Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  Patrick did feel shame. And shame at his shame. No one, of course, spoke of his and Gunther’s failed escapade, perpetrated just a week before his father died. Frank Lynch’s death made it trivial, no longer worth mentioning. Even before Dr. Lynch’s heart attack, in the days between the two events, the boys’ abortive caper was melding into WCHS prank lore. Once Gunther’s injuries proved to be the bloody-but-superficial kind (except for his right elbow, which, like his old Ford pickup, would forever unexpectedly pop into reverse), the only substantial consequence of The Scheme was the week-long suspension meted out by Dr. Lynch.

  Typically the principal, Mr. Sheffield, would have handed out the suspensions, but Frank Lynch wasn’t one to leave such a thorny task to a subordinate. He insisted on calling Patrick into his office, like any other wayward student, keeping clean, as always, the boundaries between parent and administrator.

  Dr. Lynch began by detailing the consequences of Patrick’s actions: the suspension, which would be part of his permanent record; the bill for damages to the building that would be sent to his home. Patrick looked at the floor. Had it really been covered with broken glass and Gunther’s blood Friday night? He looked out through the new window at the girls’ gym class playing softball and marveled once again at his father’s efficiency. As Dr. Lynch worked his way through the actions-and-consequences boilerplate, Patrick gazed, like many a miscreant before him, at the loon decoy on the shelf above the desk, at the 1974 Superintendent of the Year plaque from the Minnesota Secondary School Administrators Association, objects as familiar as the knickknacks on his bedroom dresser (hadn’t he and Erin run around that desk with that wooden bird, trilling loon calls?), somehow different, weightier, from this angle.

  The superintendent had stopped speaking. Patrick looked down from the shelves. His father’s eyes and mouth were open, his massive torso still. Although Dr. Greene later assured him that there was no cause and effect between The Scheme and his father’s heart attack, that Frank’s heart condition was a ticking alarm clock set to go off when it did, Patrick looked down from the loon and thought even then: My dad won’t survive this conference. Finally, his father said, “Patrick, are you angry at me?” When he didn’t respond, his father said, “It must be hard, I know, being the superintendent’s son,” and bit his lower lip. “I’ve always tried—” he said. Patrick had never seen pain on his father’s face—never recognized it—and he realized, with terror, that this was what his dad looked like when he was about to cry.

  Before this could happen, Patrick spewed up his mea culpa. He’d said nothing to his father—or mother—over the weekend. He’d just sat on his bed, stunned. He was so, so sorry, he said now, and found himself crying. He couldn’t explain his actions, he said. He had no idea why. Breaking the window, that was a stupid accident. No, he wasn’t angry at his father, of course not. It had nothing to do with him.

  He felt he’d stumbled on the right words, disassociating his hostile actions toward his father’s workplace from his feelings for his father. It had the desired effect, allowing his dad to become Dr. Lynch again, compassionate administrator, dispensing Kleenex to troubled students. But Patrick would recall this moment with a fresh wave of regret when, a few years later, his college girlfriend would maintain, tearfully, after he found his roommate’s Lucky Strike boxers underneath her bed, that it had nothing to do with them, that it wasn’t about Patrick at all.

  Patrick scanned the crowd over Mrs. Johansson’s shoulder as she enfolded him in her fulsome bosom. “We must be strong,” she whispered. Mrs. Johansson was, embedding his ribs in her pillowy chest. Katie Osterlund was behind her, wearing the same black choir dress his sister wore. Katie took his hand. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Patrick,” she said. She seemed to mean it; no tears were in those bright blue eyes, but sobriety supplanted the chipper giddiness that was her default expression. To touch her, even formally, to hear her say his name, would have been the highlight of most weeks. Their last physical contact, promenading together at a fifth-grade square dance, was a moment he’d often re-lived.

