Class Dismissed

by Kevin McIntosh

  “However, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. I want to hear from you what happened second period, April 7th.” Ms. Bartolino leaned back, swallowed by the black chair, a legal pad in her lap, pen in hand.

  Patrick sat up. He hadn’t told the full story of that day to anyone. Not to Susan, not to his sister or his mother, not to himself. Officer Rodriguez had asked questions the following day, but that was just confirming facts, facts that would determine whether or not a crime had been committed. This was altogether different; context mattered. Character and setting, boys and girls, plot should flow from them. Write what you know. Tell your story. Only you can tell your story. He could hear himself going on and on, his favorite lesson. It’s your voice, your reality. Your truth.

  Now came the final exam. Essay question: Have you violated Chancellor Regulations 112, 117, 121, 132A? Why or why not? Remember to supply specific evidence to support your answer. Be sure to begin with a topic sentence. The question of whether or not I violated the chancellor’s regulations is an interesting one, and a good example of irony, as the chancellor himself had just left my classroom…

  “It’s kind of complicated, what happened,” he heard himself say to Ms. Bartolino. “You see, the chancellor had just left my room––”

  He heard himself rambling. Hard to do a minute-by-minute replay of a lesson in a classroom where the minute hand hadn’t moved in seven years. And it wasn’t a straightforward narrative, anyway, more like one of those windy Southern tales, like Twain or Faulkner or To Kill a Mockingbird, which he’d taught so many times. Let me tell you about when my brother broke his arm; no, first I have to tell you about my great-great-granddaddy. Oh, and there’s this fella named Boo.

  Where to begin his story? We were finishing our unit on Huckleberry Finn. Josh Mishkin was sitting by himself in the back. Back right. The teacher’s right, my right. Behind the broken window. The windows, I think, were open. Josh was too cold, then too hot. Or the other way around. The principal came in. Then the chancellor and his people. Or the chancellor came first. We were almost done with our discussion. I called on Josh.

  Multiple Choice: Why, with thirty-five other choices, did I call on Josh Mishkin?

  a) To demonstrate that, despite his being a major pain in the ass, I bore Josh no ill will.

  b) Despite her being a major pain in the ass, I bore Josh’s mother no ill will.

  c) There was a chance, however slim, that Josh would make me look really, really good in front of the chancellor and my principal.

  d) Because Superintendent Dr. Francis J. Lynch, invariably fair, forgiving, and patient, would have done so.

  “Wait.” Sylvia Bartolino stopped him in mid-ramble, riffled through her notes. “You haven’t spoken to the special investigator yet, correct?”

  “No, no. When he called, I told him I needed to speak with my lawyer first.”

  “Good. Don’t.” She set her legal pad on top of his files, put down her pen. “Mr. Lynch––Patrick––this was a traumatic event. Not just for Joshua Mishkin and his family, but for your students and you. Traumatized witnesses make lousy witnesses.” Big Italian shrug. “Which can work in your favor. But even so, hearing officers, and Bill Stankowski is no exception, want to hear the accused testify, want to look in his eyes as he proclaims his innocence. A hearing is not a court of law. More…informal, as you’ll see. The arbitrator is judge and jury in these cases. They use the law, but, like juries, they also use their guts. I’m sure by now you’ve heard Rubber Room scuttlebutt about Stankowski, how he’s scattered, his attention drifts, he’s biased. I know him, defended a number of clients before him. He’s a fair man, generally. Went too far with his gut last year, you probably heard, threw the book at a teacher, got his hand slapped hard by the state Supreme Court.” She washed down the last of her tuna fish sandwich with the last of the Diet Coke, wiped her mouth with the napkin.

  “Arbitrators––and lawyers for both sides––get cynical. We see our share of troubled teachers, some overwhelmed, some, frankly, in the wrong profession. You’ve been in the Rubber Room, I don’t need to tell you. But I’m a union girl, tried and true; Dad was a steelworker in Allentown. My job is to defend teachers, the BOE’s guy, to penalize or terminate. We don’t see many teachers like you, Patrick. Skilled, hard-working, but wrong place, wrong time, wrong principal. Or,” she nodded at him, “wrong parents. Stankowski will want to hear you testify, but he won’t. You’re too traumatized to be clear, or convincing. And my sense is that, on some level, you feel responsible for what happened.”

