Moral Disorder Read online

  “Now then. ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,’ ” said Miss Bessie, “ ‘Looking as if she were alive.’ As if she were alive. Class, what does as if tell us?”

  This time she did wait. I never knew – none of us knew – when one of her waits would set in. They always woke me up. It was the suspense, the looming danger – the threat of being pounced on, called by name, forced to speak. At such times my mouth would fill with words, too many of them, a glutinous pudding of syllables I would have to mould into speech while Miss Bessie’s ironic narrowed eyes beamed their message at me: You can do better than that. During such waiting periods I found it best to look down – otherwise Miss Bessie might single me out – and so I busied myself by making notes in my notebook.

  He bumped her off, I wrote. Bumped her off was not a thing I would ever have said out loud in class, as it was slang and Miss Bessie disapproved of such sloppy and vulgar talk. I’d picked up bumped off from the detective stories I was in the habit of reading as a way of evading my homework, or at least delaying it. Unfortunately, there were a lot of detective stories in the house, along with historical novels and books about World War One, and about monasteries in Tibet – a country where women could have two husbands at the same time – and about naval warfare in Napoleonic times, and about the form and function of the Fallopian tubes. If I wasn’t in the mood for a whole book, I’d go through the stacks of old Lifes and Times and Chatelaines and Good Housekeepings – my parents were reluctant to throw anything out – and puzzle over the ads (what was a douche?) and the articles on fashion and personal problems (Teenage Rebellion: Five Antidotes. Halitosis: Your Silent Enemy. Can This Marriage Be Saved?). I’d learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.

  Bumped off, I wrote. The Duke had bumped off the Duchess. Cheap floozies often got bumped off, and so did hot tomatoes and dumb bunnies, and so did sleazy broads. Bumped suggested a blow to the head with a blunt instrument, such as a blackjack, but this was not likely the method the Duke had used on the Duchess. Nor had he buried her in the cellar and covered up the grave with wet cement, or cut her up into pieces and heaved the pieces into the lake or dropped them down a well or left them in a park, like the husbands in some of the more grisly narratives I’d encountered. I thought he’d most likely poisoned her: it was a well-known fact among the writers of historical romances that Dukes of that time were expert poisoners. They had rings with hollow stones on the fronts and they slid the stones open when nobody was looking and slipped the poison into people’s flagons of wine, in powder form. Arsenic was a substance they favoured. The poor Duchess would have sickened gradually; a doctor would have been called in, a sinister doctor in the pay of the Duke. This doctor would have mixed up a final, lethal, potion to finish her off. There would have been a touching death scene and then a fancy funeral, with candles, and after that the Duke would have been free to go on the prowl for another beautiful girl to turn into a Duchess and then bump off.

  On second thought, I decided that the Duke wouldn’t have lifted a finger in the matter himself: he was far too snobbish to have bothered with any of the actual poisoning. I gave commands, he said, later on in the poem. (I’d skipped ahead.) The dirty work would have been done by some thug with a name like First Murderer – as in plays by Shakespeare – while the Duke himself was elsewhere, dropping names and paying phony compliments and showing off his costly artworks. I had a picture of how he would look: he’d be dark and suave and insultingly polite, and would wear a lot of velvet. There were movie stars like that, such as James Mason. They always had classy English accents. The Duke would have had an accent like that, even though he was Italian.

  “Well?” said Miss Bessie. “The subject is as if. We don’t have all day. Marilyn?”

  “Maybe she’s dead,” said Marilyn.

  “Very good, Marilyn,” said Miss Bessie. “That is one possibility. The attentive reader, I said attentive, Bill, this does apply to you, unless you have some other more important engagement to attend to – no? – the attentive reader would certainly wonder that, and might wonder also – if the Duchess is indeed dead – how she might have died.”

  At the sound of Bill’s name I found myself blushing, because Bill was my boyfriend; to be on the receiving end of Miss Bessie’s sarcasm was humiliating for him, and therefore by extension for me. It was true that Bill was not an attentive reader, but he regretted it, or else he resented it, I wasn’t sure which. I could visualize him now, two rows behind me, going red in the face with shame and anger as his friends smirked at him. But Miss Bessie didn’t care about that. She trampled right over you if she thought you were fooling around – if you got in the way of her teaching.

  “Of course we often say of a portrait, ‘It’s very lifelike,’ ” she continued. “That would be the other possibility. Perhaps this remark of the Duke’s is merely a comment on the verisimilitude – the lifelikeness – of the portrait itself. The entire poem is told from the Duke’s point of view – therefore nothing he says may be taken as objective truth. We will return to this question of point of view later.”

  Verisimilitude, I wrote in my notebook. Lifelike. The Duchess is almost alive. Point of view.