  But today, even Katie Osterlund was just part of a crowd. Patrick found himself looking past her, and certainly Doug Knutson behind her, for the one person he had hoped to see in that basement after the service. Gunther had been in the last pew, next to his parents, his face a fright show of Band-Aids and gauze tape. His right arm was in a shoulder-to-wrist cast, frozen at a right angle and slung tight to his body. The strangest thing to Patrick, who expected the medical details, was Gunther’s hair, gathered back tightly, glossy on top, naked of the watch cap. Mrs. Hendrickson, mournful even in good times, dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. Mr. Hendrickson, in sports coat and tie, looked angry. Gunther, despite the short-sleeved white shirt, blue clip-on tie, and Lon Chaney make-up, looked his old impenetrable self.

  Patrick would try to make contact with him, had tried. A few days after their failed scheme, when Patrick called to see how Gunther was, Mrs. Hendrickson said he was resting. After several more calls, Patrick’s mother and the Hendricksons would make it clear that it would be best if the boys were apart as much as possible. But no sanctions were necessary; their friendship ended with that leap off the high school roof. No big scene was needed to make it official, no drama like girls would have had, no confrontation filled with blame. Gunther spent more time at Hendrickson’s Best. Patrick bagged groceries at Knutson’s, then dusted off his guitar. He started a garage band with some other non-athletes, including Charlie Sorenson, who no longer cared for fire engines but now shared with Patrick an abiding passion for the power chords of Judas Priest.

  Oddly––odd to Patrick––the two, nearly simultaneous losses of his father and best friend made him less of an outsider at Willard County High. His band played school dances; he joined the debate team. His grades rose sharply. He never became part of the popular group, but he had a social niche, and, briefly, a girlfriend. Katie Osterlund said hello to him in the hallways.

  Of course, he and Gunther saw each other. Unavoidable in a school, a town, that small. They guarded one another in gym class basketball games. Gunther sat behind him in a few classes, farther and farther behind as they moved through junior year, as Gunther reflexively sought the back row and Patrick, with decreasing timidity, edged nearer the front. They spoke, awkwardly. Patrick would sometimes glance back at Gunther in class, or as he drove past Hendrickson’s Best in his dad’s green station wagon, and see him gazing off in the distance, stroking his goatee or pulling down the black watch cap, and wonder at the conversation he was having with himself.

  Patrick missed it, the conversation––the monologues––and had no one to tell how much. Missed it more, he sometimes felt, than his father’s counsel. At such moments he’d gun the green wagon past Hendrickson’s Best, hop on I-94, crank up Judas Priest or Led Zeppelin and cruise past the loamy fields on Route 17, past the burgeoning mall at Winnipee Falls, headed for nowhere, fast as the law would allow.

  Bit by Bit

  It was a leap year, Patrick suddenly remembered, glaring at the dusty shelves of Marcus Garvey High School’s book room. February, which had once seemed so promising––and brief––was endless, a slushy mess in every sense. He stuck his head in the empty space on the middle shelf, between the Malcolm X autobiographies and The House on Mango Street, where at least ten copies of Huck Finn should be. He sneezed, banging his head on the shelf above. “Damn it, Dorie,” he muttered, smacking the metal shelf below, stinging his hand. His beloved, forgetful senior colleague, who had helped him write the grant for the “American Dream” unit, had put in the book orders in the fall and come up short. Again. Time for Plan E: an afterschool dash to the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Second and Broadway, where the Twain selection was generally long and deep. Unlike his checking account.

  The book room, inexplicably, was the pride of Marcus Garvey. “Oh, we have a book room,” Wally had replied enthusiastically when Patrick had asked what he’
d be teaching when they’d hired him seven years ago. That first day he’d followed the vice principal’s wide hips down the white-tiled hallway designed in the ’50s to ease the conversion from school to hospital in the event of nuclear attack that now provided a convenient whiteboard for graffiti, doodles, and gang tags. Wally had trooped Patrick up two flights of the fabled Up staircase, stopping before a solid metal door. He twirled through the brass key ring at his belt and unlocked the door slowly, with some ceremony, as was his way. “I’ll leave you to peruse the literature,” he said, and left.

