I shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that I want to be there more and I need help. From both of you.”
I explained my idea of student teaching at School 23 to them during dinner. Mrs. Karras was immediately enthusiastic; Lisa was not. She felt that if there was any way for anyone to stay out of the grubby world of Falls City, he or she should do it.
We took our coffee back to the living room. Lisa sat cross-legged on the floor.
Mrs. Karras urged me once again to call her Jo, and I did, but in my head she was always Mrs. Karras. She stirred her coffee and said, “I have a good eye. I know who can teach my children and who can’t and it has nothing to do with race, color, or creed, or age or education. It’s a gift. Pure and simple. The art of communication is just that, an art, as much as painting or music or literature, and it’s especially important when you’re working with children. You either have it or you don’t. You, Mary, have it. And if you have it, you have to use it.”
The front door opened and closed and Cal came in, back from a long day in Washington.
I got up and hugged him and introduced him to Lisa Eckhardt and Mrs. Karras. They chatted for a moment and then Cal excused himself and went to change his clothes.
Lisa lay back flat on the floor. “Now I know you’re crazy. You have the best of everything. Why do you want to leave it?”
“I’m not leaving it. Cal’s work is important to him, too. We value that in each other.”
“Okay,” Lisa said. “Tell you what. You go. I’ll stay. We can have a little ménage à trois.”
Mrs. Karras said sharply, “Hands off, Lisa.”
Cal returned in worn blue corduroys and a sweater, carrying a beer. “What can I get for anyone?” Wine for Lisa, a small liqueur for Mrs. Karras and for me.
Together we plotted. Mrs. Karras agreed to call Professor Foster and ask to have me placed in School 23 for student teaching. She herself would supervise, but she did not want me in a classroom. What she wanted was for me to continue the mental health program by myself.
“So it’s only three or four kids. It’s three or four kids that have some kind of chance instead of none. Say you started at nine and saw one child from nine to nine-forty-five – another till ten-thirty – a third till eleven-fifteen and another till twelve. Then you could set up the other courses you need for graduation in the afternoon.”
“What about lunch?” Lisa asked. “Or aren’t you going to let her eat?” She turned to Cal. “What do you think about all this?”
Cal was silent. When I first knew him I took his silence for uncertainty or disapproval. Now I knew he was organizing his thoughts, careful with his words. At last he said, “It’s a good idea. I’m not sure Mary would make it through another year of courses, if they’re like last year’s courses, without the children.”
“What about your dinner and the wash and the shopping –?”
“Lisa!” Mrs. Karras warned.
Cal smiled at them both. “We manage.”
A week later Professor Foster caught up to me outside the book store.
“Congratulations. Your student teaching forms for School Twenty-three are filled out, signed by me, the dean, everyone. All you have to do is stop by and pick them up. You start in January.”
“Thank you,” I answered, not sure how much he knew.
Foster stood staring at me, rocking on his heels a little, chewing on the end of his pipe.
“Isn’t it amazing how that student teaching position opened up, just like that? We’ve never placed a student at School Twenty-three before.”
“It’s a good school,” I said. “Maybe you’ll have other students there next year.”
“Maybe. Maybe we will. Anyway, Mary, good luck.”
He turned to leave and then turned back. “How’s Luke doing?”
I shook my head. “Just about the same. I’ve seen him three times now. He comes with me but it’s not like it was before. I think he’s so angry about being in second grade that he doesn’t care about anything else. It really was a rotten thing, especially not telling him. He’d been working, trying so hard, not running away, or setting fires, beginning to open up. It’s as though it proved to him that he’s no good and there’s no point in trying. It doesn’t make any difference.
“I don’t know. I just hope we can get through this fall term. Both Luke and myself. I’ve got a heavier load of meaningless courses than I’ve ever had before.” I hesitated, “And my mother’s very ill.”
“I’m sorry. Let me know if I can help.” He shook my hand, holding it for a minute between his. “I mean that.” “Yes,” I said, liking him. “I know you do. Thank you.”
“Just keep thinking about Luke, of some way to get through to him.”
My mother died on November first – alone. My father found her in her wheelchair, her head slumped down against the table, when he came back up from dinner.
“She had another stroke,” my father said. “The doctors say a ‘massive hemorrhage’ this time.” He touched my arm. “They say it happened instantly. That she wouldn’t have been in pain.”
I nodded, not able to speak, thinking only that I wished I had been there with her when it happened. I somehow couldn’t bear that she had been alone. I hardly heard my father.
“You know she wrote letters to you and each of your three children today. I mailed them before I went to supper.”
It was true. The letters arrived two days later. She had written to me and each of her grandchildren to tell us she loved us and thanked us for the Halloween cards we’d sent. Her writing was tiny and cramped, sloping every which way across the page. It must have taken her hours to write those pages. Had she somehow known?
I stayed at their apartment and my father and I worked together, doing the necessary things – arrangements at the funeral home, notices to the papers, the lawyers, sorting her things from immaculate drawers and closets. The funeral, the memorial service. I could not believe that she was dead. She had been my first teacher and beloved friend for over forty years.
