Sophomores

by Sean Desmond

  Oglesby put away his grade book and, with a tap of the golf club on both shoulders, anointed each of the candidates.

  “Repeat after me: ‘To think, analyze and invent are not anomalous acts, but the normal respiration of the intelligence . . . ’”

  Dan mouthed along, wondering what Oglesby’s questions would be. He entered a weird hyper zone where he tried to think of everything at once and couldn’t focus on anything.

  “‘Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future I will be.’”

  Oglesby then saluted the four candidates, each of whom stood up a little straighter, throwing his shoulders back in his Jesuit blue blazer.

  “Gentlemen, as you know, the Norwegian rat is more than just an A student. The Norwegian rat realizes that life is a labyrinth but finds the way. There have been years when I have taught a whole class of Rattus rattus—all of them falling for traps. Remember rule number seven: reading is paying attention. It’s time for the final questions.”

  “You guys are screwed,” Rick said in a stage whisper. The class giggled. Oglesby did not crack a smile.

  “Let’s start with Mr. Boudreaux. What street is named for the mad general of the Revolutionary War in The Catcher in the Rye?”

  Teddy plopped his arm on top of his head as if to slap the answer out of his skull. After five long seconds, he shook his head. Flanagan shot his hand up.

  “It’s too late for you, Mr. Flanagan. And my condolences, Mr. Boudreaux. You may return to your seat.”

  Teddy Boudreaux went from dejection to rage in two steps—kicking his chair over, to the delight of the whole class.

  “Oh boy, Boudreaux’s going full Hulk on us.” Rick gritted his teeth in fake rage.

  “Screw you, Dowlearn,” Teddy spat back.

  “Gentlemen . . .” Oglesby pointed with his teaching stick for Teddy to pick up his chair and cool it.

  “Sit down, clown, this ain’t no circus,” Rick added.

  Teddy planted his chair upright in the blue carpet and slumped in the seat. Oglesby turned away from this nonsense, the class still chittering with laughter at the tantrum.

  “Mr. O’Donnell?”

  “Ready, sir.”

  “Then tell me who supposedly dies at the Battle of Shrewsbury.”

  “Hotspur!” Sticky blurted out with a relieved, if raspy, certainty.

  Almost every one of the sophomores nodded his head in agreement. Trick question, Dan thought.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. O’Donnell, that is incorrect.”

  “What?” Sticky threw his hands in the air.

  “No, that’s right!” Rob agreed.

  “Silence, gentlemen.” Oglesby struck the teacher’s desk with a monstrous thwack. “The running commentary ends now. The Norwegian rat must smell the trap. Mr. Gilchrist, are you ready for your question?”

  Sticky shuffled back to his seat while Chad Gilchrist tucked his Alex Van Halen behind his ears and nodded.

  “What is Boo Radley’s first name?”

  Gilchrist lit up like he had it.

  “Nathan.”

  Oglesby lowered his eyes and shook his head. “I’m afraid that’s his brother.”

  Dan watched Chad immolate on the wrong answer. He did know it but had misspoken, somehow the answer getting tripped on its way to his tongue. I’m gonna be sick. Dan felt truly awful, partly for Gilchrist’s mistake but more so that it was now his turn.

  “Mr. Malone, are you ready?” Oglesby barked at him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What country awards Gatsby a medal during the war?”

  Dan shot Rick a look. Rick caught it and grinned with a nod, then turned to Rob, who was halfway out of his chair, ready to high five. Rob elbowed Stick, who grudged out a smile. His crew knew—I’ve got this.

  “Montenegro.”

  “That’s not fair!” Teddy Boudreaux swiped the pen, journal, and papers off his desk. “He got the question from the book we just read.”

  It was a total jackass meltdown. Oglesby turned to address this latest hissy fit. But before his teacher could say anything, Dan grabbed the moment back.

  “General Anthony Wayne, Falstaff pretended to die at the Battle of Shrewsbury, and Arthur. Arthur ‘Boo’ Radley.”

