Chapter 16: Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, Part 16

NARRATIVE of WARD COURIER

September, 2007

SOUTH WALES, WILLIAMSVILLE, and BUFFALO, NY

I should clarify something about life at many boarding schools. What they call "a day off" is only a half-day. Teachers teach their regular classes until one, six days a week, Saturday included. (That's why we have long vacations.) Teachers try to pack a lot into those short off-periods, whether it's activity, chores, amusement or relaxation. They don't have to do breakfast duty the day after their half-day, so they get to sleep in an hour. Fun, wow. You would still be surprised by how people get to look forward to that proverbial day off. Just ask a guy if you'll see him at athletics that afternoon and he'll shake his head and go, "Day off," with the spark in the eye of a wino walking up the steps of his favorite bar.

Doubtless I had the same subdued gleam and my own spring in the step as I walked back to my cottage from my last class that late September Thursday. One of my classic days off was in the works: a quick run up the hill into the park, some laptop work over lunch, a tennis game with a good friend, an afternoon wine reception, more laptop work, some live Celtic music at a city pub, and a good long sleep.

I should tell you about the school. Our students have dyslexia.

Those of you who are unfamiliar with the reading disorder dyslexia surely know many dyslexic people without knowing that about them. Dyslexia is an invisible grief with which three to seven percent of Americans live. Dyslexics are at the very top of the LD - "learning disabled" - pyramid. They don't walk, talk or look funny. In a world less run by the printed symbol there would be no need to find them a category. Dyslexic people differ from the rest of us only in the fact that they don't read well in their formative years. They can be intelligent, even brilliant, but they fall behind in school. Most have been mocked, and most dyslexics of any age bear scars.

Dyslexia seems to affect boys more and more severely than it does girls. It usually moderates significantly in adulthood, at least with a good, understanding education. Most of my school's graduates are at least average readers and writers by their thirties, and many are great successes in whatever they do. But the signs of that early inadequacy are clear to people like me, even among the succeeders. There can still be that insecurity about reading or writing tasks and quick, pressured decisions; that barely-detectable tremor when voicing an opinion in a group; that compensating outer shell of confidence, even bravado, that in some can shatter like a diamond under the just-right stroke.

I always tell the rookie teachers that that school is like the Peace Corps: the toughest job you will ever love. Most of us who stay awhile never thought of ourselves as compassionate before. We may not take the pose even after. We find our compassion, whether we admit it or not, with our dyslexic students. They test us as we try to help them. We don't always measure up, but the struggle is noble. I had my sense of mission and professional self-worth, then; but I had a hole in my heart otherwise.

It had been a year since my last relationship. I missed the intimate companionship, of course. When you're a young guy, that's the first thing you miss. Then the other stuff starts catching up on you. I was at that stage. I missed the closeness, the talk, the trust, and the touching. I missed having someone to learn from and to be excited by. I missed having a woman in my life.

Like many unattached people in their twenties/thirties, I presumed that the big encounter might be anywhere: around the corner, in line at a cafe, or behind any door I might enter. The trouble was that - stuck at a rural boarding school a long way from the bright lights of the world - I felt like I couldn't get there. The gig I was heading to after the tennis match felt like a rare opportunity. A combination of a late afternoon wine session and the premiere of several new lines of jewelry, this event was put on by three women who owned a studio together. Their friends and patrons tended to fall among the eclectic aristocracy of the city.

One of the hostesses was a dark-haired lady with a ballet body who was by then designing earrings and necklaces out of jade, crystals and silver. Another was a red-haired Texan who had moved to Western New York because of a marriage to a Buffalo guy and ended up staying after the divorce because of the children. She was the manager and buyer for the shop they shared. I knew these two pretty well.

It turns out that this party was held in a stately Victorian-gothic overlooking Bidwell Parkway in Buffalo. The whole first level was being used for the displays. It was clearly the former home of an important family, but it had so little furniture that I don't think anyone lived in it. I don't know how these folks got the use of it. I suspect that one of their Bohemian bourgeois friends had got hold of the deed to it as an investment and turned it into occasional art space.

