, with his shock of Einstein hair. He was young and slim and bare chested. A baby hung suspended from his arms. This was the ground-breaking for the new house in Corndale. Beside them, in swim trunks, with a shovel, there was a rather handsome Scottish-looking man whom Jonathan did not know. Neither, now, did his parents.
His first world. Through all the later changes in his life, Jonathan would remember his childhood as happening in that house. They had moved away from it when he was nine years old, but the interior of the Corndale house was the continent of his infancy.
The photographs would bring it back. He would remember the uncomfortable texture of the gray sofa. It had raised, rough surfaces in the shapes of flowers and vines. They made his skin itch.
He preferred instead to lie on the floor under the ultramodern chairs. He would trace with his finger the snakelike wiggle of the metal strands that supported the cushions. He liked the feeling of being enclosed, hidden, safe.
One of the ultramodern chairs was crimson, the other was bright green, and they stood by a lime-green throw rug that slipped underfoot on the polished pinewood floors which always smelled of wax. There were bookcases made of boards sandwiched between bricks, and on them stood small Indian vases, with bright blue and yellow flowers embedded in the red ceramic.
Jonathan could remember the colors, even though the photographs were black-and-white. This was very strange. Jonathan was colorblind. Except in the strongest light, green and red looked the same to him. Blue and purple were indistinguishable.
So how had the infant been able to see them? Jonathan could remember loving red, a color he could not now perceive.
