“Yes.”
“Well what are you so worried about?”
“He’s taking a pretty significant risk, not getting the surgery …”
“But his doctor said it was okay to wait, right?”
“I think that’s what he said.”
“So what the hell are you worried about?”
“I’m not really worried about him. I’ll miss him.”
She sighed slightly and shook her head.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s supposed to be a big secret, so don’t say anything to anyone.”
“Who could I possibly tell?” she said. “I don’t know anyone there.”
“You’ll eventually meet folks. Just remember to keep it to yourself.”
“How many people have you told?”
“Just keep it to yourself.” In the space of two days, I had revealed Bible’s secret to two people. At that rate, after a year, only 363 more people would know about it.
I’ll leave it to you to decide if I was being stupid, or just an asshole.
I spent the Christmas break trying to forget how unfaithful I’d been to Professor Bible. Maybe “unfaithful” is not the word. I should have kept my word to him. I betrayed a confidence, and I don’t really know if that ranks as unfaithful or disloyal or if it is in any way an actual betrayal. I just know I felt bad, and wished I’d kept my mouth shut. I would have enjoyed the time off much more if all I had on my mind was the satisfaction I derived from the party I had arranged for George; although, even that might have been cloyed by the knowledge that Annie’s approval of it was very short-lived. We were lying in bed, watching a cold December moon sink beneath broad, violet clouds, when I mentioned getting back to school after the break and taking advantage of the good feeling of the party, and she said, “So I suppose you think the birthday celebration solved something?”
“I do indeed. He won’t suffer so much at school. I did that.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do. I can’t stop what goes on at home, but I can sure help him at school. The kids will be better to him now; kinder.”
“You really believe that?”
“Yes. You weren’t there. You didn’t see it.”
She was not convinced. I pulled the covers up to my neck and gasped my relief at the end of the day. “I thought you said what I did was a good thing.”
“I did.”
“Now you’ve changed your mind?”
“No, it was a good thing. I never said I thought it solved the problem.”
“What makes it good then?”
“It was nice. You did a nice thing.”
I had no response. I was feeling kind of sad.
She said, “They will get back to him.”
“What do you mean?” I turned over on my side and looked at her in the vanishing moonlight.
“They’re nice to him now, but he’s getting special treatment, isn’t he?”
“No.”
“Yes he is. Maybe not from you—at least not from you now, but he was getting it. And you just said the kids are treating him better. That’s special treatment.”
“So what?”
“Once they turn on him again—and it will only take one—it will be worse. Much worse, because he’s had this period of being special. They will really give it to him because of that.”
“You have such faith in young people.”
“I know about kids,” she said. She was not looking at me. I watched the side of her face, tried to decide if I should kiss her next to the corner of her eyes, or touch the hair by her ears. I wanted to do something to feel better; I wanted to rid myself of this capable impulse to shove her out of the bed. Not that I actually would, but goddamn it. I felt as though she had given me something valuable and then taken it back.
“I think you’re wrong,” I whispered.
She turned herself away from me, pulled the covers up around her shoulder and said, “You’ll see.”
18
Power and Pity
I don’t want to give the impression that I had no other problems that first year, or that George or Professor Bible were my only concern. I am writing a long time after it all, and I don’t want to infuse it with how I feel now, so that how I felt then is somehow skewed or lost. I want to be truthful, but it is also important that I be accurate. No doubt you can understand that in trying to remember how all this got started I must be a bit selective in what I recall.
That first year was a busy, hectic year. I spent a lot of weekends just sitting at my desk at home, grading papers, while Annie watched football or basketball and did the wash. In spite of George’s problems, I would not have focused on them in the telling of this story but for what happened later. I had such a powerful sense of accomplishment after George; I think that might have led me to get so deeply involved with Leslie Warren. Or at least it led me to a sturdy belief in the idea of making a difference.
Most of the rest of that year George fared pretty well. He was no longer the butt of jokes and when he spoke up in class, people didn’t laugh at him. Annie may have been right about the nature of young kids, and what might have happened if they turned on him again, but she didn’t count on the renewed interest in his welfare every time he came to school with even the smallest bruise. If he came to class with a fresh bruise—one smaller and located on his cheek or his arm, one he could just as easily have gotten on the playground or riding his bike—the girls just fawned over him. It was almost embarrassing to witness. If you saw the look on his face as the girls gathered around to console him, to pat his head and hold his hand, you’d have to fight the notion that he might actually be grateful for his father’s brutality. And he never did have marks around his neck again. His journal didn’t mention many more “punishments” either. There were a few entries about getting slapped or punched, and one about being knocked down and kicked in the “rump” (I swear that’s the word he used), but nothing at all about the bungee cord and the phone book. In fact, once or twice he talked about how his dad was “rewarding” him with fishing gear and trips to the movies. Believe me, we scrutinized George very closely, and I think I can safely say the abuse had been significantly curtailed.
A few weeks after Christmas, Doreen came into my classroom during lunch break with a letter in her hand. She sat across from me, looked around to be sure we were alone, and then said, “This is a letter from my sister.”
