Missing Miss Murphy, still.

The town where I grew up was filled with Displaced Persons. Long before I was born, a basic strain of Anglo-Saxon Americans had dominated the town's undistinguished landscape, and to them it owed its imposing public library, its several large stone Protestant churches, and its active chapter of the D.A.R. But in the years following the Great Depression, Italian, Swedish, and Irish farmers moved a few miles into the town to take shift jobs in the factories. And in the decade or so after World War II, Eastern European people displaced by war, starvation, and the reapportioning of borders and of governments flowed like a steady grey river into the rundown neighborhoods around the factories. There, under the scrutiny of my father (who was a farmer and a tool-and-dye maker), sunken-eyed men in thick work pants took their places on the assembly line.

The years that saw this migration also saw the famous postwar baby boom, into the midst of which I was born. Every house on our street had five or seven or nine children. Kids spilled out onto the porches of triple deckers to play jacks, kids rode scooters on sidewalks, kids jumped rope and flipped baseball cards, kids ran between lines of laundry, between rows and rows of freshly boiled diapers.

I spent the next two years in baby boom chaos, crowding every morning onto a yellow school bus that reeked of balogna sandwiches and wet wool, and then bumping along for what seemed an eternity in the bedlam of the bus--sneakers and pencil boxes and whatnot flying through the riotous air. School itself lasted exactly one-and-a-half hours. Sixty children squeezed into public schoolrooms meant for twenty-five. Every single day, in first grade, we colored in circles and squares until it was time to get back into the belly of the yellow bus. That kind of schedule was called "split sessions"--five shifts of children used each classroom each day.

And then, when I was seven, a miracle occurred. Lots of new school buildings went up. On the first day of second grade, I walked into a brand-new classroom, fresh and gleaming, with huge windows and blond wood furniture.

There were sixteen children in Miss Josephine Murphy's second grade, and on the very first day of school she invited me to come and sit beside her at her desk, where she immediately taught me how to read. "This," she said, choosing letters from a small movable alphabet, "spells horse. And if you change this letter, it spells house." By the next day, I could read a whole book, about a girl named Susan who had a pet rabbit.

Miss Murphy wore dark grey serge suits and dark grey hair pulled back into a bun. By the end of each day her hair would be hanging in strands about her shoulders and her cheeks would be bright pink. She would personally excuse the whole class from gym so that we could go into the woods behind the school and run in the autumn leaves.

Miss Murphy taught us everything. She taught us which foods we should eat, and how we should sit, and how we should be in bed each night by 7:30. She taught us how to tell time, and how to walk like a flock of ducks and how to recite "Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream." She sang to us arias from Italian operas, and composed a special song just for our class, to be performed by us for the whole school and even for some policemen at a safety day assembly. I can still sing that song, thirty-seven years later--its theme was the importance of looking both ways before crossing the street.

Two days before Christmas, Miss Murphy's classroom was paid a special visit by Santa Claus. Santa walked among our desks, giving each of us a candy cane and a popcom ball tied up with red or green cellophane. To the whole class Santa presented a large wrapped box. Who would be chosen to come forward and open it? My heart pounded with yearning. Oh please, please let it be me ! Miss Murphy' s knuckle tapped me smartly on the head--"Miss Peggy to the front and open the present that Santa brought to the whole class !" I so wanted to be, I just had to be, and now I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was, Miss Murphy' s favorite. I tore the paper from the gift. It was a wooden ice cream maker with a hand crank.

As the class was filing to the coat room, popcorn balls crinkling, to put on their snowsuits for the long trek home toward Christmas eve, Miss Murphy beckoned me to her desk, the desk where I had learned to read a few months before. She handed me a small, slim package in silver wrapping. "Go ahead, open it," she said. I opened the present: it was an orange mechanical pencil. "I hope you'll use it to write your first book," she said.

"My teacher loves me," sang my heart, all through the snowy winter. In January Miss Murphy made a huge Chart of Children' s Virtues and hung it in the back of the classroom. For every marvelous act that any child performed, she would put a red check mark next to his or her name. For hair that was especially shiny and wellcombed, for hands that stayed nicely folded on top of a child's desk, for letters printed with exquisite neatness on a line, for arithmetic flawlessly figured, for a poem recited by heart, for a show and tell well-delivered; for any of these and other virtues, Miss Murphy rewarded the good child with her sure, firm, stylish, red check mark. A few weeks after the chart went up, I had more red checks than anyone. I was teacher's pet ! On Saint Patrick' s Day, late in the afternoon, as delicious green ice cream was being scooped and handed about to the children, Mr. Haggerry, the principal, knocked loudly on the door. Miss Murphy, her hair wild and her cheeks ablaze, jumped a mile and dropped a blob of ice cream on the floor. I stared at it, horror-struck but hungry for it. "Here is a new second-grader," said Mr. Haggerty. "Class, this little boy is named Yasha. Everyone say hello." Every eye was on the ice cream melting on the floor. I could tell by Miss Murphy' s sudden lack of composure that she had not expected either Mr. Haggerty or Yasha.

