by Darren Greer
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although none of us were prepared for it, I was prevented from attending classes in Catholic school in the fall. I should have been in grade seven, after graduating from the elementary on the Protestant side in June. There had been no indication by the principal or my teachers that I would not be allowed back in school in September.
My mother tried to register me in the public school on the Protestant side, but was stymied there also. When she went to see the principal, he did not give her a flimsy excuse as others might have done. He told her directly I was not permitted back for the year due to the possibility of contagion.
She asked how they could know I was exposed to anything contagious.
“We don’t,” he said. “And that’s just the problem. Until all that is sorted out, Jacob will have to stay home from school. If he wants to do an equivalent study program at home we can supply you with outlines and study guides. But I’m afraid, for the beginning of the year at least, he’ll have to stay away.”
My mother argued. She threatened to call the school board. She threatened to print a letter in the Advocate Gazette. She called the superintendent of schools in Trenton, though he already knew something of the case and said the principal was only being cautious and keeping me home from school for a few weeks would not hurt anybody. The decision, she was told, was precautionary, and made without prejudice. The same would be done with any family in any similar situation, no matter what the cause, and the school was entirely within its rights to ask me to stay home for the protection of the other students.
“What other families?” my mother asked on the phone. “What other similar situation?”
“Lice,” he told her, with no apparent irony. “We can ask a student to stay at home because of lice.”
“Lice?” said my mother. “You’re actually asking me to believe this is the same situation as if Jacob had lice?”
“I realize it may seem different on the surface,” the superintendent explained, “but I believe the principle is the same.”
For several days after, my mother would shake her head and wonder out loud how a collection of people could be so damned stupid. She expected, I think, for someone — the school board, some advocacy group, a concerned citizen — to swoop in and save the day, to rescue her from the insanity that seemed to be gripping the town.
She would wait a long time.
What she didn’t understand was all the concerned citizens were concerned in the wrong way — they all agreed with the school’s decision. None of them said as much to her directly, and if she asked them why a young boy should be kept from his education due to fear and what she regarded as overreaction, they avoided making comment or meeting her eye, as if to say “Why make a fuss? It’s only for a few weeks.”
My mother was outraged I was being denied my education, but she knew further action was pointless. She did not write the letters to the Gazette. She had given up trying to fight the town. Instead, she and Jeanette began home-schooling me. Since neither one of them had jobs anymore, there was plenty of time.
They had both left high school more than a dozen years before. The curriculum had changed drastically in that time, and the public school was sensitive enough to the situation to supply me with brand new textbooks for all my classes. We worked through them together. In math, I was beyond both the textbooks and my mother and Aunt Jeanette. For English and history, they asked my uncle David if he would instruct me, and gave him the textbooks to choose the lessons.
I could see playing teacher again took a lot out of my uncle.
His breathing wasn’t good.
That August he had picked up a respiratory infection. Dr. Fred was treating it with antibiotic without much success. My uncle rarely got out of bed anymore except to be helped to the bathroom. Sometimes his breathing was so laboured it could be heard all the way down the hall. At night I had trouble falling to sleep for the sound of it. I found my own breathing would sync to his, and I would roll over and place my head under the pillow, trying to stop it. My grandmother complained the sound of it kept her from sleeping.
“Jeez, Mom,” said Jeanette. “Why doesn’t he just die and get it over with, right?” The subject of death came up more and more, as if we were all girding ourselves for it, that by mentioning it a lot it would make it more palatable when it finally came.
Despite my uncle’s weakened condition, he made one hell of a teacher. One of the books on the syllabus for that year in grade seven was Lord of the Flies. He made me read it and then we discussed it “in class.”
I loved that book.
The idea that beneath the thin veneer of civilization lay a much older savage reality appealed to me. I’d seen it, when kids my age acted one way in front of adults and entirely another when they weren’t around. The theatre, for example, was one descent into madness. School another. The streets of Advocate, in alleys and parks and anywhere one could be cornered and torn apart, a third. My uncle said the book was “chock full” of symbolism, and the key to understanding the meaning of Golding’s book was to recognize them for what they were.
A symbol, he told me, is the visual representation of an idea.
“A key can be a symbol for freedom, or imprisonment. A rose for love, or sex. An apple is often symbolic of death or poison. Water for creation. The sky for God.”
What I liked about my uncle’s style of teaching is that he did not talk down to me, as so many of the teachers had in my school. He expected me to understand the books we read on their own merits, rather than dissecting them and making them accessible to me by fitting them into my world. I was in Golding’s world when I read, and I had to pay attention. The author was trusting me with a very important truth and wasn’t watering it down. He was letting me have it with both barrels.
I read Lord of the Flies in two days.
I credit my love of literature now to my uncle, who showed me what a privilege it is to be invited into an author’s world and shown his secrets. Every day, when he was feeling up to it, he would ask me into his room and we would discuss the book. He would drill me about what I read. Despite being on the lookout I missed most of the symbolism and my uncle had to explain it.
“What does it mean when the boys build huts and are unable to complete them?” my uncle asked.
