The Night of the Comet (8 page)

He talked it over with Dr. Brewer, his advisor in the science department, and decided that taking a year off from his studies—just a year—couldn’t hurt. Lots of fellows took time off before graduate school. The teaching experience could even make him a better candidate for an assistantship. “Go have your
Wanderjahr
. That’s what I would do,” Brewer said, winking and patting his shoulder. “We’ll still be here when you get back.”

And so out of guilt, coupled with a desire to prove to his parents that all his book learning was useful—that, like his brothers, he could stand on his own two feet if he had to—Alan took the teaching job. He bought a secondhand car, filled it with books and clothes, plus five new ties, shook his father’s hand, kissed his mother’s cheek, and in late July of 1955, his temporary teaching credential in a brown envelope on the seat beside him, he drove south on Highway 1. Down he drove, down
to the toe of the state, down to where the green land of his map tattered into blue patches of lakes and bayous and bodies of water too numerous to name before sinking into the Gulf. He felt, on that drive south, as the roads became narrower and the towns grew smaller and the land swampier (he ran over a black snake outside of Napoleonville), an unexpected sense of adventure, as though he were carrying the torchlight of science to the end of the world, bound at last for his own real-life Burma, Formosa, Trengganu, to a land called Terrebonne.

The town of Terrebonne, seat of Terrebonne Parish, had a population of about three thousand people then. It was surrounded by sugarcane fields to the north, marshland to the south. Bayous and canals crisscrossed the town and ran alongside roads and under bridges. In the middle of town stood the parish courthouse; it faced a square nicely laid out with walkways and benches sheltered by live oaks. Besides the handful of shops around the square, there were three churches, two grocery stores, two gas stations, and two schools, one for black students and one for the white. It took him less than ten minutes to see everything.

He settled into an apartment in a converted house near the square, went to introduce himself to his principal at the school, and before he quite knew what had happened, he found himself standing in his coat and tie on a dusty floor facing a roomful of rowdy summer-tanned teenagers. He was just twenty-one years old, barely past his teens himself, with no experience at all as a teacher—“as innocent as a Christian tossed to the lions” as he would tell it later.

His students were the sons and daughters of farmers and fishermen, trappers and oil-rig workers. Half of them, he was astonished to learn, came to school by boat. They clomped into his classroom with their shoes falling off, no socks or laces, like they weren’t accustomed to footwear. Some showed up for only the first few days of lessons and never returned; others disappeared for weeks at a time during certain trapping or fishing or hunting seasons. Many spoke with accents so odd and thick that, in the beginning at least, he had trouble understanding
what they were saying; he’d ask them to repeat themselves again and again until, judging by the laughter in the classroom, it seemed that the fault wasn’t with the students but with him, and red-faced and stammering, he’d move on to the next topic.

Maybe he’d been sheltered for too long from the real world while working in the labs at Nicholson Hall, or maybe in his four years away from high school he’d already forgotten what teenagers were like, or maybe he was just hopelessly naïve; but he was honestly baffled to find that his students didn’t share his love for science. He couldn’t understand it; the field was booming, amazing new advances were being made every day. They should’ve been rapt with wonder: the DNA double helix, programmable computers, space rockets, radio astronomy, artificial satellites … Artificial satellites! Astrophysicists were drawing up plans to shoot small metal moons equipped with radio transmitters into orbit around the Earth. How could they not be fascinated by that? But the girls in his class just sighed and chewed their gum. The boys picked at their pimples and drew dirty pictures in the margins of their textbooks. They didn’t care. He might’ve been standing in a field lecturing to rocks and trees for all the response he got.

He began to think he’d made a mistake in coming here. This teaching business was much more difficult than he’d imagined; in fact, he was pretty sure he hated it. After school he’d trudge home to his small apartment, annoyed and exhausted. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing, but he didn’t dare ask the other teachers for help, because he was afraid if he did he’d only reveal how incompetent he was. Never mind standing on his own two feet; he’d finish out his contract, and next year he’d pack up his car and go back to doing what he loved.

Except … except that from time to time, a boy would raise his hand and ask a genuinely interesting question, and Alan would see a spark of curiosity flickering in the eyes of his students as they waited for his answer. Or a girl—her name was Melinda, and she wore a wrinkled, dirty yellow dress and sniffed and looked generally friendless—would come to him after class and show him a rock she had found with markings on it. Was this a—
sniff
—fossil? How old did he think it was? And was it worth much money? Together they went to the library and
found a book on geology that contained some nice line drawings of common fossils. They compared Melinda’s fossil to the drawings and determined that it was likely from a kind of coral, possibly from the Paleozoic era, which meant that her fossil could’ve been, what? Three hundred million years old?

“Three hundred million years old! Gosh. Think of that,” he said. “That’s from before the dinosaurs. This whole continent was underwater, nothing here but a great big sea.… You’re a lucky girl,” he told her, carefully handing back her rock. “You’ve found something very special.” Melinda went off sniffing and staring at her fossil like it was a diamond, and he felt a glow of satisfaction upon recognizing that, without hardly even trying, he’d won a convert: a girl who might lack for friends and clean dresses, but who from that day on would never lack for wonder in her life.

He gradually came to think of himself as a defender of students like Melinda. The girls who collected rocks, the boys with glasses who cringed when balls were thrown their way, the overweight, the underfed, the shy or awkward or stuttering loners who lingered at the edges of his classes: these became his favorites, the ones he gave special attention to, because in them he saw the image of himself as a boy, that lonely kid sitting in his room at night with his astronomy books and homemade radio.

