Man of the Hour

by Peter Blauner

  “‘But here he was confronted with a thing of moment,’” he began, in a deep, chesty voice with a slight Long Island accent. “‘It had suddenly appeared to him that perhaps in a battle he might run. He was forced to admit that as far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself.’”

  He slammed the book shut with a dramatic pop, getting the attention of all thirty-six kids. They were jammed into the little dimly lit classroom with yellow walls, uneven wood-plank floors, and an old rotting hulk of a teacher’s desk at the front smelling vaguely of formaldehyde.

  “All right, let’s throw this one out to our studio audience,” he said, keeping his voice up so he could be heard above the constant drilling upstairs. “We’re talking about this idea of being tested again. The whole notion of what a hero really is. So how many of you guys think you would run?”

  The students turned on each other with incredulous snorts and fey high-pitched wisecracks. He was going at it too directly. These were Coney Island kids: you weren’t going to get them to own up to fear and vulnerability that easily.

  “Come on, guys, don’t leave me hanging here.” He picked up the gnarled old Rawlings baseball glove he had lying on his desk from the discussion of The Catcher in the Rye earlier. “The point isn’t that I want you to memorize these books. The point is, I want you to find something of yourself in them. Or maybe to take something out of them that will become part of yourself.” He looked around, thinking he saw a few glimmers of light.

  He slipped his left hand into the glove and pounded his right fist into it, savoring the loud wop bouncing off the classroom walls, feeling the performing juices start to flow.

  “A-right, let me give you an example,” he said, wading in among them—all six feet two, two hundred and ten pounds of him—like a ship breaking through ice floes. “Back when I was a kid, I had a job being a lifeguard one summer at the Westbury Beach Club in Atlantic Beach. Can you imagine me in a bathing suit?”

  He held up his arms and made a show of sucking in his ever-so-slack middle-aged gut, getting a round of giggles. “Yeah, right,” he said. “I looked like the ‘before’ picture in one of those muscle-builder ads on the subway. Anyway, my father was this big war hero with all these medals and I used to dream of doing something great to impress him. And everyone else. You know, common adolescent fantasy, right? You save the girl and she swoons in your arms.”

  About three-quarters of the boys in the class smirked in recognition while the girls held back, waiting to be convinced.

  “So one day, I’m up there on my lifeguard chair, waiting to be a hero, and I see this head bobbing up and down on the horizon. So I’m on it. Okay?” He moved toward the back of the class, hearing chair legs scraping on the linoleum floor as kids parted to get out of his way. “This is my dream girl, who I’m going to save. And I go running out there and I dive into the surf and I’m stroking against the current, man.” He mimed thrashing in the water, pulling back great handfuls of the Atlantic. “And then I get there, like two hundred yards out, and it’s this big fat old lady in a bathing cap.”

  “Oh, snap!” yelled a boy called Ray-Za in the third row, who up until this minute had been staring mindlessly into his tiny Game Boy screen.

  A few of the others cracked up too. It’s happening, David thought. After four weeks of school, they’re finally beginning to wake up after the long summer’s mental hibernation. Now was the time to grab them before they slipped back into indifference.

  “So I’m trying to pull her out,” said David, doing the gasping-for-air bit. “And they tell you when you’re in lifeguard class, grab the hair—don’t grab an arm or a shoulder, because the person you’re trying to save may grab you and pull you down. So I grab for her bathing cap and it comes off and she’s like bald underneath.”

  “Ho shit!” Merry Tyrone in the second row put a hand over her mouth.

  “Oh yeah,” said David, heading back toward the blackboard. “She’s bald and she’s losing it big-time. She grabs me around the neck and starts trying to pull me down with her. This big bald lady is trying to drown me in the middle of the Atlantic. It was like some Freudian nightmare. Anyway, make a long story short, the skinny girl lifeguard I had a crush on from the club next door had to jump in and fish us both out.”

  “Whhooo-aaa, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

  The whole class went off, boys and girls equally. Well, that wasn’t exactly what happened, but who cared? They liked it when he told stories on himself. You were trying to spark them, engage them, break up the frozen sea in each of them.

