The oak door opened and a man with a stern, square face, entered the lobby, followed by a much taller woman, six feet at least. The man stood off to the side.
Richard recognized the woman. He smiled when he saw her, not to be pleasant, but because he always found the way she moved amusing. Even though she was thin, she walked like a bear, awkwardly on its hind legs, looking for something it wasn’t sure it would find. She and the man both wore safari uniforms.
“I’m Ms. Garrett,” she said, “one of the Parent Representatives here at Newman.”
“I need to speak to the superintendent.”
“We told you yesterday the superintendent isn’t available.” Her lips quivered as she smiled. “Let’s give me a try, shall we?”
Richard took a couple of steps back. “I want to talk with him about taking my son out this summer, for the quarter sabbatical.”
Ms. Garrett looked at the man behind the computer. He’d been listening, but quickly resumed manipulating the projected computer image.
“No one has ever taken the sabbatical,” Ms. Garrett said. “In fact, soon the policy will be written out of the book.”
“Well, for now, it’s written in, and I want to take advantage of it.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“I’m not taking you home for the summer.”
She turned and walked toward the oak door. “The superintendent’s schedule is impossible. I’m sure you understand, Mr. Carson.” She stopped at the door and faced Richard. “I’m sorry.”
“No problem, I understand. Let me speak to Christopher then.”
“Who?”
“My son.”
She looked at the man behind the counter, but he was busy not looking back.
“Your son?”
“Yes.”
“That’s impossible. Here at the Newman Home we—”
“It’s a school, not a home.”
“You can’t just come and meet anyone you have a whim to. Pulling him out of his class would disrupt everything.” She opened the oak door. “I’m sorry, but we have the other residents to think of.”
“And I only have one to think of.” He walked up to within a couple of feet of her and heard the man behind the counter stand up. “Let me see him.”
She shook her head. “Call the superintendent’s secretary, Mr. Carson. Maybe you could meet with him sometime within the next couple of months.”
“Look, Ms. Garrett, I’m an attorney. Don’t get me mad.”
“Everyone in Manhattan is an attorney,” she said, “and they’re all mad.”
She slipped around the door and closed it after her. Richard turned the knob, but it was locked.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Richard left the school and headed for the playground. He wasn’t worried this time about whether they knew where he was going or not. When he made it around the corner, he saw a man down the street, standing on the crate and staring over the wall. Richard stopped cold. The man was about his age, balding with a bit of a stomach. He looked like he’d never been outside before. He wore a gray flannel, double-breasted business suit.
Richard walked toward him. “What are you doing here?”
The man had been concentrating on the playground and almost fell off the crate when he heard Richard’s voice. He jumped down and tried to straighten his suit.
“What were you doing?” Richard asked.
“I’m a child psychologist. I consult here. I was observing the children.”
“No, you’re not. I know the head psychologist here—he doesn’t have people going around watching the kids from over a wall.”
“No, I really—”
“Who are you?” Richard took a step closer.
The bald man looked behind him, then across the street. “I have a boy here. I just wanted to see him. That’s all.”
The man straightened his suit jacket.
“One time I think I might have seen him. But he was so far away, I couldn’t be sure. That was a year ago, when he was three.” The man pointed to the crate. “Here, take a look. Maybe you’ll see your son today.”
Richard climbed up on the crate and peered over the wall. Twenty or so children in their uniforms crowded in a circle, sitting on the grass and participating in some activity that involved clapping their hands in rhythm and reciting something he couldn’t hear. No sign of Christopher.
“Wait a minute,” Richard said, “how’d you know—”
He looked down and saw the man was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was hot in Richard’s office. Something was always wrong with the air conditioning. He leaned back in his chair and stared at his office ceiling, thinking. He had been out of the office much of the day, and now his door was closed. Some of the other attorneys would be wondering—and talking—about what was going on, but he didn’t care. He hadn’t even worried how he was going to explain a day with absolutely no hours billed.
He sat upright in his chair and looked at the photo in the brass frame on his desk, a picture of Carol, Christopher, and him, several years ago. Christopher was just a baby, sitting in his daddy’s lap. Richard was smiling big, squeezing his baby, and the baby was giggling. Carol stood behind them both, arms down around his shoulders and holding her baby’s hand. The Brooklyn Bridge dominated the background. Richard had always loved that bridge for some reason and had insisted the picture be taken there.
Christopher had been five and a half months old; two weeks later, he’d be going to Newman. Richard’s parents kept insisting they take pictures throughout the day. It wasn’t easy—not because they couldn’t get Christopher to smile, but because they couldn’t get him to stop giggling. Christopher had laughed and laughed, for no reason the adults could see. It was like there was some extremely funny private joke between him and his stuffed Winnie the Pooh bear. When Richard bought it, Carol had pointed out that he would be in Newman by the time he was old enough to have anything to do with the bear, and that the staff didn’t allow stuffed animals from outside for health reasons—whatever that meant. But Richard put it in the crib every night. And, as far as he was concerned, the baby and bear adored each other.
