Clair De Lune Read online

  CLAIR de LUNE

  Jetta Carleton

  Epigraph

  Moonlight

  Your soul is a chosen landscape

  Where charming masked provincials go

  Playing the lute and dancing and almost

  Sad beneath their fantastic disguises.

  All singing in a minor key

  Of conquering love and fortunate life

  They do not seem to believe in their happiness

  And their song mixes with the moonlight.

  The still moonlight, sad and beautiful,

  Which makes the birds dream in the trees

  And makes the fountains sob in ecstasy,

  The tall, slender fountains among the marble statues

  —Paul Verlaine

  Translation by Ann Patty

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  P.S.

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Other Works

  Credit

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Allen Liles is a fictional character. I made her up. Her story is made up too. But not all of it. Part of it’s mine, handed on to her, altered to fit.

  It’s an old story. You’ve heard it before, any number of times. But I wanted to tell it again, as it happened in a time and a place where something existed that, nowadays, it seems to me, is in short supply: innocence.

  Innocence, of course, can lead to error, and error led to the expulsion from Eden. Or so it is generally considered, although as far as we are told it was the end neither of Eden nor of the garden. It was the end only of the sojourn there of its first inhabitants. Evicted for the error of their ways, they were forbidden to return. Angels and a flaming sword were set to guard it at the east.

  Nothing is mentioned of the other boundaries. Nor is it written that the garden was destroyed. We are left to assume that it still exists. As of course it does, as a creation of the mind, as it has always been. And it is known for a fact that now and then the garden is rediscovered—here or there—and a way in found. (Perhaps from the west.) None are granted citizenship there. But there are those who enter, on sufferance of the angel, and choose not to know that after a short, blissful time, they too will be driven out.

  And so it was with Allen Liles, one spring a long time ago when the world was more innocent than it will be again and she was younger than her years.

  Spring came early that year, before winter had officially ended. In the streets of that Ozark town the wind blew catkins along the sidewalk, and maple wings and the dark seed clusters of elm trees half as old as the town. People walked out in the dusk, sniffing the weather, paused to chat under streetlamps, or strolled home slowly from some casual errand, stopping to buy ice cream in paper cartons, reluctantly going inside. Doors were left unlocked.

  Their lessons done, children played hide-and-seek in the dark angles of house and yard until they were called in to bed. On Center Street the two motion-picture houses were dark by eleven. By eleven thirty the local buses had returned to the barn and the lights were out in store windows. Only the bus-station cafe, where the lone attendant was dozing at the counter, awaiting the arrival of the last run south from Kansas City, was open. Except for a few passing cars, the streets were deserted. Stillness settled over the town, over the bus barn and the railroad tracks, the schoolyards and the eighteen churches. The great houses rose tall and secret along dark streets. And except for certain nights when the moon was high, the expansive, hospitable park lay silent.

  If facts are required, the great houses would be scattered and fewer, not all together on one grand avenue. The park on the west would not be so spacious, the town not arranged in quite this way. But it is remembered this way. A street and a house from another town may have moved in, a different park slid southward to become this park. Memory fits everything into place. And memory is truth enough.

  The fact of the matter is southwest Missouri, on the edge of the Ozarks. The fact is 1941. And there is a war in Europe. It hangs like haze in the distance, like the threat of violent storm or heat wave. But it may go around, as they say in those parts; it could miss us. It is far away.

  It was an orderly town, bred of the mines, nurtured by agriculture and some manufacture, a blend of Southern gentility and Western enterprise, firmly set in the conservatism of Middle America. Once rich and rowdy, it had fallen into meager times and respectability. It had survived the one, if not the other, and as the worst years of the Depression waned, the town of some forty thousand souls looked forward to new prosperity. Its banks were sturdy, its civic clubs active, and its churches filled on Sundays. Nine tenths of the population listened to the indisputable word of the Lord and asked His blessing on their endeavors.

  He had not failed them. While Spaniards destroyed one another, while Britain rearmed and negotiated, Roosevelt, in Fireside Chats, condemned war, and in that hilly corner of Missouri the business of recovery went on, peacefully, if slowly. By the spring of 1941 there was talk of a new chemical plant. Members of the country club had refurbished their clubhouse. In Chisdale Park, which adjoined the country-club grounds, the lake was dredged and the tennis courts resurfaced. The junior college, only three years old, had enrolled almost three hundred students.

  Miss Liles taught there. Miss Allen Liles, Master of Arts, who had arrived fresh from the university, with her brand-new diploma, cum laude, and letters of recommendation, her innocence of the outside world still more or less intact, and her virtue only a little less so (slightly flawed one summer night by an educational incident that took place between a fraternity house and a hedge). She was a lively, friendly sort—small, eager, and grateful as all get-out that they had given her a job.

