She never met the principal again. She did not even have a final talk or a final hour with him in a café or a last night in a rented bed in a hotel room. She only ever saw him once again, and that was from a distance at a meeting when he crossed in a hallway fifty feet away, wearing a suit and tie. Then in the summer she heard that he and his wife and children had moved to Utah.
She phoned three times during those months, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t take her calls. She wrote him a letter but she never knew if he received it, or if he simply refused to answer. She decided finally that he was a kind of coward for that. That was the word that came to her mind. She herself stayed and taught for years in the same little town. She believed she had to do that. It took a kind of courage. She was marked and known. It was how you paid for love. But over time that was lost too. She became part of the history of the town, like wallpaper in the old houses—the aging lonely isolated woman, the unmarried schoolteacher living out her days among other people’s children, a woman who’d had a brief moment of excitement and romance a long time ago and afterward had retreated and lived quietly and made no more disturbance.
The principal only ever came to visit her in dreams that were never satisfactory and from which she woke in tears, with an ache that wouldn’t be healed or soothed.
She had a picture of him that she had taken herself. And one of them together in the hotel lobby that the desk clerk in Denver had taken that first winter. A black-and-white picture which didn’t show how red their cheeks were, coming in off the cold street, before they rode the elevator up to the room to undress and lie down in bed together.
31
HE WAS SITTING in his chair at the window after breakfast when he saw Alice go out the front door and retrieve her bicycle from the back porch and then push it along the side of Berta May’s house and begin to ride in the street. He watched her pedal out of sight. He looked the other way to the west where the barn and the corral were. He hadn’t got the barn painted and the weeds in the corral were as tall as the top of the fence. Then Alice rode back into view and he watched her pedal out of sight in the other direction.
He drifted off to sleep. When he woke it looked hot outside in the yard. He couldn’t see the girl. He pushed against the arms of the chair and stood a while to steady himself. All was quiet. He took his cane and began to walk, shuffling, and looked out to the kitchen. He called, Are you there, Mary? He shuffled on and entered the bathroom, looking at his face in the mirror, an old man with a day-old grizzled beard, looking angry and puzzled at the same time. He stood his cane against the wall and pushed down his sweatpants and sat too hard. After a while he tried to get up. He called, Mary, come here, will you? He sat. He called again. Where in the hell? And dozed off.
Then she had come in. You’re in here, she said.
He opened his eyes. Where were you? I called for you.
I was outside talking to Berta May in the backyard.
I couldn’t find you.
I’m sorry. Are you done here?
As much as I’m going to be. Now I can’t get up.
Let me help you.
Wait. Maybe you better get Lorraine.
She’s downtown shopping.
I don’t want you to hurt yourself.
I’ll be careful.
She lifted under his arm and he gradually rose up and stood, his legs shaking, quivering.
Honey, are you all right?
He looked straight ahead. Yeah.
She drew up the diaper inside his sweatpants. This one’s still good, she said. We don’t need to change it.
I’m about like a goddamn baby, he said. It’s a damn nuisance.
It’s time for your pill. Let’s get you in the bedroom.
She held his arm while he used his cane and they went into the room and he slumped on the bed, then he lay back and she lifted his legs over in place.
I don’t like you lifting like that, he said. You’re going to hurt your back.
Are you all comfortable now?
I’ll take that pill, please.
She put the pill on his old parched tongue and gave him the water glass. He raised his head to swallow.
Okay?
Yeah. He closed his eyes.
Can I get you anything else?
No, thanks. You do too much already.
I don’t mind at all. You know that. Would you like me to sit here with you?