  “All right, so somebody else give me an example of character being tested,” he said, pounding his fist into the glove. “I’ll take anything from life or one of the books we’ve read.” He switched into his Coney Island sideshow barker’s voice. “Step right up. Make your case or get outta my face. Think fast!”

  Without warning, he whipped off the glove and threw it to Elizabeth Hamdy in the first row. That bright and radiant girl who usually came to class wearing a white Arab head scarf and Rollerblades. He wanted her to set the tone for the others. She caught the glove and looked around, half embarrassed and half proud. No head scarf today.

  “Um, what about Holden Caulfield?” she said quietly.

  “Yeah, okay. What about him? Speak. You have The Glove.”

  “Well, he has that dream near the end. About saving the kids falling off a cliff. That’s why it’s called The Catcher in the Rye.”

  “All right, but he only thinks about that.” David bowed to her. “He’s never really tested that directly. Can you give me a more concrete example?”

  “Well, my father, when he crossed the river,” she said quickly and then lowered her eyes, hiding behind a smile.

  “Yeah?” he said, not sure whether to push her. “What river was that?”

  “The Jordan.”

  “That’s in the Middle East, you guys.” David cocked an eyebrow at the rest of the class. You couldn’t make any assumptions about people’s knowledge of geography these days.

  “Yeah, he’s Palestinian.” Elizabeth blushed a little.

  “So why was crossing the Jordan such a big deal?”

  “Because the Israelis shelled his family’s village,” she said shyly, not liking the attention but determined to answer the question diligently. “And his parents asked him to take his brother and sister across the river to Jordan. They thought everyone was going to get raped and killed by soldiers.”

  “And so did he do it?” asked David. He hadn’t meant to delve so deeply, but the door was open now.

  “Yes.” She swallowed and lowered her eyes. “One time, he said that when he crossed the river, it was like his childhood disappeared over his shoulder. But, you know, not everyone in my family was happy about it.” Her fingers curled up along the edge of the desk.

  “Why not?”

  “Some of them thought he should have stayed and resisted or something like that. But I thought it was more courageous, what he did do.”

  “Which was what?” asked David, who remembered Mr. Hamdy only as a squat and exceedingly polite sixtyish grocery store owner he’d met on Parents’ Night last year.

  “He survived,” she said, tightening her mouth a little. “He moved around a lot and eventually he saved enough money to come to this country and try to start a new life for his family. So it was like crossing another river.”

  David sensed there was more to the story, but he decided not to push her on it. She’d said enough. In fact, if anyone else in the class had spoken that long, she would have been shouted down and called a loudmouth chickenhead. But with Elizabeth, the others hung back a little. They sensed she had a kind of glow about her, a special presence in the room. Look at her, thought David: she’s a star and she doesn’t even know it.

  “Okay, thank you, Elizabeth.” He gave her a thumbs-up and saw her slump down a little in her seat, relieved she didn’t have to say any more.

  “All right, somebody else!” he said, rai
sing his voice so he could be heard above the construction racket upstairs. “Step right up. Make your case. All tales of guts and cowardice welcome.”

  There was a pause, but he didn’t rush to fill it up. After fifteen years of teaching, he’d learned never to force the answers down their throats. Let them come to it, on their terms. That’s the only way they’d ever learn anything.

  Eventually, Kevin Hardison in the back row half-raised his hand. He was a runty wannabe-gangsta with monogrammed gold caps over his front teeth, a Dollar Bill cap, and two sets of baggy clothes which he alternated day after day because likely that was all he could afford. Having been in fairly serious trouble himself when he was young, David always had a soft spot for the roughnecks and knuckleheads. He signaled for Elizabeth to throw Kevin the glove.

  “I was gonna say something about how I moved last year,” the kid began with a soft lisp.

  David started to stop him, saying he wanted to keep the discussion focused on heroism in literature. But then he remembered this was only the second time Kevin had spoken up in the first month of school. Better to let him go, to encourage him.

  “All right, what’s that got to do with this idea of being tested?”

