In mid-June, near the end of the year, Teresa Thompson called to tell Mimi that The District had agreed to all their terms and that soon they would be sending her a check for thirty thousand dollars. This was the most money the advocate had ever won for a client, and she taped a Xerox of the check to the wall beside her desk next to a photograph of her son standing proudly in the superstar mail clerk apron she had bought for him to wear at his job delivering interoffice mail for The District in Dyker Heights.
“See, I told you not to worry,” she told Mimi.
“Thank you, Teresa. I knew you would come through for us.” And that was true. Still, Mimi had been worried and now she felt very relieved.
Near the end of Danny’s first year at the yeshiva, Linda Frank called Mimi to say that Danny would not be allowed to return to Chaim Akiva in the fall unless she hired an aide to go to school with him. “Your son requires nonstop attention,” she said and went on to enumerate all the reasons why. Her list included everything that the director of Danny’s nursery school had told Mimi when she’d urged her to get her son tested three and a half years before.
Mimi’s heart wouldn’t stop pounding. Linda hadn’t complained to her about Danny for months, and during the parent-teacher conferences, all the teachers ever said was how smart her son was and what a delight he was to have in their classes. Did they think they were doing her a favor, sparing her feelings?
Mimi called Teresa to report that she would have to ask The District to cover the cost of an aide for Danny. The advocate said they would never approve an aide for a school they hadn’t recommended.
“But they already approved the school,” Mimi said.
Teresa explained that that wasn’t the way it worked. The District always made sure to stipulate that in agreeing to fund a particular school, they were by no means giving their stamp of approval for that school. “That’s why the documents ratifying their agreements to settle are called ‘stipulations,’” she said.
Mimi felt the air being sucked out of her all at once. The fact that she had heard this was the way The District operated didn’t matter. Experiencing it now, for herself, gave her the feeling that she had just come face-to-face with evil.
According to everyone she had spoken to, the policy of The District was to scare parents into submission. It made no difference if they had previously agreed to pay for a school; parents still had to pay the tuition up front, then pay a lawyer, or as in the case of Jake and Mimi, an advocate, to represent them, year after year after year. The District knew that most people couldn’t afford a lawyer, much less the tuition, or if they could, many would be afraid to take the risk.
It was a game of dare they were playing. And they played this game with the parents of children who couldn’t talk, children who couldn’t walk, children who couldn’t hear, children who couldn’t see, children who didn’t have long to live, children who would always be children.
“Now, my dear, I have to tell you the aide complicates things for us,” Teresa was saying. “The District is going to question how the yeshiva can be appropriate for Danny if he requires this level of support. This time it’s going to take a little longer.”
Mimi didn’t say anything. She was too afraid to ask if that meant they were going to lose.
“You better get used to this,” the advocate added.
“I can’t afford to pay for an aide on top of the tuition,” Mimi replied.
“Not to worry.” Teresa told her that she had made a special arrangement with the Hebrew Free Loan Society to lend money to all her clients, interest-free.
Mimi created a flyer advertising for aides to go to school with Danny, and she spent the next two weeks going up and down the streets surrounding universities from the West Village to the Bronx stapling them onto telephone poles and taping them onto the glass enclosures of bus stops near the schools. She wandered the halls of the various departments and asked the professors to tell their students about this “wonderful opportunity.” By the time the fall semester was ready to begin, Mimi had hired a fourth-year PhD student in psychology. The girl had finished all her coursework and was in the process of writing her thesis, which coincidentally was about how the school system was failing children with autism.
Teresa Thompson kept on avoiding working on Danny Slavitt’s case. She hated it. She hated Mimi Slavitt. And she hated Danny Slavitt, too. Their stupid case was even more complicated than what she had anticipated. It was like nothing she was used to handling, and Mimi Slavitt was nothing like those nice, mild-mannered Orthodox women who were always sending her thank-you notes, babka, rugelach and cherry cheese strudel. She wished she could just forget the whole thing. But she couldn’t. This made her resent Mimi Slavitt and her genius son even more.
