Sons From Afar

by Cynthia Voigt

  Mrs. Wylie pushed her glasses back up her nose. “It doesn’t seem such a long time to me, young man.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” James said. “I didn’t mean that.” Sammy grinned.

  “It sounds like an imaginative project,” Mrs. Wylie took pity on James, ignoring his embarrassment. “I never had anything so interesting to do in school, not that I remember. Almost a detective story, isn’t it?”

  “I guess,” James agreed.

  “Mrs. Rottman—wait—I just thought of her—Mrs. Rottman might remember him. I wonder why I didn’t think of her right away.” Mrs. Wylie’s hands moved eagerly to a Rolodex file and she toppled over a tall stack of papers. She caught the papers before they fell to the floor, and stacked them neatly. “She taught grade school for years, and then she was the principal, for twenty years. I’ve only lived here for five years, but—if this Francis Verricker went to school in Cambridge she’d remember him. I could call her and ask. Shall I? She’s retired now, of course, but she’s as sharp as ever. She’s only been retired for the last two or three years. The board gave her a rather fine ormolu clock. Do you want me to call her and ask if she knows of Francis Verricker?”

  “I’d—” James began, but she cut him off again.

  “If she does, she’ll be able to tell you about him. Unless—it wasn’t Franc-es, was it? Oh dear, have I gotten it wrong? It’s so hard when you don’t see the name written out.”

  “No,” James told her. “He’s a male. That’s no problem. I’d be grateful if you would call,” he hinted. He tried to glare at Sammy, because Sammy was in serious danger of getting an attack of the giggles. Mrs. Wylie’s mind ran around like a chicken in a coop, pecking after corn, running after something else, clucking away. Sammy liked chickens.

  Listening, Sammy expected her to say something that would tell them that this Mrs. Rottman never heard of Francis Verricker, but he heard instead, “They’ll be very pleased, I’m sure. Yes, I’ll send them right over. They look like nice boys, Mrs. Rottman.”

  James shot Sammy a look filled with triumph. “See?” he would have said, “See, I told you so,” if he could have said anything; Sammy didn’t respond. He listened as Mrs. Wylie explained how to find Two Water Street, even though he needn’t have bothered, with James paying such careful attention. “Good-bye,” she said to them. “I’m sorry you weren’t here about the clerking job.”

  “I’m only fifteen anyway. I’m too young.”

  “You could get work papers. But, there’s no need, if you don’t want a job, is there?” Her phone rang and she picked it up. “Board of Education, Mrs. Wylie speaking.” Her phone voice sounded as if nothing ever confused or upset her.

  “Thank you,” James said from the doorway. “Really, thank you.”

  She smiled and raised her free hand in farewell. “He’s in a meeting at the moment. May I take a message?” her smooth voice asked. Her fingers scrabbled around the littered surface of the desk for a piece of paper; her glasses slid down her nose and tinged against the telephone receiver. “Yes, of course,” she said calmly, tipping over a container of pencils.

  Outside, the boys turned down the sidewalk. Two blocks west, then four or five north would bring them to the end of Water Street. “That was lucky, wasn’t it?” James said. “But it makes sense. A place like this, where a lot of people stay in the places where they were born, there was bound to be somebody who was around then. It makes sense. We were smart to come up here.”

  He walked on silently for a while, then stopped, dead. He turned to face Sammy. Now what? Sammy wondered.

  “She knew him. Our father. This Mrs. Rottman, she actually knew him.”

  “I was there,” Sammy reminded him.

  James started moving off again. Weird. His brother was weird, Sammy thought. That wasn’t his problem, though, so he didn’t mind. This was a nice street, neat houses set on bright green lawns, the trees spreading out green branches and a big old magnolia with thick, bushy, black-green leaves. The leaves were green overhead. The air smelled fine, green and sunny. Sammy felt good. Let James worry about where they were going and whatever it was he thought he’d find out. Sammy concentrated on feeling good. “You should have taken that job,” he teased James.