  He saw the boy hesitate and start to sink back down into his chair, sorry he’d raised his hand. It was going to be one of those make-or-break moments, David realized, where a kid either becomes part of the life of a class or starts the process of withdrawing and eventually dropping out.

  “It’s all right,” he told Kevin. “Make your case. I got your back.”

  The kid licked his lips. “’Kay.” He began slowly, as if he were bouncing a ball at the foul line. “Like last year? My family moved outta the Coney Island Houses and got a apartment in O’Dwyer Gardens.” He was talking about two massive housing projects a few blocks away from each other in Coney Island. “Anyways, these guys from my old crew at the Houses had a beef with my new boys in O’Dwyer. And then they both came to me and said what all am I gonna do when they have a fight on Friday night. Whose side am I gonna be on?”

  “So what did you do?” David said gently, trying to protect the moment and keep the space open for the kid.

  “I stayed home, by my moms,” said Kevin, trying to sound tough and unashamed of himself. “I was like just buggin’ out with the WB, and jacking the sound up so I wouldn’t hear them busting caps and the sirens outside and shit. And then in the morning, I found out my man Shawn De Shawn got shot in the head. They had him on life support for a month before they let him die. That was messed up, man. He was gonna play point guard for St. John’s.”

  His voice trailed off and he looked down at his fingers, ill at ease over having exposed so much to the group. A couple of the other guys in the class started mumbling behind his back and pointing in contempt, but David cut them off with a cold stare.

  “All right, enough,” he said, before turning his attention back to Kevin. “Thank you, Kevin. I give you props for opening up like that. Shawn was in my class, and for the record, I think you did the right thing. And if anyone disagrees, they can take it up with me personally after class.”

  Okay, so it wasn’t “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but to have a kid like Kevin let his guard down so much was a small miracle. The kind—along with having Elizabeth in his class—that kept David going year after year in spite of budget cuts, school board politics, and plaster dust drizzling down on his desk.

  He cruised by Kevin’s desk, collecting the glove and quietly telling him, “Come talk to me later if you want.” The morning was developing a kind of unusual gravity, with kids dropping their hearts on their desks. He made a U-turn back toward the front of the class and used his booming voice again, trying to lighten the discussion a little.

  “Okay, I don’t want to turn this into a therapy group or a talk show,” he said, picking up a piece of chalk. “I want to bring it back to the books. Because that’s what we’re here to talk about. Right? So can somebody else give me an example of a character in one of the books who’s either being tested or maybe even testing something?”

  A Russian boy named Yuri Ehrlich slowly hoisted his arm in the fifth row, over by the radiators. He was a brilliant but unscrupulous kid, with long, straight brown hair and a disturbing habit of cheating when he didn’t have to, as if the old Soviet habits of beating the system were too deeply ingrained in him. David wondered if he’d change this year.

  “Raskolnikov.” Yuri rolled out the name with a thick accent.

  “Raskolnikov who chopped up the old widow and her sister?” David tossed him the mitt. “Should I have brought an ax instead of the glove to throw around today?”

  Uneasy laughter. They were reading Crime and Punishment in Advanced Placement English, not in this class. But why make a deal out of it if the kid wanted to contribute?

  “All right, I’ll bite. Why Raskolnikov?”

  Yuri sat there, silent and brooding, letting the glove tumble to the floor.

  “Maybe he means that Raskolnikov is testing the definition of what it means to be an extraordinary man,” Elizabeth Hamdy said earnestly, leaning forward on her elbows. She was taking A.P. for extra credit too.

  “Okay, I can live with that,” said David, thinking this really was the day for heavy topics. “So does he succeed or fail?”

  “I think he fails, because his definition of ‘extraordinary’ is flawed,” said Elizabeth in her perfect diction, obviously glad not to be talking about herself.

  “Yuri, is that why you think he fails?”

  A tensile moment of anticipation. Other kids looking at each other, checking their watches; David holding up his arms, wanting everyone to hush up and listen.

  “No.” Yuri stared down at his red Converse high-tops. “He fails because he turned himself in.”

  The period buzzer went off.

  “Yuri, you’re scaring me.” David went to pick up the glove. “The rest of you give me three to five pages on this subject by next Friday.”

