Coming Ashore

by Catherine Gildiner

  It was almost two hundred years later, and maybe after another generation or two the class system would loosen up in England. Frankly, I doubted it. Anyway, it just wasn’t who I was. You never know what constitutes a deal breaker until the deal is broken.

  Clive walked by the window and saw me watching him for the first time. I didn’t say anything. I just left the flowers in the sink and went upstairs. While packing, I turned on the radio and the BBC announcer said Joni Mitchell had written a new song and was giving it a dry run on the program. It was called “California.” I remember the sun streaming through my leaded-glass windows, lighting the blue bedroom like a cloudless, bird-filled sky, as the words rang out:

  Still a lot of lands to see

  But I wouldn’t want to stay here

  It’s too old and cold and settled in its ways here

  Oh but California

  California, I’m coming home

  I’m going to see the folks I dig

  I’ll even kiss a Sunset pig

  California, I’m coming home

  From my window, I called out to the gardener and asked to be taken to the train station. I didn’t leave a note. Why bother? Clive knew. He never even wrote to ask why. I didn’t have to worry about saying good-bye to Wiggles, and Archie had never left the library.

  It was time to come home to America.

  Part 2

  Cleveland

  CHAPTER 12

  the call of thomas paine

  Moderation in temper is always a virtue;

  but moderation in principle is always a vice.

  — Thomas Paine, Rights of Man

  Returning home at the end of 1969 to finish my degree at Ohio University, I discovered the America I had left behind was unrecognizable. The ’60s, the hopeful part of the Cultural Revolution, was over and only the radical fringes and the dregs remained. Madame Defarge had finished her sweater, and it was starting to pill.

  Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated as had Robert Kennedy. Ted Kennedy had been implicated in Chappaquiddick, and the Students for a Democratic Society had blown themselves up. There had been major race riots in Detroit, Cleveland and Newark. The Black Panthers were caged, more troops had been sent to Vietnam, and Nixon and Agnew had been elected on a “law and order” platform in a landslide victory. My college graduation was cancelled due to the possibility of riots.

  I had to return to Ohio University to organize my student teaching. While I was in high school, my father had extracted a promise from me that I would get a certificate or professional degree. Whenever careers were discussed, he said, “Get a degree that will qualify you for a job that no one could take away.” He was fond of saying, “Even in the Depression, teachers had jobs.” He maintained that a “solid career” would maintain my independence. I could hear him saying, “Plan your life as though you are going to be on your own. If fate takes you elsewhere, you can opt for plan B. That way you can always have a choice.” I wondered what plan B was.

  I did a double major, which had entailed taking an extra course each semester, but the educational courses were not onerous. However, now I had to put in a whole semester student teaching to get the teaching certificate. I dreaded going back to Ohio. I probably would have dropped it all since I knew I didn’t want to teach, but my father had made me swear I’d do it. There was no way I could renege on the promise. After all I hadn’t said one kind word to him since I’d become a teenager and then he got sick and lost touch. This was the least I could do.

  Over the years, I’d found the Ohio department of education had been utterly desultory. It was run by nincompoops, ex-schoolteachers who couldn’t cut it teaching and had managed to creep back to college at night to get Ph.D.s in things like “curriculum planning” from dimwitted educational institutions. There had been whole courses on things like using language labs and film projectors. The only thing I learned was how to use visual aids that were obsolete before I’d graduated. These same pedagogical wonders came up with the brilliant ideas of having no walls, no real grades, no fixed curriculum, no standardized testing and no memorization of the timetables, and believed children could learn math from their own observation of size and shape. Then, when most kids didn’t learn anything, they were passed on to the next grade. Since these mavens inflated grades to cover their tracks, it naturally took a few decades before that scam was up. When children couldn’t do math or spell and the SAT scores took a dip, these educational wizards changed the ground rules, claiming that they were trying to improve self-esteem. However, studies showed that not only did students have less self-esteem than they had twenty years ago, but they couldn’t even spell the word. I was on the ground floor of the dumbing-down phenomenon.