  Miss Bessie was the best English teacher in the school. Possibly she was one of the best in the city: our parents said we were lucky to have her. She drove us briskly through the curriculum as if herding sheep, heading us off from false detours and perilous cliff edges, nipping at our heels when we slowed down in the wrong places, making us linger in the right ones so we could assimilate the material of importance. She described our task of learning as a race, a sort of obstacle course: there was a lot of ground still to be covered before the final exams, she said, and it had to be covered rapidly. This ground was strewn with hurdles and rough parts, and other difficulties. The days were speeding by, and we still had Tess of the d’Urbervilles looming up ahead of us like – we felt – a big steep hill of mud. It was true that once we got to the top of it, Miss Bessie – who’d been up there many times before – might show us a view; but meanwhile there would be a lot of slipperiness. We’d tangled with Thomas Hardy in the form of The Mayor of Casterbridge the year before: it was going to be heavy slogging. Therefore we needed to polish off the Last Duchess before week’s end so we could catch our breath over the weekend and then get a good run at Tess.

  “That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

  Looking as if she were alive. I call

  That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands

  Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

  Will’t please you sit and look at her?”

  “Now, class. ‘Will’t please you.’ To whom do you suppose the Duke is speaking?”

  Line by line, Miss Bessie hauled us through the poem. It was an important poem, worth – said Miss Bessie – a full fifteen marks on the final exam. English was a compulsory subject: we couldn’t get out of high school without passing it. But Miss Bessie wasn’t interested in mere passes; she wanted top marks from us. She had the reputation of the school to keep up, and also her own reputation. Her students did well because they were well prepared. “You must be well prepared,” she told us frequently. “Of course, you will have covered the material, but in addition to that you must read the question twice and make sure you answer what is being asked. You must keep your head and not panic. You must outline and structure.” For each piece of work we studied, she produced a sampling of the questions that had been asked in previous years and drilled us in the acceptable answers.

  Once we had written them, the exams would be centrally marked by a hand-picked team of markers, and then, one day in August, the final grades would be published in the newspaper, brutally, without warning, to be seen by everyone – our friends, our enemies, our families. We dreaded this. It would be like having someone yank open the curtain when you were taking a shower.

  The grades in the newspaper would determine whether we would go
on. Going on meant going to university. Our school was not for rich kids – they went to private institutions. It didn’t matter so much to their lives whether they did well in high school, because a place would be made for them somehow. Neither was it for the poor: we lacked the freedom of being considered too stupid to go on. The dropouts, as we called them, had left as early as they could, but not before they’d tortured us with taunts of “brainer,” “brown nose,” “show-off,” and “suckup,” and had jeered relentlessly at anyone who actually did homework. They’d left us with an ambiguous opinion of ourselves. “Think you’re so smart,” they’d sneered, and we had thought we were smart, smarter than them at any rate; but we didn’t altogether approve of our smartness. It was like having an extra hand: an advantage for opening doors, but freakish despite that.

  Nonetheless we would have to live by our deformity. We’d have to use our wits, work our way up the ladder provided for us, make something of ourselves. The boys were expected to become doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, engineers. As for us girls, we weren’t sure where we were headed. If we didn’t go on, we’d have to get married, or else become old maids; but with a good set of grades, this dismaying fork in the road could be postponed for a while.

  We would sit the exams during a three-week period in June, in the gymnasium. It would be – said Miss Bessie – a turning point in our lives, but if we were well prepared we need not fear this test, which was a test of our characters, not merely of our intelligence. To succeed we would need courage and a steady nerve, and if those qualities were present it would simply be a matter of setting down the right facts and observations in the right order.

  Nonetheless we frightened one another with stories about potential disaster. There was no air conditioning in the gym, and if there was a heat wave – as there usually was in June – we would all cook, stew, and fry. Girls had been known to topple out of their desks in a cold faint; other girls had unexpectedly got their periods, and had found themselves sitting in puddles of blood, which – in the more squalid renditions – actually dripped off the seat of the desk onto the floor, plop, plop, plop – a mortifying prospect. Boys had had nervous breakdowns, and had started shouting and swearing; others had lost their nerve, and everything they’d memorized had vanished right out of their brains, and at the end of the exam it was found they’d been writing nothing but their own names, over and over. One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page – meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy.

  After school I walked home across the football field, a locale that had once been frightening to me, and forbidden, and significant in some way I couldn’t define, but which had now shrunk to an irrelevant stretch of muddy grass. A couple of younger kids were having a smoke behind the field house, where sordid orgies involving a girl called Loretta – one of the dropouts – were rumoured to have taken place. I carried my big black leather binder full of notes in front of me, hugging it to my chest with both arms, my textbooks piled on top of it. All the girls did this. It prevented anyone from staring at our breasts, which were either too small and contemptuous, or else too big and hilarious, or else just the right size – but what size was right? Breasts of any kind were shameful and could attract catcalls of “Get a load of the knockers!” from greasy-haired boys lounging in groups, or from young men in cars. Or else they would chant,

  I must, I must, I must develop my bust!

  I better, I better, or I’ll never wear a sweater!

  while moving their bent arms back and forth like a cartoon chicken’s. Although in truth the catcalling didn’t happen very much, there was always the fear that it would. To yell back at the boys was brazen, to ignore them was supposed to be dignified, though it didn’t feel dignified, it felt degrading. Merely to have breasts was degrading. But not to have any at all would have been worse.