One day the advocate got a call from Don Swilke, a lawyer for The District, telling her they would agree to settle everything—on the condition that Teresa tell Mimi Slavitt to call off her battalions. The woman doesn’t know when to stop! he complained. In addition to precipitating a deluge of phone calls and e-mails from politicians’ aides, Mimi Slavitt was constantly clogging up their fax machines with legal briefs and court judgments, articles from law journals and medical journals and voluminous treatises she wrote herself. She always included quotes from autism experts, a couple of whom she had recruited to write letters and make phone calls on her son’s behalf.
“I think they’ll do anything to get rid of you,” Teresa told Mimi when she called her to report the good news. “I told you not to be such a worrywart. I told you I would do it. I told you this one was going to take longer. And believe me, this was no easy peasy. But it’s done.”
It was the biggest case the advocate had ever won. Although she had done everything she could to avoid it, her aversion to Mimi and her son made any effort she had put into the case feel like hard work and it wasn’t long before Teresa was convinced that this was a victory she could claim for herself. She was certain that her conversations with Don Swilke had made all the difference and for a while she basked in the glow of her accomplishment. But then Don reminded her about all the documents she had to send him before he signed off on the case.
“You have to play by the rules just like everyone else, Terry,” he said lightheartedly. “No documents, no settlement. I’m giving you three months. Which is more than I would give to anyone else. I’m doing you a huge favor here. It will be a big feather in your cap, winning a case like this. But you miss the deadline, that’s it. The offer’s off the table. Forever.”
Oh shit, Teresa thought to herself. Timesheets and affidavits and attendance records for the aides. Affidavits from the teachers and the principal. All of which had to be notarized. Documentation from a psychiatrist and the boy’s pediatrician. And copies of all the checks Mimi Slavitt had ever written to the school. And affidavits from the bank as well. This thing never ended.
She told herself she would e-mail Linda Frank next week. She would ask the principal to take care of most of the paperwork. The woman was in love with her, and like all bureaucrats, she loved dotting i’s and crossing t’s. But Teresa never got around to asking Linda for help. Her business started to boom, way beyond anything she could ever have imagined: two other special education yeshivas had opened up and they gave all their business to the Christian woman with the golden touch. The advocate pushed Mimi Slavitt’s case out of her mind.
Hearing that The District was finally going to settle made Mimi feel weak with relief. Everything was going to be okay. The panic attacks that had been keeping her up at night stopped. But when another year ended, and another one began with still no word from the advocate about the reimbursements she had said would be forthcoming, the panic returned, worse than ever. The only thing that could give Mimi any relief was the voice of Teresa Thompson telling her that everything was going to be okay and that she should stop being such a worrywart.
The last time Mimi had spoken
to Teresa, the advocate had told her that if she didn’t have the patience to wait, they could bring her case before a judge. “It’s up to you, Mimi,” Teresa had said, warning that taking a case to court was always very risky since the outcome depended on who you got for a judge, and a lot of the judges were clones of the flunkies at The District. Mimi decided to try to be patient and wait.
One day when the advocate was working from home—Nathan was sick with the flu, and Teresa always took care of her son when he was sick—she decided that she might as well try to get those old cases of Mimi Slavitt’s out of the way once and for all. It had been a couple of years since she had looked at Danny Slavitt’s file, and as she started flipping through it, she discovered that it was too late to do anything about any of the cases. The deadline Don Swilke had set for her to produce the necessary documents had expired long ago.
She’d really fucked up big time. And it would have been so easy. Linda Frank would have been fine taking care of the paperwork, but she had forgotten to ask her. There was no telling what Mimi Slavitt would do if she ever found out. It wasn’t fair. After all Teresa had done for so many children.