  Oglesby leaned back on his teaching stick, closed his eyes, and nodded. Rick pumped his fist. The period bell tolled. Jay Blaylock woke up as a red-faced Teddy Boudreaux stormed past him to the jeers of an entire class.

  And Oglesby picked up a brown rubber rat off the desk and handed it to Dan.

  * * *

  Just after Pat’s trip to the hospital, in a surge of productive despair, Anne Malone scheduled her own physical checkup. She was healthy as a mare, but the doctor, an icy-handed Baylor grad named Carlson, recommended an annual breast X-ray. He called it a mammogram, which made Anne picture some sort of lactating rodent turned helpless on its side by its mewling litter. Nonetheless, she agreed, and Dr. Carlson’s office made her a separate appointment at a hospital for this.

  What the good doctor didn’t tell her was this procedure literally put her tit in a wringer while a technician lowered an eerie soulless lens that looked like HAL in 2001. It hurt like hell, but the nurse complimented Anne for precaution and prevention. “Early detection” was the optimistic way to say it, but what Anne really thought was: With Pat falling apart you would be truly cursed and miserable if you came down with cancer. You deserve to be sick. Which wasn’t so much Munchausen syndrome as how miserable Irish people think.

  Anne considered her woes as she put her bra back on. And as she got ready to leave, another thought occurred to her: You’re in Presbyterian Hospital. So is Margaret Raleigh.

  The trial had ended seven weeks ago that Friday. Anne had held out for three votes of eleven to one, but then five thirty pushed to six thirty, and the bailiff came back in and announced that the sequester hotel was a Days Inn in Grand Prairie. Everyone was pissed at her stubbornness, and Anne realized she didn’t have a chance in hell of changing anyone’s mind, so she asked that dickhead dentist who was their foreman for one more vote so they could all go home.

  You were weak. You relented. She watched Standing Raleigh hug his smarmy lawyer and Elmer Gantry his way right out of the courtroom. She was ushered in silence with the other jurors to a freight elevator and out the back of the Crowley building. Down a cinder-block hall, they were joined by court officers and clerical staff, everyone scurrying to their cars. Anne ferried the Zephyr around the tight turns of the stygian parking lot, then out into the quivering evening light of Commerce Street, past the media Hooverville, past the protesters who were right for the wrong reasons, across the trickling ditch of the Trinity River, under the roaring Stemmons overpass, looping past the cenotaphless south end of Dealey Plaza, and then, missing several turns for uptown, she pulled over in downtown traffic and retched with sobs for failing Peggy Raleigh.

  For the first few days after the trial, Anne tried to shore up her mental defenses by blaming the police and district attorney. There was some truth to that—because Peggy survived the attack, the Dallas PD never worked the case like a homicide, which bereft the D.A. of evidence, and left Anne with a shaky timeline and Standing Raleigh’s guilty conscience.

  The Times Herald and Morning News chummed the waters with competing outrage. A few days later it was reported that Lucy Goodfellow had fled town and checked into a holistic healing center in some godforsaken part of California. Then Standing Raleigh disappeared as well, his children abandoned to the custody of Peggy’s parents, which left even more lurid unease over the verdict. He later turned up in prison ministry in a different godforsaken part of California. A couple of reporters had called Anne, but marooned in her guilt about the trial, she refused to comment. That left the accounts of the deliberation to the foreman, Ferris, who blathered about the jury being “
unified” and the case against the reverend being “unsatisfying,” and made it sound like he alone had averted some giant miscarriage of justice. This became the driving force behind Anne’s suspicions, and after the immediate weariness of the whole ordeal wore off, she did discover something. There were a lot of Ferris clans in Dallas. A lot of Caruthers too—dating all the way to the early days of the Republic of Texas. Anne returned to the back catalog of United Methodist Reporter in Bridwell Library and found that before Standing Raleigh was the pastor at First United, he had been assistant pastor at Highland Park UMC—where Mark Ferris’s father, also a DDS, was chair of the finance committee. Raleigh had also served as outreach coordinator at Ridgewood UMC, a church near White Rock Lake, basically built by the Caruthers family.

