“There is an enchanted courtyard in Greenwich Village,” she read “It’s only a narrow patch of brick and green among the irregular shapes of very old houses, but what makes it enchanted is that the people who live in it, or near it, have come to form an enchanted circle of friends.
“None of them have enough money and some are quite poor, but they believe in the future; they believe in each other, and in themselves.
“There is Howard, once a top reporter on a metropolitan daily newspaper. Everyone knows Howard will soon scale the journalistic heights again, and in the meantime he serves as the wise and humorous sage of the courtyard.
“There is Bart, a young violinist clearly destined for virtuosity on the concert stage, who just for the present must graciously accept all lunch and dinner invitations in order to survive.
“And there is Helen, a sculptor whose charming works will someday grace the finest gardens in America, and whose studio is the favorite gathering place for members of the circle.”
There was more like that, introducing other characters, and toward the end she got around to the children. She described my sister as “a lanky, dreamy tomboy,” which was odd—I had never thought of Edith that way—and she called me “a sad-eyed seven-year-old philosopher,” which was wholly baffling. When the introduction was over she paused a few seconds for dramatic effect and then went into the opening episode of the series, or what I suppose would be called the “pilot.”
I couldn’t follow the story very well—it seemed to be mostly an excuse for bringing each character up to the microphone for a few lines apiece—and before long I was listening only to see if there would be any lines for the character based on me. And there were, in a way. She announced my name—“Billy”—but then instead of speaking she put her mouth through a terrible series of contortions, accompanied by funny little bursts of sound, and by the time the words came out I didn’t care what they were. It was true that I stuttered badly—I wouldn’t get over it for five or six more years—but I hadn’t expected anyone to put it on the radio.
“Oh, Sloane, that’s marvelous,” my mother said when the reading was over. “That’s really exciting.”
And Sloane was carefully stacking her typed pages in the way she’d probably been taught to do in secretarial school, blushing and smiling with pride. “Well,” she said, “it probably needs work, but I do think it’s got a lot of potential.”
“It’s perfect,” my mother said. “Just the way it is.”
Sloane mailed the script to a radio producer and he mailed it back with a letter typed by some radio secretary, explaining that her material had too limited an appeal to be commercial. The radio public was not yet ready, he said, for a story of Greenwich Village life.
Then it was March. The new President promised that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and soon after that his head came packed in wood and excelsior from Mr. Nicholson’s foundry.
It was a fairly good likeness. She had caught the famous lift of the chin—it might not have looked like him at all if she hadn’t—and everyone told her it was fine. What nobody said was that her original plan had been right, and Mr. Nicholson shouldn’t have interfered: it was too small. It didn’t look heroic. If you could have hollowed it out and put a slot in the top, it might have made a serviceable bank for loose change.
The foundry had burnished the lead until it shone almost silver in the highlights, and they’d mounted it on a sturdy little base of heavy black plastic. They had sent back three copies: one for the White House presentation, one to keep for exhibition purposes, and an extra one. But the extra one soon toppled to the floor and was badly damaged—the nose mashed almost into the chin—and my mother might have burst into tears if Howard Whitman hadn’t made everyone laugh by saying it was now a good portrait of Vice President Garner.
Charlie Hines, Howard’s old friend from the Post who was now a minor member of the White House staff, made an appointment for my mother with the President late on a weekday morning. She arranged for Sloane to spend the night with Edith and me; then she took an evening train down to Washington, carrying the sculpture in a cardboard box, and stayed at one of the less expensive Washington hotels. In the morning she met Charlie Hines in some crowded White House anteroom, where I guess they disposed of the cardboard box, and he took her to the waiting room outside the Oval Office. He sat with her as she held the naked head in her lap, and when their turn came he escorted her in to the President’s desk for the presentation. It didn’t take long. There were no reporters and no photographers.
Afterwards Charlie Hines took her out to lunch, probably because he’d promised Howard Whitman to do so. I imagine it wasn’t a first-class restaurant, more likely some bustling, no-nonsense place favored by the working press, and I imagine they had trouble making conversation until they settled on Howard, and on what a shame it was that he was still out of work.
