“Then maybe there’s nothing there to hear,” he’d said. “Or maybe you didn’t try hard enough.”
“This wasn’t something that Pa told you to do once, was it?”
“Not in so many words,” he said, and then he had looked up at her sharply. “Are you ridiculing me?”
“Oh no, Alex. I was just wondering. I know your father kept to himself a great deal. You once told me how days went by often without his saying a word to anyone.”
“It wasn’t the same thing exactly. Anyway, you can forget about it now,” he said. He had gone about the house afterward and gathered up all his message pads. She was so relieved and happy about the change, she didn’t say another word for fear he would find a reason to return to his world of silence. She had put it behind her and hadn’t thought much about it until now, when she saw the way the children were behaving.
All the small talk was gone. When one of them appeared as if out of thin air, there was no hello, no greeting of any sort. There was barely a look of acknowledgment. Whoever it was was more intent on getting Alex’s attention. Her greetings were met with a nod, so similar to the one that Alex had developed that it was bone-chilling. Even little Donald had begun to mimic Alex’s gestures and ways perfectly. Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought they were all beginning to walk like him, have the same posture, hold their arms and heads at the same angle, turn and lower their jaws inward as though peering over their own shoulders, just the way he did.
When Alex realized one of them had appeared, they had the same conversation.
“Is everyone finished with his work?”
“Yes, Alex.”
“No one rushed?”
“Oh no, Alex.”
“All right then; tell them it’s time.”
“Time for what?” she asked when whoever it was went back upstairs to gather the others together. “What are you doing with them now, Alex?”
“What I’ve been doing,” he said, “building their strength, their self-image and confidence, teaching them the good things. You don’t have to concern yourself with it.”
“But do you have to take them to that place?”
“I have my reasons,” he said. “Quiet, they’re coming.”
She watched them come down the stairs. More and more they were beginning to look trancelike to her. They saw her, but they looked through her. It was as though they had already left the house and their bodies were just catching up.
“I think it started to rain,” she said. “Maybe you should use the meeting room upstairs like you used to,” she added and smiled.
It was as if she had driven stakes through the hearts of four vampires. They turned on her with such synchronization and with such looks of hate and disdain, she felt the blood drain from her face. She even uttered a moan and brought her hand to her throat. There was a long moment of terrible silence.
“I just meant that…oh, well, do what you want,” she said, and retreated quickly to the living room. When she heard them all go out and heard the front door close behind them, she felt a great sense of relief. It was a while before her heartbeat slowed and she could gather her thoughts about herself. For a long moment, she sat in one of the soft chairs, clutching its arms with a strange desperation. Her fingernails nearly pierced the material, the veins in her arms pressed against the surface of her skin, and her torso remained as taut as a knot of rope soaked in ice water.
When the calmness finally did return, she rose from the chair and went to the front door. She opened it and looked out into the night. A fine rain was falling, but there was no sign or sound of Alex and his children. The darkness was so thick she could barely see a foot or so behind the porch steps, anyway.
How dank and cold it must be in that stupid secret room, she thought. How could they enjoy it? How could they want to be there? And with the old man’s bones only inches below…she shuddered and closed the door quickly. Then she went upstairs to draw a bath of warm water. She added her bubbly soap and stripped down quickly, eager to submerge herself in the welcome warmth of the water. It washed away the blanket of cold air that had draped itself over her when she was at the front door. As she sat back and lowered herself even further into the water, she realized that Dinky wasn’t there, sprawled over the foot rug as usual. She remembered that he had loyally followed the children out. But she was sure Alex wouldn’t bring him into Pa’s room with them.
The poor dog, she thought and imagined it lying against the closed plank door, pressing its body against the old wood, trying to keep itself out of the rain. Even submerged in the warm water, she shivered in sympathy.
“Poor Dinky,” she muttered. Somehow Alex had even taken the dog from her. Such power. It filled her with awe. She closed her eyes and drew the steamy vapor around her like someone wrapping herself in a shroud in preparation for eternal sleep.
Philip Knots slipped the final corrected student essay into the folder and placed the folder in his briefcase. The thirty-five-year-old English teacher disliked bringing unfinished schoolwork home. Even if he buried his briefcase under his coat or placed it in a corner in his den, it would haunt him throughout the weekend, spoiling his sense of leisure and relaxation. Hovering about him was this constant reminder that he had work to do, work to do, work to do.
And the work seemed to have increased geometrically during the past few years. Because so many of the resort properties had gone bankrupt or sold out to tax-exempt organizations during the last decade, the tax base supporting the school system had eroded significantly. Panicking somewhat, the school board and school administration had cut back on staff, and consequently, the teacher-student ratio had become unwieldy. For Philip Knots what had once been an enjoyable, challenging, and rewarding job had slipped into drudgery. The nature of the student body had changed.
