The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [70]
“He flirts with all the girls,” she told her mother the next morning. Actually, it was the girls who giggled about Mr. Blanchard's curly hair, long eyelashes, and quiet voice, the bolder among them clamoring for extra help. And then, when that didn't work, the lie, telling her mother that some senior girls were thinking of going to the principal because of things Mr. Blanchard had said to them. And done.
What things? her mother demanded, and Nora can still see the arch of her mother's long neck, feel her breath, caught, waiting. Things, Nora said, watching, gauging the impact of her words. You know, suggestive. It seemed minutes before her mother finally turned.
“I've been a teacher long enough to know the way a student's imagination can work.”
“It's not imagination,” Nora protested. “It's true. He's always bumping up against girls.”
“That can happen. Innocently enough. He's a very nice person, and, as a matter of fact, I'll probably go out with him again. A rumor's an ugly thing, Nora,” her mother said, her face reddening, whether with anger or doubt, but the quick tremble saying her daughter's name was lure enough to send Nora in for the kill.
“All right then, I'll tell you. He … he—”
“He what?”
“Rubbed against me. You know,” she said with a squeamish gesture, low, down there.
“When? What on earth are you talking about?”
“A couple weeks ago. I stayed after. My Emily Dickinson report, he said to. For extra help.”
“And?”
“It was awful,” she said, bursting into tears because without solid ground underfoot there was no turning back. It was a lie already too nasty to retrieve, too shameful to admit. “And even now, every time I think about it I don't know what to do. It's so embarrassing. It's humiliating. You can't say anything. Please. Promise me you won't.” Her mother's wounded eyes told her that this could not be the end of it. Mr. Blanchard would have to be confronted. He had violated not only his student's trust but hers as well, his fellow teacher, his department's assistant head, the lonely woman he'd taken to dinner and so desperately kissed in the car, in the late evening shadows with Nora watching from her bedroom window.
Only her threats of running away, then of suicide, some made in repeated, frantic, whispered phone calls in the middle of the night to Carol, stopped her mother from the inquisition, the school board hearing the matter deserved. Yes, Carol agreed with her mother, the man was a pervert and deserved to be fired, but at what cost—Nora's emotional well-being? Instead, a second-year contract was denied soft-spoken, bewildered Mr. Blanchard, who left that June and would have been such a fine friend, lover, partner for her mother, whose quiet life spiraled in on itself She taught, saw Nora through school, a brief career, and marriage, retired, took the train into the city once a month for lunch with the last of the spinster cousins, then died in her sleep, in her cold bed, alone. Nora buries her face in the warm fragrant towel. Guilt, one more reason to hate herself No clarity with the well disturbed. Only sediment. Particles. Can't tell anyone, can only pray he's gone, Eddie Hawkins, the roused beast of an unpunished deed, while in the next room her children laugh, playing cards with their father, the liar, as she stands here surrounded by their underpants and shirts, folding three more facecloths, sea-foam green, from the master bath, a room she hates with its pale green tile, the gold flecks ruining everything. How could she not have noticed, not have known? It was the last room done, and something was wrong, she just didn't know what then, two years ago, insisting that he help her choose fixtures, deal with the surly plumber, go horseback riding, climb Mt. Monadnock with the children, anything that they