  Anne left her examination room and walked down the hall to the information desk. She then turned on her heel before reaching the nurses’ station—asking for Peggy point-blank would raise suspicion. She located the directory by the elevator bank. Post Trauma. Recovery. Hospice. The last one sounded right, and Anne took the elevator to the third floor. From there a long hallway led her through two sets of double doors into an older, prewar wing of the hospital. The rooms were larger, with multiple beds in each, like a ward in a TB sanitarium. A nurse walked past with a handful of linens.

  “May I help you?” She was young, with half-lidded eyes, maybe not a nurse, but more of a housekeeper.

  “I was told Margaret Raleigh was down this hall.” Anne tried to sound like she had every right to be there.

  “Yes, ma’am, last here on the right.” The maid walked her there. Anne followed and smiled a thank-you. She peeked through the porthole window in the door. There were other beds in the room but only one patient. Peggy lay there, her head and neck wrenched to the right on the pillow. Her nose and mouth were covered by a mask and tubing. There was no guard, no attendant. The monitors were muted. The only sound came from the bellows of the respirator.

  The housekeeper disappeared down the hall, and Anne stepped into the room. The air was thick and stale, smelling of disinfectant. She noticed Peggy’s arms first, atrophied and bowed from disuse. Her hair was darker, overgrown compared to earlier pictures from the paper and the trial. The machine forced her to breathe slowly, in a mechanically labored way, and Anne studied her chest as it heaved and sank. An old bouquet of carnations lay drying out on the windowsill. Anne sat down in the drab green hospital chair. No more marks on her throat. Those apparently had healed.

  Anne started to pray. She first said a Hail Mary. Then an Our Father. She was about to backtrack to an Apostles’ Creed and start a decade of the rosary, just like Sister Michael had taught her at Peter and Paul’s. What was the first Sorrowful Mystery? She had forgotten. All these years later she remembered so few prayers.

  And then Peggy opened her eyes.

  Or rather they swung open, like a doll’s, and then closed. Her whole body shivered. Then her eyes moved under the eyelids like she was dreaming and her shoulders arched and contorted. Anne sat back unsure, confused. Peggy’s eyes opened again and stared right at her. Is she seeing me? Peggy’s neck spasmed and her eyebrows twitched and she was coughing, a dry hack and gasp muffled by the intubation, her head jerking against the pillow. And despite her eyes’ being open, and blinking with each cough, it felt to Anne as if Peggy were looking straight through her. Anne stood up and reached over, placing her hand over Peggy’s balled fist. Is she there? Is she scared? Anne couldn’t tell. But they stared at each other as Peggy’s dream seemed to pass, and what was coiled and taut unraveled, and she sank back into the hospital bed, closing her eyes.

  Is she seeing him?

  Forced to relive that night again and again?

  Alone.

  Anne withdrew her hand. She too was agonized and alone. And like Peggy, pulled by this invisible string of grief. Anne bowed her chin down toward Peggy, almost touching her forehead.

  “Tell me,” she whispered.

  * * *

  Pat Malone packed two brown hard-case Touristers, one filled with his “monkey suits,” the other with everything he had scrounged from American in terms of insurance underwriting, applied actuarial science, and employee benefits. Colonel Frank Borman had been decommissioned, but the offer from Eastern stood. In fact, Pat was desperately needed. The new CEO, another union-busting, deregulating hard-ass who “liked analysis,” had locked out the mechanics in the IAM. That triggered sympathy strikes from the pilots and the flight attendants. The strikes would end in either a settlement—Pat’s job was to threshold the numbers for negotiations—or bankruptcy protection, in which case Pat would have to rewrite the benefits handbook anyway.

  And so he was packing, and flying out for Miami that evening.

  On top of his dopp kit, Pat placed the AA Big Book and The Little Red Book. Since he walked out of the emergency room it had been eleven days and he had gone to two meetings. The first was at St. Monica’s and was all fidgety testimonials and one-liners from jaundiced Knights of Columbus types. It was vaguely familiar in a penitential Catholic way that made Pat both sluggish and suspicious: Welcome to the island of one-armed men, where we sit around and tell stories about how we lost our arms in the shipwreck.

