The Crazy School

by Cornelia Read

  He smiled. “No offense.”

  “I’ll chalk it up to you being in shock,” I said. “Want to tell me why you took out the window?”

  “Not really.”

  “I won’t nark on you,” I said.

  He turned his head slowly so he could look straight up at me. “Serious?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Lean down.”

  I put my ear as close as I could to his mouth.

  “Fay’s pregnant,” he said. “If Santangelo finds out, he’ll make her keep it. He’s a big-time Catholic, just like her family.”

  “She doesn’t want to have it?”

  “I’m nineteen. Her birthday’s next week, and then we’re both old enough to walk out of here. We could manage, but not with a kid. Plus, the meds Fay’s on? She’s afraid the baby’s already too damaged.”

  Lulu was walking back fast from the other end of the hall.

  Mooney measured her progress. “They won’t let her stay here if they find out. But she can’t go home.”

  “How’d the window get involved?”

  “Fay thinks Mindy knows what’s up. I just . . .” He closed his eyes. “She said maybe it was time to do a turn-in. She’s scared.”

  “Isn’t there anybody you guys can talk to?”

  He shook his head. “There’s you.”

  Lulu stopped in front of us and crouched down. “You guys holding up okay?”

  “Kinda dizzy,” he said.

  “Just take it easy,” she said. “Madeline’s got you covered, and the ambulance is on its way.”

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Maybe ten more minutes?” She stood up. “I’m going to go see if Dhumavati needs anything for Fay. Can I bring you some water?”

  Mooney nodded.

  Lulu came back with two paper cups. She gave one to me, then helped Mooney raise his head to drink.

  It seemed like forever until I heard the distant siren, so faint at first I figured it was just wishful auditory hallucination. Then the sound came clear, growing louder and louder as help raced up the long drive. The wail cut out suddenly, and everyone was so quiet I could hear the wash of tires through gravel as the ambulance braked in front of the building, then the chunk-a-chunk of its opening doors.

  I heard Dhumavati say, “Shhhh, sweetie, it’s okay. Nothing to be frightened of. Help is on the way.” She wrapped her coat tighter around Fay’s quivering shoulders.

  “Stay right here,” she said, giving the girl one more quick squeeze before she stood up and started walking up the hallway.

  Lulu rose from the floor to follow.

  Mooney’s eyes fluttered open. The first thing he did was check to make sure Fay was all right, then he looked up at me. “Take care of her while I’m gone, okay?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “You can’t leave her alone.”

  “Listen,” I said, “don’t worry about anything else, just get through all this. They’ll fix you up at the hospital. Concentrate on that.”

  Lulu and Dhumavati came back into view, holding the doors open so the paramedics could push through with a rolling gurney.

  “Madeline?” Mooney touched my wrist with his good hand. “Help us.”

  “Mooney, Jesus . . . I wish I could just load you both in my car and get you the hell out of here tonight.”

  He grabbed on to me. “Don’t let them send Fay home. She won’t survive. She won’t even try.”

  Mooney didn’t want to let go of me, not even when the paramedics collapsed the gurney down flat beside us and checked his cut hand.

  “Promise me,” he said.

  They counted three and shunted him onto the thing, then jacked it up. The bleeding was under control now, but they’d given him a fresh compress.

  He didn’t blink once as they wheeled him away—just held my gaze until I nodded.

  Lulu held the door open again.

  Dhumavati told her to call Santangelo and let him know she’d be going to the hospital, then she grabbed the gurney’s tail as the crew shoved through to the lobby.

  I heard the ambulance doors chunk open and shut again outside. The siren powered up, loud at first but fading as they raced back out through the school gates.

  I turned to check on Fay, watched her get up out of her chair and float over to the broken window, still wrapped in Dhumavati’s coat.

  Her face illuminated by a dreamy smile, she plucked a tag of Mooney’s flesh from the icicle tip of the biggest shard.

  Then she ate it.