  Patrick had snapped on the bare bulb to find himself surrounded by floor-to-ceiling stacks of yellowed paperbacks in various stages of decrepitude, covered by dust dating from the Eisenhower administration. There had been no need to paw through the stacks as the floor was littered with a fair sampling of book covers: Bartleby the Scrivener, Silas Marner, The Red Badge of Courage, Great Expectations. Though Patrick, a Midwesterner and novice teacher, was no authority, he found it difficult to imagine the New York City classroom for which these titles––Civil War melodrama? Travails of the Victorian scribe?—would ever have seemed appropriate. He’d been force-fed a number of these volumes himself back in high school and the experience had nearly killed all native interest in literature.

  The book room, he would soon understand, was management’s answer to having no syllabus, no state frameworks––no clue––as to what he should be teaching. Marcus Garvey, like many warehouse-sized high schools in New York, had been broken into thematic “mini-schools” in the early ’80s. After the federal government told the city to drop dead in the mid-’70s, the chancellor decided to let the hundred flowers bloom: anyone with an idea, a space, and a connection at the DOE central office at 110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, could jolly well set up a mini-school. The first mini-schools––dedicated to the disciplines of art, math, technology––focused on self-explanatory curricular needs. But as time passed, their themes grew more fanciful, abstruse, even. Patrick had landed in Experiment in Cooperative Learning, a program that had recently lost its director, most of its students, and its way. What it did have was four classrooms at Marcus Garvey, nominal oversight by the principal and vice principal, and access to the book room.

  Once it became clear that his first-day tour of Garvey was over and that Mr. Kupczek was never returning to the book room, Patrick braved his dust allergy and began the nasty business of sorting through the novels. But the deeper he got in the stacks, the more dust-filled the air and the more he sneezed, sending ever-larger clouds billowing across the book room. He blew page 217-18 clear out of an ancient copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, sparing Tess the cruel advances of Alec D’Urberville. Which was more than Hardy ever did for her. It seemed arbitrary which would be the lucky first book to begin his Experiment in Cooperative Learning, but this choice was made simple in one regard: only a single novel had a useable class set. Unfortunately, that novel was Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.

  Patrick sat cross-legged on the book covers, rocking, holding his head, sneezing. Why, oh why, this book? He could picture his tortured adolescent self slogging through this novel on his bed back in Peterson’s Prairie, counting the pages still left to read, waking to the smell of its musty text, chapter five sodden with drool. What idiot had chosen this? And why? But, as a rookie teacher hopelessly overmatched by his situation must, he made peace with it. Okay: stuffy colonial British story; tea drinking; stiff upper-lips. Ridiculous vocabulary. But: sea disaster (link to Titanic?); implicit violence; a fair amount of boozing. And, he further rationalized, wasn’t there a certain fitting irony—inspirational, maybe––teaching immigrant kids an English novel by a Polish author writing in his third language?

  All rationalizations dissolved in the face of the realities of the Experiment in Cooperative Learning. Cooperative learning, it turned out, involved replacing students seated in neat rows with “participants” slouching on randomly placed sofas. The participants were not required to remove their hats or coats or to address their “facilitators” by other than their first names. Process, not product, was the thing at EICL: We’re all co-learners here; no one has the right answer.

  EICL was the dumpster program at Marcus Garvey. The Computers for the Future program had a waiting list, as did Math in the Real World. Mothers clutching false addresses lined up outside the Science & Technology Academy on the first day of school, trailing all the way out to the 103rd Street Deli. Security was called from down the hall when the office doors opened and the line devolved, half queue/half scrum. No such measures were necessary when EICL opened its doors. EICL was for the leftovers: just off the boat, just out of juvie, just out of luck. It was the dumpster program and everyone––parents, students, teachers––knew it. Everyone except Patrick Lynch, desperately clutching his nineteenth-century British novel.