  The second meeting was held at a small Lutheran church in Carrollton, where a mastiff-looking auto mechanic named Herbie came up to him and handed him both books. There was still a jittery one-eye-on-the-door quality to the discussion, but the tone was upbeat with a thank-God-for-small-favors humility. Pat raised his hand for under thirty days but didn’t share. He just studied the banners for the twelve steps and twelve traditions, and read a few pages in the Big Book. The good Bill W. seemed to be describing men like Pat’s father—unaware and antic salesmen types stuck in Eugene O’Neill plays. And while the meetings didn’t hurt, he was still too ashamed and depressed to see their value or seek fellowship. Pat knew he was an alcoholic, he knew the booze had broken him, but he was stuck somewhere between abstinence and sobriety. He had cravings every hour of the day, but once the initial withdrawal was over, half of his conditions from the MS improved. He felt better physically, but his thinking was a fog of aggravation. Even packing seemed overwhelming. This new job is what I need. Good to have a purpose. A routine. A way to provide. He had to get away from Anne, who was driving him to drink. He had to get better for Dan. The drinking had led to problems Pat couldn’t fathom—For Christ’s sake, I’m deserting my family—but with stubborn, unyielding dignity he would show his son what it meant to be a man.

  * * *

  Dan Malone hunched over the light box in the office of The Roundup, brooding with impatience. The graduation edition was running late to the printer as Father Dallanach sat on the layout boards. Dan’s father was flying out in four hours, and there was no good reason for the holdup. Final sign-off was all that was standing between Dan and summer, and he was sure Dallanach just needed to be goosed. He marched over to the closet that served as the darkroom and knocked. The fussbucket Father Argerlich, the paper’s publisher and moderator, was hiding inside.

  “In development. What?”

  “It’s Dan, Father, can I come in?”

  Dan heard the blackout curtain pull back and the door unlock. He stepped in to find the tubby priest scowling under the red lights.

  “Since you’re here, help me with this roll for the alumni newsletter.”

  Dan picked up the tongs and moved the eight-by-tens of the baseball playoffs against Bishop Lynch from stop to fixer.

  “Any word from Father Dallanach?”

  “About?” The oblivious Argerlich—twenty questions every goddamn time.

  “The final issue—are we clear to print?”

  “Ah. I saw him this morning in the residence.” Popping his glasses onto his pate, Argerlich stooped over a contact sheet and squinted through a loupe. “He didn’t make any promises.”

  “Okay, should we check on it?
”

  “I’m busy in here.”

  “Should we call the printer and get a time frame?”

  “Patience, Malone. Come back when I’m done.”

  “Father, it’s the last day of school. I’m not trying to come back. I’m trying to go home.”

  “And I’m trying to develop film. Give me an hour and we’ll go up to the principal’s office together. Pull the drapes behind you.”

  Dan ripped the curtain closed and sealed Cardinal Kodak back in his vampire vault. What a pain in the ass. He should have just gone directly to Dallanach, who would probably have blessed it with the incense of a Benson & Hedges and been done.

  Looking to kill valuable time, Dan left the Roundup office and wandered down the Bellarmine hallway to the counselors’ wing. There he found Mr. Oglesby tapping with his stick Keisaku while seated at his typewriter.

  “Malone, still here?”

  “I can’t get the Society of Jesus to close the graduation issue.”

  “The greater glory of God preoccupies us all. Come in. For an honored rodent, you look distraught.”

  Dan plopped into the low-slung creamsicle-colored chair across from his teacher’s desk. In the corner, he noticed the umbrella stand that held all of Oglesby’s other teaching sticks. He knew them all now, and smiled at each lesson and lecture they pointed to. Like the moods of the poet, Dan thought, or the magician.

  “Yeah, I have to get out of here soon,” he began, and then the following tumbled out: “My dad is leaving.”