everyone else, every person you'd encountered since the day you were born who'd supposedly listened, had really not been listening to you at all. They'd been subtly checking out their own reflection in the glass bureau a little to the west of your head, thinking what they had to do later that evening, or deciding that next, as soon as you shut up, they were going to tell that classic story about their bout of Bangladeshi beachside dysentery, thereby showcasing how worldly, how wild (not to mention how utterly enviable) a human being they were.
Hannah did ultimately speak, of course, but it wasn't to tell you what she thought or what you had to do, but only to ask you certain relevant questions, which were often laughable in their simplicity (one, I remember, was, "Well, what do you think?"). Afterward, when Charles cleared the plates, Lana and Turner jumped into her lap, fashioning her arm bracelets out of their tails, and Jade turned on the music (Mel Tormé detailing how you were getting to be a habit with him), you didn't feel the edgy feeling of being alone in the world. As stupid as this sounds—you felt you had an answer.
It was this quality, I think, that made her have such an influence on the others. She was the reason Jade, for example, who sometimes talked of becoming a journalist, joined The Gallway Gazette as a freelance staff writer even though she downright loathed Hillary Leech, the editor-in-chief who pulled out a copy oïThe New Yorker and read it before every class (sometimes chuckling irritatingly at something in "The Talk of the Town"). And Charles sometimes carried around a three-inch textbook, How to Be a Hitchcock (Lerner, 1999), which I secretly paged through one Sunday and beheld the first-page inscription: "To my master of suspense. Love, Hannah." Leulah tutored fourth-graders in Science every Tuesday after school at Elmview Elementary, Nigel read The Definitive Foreign Service Exam Study Guide (2001 éd.), and Milton had taken an acting class at the UNCS the previous summer, Introduction to Shakespeare: The Art of the Body—acts of humanitarianism and self-improvement I couldn't help but think had originally been Hannah's suggestions, though proposed in her way, they probably believed they'd thought of it themselves.
I, too, was not immune to her brand of inspiration. At the beginning of October, Hannah arranged with Evita for me to drop out of AP French with drapery-drab Ms. Filobeque and enroll with a bunch of freshmen in Beginning Drawing with the Dalf-decadent Mr. Victor Moats. (I did so without breathing a word to Dad.) Moats was Hannah's favorite teacher at Gallway.
"I absolutely adore Victor/' she said, biting her bottom lip. "He's wonderful. Nigel's in one of his classes. Isn't he wonderful? I think he's wonderful. Really."
And Victor was wonderful. Victor sported faux suede shirts in Permanent Magenta and Burnt Sienna and had hair that, under the art room lights, channeled the gleam of film noir streets, Humphrey Bogart's wingtips, opera footlights and tar, all at the same time.
Hannah also bought me a sketchbook and five ink pens, which she wrapped in old-fashioned parcel paper and sent to my school mailbox. (She never talked about things. She simply did them.) On the inside cover, she'd written (in a handwriting that was a perfect extension of her—elegant, with tiny mysteries in the curves of her n's and h's): "For your Blue Period. Hannah."
In the middle of class, occasionally I'd take the thing out and covertly try to draw something, like Mr. Archer's ranidae hands. Though I showed no signs of being an untapped El Greco, I enjoyed pretending I was a rheumatoid artiste, some Toulouse concentrating on the outline of bony arm of a can-can girl, instead of plain old Blue van Meer, who might go down in history for the talent of feverishly copying down every syllable a teacher uttered (including ums and ehs) in case it showed up on the Unit Test.
In her absorbing memoir, There's a Great Day Coming Mariana (1973), Florence "Feisty Freddie" Frankenberg, a 1940s their-girl-Friday actress whose great claim to fame was appearing on Broadway with Al Jolson in Hang on to Your Handkerchiefs (she also palled around with Gemini Cervenka and Oona O'Neill), wrote in Chapter 1 that at first glance, Saturday night at the Stork Club was an "oasis of rarified fun" and that, despite WWII grimly unfolding across the Atlantic like a telegram delivering bad news, when one was in a "new gown, perched