I couldn’t make it interesting, even for Pip. And I couldn’t make Berta Polley appear.
I checked the time, took one last look at the nondescript house, and wished I could jazz up my detective work for Pip, or maybe, being honest, for me.
When I got home, I was the loft’s only occupant. Pip was still out. He’d said he had a big day of sightseeing ahead, and I was so happy he wasn’t going to spend another day watching TV that I’d forgotten to ask what sights he planned to see.
I felt at loose ends and ethically challenged. If I was going to quit my job, did I still have to mark the accumulated quizzes and essays in my backpack? Probably. I would retain my dignity and not saddle my successor with loose ends. I marked the eleventh grade poetry units and felt another rush of sorrow and anger and disbelief when I came to Cheryl Stevens’s. I wondered how this entire episode would affect her. I hoped the same passionate emotions that had led to the poem would continue, and that she’d hold on to her sense of right and wrong. As soon as I was officially a free agent, I would get in touch with her and tell her all of that.
There was an extra poem in the packet. It lacked a name or title, as had the one Liddy Moffatt had found. Maybe one of my students was taking the idea of poems being written by “Anon.” too literally?
It was wretched. No wonder it wasn’t signed.
Mischief Night and are we scared
For big trouble we’re prepared
But what’s a prank and what’s a crime
And is the only difference time?
Friday till midnight is all right
That’s the meaning of that night.
But if it’s done another day,
Then somebody’s gonna pay
Ghosts and goblins say they will
When they have some time to kill.
Doggerel. I bet it was—wisely—rejected by its author, but just in case not, I put it in the backpack.
Pip walked in as I had my head deep into the freezer, searching for something spaghetti-compatible. I had garlic, olive oil, and basil so I felt 90 percent of the way there. “Did you have a good day?” I asked as I found a small package of ground turkey.
“Way good,” he said, surprising me with his enthusiasm.
“Did you go to Constitution Hall?”
He shook his head, then saw my expression. “I will, I guess.” Then, more emphatically, “I will. Soon, maybe.”
“Normally, I’d say do whatever you like. Today, I feel as if that trip should be a universal requirement.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ll explain later. Where did you go?”
He tossed his rain jacket onto the floor, then reconsidered and hung it on the bright yellow coatrack that, prior to cohabiting with Pip, I would have said nobody could miss. “Kind of related,” he said, “at least about the law. Or breaking it. I went to Eastern State.”
The old penitentiary—the first one in the world, now a crumbling historic site.
“Really something,” he said. “Creepy.”
“You know, it was innovative in its time. That idea that prisoners could be—”
“Penitent. The audio said that. They could change, they thought, if they kept them in solitary.”
I remembered my trip there and how, walking through its claustrophobic dimness, I found it hard to believe this once represented the most progressive thinking about crime and punishment. “Solitary confinement was thought to keep them away from bad company.”
Pip glanced at me quickly, then away. His mother blamed some of his sudden desire to drop out on unsavory new friends. “Better, I guess, than being left to molder in a dungeon,” I added.
“Capone’s cell had fancy furniture, and rugs, and everything.”
“Envious?”
He shook his head. “It’s so creepy in there. Even his place. It looks good compared to the plain cells, but they’re all little and they don’t have windows.” He made a dramatic shudder. “And they made the guys wear these thick masks so that they looked like the Mummy—so if they were near anybody, they still couldn’t talk to them. And they got fed through these wooden openings into their cells. Creeped me out.”
“Did they tell you that one of the prisoners was a dog?”
We both turned, though the voice was unmistakable. Mackenzie had come in quietly, except for the crackling of the paper wrapped around a large square object he carried.
He leaned the package against the wall near the door. “Macavity, cover your ears. Pep the dog was imprisoned for murdering a cat.”
Macavity blinked. If only a cat’s face had moveable muscles, his would have illustrated the disdain he felt for Mackenzie’s stab at what might be feline humor. Instead, he flicked his tail, and proved that body language could sometimes be 100 percent of all communication. His message was clear.
Mackenzie sat with us at the table.
“How do you know about the prison and the dog and all?” Pip asked.
Mackenzie raised one eyebrow.
“Oh, yeah. You’re studying that kind of thing. But why would you need to know what happened back then?”
“You know the sayin’ that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it?”
Pip was silent for a moment before speaking in a flat, strained voice. “Is everything you guys are saying secretly—no, not so secretly—code? Is it all a way of saying I should go back to school? ’Cause that’s what I’m hearing.”
Mackenzie cocked his head. “We were talkin’ about my education. But if you were to ask me about going back to school, I’d answer honestly. Are you asking my opinion?”
Pip’s chin moved forward. “Guess not.”
I was watching a patient angler play a prize fish. Interesting.
The microwave defrost cycle signaled it was finished, so I relocated at the range and browned chopped garlic and the ground turkey.
“On my way home, I went to the Pretzel Museum,” Pip said.
“And how many samples did you have?” I asked, like any hausfrau preparing dinner would.
“I’ll be able to eat.”
