Earl McKenzie, Contributor

Mr. Fisher, the headmaster of the secondary school, looked up from his desk and saw Miss Pearl Bernard, the new social studies teacher, standing and smiling at the door of his office.

'Come in, Pearl,' he said. He called her by her first name because he felt a certain intimacy with her as a result of the relationship he had had with her sister Althea some 25 years before. At the time, Pearl had been a pretty little girl in the first form. He was pleased that the chairman of the Board of Governors had offered her a job at the school; it was like having a part of Althea with him.

Pearl entered the office and sat in the chair which Mr Fisher offered her. She was now a plump young lady and beginning to look like her mother, as Mr Fisher remembered her. Pearl smiled at him and Mr Fisher noticed her even, attractive teeth resembled Althea's.

'Althea sends hello for you,' said Pearl.

'It is very nice hearing from her. I haven't had news of her for a long time. Is she still at that school in ... in ... St Ann, was it?'

'Yes, but she isn't at school now. She is at home. She isn't well.'

'Oh?'

'She has cancer.'

'Cancer! That could be serious!'

'It is. She is getting treatment. But I might as well tell you. The doctors are not very optimistic.'

'Oh my God,' said Mr Fisher. He rested his elbows on his desk and put his face in his hands for a moment.

'But she is cheerful,' said Pearl. 'She is determined to fight it. She is talking about going back to school one day.'

'Please give her my very best wishes. Give me her address so I can write to her.'

He gave Pearl a piece of paper and she wrote the address and a telephone number on it and returned it to him.

'I know she will be happy to hear from you,' said Pearl in a manner which suggested that she knew a good deal about the relationship between Althea and Mr Fisher. Then, explaining that she had a class coming up, she left the office.

Mr Fisher sank into a reverie. He remembered the first time he'd seen Althea. He was sitting in a bus in the parking lot of the Rousseau Senior School, listening to the throttle of the engine as he waited for the bus to drive off and begin the long journey home. He was in his final year of high school, and he was a member of a group of students who had just completed a week of educational activities at the nearby sugar estate; the trip was a gift to his school by the general manager of the estate who had been impressed by the school's performance at a national agricultural competition. Now, after the stimulation of the lectures and the tours, the pleasure of camping at the sports club, the novelty of the plains and the miles of canefields and of seeing so many people riding bicycles and motorcycles, he was about to return to his home in the hills.

He turned to look at a group of schoolgirls in their green and white uniforms who were conversing beside one of the buildings near to him. One of them had such a lovely profile it made him feel a sweet, exquisite warmth in his heart, and when she turned he saw the full beauty of her face and figure. She was listening to her friends, who seemed to be trying to persuade her to accept some view; she listened with a gracious placidity and smiled when they raised their voices insistently. He felt the bus move forward. The girl and her friends glanced at the departing bus without much interest, but even that brief look in his direction gave him a better view of her large and lovely eyes. They returned to their conversation before the bus was out of sight. He continued thinking of her as they drove away, and his memory of her, especially her eyes, remained his most enduring recollection of his visit to the estate.

The night after hearing about Althea's illness, Mr. Fisher dialed her number. He was excited by the prospect of hearing her voice again after so many years. Perhaps her husband would answer the phone: Mr. Fisher had never met him, but he knew that Althea had married him after the breakup of their relationship. He got a busy signal. He waited and tried again but the busy signal persisted. After several more attempts that night and the following night, he concluded that the phone was out of order. He decided to write to her instead.

After school the following day he went to a pharmacy in the nearby town to buy a greeting card. The funny ones seemed too frivolous, and the optimistic ones wishing a speedy recovery struck him as being vainly inappropriate. He noticed that there were no cards for the terminally ill. He bought a card without words, and when he got home he wrote in it to Althea telling her that he was thinking of her, and that his greatest wish for her was that she would not suffer very much. He mailed the card the following day.

One afternoon a few weeks later, Pearl arrived at Mr. Fisher's office carrying a stuffed envelope. 'Althea was very happy to hear from you,' she said, 'and she sends some photographs to show you.' Pearl stood on Mr. Fisher's left and explained each picture as she put it on the desk in front of him.

There were pictures of Althea's two daughters, one in her late teens and the other in her early twenties. One wanted to go to university, the other was a teller in a bank. They were attractive young women, and Mr. Fisher could see Althea's presence in their features. He thought of how close he had once come to being their father, or, more accurately, perhaps, the father of daughters their ages. He was still a bachelor and childless.

'They are very interested in meeting you,' said Pearl. 'They know a lot about you.'

There was also a recent picture of Althea which showed her lying on a bed. She was quite fat now, but had not lost the shapeliness of her earlier years. Her hair was now cut short; during their years together she had worn it hanging down, the way he liked it.

'She doesn't look ill,' said Mr. Fisher.

'If you didn't know you could never tell,' said Pearl.

He recalled that Althea had been remarkably healthy in her younger years; she told him once that she had never had occasion to see a doctor.

'Tell her thanks for introducing me to her daughters,' he said as Pearl returned the pictures to the envelope.

