“I should have had you order juice,” she said as she surveyed the limited repast, then motioned for the waitress. “Got to keep the electrolytes up.” She glanced around the restaurant to be sure what she was about to say would remain private. “How did you find me, anyway?”
I explained about the receptionist and the fictitious secretary.
“Do you know who Marvin Gillis is?” she asked as the juice arrived.
“Of course I know who he is.”
“Do you know how much trouble he can bring down on you for what you’re doing?”
“Why would he want to?”
Exasperated by such ignorance, she shook her head. “Gillis is the chairman of the board of trustees of the Sebastian School. Rufus Finner’s the headmaster, and has been for forty years, but Gillis really runs the place. From a policy point of view, I mean. Marvin lives and dies for that school. He thinks it’s more important than Harvard. And to San Francisco, it probably is.” She cocked her head. “That’s news to you, isn’t it?”
I admitted it.
“Which must mean you’re not.”
“Not what?”
“Looking for dirt on Sebastian.”
“I didn’t say I was.”
“I guess you didn’t. Not exactly.” Her tone was a mysterious mix of relief and disappointment. For my part, I was content to let her assumption go uncorrected.
“What would I come up with if I did do that kind of digging?” I asked after a moment.
Unconcerned now that I was no longer a threat, Emma Drayer shrugged casually. “All kinds of things—sexism, tokenism, elitism, despotism—to name a few.”
“In other words, a typical private school.”
She smiled for the first time since she had blown the whistle to end the game. “I suppose that’s true.”
“Sounds like you still haven’t gotten over it,” I said suddenly, to keep the focus on Sebastian, maybe to jar something loose that I could use.
The comment startled her. “Gotten over what?”
“The Balboa game.”
She squirmed. “How did you know about that?”
“Your roommate told me.”
“When did you talk to her?”
“An hour before I talked to you.”
“What did she tell you?”
“Not much. Mostly about the game and the reason you got fired.”
“What else?”
“That’s about it.”
She hesitated, as though she was rehearing my earlier representations. “The Balboa game.” Her look was arid. “Who knew such a little thing could haunt me for a decade?”
“Haunt you how?”
It took a long while for her to decide to tell me. “You know what I do at the law firm, right?”
I nodded. “Office manager.”
“A glorified bookkeeper, is what it amounts to. You know why I do it? You know why I’m not teaching or coaching anymore?”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been blacklisted at every school in the Bay Area.”
I looked for a sign of hyperbole but found only a marbled eye that demanded I believe her. “What makes you think you were blacklisted?”
“Because when I knew I was going to be fired at Sebastian, I sent off forty-two job applications. Coaching, teaching history or civics, administrating—I’ve done them all, and done them well.” She paused and readjusted. “Except maybe the administrating—I’m too impatient for that.”
“But you didn’t get a job.”
“Right.”
“Teaching jobs are hard to get in the city, aren’t they?”
“Sure, but not getting the job wasn’t the point. The point was, I got all my rejections back within two weeks.”
“So?”
Her words were harsh. “They were waiting for me, the bastards; they’d been warned about me and told to head me off.”
“All because you played a rough team in a soccer game?”
She looked into the distance, beyond the cars that were streaming past, beyond the disheveled street. When she spoke, her voice was thick with memory. “Marvin Gillis decided I was a threat to him and he wasn’t about to put up with it. So he made an example of me—he took away my job, the thing I loved most in the world, and he made it clear he could do the same to anyone else in the school who might go up against him.”
She made it sound like the stuff of tragedy, and perhaps for Emma it was. “Gillis has that much power?” I asked. “Even in the public schools?”
She nodded wearily. “What he has power over is money. Ever since Proposition Thirteen put a lid on property taxes in this state, the public schools have gone to hell. The dropout rate is soaring—sixty-eight percent of the tenth graders leave school before graduation. That’s two out of three, if your math is rusty. Plus, class size is enormous; discipline is a joke; and the quality of new teachers is pathetic, particularly in the cities.”
“What does that have to do with Gillis?”
“The chief impact of the budget cuts is extracurricular—sports, art, music, debate—there’s no money for those things anymore. But those things are important, particularly to parents, so schools look for other sources of funding. Things are better now, what with the lottery and Prop. 98, but back then where the schools looked for some extra money were the foundations. Pools of private bucks, established by rich people on their deathbeds, doled out afterward by their lawyers or their heirs.
“And Gillis has sway with the foundations.”
Her eyes widened. “Sway? Marvin Gillis can deliver any foundation in the city. If he wants to.”
“How?”
“Because of that school Chances are good that a majority of the board members of the foundation went to Sebastian once upon a time and chances are even better that their kids are going or will go there. They don’t want to cross Gillis because they don’t want the school to take it out on their kids.”
“There can’t be that many foundation people with kids in Sebastian.”
“It only takes a few. Foundations get all kinds of requests for funds, far more than they can approve. If someone comes up with a reason for denying an application, the easiest thing is to move along to the next item, without debate.”