I got there around five. In a minute I found a Chardonnay. In ten I found the party to be a letdown. It was smaller than I thought, and I didn't know anyone other than the two artists I described earlier. No conversations enveloped me spontaneously. I didn't try to butt in on any, either. You sense it when you're included-out.

Maybe coming solo was blood in the water of this social pond. Made you look desperate. Looking like an Anglo jock might have worked against me, too. This was a hip crowd, all Buffalo bo-bo's kinda happy with themselves as they were. No problem with that, even if they do act cooler-than-thou sometimes. I find their parties more interesting than those of the preppies. Of course most of these people had been preppies. Cracks me up. People who, in high school, dumped on artists do everything they can to try to look like them in their forties.

The house itself was interesting. It had clearly belonged to some family of high-rollers. I found myself enjoying the woodwork by the broad marble fireplace on the first level. It was ornate, with viny patterns and the cunning faces of leafy green men wrought out of its comforting surface. Knowing the privations the house had endured, I was surprised that it was still here. It did desperately need some refinishing.

Ten minutes after arriving I took the broad stairs to the second floor and found a big, well-worn wooden table at the landing as if the space had been in the planning for more displays. A pair of artsy-looking people by it were talking like a married couple. The guy was good-sized, with light skin, sort of a John Denver-cut dark hair, and a black turtleneck under his jacket. The woman behind him had long brown hair and wore a light grey coat. The guy made eye contact and nodded courteously enough as I passed.

I came to a big empty space that had probably been a dining room in the center of the building. The woodwork was tired, too, but impressive. Other than that, there was not much to look at. Then I climbed a half-stairs to the bare, former bedroom. Its broad, bowing windows topped the porch and overlooked the parkway and the southern sky. Something was before them.

The day had turned completely overcast, but the clouds were thin. The silver sky pitched in a surreal sort of greyness that, seeping through like something gelatinous or densely liquid, flowed around and distorted the single vertical image a foot or two from the window. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust.

The form in the gleam resolved itself into that of a dark-haired woman gazing out. She was tall and trim. She wore black jeans and had a voluminous heather-grey sweater-shawl wrapped over her shoulders. Her shape was graceful, and she looked like she would be beautiful. I entered the ambiguous glow and approached her from the left.

Her ringless left held a glass of white wine to her heart like it was the locket of a lost loved one, and she peered out the window as if waiting for him or her to return. Her expression, though, was even more detached than that. It was as if she was looking into some private world that only she could see, as if the tableau of the streets, spare trees, and sky before her was a screen that she could look through to the true reality behind it. Her detachment made you want to fly there, to whatever she might be seeing, to that world in imagination, just to see what it was like close up and to judge for yourself if it was truly so grand, then to smile back to her and fly right up to her out of it and delight to see her astonishment. One of the old Celts would have said she was looking into Faerieland. A Saxon would have called that look "fey."

By her dress, she could have stepped off the cover of an October Project CD or the walkways of Vassar. In pose, she reminded me of the campus activist-artist-philosopher who, for a few short years, lives life as a series of symbolic gestures and walks with Ani DiFranco as a second persona and Frida Kahlo as a guardian angel. It was hard to tell anything else about her except that she was at peace with herself looking out a window.

I joined her, sharing the vantage of Bidwell Parkway from three feet away. We made brief and formal eye contact and nodded. She didn't smile. She had coffee brown eyes and a perfect oval face. She was very attractive. I presumed she was waiting for someone.

"Seen enough jewelry?" I said.

She took a breath and paused before she answered. "It's all nice... What I saw of it." Her voice was full, but not deep, sort of a contralto. She sounded graciously bored. I was about to speak again, and she broke into the first syllable of whatever I would have said.

"Forgive me, but... It's so hard to meet people at parties. The small ones are just the worst." She coiled the r's - werrrrst - in a way that reminded me of a Southern Baptist listing the names of Biblical demons.

"Nice hardly meeting you," I said brightly, making my getaway. ("Ooops," I said to myself. "Fired at the interview.")

That woman's reaction seemed like a prickly way of deflecting conversation. Too-cool. Snobby. Like the whole party. I could have reacted with a wisecrack. I'm good at those. But everyone has a right to be left alone. I had barged in on her, and I had thus asked for whatever I got. On to the next aspect of the evening.

[To Be Continued...]