The students were about to laugh.
I stopped it before it started.
I smiled at Tobias.
My most charming smile. The students had not seen my most charming smile in weeks, and as they had never seen it directed at young Tobias Wilcox, such was their fascination at this unexpected event, the awful laugh died before it could be born. Wunderbar!
“Well done, young lad. It appears you have two science books. One for the school and one for the home. What a clever young fellow you are.”
“Remember you said I needed to be less forgetful? I knew I could never be less forgetful, and I know science is a big deal, so I got my mom to get me another book, which cost a lot of money, but I didn’t wanna worry about being forgetful. Sweet, hunh?”
He smiled again. A smile of nasty victory. On his little front tooth, again glittered that twirling little bright star. Ping!
It was difficult for Mrs. Ravenbach to breathe, as if every ounce of air had rushed out of the room—like a bunch of cheap carpet salesmen leaving in a hurry when, next door, they pour the free beer. I found just enough breath down in my great, massive, strong-as-leather lungs to barely announce, “Recess!”
That evening, I was so very lucky that my dear friend, Mrs. Button, was at home. She answered my telephone call and came over straightaway. What a blessing!
I was so upset by the near rebellion caused by young Tobias Wilcox that Mrs. Button had to make the tea. Her little figure bustling back and forth across my kitchen with such industry and animation calmed me greatly, I can assure you.
We sat in my beautifully appointed living room, enjoying tea and sweet cakes. I sipped from my delicate Meissen cup and my breathing slowly returned to a normal pace. Finally, Mrs. Button sensed, in her most delicate way, that I was able at last to approach the terrible situation which had precipitated my calling her to my aid. She was so deeply interested in the comings and goings of the schoolchildren.
“Leni, Leni, my dear Leni. What possibly could have happened at school today to upset you so, so greatly? There’s not a problem with the football team?”
“No. No. It was . . . It was . . .” I was unable to pronounce the words.
“Toby Wilcox. Something should be done about him. Beastly child.”
“It was awful, awful.”
“I trust in your hour of distress Mr. Ravenbach was a stalwart companion.”
“As always, as always. He says to thank you for coming over. Out for the moment, he is buying apples and other strudel ingredients. Mr. Ravenbach is happy to shop for me, as he does love his strudel.”
“Would that Mr. Button were such a helpful helpmate. He’s good at tying fishing flies and complaining.” She sighed and took a careful breath. “Leni. It is not my place to give advice. But, as a Wilcox family neighbor, I believe I have some insight into their situation that might be helpful to you.”
“My dear Mrs. Button, there’s nothing I would treasure more than to be given advice from you, my wise and caring friend.”
My dear friend’s little rodent-like face positively shone with excitement. Her shapeless dress quivered on her tiny-boned form like a sail in a breeze as her little body nearly shook with the enjoyment of what she then said. Her voice, I remember, was a wee bit . . . scary. Her tone, I remember, was deliciously . . . controlling.
She said, “Sometimes, Leni, darling, you just have to show children what’s what.” The simple wisdom of her statement was overwhelming. “You must endeavor to get him to . . . appreciate the situation.”
While I sipped my tea, I began to think.
Tea is so useful for the thinking, don’t you agree?
CHAPTER 10
Sitting at my gorgeous Biedermeier desk, knitting a lovely lavender scarf for Mr. Ravenbach, admiring the three loaves of Floured Board farm bread and gift certificates to Trumilou and the Ritz Café, the finest restaurants in the city, which were laid neatly on my desk, I moved my gaze to my pupils, who were all working on a mathematics assignment. Which one would be able to help me to help young Tobias Wilcox in his journey through life? Which one might be the most useful?
Which one might be willing to betray a classmate . . . ?
It was, at that point, that Dame Fortune smiled on me. When you are a wonderful person, wonderful things fall into your lap.
Children love the potty words. They hear their parents using such language and, because they want to be big like their parents, they are using the potty words. Whenever they think a grown-up is not listening, it is the potty words, the potty words, the potty words, here, there, and everywhere.
