Instantly I tried to smile and pretend the hairy face had not scared the shit out of me. “How do you do,” I said, reaching for her little hand.
“What’d he say?” she snarled.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “You startled me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the student’s father said. “She has that effect on lots of folks.”
“Don’t be cruel, Frank,” his wife said.
“She can’t hear us.”
“I can hear you,” the wife sneered.
He shook his head, smiling at me as if I should know what he had to put up with, and I nodded my approval. We were definitely on the same page. I wanted the little grandmother to get away from me. She kept kneading this white napkin in her hands, and I was afraid some part of her was dripping.
I met Happy Bell’s father next—he grabbed my hand and congratulated me on getting the kids to “pay attention to the important issues”—and then he told me how much Happy liked me. “I think the boy will get a scholarship if he does well enough in your class.”
“He’s a bright boy,” I said. “Very funny.”
“Funny. What do you mean funny.”
“Humorous. He keeps us all laughing.”
“Oh, really.”
“But smart too. He’s very smart.” I had been told by Mrs. Creighton not to alienate anyone with the naked truth about their offspring. She told me people don’t want to hear the bad news about their children unless there’s real trouble. A kid would have to be a real beast to get any of us to report even slightly disappointing news to his parents. What they want to hear is just the good news: how bright, well-behaved, outstanding, and truly beautiful their own specific child is.
Happy’s Dad was not smiling. “I don’t want him to be funny.”
I didn’t know what to say for a space. He seemed to be waiting for me to respond, and he still had a hold of my hand.
“I don’t want him to be the class clown, you know what I mean?”
“Sometimes,” I said, extracting my hand, “A class clown can be a pretty positive thing. I myself was …”
“Not him,” he said. “Not my boy. He’s going to be serious about his education.”
“Yes, of course.” I wanted to say, “You named the boy ‘Happy,’ ” but I kept my mouth shut.
“If he does well in your class, he’ll have a scholarship. We’re working very hard on getting him in to the University of Virginia.”
“Good.”
“I’m counting on it. We can’t afford the tuition to send him to college. This is his one chance. He needs that scholarship, absolutely.”
“Well I’m glad to hear you’re all working so hard on it.”
“Yes, sir,” he said, winking at me. “Absolutely got to have it, and he will if he does well in your class.”
I smiled. “He has to do well in other classes, too.”
He winked again, and moved off, but he raised his arm and pointed his finger at me as he departed. I couldn’t tell if it was a sign of affection, or the intimation of a kind of threat. I didn’t like the way he winked.
Then I met Mark Talbot’s father and mother—both leaned a bit too close, both wore thin wire-framed glasses that made their eyes look like peeled hard-boiled eggs, and both were “certain” that I was doing the right thing.
“About what?” I asked.
“I was worried at first,” Mark’s mother said. “I must admit, watching movies about Nazis and all that murder and killing—I couldn’t figure out what you must be up to.”
“I still don’t know,” the father said. “I don’t care. It’s gotten him interested in school again, in learning.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
I saw Leslie Warren walking around with her mother and father. Her mother looked ordinary—blonde hair, fairly chiseled face—but her father was clearly the font of Leslie’s preternatural beauty. He had deep-set blue eyes, perfectly quaffed hair. He was tall and slim as a tent pole. Leslie waved to me as she passed and I smiled. It felt like a kind of small triumph that she acknowledged me.
More people came in. Then a few more. Before I knew it, I was sitting on the edge of my desk smiling at folks and touching hands like a politician. I didn’t see George, nor, for a long time, did I remember that I wanted to. I was just too busy. Near the end of the evening—just as things were winding down and Mrs. Creighton had thanked the last cadre of parents for coming—I saw George squeeze through two people and start toward me; lurking behind him was a very lean, tall woman with close-cropped hair that seemed plastered to her head like some sort of sudsy shampoo.
“George,” I said. “Glad to see you.”
“This is my mom.” He turned and pointed at her. She wore a brown blouse and black slacks that were creased perfectly down the middle of each leg. She had on flats. Her hair was graying on top, but in those awful lights, it looked almost as if she was going bald in the center of her head. Her eyes were huge, dark, and menacing. She was at least six inches taller than I was.
“Hello,” I said.
She did not smile. “I’m Eileen Meeker.” She put out her hand and I touched the palm of it with the tips of my fingers before she drew it away. Then she turned to George, who was staring up at her warily—as if he was afraid she might topple over and he’d have to catch her. “Please excuse us Gay-org, would you?” She actually called him Gay-org.
“So long,” I said as George nodded at me. His mother said something to me, in a low voice, but there was a lot of noise, so I leaned a little closer to hear what she was saying. I only caught the tail end of it.
“… corrupt and wrong. I’m sorry.”
“What?” I said. “I didn’t hear you.”
She moved closer to me, and that made it necessary for her head to bow a bit, so she could continue to look right into my eyes. From that close distance, if I opened my mouth, she could look down my throat fairly readily. I remember a really strong impulse to back away, but there was no place to go. I was still leaning on my desk. Then I realized she was talking to me very directly and frankly. “Do you believe in God? Do you have any sense of the propriety of what you’re doing? Are you even human?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t hear the first part of what you said.”
