“Are you suggesting Mrs. Codd can’t count?” That sounded like a word game, but they both remained grim-faced. “Something else?”
“We aren’t saying Mrs. Codd’s stealing,” Eddie said. “Just wrong.”
“Eddie’s our class treasurer, too,” Margaret said. “He’d know.”
“You know, class is going to begin in less than a minute, so maybe this discussion—”
“I certainly never let the money I collect out of my sight,” Margaret said, pressing her case as long as she could. “It’s sealed and in my backpack until I take it in. Everybody else does the same. That’s the rule.”
Sometimes my room looks like the aftermath of a natural disaster with objects the students “never let out of their sight” flung in wide arcs around their desks. They have lockers, but they find them inconvenient, or they don’t have time to get to them between or before class. In the dead of winter, the concept of an aisle is lost. Parka-arms and fleece-jacket edges, plus the usual books, backpacks, purses, and lunch bags have a way of creeping out in search of one another.
The sad truth was, anybody could have extracted the money from Margaret’s backpack at any time, removed a wad of cash, and replaced the pilfered packet. Or she, or one of the other collectors, had miscounted. It wasn’t as if we were talking about a school full of mathematical geniuses, even if their hearts were in the right place.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “Suppose I have both of you collect all the homerooms’ donations, then count the money along with Mrs. Codd every day at the start of first period. I’ll write a note giving you permission to be late to my class this week. Would that work?”
They both nodded. “Except that’s about the future,” Eddie said. “What about whoever took that money?”
The odds of finding that out were slim, but I didn’t want to sound hopeless. “We’ll keep working on that. Let’s find out where the money was when, and maybe that’ll show who could have taken it. But meanwhile, when you collect from each homeroom—make sure the class knows who you are and what you’re doing.”
Eddie squinted. “How would that work at flushing out the culprit? And isn’t that kind of dangerous? Kind of setting us up?”
He’d been watching too many crime shows. “This is Philly Prep,” I said. “Not exactly those mean streets. You’re taking the money directly down to the office. What I was hoping to do was let whoever’s been siphoning off funds know that he or she can’t do it anymore.”
“Oh,” they both said softly. Stopping the crime didn’t sound as exciting as catching and punishing the culprit.
“If, in fact, somebody at school has been doing that,” I added. This time, they merely looked around at their classmates sauntering and bopping into the room, and either bored with me, annoyed by my approach, or simply acknowledging that we’d exhausted the topic and had run out of time, they mumbled thanks and moved toward their desks. Margaret immediately was all business, pulling her notebook, A Tale of Two Cities, and a felt-tipped pen out of her book bag, then shoving it in the general direction of the floor under her chair. So much for anything ever being under constant surveillance.
The ninth graders were still in the semi-cowed phase, still slightly tinged with the shame of being the babies of the bunch. Some began copying the vocabulary words into their notebooks while others were still finding their seats. They’d done such things in September and October with a worried, dogged obedience, listening attentively to any cues and clues that would help them survive the next four years. By November, they were picking up a little attitude, and now, with winter break looming, the more precocious among them were practicing how to look bored with and slightly annoyed by anything that goes on in a classroom.
Now, they did what was requested, but with frowns and sighs. With each passing moment that we neared vacation, the enchanted autumn’s mellowness evaporated.
Once they’d copied the words and I’d read them the sentences in which they were found, and together they’d tried to decipher meaning from context, we moved on to a class discussion of the many tantalizing threads at the start of the novel, including the opening segment with its famous lists of opposites and contrasts, “It was the best of…”
That, of course, made me think of Dennis-the-Jerk, but I forced him out of my consciousness, replacing him with starving French peasants and long-lost fathers. We had to talk about history, something my classes never comfortably accept as having any relevance to the English curriculum. Of course, the ninth graders were still too timid to say so directly, so we had a reasonably good talk about the era, the simmering violence in France, the way Dickens foreshadowed a future of great bloodshed, and conditions in England where the coach’s passengers feared the messenger might be a highwayman. To my enormous relief, when they understood that the book’s story began in 1775, they correctly surmised what the “messages…from a congress of British subjects in America” were. Some history had sunk in.
We talked about violent times when the accepted order stops being automatically accepted. “‘Jacques’ was the revolutionaries’ code name for one another. Four hundred years earlier, the peasants had revolted, and the royals dismissed them as ‘Jacques,’ a common name. Calling all of them that one name was meant to show they weren’t unique human beings, just a mass of ordinary nothings. The revolutionary peasants adopted the name ‘Jacques’ for themselves, and four hundred years later, the time of this novel, they’re still using the name.”
That idea of making a taunt a proud slogan intrigued most of the class, though I did see a bit of side action at the rear of the room, as a folded note was flicked to the floor, swooped up by the boy across the aisle, who read it, flicked a glance my way, then lowered his eyelids in exquisite boredom and shrugged. The body language saved him the time and energy that holding up a gigantic sign reading: WHO CARES? would have expended.
I concentrated on the ones who did care, at least a little.
As she was leaving the room, Margaret came back to my desk, dragging Eddie behind her. “We were just thinking,” she said, “that it’s kind of our own Tale of Two Cities, isn’t it?”
