The Crazy School

by Cornelia Read

“No shit?”

  “None whatsoever,” he said. “More’s the pity.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “Indeed.”

  “So you’ve done some research already?”

  “Enough to know that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should be run out of town on a proverbial rail for having allowed the Santangelo Academy to remain in business longer than a month, much less to have ever granted the place a license.”

  He started to rattle off a litany of horrors, year by year—the girl who’d been made to wait ninety minutes before an ambulance was called, after she’d swallowed razor blades. The overdoses of medication administered by untrained dorm parents at the behest of Santangelo’s fly-by-night shrinks. The accusations of sexual abuse and harassment “allegedly” perpetrated by faculty and groundskeeping staff and administrators against the students and each other. The citations from fire and health and building and sanitation inspectors, going back decades.

  The suicides.

  “Markham,” I said, overwhelmed, “I knew it was bad, but my God—”

  “Considering where this odious charlatan has dredged up the majority of his senior staff, I’d say there should have been a good dozen people in line for handcuffs before they clapped any on you.”

  I slumped down into the passenger seat, closing my eyes. “Those poor kids. And their families. These are desperate, terrified people. They don’t know where else to turn.”

  “It makes my blood boil, darlin’,” he said, “outright, downright literally boil.”

  “Mine too.”

  “Now let us get down to some brass tacks about how you ended up there and what’s happened since, starting from the moment you first ventured onto that nefarious campus,” he said.

  “I have this friend Ellis,” I began. “She’s the reason we moved to the Berkshires, and she suggested I apply for a job there when I couldn’t get work at the newspaper. She did a stint running their computer lab last year. Said it paid all right and that the kids were decent.”

  “And what became of this Ellis, pray tell?”

  “She left the Berkshires for Cincinnati and got married,” I said. “I don’t think we’d been here a week. I miss the hell out of that woman.”

  “It isn’t as though she did you any favors, hooking you up with Santangelo.”

  “Ellis warned me . . . said it was a fucking snakepit, other than the students, but that the checks cleared all right.”

  I explained about Dean’s rail grinders, about the earthquake in California leaving us stranded. “I needed checks that cleared, Markham. Small-preppy-world generosity doesn’t extend to covering my rent and groceries.”

  I looked out the window. We were on the outskirts of Pittsfield already.

  “So I came for the money,” I said, “but stayed for the kids. I mean, how could I not? I wanted to pack them all up in my car and hide them in our apartment halfway through the first day.”

  “’Nuff said. You’re to be commended for sticking it out, but at this juncture, I must say I’m damn glad you’ve got me to take up arms on your behalf.”

  “Markham D. Stuyvesant, knight errant.”

  “ Mais oui,” he said.

  We were half a block from the North Street rotary. “Tall building on the left is ours,” I said, “the one with the bank on the ground floor.”

  “I believe we need to continue this discussion. May I come up?”

  “You’re more than welcome to,” I said. “I just hope Dean doesn’t puke on you.”

  “I will give the poor man a wide berth, in any case.”

  “Outstanding,” I said. “Wouldn’t want you to muck up that lovely suit.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” answered Markham.

  Lulu buzzed me and Markham into the apartment building. We found her stirring the contents of a ginormous stockpot on our stove. The whole apartment billowed with steam and the heady fragrance of chicken soup.

  She dropped the spoon and ran over the minute she saw me, practically lifting me off my feet with a hug. “Jesus Christ, it’s fine to see you,” she said.

  “Likewise, dear friend. I cannot begin to express—”

  “Shhhh,” she whispered. “Dean’s finally asleep, poor thing. Nasty bug . . . hit him hard, and of course he’s been devastated with worry about you on top of all that.”

  I thanked her for taking care of him, hugged her again, and introduced her to Markham. The two of them took one another’s measure, obviously pleased with what they saw.

  Lulu dished up a bowl of soup and handed it to me.

  “Bring this in to Dean,” she said. “Let him know you’re all right. And take all the time you need to make sure he gets at least half of this down the hatch. Your attorney and I have a few things to discuss.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Gerald, for starters.”

  “You know about Gerald already?”

  Lulu winked at me. “Let’s just say a little bird told me during a late-night visit to my apartment while you were in the slammer. Well, not little—more like a tall, blond, and somewhat psychotic bird.”

  “Wiesner?”

  “None other,” she said.

  “Kid gets around.”

  “Who doesn’t these days? Now shoo,” she said. “Dean’s soup’s getting cold.”

  The shades were all drawn in our bedroom, and Dean was huddled up under just about every blanket and duvet we had, wearing a woolly hat with earflaps on it, for good measure.

  I put the soup down on his bedside table and kissed him.

  He stirred awake, blinking up at me. “Bunny?”

  “Dear thing,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Talk about eyes like two holes burned in a blanket.”

  “Um,” he said, “your breath could finish the job of combustion.”

  “Crap,” I said. “I totally forgot. Poor Lulu!”

  I snuck off to the bathroom for a thorough workout with Crest, then returned and started spoon-feeding him the soup.

  “Think you can keep this down?” I asked.

