Free The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins

know it is something subversive. I may not have thought too often of Paradise Lost while helping my husband brand the cattle, but I know that whatever happened in your classroom expanded my life somehow, and may even have made me a better wife and mother and rancher, and community member as well.
      I didn’t intend to write a sappy letter. Maybe I’ve reached an age where high school has begun to take on a rosy glow. I hope you are enjoying a happy retirement—fishing probably, and beachcombing, (and still practising your famous Australian crawl?) and re-reading Paradise Lost for the hundredth time! Tammy (Adams) Hermann
    Tammy Adams and Muriel Willis were two freckled girls who’d sat along the wall farthest from the windows and written messages to one another above the chalkboard ledge beside them, sometimes forgetting to erase them later.
    Ernie Grant keeps a French safe in his wallet.
      How do you know?
           Never mind.
                Do you think everyone does?
    He wished Elena could read this letter. She had often tried to convince him to give up teaching. On the Townsends’ cool veranda she had even attempted to enrol Esther’s sympathy in this matter. “I have begged him— begged him!—to quit and find something more creative and important ! But the man is obsessed with his job, with his students, with becoming the best teacher in the stupid world!”
    But Esther and Herbert had a son-in-law who taught high school science in North Vancouver. “Curtis loves his work. We wouldn’t want him to give it up. Maybe Axel feels the same?”
    â€œOh, for heaven’s sake!” Elena said. “He throws away his life! Listen, he thinks he’s a servant of love—I’ve heard him say so! In fact, he is the servant of selfish adolescents and their demanding parents, and the stubborn school board, and the ignorant taxpayers. ‘And what are you doing for your own happiness?’ I say to him. Good God—I call him ‘The Master of Happy Endings.’ He is never happy himself unless he’s slaving over lesson plans, trying to make his students’ lives turn out like a Hollywood movie!”
    â€œI can’t imagine how I will survive retirement,” he’d once confessed to Elena. He’d probably been in his fifties at the time. “Life will be almost as empty as it would be if I were to lose my fiery, too-opinionated beauty from Madrid.”
    She had not come to him from Madrid, of course, though that was how they’d always spoken. She had been born in Madrid, but her family had fled the fascist dictatorship and lived as refugees in various cities of France. Perhaps this was why, though she’d loved this getaway island, she was determined never to stay very long. “As everyone knows, if you stay too long beneath trees you will forget how to move. You’ll be stuck here forever with your roots in the ground!”
    His commitment to teaching was not Elena’s only disappointment. That they had not had children was, at first, because children would have interfered with a heavy schedule of performances taking her away from home. And then, when she was willing to begin a family, they had discovered the miracle was not possible. This had been so distressing that eventually they’d applied to become foster parents, as an experiment before considering adoption. Stuart had come into their lives for most of his tenth year, but before they had fully comprehended what was happening he was taken from them and adopted by someone on the mainland. “Never again,” Elena said, when she had grown exhausted from blaming him for not warning her of this. When he’d suggested they might adopt a child one day in the future, she made it clear she could never look at an adopted child without weeping for