  She had not won it without first having to endure the inquest of office, an interview with Mrs. DeWitt Medgar, the female member of the school board. Seated at a parlor table, the application, résumé, and letters of recommendation before her, the stern-looking lady had studied both letters and candidate with a skeptical eye.

  “I see by this that you are twenty-five.” A severe glance across the table. “You look younger.”

  There was nothing much to say to that.

  The lady eyed her a moment longer. “And you have two years of teaching experience? In a high school?”

  “Two years, yes.”

  “Merely a scratch on the surface. Most of our people come to us with ten or fifteen. This is a college, you know, not a secondary school. You would find it quite different.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Another glance at the application. “How were you allowed to teach two years without a degree in education?”

  “I was given a special permit.”

  “By whom?”

  “The state board of education. I had a bachelor’s degree—”

  “—in arts and science, major in English.” Mrs. Medgar read from the résumé and looked up, waiting.

  “They had hired a new teacher for the high school, but she resigned at the last minute, and they
needed another one in a hurry. I had been a substitute teacher there one winter when I couldn’t go back to school—”

  “Why was that?”

  “My mother couldn’t afford to send me.”

  Mrs. Medgar nodded.

  “So the superintendent got me a permit and they hired me.”

  “I see. Well, I hope you aren’t expecting a special permit for this position.”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Then how would you expect to teach here without a degree or some special—”

  “I believe they consider my two years of actual experience the equivalent. That and my master’s in English.”

  “Which you have not yet received.”

  “I will at the end of the summer, when I hand in my thesis.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Medgar flipped through the letters and returned to the application. “You state here that in your last position—” She was interrupted by a sound from somewhere within the house, a windy sigh or a moan, so faint that Allen heard it only in retrospect as the lady rose. “Excuse me,” she said and left the room hurriedly, closing the door behind her.

  Allen leaned back, as she had not dared do in Mrs. Medgar’s presence, and had a look around the room. It was smaller than it had appeared at first. A writing desk stood against the opposite wall—across one corner, a black settee with a horsehair seat, its uncompromising back carved to resemble a lyre.

  The parlor table stood in the middle of the room on a patterned carpet, above it a ceiling fixture with three bare bulbs. Lace curtains hung at the two windows; on the wall, one picture (still life with roses). Not a book, not a knickknack, not a cushion; except for the painted roses, not a hint of softness. It was not a room sat in often. But there was one thing, overlooked on first inspection, that didn’t quite fit with the rest—a framed photograph of a young woman, a man, and a child of perhaps three or four—whether a boy or a girl it was hard to tell by the clothes and the cut of the hair. All three were smiling. The photograph stood on the desk, but even from across the room she could make out the lace edging on the woman’s dress, her piled, heavy hair, and the man’s large, dark, intelligent eyes. The rest of the man’s face was less appealing; a heavy mustache camouflaged what might be a weak mouth. She was still studying the photograph when Mrs. Medgar returned.

  “I’m very sorry,” the woman said tersely. Without looking at Allen, she bent over the papers on the table.

  Her hair was gray, thick and coarse, with a slight wave and pinned at the back into a heavy coiled knot. Allen cast another glance at the photograph.

  “Now then…” Mrs. Medgar looked up.

  What had happened to harden that other face into this one?

  “Your application says that in your last position you taught a class in modern dance. Just what is meant by that?”

  Allen hesitated. A definition acceptable to Mrs. Medgar wouldn’t come off the top of her head. “Well, as an undergraduate,” she began, “I had taken interpretive dance. That’s one of the regular courses in physical education—”

  “Yes, yes, I know that. But modern?”

  “You might call it a form of interpretive,” Allen said, groping. “It’s somewhat different. More of an art form. The great modern dancers, like Martha Graham—” She saw that this was not the right approach. “It’s wonderful exercise!” she assured her. “So I asked if I might start a class—in addition to my regular classes, that is. It was quite a good class and we—”

  “Have you considered starting such a class here?”

  The idea had not occurred to Allen and she felt she had better say so.

  “Well, I certainly hope not,” said Mrs. Medgar. “This is a serious college. Our emphasis is on academic subjects and our standards are high.”

  And so on and on for another ten minutes. And just after she’d been dismissed, and was rising to leave, there was one thing more. “Your name is Ellen, I believe? Here it’s spelled with an A. A typographical error, I assume.”

  “It’s not a typo. My name is Allen, as it’s spelled there. With an A.”

  Mrs. Medgar looked up with a hint of disapproval.

  “I was named for my father. He’s dead,” she added, as if that explained everything. “My full name’s really Barbara Allen. After the song, you know? My father used to sing it to me. But nobody ever called me anything but Allen.”