  There was one professor I admired amongst this din of dunces — Professor Narly, who taught the History of Educational Theory. He looked to be on the far side of retirement age and resembled Mark Twain, and with his Virginia accent even sounded similar. He wore a black colonial string bow tie and an antique white ­linen suit. He had weathered skin and a full white mane. He said he would only discuss educational theories of previous centuries because he felt the present century was in an educational muddle and there was little to be gleaned from it. He chuckled and shook his head as he said, “The inmates are running the asylum.”

  In his course, I came across Rousseau’s educational theory that “benign neglect” was the best learning tool. When I told my ­mother about the theory, she said she knew she had been on the right track. She used me as exhibit A, saying I’d turned out “just fine” and added, “Thank God I’ve erred in the right direction.” When I asked her if she was willing to overlook me getting kicked out of grade school for stabbing someone, not doing an ounce of schoolwork in high school, burning down a doughnut shop, ­having the FBI at her door and driving through a post-­office ­window all ­before age twenty-one, she responded, “You love ­making mountains out of molehills.”

  When I got back from Oxford, I heard Professor Narly was in charge of student teaching and called an emergency meeting of all the students who had signed up for high school placement. I drove down the seven hours to Ohio University and attended this meeting with Sara Roth, my one friend at Ohio. We weren’t close, since she rarely spent time away from her boyfriend of the ­moment, but she didn’t disapprove of me and we occasionally had a cigarette together before turning in. Sara had lived across the hall from me since we’d been freshmen, and we were going to get an apartment together and student teach at the same school.

  I had first met Sara at a meet-and-greet at our dormitory during frosh week. We all had to wear a red construction paper nametag cut into the shape of a chubby bear: hers said Marilyn Frickin’ Monroe. I asked her if her middle name was Frickin’ and we had been friends ever since. She was from New York City and grew up on Park Avenue. Her father was a plastic surgeon and she had the nose to prove it. She was beautiful in an exotic way; with long, glistening black hair and a flawless olive complexion, she was mistaken for Joan Baez at Woodstock. I had never met a hippie before and was fascinated by her demeanor. She kept her cigarettes in a Band-Aid case, saying a cigarette case was too bourgeois, only wore attire that originated in India and doused herself in patchouli oil. She was the first woman I ever knew who used the word fuck as a positive exclamation, as in, “This burger is fucking good!” Unlike any woman I’d ever met, she took the pill and had sex for, as she said, “a fucking good time.” We both abhorred the provincialism of southern Ohio, and she, like my mother, spoke with an amusing sense of irony. Although their delivery was different — Sara expressed herself with Jewish New York chutzpah, and my mother’s tone was of the diffident Irish Catholic variety — the sardonic wit was similar.

  Sara, who sat next to me at the “emergency meeting,” leaned over and whispered, “No matter what they say today, we are getting out of southern Ohio. We go no farther south than Cleveland �
� as if that isn’t bad enough.”

  Professor Narly said that he had looked at the sign-up sheets and no one had thus far signed up for Thomas Paine, a high school in the heart of the Hough district, Cleveland’s toughest ghetto, which had gone up in smoke. He said that this lack of volunteers for the inner city was clearly a sign of changing times. In retrospect, I see that this was one of the death knells of the ’60s. He said in his slow drawl, “You all know that there was a time a few years ago when student teachers wanted to make a difference.”

  Everyone just looked straight ahead, sick of it all; at least I know I was. All the change we, the flower power generation, made was being weeded out by 1970. Haight-Ashbury was now more hapless than happening. Woodstock had turned into Altamont, and the protest leaders were assassinated, dying, crazy or corrupt.

  I was getting the niggling notion that maybe I was a spoiled brat, who, along with my Dr. Spock–trained cohorts, had some grandiose idea that we were different from previous generations and could change the world when, in fact, very few managed to do it. It occurred to me that instead of seething in ideological rage, which focused on the inadequacy of the rest of the world, maybe I should just focus on changing myself.

