In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  I leaned forward, to try and see who was behind the tree, but the figure was already in motion, running away from our side of the square.

  Miles loped after April, and Model T ran—with shoes on—in the direction of the man who’d been behind the tree. So much for the tranquil tableau of a moment ago.

  So much for Flora’s peace of mind. I pictured her forcing herself to listen, over and over, to foul words and malevolent messages, needing to learn whatever she could from the tape.

  “My machine message doesn’t say my name, only the number. My first name isn’t in the book, only my initial. Jones isn’t necessarily any one race, and I live around the corner—definitely a mixed neighborhood. So it wasn’t some random crank. My caller knew me, named me, targeted me. I feel…tagged, like those animals they use the stun guns on.” She paused and studied her hands. Her fingers were long and tapering, and her nails matched the dark coral of her lipstick.

  She put her lacquered box, its contents untouched, beside her on the bench. “Maybe it started when I was so upset about that Jewish cemetery. Remember?”

  I couldn’t follow her until I realized she was talking about the cemetery of Mikveh Israel, a Colonial synagogue, that had been defaced with graffiti the week before.

  “Some people have such big hates that even when people have been dead and gone for hundreds of years, they still have to go after them.”

  The vandals had desecrated four gravestones, one of which was that of Rebecca Gratz, the model for Sir Walter Scott’s Rebecca in Ivanhoe. They’d spray-painted a jagged, sloppy, sideways bolt of lightning on it. I had tried to find some literary connection, but couldn’t.

  All the graffiti was meaningless. Haym Solomon, who financed the American Revolution, had something akin to a scarlet A on his stone. Two other markers had also been defaced with initials, and several stones tipped over. Random rage. Senseless destructiveness.

  “I wrote a letter to the editor about it,” Flora said. “They printed it in Monday’s Inquirer. The day before the calls started.”

  “Except how would they have gotten your phone number?” I asked.

  She shook her head and sighed again. “Talk about not feeling like you belong here. That’s why I said you shouldn’t make up problems that aren’t given to you.”

  “That’s awful,” I whispered, knowing my words were pathetically inadequate.

  “It feels like hell to be hated,” she said. “Particularly by somebody who doesn’t know you. That makes you an object, a symbol, not a person.” She shook her head so that her earrings bounced. “And to have them be faceless, nameless, anonymous, so all you’re getting is the hate itself, like bad breath blowing on you. There’s always a certain level of this stuff, but I feel something more in my bones. Something worse and growing.”

  Around us the square was semideserted. Most of the students were gone, scattered. The nanny had whisked her charge away from the running students, and the Frisbee game had ended. Isolated people made their way from one corner to another, or sat quietly on benches. I wondered at the change. It seemed connected to the chase of the person behind the tree, although nothing had come of that, either. I wondered who he’d been and what was so provocative about him. And I wondered at the learned skittishness of everyone who’d taken for cover as soon as anything out of the ordinary began.

  “It’s like how they say we always carry viruses in us,” Flora said. “We don’t even notice them. We fight them off. Only sometimes, when our resistance is down, they take over. Well, if hate’s a virus, and why shouldn’t it be, then that’s what it feels is happening now. Something in us has gotten weak, and the virus is running rampant. There’s an epidemic going on. A plague.”

  The midday weather stayed hot, the pavement still reflected glaring bits of light, and the pattern of leaves on the grass didn’t change. But all the same, I could have sworn that an enormous cloud had obliterated the sun, and that we were suddenly shivering and in the dark.

  *

  Friday was not one of April’s tutoring afternoons, and I was glad to leave for home an hour earlier. I was exhausted and increasingly disheartened, still thinking about Flora. Phone calls were small potatoes by today’s violent standards, yet their purpose remained mean-spirited, and their effects were painful and profound.

  I scanned the room for left-behind valuables and erased the board. And then I went to lower the shades against the sun and heat, and that made me think about April’s habit of looking out, and about the mystifying scene around the fountain this noon.

