Texas Pages

From "Home School," by Charles Webb. Copyright (c) 2007by the author and reprinted by permission of Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press.

ELAINE HAD frequently seen the woman around the small town of Hastings, New York, where they both lived. She was often in the company of a man – presumably her husband – whom Elaine recognized asone of the vice presidents who sat behind a polished desk at the local bank. But Elaine had never spoken to her, so one morning when the woman wheeled her shopping cart up beside Elaine in the supermarket, stopping abruptly, Elaine’s first reaction was to jump slightly.
‘Excuse me,’ the woman said, ‘but aren’t you the people who took your children out of school?’
Elaine looked back without answering.
‘You’re teaching your boys at home.’
‘That’s right.’
It was quiet a moment, then the woman said, ‘I assume you know what you’re doing . . .’
‘I think so.’
‘I hope so,’ she said, ‘because our daughter was home from college and said if we’d done that to her she’d never have spoken to us again.’
A response came to Elaine’s mind, which she suppressed, at least to begin with, and if the woman had said no more Elaine’s statement would have remained unuttered. Unfortunately, however, she did say more.
‘I asked Claire – what in the world could motivate parents to deprive their children of the happiest experience of their lives?’ She looked at Elaine a moment longer,
then pushed her cart past her and toward the bakery section.
‘Excuse me,’ Elaine said after her, ‘did you want an answer?’
The woman stopped, turning to look back. ‘Not necessarily.’
‘We took them out so they wouldn’t grow up to be bankers.’
If given a chance to retract any statement made during the course of her lifetime, without thinking twice Elaine Braddock would have chosen the one made that morning to Marion Montgomery in the supermarket. Flippancy and pettiness were the most offensive of qualities to Elaine, and to have lowered herself to respond in kind to the woman’s insults became a source of great self-reproach. Reproach for a lapse in what Elaine felt, at root, to be her loving attitude toward all Mankind, even its most obnoxious representatives.
And then, over the course of the months that followed, she came to regret the comment on less philosophical grounds, as in the minds of their neighbors, and of the town collectively, the belief became current that Elaine and her husband had in fact removed their children from school to prevent them from entering the banking profession.
So widespread did this opinion become that Elaine’shusband Benjamin considered taking out a full-page ad in the local newspaper at one point to explain their reasons for teaching their children at home. But in the end he recognized that prejudices in the community toward their unconventional approach to education were probably inevitable, and he let it go.