She looked around her office at all the testimonials and awards and the table full of thank-you notes. It took Teresa at least a week to get rid of the unsettling feelings that this oversight of hers had triggered. The advocate was unaccustomed to feeling bad about anything, which made her hate Mimi Slavitt even more. Teresa told herself that there was no point in dwelling on past mistakes.
She decided to pretend that Mimi Slavitt didn’t exist. She told her staff that whenever Mrs. Slavitt called, they should say she wasn’t in. As a final service to her boss before she went into labor, Charna came up with the idea of posting a big sign on the wall of the common area where the staff worked that said simply: mimi slavitt, enclosed in a circle with a diagonal line through her name.
Mimi had the same e-mail server as Teresa, which she recently discovered made it possible for her to check the status of everything she sent the advocate. When she found out that Teresa was deleting her e-mails without even reading them, she knew she had no choice but to make the journey to the inconveniently located office in Kew Gardens, Queens. There had been a snowstorm the day before and the air was so cold it burned her face, but Mimi couldn’t bear to wait a second longer, so after sending Danny off to school on the little yellow school bus, she trudged through the snow and ice that covered the steep hill on 181st Street, to the subway station, to embark on what turned out to be a three-hour trip to Kew Gardens.
By the time she had finished making the long hike from the bus to Teresa’s office, her fingers and toes were numb. Gail Seltzer was unlocking the last of the four locks on the front door when she arrived.
“Mrs. Slavitt? What are you doing here?” she said, intent on expressing her annoyance. Gail had always seemed to take pleasure in letting Mimi know how much she disliked her. Another time when Mimi showed up at Teresa’s office unannounced, she had told Mimi, who was on the verge of tears, that she played the drama queen well.
Gail was part of the loyal band of Orthodox women who worked for Teresa. They accepted with equanimity their boss’s many bold expressions of her Christian faith: the cross she wore around her neck, the picture of the Virgin Mary that hung on the wall between the two windows in her office, the paperweight in the form of a Nativity scene and the Baby Jesus pencil holder she kept on her desk left them completely unfazed. Everything about their boss enchanted these women, who, in strict accordance with the precepts of Orthodox Judaism, covered their hair with wigs and dressed in long skirts, black stockings and long-sleeved shirts, even in the dead heat of summer, and they all did their best to fulfill their obligations to increase the Jewish population.
Every one of them, consciously or unconsciously, had appropriated some aspect of their boss’s mannerisms or appearance. Charna, the receptionist, raised her eyebrows in mock consternation the way Teresa did; Helen Schwartzman, the office manager, had her wig styled in Teresa’s old-fashioned dark brown page boy and she often dressed in her boss’s trademark white Peter Pan blouses and pleated skirts; Lorraine Stahl, her secretary, had taken on Teresa’s habit of tapping her fingers on her desk; and Gail Seltzer, Teresa’s right-hand woman, had appropriated Teresa’s ironic grin, and she was grinning ironically at Mimi now.
“You should know better than to come here without an appointment,” Gail repeated.
“I’ve come to see Teresa,” Mimi declared. “I can never get through to make an appointment!”
“You can make an appointment now.”
“No. I’ll wait here until Teresa can see me,” Mimi said, and slipping past Gail, through the half-open door, she ran up the steep set of stairs, planted herself in a chair outside Teresa’s office and waited.
When Teresa came in an hour later, cheerfully bearing a dozen cherry-cheese strudels from Teitelbaum’s Bakery on Parsons Boulevard, a gift from Mrs. Teitelbaum, whose little Moishe was now settled into the third grade at the B’nai Baruch Yeshiva in Huntington, Long Island, Gail rushed into her boss’s office and closed the door. After a few minutes, Teresa called out to Mimi and invited her in.
“I’m so glad you dropped by today, my dear. As a matter of fact, I was planning on calling you,” she said with a smile. “I have some papers for you to sign. Can you wait a few minutes while Lorraine prints them out for you?”