“No, but do you know Howard’s friend Bart Kampen?” Charlie asked. “The young Dutchman? The violinist?”
“Yes, certainly,” she said. “I know Bart.”
“Well, Jesus, there’s one story with a happy ending, right? Have you heard about that? Last time I saw Bart he said, ‘Charlie, the Depression’s over for me,’ and he told me he’d found some rich, dumb, crazy woman who’s paying him to tutor her kids.”
I can picture how she looked riding the long, slow train back to New York that afternoon. She must have sat staring straight ahead or out the dirty window, seeing nothing, her eyes round and her face held in a soft shape of hurt. Her adventure with Franklin D. Roosevelt had come to nothing. There would be no photographs or interviews or feature articles, no thrilling moments of newsreel coverage; strangers would never know of how she’d come from a small Ohio town, or of how she’d nurtured her talent through the brave, difficult, one-woman journey that had brought her to the attention of the world. It wasn’t fair.
All she had to look forward to now was her romance with Eric Nicholson, and I think she may have known even then that it was faltering—his final desertion came the next fall.
She was forty-one, an age when even romantics must admit that youth is gone, and she had nothing to show for the years but a studio crowded with green plaster statues that nobody would buy. She believed in the aristocracy, but there was no reason to suppose the aristocracy would ever believe in her.
And every time she thought of what Charlie Hines had said about Bart Kampen—oh, how hateful; oh, how hateful—the humiliation came back in wave on wave, in merciless rhythm to the clatter of the train.
She made a brave show of her homecoming, though nobody was there to greet her but Sloane and Edith and me. Sloane had fed us, and she said, “There’s a plate for you in the oven, Helen,” but my mother said she’d rather just have a drink instead. She was then at the onset of a long battle with alcohol that she would ultimately lose; it must have seemed bracing that night to decide on a drink instead of dinner. Then she told us “all about” her trip to Washington, managing to make it sound like a success. She talked of how thrilling it was to be actually inside the White House; she repeated whatever small, courteous thing it was that President Roosevelt had said to her on receiving the head. And she had brought back souvenirs: a handful of note-size White House stationery for Edith, and a well-used briar pipe for me. She explained that she’d seen a very distinguished-looking man smoking the pipe in the waiting room outside the Oval Office; when his name was called he had knocked it out quickly into an ashtray and left it there as he hurried inside. She had waited until she was sure no one was looking; then she’d taken the pipe from the ashtray and put it in her purse. “Because I knew he must have been somebody important,” she said. “He could easily have been a member of the Cabinet, or something like that. Anyway, I thought you’d have a lot of fun with it.” But I didn’t. It was too heavy to hold in my teeth and it tasted terrible when I sucked on it; besides, I kept wondering what the man must have thought when he came out of the Presiden
t’s office and found it gone.
Sloane went home after a while, and my mother sat drinking alone at the dining-room table. I think she hoped Howard Whitman or some of her other friends might drop in, but nobody did. It was almost our bedtime when she looked up and said, “Edith? Run out in the garden and see if you can find Bart.”
He had recently bought a pair of bright tan shoes with crepe soles. I saw those shoes trip rapidly down the dark brick steps beyond the windows—he seemed scarcely to touch each step in his buoyancy—and then I saw him come smiling into the studio, with Edith closing the door behind him. “Helen!” he said. “You’re back!”
She acknowledged that she was back. Then she got up from the table and slowly advanced on him, and Edith and I began to realize we were in for something bad.
“Bart,” she said, “I had lunch with Charlie Hines in Washington today.”
“Oh?”
“And we had a very interesting talk. He seems to know you very well.”
“Oh, not really; we’ve met a few times at Howard’s, but we’re not really—”
“And he said you’d told him the Depression was over for you because you’d found some rich, dumb, crazy woman who was paying you to tutor her kids. Don’t interrupt me.”
But Bart clearly had no intention of interrupting her. He was backing away from her in his soundless shoes, retreating past one stiff green garden child after another. His face looked startled and pink.
“I’m not a rich woman, Bart,” she said, bearing down on him. “And I’m not dumb. And I’m not crazy. And I can recognize ingratitude and disloyalty and sheer, rotten viciousness and lies when they’re thrown in my face.”
