She was an English teacher I had as a freshman in high school. Most teachers look ancient to students, but Miss S. was especially aged, quite wrinkled and bent, though she tried to hide it with a tall red wig and liberally applied lipstick. She had taught my father when he was in high school and had been quite elderly then, so I was sure she must be a least one-hundred years old. Miss S. was notoriously stubborn. My father told me that when he was a student, he got into an argument with her about the meaning of a word, and brought in a dictionary the next day to prove his point. She told him the dictionary was wrong.
Miss S passionately loved the works she taught us, and she had a sly, understated way of imparting at least some measure of that passion to her students. Once, in the course of a class discussion on King Lear, a student hilariously mispronounced the name of one of Lear’s vicious daughters. There was a pause, and Miss S said, calmly, in her cracked voice, “You can call her ‘Gonorrhea’ if you want to.”
She taught us to look for turning points in stories, moments in which the plot pivots, the characters change. In King Lear, it was the line signalling Lear’s descent into madness, “What, have his daughters brought him to this pass?”
But what I remember most is her reading out loud “The Cask of Amontillado.” To this day, when I read the story, it’s Miss S’s voice I hear, almost gasping, “For the love of God, Montresor.” An old woman’s voice, but one that conveyed the horror, the despair, the shock of Fortunato better than any actor I’ve ever heard delivering the line.
It took years for me to realize that every time I watch a movie or play, read a novel, I still look for those moments, those turning points.
I did not truly get Miss S at the time. At fourteen I couldn’t realize she was forever changing the way I — and hopefully at least a few others in that class — understood and appreciated fiction. I just saw her as a silly old woman who thought the dictionary was wrong.
Now, when I think of that story Dad told me I’m inclined, against all reason, to side with Miss S.
Pam Troy 