Caroline looked at me, her eyebrows raised.
“I think about it,” Jake said in that frighteningly calm voice. “How if something happened to him, I could be with my real father, and my mother would stop going crazy, and Mother Vivien—well, she could go to hell.”
“Jake,” I said sharply.
“No point in daydreams, is there?” he said.
Caroline waved and left, her hands filled with chalk, and the room filling with first-period students. Jane Eyre time. Another saga of a sad child.
“Thanks for listening,” Jake said. “Guess I needed to blow off steam.”
I nodded, and he, too, left.
I sat at my desk, heart pounding, well aware that whatever portion he’d blown off wasn’t enough. He was still full of that steam and I couldn’t blame him at all. And the bottom line was that I’d been of no help to him.
From outside, I heard the rhythmic chants. “Don’t pollute minds!” Over and over, the -lute sound pierced the windows.
I wondered what that did to Jake’s nerves, stretched as they were against his red-hot resentment. I had worried about him for a while now, tried to be the friend he needed. Now, that wasn’t nearly enough. I saw him in my mind, a flailing figure in the dark sea, going down for the third time.
I made a note to arrange a conference with his mother and the school counselor. ASAP, I wrote. I underlined it.
As if that resolved anything.
Four
Betsy Spiers had been so phlegmatic Saturday night, and so unsure of herself on the phone, I thought she’d wobble when she walked. When I’d called to suggest a conference, her voice quavered, then grew shrill as she stammered out a string of half sentences. “Oh, no, is anything…? Has Jake, has something…? I could never forgive myself if—”
Like a leaf that quakes so hard it creates its own windstorm and blows itself off the tree. She didn’t leave air-time between questions, as if the last thing she wanted was an answer. What if she paused long enough for me to say that yes, her son was having serious problems?
Given her level of incipient hysteria, it was heroic of her not only to agree to come in, but to urge that our conference be the next day, Tuesday, after school. Most likely, her motive was to get the terror over with, but that still constituted a form of bravery.
Particularly since, as it worked out, she had to cross her husband’s gang to gain entry. There were still more picketers, their numbers fueled by the interest the media had shown in Monday’s demonstration. As city schools went, we were exceptionally photogenic, housed as we were in the nineteenth-century beer baron’s mansion across from the Square, and this was true even on a grumpy gray day when the air was chilly and the light so flat nothing had color. Plus, we were new—that is, news. The public schools had long been under siege, but we were private, small, elitist, the administration basically one pathetic man and a board who okayed whatever he said. We were an easy target and easier, too, to summarize in a news bite.
“I—I lied,” Betsy said. “I told Harvey I was coming here to help the cause. That I was going to talk with you about curriculum choices.” Tears welled up. “Vivien called me a liar and a traitor. Her.”
We sat in the school counselor’s office concluding the Jake-excluded portion of our meeting. He’d not been pleased by this format. “What am I, a pariah?” He shrugged. “Just kidding. Don’t get me wrong, but I don’t like being talked about behind my back.”
“It’s more likely a chance to let your mother talk about herself,” I’d answered. “You’ve said she’s unhappy, and doesn’t seem to understand how you feel about your living conditions, so she needs private time.”
He shrugged and said he’d watch the protestors while he waited. Given that the source of his miseries was the leader of the protestors, or, more accurately, the two leaders, I was surprised. Given the weather, I was even more surprised, but Jake and the picketers were obviously of heartier stock than I.
This infinite winter was becoming the stuff of seasonal legend. This is the sort of thing that makes us loathe Floridians and Californians—anyone who hasn’t recently slammed his coccyx on the ice, or remortgaged his house to pay the heating bill, or ripped his hands putting chains on his car.
It was not a year or a day when anyone sane would voluntarily carry a sign up and down a pavement, which is why the less-than-sane were hard at it.
