Among School Children

by Tracy Kidder

  The genius of committees is that they can make decisions that no one would want to make alone. Chris didn't have the authority to say what would be done with Clarence. She was simply the most knowledgeable witness about the boy and his effect on her class. The person who had final say, the director of Church Square and Alpha, didn't know Clarence. He had run into situations in which teachers simply wanted to use Alpha to get rid of troublesome children. But he figured that couldn't be the case here or he'd have heard about Clarence back in October, not now in March. He was impressed that Chris intended to keep her troublemaker for the rest of this year. Thinking back, the director would say, "We need more people like that, who don't want to give up on the kid."

  So to him, Chris's descriptions of Clarence seemed completely credible. Chris's account convinced him that Clarence belonged at Alpha. "I heard her saying she'd done everything possible." In effect, it was decided that Clarence be sent away partly because Chris was willing to keep him.

  5

  Clarence might have been a model pupil if someone could have staged the commotion of a core around him every week or so. For most of the following week Clarence didn't know what was happening to him, but he sensed danger. Maybe Mrs. Zajac's special gentleness warned him, but then again, he did not, the whole week that followed, give her many reasons for not being gentle.

  There was a deep intelligence in Clarence. But it had been directed mainly toward the arts of escape and evasion and sentry duty. It would have seemed misdirected almost anywhere, except in a school for infantry or on some city streets. He didn't become angelic overnight. Yet everything that Chris had hoped to bring out of Clarence—with rewards, detentions, praise, lectures, and scoldings—he now delivered without being asked. He didn't hit or threaten anyone. Just like that, he stopped talking back to Chris. And he did his work. For several days Chris did not know what to make of the metamorphosis. She did not let herself.

  When on Friday morning, the day after the core, Mrs. Zajac announced the weekly spelling test, Clarence looked up at her and said, "I didn't study." She didn't answer. Halfway through the test, he blurted out again, "I didn't study!" He sounded angry, maybe a little frantic.

  With plain curiosity on her face, Chris said softly, "Clarence, I appreciate your honesty. But if you didn't study, what do you expect me to do about it? You haven't done your work all year."

  Clarence stared at his paper, full of misspellings, and his mouth hung ajar, as it had when he spotted his mother in the doorway that time after he'd raided her purse, or the other day when strangers kept arriving.

  The following Monday, when Chris wrote down the homework assignments on the back board, Clarence, whose attention usually wandered at this time, turned around and watched her with his pencil poised. "I'm gonna need two books tonight," he said loudly. "Three!" he cried.

  When she asked them to turn in their topics for their astronomy reports, Clarence cried out, "Report? On what? What's it about?"

  She explained.

  He wrote furiously.

  Normally Clarence didn't like being sent to the board to do a problem in front of the class. During a grammar lesson the first week after the core, he volunteered to go up and punctuate a sentence. The one Chris gave him had the word "buildings" in it. Clarence stared at the sentence. He turned back to Chris. "Wha wha what's that word right there?" He pointed at it, his face all earnest expectation and his mouth hanging open.

  On Tuesday morning, Clarence didn't do his pirouettes or linger over the menus on the closet door. He sat right down and did his penmanship, and then he asked her if he could take the attendance sheet to the office, a job that in their community was bestowed only on children who had done their homework.

  When Chris went to the Teachers' Room that morning during spelling, she paused over the coffee machine and decided to take the pot of decaffeinated. She hadn't slept well for days. That problem was much worse. Maybe, she told herself, the reason was caffeine.

  It would be "unprofessional" to get very upset about Clarence's leaving. Unprofessional. Sometimes that term seemed to apply best to teachers who used it most often. And yet it would apply to her in this case if she let her feelings show. Everyone involved had tried to do the best thing for the boy and for her class. Alpha was not a terminal illness. These things happened in school. This problem Chris was having with her sleep should not have to do with Clarence. She'd have to figure it out by herself. She couldn't talk it out the way she usually did. Professional colleagues didn't discuss such things. It just wasn't done.