The kind of students they had now were not as self-motivated. The “good” kids were bored and distracted, and the influx of transients increased. Society appeared to have turned nomadic right before his eyes. A number of students moved into the community and moved out and then moved in again over the course of a few years. Their basic skills suffered; his remedial labors increased. A significant proportion of these transients were foster children. Why, in the five classes he taught, he had nearly a dozen.
Among these, Elizabeth Sera attracted most of his interest. He had looked through her file and gotten what he thought was a good understanding of why she seemed to be the way she was. Her background read like some kind of modern-day Dickens soap opera, a tale of poverty and terror about a girl of the streets who had been used and misused by the people she should have been able to trust.
When he saw how pretty and intelligent she was, he was moved to take a special interest in her. He was aware that most teachers have this built-in Pygmalion complex—they were going to transform insensitive and unmotivated young people into highly aware, highly ambitious, fruitful members of society. And they were going to do it with forty-five minutes a day, in a class filled with nearly thirty other students, and a mountain of bureaucratic slave labor to climb. What a laugh.
But he had begun to see some real possibilities in Elizabeth Sera. She was doing better in his class than she had done in any previous English class. Her comments and insights made her look more like a “gifted” student than a remedial problem child. Maybe he could achieve something significant here. It was worth a try.
Besides, the girl craved personal attention. Just stopping her in the hall between classes and asking her how she was doing put such a glow in her face that it made him feel like a celebrity. On a number of occasions lately, she had wandered in after school to discuss something they had done in class. Her questions were always good ones, and he would sit back and talk in a very informal and relaxed manner.
He congratulated himself on the subtle way he slipped in questions about her background and personal life during these tête-à-têtes. She asked him questions about himself, as well, but he thought that was only natural.
He had more than a vague realization that the girl had a schoolgirl crush on him. In fact he was flattered by it. He had lived through something similar every year he had taught. It was one of the hazards of the job. He believed that a good teacher could handle that well and even turn it to some educational benefit.
Always in the back of his mind was that terrible scene in Up the Down Staircase when the high school girl who had a crush on a teacher gave him a love letter and the teacher, instead of handling it sensitively, corrected the letter grammatically and made the girl stand by as he did so. She committed suicide as a result.
He wasn’t afraid that a girl like Elizabeth Sera would commit suicide, but he was afraid of ever being insensitive to the needs of his students, even the ones that involved fantasies. He had to admit that there was another motivation in the attention he gave Elizabeth. She was different from the other girls who had had crushes on him. They were typical teenagers. Everything they did was blatant, whether it was the way they batted their eyes or pressed forward to be closer or giggled and laughed at everything he said, as though he were Mr. Charm. A man in his position would have to be a total ignoramus to be unaware of these infatuations.
But Elizabeth Sera didn’t do these things. Her gaze was longer, deeper. Despite his ability to hold a professional posture during most of the school day, he felt himself being moved, reacting not as a teacher, but as a man. The girl was sexy; she stirred him. Fight it as he would, he found himself fantasizing about her. It embarrassed him, because at times he couldn’t help acting like a schoolboy. He looked for her in the halls; he let himself be caught staring at her. He smiled the smile of a thousand words when he should have only nodded.
Worst of all, he sensed that his tone of voice was changing when he spoke with her. There was always some degree of formality when he spoke with his students. It was inherent in the teacher-pupil relationship. He had seen too many potentially good teachers come and go because they didn’t keep that invisible barrier up between them and their students. Everyone wanted to be liked by the members of his class; everyone wanted to be popular with the young people, but talking to them and behaving with them on their level to ingratiate yourself with them was deadly.
What was happening between him and Elizabeth Sera was similar, but dangerous in a different way. He wasn’t lowering himself to the level of a young teenager; rather he was accepting her as a peer. And it wasn’t all his fault. She did have a remarkable maturity about her. In the back of his mind were all the things he had read in her file. Her street life, her imposed independence, all rushed her into a state of maturity that made her unique, and, in a way, dangerous.
However, whether it was the fault of his ego or the result of his rationalization for his own secret desires, he ignored the warnings and convinced himself he could handle this special young lady and could be of great help to her. He discussed it with his wife, Stacey, partly because he thought it would be wise to have a female’s viewpoint about such a girl. She amplified some of his own fears, but she attacked his idealism in doing so and thus prevented him from hearing the first alarms.
“You’re not being paid to be someone’s psychiatrist,” she told him. “You’re not her father. Let her father take more interest.”
“She’s living with foster parents, who I understand have taken in a number of foster children. They probably see it as some kind of business venture. She’s really on her own.”
“Well, why is that your concern? Isn’t there a school psychologist or a nurse or…”
“Teaching is not what it was when you and I were students,” he said. “You just can’t ignore the problems kids bring to the classroom. It affects the way they learn; the way they grow. It’s not right to ignore it.”
“You’re trying to do too much,” she told him. “Nobody’s going to thank you for it.”
“I don’t agree.”
