Lovey

by Mary MacCracken

  We wrote our play; it was twenty pages long and I typed it up carefully and read it back to the children. Then I typed out scripts for everybody, but nobody except Brian could learn his part and they got more mixed up trying to read them. So finally we threw the scripts away and concentrated on the costumes and the scenery, and everyone said what came into his head at the time.

  We practised every afternoon for two weeks and finally on a Wednesday morning, the first week of February, we were ready.

  There was an unused room next to Patty’s, separated from hers by a wooden folding door. It was used, on occasion, by the church as a small chapel. For our play, we pushed back the door and Henry, gaunt, never smiling, but gentle, careful with his hands, helped us put up the painted cardboard for scenery and arrange the chairs for the rest of the school.

  The play opened with Brian as Gepetto teaching Rufus how to walk, helping him to move his stiff wooden legs. Gepetto sold his coat to buy Pinocchio a spelling book, so he could go to school. Brian loved this part and kept patting his leather apron and sneaking in commercials. On the way to school Pinocchio met up with Lampwick – Jamie rocked across the stage in excitement, grabbed Pinocchio, and led him to the Land of Pleasure without having to say a word.

  Then Pinocchio told his first lie and then another and another and his nose (an empty toilet paper roll with a paper cone inside) grew longer and our whole school clapped and cheered – and my kids got so excited that they all ran off the stage and Henry had to herd them back on. It was time for the Blue Fairy to appear and help Pinocchio.

  Hannah had stayed hidden behind one of the window curtains, but now, as Henry whispered to her, she ran out on to the stage. Mrs Rosnic had made her a beautiful costume out of old sheets. It was longer than that of the Junior League’s Blue Fairy, but it was dyed a soft deep blue so that Hannah’s own eyes seemed even bluer.

  Her wand was the end of an old fishing rod with an aluminium star at the end. Her tiara balanced precariously on her short, gleaming hair. She looked better than I had ever seen her, but, she wasn’t doing anything. Even Jamie had managed to run out on the stage and grab Rufus to lead him to the Land of Pleasure. But Hannah did nothing, and the awkward pause grew longer and longer as Rufus shifted from foot to foot, waiting for the Blue Fairy to touch his long nose with her wand and make it short again. (Rufus was supposed to poke the cone of paper back inside the toilet paper roll as he reached up in delight to touch his shortened nose.)

  This was to have been the high point of the show – and now Hannah stood doing nothing while Rufus glowered at her and Brian whispered, ‘Go on, Hannah. Touch his nose with the star. You can do it.’

  But Hannah didn’t budge.

  Rufus was getting angrier and angrier. ‘Hurry up,’ he hissed. ‘Hurry up, dummy.’

  That did it, Hannah wasn’t going to be called dummy by anybody, any more. She moved immediately across the stage, up to the impatient Pinocchio. She forgot about being the Blue Fairy, forgot Pinocchio, forgot about the play and the audience.

  Whack! Down came the wand on Rufus’s paper nose – hard, as hard as Hannah could bring it down.

  ‘Not dummy,’ shouted the Blue Fairy. ‘I not dummy any more. Not call me that.’

  Pinocchio’s nose rolled across the stage. Rufus’s own nose had barely escaped the blow, and now it looked small and vulnerable in his painted face. Our play was a shambles, or I thought it was, but the children didn’t. They’d never seen a play before, never heard of Pinocchio, and they loved the action and excitement of what was going on.

  I picked up Pinocchio’s nose so it wouldn’t be stepped on and handed it to Gepetto, who was the closest.

  Brian took the nose, his hands flapping just a little with excitement, and with inspiration he went centre stage. ‘Good beautiful Blue Fairy. You have saved Pinocchio. You got rid of his horrible nose and gave him the wonderful nose of a real boy. We thank you. The End. Brought to you by General Electric, the Wonderful House of Magic.’

  We all stood and cheered. Rufus and Hannah forgot to be mad and cheered too. Even Jamie clapped his hands. Our play was a hit, a four-star hit.

  Who says you need a script?

  Chapter 16

  ‘Oh, boy, teacher,’ Hannah said. ‘You not even know it Valentine’s Day. Oh, boy.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I forgot all about it.’

  ‘That okay. Not matter. I got two presents.’

  ‘Two presents?’