  Patrick looked at his hands.

  Sylvia Bartolino leaned across her desk, her round torso burying his files. “Stankowski won’t hear it, but I need to: Mr. Lynch, was Josh Mishkin’s injury an accident?”

  No one had ever asked him like that. The answer, he was relieved to find, popped right out of him. “Yes, ma’am, it was an accident.” He looked right at her. “A sad, terrifying accident.”

  Ms. Bartolino leaned back, patted her pudgy hands on the file stacks. “Good enough for me,” she said.

  Back in the Rubber Room, the jungle drums were beating. As usual, his fellow inmates kept their distance, but now they eyed him with that mixture of envy and pity saved for those taxiing on the tarmac, preparing for an actual hearing. That he was getting his so soon, and before summer break, when hearings were scarce and everything got bumped into the next school year, cemented his celebrity status.

  Now that he had a UFT lawyer, Patrick eschewed the Scribbler’s counsel. On his way to the men’s room, the Scribbler whisked by Patrick’s table, sulking like a jilted lover. But as the days passed, and May bled into June, Patrick began to wonder if he’d written off the Scribbler too soon; he’d barely heard from Sylvia Bartolino in the weeks since they’d met and his hearing was just a few days away. It wasn’t clear, exactly, what evidence would be brought against him, or who would testify, for or against. He’d never been part of a legal proceeding, not so much as jury duty. Was this what you did, put your life in your lawyer’s hands?

  Susan kept asking, “Have you called Sylvia? When will you hear from Sylvia?” As if she and Ms. Bartolino were old girlfriends, had roomed together at Middlebury. “I can call my dad,” she said. “It’s not too late.” Patrick had to weigh, in the balances, which fed his anxiety more, not speaking with his union-appointed attorney or speaking with Bryce, Susan’s smooth, silver-templed father. Conversations with Bryce, whether in his lovely Darien home or some embarrassingly upscale Manhattan bistro, were painful. Not because Bryce himself was pain-inducing, he was as charming and smart as he was handsome. He always tried to draw Patrick out with questions about his classroom, about education reform.

  But though Bryce’s questions were those of a progressive, well-read man, his conclusions were chapter and verse from the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Patrick, who was living partly off this man’s largesse, sleeping with his daughter and occasionally wearing his hand-me-downs to work, never pressed his luck with Bryce beyond nodding slowly and offering a few gentle correctives to his counterfactuals. Susan, who took for granted her parents’ support, and whose opinions were decidedly more Village Voice than WSJ, couldn’t help rising to the bait. Bryce was happy to joust with his daughter, took pleasure from her arguments: Look at my intelligent, beautiful, grown-up girl. Susan’s mother, Pepper, had the intellect to jump into the debate, but, for rather different reasons of culture and breeding, was as conflict-avoidant as Patrick, and the two would redirect the conversation toward the lively but less loaded: literature, food, what was playing off Broadway.

  Patrick would not be calling his girlfriend’s parents.

  Susan pulled back even more from him, frustrated with what she saw as his passivity in the face of crisis. She was her daddy’s girl, after all, of a people who viewed problems in practical terms, as soluble. Her father sold insurance; she offered solutions to those wh
o had none. Once you got past a nasty wrangle over the means of production and surplus value, they were speaking from the same emotional script. Neither of them would understand the small-town, Irish Catholic ball of shame he was reduced to. Or so Patrick thought, up to the night before his hearing.

  Susan got home early that evening and together they produced dinner in their galley kitchenette. It was their first cooking together in weeks, a pleasure once simple become unbearably complicated. Since he’d been home from Minnesota, they’d supplied food for themselves, or left leftovers for one another, but the proximity required for meal preparation risked too much.

  That night they fell into a familiar groove: he chopped; she sautéed; Ella sang. Neither dared changing the mood with conversation. Ella took over:

  For nobody else/gave me a thrill/With all your faults/I love you still

  Susan made a noise, not quite a hiccup but not quite a sigh, and he realized he’d been singing along, something he only did––and for good reason––when he was alone.

  She turned and there were tears in her eyes. Susan put her arms around his neck. The motion and expression were so like Katie Osterlund’s that he almost confessed then and there, but that would have been confession for his own sake. And could there be confession without actual sin?

