The Question Authority

by Rachel Cline

  I take the photo back to the bedroom and lean it against the wall on top of my dresser, where I can see it from my bed. Let’s see what it feels like to live with her, I think. It can’t be any worse than trying to make her disappear. I lie down beside Tin Man in his cat coma, and hug my pillow. It’s not over, but the part where I meet my shadow at the crossroads is behind me, at least.

  Monday February 23, 2009

  42

  Nora

  On Monday morning, I have three messages on my work phone—all from the same 345 number, someone’s cell phone. It’s unlikely to be any of my usual counterparts. The attorneys who make their livings suing the ED don’t generally work on weekends. Of course, it could be Beth. For all I know she was bluffing about the adjournment and the Singer hearing is still on at eleven. So I call the hearing office, and wait on hold, and find out that that is exactly what she has done.

  I rap on the partition that separates me from Ktanya. I stand on tiptoe so I can see her through the window in our cubicle wall. “That case from last week is on in an hour. What should I do?”

  “Get yourself over to Livingston Street.”

  “And do what?”

  “Represent. Read your notes into the record. At least you’ll have shown up. Chances are your opposing won’t, and then it’s their forfeit.”

  “What if she does?” I ask, meaning “show up” but my phone rings again and it’s the 345 number, so I answer it.

  The hearing room is windowless, dingy, and about the size of the dining room in my grandfather’s apartment. Seated at the far end of a brown, fold-up banquet table is a stenographer, with her machine open in front of her, as well as a bag of Cheez Doodles. She’s wearing a tracksuit. I sit down on one of the rolling office chairs at the near end of the table but it’s missing a wheel, so I switch over to the next one, which has a disconcerting stain on the seat. I smile anxiously at the stenographer, who says, “You’re new.”

  I nod and introduce myself. Her name is Lana some-thing-or-other. I knew, of course, that these hearings were not the same as legal proceedings, that they don’t follow the rules of evidence or procedure the way a real court does, but I was not prepared for this slackness—the thing is supposed to start in less than five minutes and me and Lana are the only ones here. Then the door opens and a mousy-looking woman peeks in, and then shuts the door without entering. “Wrong room, I guess,” I say. Lana says, “No one likes to be the first to show up. It shows weakness or something.”

  I unpack my bag; I figure that at a bare minimum I can read aloud from a great deal of paper. At eleven exactly, a young woman enters—Zadie Collins, owner of the 345 number: a former student of Singer’s. We barely had time to discuss what she might say, and I regret that I did not coach her on what to wear, because she has on leggings in lieu of pants and also a largely transparent yellow shirt underneath which a red bra is evident. She shakes my hand, sits down in the broken chair next to mine, and spends the next three minutes alternately forming her long hair into a sloppy topknot and poking the keys of her cell phone.

  The hearing officer arrives at five after. She is my age, African American, and has an impressive blonde weave as well as a substantial gold crucifix. She nods at Lana and raises an eyebrow at me, ignoring Zadie. “Let’s get started,” she says, at which point Beth enters the room, alone. She nods professionally at the hearing officer, then at the rest of us. When that’s over she trains her gaze on Zadie’s face, smiling a weird mixture of appraisal and approval. The hearing officer formally introduces herself—Katrina Adams—then states the time, the hearing number and Harold Singer’s name. Then she says, “With me are . . .” and the rest of us introduce ourselves. I say my name is Eleanor, and this makes me realize that I am really doing this thing, representing the Education Department and, more specifically, the girl-victims of this teacher who really isn’t Bob Rasmussen, this enemy I’ve never even met.

  Officer Adams refers to him as “the employee” as she reads the individual charges that are meant to add up to his dismissal: accompanied a female ninth-grade student to the lunchroom at such time when neither had cause to be at said place, made unnecessary notations constituting sexual innuendo on the homework of several students, referred to the sexual orientation of another teacher as “equally bent” when confronted by a student about his own behavior, and so on.

  “But wait, doesn’t he have to be here?” I ask. For I have promised Zadie and friends an opportunity to confront their former teacher.

  “I’m afraid not,” says Officer Adams.

  Beth smiles to herself, shaking her head over my naïveté. I do not recognize the sad old friend I met on Saturday, nor the desperate-seeming woman who showed up on the phone last week. We are back to being cutthroat opponents. She will not meet my gaze.

  On my left, Zadie is still monitoring her phone, which she is holding under the edge of the conference table as though this is fooling anyone. She notices me noticing and shows me the screen, which says, “G train fucked,” and she makes a kind of facial shrug. I mouth Put it away and feel like an old fart. But what else do we need to know? The classmates she said she would round up are stuck in Williamsburg. So much for Gina’s “backup singers” strategy.

  “Does the Department have anything to add?” asks Officer Adams. “That’s you,” she adds, after I have looked at her blankly for a moment. And then she says, “I see you have a witness.”

  “Witnesses,” says Zadie.

  “I wasn’t notified of this,” says Beth, calmly.

  “We only made contact this morning,” I say.

  “We’re former students of his,” says Zadie.