  Hannah nodded vigorously. ‘Two. One from me. One from Mama.’

  ‘For me?’ I asked. ‘Two for me? Oh, Hannah. I don’t have any.’

  ‘That okay, teacher. We got two. Here. Open.’

  In Hannah’s mind it didn’t matter who got the presents or who gave them as long as there were the same number of presents as people.

  ‘The world has got a lot to learn from you, lovey.’

  She cocked her head at me quizzically, not understanding, not really caring, too excited about her presents.

  ‘Here,’ she said, handing me a brown paper bag. ‘Open. From Mama.’

  I reached into the bag and took out a foil-wrapped package. I folded back the edges of the foil and found a loaf of bread on a paper plate with a note.

  You teach her good. Happy Valentine’s Day – Mrs Rosnic.

  The loaf was brown and crisp and round.

  ‘That’s beautiful bread!’ I said. ‘Your mum is a good cook. Thank you, Hannah. It’s really beautiful.’

  ‘That not mine. This mine. Look.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I’ll write your mother tonight.’

  Hannah handed me an even bigger paper bag with a long roll of paper sticking out the top of the bag.

  ‘Open,’ Hannah urged.

  I slit the tape that held the roll together and spread the paper out on the table while Hannah said, ‘I paint that, teacher.’

  It was a lovely, happy picture with a strong blue sky and a large yellow sun. Below the sun was a figure dancing. It wore a skirt and – could those be sneakers?

  ‘Sneakers?’ I asked.

  Hannah nodded and confirmed, ‘Sneakers. That how you look sometimes. And see, here your heart.’

  My heart? Could Hannah see my heart? Had anybody ever seen my heart? I could hear it now – boom boom boom. Had anybody ever even wanted to see my heart before? But there it was on Hannah’s picture, a big red blob on the outside.

  ‘That’s nice, Hannah,’ I said. ‘That’s a nice heart.’

  ‘It big, teacher. It a big heart.’

  I put my hands under her armpits and lifted her plump, sturdy little body up on to the table so that her eyes were level with mine, and put my arms around her, hugging her hard.

  ‘Not half as big as yours, lovey. Not half.’

  Chapter 17

  ‘All right, Mary. I’ll stick my neck out and make it definite. There’ll be a sure spot for Brian at P.S. 24 next fall; I’ll see to it. You’ve done a good job with him.’ Bernie Sorrino, Regional Director of Special Services, turned suddenly to me and said, ‘Who’m I kidding? You’ve done a lot more than that. It’s some kind of a miracle, what’s happened to that kid. I remember him when we sent him to you, weirdest kid I ever saw, didn’t eat, didn’t talk, flapped and squawked around like some crazy kind a bird.’

  ‘Thanks, Bernie. You won’t be sorry. He’ll do you proud,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. Well, we’ll see. I’ve promised to take him, and I won’t go back on my word. But by God, Mary, you better toughen him up between now and then or those city kids will eat him alive.’

  The Director of Special Services was right and I knew it, Bernie was a tough, smart, honest man who had worked his way up out of the slums of the city himself. He’d scrounged and scratched, won or wangled one scholarship after another, until he’d finally gotten his doctorate in education. He had started in suburban schools; when I first knew him he was in charge of special services for the whole northwestern section of our state, an area that is aff
luent, sophisticated, and relatively serene. Five years ago he had been asked to take over Special Services in the teeming, run-down, industrial city where both he and Brian had been born, more than forty years apart. In fact, he was there before he was asked, applying for the job that wasn’t even open yet.

  Our Director had disapproved of his move. ‘I thought Bernie had a good head on his shoulders. He was moving right along, but if he goes back to the city now, he’ll never get out again. He won’t get those kind of breaks twice.’

  Bernie came up to our school three or four times a year to check on Brian, the only child we’d ever had from the city. The Superintendent of Schools had told our Director tersely, ‘We take care of our own.’ But they couldn’t take care of Brian. They had tried him in their public schools, in their retarded classes, on home instruction. Eventually, on Brian’s father’s plea, they had grudgingly sent him to us four years ago, when he was eight years old. I could understand some of their reluctance; they had no school bus for special education and yet state law said they must provide transportation. So Brian travelled the twenty miles back and forth to our school in a taxi every day, not an easy thing to explain to the city taxpayers.

