Baker Towers Read Online Free Page A

an entire day. Rose scarcely remembered it; later themidwife told her she’d nearly died. Finally Stanley had called the company doctor, who cut her and took the baby with forceps. By then Rose was barely conscious. She remembered light in the distance, the angels coming to get her. When she awoke, the midwife brought her Lucy.
     
    M ISS V IOLA P EALE ate lunch at her desk. She disliked the noise of the faculty lounge, its lingering odor of coffee and tobacco smoke. A few of the younger teachers ate in the student lunchroom, a fact Miss Peale found astonishing. Each day she brought the same lunch to school: celery sticks, a tuna sandwich and a boiled egg, prepared each morning by her sister Clara. The prospect of revealing to a pupil the contents of her lunch bag—the distinctive odors of fish and egg—was, to her, unthinkable. It struck her as exposing too much of herself, like coming to school in her slip.
    Until that fall she hadn’t so much as sipped a glass of water in the presence of a pupil. Then Joyce Novak asked permission to stay in the classroom during lunch period. She had a chemistry test that afternoon, she said, and she needed a place to study. The boys in the lunchroom made too much noise.
    The request took Viola by surprise. Chemistry was a subject few girls studied, one she herself had avoided at the state teachers’ college.
    “Please?” said Joyce. She was a fair-haired girl with narrow shoulders and a sharp, birdlike face. The other sophomore girls wore lipstick and tight sweaters—in Viola’s opinion, outfits entirely too sophisticated for girls of fifteen. Next to them Joyce Novak was slender as a child; yet her intelligent gray eyes were oddly adult.
    “But what will you eat?” Viola asked.
    “I’m not hungry. I’m too nervous to eat.”
    “All right,” said Viola. “Just this once.”
    Joyce returned to her desk and opened her textbook. Viola reached into her lunch bag and nibbled timidly at her celery. Finally she’d unwrapped her sandwich. The fishy odor seemed especially strong. She wondered if Joyce noticed.
    She ate in silence until the final bell. When it rang, Joyce closed her book. “Thank you, ma’am,” she said politely.
    “You’re quite welcome.” Viola had stopped short of peeling her egg, but she had eaten the sandwich and disposed of its wrapping in the dustbin. As far as she could tell, the child hadn’t once looked up from her textbook.
    “Joyce,” she said as the girl rose to leave. “I know chemistry is a difficult subject. You’re welcome to spend the lunch period here whenever you need to study.”
    Joyce, it turned out, was always studying—chemistry, history, plane geometry. Soon she spent nearly every noon hour in Viola’s classroom. To Viola’s relief, she never asked for help with her lessons. Viola could play the piano; she read and wrote French and commanded a vast mental catalog of memorized poems, but math and science were impenetrable to her. At normal school she’d graduated near the top of her class, but she’d never possessed the acumen she saw in Joyce Novak. She wondered where it came from; in nineteen years of teaching coal miners’ children she had never encountered such an intellect. Often, watching her pupils struggle with Latin declensions or subjunctive tenses, she sensed the worthlessness of what she offered them, the cruelty of teaching geography to children who would never leave Saxon County. And what use was Latin grammar a hundred feet underground?
    Joyce Novak was that rare pupil who stood to make use of what she’dbeen taught, who might do something more with her life than marry a coal miner and raise his children. Viola had witnessed it a hundred times: promising young girls (without Joyce’s ability, but promising still) who married the week after graduation and were never heard from again. Their hard lives—the brutish husband, the endless succession of babies—seemed to swallow them completely; and those,