10/14/85
The bruise on my neck will go away. Dad says the bruise will go away but I pulled too hard against the cord if I didn’t pull so hard on the cord there would be no bruise at all.
Mom noticed it and told me not to go to school. She left for work after she kissed me and said just stay home today. I thought she might cry and I told her I was sorry about the water. She was so angry about the basement because that’s our family room. That’s what she said to me. That’s our family room and look what you’ve done to it. I wish I wasn’t so stupid.
I think I am ruining a lot of things because I’m so stupid. Dad says I am just not a good thinker he says I’m smart in other ways.
I asked every girl in English class to go out with me. Then Math class. Then History. I’m beginning to be good at it. Nobody ever says yes, but I am not afraid of asking anymore. I just go up and say want to go out with me and they say no. Daphne said she wasn’t allowed to date yet. A lot of them say that.
I wish I wasn’t so stupid. If I was bigger, and stronger and could play sports and if I wasn’t so stupid.
When I was done, I put his journal back with the others, then stretched out on the couch to wait for Annie. I figured she’d understand once she saw what George had written. I had to do something. I just had to.
8
Teaching What Matters
I wanted to talk to George, first. That would require real delicacy and tact—since I had to pretend I hadn’t read his folded pages, and I didn’t want him to feel threatened in any way. If anything, I hoped to win his trust. This wasn’t any teacherly instinct. I felt sorry for the kid.
He was absent the next day, though. At the end of the class, I went in to talk to Mrs. Creighton. She was sitting at her desk, her glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, writing notes in the margins of a huge checkbook. When I came in, she did not stop what she was doing, she only said, “Yes?” and waited for me to identify myself.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’ve got a sort of problem.”
Now she met my gaze, staring at me over the top of her glasses.
“It’s about George Meeker.”
“Yes, he wasn’t here today.”
“Do you know what’s going on with him?”
“He had a dentist’s appointment,” she said, but tentatively. Almost as if she was asking me if it was true. I could see she knew I was not worried about George’s attendance.
“His father,” I started.
“I know about that.”
“You do.”
She said nothing, but she did not look away.
“Isn’t there something we can do?”
“Don’t talk to George about it. That would ruin everything.”
“Ruin everything?”
“I am aware of the problem and I am dealing with it.”
“I was talking to Professor Bible about it, and …”
“George doesn’t trust him.”
“I want to avoid …”
“You should let me handle it. I’m working with George’s parents and I’ve been in touch with Child Protective Services. There’s no danger to the boy. His father is just very strict.”
“He hits the boy.”
“As some fathers do, but it may not be abusive.”
“Of course it is.” Now, I had her full attention. I think she was shocked that I contradicted her. “Mrs. Creighton, I’ve read some things in the folded pages of George’s journal. What he tells me—what he says about his father’s …” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. I finally said, “Beatings. That’s what they are. He ties him with a bungee cord to one of the posts on a four poster bed, and then he puts a phone book against the boy’s chest and pounds on it with his fists.”
“Did George tell you that?”
“He wrote it in his journal.”
“But how do you know it’s true? How can you know for sure he’s not making it up?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “I’ve seen the bruises on the boy’s neck. Haven’t you seen them?”
“Yes,” she said disgustedly. “I’ve seen them.” She went back to what was on her desk. I stood there with nothing more to say. Finally she said, “You shouldn’t keep your children waiting.”
“They know where I am.”
“Look,” she said. “I don’t approve of what his father is doing. I said I’m working on this problem.” She took her glasses off and let them drop to her chest. “Would you like to talk to George’s father?”
“I would,” I said, without thinking. No part of my conscious self was involved in the choice of words. My body said it, without me.
Later that day, when I told Bible that I was probably going to have to talk to George’s father, he said, “I’ve talked to him. A big fellow, and quite beastly.”
“Really.”
“Sells Buicks and Chevrolets; owns a dealership in Fairfax. He’s really an engaging and entertaining fellow until he loses his temper.”
“Mrs. Creighton says she’s scheduling a Parent–Teacher night, so we can do it then. It won’t seem like I’ve asked to speak to him special or anything.”
“Let’s have a cigarette.” He was standing in the doorway of his classroom. Behind him the window was open and I could see he had just finished eating his lunch. His class was outside, as mine was. I had a pack in my pocket. I handed him a Camel Light, and he said, “Have you thought about what you’d say to the boy’s old man?”
“No.”
“By the time I met him, I’d already called Protective Services on him.” He retrieved a lighter from his pocket and lit the cigarette. I watched him draw on it deeply, inhale it, then let it out slowly through his nose and mouth. “You know,” he said. “when you only have one or two of these a day, they taste really good. Even these lousy lights.”
“So what happened when you turned him in?”
“I didn’t turn him in. You can’t really turn somebody in over a thing like that. You report your suspicions. That’s what I did.”
Mrs. Creighton came from her office. “Could you two please take your cigarettes outside?”