  She couldn't even really talk to Mary Ann about it, though Mary Ann gave her the chance. "It's so sad," Mary Ann said. "Just because this happened, yesterday I walked in your room, and he's being perfect. Today I walk in, and he's being perfect. Ohhhh."

  But Chris looked away and, as if reciting, hurriedly said, "But I also have to consider the other kids in the room. And there are no real alternatives. I think that's not a great statement about Holyoke, but I don't know what other towns have to offer. There's always the danger he'll be influenced by the other kids there. But that's balanced by the fact that there's a full-time counselor there, and everybody says the teacher's excellent."

  She couldn't even talk to herself openly. Chris went home the day she gave up caffeine, had a pleasant evening with Billy and the kids, and thought, "Thank God. I'm over whatever it was," and then she woke up in the middle of the night, gritting her teeth.

  She said to Billy, "I think this is the first kid who's ever left my room this way."

  Billy said, "No, it isn't. You had one your first year at Sullivan."

  "I did?"

  "Yes," said Billy. "If you say the name, I'll remember."

  "Oh!" she said. "But he came out of a program like Alpha, and I only had him two weeks." She laughed, remembering that boy. "Everything I said, he used to give me the finger." That was long ago, and she'd had nothing to do with that boy's being sent away.

  6

  Chris began to feel the way she had the year her father died. She had hated teaching most of that year. Ordinarily, she would have tried to understand her difficult students and have looked for remedies, but that year, seven years ago, a lot of her class became unconquerable antagonists who wouldn't behave, wouldn't work, and wouldn't learn. Chris called that "the year I thought I was burnt out"—the term is very popular among teachers; it carries an unfortunate note of finality; at the very moment when a teacher needs to search for ways around her unhappiness, "burnt out" suggests that there is nothing she can do.

  In Chris's childhood household, her mother had been the organizer and chief disciplinarian, a cheerful one. Spankings were infrequent. Her parents sometimes raised their voices, mostly at Chris's brother, but real anger came over her father so rarely that everyone in the family remembered this incident: her brother had thrown a wooden block at Chris. He missed. The block crashed through a window. Up the stairs in a moment, really shouting, came her father. Her brother got beneath his bed. Her father stood over the bed, trying to lift it. He shook it. Her brother, on his back underneath, held on to the metal frame for dear life. Chris yelled in fright. Then her father let go of the bed, and he started to laugh.

  Jim Padden is remembered as a thin, quiet man with a quick wit. "Pretty good on the repartee, eh?" he'd say to Chris's mother when he'd gotten off a good one. He and Chris's mother had a way with children. Chris and her siblings and their friends usually chose to play at the Paddens'. Chris's brother remembered a time when a friend of his hurt his leg badly playing in the street. His friend didn't want to be taken home; he wanted to be taken to Mr. Padden.

  Even at his death, her father was still drawing a crowd. Hospital workers who had gotten to know him during his long illness drove all the way out from Boston to go to the funeral and wake. In Irish parlance, "wake" is also a verb, evocative of a heritage that is both pious and mystical, as in, "We waked Jim Padden last night." No one wakes the departed by recalling his faults, but the testimoni
als at her father's wake were impressive: from the young man who'd worked under him and whom Jim Padden had talked into going back to school; from several men who remembered how Jim Padden would forgo his own chances at earning overtime so that they, who had young families, could get the money instead; from men who'd had him as a boss and remembered being sick and Jim Padden, who almost never took a sick day himself, covering for them.