The Moral Ecologists had apparently decided on permanent residency. They had permits, they had pickets, they had student hecklers, and they were attracting gapers who felt in need of a complaint, any complaint. Some of the less clearheaded parents had heard that something bad was being forced on their kids—and they, too, hovered outside or phoned the school demanding conferences. Our principal, Maurice Havermeyer, was in a record-breaking foul mood.
Maybe Alex Fry had been right. If we’d burned the books—all our books—these people would have gone away and Havermeyer’s level of anxiety would be nearly bearable.
But we hadn’t, and at the end of this week loomed Philly Prep’s annual Open House, the yearly big deal when we preen like birds in mating season and try to attract yet another freshman class.
Competition between private schools may be bloodless, but it is nevertheless serious. To headmasters and admissions committees, this time of year is the equivalent of the Miss America pageant, and nobody wants to be Miss Congeniality, or even First Runner-up.
Havermeyer’s nervousness index could be calculated by the number and inanity of the directives he stuffed into our mailboxes, conveying that it was imperative to shine, become what we only dreamed of being, eradicate our warts, be sure our knowledge was encyclopedic—and deliver it with the pacing and style of a stand-up comic.
Also, we were to change the personalities of most of our students, raise their IQs, and lower their apathy. Above all, we were to attract, to emit scholastic pheromones, bookish musk.
Problem was, he didn’t know, nor did we, precisely how to do it. That increased the per diem memo flow. As did the fact that ten percent fewer souls had applied to date than had a year ago. There were rational reasons for this: The economy stunk, the city kept losing employers and revenue, and Philly Prep wasn’t much to write home about in the first place. But Maurice Havermeyer didn’t care about socioeconomics. He knew how to point his finger in only one direction—at the easiest scapegoat. In this case, his woes were caused by some unidentifiable but lethal deficiency on the part of the staff.
With pug-faced Harvey Spiers and Mother Vivien of the golden tresses hurling their invectives and demanding that every last “tainted title” be removed, beginning with the photography collection that included the unclothed human body, there went Havermeyer’s vestigial sanity.
Betsy Spiers had a tentative voice and she didn’t try to project it. “It isn’t that he’s hard on Jake,” she said of her husband. “It’s that he cares.” Then she burst into tears. “No, he doesn’t! He doesn’t at all! Not about me, either! Not the way he should!”
Her voice changed, took on an aluminum coating and a cutting edge. “Jake goads Harvey, and there I am, caught in the middle, and that hideous Vivien, tugging at his loyalties, undermining his leadership, when he was the one who brought the group up from obscurity!” Rachel Leary, Jake’s counselor, kept her expression impassive and handed Betsy the box of tissues.
She pulled out a handful and blew her nose. “Harvey’s beliefs are biblical. He’s spiritual. Jake doesn’t understand.” She pulled out another tissue and shredded it for a while, then looked up at us and shook her head. “When I met him, he was ordinary. An insurance clerk, not a reverend. That’s what I liked. My first husband couldn’t stand being ordinary. Always expected to become a star, the Woodward-and-Bernstein of Canada. Ambition made him thoughtless, a bad husband, never around to help me. His ego, you know…didn’t care about anybody but himself. What was I supposed to do?”
We’d gotten so far off the track we couldn’t even hear the trains anymore
. We’d already been deflected from talk of family counseling. Psychology, it seemed, didn’t fit Harvey’s religious beliefs. He counseled people, and the Lord counseled him. End of story.
After half an hour of dead ends and evasions, Rachel and I had switched to Plan B: finding out whether Jake could take a breather from the local tension and spend time with his natural father. And here we were, stonewalled again by Ms. Helplessness.
“Harvey was humble. Considerate. He paid attention.”
The sexiest thing a man could do, as well as the easiest, even though many of them found it daunting. I wondered if more men would give it a whirl if they realized that even a pudding-faced clod like Harvey Spiers became irresistible simply by paying attention.
“Then we moved here and it changed. He changed. Thought only about himself, about what he wanted, needed, had to have. Got involved with…that group. And with her. Her fault, I’m sure. Hate the sin, not the sinner, I know—but she is an evil woman. I’m so unlucky with men. Why does this keep happening to me?” Her voice was on the upswing again, much like a firehouse siren.
