Archives for July 2013

Chapter 43

When Ron got home that afternoon, he heard his phone ringing as he climbed the stairs. By the time he had gotten inside the door it had stopped. He put down his bag and took off his coat and then it started ringing again.

“Hello.”

“Ronald,” said a low and husky voice. “This is Lois.”

Ron’s brow furrowed. “Yes,” he said tentatively.

“Your mother is in the hospital. She’s had a heart attack.”

A cold rush like ice water flushed through his body and then he felt his face starting to get hot. “Where is she?”

“Mountainside.”

“I’m on my way.”

He drove like traffic signals and speed limits didn’t matter. He had one thought and it pounded in his head. Get there! Get there! He parked his car in the Emergency Room parking area and ran into the hospital. He had forgotten his jacket but didn’t feel the cold. His face was flushed and his eyes were darting in one direction after the other. He went to the desk.

“I just heard that my mother has had a heart attack,” he said breathlessly to the matronly woman with white hair who sat in back of the desk.

“What is the patient’s name?” she said without showing any kind of emotion. Ron hated her instantly.

“Marjorie Bombasco,” said Ron, biting the words off and showing his teeth.

The woman leafed through the pages of a notebook and then the phone rang and she stopped to answer it. Ron gripped the counter hard, his fingers turning white. Then he saw Lois standing at the other end of the hall and started running towards her. People’s heads turned as he raced by. The security officer started to move in his direction but Ron had already reached Lois and stopped.

“They’re bringing her upstairs,” Lois said. She was fighting back tears and losing the battle.

“What do they say? Who is the doctor?”

Ron felt a hand on his shoulder and whirled on the security guard.

“What?” he said. His fists clenched.

The guard looked passed him to Lois. “Is everything ok, Ma’am?”

Ron shrugged his shoulder away from the grip.

“His mother just had a heart attack,” said Lois.

The guard nodded and took a step back away from Ron. “You have to calm down, Sir. You aren’t going to do your mother or yourself any good by getting all riled up.”

Ron tried to get hold of himself. He nodded. “OK, OK,” he said.

“Ronald, she wants me to go home and get her some things. She is very scared. I told her that you would be here.”

Ron looked around as if he could find his mother in one of these rooms. Everything was moving very fast.

“Sir,” said the security guard. “Just take a moment before you run upstairs. You look pretty upset and you don’t want your mom to be frightened by the sight of you.”

Ron took a long deep breath and forced himself to relax and to breathe. Then he said, “She couldn’t possibly be any more frightened than she is right now.”

The Cardiac Care Unit or CCU was for intense care. Ron found Marjorie lying on her back, the hospital bed raised in the back, staring at the machines that depicted the regularity of her heartbeat, her blood pressure and a number of other things that Ron did not understand. She looked up at him with the face of a frightened little girl, her eyes wide with wonder and terror. She did not smile when she saw him but tears started rolling down her cheeks. “Bruzzer,” she said, “look what happened to me.”

“How did this happen, Mom?”

“I don’t know. I was at the ceramics shop. I have been so nervous lately I had this pain in my chest and I told Bumpy that I thought that I needed to go to the hospital.” She stopped and looked into his face. “I don’t like it here. I want to go home.”

“I know,” said Ron, sitting down on a chair next to the bed, “but we can’t do that right now. You need to be here, but I’ll stay with you.” He reached out and took her left hand. She squeezed his fingers weakly.

“I don’t want to be like this,” she said and a sob came out of her chest.

It frightened Ron. His mother’s fears were always her worst enemy. And hospitals were one of her nightmares. “But Mom, it’s important to be smart right now. I know how upset you are. You know that I know.”

She looked at him and nodded in understanding. He had been her partner when she went through the hardest times of her adult life. Maybe he had only been a boy for most of them, but they had forced him to accept certain responsibilities and roles and she had grown to trust him and she needed someone to trust right now and he was one of the only people in the world who filled the bill.

“Do you know the name of the doctor who is treating you?”

She shook her head. “When we left the store, we couldn’t get the car out. It was blocked in by people who had double parked. We blew the horn over and over but no one came out. You know how that neighborhood is.”

Ron nodded and cursed the neighborhood silently. The loudmouthed jerks who parked wherever they wanted because some Uncle or Cousin knew somebody who would make everything right if there was ever any trouble.

“Finally, someone came out and by then the pain was so bad. It hurt so much, Bruzzer.” She began to sob again.

