I saw her write “No Epocks” on her tablet and draw a box around it. As my father talked on, she began to ornament the box with triangles. “Or Lepidodendron,” he said. “Giant fern, Paleozoic, Pennsylvanian. Or Eryops. What would that be, Peter?”

I really didn’t know. “A reptile,” I guessed. “Mesozoic.”

“An amphibian,” he said. “Earlier. Or Archaeopteryx,” he said, his voice quickening, sure we would know it. “What’s that, Judy?”

“Archy what?” she asked.

“Archaeopteryx.” He sighed. “The first bird. It was about the size of a crow. Its feathers evolved from scales. Study the chart on pages two-oh-three to two-oh-nine. Don’t tense up. Study the chart, and memorize what you’ve written down, and you’ll do all right.”

“I get so sort of sick and dizzy just trying to keep it straight,” she blurted, and it seemed she might cry. Her face was a folded bud, but already in her life it had begun to wilt. She was pale and this pallor for a moment swam around the room whose shades of varnish were like shades of honey gathered in a sweetly rotten forest.

“We all do,” my father said, and things became firm again. “Knowledge is a sickening thing. Just do the best you can, Judy, and don’t lose any beauty sleep. Don’t get buffaloed. After Wednesday you can forget all about it and in no time you’ll be married with six kids.” And it dawned on me, with some indignation, that my father out of pity had hinted away to her the entire quiz.

When she left the room, he got up and closed the door and said to me, “That poor femme, her father’ll have an old maid on his hands.” We were alone together.

I stopped leaning against the windowsill and said, “Maybe that’s what he wants.” I was very conscious of wearing a red shirt; its flicker on the floor of my vision as I moved about the room seemed to instill my words with an enigmatic urbanity.

“Don’t you believe it,” my father said. “The worst thing in the world is a bitter woman. That’s one thing about your mother, she’s never been bitter. You won’t understand this, Peter, but your mother and I had a lot of fun together.”

I doubted this, but the way he said it rendered me silent. One by one, it seemed to me, my father was saying good bye to all the things he had known in this world. He took a sheet of blue paper from his desk and handed it to me. “Read it arid weep,” he said. My first thought was that it was a fatal medical report. My stomach sank. I wondered, How could he have gotten it so soon?

But it was just one of Zimmerman’s monthly visitation reports.

OLINGER PUBLIC SCHOOLS

OFFICE OF THE SUPERVISING PRINCIPAL

1/10/47

teacher: G. W. Caldwell

class: 10th grade Gen. Sci., sec. C

period of visitation: 1/8/47 11:05 am.

The teacher arrived in the classroom twelve minutes late. His surprise at finding the supervising principal in charge was evident and was remarked upon by the class. Ignoring his students, the teacher attempted to engage the supervising principal in conversation and was refused. The students and the teacher then discussed the age of the universe, the size of the stars, the origins of the earth, and the outline of organic evolution. No attempt was discernible on the teacher’s part to avoid offending religious conceptions on the students’ part. The humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences were not elicited. The teacher at one point stopped himself from pronouncing the word “hell.” Disorder and noise were present from the beginning and rose in volume. The students did not seem well-prepared and the teacher consequently resorted to the lecture method. A minute before the final bell, he struck one boy on the back with a steel rod. Such physical procedure of course violates Pennsylvania state law and in the event of parental protest could result in dismissal.

However, the teacher’s knowledge of his subject matter seemed good and some of his illustrations relating subject matter to his students’ everyday lives were effective.

Signed,

Louis M. Zimmerman.

My father was pulling the windowshades and the room had been jerked into dusk as I read. “Well,” I said, “he thinks you’re effective.”

“Isn’t that the worst God-damn report was ever written? He must have stayed up all night with that masterpiece. If the school board gets ahold of that, I’m O-U-T out, tenure or no tenure.”

“Who was the kid you hit?” I asked.

“Deifendorf. That Davis bitch got the poor bastard all excited.”

“What’s poor about him? He broke our Buick grille and now he’s going to get you fired. And two minutes ago he was in here and you were telling him the story of your life.”

“He’s dumb, Peter. I feel sorry for him. It takes a rat to love a rat.” I swallowed a taste of envy and said, “Daddy, this isn’t such a bad report.”

“It couldn’t be worse,” he said, striding down the aisle with the windowpole. “It’s murder. And I deserve it. Fifteen years of teaching, and it’s all right there. Fifteen years of hell.” He took a rag from the book closet and went out the door. I read the report over again, trying to get some picture of Zimmerman’s actual mind. I couldn’t. My father came back, having soaked the rag at the drinking fountain in the hall. With long rhythmic swipes shaped like sideways 8’s he washed the blackboard. His earnest swishing underlined the silence; high on the wall the clock, controlled by the master clock in Zimmerman’s office, clicked, jumping from 4:17 to 4:18. “What does he mean,” I asked, “the humanistic values implicit in the physical sciences?”

“You ask him,” my father said. “Maybe he knows. Maybe down deep in the atom there’s a little man sitting in a rocking chair reading the evening paper.”

“Do you really think the school board will see this?”

“Pray not, kid. It’s on file. I have three enemies on that board, one friend, and one I don’t know. Mrs. Herzog I don’t know if she’s heads or tails. They’d love to get me out of there. Get rid of the dead wood. A lot of veterans on this GI Bill and they’re all gonna need jobs.” He was grunting as he washed.

“Maybe you should get out of teaching,” I said. My mother and I had often discussed this, but our discussions were cramped, for we kept bumping our heads against the fact that my father’s teaching was what sheltered us and let us live.

“Too late, too late,” my father said. “Too late, too late.” He looked at the clock and said, “Jesus, I’m not kidding- I’m late. I told Doc Appleton I’d be there at 4:30.”

My face baked with fear. My father never went to doctors. For the first time, I had proof that his illness was not an illusion; it was spreading outward into the world like a stain. “Really? You’re really going?” I was begging him to deny it.

He knew my thoughts, and as we confronted each other through the vibrating shadows of the room a locker slammed, a child whistled, the clock clicked. “I called him this noon,” my father said, as if he were confessing a sin to me. “I just want to go and hear him tell how smart he was at med school.” He hung the wet rag over the back of his chair to dry and went to the windowsill and untwisted the pencil sharpener case and poured a rosy stream of shavings into the wastebasket. The scent of cedar filled the room like the perfume of an offering.

I asked, “Can I go with you?”

“Don’t do that, Peter. Go to the luncheonette and kill the time with your friends. I’ll pick you up in an hour and we’ll go into Alton.”

“No, I’ll go with you. I don’t have any friends.”

He took the sadly short coat from his closet. I followed him out. He closed the door of Room 204 behind us and we went down the stairs and through the first floor hall and past the glinting trophy case. This case depressed me; I first saw it as a tiny child and still had a superstitious sense of each silver urn containing the ashes of a departed spirit. Heller, the head janitor, was sprinkling crumbs of red wax over the floor and sweeping them toward us with a broad broom. “Another day, another dollar,” my father called to him.