“Listen, guys,” I said. “Today was . . . my day was something I . . .” I turned the ground meat, separating it, and sighed.
Nobody asked what I meant.
“Got a present for us.” Mackenzie gestured toward the large square he’d brought in.
“Us?” Pip and I both said.
“The bride and groom,” Mackenzie said. “Sorry. You have time to open it? It’s from a bunch of guys I used to work with.”
I unwrapped it carefully.
“They said it’s an original,” he said. “A daybill poster—except I don’t know what a daybill poster is.”
It was a bright yellow-and-red ad for The Thin Man Goes Home.
I laughed.
“I don’t get it,” Pip said. “Why an ad for an old-looking movie?”
“Your uncle’s buddies think of us—are laughing at us a little bit—as Nick and Nora, the couple in this film. What a great gift for our home, and they even had it framed.”
“You’re the thin man?” Pip asked Mackenzie. “You’re not that thin. I mean, you’re like normal.”
“So was he. The thin man was actually the victim in the first movie, but somehow the name stuck. They were sophisticated sleuths. A married couple who liked each other a whole lot, and solved crimes, too. No wonder the guys saw the similarities.”
“And they drank and drank and drank,” I murmured, wishing life were more like art here. “It’s us to a T—stinking rich and stinking drunk. I love it!”
We spent time figuring out precisely where we’d hang it, and finally decided that near the doorway, near, in fact, the yellow coatrack, would be a perfect welcoming spot for my not-abnormally-Thin Man when he came home.
And then it was time for our decidedly un–Nick and Nora dinner. “We forgot the champagne,” I murmured, looking over at the poster.
“And the martinis. And the scotch. And whate
ver else,” Mackenzie said. “I don’t think William Powell had to study after dinner.”
“And Myrna Loy definitely didn’t have to do the dishes.”
As we ate, the table talk wandered around the Thin Man movies, and I had to admit that it was not an easy job trying to describe their appeal to Pip. We’d have to rent one while he was here. We moved back to the penitentiary and Al Capone, to pretzel making, and a book Mackenzie was reading about the causes of and prognosis for families with high proportions of law-breakers in them.
The talk was flowing too well, the two males completely engaged in their storehouses of knowledge, but one second before I was going to have to force myself and my day into the conversation, and one half second before I was going to have to get annoyed by that need, Mackenzie turned to me. “Were you saying something about your day when I so rudely interrupted?”
I do love that man. “How could a gift be a rude interruption?” I said. “But yes. It was a rough one and . . . I have something important to say.”
“Want me to get out of the way?” Pip asked.
We lived in a loft. There wasn’t anyplace to send him except the street, our bedroom, or the bathroom. Besides, this wasn’t anything personal between Mackenzie and me, and it wasn’t a secret. “Not at all. This is a family discussion, and you’re part of the family now. I’ve had a horrible day, but the science teacher had an even worse one. I’ll do the rotten events in chronological sequence.”
I summarized everything I could remember about this morning: the rain, the scratched car, the explosion, the injuries. I skipped the Tisha Banks part, saving his affair and the striptease and details for later, when alone with Mackenzie.
They looked upset and sympathetic. “Any clue what caused it?”
I shook my head. “He’s still in critical condition,” I said. “Even if he lives and recuperates, he may be blind.”
“I wonder how many chemistry lab accidents there are every year,” Mackenzie murmured. “Thousands, I bet.”
“I—I’m not sure it was an accident.”
Pip sat up straighter.
“How’s that?” Mackenzie asked. “How’s that possible?”
“I don’t know. A feeling, is all. Too many bits and pieces—”
“That bad feelin’ you’ve had all week?” He said it politely, without much inflection, but I knew he was verifying that it was a feeling, not even a theory, and surely nothing with facts to back it up.
“Could somebody plant something with a long fuse? Or a time delay mechanism on it? Did they find anything at all like that?”
“I don’t think so. They think it was an accident.” I sounded like a fool. I wanted to lay my head down on the table and give up. I didn’t know enough to know what I meant. “I got this, though. Somebody put it in my raincoat pocket this morning.” Easy enough to have done. I didn’t have a locker, the way the students did. I had a peg on the wall, or the back of a chair, and I didn’t monitor whatever I tossed on either one. I stood up and retrieved the wrinkled orange piece of paper and handed it to C.K.
Pip half stood, and leaned over to read it, then looked over at me, wide-eyed.
Mackenzie bit at his bottom lip.
“I know!” I said more sharply than intended. “I know it could be a prank—but why? I don’t know what to believe or what to do.” I looked over at the framed poster. If Nora had shown this note to Nick, they’d be off and running in pursuit of the truth. My not-overly-Thin Man sighed again instead.
“You should tell the police,” he finally said.
“What do I tell them? What do I actually know? They’d laugh at that note—you want to laugh at it, don’t you?”
“Maybe not laugh, but . . .”
“Ignore it?”
“That’s closer to the mark.”
“And if it isn’t true—I really don’t want to get these kids in trouble. Not that I’d know what kid or which kids it is. But not this close to their college applications going in. By the time an investigation would clear them, it would be too late for them.”