“The very idea.”
I realized she was snapping at me. I felt cornered and sunk. “Excuse me,” I said. “Perhaps we should have a private meeting about this.”
“I’ve said all I wanted to say. I’ve asked Mrs. Creighton to take George out of your class, but apparently you’re the only English teacher …”
“Mrs. Meeker,” I said. “I still don’t know what your complaint is.”
Her eyes seemed to expand—she was fighting a powerful emotion. “Do you know my son is reading all about Nazi Germany because of you? Do you know he is real interested in Nazis now?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“I’ve caught him drawing swastikas. Making pictures of Nazi soldiers.”
“Your son is not a Nazi,” I said. “I know him well enough …”
“You don’t know him.”
“Well, but I do know him,” I said with as much restraint as I could muster. “I’ve been communicating with him most of this year and I’ve been reading his thoughts in his journal …”
She leaned further down, so her face was almost exactly above mine. “You don’t know him.”
I studied her eyes. She did not straighten up; I did not bend any further back. We were like that for only a few seconds, and then I said, a little too loudly, “I know him well enough to notice the bruises around his neck.” Her mouth opened but she didn’t say anything. Then, feeling the heat rising in my throat and up the back of my neck, I said even louder: “The rather frequent bruises around his neck as a matter of cold fact!” And as I said this, I moved from the desk, toward her, and she backed away until I was leaning in toward her. She blinked. Behind her, I saw Mrs. Creighton coming toward us.<
br />
“Are you insane?” Mrs. Meeker said.
“Am I?”
“Well,” Mrs. Creighton said as she slipped easily and gracefully between us. “Thank you so much for coming.” She tried to reach for Eileen Meeker’s hand, but the indignant, regal bully pulled back.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought you must know about the …”
“Not here,” Mrs. Creighton said.
“Where then?”
A man I didn’t recognize called across the room, “Mrs. Creighton, thank you so much. It was a wonderful evening.” She waved, sort of disconcertingly. Then she looked at me. “This is not the time or the place, young man.”
I looked for George. I saw Professor Bible slip through a departing mélange of parents. He strolled over to us with his hands in his suit pockets, his head barely upright. He had a look he always got when he was thinking—his brows crowding his eyes, his mouth slightly open under the white mustache.
Mrs. Meeker was saying she would take George out of the school, that she had never been treated so rudely in her life. “First that old man,” she indicated Bible, “and now this, this, this …” she pointed at me.
“Young man,” I said.
“Mr. Jameson, please!” Mrs. Creighton said.
Bible said, “Excuse me.”
Everyone looked at him.
“People are leaving,” he said. “The night would appear to be over. Perhaps we can all sit down here and discuss this little problem?” His voice was so smooth, and reassuring, I almost sat down at the instant he suggested it.
“I have nothing to say,” Mrs. Meeker said.
“Mrs. Meeker,” I said. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. It was not my intention to be rude.”
She suddenly looked as if she might actually smile, but then I realized it was the damn rummy light from overhead. There was something absolutely steely in her expression. She did not take her eyes off me as she spoke. “I know your type. I know what this is.”
“I really don’t know what you think I …”
“I know what you people are thinking.”
“Please,” Mrs. Creighton said.
Professor Bible said, “We only have George’s interests at heart. We don’t know you and we …”
“You have caused me and my family nothing but heartache.”
“We haven’t understood,” Mrs. Creighton said. “Perhaps if we …”
“You have no idea. I know people like you. I know.” It was almost a shout.
No one said anything. Mrs. Creighton again reached for the woman’s hand, she recoiled from it a second time, only now she had a look on her face of one who has been stricken hard with something wet and sloppy. “How dare you?” she said. Then she hollered, “Gay-org?” Her voice went way up there on the “org” part of the name. She sounded almost like an old-fashioned car horn. She called him again: “Gay-org.”
George came round the corner timidly. I had the feeling he’d been listening in at the end of things. “Yes, Mom?”
“We are going home,” she said, still glaring at us with those steely eyes. “Get my coat, and anything in this building that belongs to you.”
“Mo-om.”
“Empty your locker.”
“I don’t have a locker.” George’s face was sad now. He knew what was up, and he didn’t want it.
“We will not be coming back here.”
Professor Bible said, “Oh come now. It’s not as bad as all that.”
“It’s every bit as bad as all that.”
“Mo-om,” George whined.
“Mrs. Meeker. We are only concerned about George,” Professor Bible said.
“So am I. I don’t want him learning about Nazis.”
Bible looked at me. “Is that what this is about?”
“I asked her about the bruises. It’s about that too.”
“George, do you have your things?” Mrs. Meeker bellowed. “We are going.”
“Well go then,” I said.
