I had brought the pack with me. As I handed him a cigarette I repeated my question. “Does Mrs. Creighton know about this?”
He seemed to nod slightly as he talked. “I asked George if there was anything he’d like to change.” His face was expressionless, but the big shaggy brows seemed to sink a little. He gently put the cigarette down on the desk mat, next to his pen. He lined them up. In spite of his bulk, his hands were small and delicate. He wore a small blue ring on the pinky finger of his right hand. “Do you know what he said?”
“What?”
“He said, ‘no, sir’—real quiet, you know how he does. And I said, ‘George, pretend you have the power to change one thing—one big thing in the world, in your life, what would it be?’ And he thought about it for a while, really hard. Then he said he wished he could stay up later. He wished his parents would let him stay up later. And I said I wasn’t interested in his daily life, but his life. What would he change about his life? And he thought about it again—really gave it some thought—and then he says, ‘I’m afraid to ask girls to go out with me.’ ”
This made me smile—not because I was amused, but because I recognized that very fear.
“Isn’t that the saddest thing?” Bible said. “He’s sitting there with a blue bruise on his throat from his father’s hand, and all he wants is to stay up later, and have the courage to talk to girls.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him about a psychologist I read about. Some guy who was supposed to be brilliant, and successful. People read his books. I couldn’t remember the name. Still don’t.” He waved his hand. “I just know he was famous and he invented a kind of therapy based on his experience. So I told George about how this guy was afraid to ask girls for dates, even as successful as he was.”
“Aren’t all of us afraid of that?”
“This psychologist was incapable of it. He was a grown man and he couldn’t make himself do it. He lived in New York, and he was terribly lonesome. So one day he walks to Central Park, and every girl he sees in the park that he might want to go out with, he stops her and asks her if she’ll go out with him; a hundred, two hundred a day. He forced himself to do that, every day.”
“Damn.”
“You know what happened to his fear?” Bible leaned forward now, studied my face. “He didn’t have it any more. And that’s what I told George. The guy wasn’t afraid of asking girls out anymore because he’d already asked so many of them.”
“Did anybody ever say yes to the psychologist?”
“I don’t know.” He gave a short laugh. “Maybe somebody did.” He sat back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.
“Mrs. Creighton knows about George?”
“Mrs. Creighton knows all about it. She’s handling it the best she can. This is a private school and George’s parents are paying customers.” He folded his glasses with one hand, opened them again. “I trust that sounds as cynical as I intend.”
I had no response to that.
“I have a headache,” he said. “And I’m so very tired.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, lamely.
He opened his red eyes and regarded me. “Do you know how long I’ve been doing this sort of thing?”
I didn’t know what to say.
Doreen Corrigan came in, smiling. “What are you two powwowing about?”
“Just chatting,” I said. At the same time Professor Bible said, “George Meeker.”
Doreen’s expression changed. “Oh.”
“Did you see his neck?” I said.
“I saw it. In Math class.” She pointed at Bible. “I told him about it.”
“If this has been going on,” I said, “Why can’t we do something about it?”
“What?” Doreen said. “Call social services?”
“Yes.”
“I did that,” Bible said. “Last year.”
“What happened?”
“Two things,” Bible said. Doreen said at the same time, “Nothing.” They looked at each other, and then Professor Bible went on. “Two things. George got so angry at me that to this day he won’t talk to me. He won’t even look at me.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Like you said the other day, that boy really loves his old man.”
I shook my head. “Jesus.”
“Hell, he doesn’t even know he’s abused. It’s just normal life to him.”
“But he is abused.”
“He’s punished,” Doreen said. “He sees it as punishment. He thinks he deserves it when it happens to him. He doesn’t even know that other kids don’t get treated that way when they’re punished.”
“Oh of course he does,” I said. “How could he not know it?”
“He could be an outcast among them,” Bible said. “He could be one of those kids who is so picked on he has no friends; he has no contact with others that would instruct him in the matter.”
“Well then I’ll tell him.”
Doreen laughed. “You think it’s that simple. We’ve all told him.”
I felt kind of foolish.
Professor Bible said, “I wanted you to watch him—to see what’s going on because maybe you can reach him in some other way. I think he was in school today because he wanted to be in your class.”
“Why my class?”
“He wants to write. He’s smart. You get them writing.”
“What’s he saying in that journal of his?” Doreen asked.
“Oh, he writes a lot,” I said. He did write a lot, and I had commented in the margin on several pages about how good it was. I’d written, “Thank you for sharing,” and “Wonderful insight” next to portions of text that I had not read one word of. I felt something cold filter into my blood. I took the last bite of my sandwich then put the paper it was wrapped in back in the bag. I didn’t want to look directly at either one of them. I had nothing more to say, and when they realized that, Bible took another sip of his tea.
Doreen said, “Has he written anything about his ‘punishments’?”
“Nothing,” I said. I gulped the last of my Coke. Then I looked at Bible. “You said two things happened. But you never said what the second thing was.”
