Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [105]
“Hmm? Oh, yes,” Ian said without interest. He didn’t look up from his plate; he was cutting his meat.
“Did you attend school here in Baltimore?” she asked him.
Her voice was so bendable; it curved toward him, cajoling, entwining. But Ian merely transferred his fork to his right hand, seeming to move farther from her in the process. “Yes,” he said shortly, and he took a bite of meat and started chewing. Why was he behaving this way? He was acting like … well, like a laborer, in fact.
Finally their grandma spoke up in his place. “Yes, indeedy! He went all twelve years!” she said brightly. “And you know, Miss Pennington—”
“Ariana.”
“Ariana, I was a teacher, back about a century ago.”
“Oh, Ian mentioned that.”
“I taught fourth grade in the dark, dark ages.”
“Me too,” Sister Harriet said suddenly.
Everyone looked at her.
“I taught seventh,” she said. “But I wasn’t very good at it.”
Ian said, “Now, Harriet. I bet you were excellent.”
“No,” she said. “It’s true. I just didn’t have the—I don’t know. The personality or something.”
Well, that was for sure. The three children traded amused sidelong glints.
Leaning forward so earnestly that her bolsterlike bosom almost grazed her plate, Sister Harriet said, “Every day I went in was such a struggle, and I had no idea why. Then one night I dreamed this dream. I dreamed I was standing in front of my class explaining conjunctions, but gibberish kept coming out of my mouth. I said, ‘Burble-burble-burble.’ The students said, ‘Pardon?’ I tried again; I said, ‘Burble-burble-burble.’ In the dream I couldn’t think what had happened, but when I woke up I knew right away. You see, the Lord was trying to tell me something. ‘Harriet,’ He was saying, ‘you don’t speak these children’s language. You ought to get out of teaching.’ And so I did.”
“Well, my goodness,” their grandma said, sitting back in her chair.
But Ian was regarding Sister Harriet seriously. “I think that was very brave of you,” he told her.
She flushed and said, “Oh, well …”
“No, really. To admit the whole course of your life was wrong and decide to change it completely.”
“That does take courage,” Miss Pennington said. “I agree with Ian.” And she sent him a radiant smile that he didn’t appear to notice.
Was he blind, or what?
This past Easter, one of the foreigners had dropped by with his younger sister who was visiting from her college. She might have stepped out of the Arabian Nights; she was dark and slim and beautiful, with a liquid, demure way of speaking. Twice her brother had made pointed references to her eligibility. “High time she find a husband and settle down, get herself a green card, develop some children,” he said, and he told them it was up to him to locate a suitable husband for her, since his family still believed in what he called organized marriage. But Ian hadn’t seemed to understand, and later when Daphne asked if he’d thought the sister was pretty he said, “Pretty? Who? Oh. No, I’ve never cared for women who wear seamed stockings.”
They should have known right then that no one would ever meet his qualifications.
“Seconds, anyone?” their grandpa was asking. “Mr. Kitt? Miss Pennington? Ian, more roast beef?”
“I wonder,” Ian said, “how many times we dream that kind of dream—something strange and illogical—and fail to realize God is trying to tell us something.”
Oh, perfect. Now he was turning all holy on them. “Ariana,” their grandma said hastily, “help yourself to the gravy.” But Miss Pennington was watching Ian, and her smile was glazing over the way people’s always did when the bald, uncomfortable sound of God’s name was uttered in social surroundings.
“It’s easier to claim it’s something else,” Ian said. “Our subconscious, or random brain waves. It’s easier to pretend we don’t know what God’s showing us.”
“That is so, so true,” Sister Harriet told him.
Miss Pennington’s smile seemed made of steel now.
“Damn,” Daphne said.
Everybody looked at her. Their grandma said, “Daphne?”
“Well, excuse me,” Daphne said, “but I just can’t—” And then she sat up straighter and said, “I just