  “Stand up straight, shoulders back, don’t slouch,” our Physical Education teacher used to bark at us during volleyball practice, centuries ago, in that very same gym where we would soon be writing the finals. But what did she know? She herself was flat-chested, and anyway very old. Forty at least.

  Breasts were one thing: they were in front, where you could have some control over them. Then there were bums, which were behind, and out of sight, and thus more lawless. Apart from loosely gathered skirts, nothing much could be done about them.

  Hey! Hey! Swing and sway!! Get a load of that wiggle!

  Walking beside me across the football field was Bill, who wasn’t the sort of boy who would roam around in a pack, shouting things about girls’ breasts; or I didn’t think he was. He was more serious than that, he had better things to do, he wanted to go places. He wanted to climb the ladder. As my official boyfriend, he walked me partway home every day, except on Fridays when he began his weekend job at a grocery store in the other direction. Fridays after school, Saturdays until three – he was saving the money for university, because his parents couldn’t afford it, or wouldn’t spare it. Neither of them had gone on and they’d managed fine without. That was their attitude, according to Bill, but he didn’t seem to hold it against them.

  Several months earlier, Bill had replaced my last boyfriend, who’d replaced the one before that. The process of replacement was delicate – it called for diplomacy, and nuance, and the willpower to resist answering the phone – but at a certain stage it had to be done. That stage came after the earlier, permissible stages had been gone through – the first date, the first tentative holding of hands, the arm around the shoulders in the movie, the slow, gelatinous dancing, the breathy fumbling around in parked cars, the advances and counterattacks of hands, the war of zippers and buttons. After a while, a stalemate would be reached: neither side would know what was supposed to come next. To go forward was unthinkable, to go back impossible. This period was characterized by listlessness, by squabbling and making up, by an inability to decide which movie we wanted to see, and – on my part – by the reading of novels that ended badly, over which I would weep. That was when the boyfriend had to be traded in and a fresh one obtained.

  It wasn’t that I mourned over the boys individually so much as that I hated to have things finish. I didn’t want any phase of my life to be gone forever, to be over and done with. I preferred beginnings to endings in books, as well – it was exciting not to know what was lying in store for me on the unread pages – but, perversely, I couldn’t resist sneaking a look at the final chapter of any book I was reading.

  As a boyfriend, Bill wasn’t following – could not follow – the standard cycle. Behind us were the Saturday-night dates, ahead of us the grim scenario in the gymnasium, with all it might involve: fainting, raving, panic, failure, disgrace. Now that there was so much ground to be covered before June, we no longer had time for the endless evenings parked in a car, with the policemen shining the flashlights in and asking if everything was all right; we no longer had time for the fights, for the sulking, for the monosyllabic phone calls and the grudging forgiveness. Instead of all that, we studied together.

  Or, to be accurate, I helped Bill study. What I helped him with was English literature. So far, he’d managed to squeak through it, but now he was frightened, although he didn’t call it fright. Instead, he blamed the literature itself: it refused to make sense. He wanted everything to be clear-cut, as in algebra, a subject he was good at. How could there be two or three meanings to one single word at the same time? How could Miss Bessie get all of that stuff out of a single poem? Why couldn’t people say things plainly?

  Helping Bill wasn’t turning out to be easy. He’d get mad at the poem for being complicated; he’d argue with it, and demand that it be different; then he’d get mad at the poet for having written it that way; then he’d get mad at me. After a while he’d say he was sorry, he hadn’t meant it – I was really, really smart, in that way at least; I was good with words, not like him, and he admired me for i
t. He just needed me to explain the thing again, only more slowly. After that we would neck and fumble around, though not for very long because we couldn’t afford the time.

  This day, Bill and I were in no great hurry to get home. We strolled, we sauntered; we paused for ice cream cones at the drugstore. You had to take a break from the books once in a while, said Bill. The ice cream came in cylinders and tasted faintly of the cardboard in which it had been rolled; the cones themselves were leathery in texture. We reached the funeral parlour and sat down on the low stone wall in front of it. The sunlight was golden; pale greenish tassels dangled from the trees; Bill’s hair, which was light brown and cut very short, shone like a soft velvety lawn. It was all I could do to keep from stroking the top of his head, as if he was a plush toy dog, but he wouldn’t have liked that. He didn’t like to be patted.

  “I’m not going to pass it,” said Bill. “I’m going to flunk out.”

  “No, you’re not,” I said.

  “I just don’t get it.”

  “Don’t get what?”

  “What’s going on.”

  “What’s going on in what?” I said, though I knew what he meant.

  “That goddamn Duchess poem.”

  Goddamn was the worst swearing Bill ever did in front of me. To say the other words – the F-word, for instance – would have meant he thought I was the kind of girl you could say such things to. A shoddy girl.

  I sighed. “Okay, I’ll run over it again. The poem is by Robert Browning. He was one of the most important poets of the nineteenth century. It’s a dramatic monologue. That means only one person is speaking, like a monologue in a play. The form is iambic pentameter run-on couplets.”