Death was a common visitor in the retirement home and my father said at the end of the week, “It’s better this way, Mary. She hated sitting in that wheelchair day after day.”
I kissed him, nodding agreement, thinking how he had been the one to help her dress each day and reach the wheelchair. He had been the one that lay beside her as she sang the hymns of her childhood trying to get to sleep each night. He knew better than anyone how difficult it had been. It was not his fault that he had been at dinner when she died. It was just that I could not shake the sadness.
The phone was ringing when I walked into our apartment. I let it ring. I did not want to talk to anyone. I went out on the terrace, everything gray in the November afternoon. The sky, the bridge, the city itself.
The phone rang again. One, two, three, four, five. Maybe it was Cal or my father, or one of the children. I pulled the sliding glass door closed behind me and picked up the receiver.
“Mary? This is Jo Karras. I’m sorry to bother you at home. Are you all right? They said you’d been absent from classes the last few days. Are you better?” she asked, assuming I’d been sick. “I wouldn’t bother you except I’ve got Luke here in the office. I just picked him up at the police station. His mother’s in bed sick and couldn’t go down.”
“The police station? Why was he there?”
“Same thing. Fires. Could you possibly come over?”
I didn’t want to go. I needed time to mourn my mother’s death, to work it through. But how could I refuse?
“All right. I’ll be there. It will take me an hour from here, though.”
“That’s all right. We’ll wait.”
It was almost four o’clock by the time I got to School 23. The door was locked, but through the small side window I could see the janitor mopping the front hall. I tapped on the glass. He recognized me and unlocked the door. I walked directly to Mrs. Karras’s office. She was behind her desk working on a pile of
papers. Luke sat on a wooden chair in the corner of the room. His head was down so I couldn’t see his face. His sneakers and pants were dirty and he held the bottom of the chair seat tightly with both hands.
“Hello, Mary,” Mrs. Karras said. “Come in. Thank you for coming down.”
I nodded and sat in another wooden chair in front of her desk, my body turned toward Luke.
“Luke?” Mrs. Karras asked. “Do you want to tell Mary what happened?”
Luke didn’t even look up.
Mrs. Karras sighed and said, “They say he set twenty-five fires this afternoon. Twenty-five! All by himself. Wendell was in school. We know that. So we can’t blame Wendell.”
“That’s a lot of fires.”
“Well, you know we haven’t had rain for a week or more. Everybody got their leaves and trash raked out of their yards and piled in the streets over the weekend. We don’t have that many trees, thank God in this case, in this part of the city, so the piles weren’t terribly large. But from what they say, Luke would light one pile of leaves, then move down the street and light another pile, then run to the next street and begin again. Pretty soon he had fires burning on a dozen different streets. People were calling in to the police about a boy the size of Luke in brown pants and a plaid shirt who was setting the fires. He was starting another one when they picked him up.”
Luke’s head stayed down while Mrs. Karras was talking.
Now she sighed and continued. “They called Mrs. Brauer, but she’s in bed sick, so she called here trying to find you, thinking maybe you could go down. She said something about your being down there once before.”
Mrs. Karras paused.
I nodded.
“I don’t believe you mentioned that to me,” she said. “In any event, I couldn’t reach you so I went down.”
Mrs. Karras stood up and walked to the window. “They’ve had it. The police. There was an Officer Snow there, a big man who seemed to know Luke, but even he wanted to send him over to the shelter. Said Luke would be better off there than in a family that didn’t care about him.”
“The shelter?”
“It’s part of the county hospital, a wing where they keep kids while they’re trying to decide where to send them, what to do with them.”
I looked at Luke. He was holding onto the chair so tightly that his knuckles showed white through the soot and grime.
Mrs. Karras turned back from the window. “I told them they better be damn careful before they sent Luke anywhere. That he had an established home, that his mother was working regularly, that his brother and sister were both doing well in school, that his mother was only temporarily indisposed, that I was representing not only Luke’s family, but the Mental Health Clinic, the college, and the school, and that we all had a vested interest in Luke.”
I wished I could have heard Mrs. Karras reading the book to Officer Snow.
“Whatever a vested interest is,” she said. “Anyway, it worked. And they let Luke out in my custody.”
She turned and walked back to her desk. “However, Luke doesn’t seem to have any ideas on how to keep this from happening again, or for that matter, any ideas about anything.” She glanced at her watch. “The police called at one o’clock. I got him at two. I called you a little before three; it’s almost four-thirty now.” She sighed and rubbed her temples. “I can’t stay here much longer. I’ve got a board meeting at eight.”
I stood up myself. I wasn’t feeling anything, not anger or disappointment in Luke, or even pleasure in the Karras-Snow encounter. Not anything at all. My mind and body seemed to work; they just didn’t feel anything. It was as if I’d had a massive injection of Novocain. But Mrs. Karras was right. She had a school to run. Hundreds of kids to think about. I could at least go through the motions.
“Do you want me to take Luke home?” I asked.
“Would you? I called his mother and said you were coming down. Maybe,” she said, “you and Luke can talk on the way over.” Mrs. Karras was putting on the jacket to her suit, taking her pocketbook out of the bottom drawer of her desk, turning out the light.