  Mrs. Medgar studied the résumé for another moment, tapped the papers neatly together, and looked up. “Well then, Miss Allen Liles, I must thank you for your time and assure you that your application will be taken under consideration…” etc., etc.

  Allen left in despair. She had had such hopes, and so had her mother. Positions such as this didn’t open up every day, not to her, at any rate. She might as well face it: in spite of her Phi Beta Kappa key and all the warm recommendations, her teaching credentials were flimsy. (If her mother’s reputation hadn’t burnished her, and if her mother hadn’t made a special trip to see them, the state board of education wouldn’t have bent the rules to allow her to teach in the first place.)

  As it turned out, however, she had not failed. She was given a contract, whether over Mrs. Medgar’s dead body or not.

  Two

  She had not intended to become a teacher. She became one by force of breeding, through a long line of women—aunts and great-aunts, her own mother—who entered classrooms for lack of alternative, except to marry; who married later and, perhaps, returned in their widowhood to teach again. Some of necessity, some also out of love; there were those, like her mother, called to it as to fate.

  But Allen felt herself to be the variant, the break in the line. Though subject to the same necessity, the same narrow choices, she had other ideas, like many others of her time. She wanted to live in New York City and write books. Not a very practical longing. She was country bred, awed and bewildered by even Kansas City. She wrote poetry, and one of her stories, sent by an English professor to a national contest, had won an honorable mention. But you didn’t live on poetry unless you were Edna St. Vincent Millay, and honorable mentions didn’t pay the rent. She had student loans to repay and a loan from her brother. She could not think of any possible way to earn money and live in Greenwich Village, which at this point was much, much farther away from southern Missouri than it measured on the map. She would get there someday, she promised herself. She wanted to be where books were published, among other writers and actors and painters and musicians, all of them trying as hard as she and some who had already got near where they were going. Three years, five at the most, and she would take her place among them. Meanwhile, she must earn the fare in the only way she knew. She must teach.

  Moreover, her mother insisted on it. Mother often insisted, and Mother was usually right. Or at least she thought she was. “You will be a very good teacher,” she assured Allen, “and I just know you’ll love it as much as I do.” Mother had taught her whole life, except for those ten years after her brother and then Allen were born.

  “And you enjoyed it too, didn’t you, honey, those two years you taught in high school?”

  “Yeah, I guess I did. More or less.” Allen sat in her mother’s kitchen with the Daisy churn between her knees. She had come home for the few weeks between the summer session and her new job at the junior college. She was now in possession of an official master’s degree.

  “I know you always talked about doing something else, writing or acting and all that.” Mother laughed. “Oh, you had your head in the clouds, all right. Just like your father. Always fancied what was far away, never saw much glory in what was before his nose. But I always knew you would see that teaching was for you, same as it was for me. You come by it naturally. And you’re a good teacher. I could tell, that time you substituted up here in the high school. That was a bad winter, when we couldn’t send you back to school. I was dead set on it, but there just wasn’t enough money.”

  “Don’t feel bad about it, Mother. Those were hard years.”

  �
�Still are, in some ways. But not as bad as it was in ’thirty-six and ’thirty-seven. Anyway, I got you through school, and now you have a wonderful new job in a college. What more could a girl hope for! We’ve done well, haven’t we?”

  Mother paused with the measuring cup in her hand and beamed with such pride that Allen looked away, feeling guilty. “Yeah, I guess we have.”

  “I was sorry not to go with you when you went to your interview last spring, not to drive you down there in the car.”

  “I didn’t mind the bus.”

  “I hated to think about you down there all by yourself, having to be assessed by all those people.”

  “But Mother, you couldn’t have gone with me to the interviews anyway.”

  “Why not?” She paused, as she often did when she was reminded that her daughter was now a grown woman. “No, I guess that wouldn’t have done, would it? Anyway, you did just fine without me. But I would have taken you down there, if it hadn’t been so near time for the baby to come.” The baby was her new grandson, second child of Allen’s brother Dalton and his wife, who lived on the family farm. “I wanted to be here to help Gwennie. And see to it that they didn’t give him some outlandish name.” Mother laughed again, her big cheery laugh. “’Course, they did it anyway.”

  “What’s so outlandish about Terence? I think it’s a lovely name.”

  “Oh, it’s all right, I guess. But there’s never been a Terence in our family, nor any other around here that I know of. Someone your dad knew up in Liberty. Don’t you think it sounds a little uppity?” she sighed. “Well, at least I got his grandfather’s name in there. Terence Edwin sounds nice; I’ve always liked the name Edwin.”

  “Howdy, folks.” Allen’s brother walked in through the back door. “Here’s your mail.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Long as I was at the post office, thought I might as well pick it up.” He hung his big farm hat on a chair knob and scrubbed a hand through Allen’s hair. “How you doin’, Curly, workin’ hard?”

  “Can’t you see me sweat?”