“The key is not to spook him,” she told me over the phone.
I felt queasy. I was stunned that she’d taken such an interest in me, and terrified of saying anything that would reveal me to be the hayseed I knew I was. “I can’t tell you how much this will mean to the kids,” I said.
“It’s not the kids I’m doing it for,” she said.
Even though men aren’t supposed to swoon, I came pretty close right then.
I don’t remember how I managed to get through my first class that next day. I was in a complete fog. Helen was bringing Mowat for fourth period. I told the front-office secretary to let me know the moment they arrived. It wasn’t long before the whole staff knew. A couple of my colleagues from social studies and English intercepted me in the hall between classes. Why hadn’t I talked to administration about scheduling a special assembly so everyone could hear Mowat speak? At the very least, I should open my class to any staff members who weren’t teaching that period.
By the time Helen brought Mowat in the front door, Pritchard, the principal at the time, was there with his coterie to greet them. I came upon the scene just as he was explaining to Mowat that a reporter from the London Free Press would be arriving shortly to cover his historic visit to the school. If it weren’t for Helen, I think Mowat might have bolted right then and there.
“Farley’s really looking forward to speaking with the kids in Mr. Cruickshank’s class,” she said. “But I’m afraid he has to leave town right after.” She danced Mowat through the crowd with the grace of a toreador. “Ah, Irving. Our gallant host. Show us the way.”
Man, what a dish she was, in her Italian leather jacket with those fluorescent, skin-tight leggings and ankle-high hiking boots. She had an edgy sense of style, as if she were from cosmopolitan Montreal, not white-bread London, Ontario. I could tell that Pritchard felt jilted, but he knew enough not to tangle with her. His envious gaze lingered on us as she linked arms with Mowat on one side and me on the other. I knew I’d be getting a lecture on proper protocol in Pritchard’s office later that afternoon, but at that moment, I couldn’t have cared less.
“Who said anything about a reception committee?” Helen whispered, elbowing me in the ribs. She smelled of lavender, a scent that transported me to my grandmother’s house when I was five, and that Helen made confusingly arousing.
“Sorry about that,” I said. It was then that I noticed my eyes were level with her lips. “Word got out.”
Mowat winked at me. “Best not disappoint her, Irving. Believe me.” This tongue-in-cheek remark drew a jab from her other elbow. “You see what I mean?” he said in mock distress.
There was a buzz from the students the moment Mowat walked into the classroom. He was hard not to recognize, especially since he was wearing the requisite outdoorsman’s parka, which, by the look of it, had seen more of Canada in the past ten years than I could hope to see in my lifetime. The kids were so juiced up that they completely ignored the elaborate introduction I’d spent the whole night pulling together. When I handed the class over to Helen, she attracted as many looks as Mowat did, especially from the boys. She explained to the class how persuasive I’d been on their behalf, leaving out the bits where Mowat turned me down and she plied him with booze to change his mind. She invited Mowat to join her at the front of the class, and the two of them sat on the edge of my desk like two jawing cowhands perched on a corral fence overlooking the herd. After settling Mowat in with chit-chat about his recent travels, she looked over at me with a glint in her eye, then asked her uncle Farley, one of the country’s literary icons, to tell her the story of Sir John Franklin and his lost expedition. I’d never mentioned my interest in Franklin to her. She’d obviously pumped Will for information about me. The thrill of her attention was turning me to Jell-O.
Mowat described Franklin’s final expedition as the nineteenth-century equivalent of an Apollo moon mission. The British Admiralty had already figured out that any shortcut to the Orient through the frozen channels of the Arctic would be too treacherous to have commercial value. It invested so heavily in Franklin’s attempt simply because of national pride. Britain wanted to demonstrate its scientific superiority to the world just as twentieth-century America did when it planted its flag on the lunar surface.
“So following your analogy, that would make Franklin an astronaut,” Helen interrupted. “Wasn’t he a bit too old and podgy?”
“Like me, you mean?” Mowat said.
The class cracked up.
“All right,” he admitted. “He wasn’t exactly the Admiralty’s first choice. But he was the most eager to go.”
“Why?” she asked. “I mean, surely taking a rat-infested wooden ship into the coldest place on earth couldn’t have been his idea of fun.”
“His wife put him up to it,” Mowat replied with a mischievous grin. He was trying to get a rise out of Helen, I could tell.
Helen realized it too, but she wasn’t about to let a sexist remark like that go unchallenged. “Oh, I see. Blame it on the wife,” she said.
“Don’t you believe there are women in this world who can get a man to do almost anything?” The irony was dripping from his voice.
For the remainder of the class, Helen gave as good as she got. When Mowat said that Franklin had relied too heavily on the Royal Navy’s misleading charts, and that he’d failed to learn from the Inuit who had lived in the Arctic for thousands of years, Helen cited it as historic proof that men would sooner die than ask a local for directions. Later, Mowat described how Lady Franklin shamed the Admiralty, the emperor of Russia, and the president of the United States into helping her learn the fate of her husband, then subverted history so that Sir John was unjustifiably praised as the hero who’d discovered the Northwest Passage. Helen called it a refreshing change that for once it wasn’t a man who’d rewritten history. She told Mowat that he of all people should appreciate the importance of never letting the facts get in the way of a good story.
After the bell, Helen drifted to the back of the classroom, where I was standing, and watched Mowat sign autographs for a clutch of students. She sat on a vacated student desk, her long legs dangling over the edge. “What do you suppose the attraction was?” she asked me.
“Attraction?”
“John Franklin and Lady Jane,” she said. “She had her pick of suitors. Why choose such a lump of a man?”
“You make him sound like the Pillsbury Doughboy,” I said.
“I’m sorry. I forgot he was your hero,” she said, titillating me with her teasing. I realized I was being evaluated, and not just for my views on history.
“Lady Jane wasn’t all sweetness and light, you know,” I said.
“Meaning?”
“I suspect that Franklin was one of the few men who found her bossiness endearing,” I said.
She folded her arms in a parody of indignation. “Do you have a problem with bossy women?”
“I’m beginning to sense I don’t have much chance of winning this argument.”
“You’ve got that right,” she said.
Mowat signed his last autograph. He peered over at us with the curiosity of a field biologist observing the courtship behaviour of two wolves on the tundra.
“The two of you seem quite pleased with yourselves,” he said.
Helen retrieved his parka from a nearby chair. “You managed to survive unscathed, I see,” she said to him dryly.
Mowat grunted as he let her help him on with his coat. “I should write a sequel. Ordeal by Helen.” Despite his grumbling, I could see that the whole experience had put a spring in his step. Beneath his gruff whiskers, he plainly wore the exhilaration