I didn’t mind driving the bus after a while. I could sometimes discern what the kids were talking about, and occasionally I could sort things out enough to learn almost as much about what was going on in their lives as I did from reading the folded pages of their journals. What I was listening for was, of course, anything having to do with drugs, but also how George was getting along. I got pretty good at hearing things while whistling to myself and watching the road.
The week or so after Doreen handed me that letter from her sister, I heard somebody say something about “poor Professor Bible.” It shook me, so I really concentrated on that one voice in the din behind me. It was a conversation between two of the girls. I glanced into the wide rearview mirror above my head, but I couldn’t tell which one of the open mouths I saw uttered the words I was hearing. I heard, “diabetic,” and “dying.” I also heard “love,” and “it will kill Mrs. Creighton.”
I had told Annie and Doreen. I’d kept my mouth shut after that. Annie had never been to the school and hadn’t yet met anybody there, so the only way these kids could have known about Bible was if he told them, or Doreen did.
When I got to school that morning, I headed right for Doreen’s room, but Mrs. Creighton stopped me in the hallway. “I need to see you a moment.”
She was smiling so I didn’t think I was in trouble. “I’ll be right there,” I said.
“This won’t take a minute.”
“Well I wanted to see Doreen about …” I didn’t finish the sentence. Mrs. Creighton was not slow to pick up on things. She could see I was in a bit of a hurry and that something was troubling me.
“See Doreen about what?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“Is something going on between you two?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, what then?”
“I just wanted to—it’s nothing. Really.”
She waited.
“I was going to ask her how George Meeker is doing in her class, that’s all.”
“Still concerned about him?”
“Well, I’m keeping an eye out.”
“Haven’t noticed any new bruises, have you?”
“Not so far.”
“Come in here a minute,” she said, beckoning with her narrow bejeweled fingers.
I went in and sat down. She closed the door, walked around behind me, and sat at her desk. In front of her was a blue folder—the kind of folder I later learned she used for what she called “special” students. I’m not talking about learning disabilities, or discipline problems—although those could be among her “specials” as she called them. To Mrs. Creighton a student became “special” when she took a personal interest in that student’s welfare. It didn’t have to be any real condition or educational problem that got you nominated to the “specials” category. George was in there. So was Mark Talbot, both as bright as anybody and both willing to actually read a book, cover to cover, and talk about it. These were kids with sharp minds who did not want to waste their hours and days sitting in front of a television or walking around with a radio pinned to their ears. But when she sat me down that day and pulled out the folder, I didn’t know what it was.
“I’ve been working quite some time with a student here,” she said. “She’s much damaged.”
“Damaged?”
“I’m thinking of putting her in your class late this spring or maybe in the fall.”
“Okay.”
“I hope she’ll be ready before the fall, but if not then definitely in the fall.”
I nodded. She sat there, staring at me, and I realized she was expecting me to be a bit more inquisitive about it. “Who is it we’re talking about?”
“Suzanne Rule. You might have seen her. She has bright red hair. She won’t look at you.”
“Is she the one who walks around looking at the floor?”
“Yes.”
“I think I saw her at George’s party.”
“She was there.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“There’s nothing physically wrong. She seems quite intelligent. Her mother says all she does is read and study.”
“It will be nice to have somebody who reads.”
“She is painfully shy.”
“Is that the damage you mentioned?”
“No.”
I waited, she looked at me—considering, I think—whether or not she should tell me. Finally she said, “She was terribly abused as a child.”
I shook my head, but I had nothing to say to that. Mrs. Creighton knew how I felt about parents who abuse a child.
“She was not beaten, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said. “She was sexually abused, repeatedly, by a member of her own family. It may have been the girl’s father.”
“My god,” I said.
“But that’s not the damage either. That’s what caused the damage.” She glanced down at the desk, as if she needed to find the damage on a list of some kind, but then she met my gaze again. “The damage is, she either cannot, or she will not speak. And she won’t look anybody in the eye either. She just stares at the ground wherever she goes.”
“The poor thing.”
“I’m trying to get her so that she will trust me enough to let me sit with her in your class. Eventually, I want to be able to leave her in there and go do other things, but in the beginning, I will have to sit with her. If I can get her to go with me. That’s what I’m trying to do right now. Get her to the point where she will go into your class with me.”
“That would be fine,” I lied. I didn’t want Mrs. Creighton in there at all if I could help it.