Ron squeezed her fingers and said, “OK, I understand.”

“When we finally did get out, we drove to Dr. Gunders office and he saw me right away but he said that he thought that I was having a heart attack and that I should get to the hospital.”

Ron snorted. “He didn’t call an ambulance?”

“No ambulance,” she said shaking her head from side to side on the pillow and then she caught sight of the monitors again and just stared at them.

Ron understood immediately. The doctor had wanted to get an ambulance but she hot gotten so upset that he thought it was worse to upset her in the condition that she was in. So he had told her to drive to the hospital. To Ron’s way of thinking, he should have gone along with her, but he knew that was expecting too much.

“When I got here, they took me right away and now I’m here.”

“And this is a good place for you to be. It’s a good hospital and they have good doctors. It isn’t Clara Mass, where you can get on the staff by being somebody’s whatever.”

Marjorie nodded.

Dr. Jacob Gutberg appeared in the doorway and looked at Ron and then at Marjorie. He was a short bald man with dark glasses a white coat and a pocket protector from which stuck a number a single slender silver pen. He moved to Marjorie and said softly, “How are you feeling?”

Marjorie smiled and took a breath. She tried to laugh. “I’m very scared, doctor.”

“I can understand that Mrs. Bombasco but we’re going to get you all better and on your feet in no time as long as you are able to do as we say.”

“I just want to go home, doctor.”

“I’m afraid that isn’t possible right now. You know that you have had an episode. We think that it might have been a heart attack. What a heart attack means is that a little piece of your heart stopped working. The rest of your heart took over and right now your heart is working fairly well considering what it has been through, but we are going to keep you in this unit for the next few days to monitor you and to make sure that you heart is doing what it should be doing to heal itself.”

“And then I can go home?”

“Then we can begin to talk about what treatment options we have, Mrs. Bombasco.  This is a serious situation and the hospital and I would not be doing our jobs correctly if we sent you home right now. It would not be in your best interest.”

Marjorie nodded. The tears began rolling down her cheeks again. Ron looked at her and then over at the doctor. They made eye contact.

“Are you a relative?”

Marjorie spoke before Ron was able to say anything. “This is my son, Ronald.”

“Good to meet you Ronald. I’m doctor Gutberg. I was on duty when your Mom came in. Do you know if she has a cardiologist?”

“No,” said Ron, “just a regular doctor.”

Jacob Gutberg raised his eyebrows. “Well she is going to need a cardiologist now. Mrs. Bombasco, we’ve given you something for the pain but maybe we should give you a sedative to help to calm you.”

“I don’t want to lose control.”

The doctor smiled. “You won’t lose control of anything. You will just feel more relaxed. Being frightened will more likely cause you to lose control than being calm.”

Ron liked the doctor’s approach. He was straightforward and at the same time soothing.

“Have you ever taken tranquilizers?”

“I took Librium 10 for a long time, but not recently,” said Marjorie.

“Ok, that’s an old drug. We will give you something very much the same only a bit more up to date.”

When the doctor stepped out into the hallway, Ron followed him.

“How is she, doctor?”

“It’s too soon to tell but what I said about the next couple of days is important. Sometimes one of these attacks is followed by a second one. When she gets through the next 48 hours, I will be more confident.”

“Could she die?”

“There are, as I’m sure that you know, fatalities connected with heart attacks. We have to just wait and see.”

Ron stayed with her and they talked about familiar topics and told old stories.  The time that she had wanted to go down to the shore and had started getting nervous before they even got on the parkway and how he talked to her and soothed her and talked her exit by exit, telling her that she could turn off again in just a couple of miles if she needed to but that she was doing so well and that she could get there. How he told her that she could do it and that after a while that she had believed him and heard nothing but his voice as he kept it up. Kept talking to her mile after mile, telling her how brave she was and how much he loved her. Marjorie smiled and closed her eyes and pretended that she was in the car with him again. He held her hand and then he told the stories about how he used to meet her after work every night. She asked him to tell her about some of the movies that they saw together.

“I remember that you used to get great movie passes and we would go to Woolworths and buy sandwiches and sneak them into the movies. I remember that when we saw West Side Story we sat in the front row of the balcony. We ate our sandwiches and watched the huge screen and the way that the movie started with the helicopter and the different buildings and then the playground and the guy snapping his fingers.”

She squeezed his hand. “You’ve got some memory.”

“Those were very happy times,” said Ron. “But we were so poor, Mom. We weren’t even sure that we could make the rent on the apartment and here we were going to the movies.”