  Professor Narly, always the most intuitive of teachers, read my mind. “For those of you who think that the era of political ­activism is over or that you didn’t make a difference, history will judge it and you differently. The civil rights movement resulted in Supreme Court decisions that will change equality forever, as will the civil rights legislation in ’64 and ’68. More civil rights legislation was accomplished in this decade than in over a hundred years. You made a difference. What about the Vietnam War? You changed public opinion. You threw it in people’s faces until they couldn’t look anymore. It has wound down and will end soon. You made a difference.”

  Still no one came forward. He took a final shot at trying to get people to teach in the middle of a burning ghetto where even a black mayor couldn’t stop the arson and the looting. “The kids at Thomas Paine are the ones who really need good teachers. A great teacher could change the life of one of those kids. Does anyone remember Kennedy’s line ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country’?” It saddened me that the line that had meant so much to my mother and me a decade earlier was now falling flat.

  Sara leaned over to me and said, “At least Hough would be interesting. Besides I’d rather be shot at in a burning ghetto than stay in southern Ohio on the West Virginia border at some Bible belt cinderblock box where they shoot Jews when they get sick of shooting each other and screwing their sisters.”

  So we signed up for Thomas Paine High School and decided to get an apartment together in an adjoining area called Cleveland Heights. We received a welcoming letter from the school board with a p.s. telling us that public transportation had not yet been satisfactorily restored after the Hough riots. Sara, true to her delusional New York–centric form, suggested we “grab a cab.” I decided I’d be best off keeping one of my parents’ cars.

  Figuring Sara was an art major with great taste, I told her to find us an apartment. I gave her a lecture on getting a cheap place that was no more than a ten-minute drive to school. All she said was “I get it: no ghetto basement apartment and no doorman — something in between.”

  A few weeks later, I blew into Cleveland in my mother’s 1963 robin’s-egg-blue Chevy Impala 409 convertible that boasted a four-on-the-floor. Like the rest of my family, it was tired. With a rim of brown rust laced across the bottom, it was carrying the scars of battles with snow, ice and road salt. I’d left my mother with my father’s old Lark. I had the trunk loaded for bear, armed with a suitcase full of schoolmarm dresses I’d whipped up over the weekend from some Simplicity patterns.

  Clutching the matchbook with the address that Sara had ­given me over the phone, I pulled into the U-shaped front drive of a truly wacky building — the Alcazar Hotel, a bizarre Spanish structure built in 1923. The Alcazar was on a hill in the middle of Cleveland Heights. It was Moorish in its design and was so out of place it looked like a Hollywood set for The Munsters if they had been doing an episode in Morocco. The five-storey pentagon-­shaped building had wings surrounding what was meant to be a lush botanical garden, but I guess the architect forgot that lush and Cleveland are rarely mentioned in the same breath. All the palms and cactuses looked as though they’d been thrashed into a brown-matted straw. The central fountain in the courtyard had no head and was overrun by pigeons.

  When I got to the lobby, Sara sat languishing on a large mustard-­coloured circular couch that surrounded a dead palm. She smiled and dragged on a Virginia Slim. Before she had a chance to say anything, I said, “What a dump!”

  She said, “I know. Doesn’t it scream Tennessee Williams? It’s so Night of the Iguana. I knew you’d love it.”

  “It’s creepy and smells like old carpets.”

  “I want you to meet Sandor. He was a Hungarian count, but he lost his title in 1956 and is only working here temporarily.” Sandor was the eighty-three-year-old bellhop and desk clerk. He worked an archaic switchboard and filled the beaten-up wooden mail slots labelled with Scotch-taped scrap paper. He gave me my key, which was made of thick wrought iron and about six inches long. I said, “What is with the humongous key? It doesn’t even fit in my purse.” He replied that some people had “eye problems.”

