With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  No bills, but other irritants: a note from a student—never was a note left with good news in it—asking for an extension for her paper, no reason or excuse offered; a pink telephone message slip requesting a parent-teacher conference; another note on three-ring paper that said, Miss Pepper! The Cavanaugh burned down last night!!! What will we do????? At least on this issue I had an ace up my sleeve via Richard Quinn.

  I opened a sealed envelope with a great deal of curiosity. My mailbox generally contains reminders and brochures, not envelopes of any sort—and this one was unlabeled. I pulled out a piece of heavy bond and several newspaper clippings. The white paper had a drawing of a tombstone with an apple sitting on top of it. R.I.P. Teach was written on the stone. Makes you wonder who’s next, doesn’t it? was printed on the bottom of the page.

  I looked up, looked around, to see if the practical joker was watching. But everyone else in the office was intent on his or her own mail and looming day. I had an immediate, unpleasant conviction that this was not intended as a joke.

  No signature. The clippings all concerned violence to teachers. A college student who’d killed his professor because he didn’t get a fellowship. A high school teacher held hostage. A junior high coach stabbed. Et cetera.

  “Helga,” I asked, “did you notice who left messages in my mailbox?” I knew it was a stupid question as it left my mouth, perhaps before.

  The school secretary looked at me as if I were vermin. “She thinks I have time to monitor every to and fro to the mailboxes!” she told an invisible friend—the only sort of friend who’d have her.

  I tossed everything but the manila envelope and its contents and went to my first period class, my false hangover now doubled in intensity and my legs slightly unsure of where they were landing with each step, as if I’d suffered a mild stroke.

  R.I.P. Teach. Who on earth had sent that to me? I thought of my teacherly sins—disciplinary actions, bad grades, harsh words, boring lessons—but I couldn’t think of anything I’d done, or anything a student had done, that warranted such an extreme reaction.

  I didn’t know what to do about the packet. I didn’t know the point of telling anyone else at school yet. Anybody I’d show it to would only repeat my unanswerable questions, add to my fear. I told myself that I was overreacting, that the afterimage of Lyle Zacharias’s death was still blinding me, making me see menace everywhere, including a note that surely had some rational, nonthreatening explanation.

  It was nearly impossible to believe what I told myself.

  I had to squelch the urge to enter the classroom as a person with problems, rather than as a teacher. I wanted to say that a man had died in front of me last night, and that now someone was threatening my life. But that wasn’t my role—or my students’. Luckily, I had a low-energy morning ahead. Two sections were having exams—could that be what had ticked somebody off?—and the ninth graders were spending the week rehearsing their adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I had lots of passive time ahead in which to speculate and tremble.

  The eleventh graders moaned through yet another S.A.T. Prep drill, this time on analogies. This is to this as that is to what? Tests are to hell like school is to…

  R.I.P. Teach. Why? Who? How?

  I was mixing up the letter writer and Lyle Zacharias’s killer, making their dark thoughts and impulses one and the same. I tried to shake the ensuing confusion out of my head.

  Makes you wonder who’s next, doesn’t it? I felt nauseated as I corrected the analogies next period while my tenth graders wrote what they insisted on calling an S.A. exam about Lord of the Flies. I had tried to disabuse them of their error, explaining the meaning of the word essay: to try, or a trial, its roots in Latin and Old French.

  S.A. they insisted.

  I asked what on earth they thought the initials could stand for. Stupid Ass seemed their hands-down favorite, although there were riper suggestions as well.

  The ninth graders were behaving with atypical seriousness about their Dorian Gray playlet.

  “The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true,” a character told Dorian.

  I listened. I tried to apply the Gospel according to Wilde to my own situation, to wring some reassurance from it. The problem was, I didn’t feel absolutely certain about anything this morning, including the meaning or message in the epigram.

  End of easy morning.

  En route to the teachers’ lounge for a cramped and Spartan lunch, I composed a mental to-do list. I had the S.A./essays to mark, two more sections to teach, and a free period which was anything but since I was the faculty advisor for the school paper, which met in my room, under my supervision, every Monday.

