Chapter Two

    Even getting back to Hastings had been something of a battle, in the summer when Toby's teaching career in the North had come to an end. He had been so gloriously successful in the classroom and in the community that it had been hard to believe he would not be kept on in the Catholic school, where he and Jelena had been content to work for very modest wages, but even those wages were too much for a system that flourished on the apostolic spirit of unmarried, unfamilied, volunteers, and the halcyon days had come to a close. The priests were sorry, the sisters regretful, but that's how it was. The Skinners were two adults - only one of whom was a teacher - now with two children, and too expensive for the slim resources of the parish and the diocese, in those days before the government decided to support separate schools. The axe had come down well before the school year was over, when Jelena had taken the train to Vancouver, with the children, to visit her parents for a fortnight.

    Toby had taken the news fairly calmly. He had become accustomed to surprises, well versed both in life and study with a God who liked breaking molds in the name of improvement. So far, throughout his twenty-eight years, he had survived all the sudden contradictions, and would do so again. And he knew he was simply far too good in the classroom not to be in demand. He was too natively studious and well-read, too artistically talented, too amusing - for the sake of learning and the wisdom that would eventually make him a spiritual director - either directly or indirectly - of the highest ranks in the Church - and also too awfully good at discipline, not to be necessary to children, to the Catholic education system, to the Church itself, and to ever be out of work.
 
     Or so he had thought, up to that point.

    He had told Jelena as soon as she came back from Vancouver, of course. He had not called with the news. He did not want to worry her parents, particularly her mother. Hopefully the future would be straightened out before they had to know.
 
     But where to go?
 
     In the last months of teaching in Sitka Flats he stayed awake a lot wondering if he should head for an Indian reserve school. He'd begun his teaching career substituting in native schools, and made some good points, even thought they were not Catholic students, but on a Catholic reserve, with his successes in art and music, with a hope of taking the native's skills with quiet into Thomistic metaphysics, he might be able to work some great stuff. But no inspirations reared their head, and he had been, after all, hooked up with a bishop who had plenty of natives under his jurisdiction.
(Years later, Toby realized those sleepless hours had been all about the suffering of the native children under predatory clergy, and not just in his own diocese.)
 
     So it was fall-back time, a return to the fiery flood of inspirations that had come upon him when he first met Jelena, provoking his love affair with the town where she had grown up, far away in the Kootenays, the burgh of Hastings.
 
     But Jelena had absolutely no appetite for returning to the land of her childhood. It was not that she had no happy memories. Quite the contrary, as evidenced in her scrapbook and the stories she had told Toby from the beginning. She had loved where she had grown up, loved the town that had raised her - although she was not born in Hastings - and seen her through her first university year, in the little Catholic college established, at the suggestion of Rome, only a few years before she attended.
But once she had settled on the Coast, thanks her father's transfer, she grew even fonder of the big city - because of its culture, not because of its increased shopping opportunities - and of the university, because she not only loved study and the classroom, but assumed she would, as a professor of literature, make university life her own for the rest of her days. She had always been a blue stocking's blue stocking, but with an equal passion for the arts, which kept her from the least threat of the academic's accidie.
 
     But she had at least two personal qualities which had gravely endangered her supposed vocational choices. The first, which affected most manners of young men she had hitherto encountered, was the happy possession of the face of a film actress, with large brown eyes that could dance like a pair of nymphs but also take in everything within their view at the same time.
  
    The other virtue, which was specific to Toby's interests - although usually terrifying to the lads and other things in pants that started with the face and the dancing eyes - was that she was an omnivorous reader. Thus Toby had known at once that she was not simply intelligent much above the average, but that she knew books. Thus she knew his life work, and he knew he could tolerate no rivals. This was not just love at work; this was destiny.
 
     And then there was her singing voice, and it was really music that had exposed them to each other as what they each really cared about, over and above the verbal skirmishing that goes on between students thrown together on a huge secular campus which somehow has not been allowed to destroy or even dampen the real depths of personal faith.
 
     Even though he had grown up in the West Coast city, big and getting bigger, and had loved the place to the extent of falling into excruciatingly patronizing attitudes toward the poor souls who had not grown up there, it was not until Jelena showed up that he had completely taken all it had to offer under his tyro writer's wing, and even then it had taken some pretty heavy handed intrusions from his guardian angel, and his guardian angels commanders-in-chief, to get him completely receptive.

    So, when the crunch came down, the conversations naturally turned to Vancouver and the possibility of returning there.
 
     "You almost had a job at that new high school in the East End," Jelena said at one point. "In fact you did have it, if you'd decided to take it. Notre Dame, wasn't it? Maybe the same principal is still there. I've always been really happy in Vancouver. I know I would be again."
 
     "It was only four years ago. But I'm so glad we went north. Camden Falls was incredible. I don't think Vancouver could have offered that much of a challenge. And we would never have had the chance to live with a priest, to be so much at the heart of a parish and mix with all those clergy passing through. I don't know of any writer who got such a break. Not that I've been able to do much with it. There always seems to be so much to learn about education. That's what hurts about having to leave here. I've really proved something with the art and the music and the philosophy and the meditation. I know I have. But neither the bishop nor Clancy seem to appreciate it the same way I do."
 
     "Man proposes,' etcetera."
   
    "Of course. And there have always been the visions from Hastings. Your fault, of course, from growing up there."
 
     "But that president of the college you went to see before we went to Camden Falls: he wouldn't hire you."
  
    "No. I've always wondered why I took the trip. Mind you, you had a visit with your Mom, and I got a look at the town I'd dreamed so much about. And it was most definitely Providence at work. God sent a log to take out the propeller shaft of the Canadian Prince just so I could get ride on a boat and the bus to Hastings to get a look at the college. And, remember, Father McPatrick was on the Prince on the night of trip. Now there was a coincidence. Remember? He went barreling after the Minister of Education, coincidentally on the trip as well, and bashed him about over financial aid to Catholic schools." Toby would laugh at himself. "Very precise of God, don't you think? To be provided with a working view of my future boss at the very time I was flitting off to the Kootenays to talk to someone I hoped would be my boss? As it was, I wonder if I was speaking with an idiot. I wanted to talk about Saint Thomas and his relations with education, and he asked me about John Dewey. Months later, under McPatrick and his gallant little school, I was learning about how John Dewey had destroyed generations of American reading students and any Canadians stupid enough to follow suit. You can say that for the Vancouver school authorities. I don't think they bought the bullshit. At least not my grade one teacher. I was a phonetic whizz by the New Year."
  
    "You've learned a lot in four years. Me too. Maybe we could be some real use to a parish in Vancouver. Maybe even the diocese. Remember that I'm virtually an old friend of the co-adjutor archbishop."
 
     "So you'll write him a letter?"
  
    Jelena was quiet for a bit. "No. That I know I can't do. For heaven's sake, Toby. You’ve never been incapable of speaking for yourself." She would laugh. "And in that, Michaelson would suspect that you'd come to take over his diocese. How many times do I have to tell you that the clergy don't like laity who study? Who know Saint Thomas, and worse, the mystics? Good Lord, even McPatrick, who was and is the salt of the earth, had trouble with you. And the pastor here, just as much. You've said so yourself. But Vancouver is bigger than an archbishop. We'd survive. There's always the culture. And the ocean. And your memories of growing up on the Coast. You haven't even begun to write about them, and, God knows, you have some wonderful stories to tell."

    "Yes, I have. But only when I'm ready to do them right."