  “Broth of the gods.” He was sweating now and started kicking off the blankets between swallows. “How the hell you survived this damn flu, locked up in a cell—I almost passed out when it hit me yesterday. Thank God I’d called your uncle Alan first. I was totally delirious.”

  “You should be better by Monday, when your job starts.”

  “I’m not leaving this apartment unless you’re in the clear,” he said.

  “How long has Lulu been here?”

  “She called up yesterday afternoon, wanted to talk to you about Wiesner and Gerald. I was lying on the bathroom floor—had to crawl to the phone. She drove up when she realized how sick I was.”

  I made him finish the soup, then told him to go back to sleep. He was out again before I closed the door behind me.

  Back in the living room, Lulu and Markham were chatting up a storm, him taking furious notes all the while.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  They both looked at their watches.

  “Just past two,” said Markham. “You should avail yourself of Miss Lulu’s fabulous soup. I’ve just had a bowl and can recommend it quite highly.”

  “I’m so tired,” I said. “I’m not sure I could eat.”

  Lulu wouldn’t hear of that. She hustled me into a chair and set a bowl on the butler’s table in front of me. I yawned over it.

  “If you don’t start eating it yourself, I’m not above feeding you,” she said.

  “Yes’m,” I said, spooning up a swallow of golden elixir and blowing on it to cool it off.

  Lulu turned to Markham, hands on her hips. “I think we should let them be for the rest of the day, Counselor. You’re up to speed on the basics, here?”

  He looked at me. “What’ve you got on tomorrow morning, Madeline?”

  I swallowed my soup. “No idea,” I said. “You think I still have a job, Lulu?”

  “Dhumavati says absolute
ly. Only you don’t have to be there early.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re having a Sitting Meeting.”

  “A what?” asked Markham.

  “Someone kicked a hole in the side of the Xerox machine,” explained Lulu. “Since no one confessed to the crime in the first twenty-four hours, the entire student body is now required to sit silently in a large circle inside the dining hall, with the teachers clumped on the floor in the middle.”

  “I take it Santangelo gets a chair?” asked Markham.

  “Santangelo is too busy playing outside with his new helicopter,” said Lulu. “He has an instructor working with him in four-hour shifts. Takeoffs and landings.”

  “You mean to tell me,” said Markham, “that man has just had two students murdered, with one of his teachers in jail, and he’s not only forced the entire school to play some punitive Quaker-meeting game over a broken copier, but he’s hopping around the lawn in a whirlybird?”

  “Pretty much,” Lulu said.

  “Oh, it’s going to be a pleasure getting him in court,” he said, rubbing his hands with glee. “In fact, I may have to do it several times. Pro bono.”

  Lulu gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Let’s let these two get some rest in the meantime, shall we?”

  “Madeline,” said Markham, snapping his briefcase closed, “I will be back here early tomorrow with bells on.”

  He held out his arm to Lulu, and the two of them sashayed out the door.

  Part V

  When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.

  —Vladimir Nabokov

  Ada

  24

  I spent that night trying to sneak up on the oasis of sleep, only to have it shimmer away, à la mirage, every time I thought I was about to reach the shade of its beckoning palm trees.

  There was just too much moiling around in my skull—the likelihood of getting charged with murder, and how the hell I’d ever be able to repay my godfather for having dispatched Markham to the Berkshires in my darkest hour.

  I got up around three and drank half a beer by the light of the icebox door, listening to Dean toss and mutter in the next room.

  It didn’t help, the beer, not that I’d believed it would.

  Around five I slept for an hour. Dean came out of the bedroom at six-thirty, wrapped in a blanket and shivering.

  “You should stay in bed,” I said.

  “Markham said he’d be back early. I want to hear the progress report.” He lowered himself onto the sofa slowly, legs trembling.

  “Can I get you anything?”

  Dean pulled the blanket up around his head and closed his eyes.

  “My skin hurts,” he said.

  “Do you think you could eat something?”

  He didn’t answer, just lay down on his side, one foot splayed across the floor.

  I brought him dry toast with a cup of weak but heavily sugared tea. He looked at the stuff and emitted a creaky sigh.

  “Just the tea,” I said.

  Dean drew the blanket closer around his head and pressed his lips together, looking for all the world like an old woman disappointed by the sight of Ellis Island after a month in steerage.

  I put on some Strauss, hoping he’d find the schmaltzy magnificence of the “Blue Danube Waltz” soothing.

  “Picture yourself frolicking through sun-dappled forests above Salzburg,” I said.

  Dean closed his eyes. “No frolicking. Even the thought.”

  “Okay, just picture trees.”

  “Can’t,” he said. “This music reminds me of the stewardess.”

  “What stewardess?”

  “With the polyester lightbulb hat.”

  “I think maybe you need some Tylenol,” I said. “You’re getting delusional.”

  He didn’t open his eyes. “Bunny, in 2001. She cruises around wearing Velcro slippers so she can pass out Space Food Sticks without getting sucked into an air lock.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That stewardess.”

  I made him take the Tylenol anyway.

  Markham arrived an hour later, looking so exhausted that I immediately fired up a pot of Bustelo.

