The Tight White Collar Read online

  Kenyon was deeply and gravely offended and it showed on his face.

  “To hell with him,” he said to the man next to him. “If he can’t depend on me any more to hell with him.”

  They moved slowly and as Chris followed the lieutenant he smiled inwardly at the sight of the big, brave American officer advancing on a peaceful farmhouse with his rifle clutched in both hands and a tight look around his mouth.

  How many years of civilization went before us, thought Chris. How many years of teaching and preaching have come to nothing now that we walk over each other’s countries with the sole idea of killing one another. We’re supposed to be men. Hundreds of thousands of years went into making us into men and now look at us. Waste. Thousands of years—millions and millions of brains. For this.

  The lieutenant paused before he kicked at the door of the first farmhouse to motion to Chris. Stay back and to one side, his hand said. Cover me.

  Chris crouched under a window and hated the lieutenant in earnest now. The officer had infected him with fear and suspicion. He had smashed the shell of civilization from around him and had made him into an animal whose only thought now was to preserve himself.

  An old woman came to the door. She wore a dress of flowered, lavender material and a black knitted shawl was wrapped around her shoulders.

  The lieutenant addressed her in excellent German which Chris did his best to follow with what he remembered from high school and what he had picked up overseas.

  “I am an officer in the American army,” said the lieutenant. “Who besides yourself is in this house?”

  Chris peered cautiously through the window over his head. There was no place for anyone to hide in that room except behind a curtained space which might have concealed a closet or another small room. Chris almost giggled. Even if there was no one in this house there might be someone in one of the others. He wondered if the lieutenant was going to go through this performance at every one of the other farmhouses.

  “No one,” said the old woman in a voice as cold as the look she gave the lieutenant. “My only son was killed in France. I am alone.”

  The curtained space in the room was very still. Too still? Again, Chris damned the lieutenant. The virus of fear was running through every vein in his body, poisoning him.

  Chris never knew what it was that made the lieutenant so sure that the old woman was lying, nor what extra perception told her that the American officer knew. In the next second she had thrown the door wide and hurled herself toward the lieutenant. He threw her to the floor in one vicious motion and his aim never wavered as he fired twice into the curtained space. Two German officers fell forward as Chris watched and the flowered curtains billowed gracefully around them. The old woman lunged for the lieutenant’s gun and the lieutenant took deliberate, careful aim and shot her.

  Later, Chris had a girlfriend in Germany. Her name was Margretha and her husband had been killed by the Russians. Chris brought her cigarettes and sugar and chocolate for her little girl. In return for these gifts, Margretha slept with him, cooked whatever food he brought and tried to create a small island of comfort and peace for him in her house. The child’s name was Christine and Margretha often laughed with Chris about this.

  “There you see?” she told him. “Christopher and Christine. They go together like the American ham and eggs.”

  Often, during the weeks that Chris lived with Margretha, he took the snapshot which Lisa had sent of his own daughter out of his billfold and studied it carefully.

  “I’ll get mixed up,” he had laughed with Lisa before leaving for overseas. “Whatever shall I do with two Lisas to think about?”

  “You’re not to call her Lisa,” Lisa had said. “We’ll call her Midget because she’s so little and cute.”

  Chris looked at Christine in Germany and at the snapshot of Midget and saw that between the two children there was actually very little difference. They were of an age, the offspring of young parents and both had been born under the shadow of war. Christine was blonde, blue eyed and pure Aryan, her mother said, and Midget was dark haired and had brown eyes exactly like her father’s.

  The children! It came to Chris after a long, long time of thinking.

  It’s the children who are not different!

  Adults, nations, languages, customs and habits were all opposite one from the other. But not the children. He had seen them in England, Holland, Belgium, France and Germany and children were children. Small, untaught, unformed, born in hope and often destroyed by grownups who could think no more clearly than those whom they attempted to mold. Untaught. The word clung to Chris’s mind as a spider web would have clung to his hand. Untaught. Children were born gentle. It was the people who taught them who pointed out the ways of greed, destruction and decivilization.

  Now if it were up to me, thought Chris, if I were a teacher . . .

  It was not until after he got home that Chris told Lisa the story about the war and about the old woman in Germany and about how he had come to realize that the problems of the world could be solved if one taught the children early, often and thoroughly.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” Lisa had said, horrified. “He didn’t have to shoot that poor old woman, did he?”

  After that, Chris never told the story to anyone. It all sounded much too melodramatic and Chris never wanted people to think that he dramatized anything. But most of all he did not tell because he wasn’t sure himself if he taught because he really believed the things he had told himself or because of the feeling that came over him sometimes in a classroom. A feeling that he could not bring himself to admit he felt.

  Power.

  I’m doing this all by myself. I’m molding their minds. Shaping their thinking. Forming the children in my image.

  Sometimes, in the years that followed, Lisa Pappas was occasionally reminded of the years she and Chris had spent at the university. Then she would shudder and think, That hellhole, and push remembrance determinedly from her mind.