  Lulu came back inside after she’d called Santangelo. We steered Fay toward the library’s glass doors, depositing her at the center of a worn old sofa before sitting down on either side of her. Lulu tucked her arm gently around the girl’s shoulders and began to administer soothing, melodic doses of chatter.

  We hadn’t turned on the lights. The room’s fluorescent panels would have been unnervingly harsh. Better the cozy secondhand glow from fading sun and well-lit hallway. Plenty to see by.

  Fay hummed softly to herself, nodding occasionally, that dreamy smile still playing across her mouth.

  She was all tiny bones and downy skin.

  A watercolor girl.

  An ivory fawn tipped with pink and gold and mother-of-pearl. Not quite tame.

  She took my left hand in both of hers and raised it up a little, running a fingertip across the pale blue stone in my engagement ring. “Pretty,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “A candy made from ocean,” she said.

  “I like your necklace,” I said. “The little moon.”

  “Mooney gave it to me.”

  Through the library’s glass doors, I watched Dr. Santangelo coming down the hall, his mouth grim in its black nest of beard. The man was a walking J. Peterman catalog, arrayed in an opera cape and a billow of Jeffersonian shirt, the latter unbuttoned low enough to reveal a dark nosegay of chest hair between his flabby pecs.

  It had grown just cloudy enough outside that he couldn’t see us beyond the hallway lights and his own reflection. His cape lining flashed scarlet each time he swung to inspect a classroom.

  Lulu stood up. “I’ll let him know where we are.”

  Fay drew her feet onto the sofa and curled up against me. “Bet you the sun goes out right when he gets here. Bet you a million dollars.”

  “Bet you you’re totally right,” I said.

  The door closed behind Lulu, and we watched her wave to get Santangelo’s attention.

  Fay lifted my hand again, started twisting the ring gently back and forth on my finger.

  “Mooney told you,” she said.

  Not a question.

  She raised her head to look at me, and I nodded.

  “It’s okay if Lulu knows,” she said. “Just promise you won’t tell anybody else. Not yet.”

  Santangelo and Lulu were heading for us. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I know it’s not like we can keep this a secret forever,” she said, “but Mooney’s so fragile right now. If I just had a little more time to help get him calm . . .”

  “How long until your birthday?”

  “Five days.”

  “If Lulu thinks it’s okay,” I said, “we’ll wait until then.”

  The sun dipped below a bank of clouds at the horizon.

  Santangelo opened the door and slammed on all the lights.

  7

  Santangelo twitched his cape and lowered himself onto the sofa, knees apart to make room for the sheer mass of his belly.

  Fay started shivering again, leaning against me harder.

  “Poor kid,” he said, patting her knee. “I know this must be awfully hard for you.”

  She turned her face into my shoulder.

  Santangelo looked from Lulu to me. “I think Fay could use a nice cup of hot cocoa, don’t you? A little break before she goes back to the dorms.”

  He shoved himself upright, groaning with the effort.

 
; “Can’t I stay here?” Fay asked.

  One chubby paw emerged from Santangelo’s cape in answer to that.

  Fay ignored his open palm and rose to her feet. “I like the kind with marshmallows.”

  “I know,” said Santangelo. “And there’s even whipped cream.”

  He wrapped an arm around the girl’s shoulders to gather her in, a gesture of supportive concern belied by his no-nonsense grip on her closer wrist.

  Lulu opened the door, kicking down its rubber-tipped stop so she could move aside to let them through.

  “We’ll call the hospital,” Santangelo told Fay. “Make sure they’re taking good care of Mooney. Then you can tell me all about what happened.”

  “I will,” she said, raising crossed fingers to the small of her back as they stepped across the threshold.

  Lulu shoved the door shut behind them, fighting the tension in its hydraulic arm to get the job done faster.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, watching them go. “Please tell me you’ve got a couple of smokes tucked into that jacket, Madeline, because I need a few blessed moments of illicit-vice inhalation after all that drama.”