I shrugged. I hadn’t noticed this part.
“It’s one of the most obvious symbols in the book, Jacob,” he said. “It’s beginning to break down. Civilization, which has barely taken hold in these young men, is represented here by structure. Construction. The huts symbolize man’s separation from nature, and the fact the boys start to build them and then let them collapse is Golding’s way of showing the lines that separate civilized man from bare savage are already beginning to blur, and they have been there no more than a week.”
“Tell me about Piggy,” I said.
“You tell me about Piggy.”
And so I told my uncle. Piggy was just like me. And Cameron. Different from the rest and always getting picked on.
“True,” said my uncle. “But he also represents reason. There is no place for reason within the heart of primitive man. And so they stone him to death. They obliterate their own higher faculties for the sake of their own savage heart.”
My mother, who once or twice had sat in on these sessions, wondered aloud over dinner one night if Lord of the Flies was not too morbid for a twelve-year-old. My grandmother opined most of the books they taught in schools nowadays were trash. Sex and murder, and she wouldn’t give ten cents for any of them.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said my mother. “But this book does seem a little harsh. What’s the name of the boy they kill?”
“Piggy,” I told her.
“Cute,” said Jeanette.
“They drop a big rock, and push him off a cliff,” I said.
“Oh,” said Aunt Jeanette.
My uncle assured my mother Lord of the Flies was standard reading for Junior High students ev
erywhere. “Better they learn it from a book than on the streets,” he said. “It’s not a hopeful story, but it connects with kids. It teaches something valuable.”
I think my mother let me go on with the lesson because it seemed to be doing Uncle David as much good as it was me. As weak as he was, he seemed to energize slightly when he was teaching again. He could barely talk above a whisper, but his voice became impassioned. That my uncle had loved being a teacher was obvious, even to me. Sometimes he read passages aloud, and made the book come alive. When I read Lord of the Flies again, and I did many times, I could not do so without hearing my uncle’s reedy, rasping voice speaking the words in a stately cadence.
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deanny did go to school that fall. She was not lucky enough, she said, to be kept home by plague or poison. Her entry into grade six was the first foray she made into the Advocate public school system.
She hated it.
“Dorks and wieners,” she told me her first day when she came over to our house after school. My mother made her sit down, got her a snack, and asked her to tell us all about it. The litany of complaint was dizzying in its detail and description. She was in Mrs. Burns’ homeroom. Mrs. Burns had too much black hair piled up on her head in a bun, and looked like a tawdry tart — Deanny’s words. She made Deanny get up in front of the class and introduce herself, and everyone snickered, because they knew she came from Meadow Pond Lane and was as poor as dirt.
Deanny had new clothes that first day. My mother and Jeanette made sure of it. But they made fun of her at recess and noon hour anyway.
One girl had seen Deanny smoking out behind the school at noon hour and threatened to tell a teacher.
“You do,” said Deanny, “and I’ll wipe the blackboard with your face and beat your ears together like erasers.”
This she did not tell my mother. She saved it for me when we went up to my room.
“You’re lucky,” she told me. “I tried to tell my Mom I carried plague too because I went over to your house so much, but she isn’t buying it. Maybe I should tell the principal.”
I admit I enjoyed listening to her. There was little regret in me at not being allowed in school. I hated it almost as much as Deanny, and for the same reasons. The kids. Instead of calling them dorks and wieners, I would have said bullies. The sentiment was the same.
Deanny was a grade behind me, and so was not reading Lord of the Flies. She was reading “some piece of crap book I’ve never heard of by some piece of crap author I’ve never heard of.”
I told Deanny what a wonderful teacher my uncle was. When she came over, always just after school let out at three o’clock, I was released from my studies. We ranged about the town. Deanny was correct that it made no sense to keep me away from the schoolhouse and not her. We hung around so much that whatever I had she was sure to get.
But prejudice, if it is anything, is unreasoning. It consistently kills the Piggys in its midst. I suppose if the principal had to bar students based on association, he would have no one in his school. If what my uncle had was indeed catching everyone would have it by now.
My mother and Jeanette were more concerned with making my uncle comfortable than worrying about the town. The atmosphere, which had been so depressing over the summer, changed. We went into contingency mode. The idea was we would accept this, for the sake of my uncle. We would try to remain cheerful.
Even my grandmother began to rouse herself somewhat. She still was not wanted at town functions and meetings, but she began to bear this stoically. Fall housecleaning went ahead as it always did in September, but with an unusual vengeance. She wanted the attic and the basement and the garage cleaned, and every wall and floor in between. Deanny and I were engaged in this endeavour. Money changed hands.
The cinema still ran matinees, but Deanny and I no longer went to them. We used the opportunity to walk about the town on Saturday afternoons when practically every kid in Advocate was at Milo’s cinema. When they weren’t, we stuck to our neighbourhood and the old mill. We stuffed ourselves on penny candy and potato chips. We played basketball in the garage driveway, using an old peach basket with the bottom removed that we’d nailed above the door. My grandmother complained we were beating the shingles to death with the ball.