  James ignored him, so Sammy argued about it.

  “Really. I mean, what you don’t like about most jobs is the hard physical work, but filing and typing, you’d be really good at those. Think of it James, if you’d stayed there, you’d have earned maybe fourteen dollars before we had to go home.”

  James shook his head.

  “And only gotten your hands dusty,” Sammy went on.

  “There would have been papers to fill out, so she’d have found out right away, or at least by the time I left, so it wouldn’t have worked,” James said. “I’d have done whatever, all those hours, and I wouldn’t even get any money, because it’s illegal to hire people under sixteen, without the right papers. And a board of education is practically a government office. So I’d have just lost the time entirely.”

  Sammy shook his head. “They have to pay you for the work you’ve done. Even if you couldn’t keep the job. When you do the work, they have to pay you.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The houses on Water Street were older, three-story clapboard buildings mostly painted white, with porches on the second stories. The street ended at the Choptank River, broad here, the distant shore a low smudged line of trees. Sammy would have liked to go sit on the thick concrete wall that ended the street, to watch the sunlight glimmer along the water, but James turned in at a white wrought-iron gate. The short walk was edged with neat little mounds of flowering plants; the grass of the lawn stretched green and neatly trimmed along to the river.

  Mrs. Rottman opened the door before James even raised his hand to knock. “You must be the two boys,” her gentle voice said. “It was nice of you to come by. Come in, come on up. I have the second floor apartment.”

  She led them up a flight of stairs, down a narrow hall past a living room filled with fat chairs and a fat sofa, all covered with brightly flowered materials, and out onto the second-story porch. She sat them down on white wrought-iron chairs. The iron flowers and leaves cut into Sammy’s backside and thighs. No matter how he shifted his weight, he couldn’t get comfortable. James frowned at him, but Sammy couldn’t see why he had to sit there, and be so uncomfortable, and sit still.

  James was sitting still, with his arms on the hard armrests, as if the sharp pointed design of the seat was perfectly comfortable. Sammy didn’t believe that for a minute. The chairs even looked as if they’d be bad to sit on—he couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to buy them, unless they liked being uncomfortable.

  Mrs. Rottman had set out a tray on the table the chairs were grouped around. It was a round tray, with a pitcher of orange juice and three glasses on it, and a plate of store-bought cookies, the expensive kind that came in little paper sacks. She sat down in the chair between them and poured glasses of juice. “It’s been some time since I had children come to call on me. You can imagine that this is quite a treat for me.”

  Her voice didn’t sound like what she looked like. She looked, with her short gray-white hair cut straight and held to one side by a metal barrette, with a square face and square mouth and little blue eyes behind square glasses, with her square sensible dark suit and square sensible low-heeled shoes, like an army sergeant. But her voice sounded soft, gentle, pillowy. “I never had children of my own,” she said, handing around the glasses of juice. Sammy shifted in his seat. “Because I was widowed so young. The children I taught have been my children. Mr. Rottman was killed in the war, in North Africa. That broke my heart, but I had my work, and my children.”

  She looked back and forth at them. Sammy, holding the glass in one hand, tried to find a comfortable position.

  “Don’t squirm so. Have a cookie? These chocolate ones are my favorites. Try a chocolate one.”

  Sammy didn’t want anything but to
be standing up, which he couldn’t. James, however, scarfed up a handful of cookies and smiled at Mrs. Rottman. The whole thing was already enough to make Sammy sick.

  “Now, we can get down to business, can’t we?” Mrs. Rottman said, as if she were talking to little kids who wouldn’t know what business really was. “Why would you want to know about Francis Verricker?” She smiled at Sammy. He didn’t smile back. “Frankie is what I called him. You can’t call an eight year old Francis, can you? He was in my third-grade class, the very first year I ever taught school. But why are you asking about him?”

  Sammy just looked at James: let James answer that.

  “Well, we’re—actually, it’s me, and Sammy just came along to keep me company—I’m doing a genealogy report. For school,” James added, when she didn’t respond.