Still, however much he began to feel useful at the school—a sense that he might actually be needed there—it would not have been enough to make him abandon his dream of graduate study and stay in Terrebonne.

That would only happen, as he would tell it later, after he met a certain girl in a certain drugstore one certain night.

MY
mother, back when the new neighborhood behind us was first being developed, would sometimes take me and Megan there on Sunday afternoons “for a look-see.”

I’d leave whatever book I was reading and we’d slide into the family Rambler, an economy model with a blue exterior, hot vinyl seats, and no air-conditioning—“a car that only a drunk door-to-door salesman would drive,” my mother complained. She’d steer us out of our neighborhood, across the Franklin Street bridge, and past the handsome wooden sign planted in a bed of cedar chips: “Beau Rivage Estates.” It was a glamorous name for a place that until recently had been a low wet field where people dumped old car tires and where Peter and I went to light fires and play soldiers. The windows down, we would roll slowly from one end of the neighborhood to the other along freshly paved streets, into cul-de-sacs and out, peering up at the large homes with their landscaped lawns and newly planted trees.

As she drove, I saw my mother’s face take on the same covetous look it got whenever she brought us shopping at D. H. Holmes in New Orleans.
In the cool lights and perfumed air of the department store, she became like a starving animal searching for food. Her lips would go thin and her eyes would dart from one side of the aisle to the other. If she saw something she liked, a dress or a new kitchen appliance, she’d step quickly to it and shoot out a hand to find the price tag. She’d peek at it, tighten her face, and then tuck the price tag back into place before pulling us along to the escalators for the half-off discount racks in the basement.

She was the same on our Sunday afternoon sightseeing drives. “Don’t gawk,” she said as we stared out the windows with her. “Pretend you live here.” But even her saying that made it plain that we would never live there. We would only ever be tourists, gazing up at the homes that we would never enter, dreaming of the luxuries we could never afford.

After our tour of Beau Rivage Estates and a conciliatory stop at the Tastee Freez, we’d return to our own nameless neighborhood. Bumping along the asphalt road that crumbled away on either side into open drainage ditches, seeing the mildewed clapboard houses with their rusting pickup trucks in front, the tilting tin sheds out back, the broken toys in muddy yards, we could practically hear our mother sigh in disappointment—at herself, at her husband, at our own shabby middle-class existence. She tried, god knows she tried, but in spite of everything she did to keep up appearances, she still hadn’t managed to scrape the mud of this town off her shoes.

But just as the comet had begun to work its changes on my father, so it began to affect my mother. A glimmer of possibility shone up there in heaven—we all sensed it—and seeing the attention he’d begun to enjoy on account of his comet, and reading his weekly column in the newspaper, and marking the new confidence in his step as he set off for school in the mornings kindled in her the hope that our fortunes might still improve, that our life could be better than what it was. And if there was any model for what that better life looked like, it was the Martellos.

My mother started to linger in the backyard on the lookout for them as she rearranged her potted plants on the porch. She spoke casually about changes to their house or garden: “They’re almost finished getting those lamps installed above the boardwalk. That’ll look good, won’t it?”

At the dinner table she began to wonder aloud about them: “I saw Barbara outside again today. I went down to the edge of the water and we had a nice long chat. She seems like really a very friendly woman.” She’d heard from some ladies in town that Barbara was from a prominent Shreveport family, but you could tell just by talking to her that she came from quality. Very gracious, very well mannered. “Honestly, I’m ashamed I haven’t bothered to introduce myself before now. I mean, I see her out there all the time.”

About Frank, she hadn’t heard so much. “Someone said he used to play football for that college up in Shreveport. What is it? Northwestern? Louisiana Tech? Anyway, he used to play football there, and then he worked at Shell for years and years before he was transferred down here.” From what people said, she understood that Frank was pretty high up in the company—regional vice president or something like that. He was in charge of the whole area now.

“Have you met him yet?” she asked my father across the table.

He looked up from his plate. “Met who?”

“Frank. Frank Martello.”

“Where would I have met Frank Martello?”

“I don’t know. You go into town, you might see him around.”

“Nope. Haven’t met him.”

“What about Gabriella?” she asked, turning to me. “What’s she like? You must know her pretty well by now.”

I blushed at the mention of her name. “Not really.”

“But you’re in the same class, aren’t you? And you don’t talk to her? Why not?”

What a horrible, awkward question to ask, I thought. Wasn’t it obvious? Just look at the Martellos and then look at us. I would have liked to talk to Gabriella, sure, but in the one month we’d been sitting in classes together, we still hadn’t exchanged two words. I doubted she even knew my name. It wasn’t that she was standoffish; on the contrary,
she seemed quite friendly. The problem was that I was still too shy, too much in awe to approach her. I could still only watch her from a distance, admiring the tilt of her head, her queenly walk around the school grounds at recess.

My mother went on wondering aloud about the Martellos like this for several days, speaking as much to herself as to the rest of us, sounding as if she was circling around and around some notion she had but was too timid to articulate: Didn’t Barbara get bored in that big house all day long? It must’ve been hard for her, not knowing anyone here. She really would’ve liked to have gone on chatting with her that afternoon, but she felt like a hillbilly shouting across the water at her like that.…

Until my father, looking up from his lesson plans one evening, said, “Good lord. You should just invite them over if you’re so all-fired eager to meet them.”

“Oh, no, we couldn’t do that,” she answered reflexively.

“Why not? Just call them up, tell them to come over. They can come and fool around with the telescope some night. Come and check out the comet.”