  Faculty was required to have outside interests: hobbies, sports, or nonacademic pursuits that so enchanted us we needed to share our passion with a herd of adolescents. If you didn’t happen to have a congenial interest that minors could share, you were assigned one. I had been offered either girls’ basketball or the school paper, and as the latter sounded less noisy, sweaty, and desperate, I picked it.

  Today, I knew, the work of the paper would be put on hold while the seniors discussed the really big news, the catastrophe at the Cavanaugh. We might as well make the hunt for a new prom site the big story in the next edition. I was already hopelessly involved, anyway, as I was not only the newspaper advisor, but this senior class’s prom advisor as well. Being so selected by the students is said to be an honor, but only by those who were not so honored and who therefore get to stay home and enjoy themselves on prom night.

  I was absorbed by my agenda and by paranoid fears that I’d encounter the note-writing teacher terminator as I made my way down the wide marble staircase to the first floor.

  Somebody called my name. My unvarnished name, sans the usual Miss or Ms. that students add, even here, in these informal halls. I had a rush of panic, but the woman waving at me would never be coy or oblique about her threats. “Sybil,” I said with real shock. “Mrs. Zacharias.” I remembered that she wanted Reed to come to Philly Prep—had wanted me to pull strings if possible—but today?

  “I’m early,” she said as she approached. “My appointment isn’t until one. Reed’s coming separately. His cab hasn’t arrived yet.”

  Had she forgotten that her husband—ex or not—had died the night before? The father of the boy who would soon taxi in? I would have assumed that the business of life, including private school applications, would take a rest stop, in memoriam. A moment of silence. Twenty-four hours of not pursuing temporal goals? Time for a thought or two about the transience of life?

  “Surprised to see me, aren’t you? Want me to be a hypocrite, but if I skipped this appointment, it would have been for appearance’s sake alone. Am I supposed to act like I’m stricken with grief?”

  I couldn’t think of a response that would be both honest and polite, so I said nothing. She seemed cold to the core, capable of operating on a purely intellectual, pragmatic, and self-serving plane.

  Students swirled around us en route to the lunchroom or the great and freshly scrubbed outdoors. A few nodded in my direction or called greetings. Most completely ignored the two of us. Sybil returned the lack of concern and seemed neither to hear nor notice them. “You’re reading Wilde,” she said, with a half nod to the book I was carrying. “I didn’t realize people still did.”

  “My students—” I began.

  “My mother named me for a character in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Sybil Vane. She said it was because Sybil was so pure, so beautiful, so perfect.” Sybil Zacharias laughed impurely, unbeautifully, imperfectly.

  “But she was all those things,” I said.

  “So what? She was also dead. Ruined by Dorian. Destroyed by the man she loved. She murdered herself because of his corruption and vanity and stupidity. The name was like a curse on my head, a prediction.”

  “I’m sure your mother meant well.” She had reduced me to inanities. How did I know what her mother int
ended? Maybe her mother was stupid, or illiterate—or truly malevolent. In any case, Dorian’s first victim was a peculiar inspiration for a name.

  “Destroyed,” Sybil repeated. “But this Sybil refuses to be. No matter what he does. And I won’t let Reed be destroyed by him, either. The truth is, I can’t afford—figuratively or literally—to wait. I have to protect my son.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.” We stood outside the opaque glass doors of the office, away from human traffic. My stomach walls rubbed together, found nothing, and growled a protest, but Sybil probably couldn’t hear it above the student racket. She probably wouldn’t have cared if she had heard.

  “Her.” Sybil made the word sound like something foul she’d been forced to swallow. “The Merry Widow herself. The luckiest bimbo on earth. God knows she wanted to get rid of him and keep the money.”

  “I really don’t understand,” I murmured, very intrigued.

  “She hates Reed. She’s always been jealous of him, of every second his own father spent with him, and there weren’t that many seconds, believe me. And of every cent Lyle spent on him, as if he took each penny out of her pocket. And Lyle was so afraid of his baby wife’s tantrums that he was pushing Reed right out of his life.”