I opened my lunch bag and unwrapped my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. When I looked up at her she was waiting for me, still holding the letter. I said, “I didn’t know you had a sister.”
“She knows somebody who had diabetes. Look at this.” She unfolded it and handed it to me. In very clear scrawl her sister wrote this alarming story of a neighbor who ignored the effects of a diabetes infection in her foot and who lost first the foot, then her right leg, then her left leg, and then she died.
“Damn,” I said, handing the letter back to her.
“We have to do something.”
“What?”
“We’ve got to get him to let them remove his toe.”
“Why? According to your sister it won’t do any good whatsoever.”
“It won’t do any good if he waits too long. Didn’t you read what my sister said?”
“How do we know how long that is?”
“He could die,” she said.
“He’s under a doctor’s care. He said the doctor let him wait until after Christmas.”
“Well it’s after Christmas. Is he doing anything?”
“I don’t know.” I took a small bite of my sandwich. I did not want to be chewing during this conversation, but I was hungry and it was lunchtime.
“Talk to him about it.”
“I guess I could do that, but I don’t want to. It’s his business.”
“You have to.”
“He knows all that, Doreen.” I pointed to the letter. “The doctor told him. So maybe we should
just leave him alone about it.”
“What if he waits too long?”
“I doubt we could talk him into anything,” I said.
Doreen touched the hair over her ears, a gentle sort of gesture that let me know she would not let herself get frustrated by my resistance, but she was fighting it. “I can’t say anything to him because I’m not supposed to know.”
“You better not say anything to him.”
I could see the composure seep out of her face. “I wish he’d told me about it,” she said.
“I wish he had too.”
“I think you’re being too …” she stopped.
“Too what?”
She considered for a moment. “You think you’re …”
“I think I’m what?”
“Nothing.” She got up and started refolding the letter.
“Were you going to say God?”
She scrunched her nose. “Of course not.”
“Well, what then?”
“I don’t know. I just wish you weren’t …” she hesitated. “It’s like you’re in control of everything.”
“I’m the one who thinks we should just leave it up to him. How is that controlling?”
“You’re new here. I’ve known Professor Bible so much longer. Why didn’t he …”
“He told me not to tell you.”
She put the letter back in the envelope. Then she said, “I wouldn’t let him know that you told me about it. But I have to say something to him.”
“You better not. He didn’t want me to tell anyone, but he said especially not you.”
Her face changed. Something in her eyes softened and at the same time I saw her mouth—the only smoothly constructed, well-proportioned part of her pocked face—open slightly, as if she needed to slowly but surely take in air. At that moment, in that light from the big picture window, she was beautiful. “He said that?”
“He said, ‘Especially don’t tell Doreen.’ ”
She cast her eyes down, her head slightly tilted toward me, and I thought she looked as purely sad as any Madonna I’d ever seen staring down at the body of Christ. At times, in spite of her lean, mannish figure—her short hair, long thin nose, and pockmarked face—there was something youthful and oddly attractive about her. She carried herself with such confidence, such independent and assured awareness of herself, her body, her gleaming eyes, it was almost as if she had learned how to make people forget the acne and the scars; had found a way to make those little imperfections merely a feature of her own special charm.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “I promise.”
She smiled in a virginal sort of approving way, then walked out the door. I finished my lunch, chewing my sandwich while I stared at the bulletin board on the back wall. Somebody, in the years before my arrival, had tacked individual letters across the top of the board that said, “Adventures in Literature.” Underneath that was just orange paper stapled to the board, covering it like a tablecloth. No other adornments filled this space, so it was easy to stare at it and think nothing. I knew I’d have to get up eventually and walk across the hall to see Professor Bible. It would be a statement—a fairly loud statement—if I avoided him. Still I was always afraid he could tell by looking at me that I had divulged his secret. And what do you say to somebody after they tell you a thing like that? Every time I saw him I felt stupid for saying, “How’s it going?” Could I walk in there and say, “How’s your foot today?” He was seeing his last January as a teacher. What could I say?
I cleaned up my waxed paper and sandwich bag, and threw it all in a trashcan in the hall on the way to Bible’s room.
“George is doing very well, now,” I said.
He only nodded vaguely. He sat at his desk, as he always did, his head bent slightly toward the papers in front of him, a pure white forelock of his hair dangling across his forehead and just above his dark eyes. His face was ruddy and seemed more relaxed, as if he’d just finished a very successful chess match and was now ready for conversation. I think he might have been slightly embarrassed about what I knew.
“Did you get caught up on all your work over the Christmas break?” he asked. He didn’t seem to want to face me.
I sat down in the chair next to his desk and said, “Pretty much. But it’s piling up again.”
He was quiet, reading a student paper in front of him.
“How are you?” I asked. I swallowed a little when I spoke and I think he misunderstood the tremor in my voice as suppressed emotion.
He looked at me. “Don’t let’s get maudlin here, okay? I’m fine. I’m getting used to the idea of the end of my career. Even the end of the world. You ever thought about the end of the world?”
“No.” I was lying, of course. Most days, I can’t get the end of the world out of my mind. Especially the end of my world.