They sent copies of the pictures to Richard’s parents and Carol’s mother. Carol’s parents had divorced years before, and she had nothing to do with her father, but Richard had secretly sent him one. He’d never met the man, but he couldn’t help feeling a grandpa had the right to see his only child’s only child.
Two weeks after the picture was taken, the three of them were in the Newman lobby. The attendant kept trying to make Richard take Pooh Bear, telling him it would be discarded once the baby became an official resident, but Richard fought hard. His boy was going to keep it to comfort him on cold nights. The attendant took Christopher and the bear through the oak doorway and closed the door. Richard never saw the Pooh Bear again. He asked about it two or three times, but no one ever knew what he was talking about.
Richard placed the picture back on his desk. It was his favorite picture of his family, but he often found it difficult to look at it. Rather than reminding him of what he had, sometimes the picture would just accentuate his feelings that he’d lost his son—that, in a very real sense, he’d lost his family. The picture reminded him of a different photo he hadn’t seen for years—one of his parents and their two sons, standing on the deck in the back of their Vermont home. His younger brother, David, was a junior in high school, and Richard had just started college. It was autumn, bright gold and red leaves covered the deck, and the four of them were laughing. They’d spent a half-hour trying to take the perfect family picture. His father had made some bad joke about something, they’d laughed, and the camera timer went off at just the right time. The perfect family picture.
He turned back to his computer and clicked on the video. Christopher was on the screen, now four or five years old, sitting on the floor of a classroom with six other children. They were surrounded by a rainforest wallpaper, brigh
t green trees full of gorillas eating bananas and swinging on vines. The children wore their colder weather uniforms now, the same khaki, safari-style clothes, but with long sleeves and long pants. They watched one of the teachers as he used two hand puppets, a giraffe and a zebra, to teach about being polite.
Richard had almost memorized the video, so he busied himself with searching out details, hoping for clues—clues for what, he had no idea. For a moment, he focused on the pockets on those safari uniforms. The pockets never had anything in them. Shouldn’t they have bulged a little here and there? These were little kids, for crying out loud. Shouldn’t there have been a rock or a crayon or something in a pocket?
He studied the plush green carpet. Several of the children stroked the carpet as they watched the puppets. They would laugh, and sometimes laugh even more as they looked at one another, but they kept stroking the carpet. Reaching out to it. Feeling it. Richard kept watching the screen. Even though he’d seen this video many times, he still hoped something would be different this time. The children all seemed happy, but maybe a boy would frown for a second. Or maybe a girl would look distracted. He knew nothing would change, but he kept watching.
The phone rang. Richard picked it up without thinking, forgetting to look at the screen and see who was calling.
“Richard, are you there? This is Hunter.”
Richard closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Hunter was the head psychologist at Newman, and one of Carol’s friends from college. She felt like they owed the world to Hunter because he’d pulled so many strings to get Christopher into the school.
“Hello, Hunter.”
“Look, I’ll get to the point, Richard. Ms. Garrett told me you came by Newman today.”
Richard didn’t say anything.
“It’s not a good idea,” Hunter said. “The sabbatical. It’s just not healthy for the resident to be taken out of the environment he’s grown up in. Too disruptive.”
“You didn’t seem to mind taking him out of the environment he grew up in when you enrolled him.”
“That’s my point, Richard. We enroll them early so we don’t have to waste time retraining them.”
“I have the right to take him out on the sabbatical.”
“Look, let’s not talk policy, let’s talk Christopher.”
“Yeah, tell me about him. It’s tough to know someone you never see.”
“Richard, if I had the slightest doubt about the Newman Home, you know I wouldn’t have my own son enrolled there.”
Richard looked over at the paused image on the screen. All the children were frozen in their laughter, in their delight. All looking up at the teacher and the two puppets, a giraffe and a zebra. The children—their sweet, innocent, clean faces, paralyzed in pleasure as they watched two animals talking to each other.... What did a giraffe have to say to a zebra, anyway?
What did Richard have to say to Hunter?
“...but I’m part of something big,” Hunter continued, “really important. And so are you. These kids are from the smartest parents....”
Richard noticed something he’d never seen before. Something stuck out of one of the pockets on Christopher’s shirt. He looked harder, trying to make out what it was. It looked a little shiny. He zoomed in.
“It’s a pen,” Richard said.
“What?”
“A pen. I’ve got a video of Christopher on the computer. He has a pen in his pocket. No one else has one.”
“So he has a pen.”