"Oh dear, we don't even have a desk for you! Well, just for today, you sit up in the front with me."

In alphabetical order we all received our ice cream cones, and were licking madly. I was crunching the waffle at the bottom of the cone just moistened with green melt-off, when the letter Z' s were finally served. I noticed from my seat in the front row-- where I was placed to accommodate my near-sightedness--that there was exactly one serving of ice cream left. Miss Murphy carefully scraped out the bucket and handed the last ice cream cone to Yasha. That meant she had none. "But you have none, Miss Murphy!" I pointed out to her. I looked balefully at the melted pool of ice cream on the floor. "Ah, but I get the best part," she said, "I get to lick the spoon." Yasha was a thin, pale boy with knotted blond hair and colorless lips. He stared for a moment at his cone, and then at the class, and from his position of authority at the teacher's big desk, he vomited.

The new boy must have been nearsighted too, because Miss Murphy put his desk right next to mine. "Now you help him, because he has missed a lot of school." I could not believe how dumb Yasha was. He could neither read nor write, his hair was a mess, and he spent almost every afternoon with his head resting upon his arms like a cabbage in a laundry pile, fast asleep. "He's sleeping in school!" I stage-whispered to Miss Murphy. "You just mind your own business, Miss Noseybody!" she responded. I was stung to the core. I spent as much time in the back of the room at the pencil sharpener as I could, trying to sort it out. Yasha did everything wrong and yet Miss Murphy was constantly singling him out for special treatment. One day as I stood grinding my pencil down to nothing at the pencil sharpener, my eyes fell on the Chart of Children's Virtues. After Yasha' s name there was a long string of firm red check marks. This was a child who frequently came late to school, who wet his pants, who knew no answers. He had more red check marks than I, teacher' s pet! My head pounding with outrage, I quickly decided to take justice into my own hands. I pressed myself almost flat against the Chart of Children's Virtues, and madly, and with a kind of moral abandon, ticked off a dozen or so check marks next to my own name. I ticked them in my childish hand, and in plain graphite, but tick I felt I must. Justice would prevail.

On Easter Monday there was a spelling bee. I won with "sauce." I won an Easter toy: a tiny yellow fur chick. As I bore my prize home that day, I spotted Yasha getting into Miss Murphys car. Suddenly the toy chick turned insignificant in my hands. He was riding in her car, in her beautiful grey car the same color as her beautiful grey suit. Where on earth could they be going! I walked my usual route in an agony of unrequited love and jealous grief.

That night at supper it was announced that Miss Murphy had brought a dirty little boy into the children's shoe store, where my brother worked after school. He said she appeared to be buying him shoes, and that there was a lollipop involved. I burst into tears at the supper table, and could not be consoled.

In May Miss Murphy strode to the back of the room and untacked the Chart of Children's Virtues from the wall. Inside my head I heard drum rolls. Her plan was to choose the most virtuous child, based on the number of red check marks. She would invite the winner home with her that night for a special dinner with her and her sister Bridget.

I could hardly breathe. Of course I would be chosen---over the past month I had surreptitiously added several scores of check marks to my name. What would we eat? Would there be cake? The joy was too intense.

The drum was still rolling when she announced that Yasha was the winner. In that schoolroom full of immigrant children, I seemed to have been the only one who had aspired--who had hoped--who had prayed--who had cheated--and my disappointment was all but unendurable.

Yasha slept that night at Miss Murphy' s house, and every night for a week or so after, and then he disappeared. He just failed to come to school one day, and his empty desk sat there next to me. Its emptiness relieved me and confused me.

Sometime after second grade was over and it was summer, my mother told me that a little DP boy named Yasha was in the tuberculosis sanatorium outside of town. His father had just died and now he was an orphan. My mother said we should all pray for him.

Ten years later I brought my orange mechanical pencil to college with me. That December my mother sent me a clipping from our hometown paper. It was Miss Josephine Murphy's obituary. She had died, age sixty-one, from cancer. She was survived by her sister.

As I sat in my college dormitory room, with snow falling in a dismal fashion outside my high grey windows, reading my mail, I thought of Miss Murphy dancing us all about the second grade room. And I thought of the noon whistle, and the factories, and all the human heads bowed in sorrow and dignity over their lost homes and their fullness of hope. And for the rest of that day I felt a little displaced myself.

PEGGY ELLSBERG teaches at Barnard College in New York City.