  Had Sybil decided that her son would be better off with a dead father and an inheritance rather than a living, weak father and a stepmother who was chipping away at fatherly support? Or had, perhaps, the microbiology-loving Reed himself felt that way? Maybe they were a team, in collusion. I took a step backward.

  “And all the while,” Sybil said, “she was only using him.”

  “Him? Who? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

  Sybil eyed me as if I embodied human ignorance. “Tiffany was using Lyle, of course. Everybody knew.” She spoke half as quickly as she normally did. I was, after all, a slow learner. “It isn’t like they even tried that hard to hide it.”

  I shook my head. “Tiffany and Lyle? Hide what?”

  “I mean Reed, poor dear, his voice is still high. Hasn’t changed yet. Once, he picked up the phone and said hello and was mistaken for Tiffany herself. Reed was flabbergasted. The man on the other line went on and on about being all alone an entire night with her—with you, he kept saying, of course. He talked about where to meet and what to wear—and not wear, like undergarments.”

  “I take it the man on the phone was not Tiffany’s husband, Reed’s father.”

  Sybil sneered. “You take it right. Lyle might—in fact has—shocked his boy by being inappropriately romantic in front of him. But no, it wasn’t his father on the telephone. Not at all. It was Shepard he heard.”

  My mouth opened, ready to ask if she meant the McCoy Shepard, but what other one could she mean? It was hard to find the ones who guard sheep here in Philadelphia. I readjusted my lips.

  She shook her head with irritation. “Wasn’t it obvious? Good Lord, it’s been going on for nearly a year. No surprise, really. Almost no secret. That’s how she is about men. That’s how she got my—got Lyle. That’s how she’ll get whoever’s next.”

  I am always amazed at how long the fury of betrayal burns. I could still feel the heat of Sybil’s rage.

  “Even last night!” Rusty blotches stained her cheeks. “Like a dog in heat. Did you see when she left the room between courses and he trotted right after her? I couldn’t believe my eyes for the blatancy of it! At her husband’s birthday party! If Lyle wasn’t such a blind, egotistical, self-centered fool, he’d have noticed. Everybody else did.”

  Except me. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but the news depressed me for many wrong reasons. Not only because Lyle Zacharias had been another fool of a middle-aged man, in deep trouble even before he died. Not only because his young wife was unfaithful or because I was suffering metaphysical angst for the meaninglessness of contemporary marriage vows.

  No, I felt a stab of grief for having thought that Shepard McCoy had been coming on to me last night and that I had skillfully kept him at bay. In retrospect, with this new information, it was obvious that I had been sitting on a direct eyebeam line with the voluptuous Tiffany, and that by nuzzling my shoulder, leaning over me, pointing his face in my direction, Shepard could view his beloved clearly. The moony eyes had been aimed past, not at, me. How humiliating to resent attentions that weren’t for me in the first place.

  “I warned Lyle, tried to wake him up,” she said in a low voice. “He told me I was a dried up, bitter old…” She looked away.

  “But that’s beside the point now.” Her voice became brisk again and back to business. “Now the problem is what Tiffany will do with the money. Lyle agreed that Reed would be happier in a smaller academic environment where the special needs and individuality of each child is respected.” She had memorized our brochure. “Honestly,” she said. “I’m telling the truth.”

  Is it possible to believe anybody who says that?

  Sybil’s face was like the satellite weather map on TV. Strange clouds suddenly shadowed what had seemed an impervious terrain. Unstable conditions.

  “Yo, Miss Pepper!” Raffi Trulock is the star basketball player in our school. His real name is Gavin, but his neck is long and his legs begin at his Adam’s apple and continue for about a week. He had been compared to a giraffe for so long that a diminutive form of the word became his name.

  It gives me a crick to look up at him, but once I do, his goofy smile and stalky clumsiness are oddly and instantly endearing. “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Did you hear the Cavanaugh burned?” He looked from Sybil to me. “Didn’t mean to interrupt, though,” he added with a forward dip of his neck.

  “I have a lead on a possible new place,” I said. “We’ll talk later today.”