“You’re doing such a fine job with George. I think you can safely say that you rescued him, even from the troublemakers here. I think it was a grand strategy, even though I would never have talked to his mother the way you did.” There was a slight smile verging on her lips and in her eyes and I felt unreasoning pride for what she was saying to me. “But your idea for George was perfect. It couldn’t possibly work for every child going through that sort of thing—but it worked perfectly here because of that. Because nobody has ever done it in quite that way, it worked.”
I felt as if I grew taller as she spoke. “Tell that to Annie,” I said.
“Annie?”
“My g—my wife.” I didn’t want her to know that Annie and I weren’t married. I don’t know why except to say that I thought it might offend her.
“When are we going to meet your Annie?” Now she was smiling.
“I’ll bring her around soon.”
“Please do.” She rose from her chair, put her glasses on and looked at her watch.
“Got to get to class,” I said, and went out.
Doreen denied that she’d told anybody.
“Well how do they know, then?”
“I don’t know. I guess Professor Bible told somebody other than you.”
“Maybe he did.”
We were standing outside my room, during break, each of us smoking a cigarette. Doreen looked annoyed when I first saw her that morning, and she still did. Sometimes she would get this fixed, cross look on her face, and the skin between her eyes would bunch up and two very distinct lines would form there—so that she looked as though she was staring into direct sunlight. Her mouth would turn down at the edges and she’d wear that look all day; a scowl that said: “Keep out. This means YOU.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You don’t have to be pissed at me. I didn’t tell anybody else, but the kids on my bus were talking about it. What was I to think?”
“Oh, I don’t care what you think. I’m not pissed at you. I just wish they didn’t know.”
“Who told them if you didn’t?”
Doreen turned her scowl my way. “You think I’d announce it to my classes? I didn’t tell anyone. Got it?”
“It’s only a matter of time before Mrs. Creighton knows. You think we should tell her?”
“I don’t want to be the on
e to do it.”
“I’ll do it. But you think we should? The students think he’s dying.”
“He may be.”
“There’s no reason to be alarmist about it,” I said. “He is under a doctor’s care.”
“I don’t think I’m being alarmist.”
“If we wait, one of the students will tell her,” I said. “And if she finds out we knew and didn’t tell her?”
“How can she find that out?”
“Can’t she?”
“I don’t see how.”
“Well, we’ll have to pretend we are shocked if she tells us,” I said. “Maybe our acting won’t be very convincing.”
She gave a little laugh in the back of her throat, and her face eased back away from the scowl momentarily. “You can carry it off.”
“What if Professor Bible tells her we knew?”
“He doesn’t know you told me. Remember?”
“This is all just fucked up as hell,” I said.
She finished her cigarette and flipped it into the cement ashtray. I offered her another one, but she waved it away with her hand. I stood there, finishing mine, both of us watching the kids beginning to wander back up the walk to the building. Then Doreen said, “God. I hate the world sometimes.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”
20
Close to the Bone
In my classes that day, since Bible’s situation had gotten me thinking about it, I had my students write about death. I couldn’t very well have them write about diabetes, and I didn’t think infections would spark much interest. (To tell the truth, I didn’t want to read what they might write about infections.) So I told them we are all going to die and there’s not a thing we can do about it. I asked them to think about dying, about the end of the world for each of them. I told them to leave out religion (“For God’s sake, leave out religion,” is how I put it) and then gave them an hour to write in their journals.
It was a mistake. Not one of them mentioned anything they’d heard about Bible.
Some of them had already had a taste of death—one girl lost her baby brother to leukemia. Her journal (I read only the unfolded pages) was full of prayers and lamentations of the loss. Of course she told her mother what the day was like, what she’d been asked to write about, and her mother called Mrs. Creighton.
The next day I was back in her office.
“I just wanted to get their attention,” I told her.
“Well, you got that.”
“So many of them aren’t interested in anything, I thought I might …”
“Why can’t you just stick to the writing topics in the text? First you get involved with this Hitler thing, the camps and the holocaust, now this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I like you, young man, and I wonder if you know your circumstances here.” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “You’re here to earn your place in this school.” She let her gaze fall to the desk in front of her, and with her left hand she reached across the surface and traced with a red fingernail the outline of the blotter. It unsettled me that she would not look directly at me. “After the business with George’s parents, the complaints I received about your ‘holocaust’ lesson, and now this …”
I interrupted her. “You had more than one complaint about the holocaust lesson?”
She kept talking, only registering what I said with a slight frown. “This preoccupation with death; why death? In heaven’s name, why death? Why don’t you have them write about life?”
“That’s where I thought the assignment might lead.”
“Really.” She was not convinced.
“You’ve had more than one complaint about the holocaust thing?”
“Mr. Jameson,” she said, looking at me now, her patience clearly diminishing. “Just stick to the English curriculum, would you please?”