“So why did you ask for my opinion,” she said, and stormed out of the room. He was sorry they had had a fight about it, and later on he apologized and promised he would give everything she’d said serious consideration. He would even discuss it with the school psychologist, but when he went to do just that, he didn’t know how to begin. So he let everything drift along and told himself that it wasn’t as serious as he thought.
It all continued. He felt himself sinking into a deeper and deeper commitment. He caught himself staring at her for longer periods of time, watching the way she moved, letting himself be captured by her gaze and stimulated by a turn of her eyes. The last few days she seemed to be constantly around him, waiting for him in the hall when he emerged from a room, just behind him or very close by in the lunch line, and outside in the parking lot when he left school for the day. So he wasn’t all that surprised when she walked into his room after school, just as he had buckled up his briefcase.
“Hi,” she said. She came down the aisle slowly. He sat back in his desk chair and studied her approach. She was wearing a tight, thin cotton sweater, straight leg jeans, and sneakers. The vanilla-white sweater brought out the richness of her dark skin and deep brown eyes. He had often seen how the other girls in his class gazed with jealousy at her blemish-free complexion. They longed for the same radiance. It was part of what made her look more mature, more like a woman than a girl.
“Stayed after school again? Don’t tell me you were in detention.”
She smirked and sat in the desk right in front of him.
“Hardly.”
“I’ve got detention duty next week,” he said, and shook his head. “I loathe it.”
“I know. I saw your name on the list on the bulletin board in the faculty room.”
“What were you doing in that den of iniquity?”
“Mrs. Green asked me to bring Mr. Laruffa some papers to sign and I had to wait for him to sign them, so I looked at the bulletin board and saw your name on the list with the dates for detention duty.”
“Well, don’t find yourself in there when I’m on duty. I’m a tyrant simply because I hate being there more than the kids hate it.”
She laughed and threw her head back to get her hair off the side of her face. He let the picture linger in his mind like a freeze frame in a movie. She seemed to sense it and put that knowledge into a half-smile.
“My foster brothers were supposed to wait for me, but they must have forgotten and gone on.”
He looked up at the clock.
“You missed the late bus.”
“I expected to. We were going to walk.”
“All the way to Sandburg? That’s a good five miles, isn’t it?”
She shrugged. “We did it before.”
He looked out his windows.
“But it looks like it’s going to start raining any moment,” he said. “Maybe you’d better give your foster parents a call and have them pick you up.”
“Can’t. They went to the city today and won’t be back until supper. I’m going to make supper for everyone,” she said, pretending false pride. He smiled and shook his head.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll make an exception today and break one of my rules. Not once during my twelve years of teaching have I ever taken a student home, but today I’ll go home through Sandburg.”
“Oh no, you don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t have to, and I shouldn’t,” he said, trying to look as stern as he could. “I should let you learn a lesson—to take more care with time and make sure you don’t miss the late bus.”
“I don’t know where the time went. I was in the library reading Brainchild, the book you suggested in class today, and the bell rang and Mrs. Mallen was in her back room doing something with the microfilm reader. The next thing I knew when I looked up was I was all alone. I didn’t think you’d still be here.”
“I wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t had my third-period group rewrite their essays.”
They just stared at each other for a moment. He wondered what it would be like for him if he were a high school
student now and he saw a girl like her. He hadn’t been very aggressive with girls when he was younger. Probably would have been frightened off, he thought.
“Well, let’s get going,” he said and stood up. He went to the closet in the rear of the room and took out his dark green raincoat. Stacey had laid it out for him in the morning after she heard the weather forecast. The coat made him think of her and her warnings. He hesitated a moment, wondering if he hadn’t made a mistake. In a way he was encouraging this girl now. It wasn’t fair to her. When he turned around, he saw she was staring at him with admiration. He suddenly felt sure that he’d made a mistake, but how the hell could he get out of it now? “Where’s your coat?”
“In my locker,” she said. “I wasn’t planning on your giving me a ride home.”
“Well, go and get it. I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”
“Thanks,” she said. “You’re very sweet to do this.”
He didn’t like the tone of that. Her voice sounded artificial, the words contrived. She rushed out and he hurried from the room. It always surprised him how quickly the school emptied a half-hour or so after the final bell. Except for the students in the sports program down at the other end of the building, the place looked deserted. Few of his fellow teachers liked to work in the building after the end of the day. They had this need to flee from the site. It was as though they were suffocating within and had to escape to breathe. There was always such a look of relief on everyone’s face as he or she pulled out of the parking lot.
It wasn’t always like this, he thought. It’s just been recently that the job became such a burden and the place was filled with such despair. There were so many more problems, and no one seemed to have any satisfactory answers. He often got the feeling that everyone was in retreat or, at the very least, was burying their heads in the sand. Most of the other teachers had gotten to the point where they were closing their classroom doors to shut out the frustrations. They buried themselves in subject matter and taught their lessons to the far wall. If the students in between picked something up during the course of a semester, good. If not, tough; that’s the way it is.
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