  They held each other until the pork and garlic began to smoke. Susan turned off the stove and then they were on the sofa and they were tender but then on the floor and they weren’t. Lovemaking––if you could call it that––like that first night she’d taken him home, turned on by his passion for educating the underprivileged, for social justice. Deploying every weapon in her sexual arsenal. It felt like battle, too, territorial, fierce: Susan pillaged him, ravaged him, sowed his fields with salt. He fell asleep––passed out, nearly––knowing he’d experienced a cleansing act of forgiveness such as never before dispensed by womankind. His callous indifference to the work she loved, his short-term alcohol abuse––his assholism––didn’t matter now. As he lost consciousness, he heard the words of Oscar, his former roommate and Latin love consultant. Make-up sex, Oscar had said, it’s the best, man. Muy intense.

  He woke up on the throw rug to the sound of Chauncey masticating the garlic pork. The cat would soon be throwing up on the throw rug, but that couldn’t concern him now. Patrick lay on his back, his sweetheart’s slender frame draped over him, breathing deeply. The red blanket was on top of them; his boxers dangled from the radiator, Susan’s bra decorated a kitchen chair.

  He heard the solid thump of paws hitting floor. Susan’s warm face burrowed into his neck. For the first time he felt that, whatever happened tomorrow, let the BOE do its worst, he, they, would be all right. Chauncey padded over to him, circled twice, and plopped down in the space beneath his free arm. Patrick curled his arm around, not quite touching Susan’s cat. Soon all three were snoring, one happy family.

  In the Star Chamber

  110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn. Patrick had seen it before and knew, like all New York teachers, its legend. Feared, derided––the Bastille of the New York City Board of Education. Built in the Roaring Twenties as the luxurious Brooklyn headquarters of another BOE, the Benevolent Order of Elks, it had a massive, forbidding beauty. Purchased by the city in the 1930s, it retained some of its surface charm––the Beaux Arts façade, the Renaissance Revival style––but no coffered ceilings, no egg-and-dart ornamentation could disguise its current purpose: to house––and hide––the hundreds of employees who oversaw the flow from inbox to outbox, the quotidian policies followed in triplicate. And, like the Bastille, it was a place where the miserable accused were kept and judged.

  The room for his hearing, in contrast to the elegant exterior and commanding lobby, was undistinguished. A smallish rectangle, fluorescent lit, dominated by a rectangular conference table comprised of four smaller rectangular tables, creating an empty, rectangular no-man’s-land in the center. Patrick, never a friend of mathematics––barely an acquaintance––felt bounded by the simple geometry of it. A puzzle room within the Puzzle Palace. He sat at the corner nearest the entrance, to the left of the black-pantsuited Sylvia Bartolino and her Lynch files. At the corner directly across from Patrick sat Hanrahan, the BOE attorney, with his own, alarmingly tall stack of Lynch files. At the head of the table, in a chair noticeably larger than the others, the arbitrator, the hearing officer, Stankowski. Just around the corner to Stankowski’s left was the stenographer, a slight man with horn-rimmed glasses, expectant behind a typing machine. To Stankowski’s right, down Patrick’s side of the table, an empty chair. For witnesses. Hardly the Law and Order courtroom of Patrick’s nightmares, but intimidating enough. It’s a hearing, not a trial, Sylvia had reminded him. Big difference.

  And Hearing Officer Stankowski wasn’t the sad sack Patrick expected. A tall man, sixtyish, with an impressive head of silver hair above a gray pinstriped suit. He leaned forward in his large chair, nodded at the lawyers, then the stenographer. “Good morning,” he said in a folksy way that belied the nature of the occasion, “we are on the record in the case of Patrick Lynch, SED Number 11377.” He had the attorneys introduce themselves for the record, which they smiled through. Patrick had a twinge; “they get kind of chummy,” the Scribbler said of the hearing crews.

  The hearing officer proceeded to read the charges: “Conduct unbecoming your position; conduct prejudicial to the good order of the service; endangering the welfare of a child.” After the pre-hearing conference, Stankowski, as Sylvia had predicted, dropped the insubordination charge. “The BOE,” she said afterwards, “uses the same system for charges we used for testing pasta in college: throw a handful at the wall and see what sticks.”