We rarely went to Deanny’s house.
It was a wonder her parents remembered they had a daughter, she was there so seldom. Deanny too was now allowed in my uncle’s room. She seemed to amuse him. He would ask her questions just to hear her sarcastic answers, and once or twice she made him laugh so hard he had trouble catching his breath. Deanny claimed to like my uncle.
“He’s got guts,” she told me. “I don’t think I could be so happy if I were in his shoes.”
This made me proud. I was beginning, because of my lessons and all we had been through with him, to claim my uncle as my own.
2
only a few days after we met in Halifax, Pavel calls me up and asks me to dinner at his house. I refuse. Then Deanny calls.
“I’m not going to let you say no,” she says. “He really likes you, Jake. I’m not going to let you ruin this one.”
“It’s his house,” I say. “It’s my invitation.”
“I don’t care,” says Deanny. “You need someone to look after you. Someone to help you make the right decisions. I’m going to hound you until you agree to dinner with Pavel.”
“What will it take for you to stop hounding me?”
“Go to dinner. After that, if nothing happens, I won’t say a word.”
I agree, if only to get Deanny off my back. I borrow my aunt’s car and drive into the city the following Saturday. Pavel does not at all seem phased that Deanny had to force me to see him. He doesn’t mention it. He lives on the second floor of a Victorian home on Inglis Street. His apartment has very few furnishings and lots of books. No tv. He prefers to read, he tells me when I ask. “tv is a form of mind control. If the Romans had had televisions,” he says, “we’d still be ruled by the descendants of Nero.”
I realize for the first time Pavel reminds me slightly of my Uncle David. The thought disturbs me. Dinner is awkward, despite a bottle of wine and constant discussion. I am nervous and Pavel seems so as well. He is not his usual garrulous self. He does take an honest interest in my work. And because I don’t have to talk much about myself, I respond to him, doing the topic justice.
“It is good work,” he says. “But does it not tire you? So much trouble all the time. So much despair?”
“Not really,” I say. “The job has its own rewards.”
“But it is sad, is it not? When you lose someone?”
“Yes, it’s sad. But you get used to it. Find ways of coping.”
This is a lie, and I wonder if Pavel is sensitive enough to know it.
I never quite get over any client I lose.
Each one leaves a fresh wound on my psyche, so that I am now a mass of scar tissue of longing and regret. I take responsibility for each loss. What could I have done differently? How could I have saved them?
It is this, as well as my penchant for getting too close to clients, that makes me ill-suited for my job. When anyone dies at the agency we have a grief circle. Each of us discusses how the loss affects us, how we plan to cope with it, how it will make us better counsellors. I always lie. I am rational and phlegmatic. I give all the right answers, but inside I am seething. Each death is a replay of that first senseless death. Each death is unacceptable to me, and so I lug it around with me like a load upon my back that gets heavier with each passing day. I often worry over the fact that I am in a job that requires distance, perspective, and emotional discipline, when I lack all three. My boss, Anne, is aware of this. We have had many conversations about it, but she has yet to fire me, and I wouldn’t dream, lousy counsellor or not, of quitting.
After dinner, Pavel sits beside me on the sofa in his sparsely furnished living room, and puts some jazz musician I am unfamiliar with on the stereo. He asks me what is wr
ong.
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Dinner was very good.”
“Of course,” Pavel says. “Excellent company.”
“I mean the food. I’d like the recipe for the borscht.”
Pavel ignores this. “I don’t understand you,” he says. “I can’t figure out what you want.”
“In terms of what?” I ask.
“In terms of anything,” Pavel says. “Yourself. Your family. Your work. You seem to be full of contradictions. You give off, how do they say, mixed signals?”
“Ask me what you want to know,” I say. “And I’ll tell you if I can answer.”
Pavel nods. “Okay,” he says. “What do you think of me?”
“I think you’re very nice,” I say automatically. “A wonderful person, really.”
Pavel smiles slightly. “That’s not what I mean.”
“I know,” I say. “But there’s really no point in starting anything, is there? I live in Toronto. You here. My work. Your work.”
“Work is not important,” Pavel says.
“It is to me. It’s my life.”
“To have work as your life is very sad,” says Pavel. “It’s no life at all.”
I do not like where this conversation is going. I feel threatened by it. I’ve had similar discussions with my mother, and I always shut down. I try to explain to Pavel why my work is more important than most. “Lives depend on it,” I say. “Just as minds depend on yours. Would you leave your work if someone asked you to?”
“It depends,” Pavel says. “Who is asking, and what they are offering?”
“Are you offering me something?” I say. The question is forward, but I am annoyed at him. For impugning me. For impugning my job, which is the same thing.
“Perhaps,” says Pavel.
He is staring directly at me now. Unsmiling. Achingly handsome. I feel no compunction to throw myself into his arms, but something in me stirs. Something much deeper and more fundamental than anything that has stirred before. It occurs to me I am an adolescent, experiencing the complicated equations of longing and desire for the first time in my life. I don’t know how to deal with them. I do as I always do. I turn off.