by Barry Rachin
“I don’t see where …”
“Does anyone really give a hoot,” Grace pressed her point, “that the Visigoths invaded Spain toward the end of the Roman Empire?”
“Let’s talk about English,” Ed said peevishly, “and let the barbaric Huns and Visigoths sort themselves out. Or perhaps you’d rather travel back in an Orwellian time machine ten years or so when the ultra-liberal anarchists were trampling public education into the ground.”
“That was a cheap shot,” Grace said.
Ed Grayson was referring to a regrettable period in American education when the progressive establishment tossed traditional teaching out the window in favor of an enlightened approach. Since rote memory skills were considered old fashioned, the Dick and Jane primer was abandoned. No one needed to learn vowels or consonants, at least not in the conventional sense. First graders could sound out and spell words with an improvisational flair. It didn’t matter if a sentence was technically correct. The children would grapple with proper spelling, phonetics and grammar as they progressed through the higher grades.
Rules of language. Roolz uf Langwage. Ruels off Lainkwuch. Over time, the first graders’ Tower of Babel would eventually sort itself out. Young learners would blossom into educational free thinkers.
At least that was the grand design.
In reality, kindergarteners taught the ‘enlightened’ educational model frequently emerged in later years functionally illiterate and desperately needing remedial help to repair the damage done by ‘progressive’ education. The utopian dream proved more a pipe dream - make that pieyup drrreeeem - than the real deal.
Grace felt her enthusiasm draining away She had come to the meeting with an open mind, but Ed Gray lived in a world of tattered novels and bureaucratic niceties. Given the option, he’d probably prefer working with the bureaucrats in Boston than teaching the children. The waitress brought their food. Grace spread strawberry jam on a slice of toast. “Last year the English test focused mostly on vocabulary and punctuation.”
“Don’t forget the composition portion,” Ed added. “That counted for thirty per cent of the overall score.”
The reformed drunk suddenly rose from the counter and, moving unsteadily, careened off in the direction of the rest rooms. As he passed their booth the man leaned over and stared at Ed Gray “Hell, I know you,” he crowed. “You got some fancy pants, high fallutin’ job over at the elementary school.”
Middle school,” Ed corrected stiffly. “I work at the middle school.”
“Ooooowee! You’re girl friend’s one hot tamale!” The man dropped down on his haunches beside Grace. “I never would have taken you for a lady’s man, but what the hell do I know.” Giggling like a recalcitrant schoolboy, he staggered to his feet again and disappeared into the men’s room.
“What an asshole!” Ed lowered his voice to a faint whisper. “A totally useless waste of humanity!” He suddenly reached across the table and tapped Grace lightly on the forearm. “About that unfortunate business with the janitor‘s helper... “
The remark caught her off guard. Ed was smiling at her but the expression was pinched. “The man was ill informed. Writers in Pushkin's time were very mannered. There was a conventional romantic formula. They all used it.”
“Yes, I’m sure.” Grace didn’t know what to say.
“Alexander Pushkin was a brilliant writer but no different than the rest.” He pushed his glasses up on the brim of his nose. It wasn’t just a casual statement. A reply was expected.
“Yes, I suppose.” Grace cringed inwardly. What Ed was telling her simply wasn’t true. Pushkin was different from all the rest - a literary heretic! Ed Gray was probably telling everyone at Brandenburg Middle School that Carl was a fraud, but that was just damage control. A clever PR job.
The burnt out drunk had returned to the counter and was acting real crazy now, flailing his arms and talking gibberish. One of the cooks, a burly man wearing a soiled apron tied around his thick waste and a Red Sox baseball cap emerged from the kitchen. He bent over the counter and whispered a handful of words in the man’s ear and, without waiting for a reply, retreated back to the grill. The ex-drunk who lived in subsidized housing and got by on his disability check never opened his mouth through the remainder of his meal.
An epiphany! Grace suddenly realized who the unkempt loudmouth reminded her of. Sure, there was Dwight Goober ten years down the bumpy, dysfunctional road of life. He would be living off the dole at taxpayer’s expense and wrecking havoc in a slightly more sedate, middle-aged fashion.