“We were poor but we had fun and we enjoyed each other’s company so much. I wanted to be with you more than I wanted to be with anyone in the world. I never treated you like a little boy. Who could treat you like a little boy with that brain and that vocabulary?”

Ron laughed and patted her hand. “My brain didn’t make me older, Mom.”

“But it made it feel like you were older. I could talk to you about anything and you understood.”

It was dark by the time that Lois came back with her things. Ron had watched as she picked at her dinner and made faces at the taste of everything. Lois went through the list of the things that she had gotten for Marjorie.

Then Lois said, “George was at the house.”

Ron’s face hardened. “Did you tell him?”

Lois nodded. “Yes, he said that he hoped that you felt better.”

Marjorie began to weep again. Ron said, “That’s not going to help anything Mom.”

Marjorie said, “Why does have to be such a cold hearted bastard?”

Lois said, “That just what he is, that’s all.”

Ron said quietly, “Listen Mom, it’s getting late. I have to go and you should rest. I’ll be back in the morning.”

“What about work?” said Marjorie.

“I’m gonna take the day off. I haven’t taken a sick day since I started there.”

“Don’t get into trouble Bruzzer.”

“There won’t be any trouble,” said Ron.

He kissed her goodnight. Lois said that she was going to stay with her until they made her leave. Ron nodded.

 

Chapter 42

 

Ron’s technique for doing the play was one that he’d thought out. He had tried having the students read the play out loud in class, assigning each of them a role. But the language was too difficult and the girls had struggled with it and not enjoyed the experience. That was when he went to the Bloomfield Public Library and found that they had recordings of all of Shakespeare’s plays. From then on, he played the recording while he and the girls followed along and listened to the actors read their parts as they were meant to be heard. He would frequently stop the recording to discuss what they had just read and listened to.  But today he had a new approach to start with.

“How many of you have heard of Bruce Springsteen?” he asked at the start of the class. A few scattered hands went up into the air and Ron saw immediately that they were not the hands of the Spanish speaking girls. “I want you to listen to these words,” he said. Then immediately he changed his mind and turned to the blackboard and wrote as it scribbled, printing in large block letters that pressed hard into the chalkboard and reciting as he wrote.

“All men want to be rich and rich men want to be king and a king ain’t satisfied until he controls everything.” Then he turned back to them and let the words sink in. Then he repeated it slowly and underlined each word as he spoke. What do you think of that?” he said.

“I don’t think that all men want to be rich,” said Patricia Nieves.

“You don’t?” said Ron.

“I think some men want to be rich but some people just want to be happy. If they can be rich and happy, that’s great. But they would not want to be rich and unhappy.”

Ron stopped. He smiled. “That was an incredibly insightful thing of you to say.”

The girl beamed and wiggled in her chair for him.

“But,” said Barbara, don’t most people think that being rich is what will make them happy?”

Ron smiled again. This was going to be a good day. The girls washed away all thoughts of the previous night like they were bugs that were stuck on his windshield and they had an incredibly powerful squeegee and just slid them away like easy stains on glass.

“Once you get on that bandwagon though, it might be hard to stop,” said Ron. “Mac was happy. He was loyal. He was living comfortably. Why did he need more?’

“Cause his wife was a witch with a b,” said Imelda.

Ron wondered if she had made the reference to calling Lady Macbeth a witch on purpose or if she had just stumbled into it. Then a thought hit him and it silenced him. “Let’s listen for a moment,” he said and started the play.

It didn’t matter if it was on purpose. How many thoughts had he stumbled into? They were still his thoughts. Afterwards he would reflect upon them and think  ‘damn, how did I think of that?’ but he had grown to accept that it was what happened to him while he was being Mr. Tuck in front of  his classroom. Maybe it was the same for them. And then the refrain, ‘Time and place and people’ went through his mind again and he stopped the recording perfectly at the end of the scene.

 

Chapter 41

 

“Motif is a literary term that means,” Ron turned to write on the chalkboard as he spoke, “a repeating theme or image that gathers significance as it is repeated.” He wasn’t sure that was the dictionary definition but he knew that it wasn’t far from being the truth. “Shakespeare uses lots of motifs in Macbeth. One is clothing. The way that people’s clothes are described as fitting them and the way that people’s lives are described with images of clothing is one of the motifs. Mac says, ‘Why do you dress in borrowed robes?’ when the witches first call him the Thane of Cawdor. Now what are some of the motifs that use clothing that we use today?”

