Poor George by Paula Fox

Author:Paula Fox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1967-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

For the next two weeks, George immersed himself in schoolwork. Final grades had to be computed, late papers marked, reports finished. There was a series of meetings which George attended dutifully. Walling made a point of falling asleep—or pretending to. Rubin, who could usually be counted upon to irritate people into some display of temperament, looked enervated and worried.

The post-examination classes writhed in their seats, listened not at all, refusing to be either entertained or threatened. George had lost control of his classroom and he kept as constant an eye on his watch as his students kept on the wall clock. It had never been so difficult. Sitting at his desk, his hand on a closed anthology of poetry—the idea that he would read them poems had occurred to him in the middle of the night, like most fatuous ambitions, he thought—he kept them at bay with short barks of bad temper as they pawed the ground and shook their great adolescent heads at him.

Between classes he brooded over Lila and Ernest. She called once, leaving a message, but he had not phoned her back. He felt he knew it all now—he didn’t want to listen to her. Yet how could he condemn her? He was not unaware of her loneliness, of the small, detestable privations of her situation. He knew she would be forty some time this month although he couldn’t remember the day. He told himself that, like Ernest, she deserved an especial pity because she had so few inner resources, just because she was inept and foolish. But she might have had the sense to have resisted the stale charms of his only neighbor! He barely spoke to Palladino any more, and the other man with his aimless apologetic smile seemed as reluctant as he was to start a conversation.

George had driven around Peekskill on two Sundays looking for Ernest. The nearly empty streets, the bright morning sunlight of early June and the buoyant gleam of the Hudson River behind the town filled him with despair; he felt purposeless.

His last class, relatively quiet, had left. He went to the supply closet and opened it with his key. A smell of old books and chalk rushed out into the classroom like the released ghost of other winters. For an hour he stored his books, his erasers and blotting pad, an armful of unused blue books and all the other paraphernalia of teaching. It was warm in the room; the silence was a blessing. Lifting the books and piling them up on closet shelves, he felt the softness of his body and he determined he would do something about tennis this summer. There was a knock on the door and, at his shouted “Come in,” Walling entered.

“The great quiet has come,” he said.

George nodded and sighed. “I’m as soft as a pussycat,” he said. Walling laughed. “Exercise!” he said. “Are you going somewhere this summer?”

“We might. My wife has August off. Maybe we’ll go to Vermont. It depends.” He felt a somewhat qualified interest in Walling.

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