She should have hired a “romantic detective” before marrying either one of them. I’d get my mother on her case. And off mine.
My determined parent had made a second phone solicitation for detectivation during dinner last night, interrupting a far more serious discussion.
There’d been another book and effigy burning, this time within city limits, near Masterman School, where rigorous academic standards presumably meant the inclusion of “pollutants” in the curriculum.
The shadow of the night at Glamorgan still hung over me, and I couldn’t believe that nothing could be proven about who was setting the fires. I knew these weren’t homicides and so weren’t Mackenzie’s business, but apparently, they weren’t clearly anybody’s first order of business.
“Arson’s the malicious burning of somebody’s property,” Mackenzie explained, before my mom called. We were eating takeout Chinese. I had forgotten to buy food. I’d make up for it later this week, prepare a feast—unfortunately of the farewell variety, because Mackenzie had to leave town to retrieve a prisoner. “Even though somebody owns the empty lots where they set these fires,” he said, “or the right-of-way across from the Roederers’, the fires don’t destroy the property. An’ nobody’s ever claimed the books that burned, nor has anybody tried to collect insurance for them or for the lots. So even though there’s apparently malice involved, it isn’t the highest priority crime, and it’s murky. Not a hate crime. And nobody’s ever there by the time it gets noticed. See what I mean?”
“Maybe the antiterrorism people have to claim it, then,” I said as the phone rang and my mother launched into her rent-a-detective-to-spy-on-him pitch.
I looked at the good guy across from me, thought about the real problems of the world, and as gently as possible—and as obliquely, because I didn’t want Mackenzie to know precisely how my mother can hog-tie me in her would-be safety net—I told her to please never again mention the subject. Not ever.
The voice of Jake’s mother, not mine, pulled me back to the present. “He wanted the easy life,” she was saying of her current husband. “The American way. He thought this minister stuff—” She looked wildly from Rachel Leary to me. “Not that he doesn’t believe in it, but he didn’t go to a seminary or anything. One day, an insurance clerk and the next day, the call and he’s a reverend. But people accepted it right away. They send him money, and the more extreme he is, the more money they donate to his cause.” She managed a feeble laugh. “His cause! His only cause is Harvey Spiers! Not me, that’s for sure, because if he cared, would he be out there in public humiliating me with that…with that floozy! But what can I do? He says I’m his wife until death, and he’s a minister. I couldn’t leave. What would I do?”
Rachel cleared her throat and leaned forward. “There’s a note on Jake’s file that says you’re paying his tuition, and that Mr. Spiers is to be kept under the impression that Jake is here on a scholarship.”
Betsy nodded. “Harvey wouldn’t want the money spent on…he has so many other important causes that…” She didn’t bother to finish the sentence. Instead, she studied her nails. Then she looked up. “I’m trying, do you understand? Do you see how much pressure I’m under?”
“The thing is—you have an independent income.”
She shrugged. “Not enough to live decently on my own. I have no choice!” She wept again. “I’m so unlucky,” she said, dabbing at her eyes.
“Mrs. Spiers, we’ll help as much as we can with your domestic problems. But I’m Jake’s teacher and Ms. Leary is his counselor, and we’re concerned about finding a solution for him, too.”
“Don’t you think I’m worried sick myself?” she whispered. “To get a call like that from you? My blood pressure skyrocketed. I thought I was having a heart attack.”
“We promised Jake we’d be brief, and we haven’t yet dealt with his depression, or what we can do to help it.” Rachel spoke softly, but firmly.
Betsy Spiers looked confused, as if processing who Jake might be, what problems he could possibly have, and most of all, why she should be concerned about them.
Rachel cleared her throat and spoke again. “He wants to return to Canada.”
“I know.”
“And?”
“I can’t. I’m married. I live here, now. I made promises.”
The woman had mirrors for eyes.
