I turned up the avenue toward home.
Recalling Maddox and his gift for teaching had brought back to me some vestigial memory of learning—a time of relative innocence when a fifteen-by-twenty-foot windowless room with a dozen desk chairs and a few pieces of chalk had seemed world enough for the full measure of my curiosity. A time when I believed I could learn everything that could be taught under the sun. Maddox, of course, knew better than this. He was not a mere politician, trying to snooker us with empty promises. Nor was he some ego-ridden Harvard biggie like Davis, who dealt only in the certainties of his own accomplishments. I remembered him as the rarest of birds: a teller of essential stories, a backroom bard in love with our wide eyes and our listening. His medium was democracy’s sediment, the greasy workings, the engine under the hood and the unseen hands that had put it there. Over the years he’d fashioned this humble material into a glorious gospel, and like all true apostles he would not be ignored. His hands flapped, his lips smacked, his teeth flashed. He was tall and somewhat pear-shaped; he loved to bellow. Lightning-quick, he’d have you singled out, a thick digit (usually the middle one) jabbing at you from across the room: “Mr. Rose! Tell me a story about the longest filibuster in the history of the goddamn universe…. Mr. Glickstein! Talk to me about how LBJ mustered the count for the Voting Rights Act. If I’m not mistaken, it all began in the men’s washroom….”
Once, thrashing his arms as he acted out a paranoid rant that Nixon was said to have directed at an aide, Maddox accidentally gave a boy named Chuckie Klein a blow to the face. Blood came gushing out of Chuckie’s nose. For a moment teacher and student appeared stunned, staring slack-jawed at the ruby stream puddling on the floor. Then Maddox coolly reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, none too clean, and, tossing it to Chuckie, resumed his lecture: “So there it is, gentlemen. Let no ignoramus ever try to tell you that politics isn’t a battlefield.”
When less than an hour later Toby received my call requesting an interview for Maddox’s vacated teaching position, he said, “The thought occurred me, Julian, but you sounded as though you had lots of big-time offers out there. You sure you want to go for this? I mean, Cochrane’s an excellent school …”
“I’m sure.”
Next morning the interview process began. It lasted a week and all through it I held on to the outlandish fantasy that Maddox, out barbecuing behind his condo in Boca Raton, would somehow catch wind of my candidacy and feel inspired to fly back to New York to interrogate me himself. What a time we’d have! The gleam in the eye, the stories traded: “So, Mr. Rose, Harvard not good enough for you? The young pup returns triumphant, just as the old coonhound heads out to pasture?”
But Maddox never did materialize. Instead, for my troubles I found myself trapped in a small room with Mrs. Hogan.
The years had not been kind to her. She had shrunk visibly and her whiskers had multiplied, though her voice was the same steel trap it ever was.
“What a surprise, Julian, to hear from Tobias about your sudden interest in coming back to teach.”
She hadn’t forgotten about the tack incident, that much was clear.
In her office I noticed a ficus plant, several volumes of the National Directory of Secondary Schools, and framed photos of her husband, her two red-faced daughters, her Siamese cat. “Mrs. Hogan is a person too,” I kept repeating to myself like a mantra, as the interview wore on and on.
And seated in one corner of my mind, dressed in the garish checks and plaids that were his uniform of choice, Maddox softly drawled, “Well, son, you’re up to your neck in it now.” While in the opposite corner of my mind—the mind that seemed to be in the process of losing itself—simultaneously Davis appeared, dressed in one of his dark power suits, with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, and he too was talking to me, and though I tried to block out his voice, the words sneaked through anyway: “If you won’t ask her for yourself, then at least do it for the party. Because I’ll tell you, nothing makes the old boys happier than a pretty face….”
In the end I got the job. I found a place to live too, and on the first of September my father and I rented a U-Haul and moved my things to a tiny studio apartment on West Ninety-seventh.
His housewarming gift was the corduroy sleeper sofa, along with other furniture odds and ends from his storage bin in the basement. With the help of the super of my new building we got everything through the door and into the middle of the apartment.