  I’d liked Bernie Sorrino from the beginning. When he came to visit he really came into the classroom; no hanging on the edges or peeping in the windows for Bernie. If we were at Circle, he opened the door, dragged over one of the small chairs, and plopped himself down next to one of the kids, his bulk extending beyond the small chair seat, his short, strong legs sticking out into the circle. He was far from inconspicuous, but there was something natural, easy, and ebullient about him, so that his visits were always welcome. He sang whatever we were singing in an unselfconscious, off-key voice, and the kids accepted him far more easily than they did the timid visitors who tiptoed around the room, trying to make themselves inconspicuous. Bernie never peered purposefully at Brian or took ‘little notes – just to refresh my mind’, as many of the administrators or social workers or psychologists did. But when he’d been there about an hour he’d signal with his head and I’d follow him into the hall.

  On his first visit to the school he lit a cigar as soon as we hit the hall, puffed on it for a minute, staring into space, then turned back to me. ‘Oh, sorry – forgot. You want one?’ Proffering a big fat cigar.

  ‘No, thanks.’ I was waiting. I couldn’t tell yet. Was he joking? Was he testing?

  ‘That kid,’ he continued. ‘That kid I’m here to see, Brian O’Connell – how’s he doing?’

  ‘Okay. He’s come a long way; he’s got a long way to go.’

  ‘All right, Mary.’ He knew my name; obviously he knew far more than he let on. ‘I want him reading by the next time I come. Got that?’ His eyes, black and prominent behind the cigar smoke, crackled.

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said, straight-faced but feeling good. ‘The whole encyclopedia, right?’

  Bernie Sorrino glared back, clapping me on the shoulder with a strong, warm hand. ‘And the World Book. Don’t forget the World Book, for Christ’s sake.’

  That had been four years ago. We’d liked each other then. We liked each other even better now. I’d been on a couple of panels on childhood schizophrenia and autism with him. Once he’d worn his wife’s name tag by mistake all through a public session – and he thought it as funny as the audience did when I pointed it out to him.

  But I took Bernie seriously now. He knew Brian, and he knew the city. If he said to toughen him up, it was something that had to be done.

  I walked with Bernie out to the car, the kids following, then passing us on their bikes, ‘Can you give me some more specifics?’ I asked. ‘How am I going to toughen him up?’

  ‘Teach him to lie, cheat, steal, roll dice, play poker, drink, deal drugs, use a knife, indulge in a little rape, and keep his skin intact. For Christ’s sake, now you got him singing about Noah and his arkie-ark and Puff the Magic Dragon. Jesus, Mary, what good’s that gonna do him in the city?’

  This was legitimate criticism. The atmosphere of our school was warm, protective, loving. We dealt with reality, but a reality of our own. We faced wide ranges of emotion and behaviour with equanimity. We replaced fantasy and escapism with immediacy. Our purpose was to build, encourage, promote trust and openness among the children and the staff so that warm interpersonal relationships could (and did) develop.

  Brian was a good product of our school; he was open, without guile, tender, trusting – but vulnerable, an easy target. The reality of our classroom was far different from that of P.S. 24. As I thought about it more, it became clear that we were innocent and protective in a way that would be detrimental to Brian.

  But if the problem was clear, the solution wasn’t. Who was going to teach him? Not Jamie, Hannah, or Rufus – and I didn’t know much more.

  I brought a deck of cards and some poker chips to school the next day. I slit the cellophane on the poker chips and said to the kids, ‘Okay, we got a new game here. It’s called five-card stud.’ I had to start somewhere, and I knew a little more about cards than the other items that Bernie had mentioned. I said to Brian, ‘This is mainly for you. They’ll be playing cards at your school next year.’

  Brian smiled. ‘Like Concentration? I like Concentration.’

  ‘No, Bri. Not like that. Not like that at all.’ It was true that Brian loved Concentration, both the card game and the television show. He had a fantastic visual memory; he knew all the states and capitals, baseball players and batting averages. He could remember card sequences and positions with no effort at all. He would be able to learn poker without any trouble. But that wasn’t the point. I had to try to set him up. I wasn’t going to teach him to cheat, but I was going to try to show him what to do when somebody else did.