  With the change-over between classes, the hallways exploded in sound and visual chaos. Students stood around in exclusive circles and insolent clusters, as if daring people to pass.

  Nasser moved by them gingerly, feeling just as invisible as he had felt when he was a junior here, repeating the grade, four years ago. Everything looked the same, except for some red-white-and-blue bunting on the walls. The green-tiled walls, the dull streaky floors, the chipped mahogany banisters, the names of war veterans and valedictorians of years past painted in gold letters on brown plaques, the sports trophies in glass display cases, the posters celebrating Italian American week with pictures of famous actors, pop singers, Christopher Columbus, Leonardo Da Vinci, and pasta dishes. But the feeling was a little bit different. He no longer wanted to fit in here, he told himself. He no longer wanted to be one of them. Let them swagger by, talking in code, flirting, fighting, making incomprehensible private jokes. With their bared midriffs, their pierced noses, dyed hair, black nail polish, foul language, their tight and baggy clothes, their frank appraising stares. Seeing him but not seeing him. Someday a Great Chastisement would befall all of them.

  On the other side of the building, David Fitzgerald hiked a black Jansport book bag over his shoulder and walked past the gauntlet of kids on his way to the office. The inside of the school was like something dreamed up by a fun-house designer. Long, dark hallways that didn’t go anywhere, stairwells that didn’t connect from floor to floor, offices with tiny windows. Traffic patterns loosely based on Boston and Tijuana. Acoustics appropriate for a heavy-metal concert or a Manhattan restaurant. Buzzers going off for absolutely no reason.

  A group of loiterers in front of the boys’ room called out to him.

  “Yo, what’s up, Mr. Fitz?”

  “Yeah, look out, don’t step on me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

  “Yo, you’re scaring me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

  Though he had a few inches on most of the kids, occasionally a hand would reach out to touch hi
m on the head or the shoulder, either mockingly or affectionately. It was hard to tell at times. But there was something comforting about it anyway. A kind of assurance that he had a secure place in this intricate little municipal beehive.

  “Yo, Mr. Fitz, you gonna call my parole officer for me?”

  “Mr. Fitz, you gonna talk to my moms? Right?”

  “Yo, Mr. Fitzgerald, how’s the bike?”

  Oh yes, the bike. An old-fashioned Schwinn with a banana seat he’d picked up for five dollars at a sidewalk sale. He’d first developed an image as an eccentric because of that bike. Some years back, he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Renee had been living in Park Slope and he’d ridden it to school a couple of days a week, instead of taking the subway. So he became the bicycle man. Even after they moved back to Manhattan and he started taking the train again, he was still “the bicycle man” to the kids. He had a reputation to uphold. Funny Mr. Fitzgerald. Weird Mr. Fitzgerald. Not a bad thing. It was an identity. A way for people to think about him. One time he brought a baseball glove into class when they were talking about The Catcher in the Rye. So that became another part of his mythology. Mr. Fitzgerald brought in props. Now every year he had to bring in the glove for the imperfect hero discussions. The kids expected it.

  “Yo!” he shouted out to a Dominican kid called Obstreperous Q from his seventh-period class, who was sweet-talking a girl by the fire stairs. “Come by my office later. I got that book of García Lorca poems I was telling you about.”

  When David arrived at the door of the English Department office Donna Vitale was standing in the doorway, waiting for him. Donna with her frizzy straw-colored hair, her wonderful warm shining smile, and her one wayward eye staring slightly out into space.

  “You have a visitor,” she said.

  “Tell me it’s not Larry coming to complain about my programs again.”

  Larry Simonetti, the school’s principal, had been in a state of high fret for the past week, ever since Albany issued a report calling the school “one of the ten worst-managed” in the city. Test scores were fine, but the school had ricocheted from scandal to scandal in the last twelve months. There was the security guard running away with the ninth grader, the falling bricks that seriously injured an eleventh grader last spring, and of course the $75,000 from the annual budget that was mysteriously missing. The governor himself was scheduled to come next week and give a speech about “taking back our schools,” possibly as a prelude to announcing his own candidacy for President.