  The square was almost empty now, except for the through traffic of our rapidly exiting students and some postnap children out with their mothers or au pairs. The little park was a touchstone for me, an oasis against de-humanization and ugliness. And I loved my vantage point, from what was the second story of the school, but which, given the high ceilings of the ground floor, would be almost the third story elsewhere. I saw the tops of people’s heads and very few features, but the perspective made the goings-on seem like an impressionistic painting from another era.

  I watched, feeling a measure of peace return, then shatter when a bark of noise cut through and above the traffic. A backfire, my mind registered—at the corner across from the school, where people waited for the light to change.

  But one of those people, a slender dark-haired boy, levitated. Rose from the ground, as if jerked from above, arced, then landed on the pavement, on his back.

  I had seen that violent leap before, in films, on TV, but it was the stuff of stunt men and illusion. It didn’t belong in real life. Except in headlines that had nothing to do with my life. It did not compute. It didn’t belong here.

  Not at my school, near children, near students and babies and nurses. At the square. No matter what was in the headlines every day. A plague on all our houses—except mine. Reality belonged elsewhere.

  A woman standing near the boy waved her arms at the figure on the sidewalk, then at nothing while she screamed and screamed.

  The dark-haired boy didn’t move. A crowd cautiously gathered around him—Philly Prep students, mostly. They looked at the ground, and then turned in semicircles, looking for the assailant. When I saw them tilt up my way, I realized both my hands were at my mouth, muffling a scream I was too terrified to utter. The eyes moved on beyond me, to the roof, back to earth. The nannies scooped up their charges and backed off from the corner where the boy lay.

  I shuddered, and ran down to the office. “Call for help!” I shouted.

  Helga didn’t question me or protest or tell me to do it myself.

  “A shooting. A drive-by.” I hated that there was a word for it, that it was common enough to have been named, to have become a category of killing. “There’s a boy on the sidewalk on the corner.”

  Helga had the receiver in one hand, but she kept her eyes on me as she dialed. With her free hand she offered me a box of tissues.

  Only then did I realize I was crying and must have been for some time.

  Six

  YOU ADAPT. THE WORLD BECOMES MORE FRIGHTENING, but it doesn’t stop, so you become more cautious, more twitchy, which means you lose a little bit of your perceived freedom, but that’s how it is.

  The dead boy turned out to have been named Vo Van Tran. He was twenty years old and a member of a Vietnamese gang. That didn’t help anything make sense, it merely labeled it. They thought he’d been killed instantly by a shot from a passing car. By whom, nobody knew. A rival gang, it was assumed. Nobody seemed overly concerned about why he’d been murdered. It happened all the time.

  And nobody, including me, had seen anything helpful. I hadn’t been watching the traffic flow, and try though I did, I couldn’t remember any specific car, anything that had caught my attention while I lowered the shades. The police could barely believe that an eyewitness could have such a poor eye. All I could establish was that I, along with every other person who’d been there, hadn’t seen anybody on foot running away. Which left it classified
as a drive-by. One more unsolved murder.

  But life, as they are always insisting, does go on, as does time. The weekend passed, and by Monday, via some strange chemistry, Vo Van’s meaningless urban death seemed to have settled all of us down. Now, in the third week of summer school, I finally stopped physically bucking and rearing, and my morning class also seemed to have resigned itself to its hot-weather fate.

  We finished Romeo and Juliet.

  April Truong burst into tears at the ending. “Why?” she said. “Why must such things happen? I don’t understand people.” The class glared at her, but she seemed oblivious. She was pure intensity, giving off energy like the filament burning in the center of a lightbulb.

  “There’s nothing harder to understand,” I answered. “All our plays and novels are attempts to comprehend a little piece of the puzzle. That’s why they were written; that’s why we read them. And this one,” I said, still seeing the hideous ballet of the young man across the street arcing backward in his last leap, “this one touches on issues that are certainly still relevant, like the hatred that led somebody to shoot that boy Friday afternoon. Or, like the hatred that I was told about last week as well. Against an African-American woman whose only offense seems to be the color of her skin.”

