Read Online A Butterfly in Flame by Nicholas Kilmer - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Nicholas Kilmer
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Stillton Hall proved to be a long, low frame building, one story high, under a peaked roof high enough to contain a garret. A hallway running along the entire front of the building would seem a waste of space, except that it gave a place, this damp morning, for students to congregate around the lockers assigned to them there.
Fred’s arrival had been at close to eight-thirty, the supposed start of class. At that hour a variety of students was still milling about the corridor, conversing in small groups, talking on cell phones, pulling material out of lockers or, just generally, putting off the moment of entering either Fred’s Stillton B, or Stillton A next to it, where Meg Harrison’s figure modeling class was supposed to be meeting.
The big room itself, Stillton B, was oddly unprepared for any exercise that carried the title
Intro to Lit.
Redolent of turpentine, paint thinner and mediums, and marked with streaks of paint on exposed sinks and surfaces, its furniture was notable for what wasn’t there—anything like a desk or chair. Sturdy metal easels were bunched together against one wall, to either side of the big sinks. A back wall, along the longest side, was all windows whose lower halves were masked with a material that would discourage and disappoint neighborhood boys. A third wall—more easels and some tall stools—had at its center closed sliding doors behind which, from the gabble and clatter of industry that issued from the far side, Meg Harrison’s figure modeling class was in progress. At the center of Fred’s classroom a heavy square platform, a foot high, was festooned with stools and drapes in varied colors. A plastic bowl of discouraged fruit sat on an orange cloth there, and beside that a pinned paper notice “Do not move. MH.”
In a more or less random circular pattern around this platform, Fred’s students began to sit on simple, squareish home-made looking contraptions like no other furniture in the known world. Each was basically a bench, not quite large enough for two people, and with the leg at one end extended upward to a height that made it seem a back rest, except that the students tended to be sitting astride and resting their arms across these uprights. There might be as many as twenty people, drifting in, getting settled, finishing their conversations, taking out pencils or charcoal with which to sketch on the tablets some carried—the only sign that anyone had come to class with paper, of any kind, for any purpose.
Fred stood in front of the model stand—that was what it must be, but with the model absent—and started, “I guess we’ve all kind of been thrown to the wolves. Imagine if we had to use the bathrooms Emily Dickinson was used to.” A mild incredulity tinged the indifference that mitigated the general hostility. “Like anything else that started over a hundred years ago—plumbing, railroads—there’s lots of room for improvement. Where’s Missy Tutunjian?”
The students stared and mumbled to themselves or to each other until a young man in ripped jeans and a streaked sweatshirt challenged, “Who are you?”
“The guy noticing that nobody in this so-called lit class seems to be carrying a book,” Fred said. “What do you do with Morgan Flower, sing? I don’t care. I’m here. He’s not. I expected to see Marci. You all know her. Moonlights at the Stillton Café.”
“Marci Patenaude,” two of the females agreed, but talking to each other in undertones. Everyone looked around the room the way that’s learned in high school, to establish a fictive communal ignorance and putative innocence.
Fred said, “If it was my class, and it’s not, I’d say the way you understand a book, a novel, like
Moby Dick,
is by the end, figure out who’s left? Who’s missing. If this was a book we’d count three people missing anyway, and ask how come? Missy, Marci, Morgan Flower. Who hates them? Are they in China? Dead? Sick? Kidnapped? Lazy? Asleep? Do they
Fred’s arrival had been at close to eight-thirty, the supposed start of class. At that hour a variety of students was still milling about the corridor, conversing in small groups, talking on cell phones, pulling material out of lockers or, just generally, putting off the moment of entering either Fred’s Stillton B, or Stillton A next to it, where Meg Harrison’s figure modeling class was supposed to be meeting.
The big room itself, Stillton B, was oddly unprepared for any exercise that carried the title
Intro to Lit.
Redolent of turpentine, paint thinner and mediums, and marked with streaks of paint on exposed sinks and surfaces, its furniture was notable for what wasn’t there—anything like a desk or chair. Sturdy metal easels were bunched together against one wall, to either side of the big sinks. A back wall, along the longest side, was all windows whose lower halves were masked with a material that would discourage and disappoint neighborhood boys. A third wall—more easels and some tall stools—had at its center closed sliding doors behind which, from the gabble and clatter of industry that issued from the far side, Meg Harrison’s figure modeling class was in progress. At the center of Fred’s classroom a heavy square platform, a foot high, was festooned with stools and drapes in varied colors. A plastic bowl of discouraged fruit sat on an orange cloth there, and beside that a pinned paper notice “Do not move. MH.”
In a more or less random circular pattern around this platform, Fred’s students began to sit on simple, squareish home-made looking contraptions like no other furniture in the known world. Each was basically a bench, not quite large enough for two people, and with the leg at one end extended upward to a height that made it seem a back rest, except that the students tended to be sitting astride and resting their arms across these uprights. There might be as many as twenty people, drifting in, getting settled, finishing their conversations, taking out pencils or charcoal with which to sketch on the tablets some carried—the only sign that anyone had come to class with paper, of any kind, for any purpose.
Fred stood in front of the model stand—that was what it must be, but with the model absent—and started, “I guess we’ve all kind of been thrown to the wolves. Imagine if we had to use the bathrooms Emily Dickinson was used to.” A mild incredulity tinged the indifference that mitigated the general hostility. “Like anything else that started over a hundred years ago—plumbing, railroads—there’s lots of room for improvement. Where’s Missy Tutunjian?”
The students stared and mumbled to themselves or to each other until a young man in ripped jeans and a streaked sweatshirt challenged, “Who are you?”
“The guy noticing that nobody in this so-called lit class seems to be carrying a book,” Fred said. “What do you do with Morgan Flower, sing? I don’t care. I’m here. He’s not. I expected to see Marci. You all know her. Moonlights at the Stillton Café.”
“Marci Patenaude,” two of the females agreed, but talking to each other in undertones. Everyone looked around the room the way that’s learned in high school, to establish a fictive communal ignorance and putative innocence.
Fred said, “If it was my class, and it’s not, I’d say the way you understand a book, a novel, like
Moby Dick,
is by the end, figure out who’s left? Who’s missing. If this was a book we’d count three people missing anyway, and ask how come? Missy, Marci, Morgan Flower. Who hates them? Are they in China? Dead? Sick? Kidnapped? Lazy? Asleep? Do they
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