  They were, indeed, co-learners at the Experiment in Cooperative Learning. Patrick learned that “homework” was a euphemism. That supplies would be provided by the facilitator. To be aware of the thousand-and-one unseen landmines: don’t call Sanji Smith Mr. Smith, for example; Sanji never met Mr. Smith Sr., and it will only make Sanji quiet and sullen to remind him of that fact. What did the participants learn? Damn little at first, it seemed to Patrick as he reviewed his failings as an educator on the subway home every afternoon. Not to participate, certainly. But eventually they learned to listen—first to him, then to one another.

  It seemed they’d never been read to before. When he began reading long passages of Conrad aloud––of necessity, to bridge the half-dozen language groups in his classes––they whispered, reclined on the sofas in their puffy black parkas––pillows on pillows––in a way Patrick found both rude and distracting. Then he realized they were commenting on his performance: Listen to his voice… Look at his face… That’s so funny. They had no experience of live performance, even one so modest as his. He certainly wasn’t the performer his father had been, reading Dickens to him at length, swelling voice and body as the bloated Mr. Bumble or shrinking to the unctuous Uriah Heep, settling not merely for an English accent but modulating with each change in age, sex, region, class. But, limited as his gifts were, Patrick learned to captivate his captive audience, beginning with, of all books, Lord Jim.

  He’d thought of his father that morning as he paced his room before first period; he knew this was the moment they would be hooked by the story. Or not. As usual, they strolled into his classroom in twos and threes during the first five minutes of class, bearing bagels, coffee, hot chocolate from the 103rd Street Deli, plopped themselves down on the sofas and began chatting. When Patrick decided there was a quorum, he cleared his throat. So, where is the ship going? he asked them, a token reference to last night’s homework. The mandatory fifteen-second pause elapsed. For all the United Nations-wide diversity at EICL, the participants broke neatly in two camps: those with limited English who would love to please their facilitator if only they could, and those whose first language was more or less English who would lose face by raising a hand. When a hand went up from the second camp, it was generally followed by Yo, Patrick, gotta use the bathroom.

  Sanji, a member of no group, one of three or four who were actually reading the book, raised his hand. They are on a pilgrimage, he said.

  Very good. Where to?

  To the holy city of Mecca, Sanji enunciated in his clipped, Anglo-accented English. Where was his family from? Patrick wondered. India by way of Indonesia? Minus the puffy coat and the oversize Timberlands, he could have stepped out of this novel.

  Exactly so, said Patrick, launching into the pivotal scene of Lord Jim, a scene he’d practiced the night before in his bathroom, listening to the echo of Conrad’s words. The title character leans over the Patna’s railing as the ship founders in the Red Sea squall, the lifeboat below containing the other Europeans, captain and crew, who have already deserted the eight hundred dark-skinned pilgrims in their charge. Jim clings to the r
ailing. Jump! the white faces below scream. The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea…my breath was driven back into my throat, Jim confesses. She was going down, down, head first under me… And Patrick’s voice, which had swirled up with the squall, sank to a whisper as the prow of the Patna went under. Jim leans, leans, over the railing.

  Patrick flicked his eyes up from the page. They were leaning, leaning toward him from their sofas. Shavonda, an immense girl who took up half of one sofa, sat, mouth agape, like one of his nephews in front of the TV. Then, almost inaudibly, he read: I had jumped…it seems.

  Silence.

  Did he? Shavonda rasped. Did he jump?

  Well? Did he? Patrick swiveled his head back and forth, meeting the eyes of each participant. They looked down at their laps, or at one another. Finally, Sanji raised his hand. It was bad practice to keep calling on the same student, Patrick knew, rule number one from Ed School. It discouraged all the others. But, as Lord Jim himself would attest, any port in a storm.

  Sanji cleared his throat and sat up as straight as the Salvation Army sofa would allow. He jumped, but he can’t admit it, said Sanji. He has lost his honor.