The Darling Dahlias and the Eleven O'Clock Lady

The wooden front door had once been locked, but the padlock had been wrenched off long ago and the door hung crookedly from a top hinge. Charlie climbed the three wooden steps, pushed the door open, and went in. A bird fluttered wildly in the rafters, and from a corner came the scratch-scratch of a rat, or maybe even a possum. The scent of mildew and chalk and children’s sweaty bodies lingered, mirage-like, on the heavy air.

Charlie looked around. He felt as if the clock had suddenly been turned back some four decades and he had stepped into one of the schoolrooms he remembered (not very pleasantly) from his childhood. As he paused in the door to light a cigarette, he could almost hear the angry ridicule of the teacher who had caught him and another boy smoking behind the school’s privy one spring afternoon. The voice was so real that he had to remind himself: he wasn’t that little kid now—he was a grown-up, and smart and capable, and that teacher had long ago gone to her reward. He pulled on his cigarette and deliberately blew out a stream of smoke. (Take that, you old witch!) A ghostly, greenish light filtered through the fly-specked windows, illuminating the four rows of empty wooden desks, each attached to the one in front of it; the dusty wooden floor, scarred by decades of children’s feet; and the aisle down the center of the room.

Midway down the room on the wall to Charlie’s right stood a rusty potbellied stove, the ghost of winters past. Its stovepipe poked through the roof, and a few sticks of wood and a kerosene can lay on the floor beside it. The teacher’s desk and chair stood on a scarred wooden platform at the front of the room, with a blackboard on the wall behind it, topped with a frieze of large, precisely formed alphabet letters in Spencerian script, designed to show the children how to make their ABCs.

Above the blackboard hung several grimy rolls of pull-down maps; beside it hung pictures of an Egyptian pyramid and the Taj Mahal and a framed photograph of a sour-looking Calvin Coolidge, president from 1923 to 1929. “Silent Cal,” he’d been called, because he said very little and smiled less. Charlie half grinned at a story he remembered, about a society matron who was seated beside the president at a dinner. To Coolidge, she said, “Mr. President, I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” He replied, “You lose,” and returned his attention to his potato. Charlie thought with pity of the poor children who had to do their schoolwork in this gloomy room, under the president’s sour stare.

There were door openings at either side of the back wall, bookending the blackboard. These were the entries to the cloakroom, Charlie knew, which ran across the back of the building. Rows of big hooks on the walls waited for the children to hang up their sweaters and coats, and several long shelves offered space for stowing books, boots, and sack lunches: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (if they were lucky), or split biscuits smeared with lard and sprinkled with sugar, or chunks of cold corn pone and baked sweet potato. The luckiest ones got a tomato or a peach or an apple and sometimes a cookie.

The carpet of thick dust that stretched the length of the aisle was undisturbed. He’d wait at the teacher’s desk, Charlie decided, where he could see his informant as she came in. Now that he was here and thinking about the meeting, his curiosity was overcoming his apprehension. He had been puzzling about the identity of this woman for days now, and at last he was going to meet her. Who was she? She had to be somebody from town, somebody he already knew, since he knew everybody in Darling. But what was her connection to the camp? How had she come by the details that she was—presumably—about to share with him?

He began walking to the front of the room, his steps echoing hollowly on the wooden floor. He had almost reached the teacher’s platform when a woman spoke. Her voice was slightly muffled, but her words were quite clear.