The room was stifling; we were both drenched in sweat. At my suggestion we went around the corner to a bar on Amsterdam I knew, and sat in its stained shadows, drinking cold bottles of Tecate. A cool enough place to rest. Through the tinted front window we could see out to the street: a fire hydrant had been opened illegally and three giddy dark-eyed children were darting in and out of the gushing flood. Then a bus drove by, lofting a sheet of dirty water toward the sidewalk, and the kids scattered, laughing and cursing in Spanish.
Inside the bar, my father raised his bottle and tapped it against mine.
“To your new life, Julian.”
I tried to smile. “So that’s what this is?”
I could not remember ever being in a bar with him, sitting here like this in the middle of the day. After our exertions he looked depleted, wan, and I worried that helping me move in the heat had been too much for him. He wasn’t a young man. A sudden image of him having a heart attack flashed before my eyes—he would be pale just like this—and then, in the cavelike surrender of the bar, I felt a nugget of helpless love for him break free of its hidden moorings and rise to the surface of my consciousness.
“I ever tell you about your mother’s and my first apartment?” he said.
“No.” He had told me once or twice, but for some reason, now, I wanted to hear him tell the story again.
“Across town, Eighty-ninth and Second,” he said. “Well, it was major for us—our first apartment, and on the Upper East Side, no less. All those rich people! Of course the reality was a little different. The place was a hundred and ten bucks a month, which back then was a good chunk of my salary. And it was hardly bigger than your studio, except the landlord had decided to milk it for all it was worth by dividing it into four rooms.” He grinned. Lifted by this local act of remembrance, color had returned to his cheeks and his posture had improved. “Four closets was more like it. We slept in one of them, cooked in the second, ate in a third. The fourth was going to be for you kids when you finally arrived.”
Still faintly smiling, he took a swallow of beer. He looked out at the street and the kids playing there in the flood of water.
When he turned back, his eyes were charged with feeling and his grin was gone.
“I remember measuring that room for a bunk bed,” he said. “All we had was an old yardstick. I laid it on the floor, marked the place with my thumb and scooted it along. That’s how we did everything back then. Eight and a half by five and a half, that room was. A closet. But big enough for a bunk bed. Big enough for kids.”
He finished his beer. His eyes found mine in the smoky mirror above the backbar, and through the bottles of tequila and Cointreau and triple sec he saw me looking at him.
“That was my favorite room, Julian. My favorite room. Just knowing that one day soon you’d come along and sleep in it.”
My first memory:
I am in a bathtub that is, to me, as big as a room. He is on his knees on the white tiled floor, smiling down at me, face like a moon, his elbows resting on the rim of the tub, his hands drifting in the warm water beside my legs and feet. Short dark hairs cover the backs of his hands: an underwater forest.
I reach out and grip his wrist with both my hands. “Hold my breath?” I say.
He grins. His teeth are white. He is bigger and younger and more hopeful than he ever will be again. “Sure,” he says. “Hold your breath. But not too long.”
With one hand he helps pinch my nostrils closed, to keep the water out. The other hand he puts behin
d my head. Shutting my eyes, I take a breath so deep it puffs my cheeks out into a single balloon. “Don’t forget to come back,” he teases, then lays me back like a holy child. The warm water closes over me. Once under, I let my eyes open. His face beams down at me through a penumbra of rippling light. His lips are moving.
“I see you,” I think he’s saying. “I see you.”
This is the test I have conceived for myself, the only one that can tell me what I need to know. My cheeks are straining to hold enough life. As the oxygen disappears, my lungs replenish it with courage. My mind is everywhere, and just beginning. I am hearing the world as it might be.
I paid the check. He moved stiffly, his body already mapping tomorrow’s soreness, joint by joint. We went outside, into the sticking heat and the smell of baked trash. The kids had gone, but the water was still pouring from the hydrant.