  They switched off all visible emotion and watched me impassively. I was lecturing, hectoring, but I couldn’t help myself. What else was there to do except go on record against the viciousness?

  “The Montagues and Capulets had it easier,” I said. “At least murder had to be done by hand back then. Shakespeare wrote this play a long time ago, about a time even longer ago—and what has changed? Three days ago, in front of our eyes, a young man was murdered, and for what?”

  Expressions grew stony, and I realized, with a mixture of nausea and shame, that what was news to me was not to them. That they’d seen other people blown away in their neighborhoods, that Vo Van was one more statistic on a long list to them, and they were not impressed that, unlike them, I had been spared until now. They watched me from a great distance.

  April was still absorbed by Shakespeare. “I was thinking that it was a good plan of Juliet’s,” she said. “She could not openly defy her parents. But if Juliet did not lie and pretend, Romeo wouldn’t kill himself. So everything is her fault.”

  “Maybe she was given bad advice,” I said. “And they both were young and unlucky. And Romeo was impetuous—he acted before he thought things through.”

  “I thought they would be happy,” she said.

  “What is this,” Model T asked. “Carrying on about Shakespeare?” His pale clone, Guy, echoed him. “Yeah, what is this?”

  “But it is so sad,” April said. “So scary.”

  For her, raised in a completely different tradition, the play was filled with tension and mystery. She had been in suspense straight through, hoping for a happy ending, wishing the young couple well and becoming heartsick when fate worked against them.

  The rest of the class was less affected. Rina was still up to her nostrils in hormones. Toy Drebbin was still convinced that a future devoted to towing cars need not include poetry or plays. Woody Marshall glared on, but I took that to be his unfortunate natural expression and not a manifestation of any personal hostility. Miles Nye had burst into class that morning with another installment of his improvised curriculum, presenting the “R and J hand puppets.” Romeo was a frog and Juliet an antelope, for reasons that escaped me, and instead of dying (“too passive, too then,” Miles had insisted), they killed their parents and anyone else who got in their way.

  So the day lumbered on, and the boy who’d been shot receded from the center of our attention. By lunchtime the crimes we were examining were Verona’s ancient ones.

  Flora claimed to be cramming for an exam, and ate lunch alone in her classroom, with food, a highlighter, and a book as her only company.

  Maybe she really did have a test coming up, but I was afraid that instead she regretted telling me about the phone calls and somehow had come to see me as part of the enemy camp. I didn’t know what to do about either my fears or hers.

  At the end of the day I sat waiting for April, looking at the morning paper. I’m not sure why I ever look at it, except as an antidote to any possible pleasure I might be getting out of life. You’d think we’d learn from the past. I remember that Thomas Jefferson said he did not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and he felt infinitely happier for it. I used to sneer at the idea, but no longer. No news was good news.

  Once again, the rule held. Global self-destruction, ethnic cleansing, tribal wars, and terrorist bombings. Everybody part of an in-group that furiously wanted the “outsiders” dead and gone.

  Locally, there’d been two more shootings on Sunday night, and a Baptist church vandalized, with three smashed stained-glass windows and red-paint graffiti on the front doors.

  “Miss Pepper, I am here now.” April was intense about everything—Romeo and Juliet, her history project, and the less dramatic subject matter of crisping her diction and smoothing the kinks in her grammar.

  “My paper for Mr. Dennison,” she said, trilling out his name. One of our earliest exercises was the pronunciation of his name, because she referred to him so often, and not by his nickname. “Mr. Dennison,” she said, her syllables only slightly thickened, “he is instructing us about the Boston Tea Party. About the patriots.”