“You mean they’re finally going to come through?” Mimi asked.
“I told you they would, my dear.”
“For the entire amount?”
“I explained the situation to them. That with you, things were different.”
“And they agreed? For the entire amount?” Mimi asked.
“Don’t be such a worrywart, Mimi,” Teresa said as she buzzed Gail, who appeared in an instant.
“Do you have the documents ready for Mrs. Slavitt to sign?”
Gail looked confused.
“The papers,” Teresa repeated. “The stipulations for Mrs. Slavitt.”
“Oh, oh, of course. Mrs. Slavitt’s stipulations,” Gail said apologetically. “I’ll print them out right now.”
“Now please excuse me, Mimi. I have an appointment,” Teresa said as Gail, looking mortified and confused, made way for a short, frightened woman wearing a long skirt and an oversized black beret.
Danny was eleven now and nearing the end of his fourth year at Chaim Akiva. So far Mimi had borrowed more than one hundred fifty thousand dollars from the Hebrew Free Loan Society to pay for the school and the aides (she had hired five so far and was about to hire a sixth). There was still no word from the advocate about the money The District owed her. And Teresa was still not taking her calls. Nevertheless, Mimi continued to cling to the hope she was in the clear. The documents she had signed in Teresa’s office were proof that The District was legally bound to come forth with everything they owed her.
Then one night at Chaim Akiva’s yearly fund-raiser, Mimi overheard the father of one of Danny’s classmates complaining to another father about Teresa Thompson.
“She’s very sloppy, very careless,” he said in a loud voice. “But go figure it. Her business is booming. There’s a lot of self-deception that goes with having a kid with special needs.” He said that the lawyer he’d hired to replace Teresa had taken just two weeks to secure the signed stipulation that the advocate had been promising him for the past eleven months.
The man’s words took up residence in Mimi’s body, and there were many nights she couldn’t fall asleep. She would lie awake, too frightened to leave her bed. As she lay there, she would try to calm herself down by listing all the reasons she was overreacting. Which was typical of her, after all. It was true what Teresa was always telling her: she was a worrywart. As for the father who had criticized Teresa at the fund-raiser, Mimi reminded herself that he was always complaining about one thing or another (the air conditioning
was too cold; the new math teacher’s skirt was too short; the velvet on the mantel of one of the Torahs was showing signs of wear).
True, it was frustrating, to say the least, to have all this time go by with no word from Teresa about anything, but her position was secure. The District had set a precedent by reimbursing her for Danny’s first year at Chaim Akiva. There was no reason why the subsequent years should be any different. Even with the added complication of the aide. The advocate’s perfect track record offered further consolation. And all those letters from all those grateful parents. The awards that hung on her wall. Her adoring staff, all of whom lived lives based on high ethical standards.
But more than anything else, Mimi’s greatest source of reassurance continued to be the stipulations Teresa had given her to sign. She had it all in writing. These were legal documents. The District had no choice but to follow through on their promises.
Lingering always in the background, sometimes going so far as to pole vault its way to the forefront of her rationalizations, was the story of the great teacher of Helen Keller, Annie Sullivan. Mimi had noticed the old newspaper article displayed on a piece of varnished wood, hanging on the wall in Teresa Thompson’s reception area the first time she visited the advocate in her office.
The story was about a psychiatrist’s inspection of an orphanage in the late 1800s, a time when children like Danny were thrown into institutional hellholes. Walking down the hall, the psychiatrist came across a cleaning woman, who led him down to the basement, where she showed him something that looked like a small prison cell. “That’s the cage where they used to keep Annie,” she said. Annie Sullivan, as portrayed by Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker, had had a tough exterior and a brusque manner. Eschewing empty sentiment, committed to what was important, she had been cruel in order to be kind: Teresa was kind of like that, wasn’t she? Also, like Annie Sullivan, Teresa Thompson believed in the value of every human being.
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