But the children, they are not always realizing when a grown-up is listening. Even a child as bright and clever as bald-headed Richard Kaliski.
I heard a pencil roll across a desk.
I heard a hand scrape for it.
I heard the pencil fall to the floor.
I heard the point break.
I heard a little boy’s voice say, “Oh, crap.”
My great blond-haired head rotated like a dish antenna on a Narvik class destroyer.
And to my delight, I saw him. Little bald-headed Richard Kaliski, his face so perfectly round, and white, and soft. If I had poked my thumbs into bread dough, that would have been his face.
From across the room, like a shining spotlight, his white face was staring at me in utter fright. I nodded to him. To let him know that I knew. Then I continued my knitting. I was taking no steps at that precise moment, of course. Better to let the child dread the coming annihilation. For hours.
Later that day, when the bell rang for the children to go to the recess, I crooked my finger at Richard Kaliski. What a sweatbox he was! I felt that if you turned the heat up on him, he would melt and puddle on the floor into a big sticky ball of grease, wearing short pants. Dirty short pants.
While filing out, the children watched Richard slink to my desk with his eyes cast down, each child assuming Richard was about to be guillotined. Of course nothing could be further from the case, but that is what the little children sometimes think. Should I tell them something different?
Mother. Father. Teacher. God.
“Richard?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ravenbach?”
“What word did I hear you using earlier in the day?”
“I don’t know.”
Children! Do they think you are deaf, dumb, blind, and retarded? “Did you say a mud puddle word?”
“No, ma’am. Mrs. Ravenbach, ma’am.”
“I heard you.” He stood there sweating. How unattractive. “What . . . word . . . did . . . you . . . say?”
I have a wonderful Bavarian cuckoo clock in my classroom. Its loud, brittle ticking was the perfect accompaniment to his growing terror. At last, natürlich, he cracked.
His voice was as miniature as a leprechaun through the wrong end of a telescope. “I said ‘crap.’ ”
“Is the mud puddle word you used a word you would like me to relay to your parents?” He shook his pathetic bald head. I took great pleasure in noticing he was right on the edge of the tears. “It is a fact, is it not, young Richard, that you adore your teacher, Mrs. Ravenbach, more than anything in the world?”
He nodded.
“And for your favorite teacher is it not true that you would do anything in the world?”
He nodded.
“Here is what I am wanting you to do. For the betterment of the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children.”
“I’m always happy to help the school, Mrs. Ravenbach.”
I said, “Richard. Are you familiar with the expression ‘mole’?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’ve got a big, hairy one, right on your chin.”
This was not the appropriate moment for me to make a fist and knock him on his Kiste. “No. Not that kind of mole.” Richard, his bald round head staring up at me, shiny in the afternoon light, blinked his big, wet eyes. Richard was the most intelligent child in the class. “For the running of the classroom, it is very
important for the teacher to understand what is going on with every single one of her beloved students.”
I looked down at him. I am very tall. He said, “What kind of a mole, Mrs. Ravenbach?”
“Someone hidden deep in an organization, someone no one would suspect is feeding important, helpful information to someone outside the organization.”
“A spy?”
I smiled. “It might interest you to know that the espionage agents, they are always paid. In cash. Perhaps there are trinkets you wish to buy for yourself for which your parents do not give you enough allowance.” He vigorously shook his head. “I need you to tell me what young Tobias Wilcox is thinking. And doing. What little notes he scribbles with his fat little hands in class. Who he talks to. Who he thinks about. And most especially what he thinks about me, his teacher, who he should worship and adore, but who I am afraid . . . sadly, he does not.”
“Mrs. Ravenbach, I’d never spy on Toby! You’re out of your mind!”
I leaned forward. I put my fingers around his Adam’s apple. My thumb on the left side, my first two fingers on the right side, with my sharp fingernails, and I squeezed.