  Brian caught on to poker quickly; Rufus persevered; Jamie and Hannah soon lost interest.

  Three-handed poker isn’t the best game in the world, but Rufus, Brian, and I played every day after lunch. We expanded to five-card draw, seven-card stud, dealer’s choice, even deuces wild. Brian and Rufus learned the words: straight, flush, four of a kind, ante, and raise.

  Brian loved the game (better than Concentration) and played enthusiastically. At first he cheerfully named all the cards in his hand out loud, talking to the nice queens, telling them he’d find another. But he soon learned to play without a word, silently, competently, remembering everything, showing no trace of emotion, winning consistently; his pile of chips three times as high as Rufus’s and mine.

  I figured he was ready. When I was dealer I stacked my hand with aces, dealt off the bottom, slipped cards from the middle, Brian’s pile of chips dwindled; mine rose. Rufus’s pile was as small as ever, but he continued to play with dogged determination.

  This was taking too long. When was Brian going to catch on? I blatantly slid an ace into my hand to replace another card and Rufus yelled, ‘Hey, Mary, you can’t do that!’

  ‘Do what?’ I arranged my hand.

  ‘You took another card. I saw you.’

  I looked at Rufus coolly. ‘Who says so?’

  ‘I do!’ yelled Rufus. ‘Didn’t she, Brian? Didn’t she steal another card?’

  Brian’s hands began to flap. ‘Doesn’t matter. Nice queens. Doesn’t matter, Rufus. Let’s just play.’

  We played and my aces won easily over Brian’s queens.

  I pulled in the chips and dealt another hand, ‘Deuces wild,’ I said, spotting a two of spades that I could sneak from the deck.

  ‘She did it again!’ Rufus yelled. ‘Brian, you had to see her that time.’

  Brian lowered his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. Just play.’

  I put down the cards. ‘It does matter, Bri. It matters a lot. That’s called cheating, and any time you see it happen get out of the game. Don’t yell, that’s no good, Ruf. But don’t “just play” either.’

  Brian was very sad. ‘I like to play. Why do I have to get out of the game? Doesn’t matter if I win.’

  Sometimes it
seemed to me that the kids I taught, or was supposed to be teaching, saw the world more clearly than anyone else. Sometimes I thought if they could all just live together somewhere they would have a kind of Utopia, where there were lots of presents, but it didn’t matter who gave or got, and lots of games, but it wasn’t important who won or lost.

  Brian had known all along that I was cheating, but what did he care? If he didn’t care about winning, I could make a fool of myself all day long while he still got what he wanted: the fun of playing.

  ‘Okay, Bri,’ I said. ‘Never mind. Let’s forget this poker-playing lesson. Just do me a favour, all right? If you’re playing for money next year – real money, not chips – and you see somebody cheating, fold up your cards when it’s your turn to bet, like you do when you have a bad hand, and pass. All right?’

  Brian looked at me quizzically, ‘Yeah, sure. Mary. Nobody’d want to lose real money.’

  He probably would have known what to do all along, but I kept on, trying to anticipate, to alert him to the ways of the city.

  ‘Do you know what drugs are?’ I asked him one day.

  ‘Yes. Anacin, Bayer Aspirin, Bufferin – “stops acidity while it stops the pain.” I saw it –’

  ‘Yeah, Bri. Okay, I know, You saw it on television.’ How to tell him? How to even begin to tell him about marijuana, grass, pot, dope, amphetamines, speed, cocaine, uppers, and downers?

  Maybe television was as good a way as any. ‘Try to keep it that way,’ I said. ‘If you’ve seen the drug advertised on TV, it’s okay to use. If you haven’t, don’t touch it.’

  I shook my head at myself. I, who had decried commercials, claiming they whetted appetites with false promises, now was advocating them. You never know.

  On the subject of money: ‘Take as little to school as possible. Just enough for lunch. And if you can, get lunch tickets instead.’

  Sex. We’d been over masturbation many times. It was a large part of our reality, and on this, at least, we were probably more savvy than P.S. 24. The code here was – do it when you’re alone. Not in public. I didn’t attempt the topic of intercourse, homosexuality, sodomy, rape. Brian would probably be exposed to all of these and more, but somehow it seemed too much for our crash course. I’d answer whatever questions came up and make sure he knew how to find Bernie Sorrino.