My sister and I were halfway up the stairs, jostling each other in our need to hide before the worst part came. The worst part of these things always came at the end, after she’d lost all control and gone on shouting anyway.
“I want you to get out of my house, Bart,” she said. “And I don’t ever want to see you again. And I want to tell you something. All my life I’ve hated people who say ‘Some of my best friends are Jews.’ Because none of my friends are Jews, or ever will be. Do you understand me? None of my friends are Jews, or ever will be.”
The studio was quiet after that. Without speaking, avoiding each other’s eyes, Edith and I got into our pajamas and into bed. But it wasn’t more than a few minutes before the house began to ring with our mother’s raging voice all over again, as if Bart had somehow been brought back and made to take his punishment twice.
“…And I said, ‘None of my friends are Jews, or ever will be….’ ”
She was on the telephone, giving Sloane Cabot the highlights of the scene, and it was clear that Sloane would take her side and comfort her. Sloane might know how the Virgin Mary felt on the way to Bethlehem, but she also knew how to play my stutter for laughs. In a case like this she would quickly see where her allegiance lay, and it wouldn’t cost her much to drop Bart Kampen from her enchanted circle.
When the telephone call came to an end at last there was silence downstairs until we heard her working with the ice pick in the icebox: she was making herself another drink.
There would be no more school in our room. We would probably never see Bart again—or if we ever did, he would probably not want to see us. But our mother was ours; we were hers; and we lived with that knowledge as we lay listening for the faint, faint sound of millions.
Gryphon
Charles Baxter
On Wednesday afternoon, between the geography lesson on ancient Egypt’s hand-operated irrigation system and an art project that involved drawing a model city next to a mountain, our fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Hibler, developed a cough. This cough began with a series of muffled throat-clearings and progressed to propulsive noises contained within Mr. Hibler’s closed mouth. “Listen to him,” Carol Peterson whispered to me. “He’s gonna blow up.” Mr. Hibler’s laughter—dazed and infrequent—sounded a bit like his cough, but as we worked on our model cities we would look up, thinking he was enjoying a joke, and see Mr. Hibler’s face turning red, his cheeks puffed out. This was not laughter. Twice he bent over, and his loose tie, like a plumb line, hung down straight from his neck as he exploded himself into a Kleenex. He would excuse himself, then go on coughing. “I’ll bet you a dime,” Carol Peterson whispered, “we get a substitute tomorrow.”
Carol sat at the desk in front of mine and was a bad person—when she thought no one was looking she would blow her nose on notebook paper, then crumple it up and throw it into the wastebasket—but at times of crisis she spoke the truth. I knew I’d lose the dime.
“No deal,” I said.
When Mr. Hibler stood us in formation at the door just prior to the final bell, he was almost incapable of speech. “I’m sorry, boys and girls,” he said. “I seem to be coming down with something.”
“I hope you feel better tomorrow, Mr. Hibler,” Bobby Kryzanowicz, the faultless brown-noser, said, and I heard Carol Peterson’s evil giggle. Then Mr. Hibler opened the door and we walked out to the buses, a clique of us starting noisily to hawk and laugh as soon as we thought we were a few feet beyond Mr. Hibler’s earshot.
Since Five Oaks was a rural community, and in Michigan, the supply of substitute teachers was limited to the town’s unemployed community college graduates, a pool of about four mothers. These ladies fluttered, provided easeful class days, and nervously covered material we had mastered weeks earlier. Therefore it was a surprise when a woman we had never seen came into the class the next day, carrying a purple purse, a checkerboard lunchbox, and a few books. She put the books on one side of Mr. Hibler’s desk and the lunchbox on the other, next to the Voice of Music phonograph. Three of us in the back of the room were playing with Heever, the chameleon that lived in a terrarium and on one of the plastic drapes, when she walked in.
She clapped her hands at us. “Little boys,” she said, “why are you bent over together like that?” She didn’t wait for us to answer. “Are you tormenting an animal? Put it back. Please sit down at your desks. I want no cabals this time of the day.” We just stared at her. “Boys,” she repeated, “I asked you to sit down.”