  “I’m afraid I don’t think that’s true,” Mrs. Rottman said. Sammy could have laughed. “But I’ve always said, and told my teachers this, children need to be able to keep things private. Children need to have secrets. So I’ll let you keep this one. I’ll tell you what I remember about Frankie, but I don’t want you to think you’ve fooled me.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” James said.

  She bowed her head at him, like some queen of England. “Your name is Tillerman, not Verricker, so I can only assume it’s something to do with adoption, something to do with finding your true parents. One hears so much of such things, these days. I think, myself, it was better when the adopted children knew nothing about it. Children need protection—at least until they’re old enough, and strong enough, to take care of themselves. Don’t you agree? How can we expect children to understand what the world is like?”

  She seemed to expect them to answer that, but even James couldn’t think of anything. He munched down a couple of cookies and looked serious. He finished off his glass of orange juice. Finally, “Yes,” he said. Mrs. Rottman didn’t say anything. “I wonder,” James said, “can you tell us when it was that Francis Verricker was in third grade? We don’t even know when he was born.”

  “That was 1938. My first year. He’d have known me as Miss Rowan—isn’t that a pretty name? I was sorry to lose my maiden name, even though the initial is the same, which helps. It wasn’t until my second year of teaching that I married. So I was Miss Rowan to Frankie, and he—he was special to me. I couldn’t have said so at the time, it doesn’t do to play favorites—but he was very dear to me. He was such a bright little boy, you see, and he looked like an angel, big eyes and curly hair and such a sweet face. Not a goody-goody angel, but the kind of little angel God would especially care for, a mischievous little angel who could make God laugh. Frankie was naughty, a very naughty boy, and he was often disobedient, but I could understand why. His behavior never bothered me the way it did some other people. Bright children, especially boys, have such a hard time behaving in school. The other children are so much slower, and you can’t ask an energetic little boy to sit patiently by all day long, day after day, can you? Frankie—why he’d remember everything he ever heard or read, and he was so curious about everything—there wasn’t anything that got by that child. He was a natural leader, too, and the other children would do anything he told them. Sometimes, what he told them to do wasn’t very nice. But you couldn’t help loving him. He had such a bright little face, such a happy laugh—even when I had to scold him, or punish him, he didn’t hold it against me. I often felt so sorry for him.”

  “Why did you feel sorry for him?” James asked.

  “There was something sad about Frankie—as if he didn’t belong—something lost—I could see it in his eyes. He was the youngest, you see, and the only boy. It’s always hard being the youngest.”

  “Why?” Sammy asked.

  “Everybody else is quicker, and more clever, and does things for you, I saw this over and over again in my classroom. You get to feeling helpless and you get to like that feeling. It’s hard for youngest children to do anything with their lives. They seem to give up more quickly.”

  She didn’t know what she was talking about, Sammy thought, and she was making him angry. Let James talk to her.

  “Besides which, I suspect Frankie’s older sisters babied him. Oh, it was a perfectly nice family, very respectable. They were plagued by the bad luck of the times, but everyone was. They owned a confectionary. Verrickers made good candies, I remember them. The parents had started it when they were newly married—and they were hardworking people. Well, you had to be, to keep going through those hard years, especially with a business of your own, a small business. Frankie was like a changeling in that family. He used to make up stories, about himself, about his real family—wealthy, of course, and his father was a war hero, his mother a beauty, Frankie the only child. He had a vivid imagination, Frankie did; he could write stories I’d have sworn were the truth if I hadn’t known better. I tried to help him understand, I’d try to tell him how hard his father worked, and his mother and sisters too, and how lucky he was to have them. But he thought they were stupid—he said that and, in a way, I could understand why he thought that because he was so quick and clever and imaginative, which they weren’t. You could say he lived in a dream world, or an imaginary world, but he had a streak of realism that almost frightened me. He would tell me that it didn’t make any difference how hard they worked and the terrible thing was that he was right. The family barely scraped by.”

  What was so bad about that? Sammy wondered.