  She wasn’t the only female constantly referring to him. Not by a long shot. Phyllis-the-politically-correct-and-sibilant-hyphenate, whose marital status was still murky—she referred to one man as her “erstwhile husband” and another as her “so-called husband”—remained in hot pursuit, as did Edie Friedman. The two women’s competition for the prize had been the first week’s entertainment. They’d bared their teeth in false smiles as each of them, almost on a daily basis, appeared with home-baked “surprises” they’d had sudden urges to create. Never had the Philly Prep lunchroom contained such elegant cuisine.

  Phyllis and Edie upped the ante, day by day, producing more and more esoteric delights. Figs wrapped in filo, and fruit tarts the size of one’s thumbnail, and meringues swirled into swan shapes.

  Five drove them crazy by seeming bent on a democratic appreciation of every offering. No favorites, and a decided lack of a sweet tooth. With one of his charismatic smiles, he most often declined their baked goods. The rest of us snarfed his rejects.

  The Phyllis and Edie show ended its run after ten performances when Five absented himself from the lunchroom altogether. He decided to use the hour as conference time—he said my work with April had inspired him—and he seemed as popular with his students as he was with the female staff. I’d squelch a surge of jealousy when, on my way back to my room after lunch, I’d see half a dozen students crumpling sandwich wrappers as they concluded an hour with Five. I’d seen it and squelched it again today.

  I hoped the attraction was that his side of the building was cooler than mine.

  “I thought to study psychology,” April now said, “but I am writing this paper and I am wanting to study politics as well.”

  I hated interrupting her flow of ideas with usage corrections, but that was my job. “I want to,” I said. “I want to study politics in the future—in college, perhaps? And I want to study politics now, too.”

  “I am study politics now!” she said. “Mr. Dennison is instructing.”

  In my next life I am going to teach something simpler than English, a language as complicated as all the different people and tongues that put it together. “I am studying politics now,” I said weakly. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your history class. And how’s the paper coming along?”

  She turned a sheet toward me. On it was typed The Wretched Refuse. “From the poem on the Statue of Liberty,” she said.

  I’ve never appreciated that line of the Lazarus poem, or even the sentiment. I looked at the lovely and earnest young woman across from me and could not bear to think of her as “wretched refuse.”
Even more, I didn’t want her to think of herself that way. “How about ‘Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor’ as a title, instead?” I suggested.

  “Somebody else has that.”

  Pushing the issue would be insensitive. I began a chart on past, present, and future tenses. It was good to busy ourselves, good not to keep one ear cocked for the sound of another gun going off across the way. Yesterday, I—I wrote in the first column. Today, I—and Tomorrow, I—in the next two.

  “Yesterday, I wanted—what did you want yesterday?” I asked.

  She flushed, looked at her hands and shook her head.

  “This is an exercise,” I said. “Say anything. It doesn’t have to be true. I hope this will help you understand how to use the verb to want.”

  Whatever her discomfort or shyness, she was too obedient a scholar to refuse. “I—yesterday, I was want—”

  “Yesterday, I wanted,” I said gently.

  “I wanted to see my friend.”

  “Good!” I wrote I wanted in the first column. “And if it had been your friend’s idea, you could say to her, ‘You wanted to see me.’ And if you were talking about still another friend, you would say, ‘She wanted to see me,’ but if we were talking about now, today, this minute, the present, do you remember what you would say?”

  “I want to see my friend.” It was a lament, not a usage exercise.

  “You’re right, but you sound so sad,” I said softly.

  “I think that maybe to want in the past is better than to want now. It is sad to want what cannot be. Look what happens to Juliet and Romeo.”

  Look what happened, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. Instead, “Do you want to talk about what’s troubling you?” I asked, but as the word want came out of my mouth, I felt suspended between the lesson we should be doing and her obvious agitation.

  Through bits and pieces offered during other after-school sessions, I knew her family was large and hard-pressed. Her older brother Thomas had dropped out of school and didn’t really help the general finances, and there were younger siblings. Her parents were both employed, but America was expensive. Her own job, every night till eleven, was at a nice café, but the manager bothered her and made her uncomfortable. Still, she said, it was a job.