  I patted my Camel-hiding pocket. “The woods or your place?”

  “The woods are closer,” she said.

  We waited for Santangelo and Fay to reach the end of the hall, then hauled ourselves out a back window to make our getaway undetected.

  “Why the hell I ever left the old homestead,” said Lulu. “What possessed me?”

  She was hunkered down Indian-style under the abandoned grape-arbor hideout we’d stumbled upon our first week here.

  The structure twisted in the embrace of its gnarled vines, hung with swags of shriveling black fruit that perfumed the air with a seder-wine Concord tang. The western sky sported streaks of orange and pink.

  I shook a pair of Camels loose from my crumpled pack and lit hers first.

  Lulu blew a stream of smoke into the shadows. “Dhumavati told me we’d hold off on the faculty meeting until she brings Mooney back from the hospital.”

  “ Fuck me,” I said. “I promised Dean I’d make it home for dinner tonight. Again.”

  “Poor Dean.”

  “A patient man, as husbands go,” I said, “but getting testy.”

  “You can’t blame him. With all these goddamn meetings, he barely sees you.”

  “I got home so late last night, he said he figures if I stay here one more week, they’re gonna shave my head and make me sell flowers in an airport.”

  Lulu laughed. “He’s a keeper, that boy.”

  “I just don’t want to go back to Syracuse. Took me three years to pry him loose.”

  “Has he brought it up yet?”

  “Any day now.”

  We’d moved here from Dean’s hometown when the Southern Pacific told him they wanted two of the rail grinders he’d designed. He’d been antsy to start work ever since we arrived in August, but the contracts had to clear layer after layer of management first. When his inside-contact guy said final approval was a sure thing by the first of November, Dean began negotiations for shop space in this derelict factory outside Pittsfield. We met the out-of-town landlord there for a final walk-through exactly a month ago—October 17, just after dinner. The Loma Prieta earthquake must have hit San Francisco right about when Dean and I were first shaking hands with the guy.

  An hour later, they agreed to meet the next afternoon to get the lease signed.

  “I think that went really well,” said Dean as we drove out of the parking lot.

  I’d left the radio on and was just reaching to turn it off when the BBC News announcer said, “The two-tier Bay Bridge and Nimitz Freeway both partially collapsed, and rescuers are waiting to recover bodies from cars crushed by the quake.”

  “Bay Bridge?” I turned up the volume.

  The BBC guy intoned, “ . . . measured six-point-nine on the Richter scale . . .”

  I hit the brakes and pulled over.

  “. . . what experts believe is the second biggest earthquake ever to hit the United States . . .”

  Dean looked at me. “Bunny?”

  I held up a hand for quiet.

  “. . . have reported unbelievable damage to infrastructure, with collapsed bridges and freeways, fires, shattered buildings, gaping cracks in roads, and landslides . . .”

  Dean’s guy at the Southern Pacific called the next morning. Damage reports were still coming in, but word was there’d be no budget for any new purchase orders.

  “A year, at least,” he’d said, “maybe two. Awful damn sorry to leave you swinging.”

  Dean was stoic about it. “I can always work construction.”

  The next week General Electric shut down their Pittsfield transformer plant, cutting loose some nine thousand factory workers. They all decided to work construction.

  Dean looked for work every day, telling me each night how many hundreds of people had showed up for the same jobs he’d circled in the want ads: welder, mechanic, Sheetrock hanger.

  The other guys were local, he wasn’t.

  He’d graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse and had experience as a stockbroker, too, but the competition for white-collar work was even fiercer.

  “Look,” I said, “we’re okay. Our rent’s not much. I’m making decent money at the school.”

  But I’d married a man who started working twelve-hour shifts the summer he was five years old. He could build or fix just about anything, from cars to train engines to houses. Now Dean was stuck pacing around our apartment while I freaked out at Santangelo. He’d rebuilt the vacuum cleaner three times already.

