First Light by Charles Baxter
“Amen,” the Reverend Valentine says, and everyone sits down. Mr. Vermilya rises and does what Mrs. Welch calls “a brief blah blah blah” about this school year in Five Oaks and the little crises and triumphs that any school …
Time to tune out again. The blonde is examining her fingernails in a flirty way. Hugh tips his head back and stares at the ceiling. He was never much for school and it’s no special pleasure to be back here and to have his teachers ask him how Holbein College was, when in fact they all know he dropped out of Holbein years ago and is working on a commission basis at Bay City Buick, thirty minutes south of here. Hockey scholarship, business school, all down the drain … The ceiling, Hugh suddenly notices, is stained, as if someone had thrown several pots of coffee at it. The roof’s leaking again, he thinks, counting up the stains. Five. Contractors always take advantage of school boards, shortchanging them on building materials, playing them for goddamn dorks.
Somebody else speaks, and then somebody else, fat Mrs. Scherer, a retiring art teacher, gets a plaque. The gymnasium warms up with the body heat of nervous families afraid that their children will fall on the steps up to the stage. Hugh loosens his collar. He catches the dirty blonde grinning at him. He’s got a date for tonight, if he wants it. He’ll have to do a bit of shuffling, rearrange some other women—grown-ups—for some other nights, but this is an opportunity he can’t miss. He falls into a reverie about fast girls in high school in late spring, the backseats of cars, long drives, beer and the sound of crickets in the long grass …
There she is, there’s Dorsey. She stands in front of the Five Oaks audience to loud applause, acknowledging the fact that she’s the class valedictorian, the only member of the class to be a National Merit Scholar, the first Five Oaker to have that distinction in six years, and the first Five Oaker, ever, to go off to Cornell University in New York State, where she will major in physics, on a full scholarship. The whole town is so proud of her they’d have a parade for her, if she asked them to. Last week she had almost the entire page of the Five Oaks Gazette to herself, complete with picture.
She unfolds her speech and gazes out at the audience with a falsely modest expression. Hugh checks her out and thinks, yeah, she looks all right. For a bookworm, she’s actually cute, though her short hair (heavily sprayed) gives her a helmeted look. Her hair’s always been short. She’s never had the impulse to let it fall. She’s presentable, Hugh thinks, but she doesn’t have the cheap sleazy allure that he himself is partial to.
Hugh’s father makes a faint, dry, back-of-the-throat noise, and momentarily puts his hand to his chest. Then Mrs. Welch grabs her husband’s hand and holds on to it tightly.
The applause quiets and Dorsey smiles one last time before beginning her speech. “Today,” she says, raising her hand quickly to her forehead, “we, this year’s graduating class of Five Oaks, will receive our diplomas and go our separate ways. Some of us will become carpenters and plumbers, others will become engineers and scientists and housewives. From being a close-knit class, we will go on to reflect the diversity of the world. The writer Albert Camus has written, ‘We must be content to live only for the day.’ ” Hugh hears some people stirring behind him. They don’t like the quote. “And so it is with all of us. From day to day we each will be content with the gifts we have been given by nature, our families, and our teachers.”
Hugh shifts in the metal chair, as Dorsey pauses. For Chrissake keep going, he thinks. Salesmen don’t stop.
“What kind of a world is it that we go out to? For all of us, it will be a future of opportunities and challenges. Like every other graduating class, we will meet up with successes and failures. Some of us will find ourselves in fancy restaurants eating omelettes, while the rest of us eat our egg salad sandwiches from lunchboxes.”
“My sentence,” Hugh’s father says out of the side of his mouth.
“Don’t gloat,” his wife whispers. “It’s not becoming.”
“But in one respect,” Dorsey says, peering down at the podium, “our class, and the classes of the last twenty years, are different from the ones that our grandparents were part of. What is the nature of this difference? We can sum it up in one word: science. The young people of this country are aware, as their grandparents were not, of both the terrible destructive power of science, as well as its tremendous power for good, in the search for truth. As a woman who plans a career in science, I—”
She stops.