  He opened his briefcase, lifting out files and fanning them out across our kitchen table. Then he leaned back in his chair and just stared at them.

  “Markham, you okay?” I asked.

  “Long night, honey lamb,” he said. “For me and a number of the firm’s die-hard young associates back in Boston.”

  “This is making me feel like Hunter S. Thompson,” I said, “having an attorney.”

  “‘When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro,’” Markham said, looking up from his papers to give me a wink. “Just please bear in mind the caveat that I am not now, nor ever have been, Samoan.”

  “I’m fine with that.” I poured a cup of coffee for my non-Samoan attorney. “Milk or sugar?”

  “No, thank you. I believe I’m in need of all the uncut caffeine I can get this fine morning.”

  I handed it over. Markham took a healthy sip, let out a little whoop, and threw his shoulders back.

  “That, my dear, has what I’d call a Twenty-Mule-Team kick,” he said, raising his mug in my direction. “Much obliged.”

  “Least we can do,” I replied.

  He drank off a third of the brew, then placed its vessel carefully atop the kitchen pass-through’s half wall, so as not to put his documents at risk.

  “To business, then,” he said. “Of which the first order is your fellow faculty member Gerald Jones.”

  “Who may actually have done it,” I said.

  “Who graduated ten years ago from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio,” said Markham, “with a bachelor’s degree from their Richard T. Farmer School of Business, where he was a member of the four-year undergraduate honors program—one of forty students in his freshman class to have made the cut. Graduated first among them, having completed a thesis on”—here he consulted a crisp sheaf of papers from the nearest file folder—“ah yes, ‘Computer Applications of the Mandelbrot Set in Today’s Investment Banking Environment: Fractals and Financial Engineering,’ with accompanying self-designed software. Special products, et cetera.”

  “Gerald?” I said. “Fractals?”

  “Indeed,” said Markham. “Good stuff, too. Seven companies tried to hire him before he’d quite finished writing the thing, not halfway through his junior year. He spent several years in the thick of it all. London, Tokyo, Manhattan.”

  “Seriously,” I said. “Mousy, unprepossessing Gerald.”

  “Mousy, unprepossessing Gerald, whose personal net worth is estimated somewhere in the high eight figures,” said Markham, “hard numbers being difficult to verify, what with the bulk of his fortune being divided between the Cayman and Channel islands.”

  “Markham,” I said, “the man drives a Datsun. A really crappy Datsun. He’s practically the poster boy for cheap shoes and Sansabelt slacks.”

  “And he gave up that rather astonishingly stellar career path for a job at the Santangelo Academy, when he could easily be teaching at Harvard. Or better. Not that he needs to work.”

  “So what happened?” Dean croaked from the sofa.

  “That,” said Markham, “is exactly what my young associates back in Boston are even now attempting to determine.”

  “Nervous breakdown?” asked Dean.

  “Fondness for smack?” I chimed in. “Imminent pedophilia conviction?”

  “Nary a whiff of impropriety as yet,” said Markham. “He serves on the board of directors for a number of charities. Active in the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Supports scientific research with rather heavy donations to several universities.”

  “What sort of research?” I asked.

  Markham again consulted his files. “An eye toward fostering advancements in neuroscience—more s
pecifically, in the arena of psychopharmacology. He is apparently considering the endowment of a chair, to that end, at one of several prominent medical schools.”

  “While preparing for court dates,” I said, “in the aftermath of having grabbed a Santangelo student’s dick during bed check last year.”

  “In the aftermath of having allegedly done so,” replied Markham, rather sternly, it seemed to me.

  “There was a witness,” I shot back.

  “Who is now deceased.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “We can probably rule out the fondness for smack, then,” said Dean.

  “Markham,” I said, “have you ever defended a pedophile?”

  He shot his cuffs. “I have.”

  “To my knowledge,” I said, “that’s not exactly behavior tending to spring up unheralded. Out of the clear blue sky, as it were.”

  Markham nodded. “With rare exceptions.”

  “How much do you know about the circumstances in which Gerald made this career shift?” I asked.

  “Circumstances in what sense?”

  “Was he fired? Did he resign? Any dirt at all?”

  “Gerald was not fired, that much we have ascertained,” said Markham, “to my confident satisfaction.”

  He reached for his coffee and took a big swallow. “In fact,” he continued, “our Mr. Jones resigned in the field . . . Japanese investment bank. Gave no notice, requested no severance, didn’t even bother asking for his shares of equity in the company—shares that were literally weeks away from being vested.”

  “How many shares?” asked Dean.

  “A chunk o’ change worth pursuing,” answered Markham. “Not least since it would certainly have been granted to him if he were, say, taking a leave of absence and had been on good terms with the company’s officers.”

  “So you don’t know what reason he gave for resigning?” I asked.

  “We’ve been given to believe that he may have cited a family emergency,” said Markham.

  “Sure,” I said, “but an emergency for whose family?”

  “We should know more this afternoon. Tomorrow at the latest.”

  Dean sat up. “They work fast, your youthful associates.”

  Markham dipped his head in agreement, smiling.