Straight Man

minority. Also, the majority is espousing violence, even more reason to be cautious. Blair starts to raise her hand, then lowers it again, which, for some reason, makes me angrier than the essays I’ve just read aloud. “Is there anyone besides me who is not persuaded that I should kill a duck?” I say, looking directly at Blair and letting her know that I’ve caught her gesture. The look she gives me in return could not be more eloquent. “Don’t do this to me,” she’s pleading silently. “Just read my essay at home. You’ll see what I think.”
    “Blair?” I say. Another communal groan. Not only do Bobo and company know me, they know this Blair girl. They know that she gets good grades. They know that she can spell and everything. They are convinced that if she were not in this particular class, their own grades would go up dramatically. She invites invidious comparison, and they wish to hell she’d quit it.
    Blair draws a deep breath, the kind of breath you take when you fear it’s the last you’ll get before the anesthesia brings you down, down, down. “I saw it,” she says in a voice so quiet I can barely hear it.
    “What?” says Bobo from the back row.
    “I saw it,” Blair repeats. “The goose. Hanging from the tree branch this morning. It made me sick.”
    She’s embarrassed to say this last, I suspect, not because she’ll be derided, which she will, but because the person who hung it is perhaps her instructor.
    “I bet you’ve eaten goose for Christmas dinner.” Bobo goes on the attack, to the delight of his compatriots in the back row. “I bet you went back for seconds.”
    Although Blair looks like she’s never gone back for seconds of anything, she does not dispute her adversary’s claim, or even acknowledge him. I can tell that she’s conceded defeat, surrendered the field. If she’s angry with anyone, she’s angry with me. Or she would be if she thought she had a right to be.
    “Blair,” I say.
    “Please,” she whispers, but she’s pleading with the wrong man.
    “It made you sick,” I repeat, noting that she looks more than a little ill right now. “But tell me. Did it surprise you, seeing that goose hanging there from a tree?”
    At first she seems not to understand my question. Am I trying to trick her? I’m not above tricking students, as they all well know. If she says yes she was surprised, isn’t she accusing me of being all talk? If she says no, she wasn’t surprised, isn’t she suggesting that, sure, she thought me capable of violence? There seems to be no way out of this without insulting her instructor.
    “Be honest,” I suggest.
    “Yes,” she says, I hope, honestly. “I was surprised.”
    “Why?”
    Another deep, painful breath. She’s already taken several since the one she feared would be her last before passing out in dread.
    “I didn’t think you’d do it.”
    At this point I could help her with my inflection. What is there that prevents me? Why not help my best student off the hook? Why let her twist? There’s another pretty good student next to her who has raised his hand. I could turn to him. “Why? Why did you think I wouldn’t? I threatened to, didn’t I?”
    She’s in the front row, and I’ve come out from behind my desk to stand over her, loom over her. She reminds me a little of Lily when she was young, when we were wielding signs together, except Blair lacks Lily’s steely combativeness. This girl’s mortification is tangible, which has the effect of taking me outside myself, seeing the whole scene as an objective observer would. I imagine Finny standing outside my door the way I stood outside his, even more aghast at my classroom behavior than I was at his.
    When I begin again, I try to lower and soften my voice, but what comes out is little more than a croak. I’m seeing through the eyes of Finny the Man, speaking through the constricted larynx of Finny the Goose. “Didn’t I?”
    Blair neither speaks nor moves, and who can blame her?
    I can. “Blair,” I say, as calmly as I’m able. “You’re right. But it doesn’t do any good to be right if you won’t
speak
.”
    “Then I’ll be wrong,” she says, gathering her things from beneath her chair, shoving everything hurriedly into her backpack. Everyone is watching her now. No one has paid the slightest attention to my question. When I step back to give her room, she’s out the door with breathtaking speed and grace.
    I’m the next to speak, but it takes