Hugh fixes on his sister. Dorsey’s hands are on both sides of the podium as if she’s braced there against invisible gale-force winds.
“Oh, God,” Hugh’s father says. “She’s going to faint.”
“No. She just lost her place,” Hugh says.
The entire gymnasium falls silent. All coughing ceases. Some sort of event is occurring, winning Dorsey a moment of complete attention.
Hugh closes his eyes. He knows what the next sentence should be because Dorsey has read him the speech three times, sitting cross-legged in her faded jeans and T-shirt on her rumpled blue bedspread. “As a woman who plans a career in science,” Hugh says to himself, “I know that the world’s future is in danger.” Dorsey repeats the phrase, after him. “But only through the exercise of intelligence and love of truth will all mankind be able to cope with those dangers and overcome them.” Sentence by sentence, Hugh leads his sister through the rest of the speech to its final phrase, “… that we have been some use to the world.” Dorsey looks up, smiles, and folds her speech. A noisy admiring roar of applause breaks open into the air and echoes off the cement walls and wood slats.
After the ceremonies, Hugh and his parents find Dorsey outside on the high school’s wide front lawn, where other parents are taking snapshots of their children, flashbulbs popping in the f/16 sunlight. Dorsey is smiling, holding hands with friends, being kissed on the cheek. Her father and mother and brother surround her on all sides and lead her away to an unused portion of grass.
“You were wonderful,” her father says. “Congratulations, kid.”
“Thank you.”
“And you looked so beautiful,” her mother says, leaning forward to kiss her. “We were all so very proud of you.”
“Really?” Dorsey asks, touching her hair with the diploma cover. “Was I all right?”
“Yeah,” Hugh tells her. “You were sensational. Only—”
“—Only what?”
“Only how come you stopped in the middle of your speech?”
“I’ve been telling people I lost my place,” Dorsey says, poking into the grass with the toe of her shoe, and smiling.
“Don’t do that, honey,” her mother says. “It’ll ruin the leather.”
“Well?” Hugh asks. “Is that it? Did you lose your place, or what?”
“No,” she says. “Of course I didn’t lose my place.”
“Well?”
“People weren’t listening carefully enough. They were starting to cough and shuffle,” Dorsey says.
“They always cough and shuffle,” her mother says. “People in this town don’t know how to behave in a group environment.”
“Anyhow,” Dorsey says, “that’s why I stopped. So they’d pay attention.”
“I thought you were going to faint, Princess,” Mr. Welch says, reaching for her mortarboard and fingering it. “You had us all worried. You mean it was all a trick? Where’d you learn it?”
“I wasn’t worried,” her mother says.
“In Mr. Wigginton’s speech class,” Dorsey says, “we learned that if you lose their attention, you just stop. They’ll start to wonder what’s going on, and you’ll get them back. Daddy, what are you doing with my mortarboard?”
“Feeling it,” he says. “It brings back memories.” He returns it to her, takes a picture of her with her mother and brother, and then Mr. and Mrs. Welch begin to stroll around on the grass where the other parents and students are standing. Circulating, they collect praise for their daughter and give praise in return. Hugh doesn’t move.
“You liar,” he says. “You know, I thought Pop was gonna just keel right over. You scared him so much he turned this sort of shade of ghost white. He was clutching at himself. So what’s all this bullshit about getting everybody’s attention?”
“I had to tell them something.”
“I guess so.” Hugh waits. She won’t tell him; he’ll have to ask. “So what happened? Come on, Cass. Spill it.”
“It wasn’t making any sense.”
“Huh?”
“I was looking down at the words, and they weren’t making any sense. None of it was. The gym wasn’t, the speech wasn’t, nothing there was making any sense. I was feeling sort of dizzy, actually, and then, I don’t know, I sort of started up again like it was a job I had to do, and I got through it all right. I never did like public speaking.”
