Drenched, with black hair pasted on forehead, he stood, looking at me. I saw indecision in the eyes so, before he scrammed, I justled the door open.

       I held my breath, and beckoned him inside.

       He approached like a wet pup, entered, looked at the wet trailings behind, and up at me.

       "Don't worry." I exhaled and helped him out of the dripping windbreaker. "Dry yourself, in there," I pointed to the toilet. I hustled to the bedroom for a robe. The tempest in me was giving way to anxiety.

       The antiquated clock on the plastic, coffee table began to chime when I returned. It was midnight. I hung the terry cloth robe on the handle of the bathroom door and I plopped on the sofa drained from this day.

       His mother will be worried out of her mind, I fretted. I'd have to get Stavro home tonight. Somehow.

       Phil, Michael, Niko, and now Stavro. The men in my life.

       Others? A few.

       John Hanshaw, a junior in the liberal arts college, both of us caught an a whirlpool of post-adolescent passion.

       And Ed McCreddy, with thick wavy blond hair, came to replace John when Hanshaw turned to a crow-haired, buxom graduate--two years his senior.

       Ed had been wrapping up pre-med and I my freshman year. He was the smartest person I had known. He had more stored in his brain about nineteenth century English prose, I swear, than Professor Litton, my cocky instructor on the subject.

       Ed had borrowed my lit text and returned it a week later. He claimed that he had read it all, 1324 pages. His comments, "A dastardly abridged job, Loanne, and the footnotes stink."

       I had shaken Ed off before burning out completely. He was an insomniac and an ardent disciple of the Kama Sutra.

       Three others had followed before I met Michael. But they were of the every day, run-o-the-mill stock. After Ed, I did not mind.

       Michael's debut into my life had been at a Columbia University Foreign Students' Union dance.

       I commuted to school every day from Norwalk on the New Haven Railroad. An hour's comfortable ride to be dropped off in the heart of Harlem to catch the local subway which took me to my graduate classes. My field of concentration had been EFL/ESL, teaching English to foreign students.

       The rococo '60s were nearing a jarring end. I, twenty-three then (how time flies). The King sang "Being in Love with You". The din of the crowded lounge favoured a cross section of the U.N.

       A tap on my shoulder, I turn--

       "Where have you been all my life!"

       Tall, light brown hair, hazel-green eyes, and a dimple on his right cheek below an oval dark birthmark. He smiles all the while and the dimple remains etched there.

       "Take my hand, Take my whole life too..." he sings too in a velvety baritone voice extending his hand to me.

       I take it. It's firm and warm around my own.

       We dance, and dance...and dance.

       People, sounds and things began to dissolve away, somewhere in the distance, a piece at a time. Till only Michael and I remained--floating, shimmying, gyrating.

       An eternity later, he took me to his place, an apartment on 121st Street. He made love to me entirely and tenderly through the night, and before morning, I had discovered that Michael Karras from Athens and I were indisputably in love.

       He had been attentive, conferring and romantic.

       His English was reproachless down to the accent. He used his Yale diction with confidence and demure. His undergraduate work at Yale had earned him that, plus a degree in engineering. He switched to Business Management and Columbia two years later, after realizing that technology and New England were stymieing him with their narrowness and rigid perspective. He believed himself a liberal and as such needed elbow room and deftly-applied egalitarianism to flex his stifling yuppie muscles. He ventured to search for both in New York City, where I had met him, two years later married him, and wended my life onto a different track, Michael's.

       California in the '70s proffered new horizons, vanguarding where the City waded behind. High-tech and business was the dynamic combination, and Silicon Valley cleared brave new paths for corporate temperaments on their way to solid-state Valhalla, Inc.

       Meanwhile, things in my life were nudged aside. Each year came, ripened, and passed. And I had let the spring of my life while away, resigned to the fact that what I loved most, and truly wanted, I could never have.

       But irony made concessions.

       It was a kind of magic.

       When I entered the classroom the world outside shut off. The basement of my brain levitated and expanded. Things couldn't go wrong. Things didn't.

       It was a tug-o-war: The students yanked to extract knowledge out of me, I in turn pulled and lugged to elicit from them its accurate use. They would test me, sometimes ruthlessly, on minute grammatical points.