“I’ll get the check,” Ed waved a hand at the waitress.
******
A week after Thanksgiving temperatures plummeted. There was no more talk of Indian summer or winter reprieves with sunny days in the high fifties. A thick film of frost on the windshield greeted Grace went she went out to warm up the Volvo. The finches, chickadees and hummingbirds had long since departed for more temperate regions. Only a handful of diehard cardinals, pine siskin and blue jays presented themselves at the feeder.
At Brandenburg Middle School, vocabulary lists had been inflated to twenty-five words per week amid grumbling and groans from the students. Information overload—too much homework, too many facts to digest, not enough hours in the day. Schoolwork as drudgery! Sisyphus, king of Corinth, doomed to roll his rock up the steep mountainside on a daily basis. Worse yet, Ed’s new strategy, which was no different than the old strategy, produced the opposite effect. Test scores continued to plummet. Now parents were in open revolt, and the chairman of the English department’s only response was to hold firm.
Shortly before lunch, Grace found a handwritten note in her mail slot.
Mrs. Shapiro called. Please
stop by later today after work
regarding an urgent matter,
an emergency. P.R.
Pam Riley, the office secretary, took the message. If she made the connection between the old woman with the funny accent and Ruth Shapiro, Grace was in serious trouble. The administrative secretary was an insufferable news bag, a one-woman rumor mill, who would let everyone in the school know the latest dirt. Actually, Grace wasn’t quite sure what exactly Pam Riley might do with the information, but it wouldn’t be anything flattering.
Later that afternoon, Grace baked breaded scrod with mash potatoes. When the meal was done, she left Angie to clean up and drove out to Mrs. Shapiro’s house. Carl’s car was not in the driveway.
“You mentioned an urgent matter,… an emergency?”
“Emergency?” Mrs. Shapiro shrugged. “What a strange choice of words!” The woman was dressed in a white blouse and blue skirt. Grace followed her into the living room. Again she favored her left side, dragging the injured leg in a sweeping arc, an accommodation to the illness. “PTO meeting at the school tonight,” Mrs. Shapiro noted absentmindedly. “Carl has to close up so he won’t be home until late. Too bad. He would have enjoyed your company.” The room was growing dark and she flicked on the Tiffany light. The bulb was weak and only dimly lit the area around the recliner. “Poor man! He doesn’t enjoy much of a social life.”
Grace let the remark die a natural death.
“Weather has been so cold lately.” She settled into the recliner, wiggling her rear end until she was quite comfortable. Her withered left hand curled inward toward her chest in a limp ball. “We were spoiled by the warm weather. Now winter is here with a vengeance.”
Grace took a seat by the mahogany table. Why had Mrs. Shapiro invited her here? Certainly not to discuss the weather. “You lived in Israel,” Grace deflected the conversation in a new direction.
“Seventeen years. We were Zionists, nation builders back then.” The old woman tucked her crippled hand in the crook of her arm and smiled wistfully. “I was twenty-five and living on a kibbutz, a communal farm, in the upper Galilee. The Golan Heights rose snow-covered to the east, the biblical cedars of Lebanon due north.” A nostalgic, bittersweet reminiscence
tugged the corners of her lips gently upward. “I worked in the poultry barn, but mostly we harvested apples, oranges and grapefruit for export.”
Grace tried to picture Ruth Shapiro as a young girl, petite with dark hair and eyes—a fastidious little bird of a woman. A Jewish settler, brimming over with pioneer fervor in the land of milk and honey. “But you left.”
“Too many hate mongers,” the old woman replied, “on both sides of the ethnic fence.” She fell silent. In a distant room, a grandfather clock struck eight o’clock. Only when the last chime had rung did she pick up the thread of conversation. “There was a handful among us who still remembered the tradition of haskalah.”
“Which was?”
“An outmoded, 19th century notion that all people could live together in peace and brotherhood. The father of modern day Zionism, Theodore Hertzl, was a proponent of haskalah, but few people remember that utopian gibberish today.” Her final words trailed away in a self–mocking tone.