“Well, you did a real good job,” he says. He lets her go off with her friends, who are standing a few yards back waiting for him to finish talking to her, and once she joins them the girls laugh happily, reaching for her hand, and the boys pat her on the back as if she were one of them, experienced, cynical, and tough. It’s just like Dorsey to give four different explanations for what happened, and Hugh is sure each one of them is partly true.
Taking off his tie and stuffing it into his jacket pocket, he heads off to the west doorway that leads into the band room in search of the clarinet-playing blonde. He’ll offer to give her a ride home. He’ll tell her he once played the clarinet himself. He’ll tell her how she kept distracting him all the way through the graduation, the way she was licking her reed like that. Then he’ll start in on the compliments. For openers, he’ll tell her she’s beautiful. He’ll say it again and again. Hugh is generous with compliments because they make people happy and always get pleasing results. He has discovered that no one argues with him when he starts in on the praise. It works with girls; it works with customers. Hugh can’t imagine a situation he couldn’t get out of by just heaping on the praise in a slow, sincere voice, looking the gratified victim right in the eye.
11
During Dorsey’s senior year, she hasn’t been invited out often on dates. The boys in her class seem to be scared of her—she has a cool ironic streak she picked up from her mother—and the only steady attention she’s received has been from Donald Enderfurth, who is vice president of the Physics Club and with whom Dorsey organized a field trip to an experimental nuclear reactor outside Detroit. Donald has said that he admires Dorsey’s mind, and he’s taken her to several movies at the Wolverine Arts Theater, followed by burgers at the Golden Oaks Grille. To Dorsey’s disappointment, he hasn’t tried anything with her. Boys who try things don’t go out with Dorsey. Donald and Dorsey’s evenings have always ended unsoulfully with a good-night kiss at Dorsey’s door. On their last date, Donald announced, right after the ritual kiss, that he really enjoyed talking to her. “You’re deep,” he said, holding her hand but moving back. “You’ve got so many ideas.” He said good night and turned to go.
She went inside, appalled, and stood in the dark kitchen by herself, drinking a glass of tap water. As Donald drove away, she imagined herself as an old maid wearing a white frock coat in a laboratory, carrying a clipboard, and surrounded by test tubes filled with caustic yellow and pink industrial fluids.
There might be something she could do about her appearance, she doesn’t know what, but there is nothing she can do about her ideas. At certain times, she’s tried to act stupid, but it hasn’t helped. She didn’t win any friends. No one believed she was stupid, not for a minute.
She wasn’t invited to the prom last year, but this year she thinks maybe Donald Enderfurth will call, or, if not Donald, Gary Burgess. Gary is not much to look at because of his facial scars from a childhood boating accident, but whenever they run into each other, he always asks Dorsey for the time, and she thinks these swallowed nervous overtures may eventually lead to something. The prom will be in the gymnasium, as usual, and the prom committee has booked a band called Hot Wax, from Mt. Pleasant. The gym, she has heard, will be decorated with last year’s orange crepe paper and blue spotlights, and, on the walls, posters borrowed from the foreign language teachers, showing the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and corks popping out of champagne bottles.
The senior girls outnumber the boys by seven, so not everyone is going to get lucky. Besides, Dorsey has other matters to think about, such as which university she’s going to attend in the fall. All the same, she’d like to dress in a formal gown; for one night she’d like to stop being smart, and wear gold earrings and show off the white of her shoulders. She’d like for once to look like a woman, and make some man sleepless, tossing and turning, thinking about her. Her own preoccupation with love strikes her at times as faintly contemptible.
By late spring she has taken to doing her homework in the back study, where she can gaze out through the large windows down to the Five Oaks River and The Lake, as it is called, though this lake is only a broadening of the river behind an old hydroelectric dam. Here, in the study, she works on advanced calculus, memorizes vocabulary words for her German class, where they’re reading Steppenwolf, and is within arm’s reach of the telephone in case Donald Enderfurth or anyone else should call her with a last-minute invitation.
One evening her father comes in after work and sees her in his leather chair, her knees drawn up close to her chest, a compact circular mass. She has a copy of As You Like It open, but she doesn’t seem to be reading it. She’s wearing a vague, puzzled expression. Dorsey’s father rolls up his newspaper and taps her on the head with it.
