Getting Off Clean

by Timothy Murphy

  After Beating Number 2, it was Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli herself who implored the parish priests in Leicester to extend an open invitation to the mothers of Leicester to come to her church for a “meeting of neighbors.” Surprisingly, they did come, the following Sunday night, droves of mothers, in secondhand cars and bargain-basement coats, entering at first distrustfully, then warming to Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli and her legions, then finally letting it all out, crying, “We don’t want to bury any more of our children! Do you? Do you?” “No,” cried the mothers of West Mendhem, “no more than you! We are all mothers!” And then they were all laughing and hugging. “See how much we have in common?” they said, and “Why didn’t we ever do this before?” That meeting, slated to be the first in a series, was the last—but the important thing, according to Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli, was that the two communities shared. It didn’t mean that mothers in West Mendhem started shopping in Leicester (it had nothing to do with the people there, they maintained; it was just that the produce was better at the grocery in West Mendhem), or that people from Leicester started moving into West Mendhem (the real estate and the taxes obviously priced them out); it just meant, they said, that no one wanted to go through the senseless grief and nonsense that had gripped everyone in January. The Leicester Tribune published several articles and editorials about the joys of finding common ground, about a renewed sense of security, about what they called “the healing.” Buried in one of these pieces was a quote from a sociology professor at Tufts saying that what had happened between Leicester and West Mendhem was part of a growing pattern, was attributable to white flight and the ever-widening gap between haves and have-nots, and that it was just a matter of time before something similar, or worse, happened again—something that would really shake West Mendhem to its very foundation—but nobody really dwelt on that.

  Everybody wanted peace back, and it’s important for me to explain: I was the one who made them want it. They would all say, shortly thereafter, they never realized how bad things were getting—not from Kerrie, not from Jesús—until that poor boy, who intervened to save the life of some crazy kid he didn’t even know, just stood up on that podium and broke down crying, so broken was he by the senseless acts of hatred taking place before his very eyes. I can’t forget that night: Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli and Phoebe helping me from the podium and escorting me back up the center aisle of the church, not being able to make out individual faces for my blurred vision, wanting to run out into the night and stop the ambulance, abduct him, take him away, nurse him back to the unbattered Brooks, stay with him forever, and never come home. But they wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t halfway up the aisle, the grave, uncomprehending applause had hardly died away, when it seems like the entire congregation closed ranks around me, hugging me, kissing me—“Don’t you worry, honey, this is never gonna happen again, you’ll never have to do that again”—hugging and kissing each other, virtually hugging themselves.

  “I wish my son could be so brave, taking on those punks,” some woman said to me, strangling me in her arms. “I hope that boy gets to thank you someday.”

  “You don’t understand,” I whispered, looking crazily into her eyes. It was virtually the only thing I had said since stepping back into the church.

  “No, honey, I don’t understand,” she said back to me, squeezing twice as hard. “No one understands this insanity. Only God understands.”

  “Let this kid get through and let him get some rest,” Mrs. Shapiro-Signorelli called out. In the lobby, I waited while Phoebe fetched our coats from downstairs. I sat down on a bench, felt the letter in my pocket, and started crying all over again. When Phoebe came back up, she sat down and put her arm around me.

  “Eric, baby, it’s okay. He’s gonna be all right. They only roughed him up a little.”

  “But he was gagging! Did you hear him gagging?”

  “At least they didn’t kick in his head, like they did to the kid last night. Man! Why the fuck do we live in such a barbaric society? It’s like the Crusades or something. Or the Huns!”

  I hardly heard Phoebe’s inanities. “I could have stopped that from happening.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? You did stop it. Maybe they would have kicked in his head if you hadn’t intervened.”

  “Oh, Feeb. I hate myself. I wanna die.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Eric. You’re suffering witness guilt now Go home and get some sleep. I’ll see you in school tomorrow.” She gave me a long hug good-bye, then sent me out into the night, the church behind me bright and warm, the common before me deserted now, haunted with him.

  Over the next week, things happened. The Leicester Tribune published a story on me, “Teen Essayist Lives by His Words,” in which I was quoted as saying about the intervention, “It just seemed like the natural thing to do.” I became a sort of town hero, with freshmen passing me in the halls saying, “You’re the guy who saved that black kid’s life,” and teachers joking, “Where’s your white hat and trusty steed, Fitzpatrick?” Mr. McGregor asked if I would give the keynote address at graduation. Unbeknownst to me, Mrs. Farnham sent a second letter to Yale telling them about the incident and my “extraordinary heroism,” and someone from Admissions called me to say that although they couldn’t suggest how the act would bear on my application, I had demonstrated the kind of character they looked for in a student, and that I had their hearty congratulations. My mother hugged me (even while screaming that I could have gotten myself killed), my father’s eyes leaked with pride, Brenda (who’s still living in Billerica, avoiding Frank, and, I presume, getting bigger every day) called to tell me that what I did “took balls,” and Joani started sewing me a Superman cape. By this point, Grandma was too disoriented to understand; when my mother showed her the article in the Tribune, she spat, “Leave it to a Polack!” which threw us all for a loop.