Mrs. Creighton took hold of my arm. “Stop it!” It was the loudest noise in the room, a terrific shout. Her face was as angry as any human face I’d ever seen. I think all of us jumped. No one said anything for a long time. Then Mrs. Creighton said, “We must all calm down, now. Important decisions should be made without passion.” Her voice was trembling, but it was amazing how completely she had gotten hold of herself.
George began to sniffle, but he manfully resisted outright crying. Finally, he said, “I want to stay here.”
Mrs. Meeker turned, grabbed him by the hand, and dragged him out the door. The three of us watched her go, saw her cross the yard, open the car door, and shove George in the backseat as if she were kidnapping him. Then she slammed the door, walked around behind the car without looking back, got in and drove off.
The next day, Mrs. Creighton wanted to see me right after my eleven o’clock class.
11
The Natural Curse of Private School
As expected, George was not in school, and I figured I was in a lot of trouble. When I walked in the door of Mrs. Creighton’s office she said I was about to have that conference with George’s father—that in fact he had requested it himself, and he wanted it to be a private conference.
“When?”
“He’ll be here today.”
“What about my bus route?”
“I’m asking you to come back here after. He wants to meet at five thirty.”
“Can’t he make it earlier?” I didn’t want to drive everybody home, then come back to the school and wait around all afternoon.
“I didn’t ask, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to do so.”
I shook my head.
“He’s probably coming after work, at the end of his day.”
“Well, it’s a long time after the end of my day.” Even with my bus route I was usually home by three fifteen or so. “He wants a private conference with me.”
“Just you.”
“Not Professor Bible, or …”
“Just you.”
“Great.”
“You did say you wanted to talk with him.” She gestured for me to sit down and I did so. She watched my face and I tried to get comfortable, waiting for whatever else she was going to say. My heart was beating a fairly strident rhythm, and I could not believe how dry my mouth was.
“I liked this thing …” she started, then seemed to lapse into puzzled thinking. She gazed around the room, fiddled with some papers on her desk. Then she went on: “This business of teaching them about the holocaust.”
I nodded, but said nothing.
“I think it’s important to do things across the curriculum.”
I knew a “but” was coming.
“And your class has been much attuned to what’s happening in Professor Bible’s history classes.”
“I’m glad.”
“I wonder if you didn’t go too far though with the younger ones. The tenth graders.”
“I got good papers from them too.”
“I suppose it was okay for most of the seniors, but I even wonder about …” she paused.
“You mean George.”
“No, not him particularly.”
“It was that class—Jaime Nichols was the one who didn’t know who Hitler was. Eleventh grade and she doesn’t know—that’s how it started.”
She sat back and put her hand up to her face, ran her fingers over her chin. “You are not going to like what I’m going to say to you next.”
“I haven’t liked much of anything so far.”
She frowned.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I wonder if you really want to be a teacher.”
I said nothing.
“You make your own decisions here, but if you were teaching in the public schools you might already have been fired.”
“For what?”
“Impertinence, for one.”
I asked her to explain exactly what she meant by that, and when I
was “impertinent.”
“Don’t take that tone with me,” she said. Her voice was quiet and calm.
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound disrespectful.”
“You don’t sound disrespectful, you are being disrespectful.” She put both hands on the desk in front of her and leaned toward me. “And if you want to know when you’ve been impertinent, examine your behavior right now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And last night.”
“I know I should not have lost my temper.” It was quiet for a space, then I said, “I’ll be better, I promise.” Suddenly I realized I might actually lose my job. She nodded and settled back in her chair. She looked exasperated and I was afraid of what she was going to say next. My heart was beating like a paint mixer.
“I hope you will give me another chance,” I said.
She seemed surprised. “What?”
“Don’t fire me.”
“I’m not going to fire you.”
“I’m very glad to hear that.” I think she must have noticed the deep breath I took, the way my face relaxed. “You had something to say I wasn’t going to like?”
“If you’ll let me finish?” She raised her brow and stared at me. At that moment, when I knew she wasn’t going to fire me, I had so much affection for her I didn’t care what she might say. “Mr. and Mrs. Meeker are not just parents,” she went on. “We are not in the same position here as the public schools. Students don’t just flock to the door because they live within an arbitrarily set boundary line, and the law says they have to attend our school. This is a private school. Do you know what that means? We count on enrollments for our very lives, here.”
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t act like you know. Mrs. Meeker is not just Gay-org’s mother, she’s a customer, a client. Their money helps keep our doors open and pays your salary. And as in any business, we have to operate on the principle that the customer is always right.”
“Even when the customer is clearly wrong?”
“Yes. At least we have to treat the customer as if she is right, and that means we do not flaunt how wrong the customer is, and we don’t argue with the customer.”
Now, I wasn’t feeling so affectionate. I think it’s possible I was feeling sorry for her. I know my unreasoning respect was beginning to weaken and it made me sad to realize it. I thought she was above talk like that. But then it hit me that she had tried to prepare me. She said I would not like what she was going to say. Maybe she understood better than I did how corrupt it would sound to be talking about what was essentially concern for money, rather than George’s neck.
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