“Wake up, wake up, wherever you are,” he says. She looks at him but does not smile. He turns away, fishes a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, and lights up. “You have your own phone in your room,” he says, exhaling smoke. “How come you’re down here, sitting in my chair?”
“The view is better,” she says.
He opens the newspaper and pretends to read it. “He didn’t call?” She shakes her head. He glances at his daughter and starts to sing.
“ ‘All alone, by the telephone,
Waiting for a ring, …’ ”
“Stop it, Daddy.” She covers her eyes with her hand.
“I’m sorry. I was only trying to be funny.”
“I know. But it isn’t funny.”
“All right.” He nods, then lets himself down onto the sofa, accidentally sitting on top of a month-old issue of Newsweek. He pulls it out from under his seat, stares at the cover, then tosses it to the side. “I agree. It wasn’t funny. It used to be funny but it isn’t anymore.”
They sit together in the room, neither of them actually reading, though Dorsey’s father occasionally glances down at the front page of his newspaper. Outside, the late afternoon darkens into a luminous spring dusk. They both hear Mrs. Welch clattering pans in the kitchen as she prepares their dinner, and from the front of the house, across the street, comes the sound of their neighbor, Burt Atwood, mowing his lawn.
“You know, I was smart, too,” Dorsey’s father says quietly. “It’s not enough to be smart. You have to be tough. An upstart. You have to learn how to wait. Sooner or later in the Big Casino the odds change so that they’re in your favor. There’s always good news somewhere, and the good news is that the rest of your life isn’t going to be like high school.”
She thinks it’s sweet for him to say what he’s said, but she doesn’t believe it. She thinks the rest of her life is going to be just like high school. It’s going to be like high school until you die.
12
In early April, Hugh gets a call during the day at Bay City Buick, and the call is from his mother. “I don’t think Dorsey is going to be invited to the prom,” Hugh’s mother says, as soon as she has her son on the line. “I don’t think it’s important, except that I’ve noticed that she’s getting moody, which, for her, is quite moody. She’s beginning to have doubts about people. Not some people: all of them. Do you still know anyone, some nice boy, in the
Hugh leans back in his office chair, behind his desk, his ink blotter, and his nameplate (his first). He checks the showroom to see if anyone could possibly be monitoring this conversation.
“Ma,” he says, “you shouldn’t call me here with questions like this.” He waits for her to respond, but instead she gives him for free that maddening silence of hers. Looking down, he checks the polish of his cordovan shoes. “No, I don’t know anyone in the senior class. I’m five years older than they are. They were seventh graders when I was graduating. They were just little twerps.”
“I thought maybe you could help,” Mrs. Welch says. “I thought you knew everybody. You do know everybody.” She waits again; it’s one of her ironic silences. “For example, do you know Donald Enderfurth? He’s a timid, unattractive boy who’s taken Dorsey out a few times, but at this point he’s the only person standing between her and her usual angry solitude. I don’t want her to hate men all her life, if I can avoid it. Anyway, I thought that maybe if you knew him, you could pressure him somehow. You know how to pressure people.”
“Pressure him. How would I pressure him?”
“I don’t know. Threats. Bribes. Tell him you’re a lawyer and you’ll sue him unless he invites your sister out.”
“Now you’re not being serious.”
“It was just a thought,” she says. She luxuriates in another long pause.
“What is it, Ma?” he asks, knowing she has something else on her mind.
“I’m worried about your father. He’s been complaining about chest pains. He’s low on energy, and he’s looking old fast. His hands are always damp; I don’t like that. I keep telling him to get to a doctor, but you know how he says that they’re all quacks.”
“He’s right.”
“Oh, Hugh, would you talk to him? The men in his family, and this will include you, have … well, his father, your grandfather, had a bad heart, and your father once said he thought he’d inherited a bad one, too, but I don’t believe him. Anyhow, I won’t nag.”