The Swellest Thing

I stood with my two daughters outside the red double doors of the two-story white house on the lake. Pines and hemlocks lined the shore so that we waited in stripes of shadows, and the wind blowing across the water smelled fresh and cold with a memory of the fish that swam in its depths.

It had been aberrantly hot in the north Wisconsin town of Hayward, where earlier I had bought a bakery apple pie before driving ten miles east for our first visit to the lake home of Maryhelen Ryan. We had met a few years earlier when I began work as a Chicago high school English teacher, and she was one of the veteran clerks who kept the place up and running.

Her first words back then were hardly portentous of a friendship:

"My God, will you look at this?" she had said.

Such was my welcome when I reported for my duty period as a rookie instructor at Chicago Vocational High School (CVS).

"I'm supposed to report here for fourth hour," I said, digging in my briefcase for a copy of my class schedule.

"Are you sure?" she asked. She was looking at me but speaking loudly for the other clerks and students in the crowded attendance office to hear.

"Yes, Room 128," I said, holding the blue schedule sheet up in the air—it was folded over, and I inclined my head to read from it. My new Zayer Department Store vinyl briefcase hung by a strap from my shoulder.

"First hour, I have x, which stands for nothing," I said, "and second hour, English I Regular. Third hour is English I Essential Level, and fourth hour I'm assigned here to . . ."

"We know all that, honey," she laughed. I was pretty sure it was a sympathetic laugh. "We just want to know are you sure?"

From someone else this may have been insulting. But this woman—this Maryhelen Ryan, a matronly 55 years of age, heavyset, her gray hair helmeted and sprayed to the consistency of tree bark, a face furrowed for laughter or trouble, blue eyes that would not let go once they fixed upon you—made me feel on this first day that someone was finally paying attention to me. I felt like extending a hand or a limb so that she could bandage it.

"Come here, honey—what did you say your name was?—and we'll show you the ropes all right. Let's hope you don't hang yourself with them."

That first dizzying year in a big city school, Maryhelen did, indeed, help keep me from falling overboard, advising me on everything from what mail you could toss (textbook solicitations) to what you'd better save (notes from students' homes); or whom you could ignore (a certain blustery but harmless assistant principal), and whom you'd better heed (Mrs. Fortuna in the Program Office).

Most important was what she told me about my students: concentrate on the good you find. "Most of the kids are swell," she would say, and that I should not fall into the trap that so many teachers have, of becoming embittered by the disappointments. "It kills them inside," she had said.

This morning at Round Lake, she opened both doors wide and put her finger against her lips, while cocking her head for Jackie and Janet and me to follow her within. She stepped back to let the children go by, glancing connivingly at me.

We entered the great room of the house, its walls paneled in 1x4 mahogany planks rising to a 20-foot-high ceiling. A 10-foot oak dining table sat in the center, and a brick fireplace filled the middle of the opposite wall. Above us, a catwalk was built around the entire perimeter, for getting to the bedrooms over the laundry and over the screened-in porch. Sun was splashing off Round Lake and through the windows. It felt like church.

"Jackie...