“Social services sent a team out to talk to his mother and father, then they talked to George, then they came and talked to Mrs. Creighton and me.”
“It was a lot of nothing,” Doreen said.
“George was furious. Like I said.”
“What about his parents?” I asked.
“I think they were happy to let George handle it,” Doreen said.
“What’s he saying in his journal about his father?” Bible wanted to know.
He had written a paper about fishing with his father, and I’d seen the word father, underlined, on several pages of the journal. He’d ended one entry with how much he loved his father. I’d seen that. So I said, “Like I said, he seems to love his father very much.”
Bible shook his head. He flipped his glasses open and put them back on. “I don’t suppose you’d mind letting me read the folded pages in his journal?”
“I can’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?” Doreen said.
“I don’t know. It just feels wrong. I feel bad reading them myself.”
“How will he know you let us look at it?”
“I don’t care if he’d know it,” I said. “I’d know it.” No doubt you have already guessed that I was not exactly taking a principled stance over the privacy of my students. I was protecting myself. I had no idea what the journal said, so I was not going to give either of them the chance to read it before I did. “I’ll look at it again,” I said. “Read it more carefully, now that I know what is going on.”
“Have you been reading his journal all along?” Doreen said.
“Of course.”
“Cindy Gallant didn’t. She barely glanced at them.”
“Really,” I said.
“She told me half the time she didn’t read them at a
ll.”
“Why’d she make them keep one?” I asked, pretending not to know.
“Just for busy work, I guess,” Doreen said. “To give them something to do while she graded their papers.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s amazing.”
“It’s not a sin,” she said. “It’s legitimate. A tennis coach doesn’t see every groundstroke her students hit against a wall. It’s just for practice.”
“That’s an interesting way of looking at it,” I said, feeling vaguely justified. Then I lied again. “I read them. Every page, except the ones they fold over.”
“You really don’t read the ones they fold over?” Bible said.
I didn’t know if they knew of Mrs. Creighton’s requirement. I blurted, “Right.”
Bible looked at Doreen and then back at me. “I should think it would be just too tempting to resist.”
“So you’d read those pages,” Doreen said, laughing slightly.
“Those would be the only pages I’d read,” he said, and we all laughed at that. I was relieved to see they did not know. Bible reached down and picked up his cigarette.
“Where’d you get that?” Doreen asked.
He pointed at me.
“Can I have one?”
“Sure.” I handed her the pack. She took one and then said, “Lunch is almost over,” as she went out the door.
“I guess I’ll have one too,” I said.
Bible leaned back in his chair again, took some matches out of the center drawer of his desk, and lit his cigarette. “Do me a favor,” he said.
“Yes, sir?” I was still shocked that he’d lit his cigarette in the classroom.
“Open that window over there.” He pointed to a narrow window next to the chalkboard, a few feet from his desk.
I did as he asked and then sat back down in my chair. “Can I have the matches?”
“Oh,” he said, looking at me very sternly, a thick cloud of blue smoke around his head. “You’re not allowed to smoke in here.”
When I dropped George off at his house that day I felt so sorry for him. Other kids jumped from the bus and sprinted home—their hair blowing high in the wind. They scattered the leaves as they made their escape from school, the bus, and me. But George stepped down to the ground as if he were testing the surface of a new planet; as if he were worried about the atmosphere.
“See you tomorrow, George,” I said.
“Yeah.” He didn’t look back.
I drove home wondering what I could do to save him.
7
One Does What One Can
Of course, that night Annie said, “Why do you have to save him?”
“Somebody has to.”
“But why you? Why is it your job?” She sat on the couch next to me. She was wearing a towel over her hair and she’d just washed her face, so she wasn’t wearing any makeup. “Shouldn’t you simply tell Mrs. Creighton what you’re thinking and let her handle it?”
“He’s my student.”
“The county has services for that, right?”
“I think so.”
“Of course they do.” She put her foot up on the coffee table, then placed a cotton ball in between each toe. While we had this conversation, she carefully painted her toenails bright red. “Fairfax County has some sort of child abuse organization. What is it called, anyway? I’ve read about it. It’s not Child Abuse, it’s …”
“Did you know that the United States had a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals before it had any kind of child protective services?”
“That’s it. Child Protective Services. Call them.”
“They already tried that, last year. It didn’t work.”
“Call them again. Eventually if they get enough people reporting it, they’ll do something.”
“If I do that, I will make an enemy of the person I’m trying to help.”
“What do you mean?”
I told her about Professor Bible and George’s reaction to him. “Bible says he can’t teach the boy anything now because he is so bitter about it.”
“Well then forget about it. He doesn’t want help.”
“He just doesn’t know it.”
“Know what?”
“That he needs help.”
“I didn’t say he didn’t need it. I said he doesn’t want it.”
“He’s being viciously abused by his own father. A boy that age.”
“What’s age got to do with anything?”