On the corner we parted with a brief hug. We would go to our own places now. I envisioned the cluttered heap of things sitting in the middle of my floor, the windows sealed shut with fresh paint.
three
A HAND WENT UP. Pale hand, short fingers, belonging to a small dark-haired boy with a purposeful but shy expression to his eyes, which, on this first day of school, he could not quite raise to meet mine.
A glance at the roll list in front of me and I came up with a name: David Glassman, junior.
“Yes, Mr. Glassman?”
“I heard you went to Cochrane yourself, Mr. Rose.”
“That’s right.”
“How’d you like it?”
“Well enough to come back here and teach.”
“How long ago was that?” asked another boy, whose tie appeared to be a swatch of hemp.
“Let’s just say it was a while ago.”
“Like how long? I mean, who was president?”
“Eisenhower.”
A pause.
“Gentlemen,” I said soberly, “that was a joke.”
David Glassman grinned. He was the only one. Then I saw a couple of other boys smirk sideways at him, mocking him. Glassman observed this too; he swallowed his grin and ducked his head, turtlelike, down into his neck. Most damaging of all was the look on his face that showed implicit agreement with his detractors, even affection for them—the Stockholm syndrome, I thought, and instinctively my heart went out to him.
It was my first day. And on the first day of school—whether child or adult, student or teacher—in fear and trembling you received with inordinate gratitude what wisps of encouragement and generosity of spirit were offered your way. This wasn’t ass-kissing but mutual recognition. In no more time than it had taken to call out the names and tell a thudding joke, I’d had a vision of a kid that matched in some restorative and hopeful way the vision I’d long harbored of myself: dark-haired and quiet, shy but confident, quick to duck his head but always listening carefully; always thinking. A boy who relied perhaps too heavily on the inventory of his brain as the sole means of getting across to higher ground. A boy who as he matured would grasp with scientific precision a large number of right answers—and yet who, for all that, would fail to translate those answers into the deeper poetics of selfhood. A boy who, having no real compassion for his own tender sensibility, was inclined to side with those who would denigrate it over those who would nurture it. A boy whose parents probably didn’t love each other, whose family didn’t feel like a family. A boy, in short, in search of a mentor or a big brother or a father. A boy waiting to be taught.
I began to speak to the class.
“This is a two-term course,” I explained. “The second term will be called ‘Effecting Political Change’ and will be something of a kitchen sink of political topics. In one way or another we’ll touch on elections, new communications technologies, voting patterns, media groups—whatever aspects of political life seem relevant to the changing world we live in. This is government and its workings as seen through the lens of political science, not history. But it’s my belief—and it was Mr. Maddox’s belief when I was his student here—that to speak about political science without first having a solid grounding in history is to speak first and foremost out of your asshole.”
Laughter.
“Which brings us to the present term, which as you no doubt are aware is called ‘American Political Institutions.’ Here, we’ll be concerning ourselves primarily with just that—the architecture and goals of the Constitution, the political and social environment that gave birth to it, the mind-set of the authors as we have come to know them. Aspects of Federalism. You all know what Federalism is? You’ve taken your basic U.S. history, I trust. Mr.”—a quick glance again at the list of names—”Chen, would you please give me a succinct definition of Federalism?”
“Federalism was the approach adopted by the Federalist Party.”
“Approach?”
“Um, doctrine?”
“Go ahead.”
“I think Alexander Hamilton was the head of it. The idea was that the country needed a strong government and so it should vote for the Constitution.”
“Who should vote?”
Brian Chen looked down at the cover of his notebook and sought to become invisible. David Glassman’s hand rose a few inches, then stopped, at war with itself.
“Mr. Glassman, is that a raised hand?”
“The states,” Glassman said. “The states should vote.”
More smirking, from the same source as before.
“Is that amusing, Mr…. Weisberg? The states are amusing? Which ones in particular?”
“Delaware,” Liam Weisberg, a red-haired sharpy, shot back, uncowed. “It’s smaller even than Central Park.”