  All along, I was making myself sicker and sicker. It culminated one night when I went to speak to a troop of West Mendhem Boy Scouts about heroism. There were about twenty of them, assembled in the cafeteria of my old junior high school, squirming and farting in their little chairs, the two troop-leader dads hushing them up. I sat on a table, lording over all of them, unable to look into any of their combative, porcine faces.

  “Let me start by asking what heroism means to you—” I began, but my voice cracked wildly on you, sending them into their own chorus of falsetto hysterics.

  “Hey! Hey! Show some respect,” the troop leaders called out.

  “I’m just going to get a drink of water from the bubbler,” I said, excusing myself and heading around the corner. But when I got there, the distorted image of my own face in the stainless steel fountain was too much for me to take. I slipped out a side door, drove out on Great Lake Drive and parked along the stone wall that holds back Lake Chickering, a clear view across the water, through the dark trees, and toward the lighted yellow window squares of St. Banner.

  Of course he’s out of there, now; whether he had been serious or not in that letter about leaving of his own will, I knew it was the end of his tenure at St. Banner the minute they carried him away in the stretcher—off campus after curfew, stinking drunk and beaten from a brawl with village thugs. For the first three days after the beating, I was too stunned to call S.B.A.; instead, I just walked around at school, at home, like a zombie, going through the motions, fighting off a creepy numb fear that at any solitary moment, someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and when I turned around, it would be him, lacerated from head to foot, his mouth hanging open in a mute scream, and that I would answer him with an all-too audible scream of my own. Finally, when I felt like I was getting my wits about me, when three days passed and there was no news about him in the paper other than the obligatory short piece accounting for the interruption of the Sunday night meeting, I crept upstairs to the phone in my parents’ bedroom one afternoon when nobody was home.

  “St. Banner, Admissions, can I help you?” This time, it wasn’t the champagne voi
ce of Susannah Bailey, but the cigarette-wasted rasp of a receptionist, a local.

  “Yes. Could you please tell me what dorm Francis Tremont is in?” I asked, lowering my voice and carefully effacing the remains of my own North Shore accent.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, honey, he don’t go here anymore.”

  “He doesn’t?” I asked, faking surprise, even though she was confirming exactly what I had expected. “He did just a few weeks ago.”

  “Yeah, well—” She sounded uncomfortable now. “Who’s this, anyway?”

  “I’m a good friend of his, from Virginia.”

  “You don’t sound like you’re from Virginia.”

  I laugh. She doesn’t. “Um, that’s ’cause I’ve gone to school up here for the past three years. And Virginia’s not so Deep South, anyway.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s so,” she says, and I hear her lighting up a cigarette, probably menthol. “Anyway, I guess you’re outta touch with Francis Tremont, ’cause he don’t go here no more, honey.”

  “What happened?”

  “Aw, jeez. You really wanna know?”

  “Well—yes, if it’s all right.”

  “It’s all right, I guess, but he’s not. Honey, they had to expel him for a whole buncha things. Sneakin’ off campus, and drinkin’, and gettin’ in a fight, and God knows what else. I mean, I know that a lotta stuff goes on here. I know a lotta stuff goes on with kids—I got three of my own, at the high school here in town, but that kid—your friend. He’s another story. He’s got troubles, you can tell. My heart kinda went out to him, actually. He’s just about the only, you know, the only black here, except for one other, I think, a pretty little girl from the Bronx or somethin’.”

  “Yeah,” I said tentatively. “He mentioned that to me.”

  “Anyway, Headmaster here gave him a lot of chances in the past—but this time he said your friend Francis needed help beyond anything he could get at St. Banner. It’s funny, though. Headmaster wasn’t mad at him, really. More confused by him than anything else, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do. I definitely do. He’s a character, all right.”

  “Yunh,” she grunted in agreement, exhaling smoke.

  “Anyway, did he go back to Virginia?”

  “Hmmmm. You know, I’m not really sure, honey. I’m just the afternoon receptionist here. But it’s a small school, so everyone knows everyone’s business.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Well, would you have his phone number and address in Virginia? I want to try him down there, but I’ve lost it myself.”

  “What’d you say your name was again?” she asked me, the original hint of suspicion creeping back into her voice.

  “Fitz!” I spat, before anything else came to mind. “Jeff”—his middle name, Jefferson, suddenly popped into my head—“Jeff Fitz.”

  “Fitz?” she asked, her voice cracking in surprise. “Just Fitz? Not Fitzwilliam, or Fitzgibbons, or Fitzsomething?”

  “No,” I said, calm by now. “Just Fitz.”

  “Oh,” she said, accepting it. “Is that Irish?”

  “No, Jewish.”

  “Oh.” She sounded suspicious again. Then, after a pause: “I’m Irish myself. One hundred percent. Wouldn’t want to be anything else.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Well, I like it!” she exploded, then started laughing hysterically. Finally, when she subsided, she said, “Hold onna minute. I’ve got the face book right here. Lemme getcha his number and address.” I heard a bit of rustling, then she was back on the line. “Here we go. Francis Jefferson Tremont.” Then she recited the address and phone number back to me in a labored, slow voice—it was the city he’d mentioned before, and his entire background seemed so mythological to me that I was almost surprised the place she named matched up with what he’d said—and I scrawled it down on the back of a school notebook.