I tried again to redirect her attention. “We were considering Jake’s prospects. Jake’s ability to live with his father. And while I know it would be difficult to be separated from your son, maybe it’s worth a try, given his unhappiness.”
Her eyes widened and she clutched the tissue to her chest. “Oh, no!” she said, with more emphasis than I’d heard thus far. “Not possible. Not at all.” Once again, tears welled from her eyes.
I braced myself for reasons why it was not possible—heartlessness or depravity or other disqualifying traits on the part of Loren Ulrich.
“I couldn’t bear it!” Betsy said. “I need Jake.”
“But he—” Rachel began.
“Oh, no.” Betsy Spiers’ voice had gained strength and altitude again. “I’m not a strong woman, I’m in an unfamiliar city, I have no friends. If Jake weren’t with me… No! He can’t. Did you tell him he could? You have no right to do that, you know. He’s still a minor.”
She was an iron-willed woman, for all the putty and fluff stuck on as disguise, and she controlled by means of hysteria.
“And Loren,” she went on. “He’s probably with somebody else, having another child for all I know, leaving that wife and baby alone, too, and I wouldn’t send any—”
To my relief, even though it further complicated the dynamics, the door was knocked upon and opened in one motion, and Jake entered. “He caved,” he said flatly.
Betsy stood up. “Harvey?” she asked. “Gave in? Went away?”
“Yes and no.” Jake lounged against the door in what I was sure he considered the insouciant, sophisticated pose of He Who Knows. In reality, he looked like an awkwardly hinged set of adolescent parts. I still wished I could give him a hug.
“What do you mean, Jake?” Rachel asked quietly. “What’s yes and no?”
“Yes is that Harvey’s gone,” he said. “He went away.”
Hooray! Havermeyer would relax, we’d return to the ordinary level of insanity that preceded Open House, and—
“Because Havermeyer caved. Said he’d remove the books and is doing so right now. For all I know, he’s giving them to Harvey to burn. Can we write an article about it for the paper? Or an editorial? Or both?”
We could headline the story OUR PRINCIPAL: A MAN OF NO PRINCIPLE.
It was, indeed, quiet outside. But inside, it crackled with tension. Jake looked from his mother to me, back again, and then his glance flitted to Rachel Leary, who took the plunge. “Your mother doesn’t seem to think your leaving Philadelphia is feasible.”<
br />
“Mom!” Jake said. “I thought for sure…” His voice cracked. “You know how much…” He swallowed, hard.
So there it was, one boy’s options needlessly narrowed, his hopes dashed. Less than an eye blink in the cosmic scheme, which is not to say it didn’t matter.
“It doesn’t make sense, Jake,” his mother whined. “Your father’s undependable. He forgets about you all the time.”
Jake winced. I looked away.
“—and he’s not—not a good, a moral man, he’d be a bad influence on—”
“Not good! Like Harvey’s good! Or moral! My God, he’s so immoral his own followers hate him—his partner—”
“Vivien isn’t his partner, she’s—”
“She started—oh, who cares. Forget Vivien. He’s the one who’s immoral. I heard him. That wasn’t the way a good man talks. Those were threats.”
“Jake,” I said. “This probably isn’t the place for whatever you’re talking about.” My mind and energy were mostly out in space trying to absorb the idea that a school principal had agreed to remove good, even classic, works because a fanatic said so. But a part was here, increasingly worried about this boy-man, who was having the air crushed out of him.
Betsy, who wasn’t concerned about the future of the world, or anything except herself, seized my message and ran with it. “Jake!” she said in her fire-engine siren tone, “she’s right. What we talk about in our home is private!”
But Jake was two steps beyond propriety. He wheeled toward me. “He said some guy was a pervert and he—Harvey—would make him pay for pretending to be what Harvey calls normal.” He turned back to his mother. “That’s blackmail. You call that good and moral? Is that who I have to live with? Is that what I’m supposed to become?”
The Bluest Blood Page 5