“I thought I was free to do whatever I wanted to teach them what they need. A certain spontaneity. I can’t …”
“The English curriculum,” she repeated. “You are a wonderful teacher. I believe that. But you just need to focus on the subject you are supposed to be teaching. English. That’s why you were hired, and that’s why I’m paying you.”
“Well, but …”
She let her shoulders fall a little and she tilted her head. It was clear she did not want to hear any more about it.
“Of course I’ll teach the curriculum,” I said. “I just wanted to say that I thought the holocaust essays were wonderfully written. Those kids cared about what they were doing when they wrote about that. I think some of them were made more aware of …”
“I’m not saying it was a bad assignment,” she interrupted. “For a college classroom it’s probably fine. But some of these kids are just too young yet, too unready for such ugly truth.”
“I guess,” I said.
“You can still do things like that with the seniors, or even the juniors, if you want—though I still think you should tone it down. But the younger ones …”
“Certainly,” I said. “I see what you mean.”
She sat back a little and smiled. I had the feeling that she wanted to say something else to me; that she was considering it. But then she only waved her hand toward the door and said, “Have your best day of teaching today.”
Doreen came to my classroom just as lunch was beginning. “I saw you in with Mrs. Creighton,” she whispered. “Does she know anything?”
“Not yet. I’m going to see Bible right now. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him.”
“I wish I could go with you.”
“I wish you could too.”
To tell the truth, I didn’t know how I was going to broach the business of his operation with him again. When I got to his room, Leslie was there, leaning back slightly in her chair, talking to him. Bible was seated at the desk, his arms folded across his chest the way he did when he was just listening, his white hair hanging over his forehead like the bill of a cap. His head was tilted slightly, his eyes on Leslie, and a bent but genuine smile on his face.
“I think it’s a mistake,” Leslie was saying. “I don’t have anything against black people, but why should we be treating them like children now?”
“Why do you say that?” Bible asked. It was clear he was truly interested.
“Say what?”
“Like children. Why do you think affirmative action programs treat blacks like children?”
“Don’t they?”
“Explain,” Bible said, and there it was: The one word that cornered you instantly and rendered you helpless in the face of his expectant, amazingly critical intellect. Bible had extraordinary skill at getting answers from students, or even from colleagues. He’d said, “Explain,” to me a few times already. He really was good at that. He’d utter that one word, a deeply curious look on his face, his eyes totally focused on you, and the silence was almost frightening. You just could not leave that space unfilled even if you went on to make a complete ass of yourself. But to his credit, most of the time he wouldn’t let you know you made an ass of yourself. This was his gift. He could make the dumbest comment seem only strangely invalid or slightly misdirected. He would treat what you said with respect. That was it. But it all started with his fixed stare into your eyes, his head slightly angled away from you as he waited for you to: Explain.
“Well,” Leslie said, but then she noticed me standing in the door.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Bible leaned a bit toward her and said, “Would you mind if he had a seat here with us?”
“No, not at all.” She graced me with that smile. I sat down next to her and nodded her way. Bible leaned back again, his arms still across his chest and that look still on his face. “We’re talking about why affirmative action programs are wrongheaded. Go on,” he said.
“Well,” Leslie said, her voice slightly quavering, but she was sure of herself. “My mother did not get a promotion where she works because of affirmativ
e action. They gave it to a black woman who had only half the experience my mother had, who wasn’t as qualified as my mother was. When you give somebody an advantage that isn’t based on anything except wanting to provide that advantage—isn’t that treating blacks as inferiors again really—like we have to haul them up to our level by giving them an unfair advantage? That’s treating them like children. They can’t do it on their own, so we have to help them.”
As I listened I realized I agreed with her. What she was saying made perfect sense to me.
Bible said, “Go on.”
“Well. That’s it.”
“Why is that parental, instead of, say, a socially desirable remedy at law?”
“What do you mean by that?” Leslie really wanted to know and so did I.
“You have a condition,” Bible said. “A seemingly permanent circumstance based on the location of people. Whole cities have been segmented and divided along racial lines because of racism. In those separate segments you have housing, jobs, and schools. White housing in the white segments, black housing in the black segments. White schools in the white segments, black schools in the black segments.” He talked deliberately, calmly, slowly, in a normal tone of voice—but the sense of it, the way he was putting things, became almost rhetorical, as if he were making a fervent radio address or quiet public speech to people who can’t stand noise. He went on, “White businesses and jobs in the white segment, and …” he paused, still not looking away from Leslie’s astonishing eyes. “Finish that sentence.”
In the Fall They Come Back Page 15