103: My mother and Mr. Beaker ...
Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam,” Chapter 3 continues
My mother and Mr. Beaker decided that I had memorized parts of the stories, and that I was making additions and changes to cover up for my not being able to remember other parts. In short, they decided that I couldn’t really read at all.
My mother worried about me. In consultation with the other mothers in our neighborhood, she decided that I had serious intellectual deficiencies that should be corrected before I began kindergarten. She wanted to enroll me in the Misses Leighton’s Nursery School. She enlisted Eliza Foote as an ally, and together they persuaded Mr. Beaker to endorse the idea. The Misses Leighton’s Nursery School was much less practical than what Mr. Beaker would have liked, but it was the only school that that I could possibly attend, since there was no other nursery school in Babbington, and it would at least be a beginning. I would be, at least formally, a student. When my father seemed hesitant, Mr. Beaker offered to pay half the cost, and the matter was settled.
The school was conducted within the Misses Leighton’s house, a large and comfortable frame house where the two women—Emily and Louisa—had for some twenty years attended their ailing mother. When she had died at last, the daughters, released from their responsibility well into middle age, had spent their small inheritance on a trip to Greece, where they acquired an enormous number of fascinating miniature plaster replicas of classical statuary, and where Emily learned to play the bouzouki, though not well.
When they returned, they opened the little school, which emphasized the visual arts (mostly coloring, finger painting, and modeling in clay), dance (which consisted of having the children put on shifts made of cheesecloth and romp around the lawn behind Louisa while Emily played the bouzouki), and literature (which consisted of our sitting in a circle and listening to one or the other of the Misses Leighton read aloud).
Most of our instruction took place on their porch. The porch had been enclosed with windows and knotty pine. In my memory of the time I spent there, the sun is always shining. Miss Emily, large and soft, is wearing a white cotton dress with a billowy skirt. She is constantly moving, bustling from one pupil to another, giving out squashy hugs, and from time to time she bursts into operatic passages that make Louisa, a wiry, wan woman with fine, dark hair, wince.
Miss Emily paid particular attention to one of the other boys, who was so plump and soft and pale that the rest of us thought of him as a marshmallow. He was a sad little boy who wore a look of disappointment nearly all the time. He didn’t laugh, but neither did he cry. He was so uncommunicative that the rest of us gave up trying to talk to him after a while, though Miss Emily continually urged us to talk to him, to play with him. This was Matthew Barber. All of the rest of us knew that Matthew sometimes stayed at the Leightons’ after we left. His mother would come to get him later, when she closed her shop. I had heard my parents talk about how big-hearted the Leighton sisters were, how fortunate Mrs. Barber was that the Leightons allowed Matthew to attend the school for nothing, how fortunate the poor boy was that he had this opportunity.
Outside the porch, behind the house, was a wide lawn, surrounded by lilacs. Surely these lilacs cannot always have been in bloom while I was at the Leightons’ school, but in my memory they are. Perhaps I am remembering the lilac cologne that Miss Emily wore.
During the morning we would draw, paint, or model in clay. Then we would eat lunch. All of us brought lunches from home. When it was time to eat, we would gather together in groups of friends. Periodically, Miss Louisa took us aside, one at a time, and reminded us that Matthew was not a happy boy, that he had no father, and that we should share our lunches with him because he didn’t have any money. Once, I traded sandwiches with him. The sandwich I gave him was tuna fish, and I was fond of tuna fish sandwiches. The sandwich he gave me was lard, just lard. With the first bite I decided that I’d been duped. I looked at him. He was wolfing down the tuna fish sandwich, but he paused to smile at me. It was not a pure smile. It was more like a sneer.
During the afternoon, we would dance, hurl the discus and javelin, play follow-the-leader, or act in skits. Then at the end of the day, our little group would sit in a ring around Emily or Louisa, who would read to us. On cool days we would sit on the porch, but on warm days we would sit outside on the lawn. After the day’s reading, our parents would arrive, and we would go home.
Most of the time, my mother drove me to the school and picked me up at the end of the day. She was always deferential toward the Misses Leighton, who quite bowled her over. Sometimes, though, my father picked me up, and he was always nervous around the Leighton sisters. He would stand with his hands in his pockets for most of the time. He looked at the ground or the floor, or he looked quickly at the drawings and finger paintings I had made, but he almost never raised his eyes to look directly at Emily or Louisa, and since he spoke, when he spoke, in the direction of the floor, neither of them had any idea what he was saying. When we rode home together in the car, he would sometimes ask me questions about what went on at the school, but he seemed more interested in knowing whether the boys and girls changed into their cheesecloth shifts in the same room at the same time than in what I had made out of my ration of clay that day.
[to be continued on Wednesday, October 6, 2021]
You can listen to this episode on the Personal History podcast.
In Topical Guide 103, Mark Dorset considers School; Education: Early Childhood, Benefits of; Classical Statuary, Replicas of; Bouzouki; and Personality Traits, Distinctive from this episode.
You can begin reading at the beginning or you can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.
You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.
At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.
You’ll find an overview of the entire work in An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.