Read Online The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins - Free Book Online Page B

cello strings, and mock you in public when you’re forced to walk them to school.”
    This had been, indeed, a possibility. “But I expected an interview first, of course. And I’ve had some experience with mischievous youngsters—some holy terrors in fact.”
    But even after an interview, she insisted, the person he might have chosen from all those letters could turn out to be a former student who’d been waiting for the opportunity to take revenge for humiliations he’d suffered—because of his poor grammar, for instance, or the graduation ceremony he’d been denied because of Mr. Thorstad. “And there’s always the chance you’d fall into the hands of a homicidal maniac who likes to murder old men who remind him of his father.”
    Since it must have been obvious that he was not especially alarmed by her imagined scenarios, she informed him, as she rang up his cheese and eggs on her ancient machine, that if he fell for one of those job offers he would find the world much changed since he’d said goodbye to civilization. “Haven’t you been reading the papers?” For instance, if he thought wearing a fur coat was still the worst of crimes a person might commit in public, always punished with a hostile splash of thrown paint, he should be prepared for an endless list of newer crimes. “Suppose you lit up a cigarette in a restaurant! Prepare to see your picture in the paper. ‘Old Man Endangers Public Health . ’ ”
    â€œBut,” Thorstad said, aware that he was grinning, “I haven’t smoked for forty years. It’s not likely I’ll start again now.”
    Although his letters obviously represented a failed attempt to change his life, he opened the next to arrive because it was addressed to a Mr. Axel Thorstad in quotation marks, as though he might not any longer be himself. He read it while sitting on a bench outside the Free Exchange. The long blue coastline across the strait had reappeared with this morning’s light. Ragged columns of mist rose like white smoke from behind each successive hill as though from hundreds of secret bonfires, gradually revealing the chain of blue mountains down the island’s centre—some rising to snowy peaks and others to scalped plateaus and isolated Mohawk cuts of timber left to drop their seeds for future growth. The world was still there and getting along without him.
    Dear Sir,
      The other day I was told, by someone who was only partly sure of his facts, that my Grade Twelve English teacher now lived on Estevan Island. I am writing in care of the island’s post office in case this is true.
      I was in the same class as Ivan Norris (I know you’ll remember him and the red hat he refused to remove because he was already going bald—at sixteen!) and graduated thirty years ago before going on to the University of Saskatchewan and marrying a cattle rancher. I have not been back to the Coast since leaving, but I have kept in touch with Muriel Willis. I have no doubt you remember the day Muriel accidentally set my hair on fire while we were sneaking a smoke in the girls’ washroom.
      Now that my children have flown the coop, I’ve enrolled in university again to complete my degree. My Shakespeare professor reminds me so much of you that I feel compelled to write, if only to say hello. Like you, he towers above the class, his long arms flailing like an animated scarecrow. Like you, he is so much in love with his subject that it’s sometimes comical—like a small wide-eyed boy excited to tell about the treasure he dug up in the garden. Like you, he is even more interested in his students’ welfare than he is in his beloved subject, somehow making you realize that what he appears to be teaching is only the tools he uses for teaching something else. I haven’t yet figured out what this is, but I