  A month into his search for work, stoic was giving way to cranky, with scattered showers of bitter. He’d start rattling the Berkshire Eagle’s employment pages every day at dawn. “Bunch of listings for goddamn boutiques . . . part-time goddamn real estate . . .”

  I kept waiting for the ax-fall moment when he’d finally come right out and say it was all my fault for dragging him to the Berkshires, that we had to go back to Syracuse.

  But so far he’d just look up from the paper and apologize for being whiny. “I go nuts with nothing to do, Bunny. I’m not wired for leisure.”

  “Maybe a temp agency,” I’d said last week. “Get your foot in the door somewhere?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll start making calls.”

  Please God, let his interview today have garnered something. I can’t go back to that place, to freezing in the dark.

  The ground was cold under the grapevines. I shivered and turned toward Lulu.

  She took another deep drag off her Camel. Blew it out slowly. “So. Any idea what all that was about with Mooney and the window?”

  “Actually, yeah. But we can’t tell anyone for a few days. They made me promise.”

  “I give you my word of honor,” she said. “Spill.”

  “Fay’s knocked up.”

  “Oh, those poor kids,” said Lulu. “Jesus Christ.”

  She stubbed out her smoke and buried it next to an arbor post.

  I did the same, then lit us two more.

  The faculty meeting was in Dhumavati’s apartment, long after dark.

  Lots of decaf. A platter of carob brownies.

  We’d been there two hours already, what with everyone feeling compelled to weigh in on Mooney before we could get to the business part.

  Thursday-night summary: how classes had gone this week, which kids were struggling, which kids each of us wanted to give a gold-star commendation in the next morning’s announcements.

  When it came around the circle to me, I said Wiesner was really pulling his weight.

  “I’m very encouraged,” I said. “He’s polite, he’s on time, he’s pitching in after class.”

  I left out the part about his comments on the view of my ass.

  Mindy giggled, her hand up coyly to her mouth.

  “ What?” I said.

  She glanced across the circle to Gerald.

  T
here was an air of maiden-aunt prissiness about the guy, but he’d toughed out at least a couple of years here.

  I wondered why. Did it help, all this wallowing, or did he just have nowhere else to go?

  Gerald sighed.

  “Go on, tell her,” said Mindy.

  He rubbed his palms down his thighs.

  “I thought Wiesner was doing really well in my class last spring,” he said. “For a few weeks there, he was all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed—asking if he could do extra reading, swinging by my classroom so he could walk me to lunch. Gold stars every Friday, let me tell you.”

  Dhumavati and Mindy nodded.

  “And?” I said.

  “And this,” he said, reaching up to pop his four front teeth free, holding the plate out toward me, pink and white plastic bits glistening at the center of his palm.

  “Wiesner walked right over and sat down on my desk one morning,” he said, “happy as could be. I looked up, and he slammed a fist into me with all his weight behind it. No warning, no reason. He gave me a big grin the whole time, like he’d asked if he could help bang chalk dust out of the erasers.”

  Gerald looked twenty years older without his teeth. Lisped a little, too.

  “Gerald,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  He dropped his eyes and shoved his teeth back in. “Just be careful.”

  There was a needlepoint pillow next to him on Dhumavati’s sofa, the words THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT picked out in white on a dark red ground.

  Gerald fussed with it, giving the thing little pats on either end to plump up the down.

  “Let’s end here,” said Dhumavati. “We’ll have our first meeting tomorrow at six-thirty sharp.”

  I looked at the clock on her mantel and bolted for the door. Quarter after ten, with a good twenty miles of mountain road between here and Dean.

  On the bright side, I had recently inherited a Porsche.

  I drove to the edge of campus, impatient with the school’s five-mile-an-hour speed limit and egged on by the Violent Femmes in my tape deck, bass and volume turned way the hell up.

  My headlights flashed across the school gate’s stone pillars, the arc of rusted butterflies above them, the Santangelo motto: FREE TO BE!

  Cha. More like ARBEIT MACHT FREI .