I unlocked the door of my car for Luke and he crawled in and pulled it closed behind him. I went around to the other side to unlock my own door and then stood for a second watching the lights on Mrs. Karras’s car as she pulled out of the lot next to the school. With daylight saving gone, night arrived early. I wished they could have known each other – my mother and Mrs. Karras. Sadness enveloped me and I got in quickly and turned the ignition key. Luke had his legs pulled up under his chin, his arms wrapped around his legs. Talk, Mrs. Karras had suggested. What was there to talk about? Luke and I had run out of words.
“Are you ready to go home, Luke?” were the only words I could find.
He nodded and we drove the few blocks to the project in silence.
“I’ll wait,” I said, “to make sure you get in all right.”
He nodded again. At least I thought he did, but he didn’t get out right away. Finally, he said, “You want me to get the box?”
“Box?”
“The box with the chalk and stars and stuff. You want me to give it back?”
He must mean the box with his things that I’d given him last June. I’d forgotten all about it and he’d never mentioned it this fall.
“No, Luke. Of course not. Those are yours. They belong to you.”
Again we sat in silence for a while. Then Luke opened his door and put one leg out. “Maybe,” he said, pausing between words, “maybe I could bring the box to school.”
So we are not done. Luke is saying as clearly as he can, in his own words, that he wants to try again. And I want to say to Luke – don’t. Not now. I don’t have the energy to think about you or anyone else right now.
I put my head against the side window, pressing my forehead against the cold glass, trying to clear my thoughts, and suddenly I realized what I should have known before. Luke knew me as well as I knew him. My added years did not make me more expert at this kind of knowledge. Out of his own sorrow, Luke intuitively recognized mine and he was reaching out not so much for help himself, but to help me.
“All right,” I said, straightening up. “Okay, Luke. Maybe you could. Maybe we can. I’ll come down to school late tomorrow afternoon. How’s that?”
Luke nodded and I said, “Okay. I’ll see you then. I’ll watch now till you get to your door.”
Luke pushed the car door closed and ran to his apartment, opened the door with his key and ducked inside. I backed the car around and started to pull out when Luke was back outside waving, calling something. I slowed and rolled down my window.
“She wants to talk to you. My mother does.”
The front door opened directly into the living room and Mrs. Brauer stood in the open doorway, pulling her pink bathrobe together around her throat.
“Thank you,” she said. “I got the flu pretty bad. Thanks for getting Luke.”
“Mrs. Karras did that. I just brought him home.”
Mrs. Brauer coughed and shivered as a gust of wind blew through the open door. I could hear children arguing somewhere behind her and a deeper voice, or was it the TV?
“You should get out of the draft,” I said. “You don’t want to get chilled.”
“Mary – uh. I don’t mean to call you that. It’s just that it’s what Luke says –”
“Mary’s fine.”
“Could I talk to you? They’re not going to send him away or nothing like that, are they?”
“No. I don’t think so. Not this time, anyway.”
“Could I come over to school? When I’m better, I mean?”
My heart lifted a little. Maybe if she would help – maybe.
“I’d like that,” I said. “Just let me know when’s good for you. We’ll work something out.”
Cal was home when I got there.
He looked at me carefully. “Tired?”
I nodded, tears so close I couldn’t speak.
“Sue and Nan bo
th called to see how you were. You just missed them. They both sent their love.”
My daughters. “I’ll take a shower. I’ll just be a minute.”
I leaned against the side of the shower and let the water run hot against my shoulders, my face, my back. Thoughts and tears mixing with the hot water.
I stepped out and rubbed myself dry with a towel, rubbing away rivulets of water and the last remainder of tears.
Chapter 23
Luke was already in the music room when I arrived at School 23. He was sitting at the long table, the carton in front of him. He watched as I hung up my coat.
“Miss Eckhardt said I could wait here,” he said.
“Okay.” I went and sat beside him.
The cardboard box was dirty and cracked. At least he had used it. I touched it tentatively. “Can I look?” Luke nodded and I pulled the box toward me and took off the cover.
There was the box of colored chalk, the stars, the notebook, pencils, Luke’s story book, the mystery box. I lined them up in front of me; the accoutrements of our time together were so few.
“There’s more,” Luke said. “See. I put this in.” He put a flattened penny with the other things. “And this.” He laid an empty lipstick tube beside the penny. “You know ’bout that?” he said nodding. “You know where that came from?” I nodded in return.
“That’s all. Except for this.”
“A tooth?”
Luke nodded. “A mole’s tooth. I found it in the field.” We looked down. “No. It isn’t. It’s my own. I put it in there myself.” He looked at me straight now, full face. “They told me, some kids did, that there was a tooth fairy and that if you put your tooth under your pillow when it came out, this fairy’d give you money. I didn’t have a pillow, so I put it in the box. But nuthin’ happened.”
Luke was forgetting to sit straight. He was up on his knees looking at me. No more standing in the corner, head down. His eyes were only inches from mine.
“Is there a tooth fairy?” he asked.
I took a breath and then let it out. What a place to start. “That’s a hard question, Luke.”
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