       "Why plain and not full infinitive, Ms. McClorry?"

       "After what words can we use both gerund and infinitive, Ms. McClorry?"

       I would explain, and quickly sortie challenging them for examples. They would respond with, quivering hands--all wanting to be favoured first--and I'd point, listen, point swiftly to one, and the other, then another, till both sides, overcome by exhilaration, would break out into booming laughter and enthusiastic commentary. The miracle by then had already taken place. They had learned.

       There were times though when the experience was unnerving and no way to explain certain words or expressions. The class would get restless; I'd lose them and become disappointed in myself and I'd wish that they had spent some of their taffy-chewing, liquorice-sucking years in Norwalk, Conn. of the U.S.A. They'd know then what squirrel was and how acorns felt to the touch, whiff the pungent fragrance of dried and wet leaves burning in autumn below towering oaks with rainbows for foliage. They'd savour the crisp, pristine scent of coming spring, listen to the robbin call and the chirrup of the bluejay, and almost hear the rich grass growing. Audiovisual aids simply could not do as much.

       The bell signalled the end of the school day. I shrugged. Squirrel and acorn can wait their turn to be discovered, after infinitive and gerund, I had decided earlier that evening, and looked at more shards in my life.

       When we had moved to California Michael and I had a logical discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of an abortion. He had drawn up a sheet with the pros and cons listed separately on it. The pros won. He died eighteen years later with cancer of the lymphoid glands, and I could not conceive any more babies.

       To my surprise, there hadn't been much pain then on either side. He got weaker by the week, and I stronger.

       I was by him that night three years ago when he asked for yogurt. I passed two shallow spoonfuls into his mouth. He swallowed, rested his head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling. He didn't rave or moan or whimper. He just never stopped staring at the off-white ceiling.

       I couldn't imagine death so simple. There was no ceremony or melodrama, only a person that had just then died.

       Since Michael's passing away I drilled in keeping busy. I found old friends, stopped smoking, and started reading again. There was an amalgam of thoughts and emotions bottle-necking inside.

       Things like notions about getting helplessly caught in the gears of propriety, and being unable to control any longer your choices. Was that the reason Michael had died? Had he lost track, somewhere along the way, of his priorities? Atrophied his alternatives? Was he sucked up by a depleted ego, empty because the preoccupations of parenthood were not there?

       And where was I to buttress him all the while it was transpiring? Had he wanted a divorce all along and didn't say so? Was my inaction what ate him up?

       I'll never know.

       More of me listened to Alison, Trudy and Beth than contributed. I wanted to end my mourning, rejoin the crowd and belong. I sought acceptance for what I was, a woman who had recently lost her husband and could not have children.

       I'm sore, I admitted to myself, and stick out like a sore thumb. I can't live down my attitude, live up to my role, and make best with a past that's gone.

       Yet, with each day that passed, I wished a sort of confrontation. Someone to go in there, unmask the throbbing gash and lay the grief open. But all, Beth even, widowed two years, fell back with the others. "Loanne," she had said, "it'll drive you up the wall if you let it. Now's the time to do the hardest thing: what you always wanted to, but couldn't."

       So, I severed my ties, did not touch a cigarette, and developed a good size library. The books had told me that Clearmont, California was only a tiny piece of the world.

       Athens had just about the climate of Clearemont, but not so desert-like. The quakes were fewer, and the seas less restless. Aegean shores, sky and water fringed my Attica enclave.

       I realized as I attempted to sift my emotions into a semblance of ordered thoughts, and prepared to leave school that evening that my silent onlooker standing by the door had no intention of leaving.

       I brightened, "Stavro."

       The boy came up to my shoulders. Skinny but no push-over. Some of the others in his class towered a good foot, and more, over him. When provoked he'd start swinging first and then look, usually up, at his contender.

       But overriding the I'm-no-soft-touch demeanour was a quality, nesting where it was well protected: a sensitivity which, finding no response, was mutating into discontent and aggression. The chestnut pools of his eyes were perpetually ruffled by a look of distress and chagrin. When I had approached him for the first time he sensed, as children can do, my own malaise and taken to me.

