A Hoosier holiday

by Theodore Dreiser

But the school next door gave me the cruellest shock of all. I went into it because, it being mid August, the preliminary autumn repairs were under way and the place was open. Workingmen were scattered about—carpenters, painters, glaziers. I had no idea how sound my memory was for these old scenes until I stepped inside the door and saw the closets where we used to hang our hats and coats on our nails and walked up the stairs to the seventh grade room, which is the one in which I had been placed on our arrival in Warsaw.

Here it was, just as I had left it, apparently—the same walls, the same benches, the same teacher’s table. But how small the benches had grown, scarcely large enough for me to squeeze into now, even though I allowed for a tight fit! The ceiling and walls seemed not nearly so high or so far as they had once seemed. At that very table sat Mae Calvert, our teacher—dead now, so someone told me later—a blooming girl of nineteen or twenty who at that time seemed one of the most entrancing creatures in all the world. She had such fine blue eyes, such light brown hair, such a rounded, healthy, vigorous body. And she had been so fond of me. Once, sitting at my little desk (it was the fifth from the front in the second aisle, counting from the west side of the room), she paused and put her hand on my head and cheek, pinching my neck and ear, and I colored the while I thrilled with pleasure. You see, hitherto, I had been trained in a Catholic school, what little I had been, and the process had proved most depressing—black garbed, straight laced nuns. But here in this warm, friendly room, with girls who were attractive and boys who were for the larger part genial and companionable, and with a teacher who took an interest in me, I felt as though I were in a kind of school paradise, the Nirvana of the compulsorily trained.

Another time (it was in reading class) she asked me to read a paragraph and when I had and paused, she said: “I can’t tell you how beautifully you read, Theodore. It is so natural; you make everything so real.” I blushed again, for I felt for the moment by some odd transposition that she was making fun of me. When I looked up into her face and saw her eyes—the way in which she looked at me—I understood. She was actually fond of me.

At later times and in various ways during this year she drew me out of an intense dreamy shyness by watching over me, expending an affection which I scarcely knew how to take. She would occasionally keep me after school to help me with my grammar—a profound mystery, no least rudiment of which I ever mastered—and when she gradually discovered that I knew absolutely nothing concerning it, she merely looked at me and pinched my cheek.

“Well, don’t you worry; you can get along without grammar for a while yet. You’ll understand it later on.”

She passed me in all my examinations, regardless I presume, though I have reason to believe that I was highly intelligent in respect to some things. At the end of the year, when we were clearing up our papers and I was getting ready to leave, she put her arms about me and kissed me goodbye. I remember the day, the warm, spring sunlit afternoon, the beauty and the haunting sense of the waning of things that possessed me at the time. I went home, to think and wonder about her.

I saw her a year or so later, a much stouter person, married and with a baby, and I remember being very shocked. She didn’t seem the same, but she remembered me and smiled on me. For my part, not having seen her for so long a time, I felt very strange and bashful-almost as though I were in the presence of one I had never known.

But the feeling which I had here today passed over this last unheeded. It concerned only the particular days in which I was here, the days of a new birth and freedom from horrific Spartan restraint, plus the overawing weight of the lapse of time. Never before I think, certainly not since my mother’s death, was I so impressed by the lapse of time, the diaphanous nothingness of things. I was here thirtytwo years before and all that I saw then had body and substance—a glaring material state. Here was some of the same material, the same sunlight, a few of the same people, perhaps, but time had filched away nearly all our characteristics. That boy—was his spiritual substance inside of me still unchanged, merely overlaid by experience like the heart of a palm? I could not even answer that to myself. The soul within me could not say. And at least foursevenths of my allotted three score years and ten had gone.

Down the street from this school about five doors was another house which was very familiar. I went up the narrow brick walk and knocked. A tall, lean, sallow creature of no particular figure but with piercing black eyes and long, thin hands came to the door. Her hair, once jet black, was thinly streaked with grey. She must have been all of thirtyfive or forty when I knew her as a boy. That made her sixtyfive or seventy now; yet I could see no particular change, so vigorous and energetic was she.

“Well, Ed,” she exclaimed, “or is it Theodore? Well, of all things! Come right in here. I’m glad to see you. Land o' goodness! And Nate will be pleased to death. Nate! Nate!” she called into an adjoining room. “Come in here. If here isn’t Theodore—or is it Ed?” (“It’s Theodore,” I interjected quickly.) “You know it’s been so long since I’ve seen you two I can scarcely tell you apart. But I remember both as well as if it were yesterday. And it’s been—let me see—how long has it been? Nearly thirty years now, hasn’t it? Well, of all things! I do declare! And you’re getting stout, too. And you’ve grown to be over six feet, at least. Well, I do declare! To think of your walking in on me like this. Just you sit right down here and make yourself comfortable. Well, of all things!”