“Yes.” I had long since finished my paperwork and had been staring out the window at the lawn like it was the sea off Nantucket. I watched her maneuver into her desk, which was the largest and the closest to the window, and had a trio of potted ferns across the front that bobbed and trembled as she dropped her things on the blotter. She was thick in the arms and legs, muscular, with a matter-of-fact face. She looked about fifty. “We’re giving you the boys in Cottage 9,” she said. “Mrs. Minsky will give you their files.”
CHAPTER 5
There were twelve boys in Cottage 9, ranging in age from fourteen to sixteen. Down the spine of each binder file ran a typed label that gave the boy’s blood type and stated that he was or was not allergic to penicillin: a large YES or NO. On the first page of each file was a photo of the child, and underneath, a description of his body: his hair and eye and skin color, dark-skinned, yellow, olive, ruddy, freckled, fair, white. His height and weight, distinguishing marks. Keloid scars on left shoulder and back; burn marks on backs of both hands; puncture scarring on right cheek; acne scars on face and upper back. Race: black, mulatto, white, white ethnic, Spanish, Jewish, Oriental. I longed for the specificity blotted out by Spanish. How many Dominicans?
The room filled with caseworkers. A cheery young Puerto Rican woman, who had a diploma from the graduate program in social work at Hunter College framed on the bit of wall closest to her desk, took me to a supply closet and a huge set of taupe filing cabinets and explained all the documentation. Her name was Gladys. She pulled form after form in triplicate from cabinets and mail bins screwed to the wall. “These are every week,” she said, placing a paper gently on the stack in my hands at the end of each sentence. “These are every month. These are every quarter. These are only once every six months, good thing, ha ha! Because the first time I did one, it took me two days. You want to keep your old ones and copy over some of the information. And these are yearly. These are incident reports. Remember to keep copies! Because the review board can take up to six months to look at them and then they call you up with a question and you can hardly remember what happened! These are supply requests. These are external incident reports. These are police reports. These are missing child reports. These are injury reports. These are morning rounds. You won’t have to do those but once a month when you’re on call. These are evening rounds. These are behavior logs. These are leave logs. These are family visitation logs.”
“My goodness,” I said finally.
“You know what they say,” she said. “If it’s not documented, it didn’t happen.”
“Do they say that?”
“Mrs. Allen certainly does!” She walked back to her desk and I followed her. “You have to make sure you see each boy once a week. You’ll see them more often than that, but at least once a week you have to document it. Use the casework visit form. You say what you talked about, how they looked, whether they behaved or not. You talk to the family at least once a month. It can be on the telephone, but then you have to use the telephone form. If the boy is allowed to go home for visits, you have to inspect the home once every six months. That keeps you busy, with twelve boys! Request the train tickets ahead of time from Mrs. Minsky. She keeps a bundle in the reception desk.”
“How do you like it here?” I said.
She looked me over. I could see her deciding something, although whether it was about me or not, I wasn’t sure. She leaned forward. The other caseworkers and social workers were busy, and the room was filled with a buzz of low conversation, of drawers opening and closing on tight tracks, the casters of wheeled chairs squealing and spinning.
“Is this work political for you?” she said.
I often felt that because of my past work, I knew both too much and too little about politics: that my original naivete had been replaced wholesale and overnight by a congealed cynicism, which only grew thicker the more I read. I looked curiously at Gladys. “I don’t know,” I said.
“It is for me,” she said. “And that’s why I chose this place, and that’s also why it drives me crazy.”
I hadn’t met many women who spoke this way, at least not outside the circles that Jane traveled in. Gladys’s look was entirely square—hair curled and sprayed, nails painted pink. I glanced around at the room of similarly dressed women.
“Mrs. Allen said you can speak Spanish,” she said. “Where are you from?”
“Washington, DC,” I said.
“Your parents, though?”
“Montana and Texas.”
“You’re not Hispanic?”