“Maybe he draws with that pen.” Richard pointed to the screen. “Or maybe he writes. Maybe he does something with it without having any official approval.”
“Or maybe he just left a pen in his pocket.”
“Maybe there’s a rule that you can’t have a pen in your pocket,” Richard said, “and he’s breaking the rule. Wouldn’t that be great, Hunter!”
“Breaking rules really doesn’t lead to much success in life.”
“It could. Happy little clones. Look at them.”
“I’m on the phone. I can’t see them.”
“That’s the point. You don’t even have to look at them, Hunter. They always look the same.”
“They look like students at the finest private school in the world. What’s the problem? How could you possibly find anything wrong with a picture of happy children? Just admit it: there’s nothing wrong with Newman, you just miss your son.”
“I do miss him,” Richard said, “but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing wrong with Newman.”
“You know what the studies show. Public schools failed a long time ago.”
“If that’s true, it’s because we made them fail.”
“It’s taken government and business working as a team to save our children.”
“Let’s see, government mandates without funding. Vouchers. Privatization. They weren’t trying to save our schools or our children. They were trying to create a new profit center. No child left behind? All the kids were left behind.”
“Always the cynical lawyer.”
“Newman tuition is the highest in the world, I bet,” Richard said. “And there’s all that fundraising. Makes you wonder if Newman isn’t really about all the money.”
“It’s about the best education in the world. Worth every penny.”
“I never went to a boarding school. I lived with those people... what do you call them?...oh yes, parents. Parents who loved me, who wanted what was best for me, who wanted to be with me.”
“Newman parents love their children, too. That’s why they enrolled them. They wanted what’s best for their kids—the best education possible.”
“Don’t give me that spiel,” Richard said, sitting up taller. “Those parents sent their kids to boot camp because they were too busy with their beloved careers to mess around with nuisances that had to be clothed, fed, and held. They have enough money to make their kids one less thing to worry about before staying late at the office or going out for dinner and a play.”
“Or writing their novel?”
Silence.
“I didn’t enroll Christopher so I could write my novel.”
“Nobody held a gun to your head to get Christopher into Newman, Richard. You signed your name just like Carol did.”
Richard slammed down the receiver. Hunter was an idiot. There was no way Richard agreed to let his son enroll in Newman so he could write. If someone told him he could have his son back if he gave up ever writing another word, he’d drop his pen and grab his son in a second.
The pen in Christopher’s pocket now stood out in the picture. How could Richard have missed it before? He cherished the possibility, however slight, that his son had the same connection to writing that he did. He smiled. Maybe writing would be the key to bringing them together.
CHAPTER NINE
The secretary at Weatherford and Williams tried to stop him, insisting his wife was in an important meeting, but Richard walked past her. He finally had a plan for getting Christopher home and he didn’t want anything to slow him down. He knew himself well enough to know he had to keep his momentum before he talked himself out of his plan. He opened Carol’s office door without knocking, knowing he’d jump into the middle of whatever was happening. She was leaning against her desk, speaking with two attorneys who looked new to the firm, judging by the way they took notes on everything she was saying. Richard grabbed her hand and told her he was starving—they had to get something to eat together or he’d die. She complained, saying she couldn’t leave, but she went with him. She usually liked to call the shots, but he knew she sometimes liked it when he’d step up and lead the way, almost leaving her in the dark. For a little while, at least.
He was still holding her hand as they came out onto the sidewalk. Traffic was heavy, as always, and the street was noisy. Nameless people crowded the sidewalk. Richard walked quickly, and Carol had difficulty keeping up.
They walked two or three blocks without saying a word. Whenever they passed a restaurant, Rich
ard didn’t even slow down. Finally, Carol let go of his hand and stopped.
“Richard, it’s almost four o’clock. I grabbed a sandwich a long time ago.”
“Then let’s call it dinner.”
“It’s too early for dinner.”
“For crying out loud, woman, live on the edge!”
“Where exactly are we going?”
“For the first time in your life, you’re not going to know exactly anything.”
He started walking down the sidewalk, leaving her standing. He turned at the corner and looked back at her. She was smiling, but stopped when she saw he was watching her.
“I hope we’re not going to eat vegetarian hot dogs again,” she shouted after him. “I hate green hot dogs.”
She caught up with him just as he was about to turn a corner. Richard paused for a second, as though out of respect or reverence, as he looked at the massive building straight ahead. The gigantic lions kept watch over one of the few places in the city where a person could find books that weren’t just on screens.
“We’re going to eat dinner at the library?” Carol asked.
Richard nodded and almost ran toward the library. He knew what he was doing, but he had no idea how to do it. How was she ever going to go along with this? Carol again tried to catch up, and finally got to him when he paused at the top of the steps. The two entered the library and headed straight for the huge reading room.
The Newman Resident Page 3