“You know,” Professor Bible said, sitting back in his chair. “Somebody once said, ‘Even when you know you’re going to die and the sentence will be carried out very soon, it’s still extremely rude to sit in a corner and wail about it.’ ”
“You’re not necessarily dying,” I said. “You don’t have to let this kill you.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking,” he said. “A lot of thinking. I live alone, I have no family to speak of. Oh, I got a brother in Indiana that I talk to sometimes, but nobody else.” He met my gaze, and seemed to understand something about what was going through my mind. “No,” he muttered. “I haven’t told him. He’s pretty old—twelve years older than me. I don’t think the old guy would …” he stopped. I waited for him to continue, but he just started lifting the corner of one of the papers on his desk. He studied the tips of his fingers, the edge of the paper, as if he was looking for something very small and likely to move.
“Don’t you think your brother would want to know?”
“He’d forget about it the next day.”
“Oh.”
“We don’t talk that often. When I call him, I have to tell him who I am.”
“I’m sorry.”
It was quiet for a while. He wasn’t looking at me, and I was sort of watching his fingers and the edges of the paper. Then he said, “You know, I think I’ve done some good.” He was still studying the corner of the paper. “I’ve been thinking about my life. About all those years teaching. I can’t remember when I wasn’t a teacher. I was just working, doing my job, enjoying myself. Oh, I always enjoyed myself. But you know, I think I might have done some good.” Now he looked at me again. His face was less flushed, but his eyes gleamed in the afternoon light that flooded through the windows, and he was smiling, just slightly. It wasn’t the kind of smile that you associate with happiness, or joy, or good humor. It was almost not a smile. He looked deeply pleased. “I think I did some good in the world, Benjamin. What do you think of that?”
“Of course you did.” I can’t believe how sad I felt, then. Everything I said to him felt like a lie. As I said, I don’t want to let what finally happened color my memory of this time. I was living it; I didn’t know any of the later events in my short teaching career. At that moment I was deeply sorry for him because I believed his life had been so pathetic. I couldn’t imagine a life more sadly devoid of meaning. To end up alone, in a classroom, with chalk on my hands, in an old linen suit, my tie dangling from my throat, my hair white and falling across my mottled brow—for his brow was mottled, and speckled with those marks old men get on their faces and hands and arms—to end up like that, and to have only the forlorn belief that I might have done some good in the world to console me against the end of my life was the most overwhelmingly sad and pitiable thing. I know it’s possible that any life—no matter how fully lived—would seem pitiable and gloomy at the end of things; that’s probably what made me so sad. I felt as though I was watching a man who was about to be hanged, and he strove to find something admirable about the rope.
“You have done some good,” I said.
“You know, Benjamin, I used to
say ‘in the fall they come back.’ ” His voice broke and he averted his eyes. It was quiet for a moment, then he looked at me again, his eyes not quite swimming but there were tears there. “They always come back.” Now he smiled, shaking his head. “I never thought very much about what it would feel like to know that one fall I wouldn’t come back.”
I got up. “I hope one day I can be a great teacher.”
Again, it felt as if I was lying, and it’s possible he didn’t completely believe it, but he smiled more fully, gestured with his hand toward me as though he were letting me through a door. “Welcome, my boy. It is a job I recommend,” he paused, looking now directly into my eyes, “Highly, very highly.”
I admired him. I wanted to be like him in so many ways. But I did not want to end up like him. I said, “I hope to be a great teacher like you. I really do.” I like to think that perhaps he could not really see what a bad liar I was. Maybe he believed me.
That’s what I like to think.
19
Rumors
Here’s the thing about kids between fourteen and twenty-five or so: they think about death in the same way they think about their own birth. It’s something far distant in time, and they’ve pretty much forgotten about it. (I never had that luxury because of what Annie calls an unfortunate fissure in my brain. I think about death every day, and I have two basic conditions: healthy, and dying. There’s no in between. The first symptom, of anything, is always the onset of what will kill me. All my life—even during my childhood—I’ve been that way; but Annie tells me most people my age don’t think about death at all, unless it sneaks up and bites them in the ass.)
Of course, kids know about death. They just don’t believe it. That’s why people under the age of twenty-five make such good soldiers—because it takes at least a quarter of a century of living to develop a sense of life; to become aware of what is to be treasured and even hoarded if you can do it. You can be persuaded to take a lot of risks you wouldn’t ordinarily take when you’ve forgotten or don’t admit the possibility of dying. What most kids are afraid of is humiliation. That above all else. So there is no balance in the sense of danger you find in young teens. They will shrink from an irate, angry looking fat lady in a McDonald’s—make their escape as though they were fleeing the scene of a blood-soaked clash—and yet think nothing of getting into a car and roaring it up to speeds that would turn their bones to powder if they hit anything. Many of my students could get into their own cars and race me down the road once I dropped them off, but most were forced to ride with me every morning and every afternoon. If they were going to kill themselves, it wasn’t going to be during school hours. Only a half a dozen or so students drove their own cars—Leslie was one of them.
In the Fall They Come Back Page 14