  “Of course Frankie was always in trouble at home, of one kind or another. I’m sure he was provocative at times—he was a terrible liar and sometimes—well, once, I’m pretty certain, he was the one who took a dollar bill I’d left in my coat pocket. He said he wouldn’t ever do that, not to me, but I wasn’t sure I could believe him. And I’m not sure I can blame him, either. Life was harder on Frankie than on the rest of us, because he had so much imagination and so many dreams. He was always telling me about what he’d do, what he was going to do, how rich he would be—I was a great favorite of his, you see, and he often came back to visit my classroom, until he graduated into the high school. We had a particular relationship. I thought, sometimes, that I should have asked if he could come live with me. I didn’t know then that I wouldn’t ever have children of my own, so I never thought seriously about it, but we had such a particular relationship. I could control him, more than anyone else. His family couldn’t understand such an intelligent boy, such a spirited little boy. I always wondered what Frankie would do in his life. After he was expelled I lost track of him, although I sometimes still think I’ll see his name in the papers, as a scientific discoverer, or one of those entrepreneur businessmen. The kind who take huge risks and amass huge fortunes. He seemed such a sad, intelligent little boy. He’d have been in the gifted program, if we’d had one then. Are you boys in gifted programs?”

  Not on your life, Sammy thought. James was, but James didn’t say anything about that.

  “You said he was expelled,” James asked Mrs. Rottman.

  “Yes, from the high school.”

  “Does his family still live in Cambridge?” James asked.

  “Goodness no. They went bankrupt, in the late forties. I think Mr. Verricker had died by then, and his wife, too, and the daughters were trying to run the business. It’s sad, really, because they’d hung on through the Depression and they’d hung on through the war years, with all the shortages, and then—just as times were getting better—they went bankrupt. They moved out of the area years ago. But Frankie had already left home by then, as I understand it.”

  “What was he expelled for?” James asked, as if he wanted to hear everything bad that he could, Sammy thought.

  “Nobody told mc, except that it was something serious. Well, it would have had to be, wouldn’t it? Perhaps they wanted to spare my feelings. I’d like to think so. People sometimes want to be kind.” Her hand reached out for a chocolate cookie, which she bit into thoughtfully. “I hadn’t seen him since he was in sixth grade, at that time.�
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  Sammy figured she was finished, and he tried to catch James’s eye so they could leave. James just took some more cookies, and kept on eating.

  “Is there anyone who might have known him in the high school? Anyone like you, who has been a teacher here all their lives?” James asked.

  “All his life,” Mrs. Rottman corrected.

  “Yes, all his life.”

  “No, I can’t think of anyone, personally. There are lines drawn, you see, between the elementary and high school teachers. Quite a gulf lies between us. High school teachers do look down on those who teach in elementary school.”

  “I never thought of that,” James answered, as if that was something worth caring about.

  Sammy was glad that James seemed to know what to say to this woman. He squirmed in his seat and thought about this little boy Frankie. It sounded like Frankie could have been anything he wanted to be, in his life, if he was so smart, and a natural leader. A liar, too, Sammy thought, and probably a thief—this Frankie reminded Sammy of himself.

  “I don’t want you worrying about Frankie, if he is your father,” Mrs. Rottman told them. “Sometimes, in a family, there’s one child who is just different. Like a changeling child. Frankie was like that—he had so much potential, bright, imaginative, he never seemed to run out of energy and he looked just like an angel. He was the most beautiful child I ever taught, in all my years. He simply didn’t fit in among the Verrickers. There’s Mr. Ferguson, of course, but he’s always been in administration. He never taught in a classroom, except for occasional substitution. He came to the high school as assistant principal in the last years of the war, because he’d had rheumatic fever, you see, and so wasn’t physically qualified for military service. He might well have known Frankie.”

  “Do you know where we could find Mr. Ferguson?” James asked.

  “Why at the high school, of course. Now I think of it, he’d probably know when Frankie left school. Do you think you’d be able to find the high school?”