Moise and the World of Reason by Tennessee Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

thalamus which is in the rear section of the brain which takes me all the way back to my geography classes in Thelma, Alabama, and to the sad but companionable recollection of Miss Florida Dames who taught geography there and who was a spinster withering desperately toward her time of retirement or unmentionable death, which I have just now mentioned as one is compelled in a dream to open a closet door despite or even because of one’s intense dread of what it is closed upon.
    And back, now, to seventh or eighth grade geography in the class of Miss Florida Dames in Thelma High Junior and Senior. And it is drawing toward spring, the air is infected with a sensual languor, the sort of atmosphere that exists and prevails in my Blue Jays.
    (Came very near saying “blue jeans.”)
    And fatally one day Miss Dames does not enter the classroom alone but accompanied by her little non-singing canary in its delicately shimmering wire cage and it is as if she had brought along with her an image of her implacable retirement soon to contain her but not shimmering and not delicate as wire with swinging perches for a loved companion. Some girls giggle, some boys grin, and she gives them a little bow of her tight-curled head as if to acknowledge a modest round of applause and she then nods encouragingly to the canary and she places the cage on her desk, remarking, “It was so frightened today I couldn’t leave it at home,” and even the most insensitive clod in the class must have sensed, at least dimly, that she was referring to her own fright more than to the canary’s. Then she sits down and says, “If it disturbs anyone, please raise your hand and I’ll”
    She didn’t say what: I don’t think she meant she’d remove it. I think that Miss Florida Dames was terrified of being without her canary, yellow as butter in a wire cage yellow as finely spun gold.
    However, its presence didn’t calm her nerves any more effectively than her nerves calmed the canary. She became more and more agitated as if there were a storm of wings in her narrow chest and her necklace of coral shook and her voice shook with it and the canary hopped about with more and more agitation, in precise correspondence to hers.
    â€œRoger, will you please”
    (She stopped, gasping for breath.)
    â€œPull down the”
    (Gasp for breath.)
    â€œMap of the world I received from the P.&O. Lines in Mobile?”
    He was a tall boy in the front row and when he rose after long hesitation to comply with her request, the fly of his corduroy pants bulged as if he’d been entertaining libidinous thoughts concerning Miss Dames or her canary or the very large colorful map of the world. She had often informed us it was presented to her by a branch office of the P.&O. Lines twenty-five years ago when she had considered a holiday trip to Hawaii. She had been obliged to abandon that idea for an unexplained reason probably having to do with the expense of it, but she did have the map, courtesy of P.&O. Lines Ltd. . . .
    (Limited to what? Her travel expenses that summer? Certainly not to the geographical details of the map.)
    Again girls’ giggles, boys’ grins, and Roger flushing and shuffling up a narrow corridor of space between embarrassment and pride at the bulge of his sub-equatorial pointer that spring afternoon, and jerking the rolled map down with the violence of a rapist and Miss Dames gasped and her coral necklace bounced on her narrow chest. Girls giggled, boys grinned, the canary hopped wildly about and Miss Dames recovered sufficiently to request,
    â€œNow point out to us the islands called the Marquesas.”
    (And it occured to me, “Will he open his fly to point them out with his —?”)
    He stood there, voiceless as the canary and beginning to grin.
    â€œRoger, the
Marquesas, where?”
    The heretofore voiceless canary utters a loud “Cheep” and the classroom explodes