       Between sessions he would often come early to class, as he came today, approach while I put the assignment on the board, and coyly stand near by. I'd smile and show pleased at his company. He'd grin a little, pretend to wait for me to finish, and when the other kids started coming, stroll to his desk and moseyly sit.

       "Today we'll read a poem. This poem speaks about courage and hope. It is about people who, through struggle and faith, achieve their very own, seemingly impossible, dreams. Dreams that appear to us, at first sight, difficult to hold on to as soap-bubbles and quicksilver..."

       "What can I do for you, Stavro?" my attention returned to the waiting boy.

       He faltered, "I lost it."

       I got up, walked to him, and put a gentle hand on his shoulder. "What did you lose?"

       Minding around for others, "The paper with the poem."

       "Have you now?"

       He delivered a single nod. Stavro was not one for speaking much, his eyes told all.

       "Next session I'll have a copy for you," I managed to put in before he made a little bow with his head, about faced, and scooted out of the office.

        `My kids' were graduating in June. It was already the end of March. Soon, I would have to relinquish my flock from the auspices of my wing. Kids I taught and parented for three years, I would not look upon again, never to chide or commend, reprove or praise, soar jubilantly to magiclands of learning or pluck pensively at the subtle verse of Cushing.

       Being a private enterprise, the language school had to maintain a high academic standard and enrolment. Whereas in a public school attendance was compulsory, independent of teacher and curriculum quality, here it was competitive. A dissatisfied parent could withdraw his child at any time.

       Thus, Loanna McClorry (along with my new life) was tentatively initiated into the earthy and onerous nature of enterprising academia.

       "Our institution lies between Scilla and Charibdis, Ms McClorry," Niko had said, standing over a cluttered rose-wood desk at my time of interview, three years before.

       He was a tall, graceful man with unsettled eyes and eternally a lit cigarette between his fingers. His manner was refined and proud, taking infinite pains not to offend.

       "Our students must be taught discipline softly. English, French, Italian, etc., is of secondary role, Ms McClorry. We have to keep our students here, in the school, then teach them the language of their choosing. It is our primary job therefore, to mould the young people into participants, do it by entertaining, enchanting--captivating them."

       When he spoke he looked into me, not at me. I had to really dig my nail into my palm to severe the spell. The tenure of the textured low tone, the overlaying raspiness of a chain-smoker's voice, the exacting Swiss-precision of intonation and speckles Queen's-English inflection vaunted contention with the best of Shakespearean champions. He wasn't merely speaking, he was orating from his heart of hearts. And I loved every second.

       Stavro gone, I retrieved my gabardine and walked down the long corridor for the main lobby. As usual, clusters of children, tiny tidy ones to tall tousled-hair ones, engulfed me in their passing, smiling and waiving or plodding and moping around with no visible acknowledgement of my presence, vacuum and unresolve on their adolescent faces. My heart flitted. I forced myself to loosen up. Teaching would wear me down to the bone by day's end. I would forget all else during sessions. Fifteen to twenty-five souls often hung from my lips, my next articulation, gesture, the light in my eye.

       "Precious babes..." suddenly I was overwhelmed.

       I donned a transparent plastic hood over dense and ample red hair and walked out of Zaphyriou Language School into a rainy, cool night.

       The letters from Phil made an effort to be informative and customary. First, he wrote the details and chit-chat about his recent divorce, and about mother and friends. Then, my brother touched the subject of being concerned and questioned my motives for absconding myself to live and work halfway around the world.

       "Couldn't you have chosen," he wrote, "a closer place, like Mexico or Canada? There, at least, we could visit you."

       Yeah, I nodded, like that one, and only, time you came to visit Michael at the hospital--in the nine months he'd been sick, once you stood by my side.

       In his own way my brother wanted to remind me how I had abandoned him for a second time.

       Phil's coming to the world seemed to be one: to inhibit my life and sap on the last of my strength. In our youth, having been nearer his age, I could identify more readily with his puerile fears and whimsies.