  “Objection,” says Beth, as the hearing room door opens and two more young people walk in, a young man and woman. The woman looks around, checking our faces nervously; the man just looks at Beth and smiles a smile of what truly looks like joy.

  “Please take a seat, we’re in session,” says Officer Adams. “And identify yourselves. You first,” she says to Zadie. The two girls give their names. The new one, Meredith, has a large tattoo underneath her clavicle that says “strength” in fancy script. The boy announces himself as Ello Cascarelli. “I use ze, zir, zirself,” he says.

  “What, now?” says Officer Adams.

  “Those are my pronouns. Instead of he you say ‘ze,’ instead of his you say ‘zir’—”

  “We’ll do our best,” says Officer Adams, clearly impatient.

  I stare at Ello, last seen on Facebook as a pretty girl, presumed dead. The charges against Singer from 2002 weren’t upheld because she, the victim, didn’t even show up. Now, as Ello, ze is wearing a jacket and tie, and quite fiercely alive.

  “Harold Singer was my rapist, on numerous occasions in 2001 and 2002, when I was his student at the Hilda Conkling School,” Ello continues, unasked.

  “This is not the matter at hand,” says Beth, irritated.

  “Agreed,” says Officer Adams.

  “He persuaded me that he could cure my gender dysphoria by arousing me sexually,” ze says. “I have a number of handwritten notes from him that will substantiate this claim.”

  “This matter was previously decided,” says Beth.

  The hearing officer is obviously frustrated by this complete departure from procedure, but I can see that she is also interested—perhaps out of prurience, but I suspect also a sense of justice. Who hasn’t dreamt of coming back to face an oppressor with the tables somehow turned?

  “I would ask that the Department’s witnesses be sworn in appropriately so that I may consider their testimony,” she says. “That means you, young . . . person. And you need to pipe down until you’re called on.”

  Beth is shielding her eyes with one hand and scribbling furiously on her yellow pad, but I can tell that she’s not actually writing anything. I know what she looks like when she’s faking. And this, more than anything that comes after, tells me that she has nothing to match this, no more tricks up her sleeve. She was assuming I
wouldn’t get here, wouldn’t put on a case, wouldn’t matter, in the end, but it seems I do.

  After the hearing, I shake hands with Ello, Meredith, and Zadie in the freezing morning air on Livingston Street. Beth has disappeared. “Thank you so much,” I say. “That was so brave.”

  “I just wish I’d been able to do it the first time around,” says Ello.

  “It must be easier as a man,” I say.

  “I’m not a man,” says Ello. “I’m genderqueer.”

  And, I guess because I am so flustered, I then say, “I thought you were dead.” Ze looks horrified, appropriately. “From your friends’ Facebook posts . . .” I try to explain.

  Ello laughs a splendid laugh, linking arms with the others. “My friends are such drama queens,” ze says. “It was all about them, right?”

  “Hey,” says Zadie, “we were fifteen!”

  The wind is so cold my nose is already numb, but they are so adorable and full of life that I ask them to hold on a second while I take their picture. My phone may not be smart, but it does contain a camera and I know that their feeling of triumph is one I want to capture for myself.

  Acknowledgments

  Although the Academy is entirely an invention, the Tis Bottle looks a lot like the Turtle, a volume authored by my own seventh-grade classmates at the now-defunct Woodward School. I am grateful to Sophia Hollander and the brave women she interviewed about their experiences at Woodward for her 2014 Wall Street Journal article “Years of Abuse at Brooklyn School Alleged.”

  I came up with the idea of Nora’s grandfather, the rockstar poet, after reading about Edwin Markham, whose “The Man with the Hoe” was—according to the New York Times—“the most profitable poem ever written” at the time of his death. I used the poem “He Who Loved Beauty” by Alec Brock Stevenson as a starting point for “The Pursuit of Virtue at Brooklyn Heights.”

  Brooklyn Heights is where I grew up and now live, but so much has changed. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn by Suleiman Osman was a helpful (and fascinating) look at the period I was trying to describe.

  I wrote an early draft of this book at Yaddo in the summer of 2011, and though not a sentence survives, I am forever grateful for that experience.

  Since it took me the better part of ten years to write this novel, the number of friends pressed into service to read, reread, encourage, and commiserate is unbearably long. I am indebted to all, but a few deserve special credit: Julie Applebaum, Joe Gioia, Kara Lindstrom, Naomi Rand, Jenny Snider. Thank you, my dear friends!

  Many thanks also to Ann Rittenberg for her interest, effort, and encouragement, and to all at Red Hen Press, for making this book a reality at last.

  Biographical Note

  Rachel Cline, author of the novels What to Keep and My Liar, has written for the New York Times, New York, More, SELF, and Tin House, and is a produced screen and television writer. For five years, she was a screenwriting instructor at the University of Southern California and has taught fiction writing at New York University, Eugene Lang College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a resident at Yaddo, a fellow at Sewanee, and a Girls Write Now mentor. She lives in Brooklyn Heights, a few blocks from where she grew up.