After Pearl left, Mr. Fisher recalled the beginning of his relationship with Althea.

Four years after seeing Althea for the first time, Mr. Fisher became a member of the staff of Rousseau Senior School. It was his first job after graduating from teachers' college. A lecturer at the college had been impressed by his work and had recommended him to the principal of Rousseau. He had pleasant memories of his first visit to that part of the country - and especially of the girl he had seen there - so he happily accepted the job when it was offered to him.

A few months after he started working at Rousseau he saw Althea again. The exact moment came back to him vividly. It was after school and the evening classes were in session. He had stayed behind to talk with one of the senior teachers who had taken a motherly interest in him; she was sitting at her desk in her classroom and he was standing at the door to the corridor. He turned and saw an attractive young woman walking gracefully down the driveway on the other side of the lawn. He recognized her at once and asked the senior teacher who she was. The teacher told him she was a past student of the school, and that she was now a pre-trained teacher at a nearby primary school. She visited Rousseau often to see her brother, who was on the staff, and her younger brothers and sisters who were students. Mr. Fisher was pleased that fate had brought them together again, and he decided to make her acquaintance.

He started a conversation with her the next time he saw her; his opening line was: 'Miss Bernard, I have been carrying a picture of you in my head for the past four years!' In that first talk he discovered that she wanted to go to college to be trained as a teacher, and was curious to hear about college life from a recent graduate like him. She came to his classroom after school and they sat and talked for hours. He remembered the evening when she sat looking at the floor, not wanting to look at him and show the feeling in her eyes, and he felt the thick, erotic telepathy between them. They began taking walks together, and he would sometimes push her bicycle for her. There was the unforgettable first kiss: the exciting sensation of a warm woman moving beneath the force of his lips for the first time. There were the love poems he wrote to her. And there were the times when she sent one of her brothers to the home where he boarded, to tow him to her home on his bicycle, and to travel for miles in nights scented with the sweet aroma of ripe sugar cane.

The bell sounded, reminding Mr. Fisher of his responsibility for the school.

The next time Pearl visited his office she wasn't smiling. Strain was showing in her eyes when she sat she bent forward, unable to relax. But there was a motherly maturity in her voice when she said: 'We are rushing Althea to New York for treatment. Her doctor recommends it.'

'Do you have any relatives over there?'

'She is going to stay with her husband's sister in the Bronx.'

'It is a good thing she has a supportive family. I wish there was something I could do.'

'It means a lot to Althea to know that you are thinking of her now.'

Mr. Fisher had difficulty falling asleep that night. The memory of his affair with Althea kept running through his mind. He tossed and turned as he thought about it.

After a year at Rousseau he had got a one-year scholarship to Canada. Althea entered a teachers' college in Kingston. They corresponded throughout the year. Althea sent him a studio photograph of herself showing her standing, elegant and shapely, beside a huge Grecian vase: he felt the two shapes complemented each other beautifully. He put the picture on the wall in front of his desk in the basement flat in which he lived. His landlady noticed it and often teased him about 'The Vase Girl'.

When he returned to Jamaica he got a job in Kingston so he could be close to her. They went to movies and dinners and parties at her college; they took bus trips to the outskirts of the city. His flat was their cosy retreat where they spent happy times by themselves.

He was an attractive young man and there were other girls whom he dated from time to time. But everyone who knew him knew that Althea was the special one. One of his closest friends - a notorious womanizer - recognized the tenderness of his feelings for Althea, and once remarked that that was how a man ought to feel about his wife, and that he would get married if he ever felt that way about a woman.

Mr. Fisher tried to get at what he thought was the heart of Althea's feelings by recalling her most memorable expressions of endearment. He remembered the concern and affection in her voice when, on one of the occasions when he was to be towed home, she cautioned her brother not to let him fall from the bicycle; they all laughed, but he remembered the real emotion in her voice. Once, while caressing her hair, he asked her why she liked him. 'Because you are lovable,' she said without hesitation. It wasn't great poetry, but it was the first time he heard a woman use a word resembling 'love' to describe him. Most of all there was the inscription she wrote on the back of 'The Vase Girl' photograph: 'To Jeffrey - From Althea, your true love.'

'Women, women in my life,' said Mr. Fisher to himself as he turned in his bed, 'which of you has loved me most of all?' Althea: something in him said. She was gentle, and he sensed in her now the depth of the proverbial quiet river.

The breakup came after he moved to the country, to his present school, to take up a better position. Althea was still at college in Kingston and he saw her less frequently. More importantly, there were several pretty young women on the staff of his new school, and some of them were interested in him. He decided he did not want to settle down in a serious relationship just yet, so he wrote Althea a letter ending their affair. She wrote a grief-stricken reply to what she called his 'heart-rending' letter. But she also commended him for the manner in which he had brought the affair to an end.