  The town of Denton, where the university was located, was in the central part of the state and was a pretty town by the standards of northern New England with its old-fashioned lampposts, ivy-covered brick buildings, small paned windows in old houses and its general aura of age and stability. But the end of the Second World War and the advent of the GI Bill of Rights caught Denton flat-footed and unprepared for the influx of student veterans. Almost overnight the town and the university found themselves in the position of having to make provisions not only for hordes of new students, but for students who would arrive with wives and children and furniture. Hastily, they cleared a vast tract of land a quarter of a mile out of town and there they erected row upon row of old army barracks and converted them into four-room apartments, and they called this place College Road Housing for Student Veterans. There had been neither the time nor the inclination to paint the buildings, so they stood now, the same olive-drab color as they had been on army posts throughout the country, and the walls that had been slapped together to divide the apartments were made of the thinnest plywood. It soon became a standing joke on College Road for families already situated to warn newcomers about the walls in the College Road Apartments.

  “Don’t put your bed against the wall of the apartment next door,” they said and laughed.

  “Nobody on College Road makes love without an audience of at least four,” they warned.

  Christopher Pappas moved his family into No. E16 College Road on a hot, wet Saturday in August and Lisa took one look at the drab, uniformly painted cream-colored walls, the old-fashioned icebox complete with galvanized drip pan and the two-burner electric plate, then she sat down on a packing crate and burst into tears.

  “I’ll never be able to stand it here!” she wept against Chris’s shoulder. “It’s so ugly.”

  And even Chris, who was wildly enthusiastic about starting his courses, had to agree t
o that. Over Lisa’s head he could see out the window to the bare gravel space between the barracks in which he would live and the one opposite. There was no grass, not a single bush or flower.

  “It’s ugly all right,” he said to Lisa. “But listen, honey. This is the beginning for us. Time will pass quickly, you’ll see, and in no time at all I’ll be a teacher and we’ll move away to some place beautiful with lots of grass and trees and flowers.”

  But the years of Chris’s education were slow, painful ones and often Lisa thought bitterly of the ideas she had held on “college life” before coming to Denton, ideas and images culled from a hundred magazine stories and as many movies. Where were the convertibles, the secret bottles of liquor, the gay young men and their wild girlfriends? The answer was simple, realized Lisa. College life as she had dreamed and read of it was lived in the big fraternity and sorority houses on campus by people not much younger than she who were not tied down with College Road apartments, husbands, bills and children.

  But the years did pass and by the time Chris was a junior at the university, Lisa had found a sort of escape from reality for herself. She discovered that if she read all the time and concentrated on what she read her brain would not stray into the uncomfortably real ugly world of College Road. She had started on murder mysteries but she had soon tired of violence and sameness and then she had begun on what Miss Huntoon, the head librarian at the university library, called “the Classics.”

  While she drank her morning coffee, Lisa read. She left the dirty breakfast dishes on the table and went into the living room where she lay on the sofa and read. Sometimes, at noon, she felt it difficult to stop reading long enough to warm up a can of soup for Midget and Chris and she resented having to leave a book for all other duties.

  I have a very good mind, Lisa told herself. I’ll bet I could write a book if I had the time. I should have had a career of some kind. I’m much too intelligent to be a slave to a sinkful of dirty dishes.

  When she was not reading, Lisa sat still and stared into space. She imagined herself as a brilliant authoress, ballet dancer, opera singer, artist, and in all her daydreams the wonderful, talented people of the world sat at her feet and looked up at her in adoration. Then, inevitably, something would happen. Midget would come crashing into the room, or a neighbor would poke her head through the door or Chris would come home from class and Lisa was back in her cream-colored living room with the space heater that balked and the secondhand furniture.

  I’m trapped, she thought angrily. Trapped with a husband and a child and poverty, and I can’t get out.

  Lisa began to wonder about things that she had always taken for granted, like sex. She read countless stories in which women experienced indescribable joy during the act of love and she wondered why she never felt this emotion with Chris.

  In the beginning, it was one thing, she thought. Then it was new and different and that’s all that made it exciting.

  At first, when she had realized that Chris no longer excited her she had blamed it on the fact that perhaps she had inherited her frigidity from her mother, but now she looked at her husband with new eyes and fastened a new label on him. Unsatisfactory. She was not to blame. Chris had very little imagination and he was unsatisfactory.

  It seemed to Lisa that her whole life hinged on one sentence and that sentence was, “When Chris graduates and starts teaching.”

  Well, what of it, she thought. What then? Teachers don’t make any money. We won’t be a hell of a lot better off than we are now.

  By the time Chris was a senior the situation was almost unbearable to both of them.

  “I don’t know what’s got into you,” Chris shouted, “but whatever it is, you’d better get rid of it and fast.”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that! Just who do you think you are?”

  “I’m your husband, goddamn it, and I’ll talk to you any way that I find necessary. I don’t mind your trying to improve yourself, but I’m damned if I’ll let my wife sit on her backside all day while my daughter goes hungry and the house goes to pot.”