  I had to unload the car myself since Count Sandor the Bellhop was so bent over, old and creaky, he couldn’t even reach the second shelf of the mail slots. As I handed some boxes to Sara to carry up on the elevator, she smiled as though she was tickled pink with her real-estate skills. I tried to burst that bubble by saying, “What were you thinking when you took this place?” Sara ignored me, while Sandor, clearly offended, said in a thick Hungarian accent, “Well, I don’t think Cole Porter thought it was a dump when he stayed here and was inspired to write ‘Night and Day.’” Like anyone would know night from day in that cavern.

  As we got on the elevator, Sara said, “Wait until you see who lives here. Honestly, they scream Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte.” The people I saw in the hall made no eye contact and slithered along the walls. They were like vampires who realized they’d mistakenly come out before dark.

  Our apartment was as bizarre as the architecture and the other patrons. It had a dark living room, gigantic heavy wooden furniture and brocade curtains with huge tassels. Murphy beds fell out of the wainscoted walls and the kitchen had one of those running board sinks that Ralph Kramden had in The Honeymooners. ­Although the living room was small, there was a huge walk-in closet that had short little curtains on each shoe cubbyhole and rows and rows of old wooden hangers. It smelled like a combination of mothballs, talcum powder and decomposing Old Spice. The dresser had a fold-away mirror surrounded by Hollywood lights. Whenever I put on my makeup, I used to say to Sara in my best Gloria Swanson, “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.”

  As we drove to Thomas Paine High School for orientation, we saw all kinds of vacant buildings, which made the Hough neighbourhood look like a set from Gone with the Wind after Sherman’s march. The businesses had iron grates across their fronts and were burned out on the inside. The brick buildings had charcoal on the outside and the wooden stores were just piles of ash. People hung out on the street as though it were still a main thoroughfare, but really there was nowhere to shop — it was just a pile of ­rubble. A young boy of about twelve sat on an upside down plastic milk delivery crate and sold cigarettes. Another man sat in a lawn chair, selling leather shorts. (Tough sell in January.) Sara said, “Hot cigarettes and hot hot pants. Wow, who would shop here? Hans Christian Andersen if he smoked?”

  We pulled into the Thomas Paine parking lot on a freezing winter day, ready to start the January semester. I distinctly remember that “I’m Henry VIII, I Am” blared on the radio. The school looked like an armed camp or a jail. We were stopped in the icy
driveway by a policeman posted at the entrance gate. He asked us for identification and then asked why we were there.

  He was young and attractive in a Huck Finn kind of way and looked new on the job. While I was searching for my licence among the debris in my purse, Sara and I exchanged a look. It was only a glance, but girls of a certain age share a “glance vernacular.” It was like Morse Code that in this case spelled out “This guy is really cute and I’m going for it.” I might have been slightly off. It might have meant “Let’s have a few laughs before we become teachers and never laugh again.”

  “We’re student teachers,” Sara said, tossing her long black hair over her shoulder. A cigarette hung from her lips, and the smoke drifted into her partly closed eyes. Switching to her best Ohio hick accent, she droned, “We’re here to carry the revolution into art and literature.” She could do a perfect rendition of what she referred to as “defanged bobcats.” The policeman laughed at this and said that he was from Chillicothe, the closest small town to Ohio University, and she had the accent down perfectly.

  The policeman nodded as I showed him my licence. He went back to the squad car for a long time and talked on his walkie-­talkie.

  Sara asked, “What is he doing for so long? Hope he’s writing down our home number.”

  “I swear you really like these Ohio strawberry blonds from hick towns.”

  “They’re exotic if you’re from Manhattan.” I shook my head, indicating that she was too weird, which prompted her to exclaim in romantic thrall, “Come on! Look at that swayback in those high boots. And that way he wears his hat low on his forehead. And that little Tom Joad westward-ho cowlick. Yuppers,” she said, blowing smoke out her nose, “he could eat Cocoa Puffs in my bed anytime.”