“Think how long it must have been going on. George is almost an adult. How long can a person take abuse before …?” I stopped.
“Before what?”
“What does that do to a person? Won’t it make George just as violent and maybe dangerous as his father?”
Now she looked at me. “You do realize that this is your Christ complex coming through again.”
She knew how I’d react to this. Somehow, she had got the idea that I liked to control things a little bit more than the next person and she’d started calling it my Christ complex. But it was a sore subject with me and she knew it because we’d fought over it before. I don’t have any such complex, but any time I tried to get anything to work out better than it appeared it would work out, she brought out the label. This time, all I said was, “That’s not fair.” I was willing to let it go.
But she said, “You’re trying to prevent the—the—the creation, if that’s the word I want. You’re trying to prevent the creation of a criminal.”
“What?” I fairly yelled this.
She went back to her toes. “You have to intervene here because of the damage being done to George.”
“That’s got nothing to do with criminals.”
“Well what do you mean then about the damage? Isn’t that what you’re worried about? A violent childhood, abused children grow up to be violent themselves?”
“I can’t talk to you about these things,” I said. I got up and went into the kitchen.
“You don’t have to get mad,” she yelled so I could hear her.
I stuck my head back around the corner. “I can’t stand by and watch that little boy get tortured like that. I’m sorry if that bothers you.”
“It doesn’t bother me. It just means you’re sweet.”
“Thank you.”
“But it’s your Christ complex. You have to fix everything.”
“I just want to fix this. That’s not a complex.” I waved my hand in dismissal and went back into the kitchen. I was going to cook dinner that night, but I’d made up my mind to simply make a few sandwiches and forget about a hot meal. The idea of eating well at that moment made me a little sick.
The next day I collected all the journals in my classes. When I got home that afternoon, I began reading through George’s entries. His journal was thick—pages wrinkled and curled, so he must have gotten it wet somehow—but the ink was not smeared. As I guessed from merely glancing at the pages, he said nothing of any significance for page after page. He wrote about what kids that age always seem to write about: sports, movies, music, and “hanging out.” He probably mentioned more books than the others, but even there he only talked about what he read and what he was going to read. No thinking about the books, or for that matter the sports, movies, and music. He had entries that only listed the songs he liked, or the movies he’d seen. He did not talk about anyone except his father, and what he said about him was not bad. My father likes to go fishing and sometimes he takes me. We have so much fun. At one point he wrote, Dad made toast for me this morning. We played football yesterday. I caught the ball every time almost. He said I was getting good. Only two pages were folded over and tucked into the binding. I put a check mark on each one, then set the book aside. I went through all the other journals, too—without reading them, mind you. I made marginal comments as always. “You’re doing better here.” Or, “Practice is beginning to show.” Or, the old standby: “Thank you for sharing.”
I don’t know why I waited until I was don
e with the others before I went back to George’s book. Perhaps I hoped Annie would get home and stop me before I kept my word to Mrs. Creighton and violated it to my students. I did not bother to read the folded pages of any of the others, and I’d gone through 122 journals. (Several students did not have their journals when I collected them. This was a usual boon that I tried very hard not to gleefully react to on days when I collected the journals. I pretended I was very unhappy about it, in fact.) I reasoned that this was a crucial situation; a moral necessity. I had to know what was going on with George’s father. It was my duty to read the folded pages. In other words, it was a decision I would have made no matter what Mrs. Creighton expected of me.
I made a hot cup of coffee, sat down on the couch, and opened his journal. The first folded page was filled with very small, very neat writing.
10/12/85
I washed the car yesterday. I thought I would do something constructive like dad always says I should do when I’m home with nothing to do so I washed the car. I did a real good job. It looked very nice in the sun. I even dried it off with a towel. I could see myself it was so shiny. I wanted to take a picture of it so I went into the house and looked for my camera but I couldn’t find it anywhere. When I was in the house the phone rang after I had been looking for a long time. After I answered the phone it was mom. She asked me what are you doing and I didn’t want to tell her about the car. She was going to the airport to pick up Dad, and she wanted me to eat what she made in the refrigerator. She made me some chicken noodle soup and told me to eat a sandwitch too. I could have a soda if I wanted. She said she and Dad would be home before ten at night but that I should do my homework and be in bed by then. I said I would’t wait up and then I went downstairs to do my homework. That’s when it happened. I forgot I left the hose on. I fell asleep. I am so stupid. I can’t do anything right. I forgot to turn the water off and it leaked into the basement. When I woke up and put my feet down from the couch to get up, they got soaked. The whole floor was covered with water. I’m in big trouble now.
10/13/85
I was punished for letting the water in the house yesterday. My stomach still hurts. Dad made me hold the phone book against my chest and then he hit the book as hard as he could. He kept pounding on it. He hit it so hard this time. I haven’t told him about my back. When he hits the book it hurts my stomach, but my back against the bed post too. It drives me back against it. I haven’t told him about it. Dad came in last night and said he was sorry. I was crying
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