27 November 2007 | Vol. 7, No. 3

Mr. Cygnus and Miss Lemon

by JANICE D. SODERLING

Why did Zeus transform himself into a swan when he sought to seduce Leda? The answer is so simple. He understood the guise that assures a yes from even the most cautious or virtuous of women.

Swans mate for life.

Valerie Lemon was a cautious woman though, strictly speaking, no longer virtuous.

It is cruel to characterize her as an old-maid schoolteacher, doubly cruel, because that is what she was, and what she had never expected to become. Few young girls, if any, visualize their future as a barren passing of years, and certainly not pretty, sociable young women who are intelligent enough to acquire a higher education and who have an inborn zest for life and laughter. Young women like Valerie Lemon once was.

Miss Lemon, as she was known in the classroom, at the age of thirty-nine had the unfortunate experience of overhearing a whispered conversation between two of her sixth-grade boys, insolent, dirty-necked devils that they were, one with pustular spots emphasizing a nose grown too large for its face and the other with astounded eyes. She distinctly heard the taller one say to the other, "She has a Coke bottle stuck up inside her. You ever notice the funny way she stands holding on to the back of her chair."

"Did she swallow it?" asked the hearer, open-mouthed.

"No, stupid. She put it in!"

"Why doesn't she take it out?"

"It's stuck, stupid. She can't get it out."

"How do you know?" the other boy asked.

"Oh," said his knowledgeable informant. "You can tell by looking at her."

Valerie's face and knuckles grew white as she realized why her class had watched her, wide-eyed and respectful, for two whole weeks.

This vicious lie became part of the schoolyard mythology, repeated in later years by older children to younger ones as the latter arrived at the age of sexual nosiness and raucous guffaws. Of course, no Coke bottle had ever touched the tender space between Miss Lemon's legs, nor at that time had any other foreign object except a soapy washcloth doing what it was made to do. Not until later did a soapless hand that was not her own, journey like a knight errant through that warm and humid countryside.

Miss Lemon was far too shocked and embarrassed at what she overheard to pounce on the boys and anyway, corporal punishment was not allowed, but she gave them both, and for good measure their male cohorts, present and future, a hard time every day from then on. Hatred became the mutual bond between Miss Lemon and the rude-eyed boys in each new sixth-grade class entrusted to her teaching skills.

—

To the town where Valerie Lemon lived, came one late spring day Mr. Randolph Cygnus. He came there because he had inherited a house from his maternal grandmother, an exceedingly old woman whose obituary shocked most of the townspeople, because they believed her to have been dead for years.

Town is too pretentious a word for that little community, for there were few shops, no parking meters, and only two churches. Miss Lemon's house was built on a corner lot beside the dandelion-infested lawn on which stood the dilapidated dwelling now under inspection by Mr. Cygnus. Most of the families on the dead-end street belonged to a younger generation who had acquired a deed and a mortgage as the old owners, one after another, died away.

These young families had children, loud-voiced, squalling, ball-bouncing progeny who cut across Miss Lemon's lawn winter and summer, shouting and laughing, and being a general nuisance. They would all eventually enter the sixth-grade classroom to learn and repeat the legend of the Coke bottle.

From an upstairs window, Miss Lemon followed every movement of a stout man walking around the house next door to hers. He took up a key, opened the front door and stepped inside as if he owned it. Her hand flew to her mouth.

Mr. Cygnus had every intention of selling the ramshackle house when he limped up its weed-choked walkway. The leaves of many years moldered in the gutters. A large broken branch lay atop the roof of the garage; it had lain there a long time. The white paint was peeling, and one shutter hung askew on a loosened hinge. But as he inspected the premises he now possessed—when he reviewed the high-ceilinged sitting room, the big bay window of the dining room, the glassed-in side veranda—he was overwhelmed with nostalgia. These rooms were full of memories. He saw the dining room, not dim and dusty, but flooded with sunlight and conversation. He walked into the kitchen and remembered it filled with pleasant smells: meat frying, pies baking, and had a flashback to the little boy he once was sitting down to milk and cookies. His head was full of recollections of feather mattresses and creaking beds and crickets chirping, a box-like telephone on the wall unexpectedly ringing with a shrill jingle.

From behind the curtained window of her bedroom, Valerie watched him walk into the house and then out of it. She watched him pull at the drainpipe to test its fastenings. She saw him extract a knife from his pocket and pry at the cellar door to determine wood rot. Like a spy observing an enemy camp, she watched him push, pull, pry, prod, and kick. She wondered where the man's wife was, and scowled because she did not want new people next door. The dead woman had been a neighbor since Valerie was a little girl, the best sort one could hope for, her existence confirmed only by a single electric light going on in the evening and later going off. Never, not even when Valerie's parents were alive, did the old woman trouble anyone to borrow a cup of sugar or gossip an idle hour away.

As Mr. Cygnus continued his inspection of the house and grounds, he became increasingly enamored of the idea of moving there. He had spent many childhood summers with his grandmother but he was amazed that his memories were so vivid. Wasn't there a pear tree in the backyard, he wondered and hurried to look. He was disappointed not to find one. Discovery of a broad stump overgrown with grass brought back his jolly humor and he decided right then and there to keep the house and plant a new pear tree. "Sentimental fool," he called himself admiringly.

Mr. Cygnus was at an age where his eyes watered in a brisk wind, and the bones in his legs forecast atmospheric change as well as any barometer. It had been a long time since he bounced agilely out of bed in the morning. Do not infer from this that he was old. He was, he was prone to point out, in his prime. Suffice it to say that he was not quite sixty.

He was a widower. That much was known about him. He smoked very large, very smelly cigars. That was obvious as the nose on your face. But gossip is a small-town pastime, and other hearsay was repeated with authority.

He had been a military man, it was rumored, and was retired. Another report had it that he had been a schoolteacher in Africa and was retired. Both these particulars were true.

Others were not. That his wife had been sickly for many years before she died. That he had inherited her money and was an extremely wealthy man. That he had an artificial leg. All false.

—

One afternoon soon after he installed himself in his new home, Mr. Cygnus went up and down the dead-end street introducing himself to his new neighbors, not staying very long anywhere. This may have been a military habit, a reconnaissance of the enemy. Or it may have been more kindly meant, a throwback from his time in Africa when neighbors needed to know and help each other.

At any rate, since Valerie's house terminated the circle-like route he had taken—walking up one side, across the street and back down the other side—his round culminated at her house and there he stayed longer than anywhere else.

They soon discovered she was the small child he remembered running around on the next-door lawn, those summers he spent with his grandmother.

"You always had a large hair bow," he laughed, "and droopy drawers."

Miss Lemon wasn't sure if it pleased or embarrassed her to be remembered in such detail. The hair bow she had forgotten, but she did recall her home-sewn pants and the elastic band that seemed always to be giving way. Yes, she remembered the pear tree too. No, she did not remember what year it was cut down. She offered him a cup of coffee and he accepted, leaning back and lighting up a cigar without asking permission.

It was nice to have a friend. It was nice to have a gentleman caller. It was nice that the house smelled of cigar smoke. It was all so nice.

Especially now that spring was in the air, and summer, lonely summer, on its way.

She invited him over for dinner three Sunday afternoons in a row. She told him about her dull work, though not the ghastly story of the Coke bottle. He sympathized. He was a good listener, though he related little about his own person.

Yes, he had been in Africa, gone for a short visit, but stayed ten years. He described himself as a sentimental old fool, and mentioned in passing that despite his soldiering life, he was a faithful man, and believed that marriage was for life.

These small confidences pleased her and she made much of them in her own mind. She had long been a rather