Passage

I hope that doesn’t mean he’ll turn on me now, Joanna thought, but when she turned back to Mr. Briarley, he was smiling benignly at her. “Now then,” he said. “What can I do for you? You said you’d been to the high school — ?”

“Yes, looking for you,” Joanna said.

“I don’t teach there anymore,” he said in an odd, uncertain tone, as if he were trying to convince himself. “ ‘Neither fish nor fowl, neither out nor in.’ ”

He must miss it, she thought. “It looked so different, I hardly recognized it. I don’t know if you remember the class I was in, Ricky Inman was in it, and Candy Simons—”

“Of course I remember,” he said, almost belligerently.

“Good, because I need to ask you about something you said in class about—”

“The tea will only be a minute,” Kit said, appearing in the doorway with a tray. She’d slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops. Joanna cleared a stack of books off the little table, and Kit set the tray down. “I brought the cups and saucers, and the sugar,” she added unnecessarily.

Mr. Briarley looked the tray over irritably. “You didn’t bring any—”

“Spoons,” Kit said, darting out to the kitchen. “I forgot the napkins, too.”

“And the milk,” Mr. Briarley called after her. “How difficult is it to make a cup of tea? I was wrong,” he said to her as she came back, carrying a pitcher and the silverware. “The name Kit suits you admirably. As in mess kit. Don’t you agree?” he asked Joanna.

This was not the way Joanna remembered Mr. Briarley as being at all. He had been sarcastic, yes, and sometimes even cutting, but never spiteful. He would never have humiliated Ricky Inman the way he had just done Kit.

“Here’s the tea,” Kit said, coming in again with a teapot. “You take milk and sugar, don’t you, Uncle Pat?” she asked, already adding them. She handed the cup to him.

Joanna was afraid he would complain about the amount, or, after she’d taken a sip from the cup Kit handed her, the temperature. In spite of Mr. Briarley’s snapped orders, it was obvious Kit had used the microwave. The tea was barely lukewarm. But he seemed to have lost interest in the tea. And in Kit’s shortcomings, and her name. He leaned back in his chair, the cup and saucer on his knee, and gazed pensively at the rows of books.

“It was so nice of you to come visit Uncle Pat,” Kit said, taking the half-drunk cup from her as if the visit were over.

“I didn’t just come to visit,” Joanna said to Mr. Briarley. “I came to ask you about something you talked about in English class, something you taught—”

“I taught a good many things,” he said. “The definition of an adverb, the number of metric feet in blank verse, the difference between assonance and alliteration — ” Mr. Briarley said. “You will have to be more specific.”

Joanna smiled. “This was something about the Titanic.”

“The Titanic?” Kit said sharply.

“Yes, I don’t know if you read it out of a book or if it was in a lecture you gave,” Joanna said. “I work at Mercy General Hospital—”

“Hospital?” he said. The teacup clattered on the saucer.

“Yes. I’m working on a project that involves memory, and — ” She could tell by the look on his face that she was explaining herself badly. “I’m working with a neurologist who—”

“I have an excellent memory,” Mr. Briarley said, glaring at Kit as if holding her responsible for Joanna’s being here.

“I’m sure it is,” Joanna said. “In fact, that’s what I’m counting on. I’ve forgotten something you taught us or read to us, and I’m hoping you remember what it was. It was about the Titanic. One of the parts I remember was about people standing out on deck after the collision. They were in their nightclothes, and they didn’t know what had happened. They’d been awakened by the engines stopping.” She leaned forward, holding her cup and saucer. “Do you remember talking about that? Or reading something to the class about it?”

“I remember,” he said contemptuously, “that I scarcely had time to teach Dickens and Shakespeare, let alone a book about the Titanic.”

“I don’t know that it was a book,” Joanna said. “It might have been an essay, or a lesson—”

“A lesson? On what? The onomatopoeia of the iceberg scraping along the side? Or an exercise diagramming the passengers’ drowning cries? What on earth does a shipwreck have to do with the teaching of English literature?”

“B-but you talked about it all the time in class,” Joanna stammered, “about the band and Lorraine Allison and the Californian—”

“I realize, of course, that nowadays English classes teach everything but English — rope-skipping rhymes and Navajo tribal chants and deconstructionist drivel. Why not maritime disasters?”

“Uncle Pat,” Kit said, but he didn’t even hear her.

“Perhaps the Titanic and Toni Morrison constitute what is taught nowadays, but in my classes I taught Wordsworth and Shakespeare.”

“Uncle Pat—”