I put the chameleon in his terrarium and felt my way to my desk, never taking my eyes off the woman! With white and green chalk, she had started to draw a tree on the left side of the blackboard. She didn’t look usual. Furthermore, her tree was outsized, disproportionate, for some reason.
“This room needs a tree,” she said, with one line drawing the suggestion of a leaf. “A large, leafy, shady, deciduous…oak.”
Her fine, light hair had been done up in what I would learn years later was called a chignon, and she wore gold-rimmed glasses whose lenses seemed to have the faintest blue tint. Harold Knardahl, who sat across from me, whispered, “Mars,” and I nodded slowly, savoring the imminent weirdness of the day. The substitute drew another branch with an extravagant arm gesture, then turned around and said, “Good morning. I don’t believe I said good morning to all of you yet.”
Facing us, she was no special age—an adult is an adult—but her face had two prominent lines, descending vertically from the sides of her mouth to her chin. I knew where I had seen those lines before: Pinocchio. They were marionette lines. “You may stare at me,” she said to us, as a few more kids from the last bus came into the room, their eyes fixed on her, “for a few more seconds, until the bell rings. Then I will permit no more staring. Looking I will permit. Staring, no. It is impolite to stare, and a sign of bad breeding. You cannot make a social effort while staring.”
Harold Knardahl did not glance at me, or nudge, but I heard him whisper “Mars” again, trying to get more mileage out of his single joke with the kids who had just come in.
When everyone was seated, the substitute teacher finished her tree, put down her chalk fastidiously on the phonograph, brushed her hands, and faced us. “Good morning,” she said. “I am Miss Ferenczi, your teacher for the day. I am fairly new to your community, and I don�
�t believe any of you know me. I will therefore start by telling you a story about myself.”
While we settled back, she launched into her tale. She said her grandfather had been a Hungarian prince; her mother had been born in some place called Flanders, had been a pianist, and had played concerts for people Miss Ferenczi referred to as “crowned heads.” She gave us a knowing look. “Grieg,” she said, “the Norwegian master, wrote a concerto for piano that was…”—she paused—“my mother’s triumph at her debut concert in London.” Her eyes searched the ceiling. Our eyes followed. Nothing up there but ceiling tile. “For reasons that I shall not go into, my family’s fortunes took us to Detroit, then north to dreadful Saginaw, and now here I am in Five Oaks, as your substitute teacher, for today, Thursday, October the eleventh. I believe it will be a good day: all the forecasts coincide. We shall start with your reading lesson. Take out your reading book. I believe it is called Broad Horizons, or something along those lines.”
Jeannie Vermeesch raised her hand. Miss Ferenczi nodded at her. “Mr. Hibler always starts the day with the Pledge of Allegiance,” Jeannie whined.
“Oh, does he? In that case,” Miss Ferenczi said, “you must know it very well by now, and we certainly need not spend our time on it. No, no allegiance pledging on the premises today, by my reckoning. Not with so much sunlight coming into the room. A pledge does not suit my mood.” She glanced at her watch. “Time is flying. Take out Broad Horizons.”
She disappointed us by giving us an ordinary lesson, complete with vocabulary and drills, comprehension questions, and recitation. She didn’t seem to care for the material, however. She sighed every few minutes and rubbed her glasses with a frilly handkerchief that she withdrew, magician-style, from her left sleeve.
After reading we moved on to arithmetic. It was my favorite time of the morning, when the lazy autumn sunlight dazzled its way through ribbons of clouds past the windows on the east side of the classroom and crept across the linoleum floor. On the playground the first group of children, the kindergartners, were running on the quack grass just beyond the monkey bars. We were doing multiplication tables. Miss Ferenczi had made John Wazny stand up at his desk in the front row. He was supposed to go through the tables of six. From where I was sitting, I could smell the Vitalis soaked into John’s plastered hair. He was doing fine until he came to six times eleven and six times twelve. “Six times eleven,” he said, “is sixty-eight. Six times twelve is…” He put his fingers to his head, quickly and secretly sniffed his fingertips, and said, “…seventy-two.” Then he sat down.
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules Page 4