“No,” I said. “I just studied it in school.”
“We’ll test you,” she said, smiling. “Some of these boys don’t talk like they teach you in school.”
I read through the charts of the boys on my caseload. They were filled with reports from reform schools and juvenile detention centers and the agencies that sent social workers into homes, social workers who wrote down the contents of the refrigerator and the pantry, noted the fire exits, made lists of items for remediation: lock broken, window won’t open, back door blocked, plaster falling, not enough beds. Some of the boys were truant and had been arrested for thefts or fights and had arrived at Saint Jerome by the same route that took me to the Maryland Youth Center: the courts. They were boys who couldn’t be managed and wouldn’t stay home. Others had no one left to look after them. Two were orphans; more had one missing parent and one listed as ill or unsuitable. Unsuitable led back through its own chain of documents, into a past that appeared unknowable and confused even if it spanned only a few years—court orders and home visitation papers in which the spelling of names changed repeatedly, the order of deaths and arrests and other cataclysms was disputed, addresses were only partly legible in faded third-page triplicate. Documents that showed the boys’ official movements from the custody of one entity to another, wandering and backtracking through the state of New York, were interrupted by periodic examinations of their bodies. Heights and weights advanced as I turned the pages. Teeth were filled or extracted. Haircut allowances were requested, mislaid, requested again. There were inventories of their possessions, lists of their clothing: knit hat, oxford shirt, four pairs socks, shoes (tennis), shoes (leather/church).
There had been girls at the Maryland Youth Center, I thought, whose inventories would have been as brief as this. At that age I’d had a mahogany bedroom set, a record player, a closet full of good shoes and coats, although of course none of that came with me. I had been broke later, and it made the world into a constant abrasion. I remembered what another girl at MYC had said to me when I was told I was being transferred to the Barrington School at the end of my thirty days: “It must be nice to have money.” The girls who didn’t had come to places like this. Had Félix been old enough to understand, at eleven, what his family really was? I thought of A Little Princess: the orphaned child whose parent returns, the poor child who turns out to be rich. The death that was only a misunderstanding.
When my own father died, after a week in the hospital, no one told me for two days. My mother didn’t know how to say it. The hours ticked by. Since the day he was taken away, I had been playing a brutal and exacting game with myself: if I didn’t do this, didn’t do that, then he would come home. I was still playing when she finally came to tell me the news.
As I worked my way through the filing cabinets, learning the organizational system, I tried to guess where the master lists of residents might be. I wished again that I had a more recent photograph of Félix.
Mr. Ibarra’s first check had cleared. It might all be going all right.
It wasn’t until three o’clock that I was offered a chance to meet the boys of Cottage 9. I was led there by a somber man in his fifties named Mr. Jenkins, who wore a coat and tie. I followed him down a broad driveway and along a brick path. “They should be studying,” he said as we approached. “Final exams are after the break.” It was a brick building, an odd size; a tar-shingled roof angled down over small windows. Mr. J
enkins knocked once and pushed open the door. “Muster, gentlemen,” he called out. “You’ve got a new worker.”
It was an open hall lined with bunks. There were two desks in front, and a boy in glasses who was sitting at one, holding a sandwich, looked up at me. “What happened to Miss Flores?”
“Nothing happened to her. She’s in her office. This is Miss Davies, she’s the new caseworker.” He called out again. “I said muster up, boys.”
A few boys dangled from their bunks and then dropped to the floor like cats, ignoring the ladders bolted to the frames. I watched twelve boys assemble. They did so languidly, but didn’t take long. A kind of remote compliance. I was embarrassed and couldn’t say why. Maybe because they had been through this scene so many more times than I had. People come and they go, the secretary had said.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m Miss Davies. It’s really nice to meet you.”
“Say hello, Cottage 9,” said Mr. Jenkins.
“Hello,” said Cottage 9. A smaller boy near the wall smiled broadly, but the rest did not.