Grace didn’t know what to say. Snowing was falling outside, the ground peppered with a lacework pattern of fragile whiteness. The small room where they were sitting exuded an austere, monastic economy as though in her final years this well-traveled woman was slowly shedding the unwieldy trappings of the material world.
“The Magic Mountain—I don’t suppose you read it in the original.” Grace shook her head. “So much gets lost in translation.” She pursed her lips and stared at Grace for the longest time before proceeding. “The main character, Hans Castorp, visits a friend at a TB sanatorium. He falls sick and ends up a patient himself.”
“Yes, I remember,” Grace replied. “The boy remains at the mountain until he is well enough to leave.” She was getting used to Mrs. Shapiro’s scattershot tendency to talk in free associations. One disjointed thought melded into the next with little or no forewarning. But there was a method to the madness. Conversations careened in a dozen random directions, ricocheting off her nimble mind, but, whatever it might be, the cagey woman never lost sight of the central theme.
“The book’s ending is left intentionally vague. Not your typical bildungsroman, where a hundred loose ends are neatly tied up and everyone ecstatically happy.”
“But you didn’t call me here to discuss German literature,” Grace observed.
“I see no ring on your finger. You’re divorced?”
“A year now.”
“Seeing anyone special?”
Outside an inch of snow blanketed the ground. “I’m not in the market for romance at this stage in my life.”
“That’s too bad.” The old woman waited a discrete interval before continuing. “You remind me of Hans Castorp.”
Grace laughed. “We’re discussing a fictional character from a previous century who, coincidentally, happens to be a man not woman. It’s just a beautiful story.”
Mrs. Shapiro shrugged off the remark. “At the Zauberberg, The Magic Mountain, many patients were terminally ill. They got no second chance at life. Don’t become one of them.”
Grace rose. “It’s getting late and I have to be up early.”
“But you can’t leave just yet,” Mrs. Shapiro protested, half rising from the chair. “We haven’t even discussed the reason I called you here.”
******
Grace was so distracted on the ride home that she almost missed the hulking figure lurking behind the bushes at the far end of the driveway. She flicked the high beams on to get a better view and Dwight Goober, like some nocturnal predator, slid away behind the foliage.
She entered the house. “Why are all the lights off?”
Upstairs in the bedroom, Angie was huddled on a rocking chair, a blanket draped over her shoulders. She threw her arms around her mother and burst into tears. “Dwight’s been out there for over an hour now. He knew you were gone because there was no car in the driveway.”
Grace gently held her daughter at arm’s length. “Stay here.”
“Where are you going?”
“To have a little one-on-one with the Village Idiot.” Grace rushed down the stairs and out the front door. Eight inches of powdery snow now covered the ground with the temperature bottoming out in the low twenties. No one in their right mind would be milling about on a night like this. No one in their right mind. Grace had no game plan, no idea what she was going to do. Dwight was standing under a streetlight on the opposite side of the street.
“Go home, Dwight.” The boy just looked at her with an oily smirk and shifted back and forth on the balls of his feet, a percolating mass of primal flesh. “It’s ten o’clock at night and there’s school tomorrow.”
“School but no curfew for minors,” Dwight shot back in a gravelly voice, “and you can’t do shit.” Dwight’s face was all blotchy, an unsavory mishmash of acne and freckles. Never a particularly attractive youth, the teenage years had been particularly unkind.
In response to increased crime, homeowners in Brandenburg wanted a curfew for teens, but the ACLU got involved and squelched the petition before it ever came to vote. Kids - good kids, that is - worked or participated in late night activities. Why punish them? The pending legislation raised too many complications. You couldn’t trample on people’s basic freedoms, even if the people included neighborhood bullies, drug addicts, hoodlums and thugs.
“There’s school tomorrow, and the day after that, too,” Dwight was enjoying the repartee. It was a sadistic game. This is what he lived for. Other kids played on the varsity football team or acted in the tri-region musical theater. They collected stamps or skated or took gymnastic lessons or joined 4-H club. Dwight Goober hid behind bushes and terrorized the Bovey street neighborhood.
“Want a smoke?” He pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and lit a cigarette with a butane lighter. Inhaling deeply, he luxuriated in the smoke, then crumbled the empty box in his fist and tossed it over his shoulder.