       We had shared the second bedroom, our beds were side-by-side. He would reach across and seek my hand to hold his own till late deep night. My appendage would grow numb from inactivity and the twisted position. But alas, my slightest movement would prompt Phil to cling to me even more.

       "I'm not going anywhere, Phil," I would whisper.

       He'd make inarticulate sounds and return to slumberland.

       Awake, with eyes open in the dark, I would fantasize what our lives would have been like had father lived on.

       Joe McLorry had been tall and lean with curly light-brown hair. My favourite pass time was to play with the curls. I'd pull them to the side, let go and watch them bound back like little watch springs. His eyes, amidst brown and gold freckles, would squint and smile then. Phil's eyes were flecked like that. But Phil's were not smiling eyes. They were round and wounded. My mother's. I had my father's look and his thin sinewy body.

       Phil was three years my younger. When he was in kindergarten I would often be called from my classroom to go to his because he wouldn't stop crying. When he'd see me coming he'd rush to me. With smeared tears and runny nose he'd implore, "Let's leave Annie--I want to go home!"

       I empathized with my brother, sought to soothe him disregarding my own ache. The construction accident had left us paternal orphans. Phil was the surviving male of the family and was attended by both of us. Now he was the man in the family, the only male McLorry. Nothing must hurt him.

       "Loanne," my mother, garbed in black, said, "I missed looking after your father. It won't be the same with Phil, and I want your help."

       I became a second mother. I put aside my own grief to embrace my mother's and immersed myself in Phil's upbringing.

       I looked after him at school. Woke him in the mornings, helped him dress and taught him how to button up his shirt without leaving extra holes or buttons. I supervised his washing up and would make sure he aimed truly at the toilet. I'd serve our breakfast while our mother fixed herself up for work. Tidy up our room quickly, put the dished in the sink, wipe the table clean, and hold his hand at night when sleep brought with it goblins and horrors.

       The years passed slowly with my chores being ample. Phil grew to be eight, ten, fourteen.

       "Loanne, Phil'll be sleeping on the living-room sofa," my mom told me one morning, "and you'll be locking your door nights. Your brother has taken to walking in his sleep--and he's at that age...."

       I understood.

       But Phil had not. He resented it. He made me feel guilty at every chance he got. And I could never bring myself to explain to him why we had had to separate.

       When I arrived home that night, I found Phil's letter and, slipped under my door, a note.

       "Please come," the note said, "Alcyone at eleven tonight. It is important that I speak to you and I haven't been able to reach you by phone."

       The signature was Niko's.

       Nicholaos Zaphiriou was a competent administrator not by formal training but through insight and good sense. The first law with working with people, particularly children, was an active knowledge of the underlying psychology, the kind forged by thirty years exposure to the soul-bearing travail of classroom teaching. He had not simply survived it, he had cultivated upon it.

       "They are our little hopes, Loanne." We had been lying side-by-side in my bedroom, at the end of my first school year. "I see more to these young, wound up people than just cute by-products of wedlock. They are our singular future. I look at teaching as the opportunity to have a say in that. Teach them about our mistakes. Make them aware civilization cannot endure another round of the same."

       He was a concerned lover and a gentleman. As some put their faith in politics or technology, Nick placed his on the young, rallied on their dreams and imagination.

       As I got to know him better, I compared him to Michael. Michael was quiet when it came to the subject of children. The aim in his life had been the day-to-day present and its avail to outwit the competitor, witness his withdrawal or demise, and gain from it.

       Nick, on the other hand, had hit upon a harmony in elements. He apprized his business, but parallel, undertook to sculpt character and inculcate reforms. Where Michael would ignore, perhaps even slight, this kind of challenge, Nick would involve himself in it.

       I began once more in my life to evolve. Although in my forties, I was surprised again at the power of influence an affair can have. I needed to revive principles that I had, at some point, put aside to replace with Michael's own. Surprised at being aspired to Niko's time-honoured, tested axioms. Axioms which sought to brake the rat-race enough to think choices through instead of sublimately react to them.

       "I did not marry because," Niko said, "I could not serve two mistresses." So he chose the children.

       "Fifteen thousand have graduated since I opened my school. Enough to populate a small city. With most of my pupils I have spent six or more years. What do you think of this investment? Every time they utter a snipped in English, French and German they will recall, too, the other things."