The cuckoo clock ticked and ticked.
When he blinked, I knew I had him.
It was a bright and sunny day at the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children. As you know, it is always a bright and sunny day at the McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children, especially in the classroom of Mrs. Ravenbach. At parent-teacher conferences, the parents always say to me, they say, “How do you manage to make the children come home so sunny and bright?”
And I always answer, “Because sunniness and a bright mood begin in the heart. When your heart is pure and clean and clear, sun will surround it. The children sense this and are drawn to me, and my happy, upbeat mood, in my sunny and bright classroom.”
The parents, they smile and they go on about their important business. Like purchasing me gift certificates from the restaurants I like the most! Ha-ha.
Richard “The Mole” Kaliski . . . he was not so sunny and bright as he delivered information about his friend Tobias, such as what the night before he had for dinner, odd jobs he was doing to earn the extra money, what sin he had committed that his parents were upset about, which homework assignments were proving particularly difficult . . . He did not smile his sunniest smile as he betrayed his friend.
I was feeling a good deal more confident in my ability to help young Tobias Wilcox.
That particular sunny morning we were discussing the careers.
Drusilla asked if she could brush my hair later that afternoon. I, natürlich, replied in the affirmative. I do love to have my hair brushed. Doesn’t everyone?
After our nourishing luncheon, the bright-eyed children were eagerly wondering what new and wonderful task I was going to assign them to do. All the fresh, glowing, eager faces! Arthur, Richard, Drusilla, Trevania, and Sophie. That was only in the first row! I do enjoy having a large class, the more children with whom to share my extraordinary knowledge!
I put down my knitting and said, “Class, this afternoon we’re all going to write a haiku.”
“Are you gonna write one too, Mrs. Ravenbach?”
“No, Tobias. I have had books of poetry published in many languages around the world, so there is no need for me to write a haiku today, just to prove that I know how to do it.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, “you said ‘we’re all.’ I musta misunderstood.”
“A haiku is a poem. A poem with very strict rules. We Germans are very interested in strict rules.”
“I’ll say!” said Arthur. It seemed that young Arthur Hester had been taking lessons from young Tobias. Rudeness lessons.
“A haiku consists of three lines, five syllables in line one, seven syllables in line two, and again five syllables in line three. Very simple and wonderfully elegant.”
I assigned the children the wonderful exercise of writing a haiku about Vincent van Gogh, the finest painter in the history of the world. It is a pity he was not German. He was Dutch, and being Dutch is very nearly being German.
I know Mr. Ravenbach certainly enjoys having me around the house after I’ve been looking at van Gogh paintings. He feels I make him a bigger omelet in the morning. I disagree. It is my feeling that I am always giving him a large-size omelet in the mornings, but he feels that, after viewing a painting or two by van Gogh, I am a wee bit more generous around the kitchen.
In any event, van Gogh is my hero. I place him higher than Beethoven, and you know how I feel about Beethoven!
It was a sunny and bright day in my classroom, and the children’s little heads were bent over their lined paper, carefully and beautifully writing their haiku about Vincent van Gogh.
Young Tobias Wilcox finished first and was looking around. He always finished his work quickly, with much haste, and a great deal of overall sloppiness.
From my high spot at my teacher’s desk, I said, “Tobias?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ravenbach.”
“You have finished?”
“Yes, ma’am. It was real easy.”
“I have never found writing haiku to be easy. Yet you do, on the first haiku you’ve ever written?”
“Sure did!”
“Please. Bring it to my desk. I should like to read it.”
“Sure thing, Mrs. Ravenbach!” Tobias Wilcox certainly was in a jolly mood. Perhaps he was so proud of his work that he couldn’t wait to share it with his beloved teacher.