  “Great! I knew you’d do it. You’re the—that’s great!” And with a duck of the head, towering over the classmate who’d been waiting for him, he bade farewell. His buddy gave him an elbow to his side. I watched a mock scuffle, then both boys looked back at me before truly departing for lunch. For a flicker, less than a second, I wondered if they could be the note-writers. They seemed so intent on me. But then I discarded that theory as ludicrous.

  “That’s why I have to get Reed placed immediately,” Sybil said. “Like, um, as of last week. At least then my lawyer can make a case for keeping the status quo. It isn’t fair to take things away from an orphaned boy, is it? But if I wait, that bitch will refuse to pay for it, won’t admit that this is what her husband wanted for his son. She wants every penny. She probably did it.”

  “You mean because of…Shepard?” Good thing Sybil worked with plants, not people. A begonia can handle angry incoherency a lot better than most folk.

  “Because of Lyle’s life-change,” she said. “You know—the simple life he talked about last night, just before… Retiring. Quitting his job, selling his house—everything. Of course, now I know his show was being canceled. He was saving face. Or maybe he was really burned out, or going crazy. He told me he was through with all the leeches—meaning me, of course, and his own flesh and blood, his son.”

  “He said that? He called Reed a leech?”

  “First he called Richard the leech. After Richard’s partner had a heart attack and dropped out, he came to Lyle for a loan.”

  A little slowly, I targeted her Richard as Richard Quinn.

  “Lyle said that was the final straw. That everybody wanted something from him. Everybody was a leech. Guess who else he meant. But of course the simple life business was an excuse to screw me and his son. He was going to deliberately make himself poor—at least as far as the courts could see. Can’t get blood out of a stone. A farm in the unfashionable country. Vegetables. You think his bimbo wanted that? Lyle without bucks? Without parties?”

  And what about you? I wondered. What good timing, what good luck, what a coincidence that Lyle died before he could hide his assets. “Good luck to you and to Reed,” I said briskly. “My lunch hour is about to end and—”

  “Do you thi
nk this principal of yours, Haverwhatsis—”

  “Meyer. Havermeyer.”

  “Whatever. Is he—how much of a stickler for…” She straightened her shoulders and became almost belligerent, as if she were preempting predictable objections. “I mean,” she said emphatically, “what difference would it be to anybody except poor Reed if he had been officially enrolled here say, two weeks ago? It’s not as if it’s any crime I can think of. He’s quite bright. He’ll be an asset to the school.”

  I didn’t know which way to bobble my head to show that I couldn’t see how it would matter, either.

  “Then do you think he—Mr. Haverstein, will—”

  “Meyer. Havermeyer. Doctor.”

  “—object? I mean I did call several weeks ago. I might have come sooner. It wasn’t my fault that he didn’t have an appointment open until today. At least not one that fit my schedule. It’s no more than a technicality. If he’s a rational man, this Mister—Dr. Haverman, he’ll have to agree.”

  I didn’t correct her this time. I wasn’t her tutor. And I didn’t tell her that Dr. Maurice Havermeyer was willing to bend any rule, particularly if the weight used to bend said rule was a heavy check. My principal’s principles were simple and focused: goodness was money. Goodness incarnate was a person who brought money to his school. He wanted good people’s children around him, and the rules—especially picayune ones like the date on the acceptance—be damned.

  Sybil looked at her watch. “I’ve been standing here talking and I’m nearly late now!” She looked at me accusingly. “The last thing I want is to make a bad impression!” We reversed places. I moved away from the office door and she entered it without a fare-thee-well.

  I wondered if she had ever been gentle, or subtle, or likable. Did a man’s defection warp a woman’s personality or simply heighten what was already there? In any case, I was glad to contemplate lunch and gladder still to see the last of Sybil.

  I wanted to be rid of the Zachariases. The living Zs were exceedingly unpleasant, and if Sybil was to be believed, the deceased had trundled around on two clay feet. If I didn’t want to think ill of the dead, I’d better stop thinking about him at all. I had promised to take my mother to visit Lyle’s aunt Hattie in the hospital, but after that I would be finished with that family except for Reed. But I’d cross that Zacharias when I found him in my roll book.