“Michael, where are your glasses?” Mr. Jenkins said.
“I don’t know, Mr. Jenkins.” Michael was tall and brown skinned, a pencil line of mustache growing in, his hair parted and combed back.
“You don’t know? Those glasses were new.”
“They were from last year.”
“Last year is new, Michael. When did you lose them?”
“A couple of days ago.”
“That’s not answering the question.”
“It was on Friday, I believe, sir.”
“Where did you go on Friday?”
“Just to school and the cafeteria and back to here.”
“No home visit?”
Two other boys in the line abruptly shifted their weight and looked upward.
“No, sir, I didn’t get a pass.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Mr. Jenkins glanced at me. I began to wonder if this interrogation was for my benefit, and if so, what I was supposed to get from it. I could see that the boys didn’t want to cross him, at least not to his face. I could see that they came when he told them to. “How many weekends did you lose?”
“Three, sir.”
“Next time, might not seem worth it.”
“Might not, sir.”
“Well.” Mr. Jenkins crossed his arms. “I want you all to behave yourselves for Miss Davies.”
They said nothing. I smiled again. Mr. Jenkins turned and let himself out, and I clasped my hands. “Can you all tell me your names?”
Michael looked down at me from his great height, with a narrow gaze that I now understood to be myopic. “I’m Michael,” he said, and the boys all laughed.
“So I heard,” I said.
The rest were Tommy, Carlos, Anthony, Emil, Yakov, Frankie, Clarence, Clark, James, Randall, Cesar. I said my own fake name twelve times, shook twelve hands. There were obscure currents in the room around Michael, around the missing glasses and the forfeited home-visit pass. The feeling of undercover work was coming back to me: the way of being lightly balanced, ready to break in any direction, follow the lead of any person in the room. “He gave you a hard time,” I hazarded to Michael.
“That’s just Mr. J, miss,” he said neutrally.
“Well. It was nice to meet you all,” I said. As I left, I sensed the rearrangement of bodies and expressions that always followed the exit of an adult from any room full of adolescents.
I sat by the window on the way home, watching the river darkening beneath its feldspar cliffs. Now and then I saw cargo ships, striated with rust, headed north. I loved this and every river in a way that was hard to articulate, even to myself. Water makes a perfect line. It had been a dim, rainy day, and the river was dim too, softening now into darkness, passing villages where the lights were coming on. I knew it was very deep and very cold, and the current was strong. Here and there, small jetties traced with lights ventured into it and stopped.
Jane had this feeling about the ocean. The ocean had always been impersonal to me, but it settled her. She had been very happy in Montauk that summer, those four days we had spent in a rental house two sandy blocks from the beach, packing sandwiches in wax paper in the mornings, her freckled shoulders bare, a handkerchief tied over her hair to keep it from tangling in the breezes that swept in from the Long Island Sound.
I thought about the Bracken again while the train found its track in the diverging and converging lines beneath Grand Central. But I had another early day ahead of me. Better not to. It would be another forty minutes before I was home, and then I would make a mash out of whatever I could find in the refrigerator, have some of my own whiskey, and put the television on.
CHAPTER 6
Michael had been marked late for curfew on Wednesday night, arriving at the cottage for check-in with the evening staff at 9:37 PM. And on Thursday morning in the cafeteria, he had his glasses back. I had been asked to supervise breakfast, and I was standing at the back, where I could see the shuffling boys moving down the line with their trays.
He was a leader, I could see that. He said less, moved less quickly than the rest, and yet was always flanked by friends. I had looked over his chart again. His mother worked for the postal service and said she could no longer have him in the house. He had stolen twenty dollars from her purse, he had stayed out all night too many times, she was tired of calling the police to go looking for him. His father was dead, KIA in Korea when Michael was small. An older brother in Connecticut had kept him for a month here and there but had just had twin babies of his own and didn’t have the space to put him up when he fought with their mother anymore. He’d been arrested in Central Park for truancy in September and then sent here, not for the first time. He was five feet eleven inches tall, weighed one hundred thirty-eight pounds, and was allergic to milk and pineapple.