“Isn’t what?”
“Here. Philadelphia and New Orleans.”
It was, I thought. Here, and at home.
“That’s why the money’s so important,” Margaret said. “So thanks for helping us. And that other city.” Then she winked and smiled and pulled Eddie out of the room.
They were definitely a couple, even if he didn’t know it yet. And Margaret should think about running for elected office.
At noon, having gotten through the French Revolution and S.A.T. preparation the next period, and the subjunctive-and-gerunds hour after that, I walked out to the front steps, where reception was better, and phoned Mackenzie. “Change of plans,” I said. “Turns out I promised—or at least Sasha says I did—to be in Bordentown this afternoon. Cleaning out—tossing—Phoebe’s treasures so that a house-buyer can see the actual walls and surfaces.”
He had no problems with it. He’d use the time to study, and that would be fine, as long as I didn’t “rescue” any throwaways. He was probably relieved. He needed the time, always needed it. I knew that, in addition to hitting the books, he’d be on his cell to Louisiana, and thanks be for the toll-free calls. And when he wasn’t phoning, he’d be online, trying to help via e-mail. I knew Sasha wanted the great detective, not his lowly apprentice, but no matter how she might feel about it, I’d do the actual legwork for this labor of love.
He was still talking, sounding down. He’d spoken with his mother’s eighty-five-year-old cousin, who had not only lost his home but the land it stood on, which had become a permanent wetland. Nobody could think of a good solution, although the eighty-five-year-old had been chuckling about the ridiculousness of it, Mackenzie said.
Shortly after, we clicked off and were back in our separate worlds. I walked into the school’s large entry hall bucking lunchtime traffic, and the folly of my directio
n was proven when a navy, hooded parka barreled into me.
“Sorry!” he said.
“Jonesy?” I said when I could see his face.
“Yeah. Sorry.” He looked at the door. “Didn’t see you.”
“Those hoods make it hard,” I said. “I didn’t get a chance to say good-bye on Sunday, to thank you for coming.”
He looked as if he were dying to say, “And your point is?”
“Well,” I said lamely, “I guess this is my chance. It was nice of you to come.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t exactly have an option.”
“Did you know Phoebe Ennis?”
He sighed. “Kind of. When I was with my dad. She was around when I got to his apartment.” He shrugged. I am constantly amazed by the acute discomfort teens who brag and lie—I hope—about their own experience and prowess show when touching, even peripherally, on the subject of their parents’ private lives. I nodded and let the subject go.
Besides, the tide of humans was against me, and I was keeping him from wherever he’d been headed, and I wasn’t sure why. I could have asked him why he was voluntarily going out into the damp cold, but that would have sounded so geriatric. Besides, he’d probably have told me, and I already knew the answer: frostbite and freedom were better than any heated schoolhouse. “Nice to see you again,” I said.
“Yeah.” The parka hood nodded and moved off.
I turned and went into the office to speak with Opal about the hurricane money. Also, of course, for the thrill of reading the blather that had made its way into my inbox since morning.
I was still surprised, each time, by the sight of our newest school secretary. Today, as always in my experience, she was smiling, the first surprise, given past experience. She was a tiny woman, and she seemed still smaller when she stood behind the divider. “Yes, dear,” she said, “can I help you?”
Helpful. The second surprise.
Opal looked freshly minted from a child’s storybook. The reason I’d grabbed for the stupid “sounds like Miss Odd” was that otherwise, when I thought of her, the name Miss Tiddly-something popped up. Her gray hair was pulled up and back in a bun, tendrils escaping and waving around her round face no matter what she did. She wore aptly-named granny glasses—she had “one dozen grands,” she’d told me with one of her smiles—and long-sleeved dresses, the skirts mid-calf. She was efficient, cheery, and did not seem fazed by the student body or worried about our school’s depressing secretarial turnover. She’d been retired from a lifetime of exemplary office work when a relative of a friend of a school parent called to say Philly Prep once again needed a secretary.
She had an air about her that suggested she’d likely as not whip a freshly baked pie from her computer. “So glad to be busy again!” she’d said when she was hired. “I thought I’d go insane sitting home. There is just so much gardening and lunching and book clubbing and grand-sitting that one woman wants to do. And Mr. Codd being home as well, well, oh my!”
That had been only a matter of one week ago, but she’d bustled in and gotten the hang of the system within minutes.
All the same, hurricane money was probably missing.
“You know a petite ninth grader named Margaret Burbidge?” I asked her.
She nodded. “Mite of a thing, isn’t she? Cute. And proud of this hurricane project, isn’t she? She’s been in here, along with that sweet young man—”
“Eddie Schneider?”
“Yes. Him. I think he’s sweet on her. The two of them have been in asking about how much we have so far. Nice that young people are concerned about the welfare of strangers.” She smiled again, and there was no way I could envision her siphoning funds out of the collections.
“I think they’d love to be still more involved, and it’s good training. I was wondering if you could help them out. They’re going to be collecting all the funds—going from classroom to classroom—each morning, and so far, they’ve been doing the math in their heads. Eddie’s head, actually. A guesstimate, I’m sure, but they’re concerned about how they’re doing with calculating the total sums turned in to the office and wondered whether they could be here when the count is made.”