“I’m not smoking,” I said.
She stared at me over her glasses. Professor Bible had not moved.
“Okay,” I said. I moved toward the back door, and Bible came along behind me. He acted as though I was the one with the cigarette. “I’ll go outside with you,” he said.
Outside he opened his jacket and leaned against one of the picnic tables. A slight breeze lifted his white hair and the sun shone off a bald spot underneath. He did not even glance my way as he smoked. I said, “So what happened when you talked to him?”
“Who?”
“George’s father.”
“I didn’t get a word in edgewise. He said ‘how dare you’ a few times. But mostly he let me know he was going to raise George the way he saw fit. He used the word discipline a lot.”
“How’d you keep from decking him.”
“Like I said. He’s a big fellow. Knows what he wants.”
“And that’s it? That’s all that happened?”
“That’s about it. Except George no longer speaks to me.” He studied his cigarette—twirling it in his fingers. As it got smaller, his puffs got longer, and deeper. Clouds of smoke drifted around his face and up over his head. When he was finished with it, he dropped the butt at his feet and stepped on it.
How can anyone figure out what makes human beings tick? I hate to ask such an abstract question, but look at it. Countless people have hated their parents and for good reason, but what do you do with a fellow like George Meeker? His father was like a God to him. All he wanted was to win his father’s love and approval, and if that meant suffering at his hands—if that meant being tortured like any prisoner of war—that was what he would do. I understood finally why George was always impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, why he always wore his hair clipped neatly, and why he always clacke
d around in brightly shined wingtip shoes. He wanted to be a man. He saw how charming his father was with other men, he saw that his father’s friends did not have to endure his wrath or his torment; so he wanted to kill the child in himself and become a man as quickly as possible. He must have known at some level that if he could just be a man in his father’s eyes, he would gain a perfect kind of redemption; he would gain his father’s love, and an end to his suffering.
It was awful to watch.
I took Mrs. Creighton’s advice for a while. I said nothing to George, intending to wait until I’d spoken to his father, but I started thinking about how I could get him to recognize that what his father was doing to him was cruel, and evil. If I could only do that, perhaps he would come to know that he was being abused, and we wouldn’t need anybody’s help. I kept asking myself what I could possibly do without confronting him directly about it. And then something happened one day in the junior class that gave me the answer to my question.
We were talking about “heroism.” I don’t remember what story I’d had them read, but we ended up talking about heroes, and what a hero was. “We’re going to address a lot of things in this class,” I said. “Questions like, ‘what is the nature of the good life,’ or ‘what is the value of love.’ We’ll discuss what moral behavior is, and heroism. What is the nature of the hero and what’s the difference between a traditional hero and a mere protagonist.”
“How do you define a hero?” this one student said. His name was Mark Talbot. He was tall and lean, and wore wire glasses and had read a few things. I liked dealing with him because he was clearly smart. And when he asked me that question, George spoke up. His eyes seemed to come alive and he said, “A hero is a person who leads in spite of danger or suffering.”
Happy Bell said, “A brave person who doesn’t take any …” he stopped and looked at me. He seemed to think a bit about what he wanted to say, then he said, “crap.”
“You know,” Talbot said. “By that definition, Charles Manson was a hero.”
“You’re an idiot,” Happy said.
“Charles Manson?” I said. I was aware of a look of consternation on some faces, so I explained who Charles Manson was. Most of them knew quite well, though they were not real clear on the crimes he committed. When I talked about the murders of an entire household of people, about the LaBianca’s final hours in their own home, I realized George was watching me with bright, almost fiery eyes. Finally I said, “How does Manson fit the definition of hero?”
“He was brave. He didn’t take no crap from nobody,” Happy said.
“In what way was he brave?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
I smiled at him—nodded a kind of thank-you—then pressed on. It hadn’t hit me yet what this had to do with George and his problem, but I saw he was interested, he was paying attention, and I wanted to get back to the subject of cruelty; of criminal behavior and heroism. “In what way is Charles Manson brave? Anyone?”
Happy smiled across the room at Talbot and then said, “Well, he had the courage to do what most people never dream of doing. He was a leader—he had followers.”
I said, “Hitler was a leader and had followers. He did things nobody ever really dreamed of. But is he one of your heroes too?”
I would later find out that Happy was Jewish and I had trapped him far more completely than I knew. At first I was almost afraid he would say, “Yes, Hitler is one of my heroes too,” at which point I might have done some things right then and there that I shouldn’t—you cannot teach anybody anything in a rage and I knew that would be my response to such a stupid comment. But Happy shrunk a little in his seat, looked slightly insulted. Then he said, “No. Hitler ain’t no hero.”
“He was to some people,” Talbot said.
One of the students in the back, a young girl named Jaime Nichols, said, “Who’s Hitler?”