“Pejorative hyperbole will get you nowhere in this class, Mr. Weisberg.”
“What’s ‘pejorative’ mean again?”
“Disparaging or belittling.”
“Well, George Washington was from Delaware and even he was pejorative about it.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. My dad told me an anecdote about it.”
“As I was saying, Mr. Weisberg.”
“Sorry, Mr. Rose.”
“The Constitution. Federalism. This is where we begin. Let’s try to go back to 1780 and see if we can’t imagine what government felt like then. Its effect. The footprint it left on the psyches of ordinary Americans. How much authority did government have at the time? Where was that authority located and how did it assert itself? Why might such authority be needed? Mr…. Jackson?”
A brown-skinned junior, tall and thin as a reed. “To control people? Otherwise, you know, all hell can break loose.”
“Precisely. All hell can break loose. And what might that say about the nature of power in human hands?”
“It’s a sign of human weakness,” Glassman offered.
“I thought it was an aphrodisiac,” Weisberg chimed in sarcastically.
“That’s probably why you’re in an all-boys school, Mr. Weisberg.”
Laughter. Weisberg, to his credit, laughed the loudest.
“Wait a second,” I said. “Let’s stay with this. Power as a laboratory for human fallibility. Power also as a natural source of concern among a people, especially those Americans in 1780, who after finally liberating themselves from British rule were not necessarily keen to put themselves under a highly centralized authority again. Where is power to be observed?”
“In government?”
“Yes. Where else?”
“In families.”
“Yes. Good. Where else?”
“Everywhere. Human nature.”
“All right. Who here has seen the film 2001: A Space Odyssey?“ No hands went up. “Okay, so nobody’s seen it? See it sometime, if you can. In the first scene a bunch of semiprehistoric apes gathered around a watering hole are gnawing on a zebra carcass. Kind of like you guys here, in fact.”
“If we’re the apes, does that make you the zebra carcass?”
“Not bad, Mr. Weisberg, not bad. Now, to continue: the scene’
s sort of kitschy and amusing till a rival ape gang shows up wanting the food and water for themselves, and brutally attacks the first gang. What we then see, as Mr. Jackson so aptly phrased it, is all hell breaking loose. Bloody murder. As a metaphor for human nature at its most unbridled, this is about as good as it gets. Ape versus ape holding up a mirror to man versus man. Better even than all those old reruns of Wild Kingdom. Not a bad reason to start thinking about the role and function of government. After all, it’s supposedly our brains that got us here, allowing us the rational capacity to control our otherwise animalistic tendencies toward the abuse of raw power. Checks and balances, in other words. Which brings us to the seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, whom you will all read more thoroughly when you get to college, I hope, and who among other things advocated the need for some restraining authority to keep that raw power in check against the bullies of the world. And there are still plenty of bullies in the world. If you don’t believe me, just take a look any day of the week at the Times Metro section.”
Brian Chen raised his hand.
“Mr. Chen.”
“You mentioned bullies. Well, I was mugged last week.”
“You were? Sorry to hear that.”
“They took my watch,” Chen said. “And fourteen dollars.”
“That’s terrible.”
“I’ve been mugged three times in the last five years,” another boy said.
“Which brings us,” I persisted, “to Madison. James Madison. Anybody? Mr. Glassman.”
“The fourth president of the United States and one of the authors of the Federalist Papers.”
“Correct. And Madison, you can be sure, had read his Locke. He’d read Locke’s Second Treatise. He’d read a great many things. He knew Locke’s writings on the state of nature intimately, and drawing on them, and on his own observations as a political thinker in a newly formed nation, he was able to dream up the notion of using the idea of human fallibility, human weakness, as a virtue within a new and necessary document—the Constitution—that would address and codify the relationship between the people and the power they had entrusted to their government. It’s a beautiful thing, this system of checks and balances. The three branches—legislative, executive, judiciary—each working as both initiator and ballast….”
Claire Marvel Page 13