His grubby little hand thrust a wrinkled piece of paper upon my desk. Small flecks of dirt fell off the paper and soiled the clean, lovely wooden surface of my beautiful teacher’s desk. I flicked the dirt toward him and lifted his crinkled paper. It did not take long to read his haiku, nor did it take long to realize that young Mr. Wilcox was doing his best to irritate his beloved teacher. He was generally a success at irritating people.
“Your haiku is this?”
“Yepper!”
It had been a difficult morning. Sophie Taschlin had thrown up in the teachers’ lounge while asking for a peppermint to ease her unsettled stomach. We gave her the peppermint. It did not help. Because Sophie existed on a diet solely consisting of the Pop-Tarts, the teachers’ lounge had to be evacuated.
I was in no mood to be toyed with by young Tobias Wilcox.
“Would you please read your haiku to the class?”
“Sure thing!” He waddled up to my desk, reached his fat little hand up high, and I shoved the nasty piece of paper into his outstretched grubby little fingers. I could see the dirt under his fingernails.
He unfolded his nasty paper, smoothed it on his grubby, bare knee, stood up as straight as was possible, and read his haiku out loud. I quote, precisely, word for word because it is burned eternally into my memory.
The little monster looked up at me and smiled. I will go to my grave believing that child woke up every single morning trying to come up with a manner in which to irritate me at some point during the day. I must confess, I lost a little bit of the self-control.
“Why would you write a haiku like that about the magnificent painter Vincent van Gogh?!”
“Van Gogh’s not magnificent. He’s stupid.”
“What?! WHAT!!”
“I think you heard me.” His tone of voice was the most sarcastic you can possibly imagine. And once you’ve imagined that, double it. And once you imagine that, triple it.
Never in my life as a teacher, as an adult, or even as a person had I felt such hatred for someone four feet tall.
“How can you possibly think van Gogh is stupid?”
“Over spring break, I saw a museum with his stuff. He can’t paint, and everything he paints is stupid.”
“He is one of the finest painters in the history of Western civilization!”
“Why do you care whether I like him or not? I like Norman Rockwell.”
“Van Gogh is an artist! Norman Rockwell was an illustrator! The two have nothing in common!”
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“I disagree.”
“You are not allowed to disagree with your teacher! It causes ill will among the other students, and does not follow a clear path toward the order and the discipline!”
“You can’t tell me how to think.”
“You may not believe that I can tell you how to think, but I guarantee you Principal Hertenstein can!”
If I were not the type of person who maintains herself in peak physical condition at all times, eating well, mostly yogurt and Müsli, I might have had a stroke right there at that very moment. Fortunately for me, and for my students, I did not.
Young Tobias gave me a queer little Tobias Wilcox look and said, deliberately, “Maybe you better send me to his office, then.”
“An excellent plan!”
“What do I tell him why I got sent there?”
“Because you wrote a haiku disrespecting one of the greatest painters in the history of painting, that’s why! Now go! Mach schnell!”
That child gave me the most devilish smile and said, “Sure thing, Mrs. Ravenbach!”
Late that afternoon, after dismissal, I was feeding a live rat to the python in the glass cage in the corner of my lovely, beautiful, sunny classroom. I do so enjoy watching the python eating the rats. It reminds me of how I sometimes am feeling toward my students. Feeding the live rats to a python is not something you do in front of children, because it upsets them. Not, ha-ha, nearly as much as it upsets the rats.
As the rat was cowering, again reminding me of my pupils, Mr. Hertenstein came in.
Principal Hertenstein rarely came to visit the classroom. Administrators visiting the classroom is not the finest idea. It is best for the administration to do the administrating and the teachers to do the teaching.
Nonetheless, I was honored to have Principal Hertenstein in my classroom. Mr. Hertenstein was a wise and thoughtful man. Perhaps he was of German extraction. He was so attractive in his three-piece suit and polka-dot tie. His gray hair combed just so. The McKegway School for Clever and Gifted Children was so wonderfully lucky to have his firm, guiding hand at the helm. I must confess, that when Principal Hertenstein stood near me, my heart did beat a tiny bit faster.
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