Dan confessed to Owen and me that the Whites had given him the shivers.
“YOU THINK THEY GIVE YOU THE SHIVERS NOW,” Owen said. “JUST WAIT UNTIL HE STARTS MAKING DECISIONS!”
Toronto: May 13, 1987—another gorgeous day, sunny and cool; Mrs. Brocklebank and others of my neighbors who were attacking their dandelions, yesterday, are having a go at their lawns today. It smells as fresh as a farm along Russell Hill Road and Lonsdale Road. I read The Globe and Mail again, but I was good; I didn’t bring it to school with me, and I resolved that I would not discuss the sales of U.S. arms to Iran and the diversion of the profits to the Nicaraguan rebels—or the gift from the sultan of Brunei that was supposed to help support the rebels but was instead transferred to the wrong account in a Swiss bank. A ten-million-dollar “mistake”! The Globe and Mail said: “Brunei was only one foreign country approached during the Reagan Administration’s attempt to find financial support for the contras after Congress forbade any money’s being spent on their behalf by the U.S. Government.” But in my Grade 13 English class, the ever-clever Claire Clooney read that sentence aloud to the class and then asked me if I didn’t think it was “the awkwardest sentence alive.”
I have encouraged the girls to find clumsy sentences in newspapers and magazines, and to bring them into class for our hearty ridicule—and that bit about “any money’s being spent” is enough to turn an English teacher’s eyeballs a blank shade of pencil-gray—but I knew that Claire Clooney was trying to get me started; I resisted the bait.
It is that time in the spring term when the minds of the Grade 13 girls are elsewhere, and I reminded them that—yesterday—we had not traveled sufficiently far in our perusal of Chapter Three of The Great Gatsby; that the class had bogged down in a mire of interpretations regarding the “quality of eternal reassurance” in Gatsby’s smile; and that we’d wasted more valuable time trying to grasp the meaning of Jordan Baker exhibiting “an urban distaste for the concrete.” Claire Clooney, I might add, has such a general “distaste for the concrete” that she confused Daisy Buchanan with Myrtle Wilson. I suggested that mistaking a wife for a mistress was of more dire substance than a slip of the tongue. I suspect that Claire Clooney is too clever for an error of this magnitude; that, yesterday, she had not read past Chapter One; and that, today—by her ploy of distracting me with the news—she was not finished with Chapter Four.
“Here’s another one, Mr. Wheelwright,” Claire Clooney said, continuing her merciless attack on The Globe and Mail. “This is the second-awkwardest sentence alive,” she said. “Get this: ‘Mr. Reagan denied yesterday that he had solicited third-country aid for the rebels, as Mr. McFarlane had said on Monday.’ That’s some dangling clunker there, isn’t it?” Claire Clooney asked me. “I like that, ‘as Mr. McFarlane had said’—it’s just like tacked on to the sentence!” she cried.
“Is it ‘like tacked on’ or is it tacked on?” I asked her. She smiled; the other girls tittered. They were not going to get me to blow a forty-minute class on Ronald Reagan. But I had to keep my hands under the desk—my fists under the desk, I should say. The White House, that whole criminal mob, those arrogant goons who see themselves as justified to operate above the law—they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood!
I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver “ranting lectures” to them about the United States; some parents have complained to the headmistress, and Katherine has cautioned me to keep my politics out of the classroom—“or at least say something about Canada; BSS girls are Canadians, for the most part, you know.”
“I don’t know anything about Canada,” I say.
“I know you don’t!” the Rev. Mrs. Keeling says, laughing; she is always friendly, even when she’s teasing me, but the substance of her remark hurts me—if only because it is the same, critical message that Canon Mackie delivers to me, without cease. In short: You’ve been with us for twenty years; when are you going to take an interest in us?
In my Grade 13 English class, Frances Noyes said: “I think he’s lying.” She meant President Reagan, of course.
“They should impeach him. Why can’t they impeach him?” said Debby LaRocca. “If he’s lying, they should impeach him. If he’s not lying—if all these other clowns are running his administration for him—then he’s too stupid to be president. Either way, they should impeach him. In Canada, they’d call for a vote of confidence and he’d be gone!”
Sandra Darcy said, “Yeah.”
“What do you think, Mr. Wheelwright?” Adrienne Hewlett asked me sweetly.
“I think that some of you have not read to the end of Chapter Four,” I said. “What does it mean that Gatsby was ‘delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor’—what does that mean?” I asked them.
At least Ruby
Newell had done her homework. “It means that Gatsby bought the house so that Daisy would be just across the bay—that all the parties he throws … in a way, he throws them for her. It means that he’s not just crazy—that he’s made all the money, and he’s spending all the money, just for her! To catch her eye, you know?” Ruby said.
“I like the part about the guy who fixed the World Series!” Debby LaRocca cried.
“Meyer Wolfshears!” said Claire Clooney.
“-sheim,” I said softly. “Meyer Wolfsheim.”
“Yeah!” Sandra Darcy said.
“I like the way he says ‘Oggsford’ instead of Oxford,” Debby LaRocca said.
“Like he thinks Gatsby’s an ‘Oggsford man,’” said Frances Noyes.
“I think the guy who’s telling the story is a snob,” said Adrienne Hewlett.
“Nick,” I said softly. “Nick Carraway.”
“Yeah,” Sandra Darcy said. “But he’s supposed to be a snob—that’s part of it.”
“And when he says he’s so honest, that he’s ‘one of the few honest people’ he’s ever known, I think we’re not supposed to trust him—not completely, I mean,” Claire Cooney said. “I know he’s the one telling the story, but he’s a part of them—he’s judging them, but he’s one of them.”
“They’re trashy people, all of them,” Sandra Darcy said.
“‘Trashy’?” I asked.
“They’re very careless people,” Ruby Newell said correctly.