“One less decision that has to be made.”
“Exactly.” She gulped her juice. “God, this is depressing. I had all this bottled up, and you come along and pull the cork. Pardon me if I don’t thank you. And you can pay for the goddamned waffle.”
She made as if to go, so I reached out a hand to stop her. “I haven’t gotten to my questions yet.”
She looked at her watch.
“It’ll only take a minute. Actually, I am digging up some dirt.”
The revelation made her angry. “In other words, you lied to me.”
I shook my head. “I just let you live with your assumptions for a while.”
Her breaths quickened. “What are you trying to do? What are you trying to find out?”
“I’m interested in a sex scandal at Sebastian—I think it happened about nine years ago.”
She stayed where she was, then returned my words to me: “You think?”
“My information is hazy,” I admitted. “It may not have been sex, it may have been something else. But what I think happened is that a female student accused a teacher of molesting her. He may have been an English teacher. I think he went to jail for it.” When I looked closely at her I thought I saw a fresh intensity and even a trace of panic. “So how about it? Does anything salacious come to mind about the old days at Sebastian?”
She wouldn’t meet my eye. “Why do you want to know about this?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“My God, don’t they feel six years is enough?”
I sighed and leaned back against the booth. “So it did happen.”
Pained, she bowed her head and closed her eyes. “Yes.”
“As I described?”
“Pretty much.
Except not that long ago. It was 1983.”
“Who was the girl?”
She raised her head and shook it. “I won’t tell you. Not without knowing more.”
“More what?”
“About what you’re going to do with the information.”
“That’s no concern of yours, is it?”
She looked at me with the severity of a schoolmarm on detention detail. “I don’t know if it is or not. I do know there’s been a lot of pain involved in this already and I don’t want to add to it.” Her next question was so hopeful she seemed a different woman. “He’s out of prison, isn’t he?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Do you know where he is?”
I shook my head. “I wasn’t even sure he existed, till now.”
“Then I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“And I don’t understand why you’re so protective of him.”
She turned away and sighed, attuned to images from half a dozen years before. “I’ve never seen a more pathetic creature than he was after the rumors started.” She shook her head sadly. “I was afraid he was going to kill himself; I’m a little surprised he didn’t.”
“What did you think when you first heard about it?”
“I couldn’t believe it. Not of … him.”
“So you thought he was innocent?”
She shrugged. “At first.”
“Do you think so now?”
She was tentative with her answer. “I want to, even though I don’t know why he would have let them lock him up if he’d been innocent.” She met my eye. “What I do know is that you should let him alone. No one will be helped by resurrecting all this.”
I decided not to tell her about the book. “Why are you so sure? Maybe if you help me, we might learn what really happened back then.”
I’d stretched my undertaking further than it would legitimately go, but not so far that I couldn’t live with it. “All you have to do is tell me his name, Ms. Drayer,” I said when she didn’t respond.
What she wanted was to feel that if she helped me I would make things better for all concerned, but she couldn’t make herself believe it. “A possibility isn’t enough. I won’t talk to you unless he tells me it’s all right. He’s suffered too much already; I won’t add to his burden. Not inadvertently.” The speck she wiped from her eye looked like a murky tear.
“I can’t find him to tell him to give you the authorization to talk to me unless you give me his name.”
She shook her head firmly. “That’s your problem. I’m sorry. He was the only one who was decent to me while I was at that school. I can’t betray him now.” She stood up and fished in her bag for a card. “This is my number, home and office, in case you find him and he wants to talk to me about it. Otherwise, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t bother me again.”
And she was gone, leaving the restaurant with the strong stride of an athlete, leaving me with the echo of her resistance and a limp and soggy waffle.
As I lingered over my third cup of coffee, I reviewed what Emma Drayer had just told me, then remembered as much of Homage to Hammurabi as I could, which was enough to give me an idea. After I found a pay phone I dialed a number that was staring back at me from Emma’s card. “Ms. White? This is Marsh Tanner. I was over there a couple of hours ago.”
Her tone was sour. “I remember. Believe me.”
“I thought you were off to Sausalito.”
“I was just going out the door.”
“Did you keep your date with the spin cycle?”
“I’m in the folding phase, thanks for asking.” She softened. “If you’ve changed your mind about Speedo, I have to tell you I already filled your slot.”
“Actually, I was wondering about that painting on your wall.”
“Which one?”
“The carrots.”
“That thing,” she scoffed. “What about it?”
“I was wondering if you could tell me who painted it.”
“Are you a collector, Mr. Tanner? Somehow you don’t seem the type.”
“Let’s just say I know what I like, and what I like is carrots.”
“Descended from a long line of bunnies, are we? Well, that one’s Emma’s; I forget the name of the artist, just a minute …” Noises left the telephone, then returned. “Her name is Lily Lucerne. The painting’s called Carrot and a Stick. The stick is Wrigley’s Spearmint, I don’t know if you noticed.”