It suddenly occurred to Mr. Fisher that the reason for his breakup with Althea was the same that had ended all his affairs: he was lured on by seemingly even more attractive women. He remembered a scene from the story of Sinbad the Sailor. According to the story, Sinbad was shipwrecked on an island covered with precious stones. Each time he picked up one, he saw a bigger and more beautiful one ahead of him, and he would drop the one in his hand and go after the bigger jewel. It was the only part of the story he remembered, but this fragment now loomed in his mind as a cautionary tale; the Sinbads of this world often ended up without a single jewel, and he did not want that to happen to him. He had to do something about what he now called his Sinbad Complex. He was too much of a fisher of women. He fell asleep and dreamt that he was chasing a nude, immaterial woman running before him in a blue mist.

When Pearl appeared at the door of his office a few days later, he could tell from her expression that she was the bearer of sad news.

'Althea has passed on,' she said after she sat down.

Mr. Fisher knitted his brow and stared at the papers on his desk. His first girlfriend had died and he felt diminished: Althea's side of what they had created together was now mostly gone. The death of a first girlfriend was not a milestone he had ever thought of before. There had been a number of recent deaths in his own family, and he felt that he had moved over to the death-half of his life's continuum.

Pearl said, 'She died at home in one of her daughter's arms.'

'Althea was very special to me,' said Mr. Fisher, finally letting Pearl see some of his emotion.

'I know,' said Pearl, her dark-brown eyes shimmering with understandings she did not put into words. Mr. Fisher saw her as a timely and chance emissary from his past, reconnecting him with Althea in her final days. He felt that Pearl knew a good deal about Althea's feelings for him, and that she was getting some satisfaction from her role as love's last messenger.

Pearl said, 'The funeral will be next Saturday at St Margaret's at three o'clock.'

'I will try to be there,' said Mr. Fisher.

After supper that evening, he felt like talking to someone about Althea, and he decided to tell his household helper about her. He opened a drawer and took out the envelope in which he kept photographs of his former girlfriends, and after thumbing through pictures of Carol, Lydia, Carmen, Bernice, Gloria and Lois, he came to 'The Vase Girl.' A flood of recollections filled his mind as he looked at the picture, his eyes moving over the form he once knew so well. He went into the living room and sat and waited for the helper to come out of the kitchen.

'Have a seat, Miss Alice,' he said when the helper appeared at the door. 'I have something to show you.'

Miss Alice sat in the easy chair facing him. She was slim and dark-complexioned and was wearing her usual head-tie. She had often showed a discrete curiosity about his love life, and her eyes lit up when Mr. Fisher handed her the photograph. As she studied the picture, he told her the story of his affair with Althea.

'Is a very pretty young lady, sar,' said Miss Alice. 'How come you let her drop outa your hand? Me sorry fe hear about the death.'

Mr. Fisher took the photograph.

Miss Alice continued: 'And you mustn't think that it was a good thing you didn't marry her since she would have left you a widower so soon.'

'Such a thought never occurred to me,' said Mr. Fisher.

'You just remember the nice memories,' said Miss Alice.

On the day of the funeral Mr. Fisher stood at a window at home and watched the rain pouring down. His car had holes in the floor and he had fears of flooding on the plains. The headlights of his car were also poor, and he had doubts about a long night journey on a wet, unfamiliar road. But was he merely rationalizing? he asked himself.

The real flood he feared were the emotions likely to be released in him by meeting her husband, children and the relatives he knew in those early years. Everyone had seen him then as Althea's young man.

As he watched the streaks of water on the glass he remembered the last time he saw Althea. It was at Pearl's graduation dance, and he had gone there with the then woman in his life, thinking of it only as another dance to go to. He met Pearl on the dance floor and she told him that Althea and other members of their family were sitting in the southeast corner of the auditorium. He and his date sat out the next dance and he asked to be excused and went in search of Althea. He found her sitting quietly, looking beautiful and mysterious in the dark. She seemed very pleased to see him. He bent over and kissed her on the left cheek. The music was too loud for conversation, so after standing there for a few minutes, he asked to be excused and went back to his date.

That was how he wanted to remember her, he thought, looking reflectively in the rain. He decided not to go to the funeral. He wanted his last memory of seeing her to be that final kiss on her left cheek.

Pearl brought him a report on the funeral a few days later.

'I thought you were coming to the funeral,' she said, showing her disappointment: the story had not ended the way she wanted it to.

Mr. Fisher described how bad the weather had been.

Pear continued: 'She was buried in a vault in the yard of the home she and her husband built; but they never lived in it.'

Mr. Fisher listened as she recounted details of the funeral: the packed church in spite of the rain; the performance by children from Althea's school; the abundance of cars.

Mr. Fisher handed Pearl a piece of paper. 'I want to write to her mother. Please give me her address.' Pearl wrote on the paper and returned it.

Then she took a plastic card from her handbag and handed it to Mr. Fisher. On one side was a picture of Jesus as a shepherd with Althea's name printed at the bottom; on the other side were the words of the Twenty-Third Psalm.

'Thanks for the souvenir,' said Mr. Fisher.

As he watched Pearl leave he felt a warm affection for her rise inside him; she was now like a relative, and would be an ongoing link with his memories of Althea.

He read the psalm for the first time in many years. Then he read it again looking for a sentence or phrase he could hold onto. His eyes settled and lingered on the words: 'He restoreth my soul.'

END

Earl McKenzie