The following evening as Dr. Pearson was passing in front of the school, it happened that Miss Kunstler was sitting beneath the same trees working on another set of papers. Approaching the spot where the collision had occurred, he looked up and saw her mild but resolute eyes beaming back at him. Mechanically he raised his hand in greeting, a trifle surprised but not unhappy to see her there again. Walking on, he felt a twinge of self-consciousness about what had just happened that was not unpleasant at all.
The next evening she was not there, but Dr. Pearson paused momentarily by “their” tree before moving on. A few hours later, when it occurred to him that it was Saturday, this realization seemed somehow significant to him, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly why.
Monday evening Miss Kunstler was back under the tree again correcting papers. Approaching the line of maples, the solitary hiker marked how cheerily she lifted her chin and smiled at him, so he ventured to stop and exchange a few words with her. Tuesday evening he arrived a little earlier than usual and traded a few more cautious banalities with her. The week went on in this manner from day to day until by Friday Miss Kunstler felt emboldened enough to invite him to sit down on the bank beside her “for a minute or two.”
There was a rather deep grassy ditch running between the twin rows of maples that bordered the schoolyard and the road, forming an irregular slope, now gentle, now steep, under the trees. The spot which Miss Kunstler favored for correcting papers was almost like a sofa with a low back and a long foot stool. Four or five people could easily have been accommodated on it side by side.
The little teacher discreetly moved over to give Dr. Pearson plenty of room. Even though the evening hour had brought restful tranquility to the world around them, she found herself just slightly short of breath and she detected in the abrupt self-conscious movements of her new friend a similar trace of disquiet in him.
But through the trunks of the trees on the other side of the ditch they could look beyond the walls of the frame schoolhouse onto the patchwork of woods and pastures that rolled off into the horizon across the hunch-backed swells, and as they sat there taking in this ancient sight, they both grew more calm and composed. The sun, now spreading its diagonal rays over the lush vernal vegetation, had transformed the hills into a weightless translucent green, the color of sprouting life.
They took it all in without saying a word.
Eventually Miss Kunstler observed, “You can see why I prefer to do my work out here every chance I get. It doesn’t really take your mind off Jimmy’s poor grammar, but it puts it in a healthier context.”
“That is worth something.”
“In the winter I positively cringed before this stack of papers. Now I welcome it.”
The gray-haired man was gazing into the distance and nodding his head up and down in response.
“It’s fearful, is it not, to contemplate how much violence and suffering it took to preserve peaceful scenes like this.”
Mildly startled by this strange comment, Miss Kunstler tried to imagine what kinds of violence had anything at all to do with the tranquility before them.
Sensing her confusion, he added, “The war.”
Silence.
“Oh, of course…. It is fearful. But … but if we think about it so much that it totally sours the sweetness of what we have fought for, then we might just as well not have fought for it, don’t you think?”
He stroked his chin wearily.
“That is certainly true. That is exactly what it does.”
“Very often I think of all the destitute and broken families, the shattered lives, I left behind me in Europe….”
“And doesn’t it plague you to think that they are destitute and broken because we fought to keep this?”
“It does. And yet, though I can never escape it, I can vindicate it logically in the name of achieving the greater good. It doesn’t make much sense, but every other choice makes even less sense to me.”
“That’s how I vindicate it too. But I only wish my heart would pay more attention to my mind…. Or maybe I don’t wish that either. Lately my mind seems to be pulling loose from its moorings, too. I thought it was in a perfectly ‘safe’ harbor. But lately…. O well. It’s time for me to be moving on. You’ll be blaming me for not letting you finish your work.”
“O no, Dr. Pearson. You’ll be blaming me for distracting you from your serious work of coming to terms with all of this.”
They smiled at their thin excuses, but understood. Dr. Pearson rose to leave.
“Please take care until Monday,” she called after him.
“Until Monday,” he repeated to himself as he trudged on down the road.
On impulse he glanced back over his shoulder. For the briefest instant their eyes made contact, but that fleeting moment of contact felt to him like glue.
It ensured that Monday would lead to Tuesday, and then to Wednesday, and then to Thursday and Friday, and then to the week after.