Alone in the Classroom by Elizabeth Hay Read Free Book Online Page A

re-establish themselves, and itwasn’t just the quantity of snow that was to blame, but the unprepared earth, not yet frozen, and the leafy innocence of the branches now groaning under a double weight. You see the same thing with bereaved children. Connie and my father, for example.
    And why the early desire to be an actress? I pressed her on this, because I’d had the same impulse. In her case, when she was twelve, she had played the first witch and the second assassin in
Macbeth
, coached to enunciate each word with demonic relish by storming, funny, unforgettable Mr. Goodwin. One lucky girl was assigned to be the Manager of Blood: Ada Lempke took Mr. Goodwin’s recipe and cooked up a syrup of water and sugar doctored with red food colouring and a smidgen of green. He trained them all in the best way to slit a throat onstage: knee the victim from behind, then haul back the head to expose the doomed throat.
Macbeth murthers sleep, innocent sleep
. “It’s a play about insomnia,” he taught, “moral insomnia, about not being able to close your eyes to the dark within. Notice how Macbeth’s language becomes more and more like the witches’ as the play unfolds.”
Approach thou like the Russian bear, The arm’d rhinoceros, or th’ Hyrcan tiger; Take any shape but that, and my firm nerves shall never tremble
.
    Syd Goodwin was another rarity, venting his spleen on property rather than on children. He banged the wall with the pointer, booted the side of his desk, once took a running kick at an empty bushel basket in the schoolyard and broke his toe on the rock inside. The kids laughed themselves sick over that, and he laughed too, eventually.Outside of Shakespeare, he had the fullest range of insults Connie had ever heard.
Numbskull, knucklehead, nitwit, chowderhead, lamebrain, meathead, dim bulb, dough head, bone-head, fathead, lunkhead, blockhead, hole in the head, mongoose, muttonhead, hambone
. He was a mighty walker, too, taking them on extensive and impulsive field trips, his rousing battle cry being, “It’s too beautiful to stay inside!”
    Enter
John Durbeyfield
carrying a basket. He is met by old
Mr. Tringham,
an antiquarian
.
    Most of the parts had been handed out. Jake Aarp, a blustery boy in grade ten, was drunken “Sir” John, Tess’s father. Small Henry Rhodes was Mr. Tringham, the antiquarian. Red Peter (for his red hair and as a shortened form of Alfred) played Tess’s brother Abraham. Susan Graves was Tess, of course. Her friend Hildy Kowalchuk played Joan Durbeyfield, the mother.
    Parley said, “It takes almost nothing to make you feel the role. A shawl - and you’re Tess. A hat set at a certain angle - and you’re her useless father.” He set a brimmed cap on his own head. “Deep disguise,” he deadpanned. “It works for the actor and it works for the audience. We all want to believe.”
    He had not settled on the boy who would play the seducer, bad Alec. In the meantime, he played the rogue himself.
    Alec D’Urberville
enters with a cigarette and a little basket of strawberries
.
    The strawberries had been constructed by the childrenin Miss Fluelling’s class from papier mache painted red, stems painted green.
    Alec
takes a strawberry from the basket
and Parley cannot resist: he holds it aloft.
    “Papier mache
, from the French.
Papier
, for paper.
Mache
, past participle of
macher
, to chew.”
    He
holds it by the stem to her mouth
. Tess
covers her mouth
. He
persists;
she
retreats till she is against the wall; laughs distressfully, and takes it with her lips as offered
.
    Alec: There’s a darling.
    Connie watched him rehearse the rickety bones of the play and at night she reread the novel to remind herself of its agonizing beauty and depth. The terrible death of the horse. The seduction and fall of Tess. The milk meadows, and the blessed world of Tess’s one happy summer.
    She said to Parley as he walked her home, “I think you should have the scene with Prince. There are boys