I thanked Christine for the information, made a statement about seeing her again sometime that sounded more ambivalent than I intended it to be, then returned to the booth and finished my coffee. At some point I began to wonder why, if Marvin Gillis had gone to such lengths to blackball Emma Drayer at Sebastian, he’d ended up by giving her a job.
The mystery novels that I used to devour late at night suggested that motive is the key to crime. Certainly my own was so eagerly presumed, it eased the assumption of my guilt. But what of the motive of the true perpetrators of the outrage? Why would someone go to such extremes to remove me from both school and society? The only power I wielded was the assessment of performance in the most elemental of academic disciplines. Also, I acknowledge, I was for a few young women the focus of an adolescent crush. Hardly unprecedented, hardly ominous, hardly the stuff of conspiracy and vengeance.
Yet here I sit.
Homage to Hammurabi, p. 188
13
I drop by the Museum of Modern Art from time to time, when someone like Kline or Hoffmann is being featured or when I’m in the neighborhood anyway, waiting to testify across the street in City Hall. And on the rare occasions when someone in my family comes to town, I’ll shepherd them to the de Young or the Legion of Honor, just to prove that San Francisco is different from the places in Iowa and Kansas they will return to in a week, though deep down I know the difference is mostly superficial. But I don’t keep up with the art world as a matter of course, so when I got back to the office I phoned someone who tracked it for a living.
Darryl Dromedy had been measuring and interpreting the visual arts for the Examiner for over twenty years. Iconoclastic and bombastic, perverse and puckish, his Sunday survey pieces were a pleasure to read even if you didn’t know the Impressionists from Ingres or Dada from David. Inveighing against fads, champion of the unknown, debunker of the overpraised, Darryl had boosted more than one minor figure to a place of national prominence and, in the process, had made both himself and certain favored collectors wealthy beyond their dreams.
Normally, I don’t travel in Darryl’s circles, but some years back I’d gotten a call when a self-described “organic ornamentalist” had decided Darryl had demeaned him in the review of his retrospective. Inspired by the “turd birds” he’d seen for sale while on an NEA-aided trip to Nebraska in search of egalitarian inspiration, the sculptor had abandoned his normal metier, which featured the tensile properties of soda cans, and begun to work in dung. The finished products of the new direction were lumpy pieces of dinnerware and food molded from a variety of wastes produced by everything from elephants to rats, the only additives being a dollop of clay for bonding and a layer of glaze to preserve the stuff incarnate.
When Darryl had opined in print that this was the clearest case in history of a artist devaluing his materials—i.e., the dung was no longer suitable for fertilizer—the sculptor had threatened Darryl with bodily harm. While persuading the ornamentalist to reconsider, I was forced to use one of his cow pie casseroles as a cudgel. Among other things, the experience led me to avoid any artwork more avant-garde than the comics page for well over a year.
Whoever answered the phone at the Examiner told me that Darryl had just come in for the day and was roaming the room in search of a bagel. While I waited for him to come on the line, I glanced at the clock. It was four-fifteen.
“Long time, no seascapes,” Darryl began—among other things, Darryl fancies himself a wit. “Did you buy that little Thiebaud I told you about?�
��
“I’m afraid Thiebaud’s out of my league.”
“It was a steal at that price, Marsh—the guy didn’t know what he had. You’d have quadrupled your money overnight.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Your loss is some speculator’s gain, you know. He’ll scarf up that lovely little canvas and stick it in a chilly old vault and wait for the appreciation. No one else will be able to enjoy it for fifty years.”
“It’s unconscionable, I agree, but I don’t have that kind of money.”
As he is wont to do, Darryl began to scold. “If you’d forgo your athletic indulgences, you could enjoy a more permanent aesthetic, you know.”
“You mean trade my season ticket for a still life?”
“Precisely.”
“I’ll give it some thought.”
“Good. In the meantime, Survival Research Laboratories is staging another techno-allegory tonight—I hear this one might bring out the bomb squad. Of course you’ll have to sign a release before they let you in.”
“Why?”
“They commit all kinds of mayhem at SRL performances—machines assaulting other machines, underground explosions, computers run amok, electronics going haywire. It’s delicious. The last time they gave us goggles and earplugs. Want to be my date?”
“No, but it sure sounds fun.”
Darryl giggled with the abandon of one who thrives on the risks of others. “It’s art, ain’t it?”
“You tell me.”
“Of course it is. It bothers people. That’s enough to make it art in my book.”
“Which makes Tiny Tim the greatest artist who ever lived.”
Darryl giggled again, then shouted something to someone who must have needed a battery in his Beltone. When he got back to me he had calmed a bit. “So why’d you call, Marsh?—you got a nephew who thinks he’s the new Schnabel?” He stopped abruptly. “Please don’t tell me the dung master’s back in town.”
Book Case Page 11