That sentence emerged with such loops and convolutions, I hoped it made sense. And then again, I hoped it didn’t. I didn’t want Opal to suspect for a moment what had been suggested.
“The count would be made under your supervision, of course. That might help them get things straight.” That was about as non-threatening a way of framing their suspicions as I could come up with.
The lines that always crisscrossed Opal’s face rearranged into confused hatch-marks, but she nodded. “Of course! But I do that final count during first period, and they’ll miss a bit of class.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s my class, and it’s only for this week.”
I thanked her and went to pick up my mail, though I wasn’t sure why we called it that. It was seldom actual letters. “Picking up my junk,” “picking up recycling-bin fodder,” or “picking up today’s detritus” would all have been closer to the truth.
Opal was looking beyond me, through the open doorway into the hallway, where the exodus had subsided, those students with this lunch hour presumably now wherever they intended to be. “Funny how things change,” she said. She waited for me to respond, even though I’d thought it was a rhetorical comment.
“Yes,” I said, flipping through a Xeroxed news story about a young man who’d conquered a physical disability, near-starvation, homelessness, and a precocious bout of alcoholism to go on to win a college scholarship. The headmaster, Maurice Havermeyer, who was maintaining his record for never once coming up with a good idea, had scrawled across the top, “Good story to inspire our youth!”
I could just imagine the response. The young man in the article deserved praise and respect. He would not get it if I read this story to my classes. They’d be intrigued by the alcoholism, not the recovery.
“In my day, it meant you were a bad boy. The kind your mother didn’t want you to associate with.”
I untangled Opal’s sentence. Two boys were involved. One bad, one told not to associate with him. Or perhaps one bad boy and one girl whose mother didn’t want her associating with him. But I still didn’t know what she was talking about.
She saw my puzzlement. “Gambling!” she said. “A ‘poker-playing man,’ they’d say, meaning a gambler.” She shook her head and pursed her mouth. “Code for up to no good in my day.” Then her features relaxed. She must have been a pretty, delicate young woman, and she was still attractive, even with accordion-pleated skin. “Nowadays, it’s a fad! It’s fashionable. Look at these boys, the crème de la crème!”
Hardly. We were a school filled with intellectual skim milk, not cream.
She sighed. “I know I’m out of touch with this modern world because Mr. Codd watches the poker tournaments on TV, too. Loves them, and I’m sure those boys do, too. Besides, who knows better than the administration—”
I was proud of myself for not informing her that pretty much everybody knew better than our administration.
“—and obviously, Dr. Havermeyer and his board aren’t perturbed by it.”
“By poker playing?” Poker held no interest for me. I’m not great with numbers, and I can’t remember what was played or what to do about it. I thereby infuriate everyone else in the game, and bore myself. So I responded to Mrs. Codd out of politeness, not interest. “Why would they be?”
“Well, the way our boys—it is almost all boys—play so much. Noon, and after school, and for all I know, into the night.”
“Here? In the building?” How had she noticed and understood so much in a week, and why hadn’t I?
“Not inside the school.” She shook her head. The silver tendrils swayed with her motion. “Our archididascalos forbids it,” she said, then she chuckled.
“Mrs. Codd—”
“Opal, please!”
“Archididascalos?”
&n
bsp; Another chuckle. “I like a little sparkle in my sentences, so I’m studying up. Need a better vocabulary now that I’m here in a place of higher learning. Need to set an example.”
“And archididascalos?”
“School principal. Dr. Havermeyer.”
“I’ve never heard that term before.”
“Few have, alas. And amazingly, it’s not in every dictionary, but it is a perfectly good word.”
Perhaps so, but I didn’t see the point of a word that obscured meaning rather than clarified it. Perhaps that was evidence only of my ignorance.
“Put his foot down, as I understand,” she said. “The woman who was here before me? That lovely young woman?” She paused, brow creased.
“Harriet Rummel,” I prompted.
“Yes,” she said with another of her smiles. “She was so kind to stay a day and train me, and she told me the rule about no playing in school. It’s the gambling part, you know, not the playing itself, that’s so worrisome.”
“Times do change,” I murmured. I felt mildly queasy about kids rushing off to play poker in the cold. Queasier still that I’d been unaware of it till now. Still, I knew watching poker on TV or playing it online was almost a mania, and I wasn’t surprised. Or particularly interested.
“Harriet was a sweet young thing, wasn’t she?” Opal Codd said. “And so deeply in love. I do hope things worked out for them.”
Our last secretary had been engaged to a man who was so preoccupied with finding himself and following his bliss that he was rarely to be seen. They’d been engaged for over a decade, and still, he was lost. He’d thought he’d found himself at taxidermy school, but after nearly completing his course of study, he apparently had been chastised for misstuffing a wildcat. “You’re a clown,” the instructor had said, and he took it to be an omen and a portent.
Harriet followed him to Florida, to Clown School, sure that once there and settled in—and while she continued as always to support him—they would wed.
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