  Stankowski asked Mr. Hanrahan to introduce the Board of Education’s case against Patrick Lynch. Hanrahan was disconcertingly familiar—stocky, pale, a freckled forehead beneath retreating sandy hair. He could have been on the barstool next to him at Marty’s. Or, better yet, a cousin, the more aggressive one, the one who blocked too hard at touch football, who drove the hardest bargains at Monopoly. The one who went to Law, not Ed, school. He wore the slightly shiny, navy blue discount suit of the public servant, an older version of what Patrick now wore. Hanrahan tugged at his lapels and raised his pugnacious Irish jaw.

  Without any courtroom theatrics, the BOE attorney began reading, seated, from his script. “The Board of Education does not prefer these charges against Patrick Lynch because he is unqualified as an educator. His personnel file shows a teacher who is well-educated and skilled in his presentation of material, who even goes above and beyond to make his lessons engaging and meaningful.” He continued in this vein, even quoting laudatory comments from Silverstein’s observations of his classes through the years. But the more Hanrahan sang his praises, the wetter grew the short hairs on the back of Patrick’s neck. He was being sandbagged, like X had done at the infamous scheduling debate. The BOE attorney came not to praise Mr. Lynch, but to bury him.

  Hanrahan looked up from his script, regretfully. “But, as we all know, and as the New York Department of Education states in its frameworks, pedagogical skill is not all there is to teaching.” The freckles on his Celtic brow drew together. “Not by a long shot.” Patrick swallowed hard against the tightening noose. The stenographer tapped away softly. “Teachers must exercise judgment, day by day, class by class, moment by moment. Student by student.” Now came the presentation of a man, Mr. Lynch, whom Patrick did not know. A man who let the challenges––yes, the irritations––of a fifteen-year-old boy get the better of him. “Who, as the specifications pursuant to the charges preferred by the Board of Education illustrate, was negligent in meeting, per federal mandate, the special needs of Joshua Mishkin, was combative with this student, in and out of class, and was unresponsive to the pleas of his parents.”

  Patrick felt Ms. Bartolino’s round little hand on his forearm. Only then did he realize how far forward he was leaning in his chai
r, how hard he was breathing, and he wondered if he could be heard above the stenographer’s soft tapping. Sylvia squeezed his forearm and glanced up at him. Pace yourself, Mr. Lynch, her eyes said. This is just the opening volley. Patrick looked at Stankowski, who was settled back in his chair, his lids heavy already, the grooves deep above his cheekbones. And Hanrahan, though his accusations grew sharper, harsher with each word, never varied in pitch. Patrick looked around at the three legal officials, who seemed no more exercised than the stenographer. Just another day at the office for them.

  Hanrahan’s tone intensified. “All of this mounting frustration with and animosity toward Joshua Mishkin culminated on April 7, in the horrific, life-altering injury of Patrick Lynch’s student. A traumatic loss of a body part, his right middle finger above the second knuckle.” Hanrahan was stroking his right middle finger. Stankowski scratched his. “Soon we will hear counsel for the respondent refer to this maiming as an accident. An accident.” He hocked up the noun as if he’d like to spit and rinse.

  After detailing the conflicts with Josh in class, the aborted after-school tutorial, and the showdown following the chancellor’s visit, he stated that all the pent-up rage at Josh was released in that door slam. “The specifications don’t point toward intent,” said Hanrahan, “but they do show negligence and a tragic lack of self-control, substantiating the charges preferred by the Board of Education. This injury, this maiming, could have been avoided,” he continued, “if Mr. Lynch had followed the directives in Joshua’s IEP concerning de-escalation of conflict and taken into consideration Josh’s impulsivity and his predictable response to the medications he was taking. Given the history of tension in Mr. Lynch’s class,” Hanrahan added, “putting Joshua on the spot in front of the chancellor of New York City precipitated an inevitable battle of wills. Mr. Lynch’s expulsion of Joshua from his classroom, while perhaps warranted by Joshua’s actions, was sudden, and the manner in which Mr. Lynch closed his door was careless––cavalier even––and, as the special investigator’s report will show, done with such force that injury was not just possible, but likely.”