  Her father didn't drink or boast. "He wasn't one of your—I hate to say it—bullshitting Irish," Chris would say. For her, his memory defined the term gentleman. He had not made it very hard for Chris to please him. He loved to read, and she decided she did, too. They often talked about books, describing ones they'd liked to each other. He would take her to the library and bookstores and book fairs as other fathers take children to baseball games. He didn't preach to her about college, but she knew he wanted her to go. In that household, youthful expressions of ambition were taken seriously. Both her parents felt that teaching was the right profession for Chris. When playing teacher with her siblings on the stairs, Chris was allowed to write on the wall opposite the landing, which cannot have been a small concession in a house as tidy as the one Mrs. Padden always kept. When Chris made the National Honor Society, her father put the newspaper clipping that mentioned her name inside his wallet, where it crumbled after many showings.

  In Chris's family, one went to Mass every week. There was no discussion or argument. Even when Chris reached the age of choice, she attended church, but mostly out of habit and because she knew her parents wanted her to. She didn't know how much religion mattered to her until her father got sick. Then she didn't know what else to do except to pray. She prayed as doggedly as she did most things. She tried to cut any number of deals with God. When her father died anyway, she felt very angry. In church she might be on her knees and look devout, but in her mind she said, "You killed him. Why him? He was a good man, and we still need him."

  In his eulogy, the priest, still one of Chris's favorites, offered an answer that would have resonance for anyone whose family history included the terrors of immigration. The priest probably drew inspiration from the Gospel of John. Chris's father had provided well for his family here on earth, and was still providing for them, the priest said. Her father had gone on ahead, to prepare a place for them in Heaven. He had died now so that they would not feel frightened when they followed him.

  Occasionally, Chris asked herself, "Where is my father?" But with her heart she accepted the priest's explanation, and hung on to it through what remained of that worst year in her life. Her father had died in May, before school let out. In July, she lost her second child to a miscarriage. Then her mother's routine physical turned up something ominous. There had been too much death around her and inside her. She spent August living through the news ahead of time, that her mother was going to die, too. If she lived it out in advance, the worst would have happened already, and her mother wouldn't have to die. She made another deal with God, on her knees at Sacred Heart: "Please make my mother healthy, and I'll stop blaming You and the world for my losing my father." Chris kept her end of the bargain. The doctor declared her mother fit the day before school started. "It was like everything just left me. I saw I had so many things to be thankful for. Billy looked at me and he said, 'Thank God. I never thought you'd be normal again.' The first day of school, I was exhausted, but I felt like a new person."

  Chris didn't talk about religion, except in church or among people very close to her. That God made people for a purpose seemed plausible to her, however. She thought God had intended her to teach, and if He had not given her the power to alter the lives of every troubled child who came into her room, He expected her to try.

  So would her father. In her classroom, she would look at Clarence refusing to work and would consider just ignoring him. But then she'd say to herself, "No, you give me a hard time every day. I'm going to give you one." And she'd also remember the time when she began her student teaching and her resolution faltered and she said to her father that maybe she should become a lawyer. Her father had told her, "Oh, come on, Christine. You can't give up that easily."

  Over the years Chris had gotten in the habit of wondering when she would burn out. It was like waiting to catch the flu and, at the first intimations, like waiting to see if flu would turn into pneumonia this time. Now in the room, during the week after the core, she kept having a feeling of doubleness. She didn't want to be here. The real Chris wasn't here. Now and then she lost her temper at one or another of the children for offenses that would not have upset her before, and her voice sounded harsh and shrill to her, like the voice of someone else, someone she didn't like. The little leaps of the clock's minute hand, which had seemed to happen much too quickly once, now seemed to come after endless delay. On the surface, her lessons seemed adequate but plain. In her mind, as she taught some of them, she thought, "I'm boring myself. I'll just get through this one. I'm not really here. I don't know what's wrong." She told herself, "It's March. I do this every year. I say, 'Uh-oh, it's March. I'm supposed to feel terrible.'" But in the middle of a social studies lesson on Tuesday, she felt as if she were listening to someone else drone on before the class, and she asked herself, "Oh, God, am I losing it? Am I burnt out?"