  “Thanks so much,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it. And if you do catch up with your friend, tell him Mrs. Lacey says she hopes he’s feelin’ better. I always liked the kid. I don’t care how weird he seemed.”

  “I will,” I said. (It occurred to me that I did know her kids, and they were all alcoholics.)

  I hadn’t planned to call the number right away, but no sooner was I off the phone with the receptionist than I was dialing, furiously, my heart pounding. It rang three times—What the hell am I supposed to say? Why am I calling? Why am I even calling? I was thinking, then, the even colder fear: I betrayed him, to his face. He’s not going to want to talk to me—but before I had mustered enough fear to hang up, the ringing stopped.

  A burst of static, then in a saccharine southern accent: “We’re sorry. The number you have dialed has been disconnected. No further information can be provided about—”

  It finally hit me, then. He was lost to me. He could be at his dead aunt’s house in Virginia, or he could be in Paris, or on the French Riviera with his mother, or fallen clean off the face of the earth, for all I knew. The only place I saw him now was in my dreams: his lips curling in the hysterical scorn for mankind I was already beginning to ache for, or bubbling with blood and unintelligible protestations as they had on that final night, or surfacing back up through leagues of my unconsciousness, bowing for a kiss, just above me in the bed. Some part of me—the practical boy, the safe boy, the boy who had bullshitted his way through life, onto newspaper pages, into Yale—said this was the time to let it go, said You’ve come out of this by the skin of your teeth, said, Consider yourself lucky. But some dimmer part of me—not me, maybe, but something colonized in me—said the contrary: that it wasn’t supposed to have ended where it ended, that there was something to be seen through.

  No one knows, of course, except for Mrs. Bradstreet. She was out of school, mysteriously, on the Monday and Tuesday following the church meeting, but on Wednesday she was back, ashen and distracted. I stared down into my book through her entire class while she droned on tonelessly about the New Deal, terrified of making eye contact with her. At the end of the class, I slammed shut my book and readied to make a beeline out of her teaching pod, but she hastened to me and put her hand on mine, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

  “Will you stay a minute?” she asked me. I could see, horrifyingly, that her lower lip was trembling.

  “I can’t—I can’t,” I stuttered, gathering my books, looking away.

  “I just want to know how your friend is doing,” she says, low, leaning in to me, before I can get away.

  I looked up into her eyes and saw something there that stayed me for a moment; she was, after all, the only one who knew the whole story (or at least half of the whole story), and she didn’t seem to be judging me, or threatening me with blackmail, which I had had some wild paranoid feeling she was planning to do.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back, looking down again.

  “Will you let me know when you find out?” she asked me.

  “Um—”

  “I’m just thinking of you, you know. We odd birds have to watch out for each other.”

  For some reason that made me laugh a little, sadly, and she smiled along with me. “I will,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said, businesslike, before she hustled back to her desk and began arranging her papers, as though the conversation had never happened.

  * * *

  I’ve had that address in Virginia now for three months, balled up in the top drawer of my desk. Life has gone on. Things are fine, really—and they’re not. And that is why this train is pulling into Union Station in Washington, D.C., right now, at eight o’clock on a Saturday night, and I am stepping off it, my own duffel bag in tow, stepping into the vaulted heights of the train station here, where I’ve never been before, standing in place as a million people crisscross before me, looking for the arrow, the sign, the clue that will bring me to a certain Virginia bus line, which will bring me to anything, anyone, or nothing at all, but maybe something—maybe just something. />
  * * *

  The station here is so crowded. It’s in the midst of the crowd that I pass and see it: two guys, maybe in their thirties, in business suits and with briefcases resting by their calves, kissing each other hello or goodbye. I don’t even know I’m doing it, but I just stop and watch them, like they’re a statue in a museum and there’s nobody in the gallery but me.

  Finally, one of them catches me out of the corner of his eye, pulls away from the other, and stares back at me. The other one joins him, and in a moment they both start laughing.

  “Well?” one calls to me. “Aren’t you going to throw change at us?”

  I don’t answer; I don’t know what to say. I just stand there and smile stupidly.

  “Are you okay?” the other one asks me.

  I hold out the crumpled paper on which I’ve written directions to myself. “Do you know how to find this bus line?”

  “Why, are you running away from home?” the first one asks me.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, surprising myself.

  They both laugh again and say, virtually in unison, “Oh really?”

  “Well. Just for a little while.”

  They nod, and the first one points me in the direction of the bus line. They both have crew cuts, I notice, and wing tips.

  “’Bye,” number one says to me. “Don’t run away for too long, like me.”

  “I won’t,” I say back. “Maybe.” Number one arches his eyebrows, and I smile, even though I’m becoming a little afraid now, as I venture on, leaving them behind.