“You can’t ignore it! I thought you two were crime fighters.” Pip gestured toward the entry, toward the poster again. “You have to solve it!”
Mackenzie and I looked at each other, and then at our nephew. “Okay,” I said. “But somebody has to write me a script first.”
“And put lots of martinis in it, too,” C.K. said.
“But you’re there,” Pip said. “And look—somebody’s trying to tell you something. It’d be easy for you to—”
“That’s what I wanted to say. I won’t be there. I’m quitting.”
“Quitting what?” the males asked in unison.
“My job. Teaching.” I am ashamed to say that I enjoyed their matching horror.
“Can you just quit like that? Isn’t it wrong?” Pip looked like he had a lot more to say, but then he belatedly realized that he was in no position to take a stand against the idea of quitting school. I felt embarrassed to be setting such a bad example for him, but I wasn’t doing this gratuitously.
“Because of the explosion?” Mackenzie asked me quietly.
I shook my head. “Because of the poetry reading.”
Pip pushed himself away from the table. “Listen, you don’t want me for this. Poetry is not my thing.”
“That’s exactly how I hoped you’d react,” I said. That startled him enough to wait to hear me out. “Because that’s how almost everybody in my tenth grade class reacted—especially the boys—when I said we were going to have a unit on poetry.”
“I’d better declare myself right now,” Mackenzie said, looking at his nephew. “I like the stuff.”
Pip checked to make sure his uncle wasn’t poking fun at him, that he really did have feet of clay.
“Anyway, it turned out that most of them liked the poems I’d picked, and some of them even said they wrote poems themselves.”
“Guys?” Pip flashed a quick look at the resident guy, worried now that his uncle had entire legs made of clay.
“Wish I could, but I’m not sufficiently talented,” Mackenzie said, shaking his head.
“Okay, mostly girls wrote them,” I admitted, “but not all.” I explained how the idea had grown and been a success and how we’d performed it—on TV—for the entire school.
While I spoke, Mackenzie stood and cleared the table. I had noticed how intently Pip watched whenever the man of the house did anything vaguely domestic. His mother had been married twice, and from what I gathered, had endured several unformalized but equally unhappy unions. Without knowing a single one of those men, I could almost envision each one by watching Pip’s amazement. Dishwashing, poetry loving, and who knew what else? We were either traumatizing the teen or helping him redefine—by lurches and jolts—what it meant to be a male.
“Want me to help, Unc?” he asked. Another small victory.
I plowed on while Pip picked up a dish towel and dried plates, and to feel part of the group, I cleared the placemats and condiments while I spoke. “Not the poetry, but because a social studies teacher objected to one of the poems. Said it was un-American, that it might foment violence.”
Mackenzie had stopped washing dishes. “What did it say?”
“I’ll get it for you, but does it matter? It wasn’t pornographic, it wasn’t a call to do anything—it was an antiwar lament. This girl’s cousin came home blind and she’s horrified by what that means to his life. So the poem’s her feelings about killing or being sent to war.”
“And?” When he wanted to, Mackenzie had the ability to pay attention so fiercely, I felt as if I had a klieg light aimed at me.
“She’s been asked to leave the school—not that Havermeyer admitted that. But she’s leaving. And I’ve been advised to stop spreading dissent, and not to publish the poem in the school paper. I mentioned freedom of speech, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights—and all I got back was that these were special times.”
He’d turned off the water, and
dried his hands.
I walked back to the table and slumped down in the chair, and first Mackenzie and then Pip also pulled out chairs and sat back down.
“What are you going to do about it?” Mackenzie asked.
“Honestly?”
“Not dishonestly.”
“I don’t feel I can continue working there, and I’m going to resign immediately. I’ll be able to pick up some other work while I look for another—”
Both Mackenzie and Pip shook their heads, as if they’d rehearsed. I could see a resemblance between them for the first time. “What?” I said. “I’ll find something. Maybe I can work for Ozzie more, or for some other—”
Pip put one of his big hands on my arm. “You can’t quit.”
“With all due respect, Pip, you’re a fine one to talk about quitting.”
His eyes widened. “I’m a kid! I’m allowed to do stupid things. I’m stupid! Haven’t you noticed? I’m sixteen! It’s not the same thing at all.” He had a cute dimple when he wasn’t sulking.
“That’s the most ridiculous argument I’ve ever heard.” But it had made me smile, and to once again revise my opinion of the young man’s intelligence. “Why can’t I quit? Aside from your somehow believing that I’m too old to be stupid.”
“Because they’re the ones doing the wrong thing, not you.” He smacked the table for emphasis. “Let them leave!”
“Because it’s your job,” C.K. added. “An’ the girl who wrote the poem—she shouldn’t leave, either.”
“But she is. Her parents are taking her out, and I can’t blame them. I’d do the same. She deserves a better environment for learning and experimenting.”
“So do you.”
“Not going to have it there. I’m too angry, and there’s no fighting him. It’s Havermeyer’s school and he’s got no spine.”
A Hole in Juan Page 13