  “There are things vastly more important to me than housework,” cried Lisa. “I’ve never been anything but a slave to you since we got married. I never realized before that I have a brain. Well, now I do and I intend to use it and I should think you’d be proud of the fact that I’m trying to keep up with you instead of letting myself get into a rut.”

  “Listen, Lisa,” said Chris and made an effort to lower his voice, “I loved you before you went on this learning kick. You’re smart enough for me. All I want is for you to be the way you used to be.”

  “I’ll bet!” said Lisa. “You loved it when you were the sun and the moon and I was nothing but the good old solid Earth that revolved around you and whatever you wanted.”

  “For Christ’s sake, you don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about!” shouted Chris and stamped out of the apartment.

  I’ll leave him, thought Lisa. I’ll take Midget and walk out of here right now.

  Walk out to where? Back to Cooper’s Mills and Irene and the beer bottles and the gossip? Never. Well, where then? Lisa knew the answer even before the questions were complete in her mind. Nowhere. I’m trapped.

  A few weeks later, she discovered that she was even more trapped than she had thought. She was pregnant and weep and rage as she might, she stayed that way. Little Chris was born two weeks before Chris graduated from the university. The afternoon of the graduation exercises was the first time Lisa was able to go out after the birth of the baby and as she stood in the warm June sun and watched Chris, she began to hope again. She heard his name, Christopher Pappas and she heard the words of the hard-earned degree, Bachelor of Arts and she heard the special words, magna cum laude and she thought:

  Now things will be better. We’ll be able to get away from this wretched place and start again. Little Chris must have been an omen. A new baby, a new diploma and a new life.

  Christopher Pappas was offered and accepted a position to teach social sciences in a town called Devon, and after he and Lisa had seen the town there was something like enthusiasm between them for the first time in years.

  “It’s lovely here,” said Lisa.

  And it was. They rented a small house and met their new neighbors and settled down to live.

  “Live!” cried Lisa a few weeks later. “Is that what you call it? Living? I’d like to see anybody else in this town living on twenty-five hundred dollars a year!”

  There was never enough of anything. Lisa had to plot and scheme for a whole month to find enough money to buy one pair of shoes for her children. She had to scrimp on food and clothing and neither she nor Chris had been to a dentist in over five years. But Chris was happy. The Devon high school was small but well equipped and as far as he was concerned, he’d have been contented to spend the rest of his life there. Neither the members of the P.T.A. nor the principal interfered with his teaching methods and there were enough bright students enrolled in the school to make his job exciting to him. If it hadn’t been for the money, he and Lisa might well have remained in Devon, but at the end of his second year there, the school board at West Farrington offered him a position teaching fewer classes for more money and Chris, weary of watching his wife pinch every penny and hopeful that a few hundred dollars would help ease things, accepted.

  He knew from the first day he began to teach at West Farrington that he would never make it through the year.

  “I’m hamstrung,” he told Lisa. “I can’t teach with both hands tied behind my back and lies rolling off my tongue.”

  At first Lisa, remembering the hard-earned degree and the miserable years at the university, argued with him. “Go along with them,” she said. “How can that hurt? Just say yes and humor the damned board and keep your job.”

  Chris just looked at her hopelessly. “I can’t,” he said, and one Friday aftern
oon, after he had been teaching for three months, he came home and said, “Let’s start packing, Lisa. I’ve had it.”

  Lisa was too tired to fight. “All right,” she said.

  They left West Farrington the next morning and arrived in Cooper’s Mills that same afternoon.

  “Ha!” said Costas Pappas, not bothering to conceal his triumph. “So you fin’ly got sick of wearin’ a tight white collar, huh? Was chokin’ you a little, huh? Come on, Mr. Schoolteacher man, cheer up. Come on out back and I’ll give you a little drinka oozu and you’re gonna feel better. I’ll even give you a job ina store.”

  “No thanks, Pa,” said Chris quietly. “I’m not going to work in the store. Tomorrow I’m going to get a job in the mills.”

  “You was always a goddamn fool,” said his father. “Go ahead. Go get a job in the mills. Go ta hell if you want. I don’t give a damn no more.”

  Lisa and Chris rented a house from Eben Seton and Chris began a new job at the factories. He had been there for six weeks when a call came from the head of the State School for the Feeble-Minded at Marmington.

  “You’ll never be able to stand it,” argued Lisa. “You’re not trained to teach idiots.”

  “The teachables aren’t idiots,” said Chris. “And anyway, it’s teaching, no matter what they are. I can’t stay in the mill, Lisa. It’s either teach or starve. It’s all I want to do.”

  “Well go ahead then,” said Lisa angrily. “But you’ll hate it worse than West Farrington, you’ll see. At least there you were dealing with adults. Maybe they weren’t too bright, but at least they were adults and not feeble-minded kids.”

  During the weeks that followed Chris thought often of Lisa’s words and there were times when he was sure that he’d never stick it out, for at Marmington he had come to what must surely be the most despairing moments of his life.

  It was the end of a long day and Chris began to pick up scattered balls and bats from the baseball field at the state school. A few feet away, a group of ten boys ranging in age from eleven to nineteen years stood and watched him.