For a moment, I was shocked into silence. I could not believe it. I just could not accept that any human being born after 1945 didn’t know who Hitler was, and it made me suddenly quite zealous. I think that’s the only word for it. I was not going to tolerate such ignorance, and my respect for history—my belief in a kind of justice, and the true need for historical awareness—lit a fire in me. At that moment I was suddenly aware of something enormous in the back of my mind that would be the engine of everything I did with these kids, and it would be the avenue by which I could take George out of his troubles. I could teach him about his father’s cruelty by showing him the cruelty of others, in spades. I know it sounds simple, even juvenile to think I could do something so prosaic and useful, but that’s how I felt. George did not know his father was a fiend, but he would learn it because, indirectly, I would teach it to him. When Jaime Nichols asked me who Hitler was, I didn’t say anything or show how shocked I was, except for that initial moment of silence.
Talbot did not respond either. He only smirked at me finally and said again, “Hitler was a hero to some people.”
“But not to you?” I said.
“No. I don’t have any heroes.”
“I just don’t understand what a hero is then,” Jaime Nichols said. She was so small, it was always a shock to hear the resonant, deeply adult quality of her voice. She had short-cut black hair and kind eyes, and I felt sorry for her; sorry for her ignorance. “Happy described the traits of a hero, didn’t he?” she asked.
“Not all the traits of a hero,” I said.
Talbot turned in his seat. “It’s all in the eye of the beholder.”
“A lot of things are,” I said. “But a lot of things aren’t. Isn’t there some component of virtue bound up with the idea of a hero?”
“What’s that mean?” somebody said.
Happy laughed a little.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess a hero’s a hero to anybody who worships him.”
“That’s a beginning, but it doesn’t really define anything,” I said.
Mark Talbot said, “I worship Leslie Warren, but that doesn’t make her a hero.”
“Everybody worships Leslie,” Happy said. There was general laughter.
“Well,” I said. “Leslie is a beautiful young girl …”
The laughter died down. Jaime Nichols said, “I think she’s a cold-hearted bitch.”
“That’s enough of that,” I said. “I won’t have that.”
She smirked and looked out the window.
“Maybe,” I said, “For a while there, Hitler was a hero to some. But is heroism really in the eye of the beholder? Use Hitler for your answer. And for God’s sake, think about virtue.”
“What does any of this have to do with English?” a broad-faced kind of chunky girl in the front row said. Her name was Pamela Green. She had a small, smartly curved mouth and now, because she was puzzled, it looked almost as if she was pouting. She wore her short, light brown hair combed straight down on either side of her face.
“It has everything to do with English,” I said. “Literature helps us define the heroes and the villains among us—because it reflects our thinking about those things throughout the ages.”
George was now smiling, and I had the cheeky misapprehension that he had learned something from me. It would take a while for me to begin to see the deeply rich measures of George’s face. He was like a child in that way more than any other; his face betrayed what he was thinking or feeling exactly. To tell you the truth, I felt a sort of lucky elation—the way you feel when you win at poker, or hit the jackpot on a slot machine. I was being paid to do what I had been doing all day: talking with kids about things that really mattered in the world. It took Mark Talbot to bring me back to earth.
“Heroes save lives and villains take it,” he said.
I jumped at this idea. “That’s a great way of putting it.”
“So Hitler and Manson took lives. Villains.”
“Right.”
“And an ordinary ambulance driver. Hero.”
“Doctors and lawyers and policemen …” He looked around the room slowly after he said this word, then he repeated it. “Policemen, they’re all heroes.”
“They can be,” I said.
“Not to me,” Happy said.
“They can be if somebody’s trying to kill you and they show up to save your life.”
“That’s their job,” Talbot said.
“Still …”
“They get paid to do that. And sometimes they go on strike. The cops in Boston are on strike right now …”
“Ok, Mark. I—your point is well taken. It won’t be as simple as you made it sound to define what a hero is. But that is why you study literature,” I said. “That’s why I love it so much.”
George was not paying attention anymore. He was writing in his journal, feverishly working over it as I talked. I didn’t think he was taking notes, and I had the idea that I would collect the journals that day so I could see what he was writing, but I didn’t do it. The thought of all that work made it easy to let it go another day. Besides, I wanted him to have time to finish what he was writing.
“Literature,” I said, “is about everything. It’s about history, and psychology, and sociology, and philosophy, and art, and anthropology, and music, and biology and zoology, and even mathematics. It’s about all things human.”
“How can it be about math?” Pamela Green said.
“Read Einstein,” I said. “The theory of relativity. That’s literature.”
They were all looking at me now. Even George stopped writing and stared at me. I felt as though I had just finished an angry, eloquent outburst in which I had won the day in an argument; a kind of triumphant satisfaction, but powerful anticipation as well. I was already thinking about the films I would get about the holocaust and about what I would let them all see: Bodies piled like white sticks; black flies swarming over eye sockets; flesh sucking bone; black shadows hurled into pits or knocked in half by gunfire; and the seedy little corporal who engineered it all.
In the Fall They Come Back Page 7