  Little incidents distracted her. As if to remind her that Lil was gone from the office and not coming back, Al's mood music got piped into the classrooms by accident for a little while and made her interrupt her lesson until the place stopped sounding like a dentist's office.

  Nothing visible had changed. The room was the same. The bright-colored children's chairs had the same old air of prearranged, forced cheerfulness. The flecked blue carpet, designed for wear, hid the little messes that inevitably occur in a classroom over years. What went on here now was just one little play out of many already staged and to be staged. Through the thin walls came the sounds of other classes going on just as before. The room was filled, as always, with the prettiness of children, and the many stacks of books and papers lay, as always, on the cabinets, on the front table, on the corners of Chris's desk, in the carefully organized disarray of a craftsman's workshop.

  School goes on, but Chris felt as if it went on without her all that long week. Robert's arriving without homework, as usual, sent her to the phone by the door, to call the office and say, "Al? Robert. I can't deal with him today." (Al, who was not a stone, as some teachers thought, showed up just moments later and took Robert away for several hours.) The class seemed different to her. As the week dragged on, more and more children ceased doing their homework. Chris looked up at the quadrant of green board where she recorded debts of effort, and the lists were full of children who had been making lots of progress just a while ago, and by midweek the only name that she would not have minded seeing there now had vanished. The pattern was all wrong. For the first time this year, Clarence did all of his homework two days in a row. She looked at Clarence playing the little scholar, working on his penmanship without being reminded, his tongue pinned in the corner of his mouth. He made his cursive especially neat—she'd always praised his handwriting back when she had to search for ways to praise him.

  She would have to tell him soon.

  For a while Chris thought Clarence's mother might do that job for her. On Wednesday, his mother showed up. She said she hadn't heard about the core.

  She wore a colorful cloth bandanna wound around her temples. She was tall. Her voice was deep. She looked exotic and powerful, and maybe even dangerous if crossed. And yet, in this setting, she seemed meek. Many adults feel a little nervous going back to school. Standing in the hall, leaning on the balcony railing beside Chris, Clarence's mother seemed more like a wayward pupil than an adult.

  "And we thought it would be the best thing for Clarence to go to a special class," Chris said.

  "A special class? Oh, no." But his mother's deep voice had no power behind it.

  The counselor took the mother to his office. She was talked to by several others involv
ed in the decision. The mother nodded. She looked a little sad sometimes. She made her musical laugh over jokey remarks from the counselor. She was extremely polite. She wanted to know how long Clarence would stay in the special class. Probably through sixth grade, said the counselor, who did not tell her any lies. "I think he'll like it, and you can always go up and take a look at it," said the counselor.

  Clarence's mother didn't ask for a ride to see the special class, though. The counselor offered to explain anything she didn't understand about the class and about the forms she had to sign if she agreed. She said, "Well, give it a shot," and started signing.

  Chris felt sorry for the woman, but while she'd talked to her briefly that day, Chris was thinking, "We're picking up your pieces. We have to try to figure out something to do for him. And I have to feel lousy about it."

  That afternoon Chris told the class about an essay contest. She said it was optional, and Alice and Judith said, in that case, they didn't want to participate. Chris looked at them sternly and said, "I know I have a lot of good writers in here."

  "Yeah, me!" declared Clarence.

  He lingered after school. She didn't tell him to stay. She took the other walkers out and, returning, found Clarence sitting at his desk, copying down the homework assignments.

  "Mrs. Zajac? What's that word? E-s-s-a-y?"

  She stood over him, looking down at the busy boy.

  Clarence looked up at her craftily. "Mrs. Zajac. I got a joke for you."

  She lifted her eyebrows.

  "There's a horse name Nobody. If that was the only horse on earth, who would you marry? No! If you and the horse was the only ones on earth, who would you marry?"

  She smiled, half closing her eyes. "Nobody."

  Clarence grinned. Then he asked her if he could wash the boards for her.