       I knew what `other things'. Respect to self, honour to parents, loyalty to a friend, and trust in dreams.

       "A child must have dreams, otherwise it does not grow up, it withers, Loanne."

       "And we, Niko, who give love and dreams unreservedly--what remains for us?"

       "The comfort," he replied.

       "The comfort?" I asked the man in my bed.

       "Yes. The comfort of knowledge: to fear less because you know more."

       "And ourselves?"

       He had turned and faced me. "We have reserves, Loanne. What we give is surplus that weighs us down. We are teachers because we love best giving little bits of ourselves."

       I blinked twice, the randevous with Niko.

       My watch had said ten-thirty.

       The shower was quick, but it revitalized me, lifting some of the day's fatigue. It took seven more minutes to fix my face. I slipped into a dark beige overalls suit, threw the black gabardine over my shoulders, and grabbed an umbrella. It was ten-fifty. I scuttled.

       Niko rose when I came to his table. He seemed to me a might unsteady, but it could have been my imagination. The silver rimmed glasses he wore were deceiving. There was too much reflection from the small chandelier just over them.

       I couldn't puzzle out what this was all about. Alcyone cafe was a regular for the school staff, two blocks away. Friday nights we would gather there, compare notes and chat on the week that past. Tonight, a Tuesday, I saw none of the familiar crew. Across from me a man I had made love with dozens of times, and just might be beginning to love, sat.

       "Please, what will you have?" he spoke, his tone dithered.

       "Coffee," I told the waiter, "milk, no sugar."

       "You have Stavro in one of your classes, Stavro Vergis?"

       "Yes--what's wrong?"

       "Nothing serious, I don't think. He ran away. His mother called the school." He took a sip of his wine. "You expected something wrong?"

       "I don't know," I tried to assimilate what had just been told to me. "He was an unhappy child. I tried to see why--"

       "It is the reason I wanted to see you. The sooner the better."

       "You did right, but what can I do?"

       "Loanne, the boy had spoken of you often to his mother. He thinks highly of you. A boy his age may even be infatuated with his teacher." His face from sombre relaxed, "I know I am," he put in, all too unexpectedly, and my heart flittered a second time that day.

       "Stavro's father, it seems, got restless..." he paused mid-sentence, and I thought: that's all you are, Niko, infatuated. And we both know it. "...the boy may try to contact you, his mother seems to expect."

       "I see," I managed. Then, "It's a nice thing you've said, Niko--you know, the other thing."

       The downpour did not let down. I made my way back to the apartment. The black asphalt of the night streets danced glimmering to the down beat rhythm of the rain. There were passers-by scampering through the torrent.

       "Restless," I heard myself scoff and splashed vehemently into a puddle. Sophistication be damned--the father got itchy soles, upped and beat feet. Stavro's old man, his idol, simply left home, at break of dawn, a year ago, because he got tired of it all. The thought enraged me, and even the wet cold didn't prevent my damp face from flaring. Stavro worshipped him, and the sonofabitch traded him in for another woman. How can people do it? To children!

       I blinked and the past fell away, back to where it had come from.

       Stavros stood in front of me wrapped up in the mauve terry cloth bathrobe, several sizes too big for his petite build. His hair was neatly combed and the look of a clean and manageable little young man was upon him once again. My gaze and a rueful smile lingered on him.

       He beamed at me. I saw acknowledgment there.

       I would trade them all. All the men in my bleak, sodden life for this boy, this child, who wandered soggy and gloomy streets of night to find me. Would forfeit--had I any--Byzantium treasure troves to have him as my own.

       Instead, I said, "Do you remember the poem, Stavro?"

       "A little."

       "The title?"

       He furrowed an eye. "`Don't Quit'."

       "Do you want to quit loving people because something came in the way?"

       He stared. Smile diminishing.

       "Your mom needs you now, more than ever. Do you want to quit on her, Stavro?"

       He said nothing, but looked at the phone.

       I nodded.

       He walked to it, picked up the headpiece and began to dial. "I love you too, Ms McLorry," his voice was bearly audible.

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