His best friend was Cesar. Cesar was short and strong, and spoke with incredible speed and intricacy in a soft Bronx accent. He was funny, although I could catch only half of what he said; the other boys would have gone to war for him. Both boys were evasive and deferential to me, and in the three days I had spent on campus neither had answered any question I asked with more than three words in a row, of which one was invariably “miss.” Some of the younger boys, on the other hand, scowled in silence, or edged close to the hostile, flirtatious style of grown men calling after girls on the street. It was such an obvious performance that it made them seem too small for their own clothes, as if they had been badly costumed for a play. Gladys said, “They think if you get too comfortable and stay, their social worker will leave.”
“Why?”
“Because sometimes that’s what happens. The good workers feel bad leaving when we’re short-staffed, so they wait until another position gets filled before they give notice.”
“Does she want to leave?” Their social worker was Miss Flores, who had been there two years.
“Who knows?”
I had gotten a look at the admissions lists by saying I needed to find somebody’s mother’s maiden name, but even that excuse seemed unnecessary. No one was particularly interested in what records I needed or why. The reports we had to write asked for reams of information like that, and the caseworkers were always paging through old files, looking persecuted. The admissions list was a huge logbook, bound in vinyl that was pressed to look like leather, housed on a shelf in a storage closet filled with identical logs that went back twenty years. I found the one marked Aug–Oct 1967 and paged through to September. On September 20 there was a Robert Candelario, age fourteen, admitted and assigned to Cottage 4. His date of birth was wrong, by a month and a day. Could it have been him? A misspelling, or an alias slipping, or only a coincidence that would waste my time? I read through the logs up to the present, to see if Candelario had been marked as discharged or transferred, but his name didn’t appear again. If he wasn’t discharged or transferred, he should have been present. And yet the population list, which was updated ever
y day with the name of every boy currently in the charge of St. Jerome’s, and which was posted on the wall in the guard booth and on a bulletin board in the staff room, did not include his name.
I was considering all this while I watched Michael, who looked happier and more alert with his glasses on. I saw another boy point to his own face and then to Michael’s, as if in congratulations, and they both laughed. According to the logs, Michael had been on and off this campus four times in the past three years. If anyone was likely to know who had come and gone among the boys, it was him.
There was a common room for the boys between the cafeteria and the library. It was a mirror image of the staff lounge in the administration building, although the boys were likely unaware of that, since the staff guarded access to the lounge as if it were a nightclub. Both rooms were tiled, with bright overhead lights and windows that looked out on the downward-sloping lawns and the edge of the woods where deer sometimes appeared at dusk. Both contained the same battered yellow pine furniture, modular for stacking and heavily varnished. Against one wall, there was a sink, a cabinet gritty with powdered creamer, and a counter with a coffeepot. The boys used the common room to play cards and took turns being caught smoking. Because of this habit, the windows were always cranked open a few inches, and the room was cold and damp from the air that rose up the hill from the river.
After the second time in my first week that cigarettes had been confiscated from ninth graders in the common room, I was assigned to sit there for the two hours after classes let out and before dinner was served. I had a six-month status report to write, which would have been easier in the privacy of the caseworkers’ office, but the milieu staff who usually supervised the boys on campus were even more short-staffed than the social workers. I didn’t mind having to fill in. I could sit alone at a small table, pretending to be absorbed in copying information from old reports, while the boys tipped back in their chairs and bounced rubber balls off the cabinets and gossiped and complained. Their speech was coded, and sometimes they looked over at me and dropped their voices, but still, I learned a lot in the common room. If they’d had more places to choose from, they would probably have spent their time somewhere else, where they could speak more freely. But as quickly as the boys discovered new corners to gather in, the staff found and forbade them.
Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery Page 4