A light went on across the street and a neighbor’s head emerged in the open doorway. Grace felt a surge of confidence, but just as quickly, the light was extinguished and - Thump! - the door slammed shut.
“Hey, look who’s here!” Dwight knelt down as a small beagle sidled up to them, huffing and puffing in the frigid air. The neighbor had only let his dog out to pee. “That mean Mrs. Paulson doesn’t like, Dwighty, but you sure do.” The dog‘s tail was whipping the air in frenzied joy. Dwight scratched the dog behind the ear. “Her stupid bitch of a daughter ain’t got no use for me neither so you’re my only girl friend—the love of my freakin’ life.” Flicking his cigarette up into the air, he grabbed the dog forcefully by both ears and planted a sloppy kiss on its snout. The beagle broke away and, with its stiffened tail tucked firmly between its hind legs, ran off down the street, yelping like a banshee.
“Where are your friends, Dwight?” There were plenty of kids Dwight’s age in the area, but the incorrigible oaf had no friends. Well, that wasn’t really true. There was a kid off of Lancaster Boulevard that he chummed around with, but he was locked up at the juvenile training center for a string of robberies. The other teens kept a wide berth. They knew what Dwight Goober was capable of.
“I got plenty of friends.” He picked at a scab on his chin. “But maybe your daughter, Angie, might want to come out here and spend some quality time with me.”
Grace could feel the control slipping away. As soon as he mentioned her daughter, the hoodlum gained the unfair advantage. “Goodnight, Dwight. There may not be any curfew, but if you’re not gone in five minute’s I’m calling the police.” She went back in the house.
Grace turned all the lights on in the lower level, an act of defiance. Climbing the stairs, she went into the second floor bathroom and peered out the window. Dwight hadn’t moved a fraction of an inch since her ultimatum. Five minutes later she called the police. “I want to report a rather large youth loitering on my street.”
“Address please.” The officer sounded bored. Grace gave him the particulars. “There’s a patrol car in the area. I’ll send him
right over.”
“Thank you.” Grace turned back to the window. Dwight Goober was nowhere to be seen.
******
Ruth Shapiro hadn’t invited Grace over so she could play matchmaker.
The previous week, Angie stopped by the middle school after classes to see Carl. She wanted him to teach her how to make elegant boxes like Lois Keenan Ventura’s. Carl said no. She was too young. Power tools were dangerous. More to the point, since everything from the four-inch belt sander to the Delta drill press belonged to Mrs. Shapiro, it wasn’t his decision to make.
The next day Angie returned. “Teach me how to make boxes like that lady woodworker from Pennsylvania.” Carl, who was spreading rock salt on the front walkway, told her to go home. The issue was non-negotiable. Out of the question. A no-brainer. On the third visit, Carl threw his hands up in the air and growled, “I’ll ask Mrs. Shapiro. Depending on what she says, you would still need your mother’s permission.”
Grace cornered her daughter after supper. “I met with Mrs. Shapiro.”
Angie eyed her uncertainly. “I figured as much.”
Grace ran her tongue over her lips. “Okay. Go make boxes with Carl. Just don’t cut your lovely fingers off.”
Angie threw her arms around her mother’s neck. “I was so sure you would -”
“Perhaps you could make me a nice chest with a separate compartment for my chains.” She held her daughter close and nuzzled her neck. “A light wood like maple or white oak would be nice.”
What Grace conveniently forgot to mention was that, before leaving Mrs. Shapiro’s home on the snowy evening, she had reached her decision, and it was non-negotiable. Angie would not, under any circumstances, be spending time with Carl Solomon churning out woodchips and endless piles of sawdust. But halfway home, she had a change of heart. It wasn’t anything thought through in a logical, coherent fashion. Curiously, Mrs. Shapiro remained totally neutral and hadn’t tried to influence Grace one way or the other. No, it wasn’t anything quite so obvious. Maybe it was the rarified air at the summit of the Magic Mountain where young people languished, their most precious dreams fading away unfulfilled. Grace decided, just this once, to put her cogitating mind on hold and let some other, ephemeral organ run the show.