Connie raised her hand. Smiling she said, “That girl dresses like a slut.”

The girls laughed their nervous laughter when one of them made a reference to sex. Ron stopped as if he had been frozen by the comment. “Now that’s not exactly what I had in mind.” The girls laughed again.

Barbra raised her hand. “Is it like when we call the nuns penguins?”

She said it in a hushed voice and the class was quiet after she said it.

Ron smiled a big grin. “That’s it exactly! Now that image is considered a bit insulting, but that is exactly what I am talking about. What do we learn about people from their clothes?”

Immelda said, “Whether or not they have any taste.”

The girls were in a comfort zone again and laughed merrily.

“Whether or not they have money,” said Barbara.

“Sometimes,” said Ron, “but people make lots of mistakes by judging others based on their clothes, don’t they?”

The girls nodded but Ron knew that they didn’t believe him. He knew that they judged everyone by the appearance that person made, maybe more than any one single thing.

Connie had a devilish look on her face. “What about the way that you dress, Mr. Tuck?”

Ron paused dramatically. He stood close to the girl’s desk and said with feigned sternness that they knew by now was not actually real, “And what about the way that I dress?”

More giggles.

Connie was silent as if his nearness had taken away her courage but Immelda, who Ron had cast as the traitor, said. “It is kind of corny.” Then she added quickly. “I’m not saying that you are corny, Mr. Tuck but the way that you dress is.”

Ron smiled. “And what is so corny about it?”

Carmella said. “A pale green leisure suit, Mr. Tuck. Are you really asking us what is corny about that?”

The girls cracked up. They laughed really hard and Ron laughed with them. Then he said, “Well Carmella, the truth is that I didn’t have anything to really wear when I got this job. I spent my life living in jeans t-shirts and work shirts. So when I got hired here, my stepfather gave me some clothes.” Then he repeated. “Borrowed robes. What does that mean?”

Connie said, “What do you call it… hand downs.”

“The phrase is hand-me-downs and that is exactly right. So what does it mean?”

Connie said, “Is Mac insulted because he thinks that they are saying that he is poor?”

“Not exactly,” said Ron, “but you’re on the right track.”

Then Barbara’s face lit up. Without raising her hand she said, “Why are you saying that I’m something that I am not.”

“Perfect!” exclaimed Ron and he smiled triumphantly at the girl.

Barbara continued, “Cause you aren’t corny even if you look like you are.” And then everyone, including Ron, laughed too.

 

That afternoon Ron drove up to meet James Devin. He was a tall kid and very pale. His hair was dark and curly and piled up on his head. He answered the door promptly and called up to his mother saying that the tutor was here. She answered with an OK, but Ron was a bit surprised that she didn’t come downstairs to meet him. He made a mental note to stop upstairs and say good-bye to her unless she came down during the lesson. For some reason, Ron expected him to be disheveled but his shirt was neatly pressed and so were his jeans. They even had creases. Then Ron looked down and saw that James was wearing purple flip-flops and that his toenails were painted black. He made a mental note. It was the kind of detail that Charlie would want to know.

The young man’s voice was very soft. He caught Ron up on where he was in each of his classes and slowly Ron reviewed each of the assignments that the teachers had provided. He was annoyed when James told him twice that he had already done the assignment that had been given to Ron.

“We did that before I stopped attending,” James said in a voice that Ron thought seemed dignified.

“OK,” said Ron. “I’ll work on getting you new assignments but in the meantime do this.” Ron looked ahead in both the history and English books and assigned the next story or chapter along with the study guide questions that accompanied it. It was a boring approach and Ron knew it, but it was also what the teachers wanted to see.  Ron had the feeling that it was also what they did in their classes. He knew that when he talked to the kid about the chapters or stories that it was then that there might be an opportunity for some learning to take place.

About forty-five minutes into the review of where James was with his studies, Mrs. Devin came down the stairs. She was shockingly pretty. Ron smiled and stood up but James just sat back and seemed to shrink.

“I’m Sheila Devin,” she said extending her hand.

Ron took her hand and found it warm and dry and soft. He introduced himself. And they both remained standing while Ron reviewed the rules of Home Instruction. She nodded from time to time and said that there would be no problem for her to be home for each of his visits. Ron scheduled him for two days during the week and a Saturday appointment.  James seemed to grow smaller and smaller as the conversation continued. When Mrs. Devin left, James had actually brought his knees up to his chest and turned on his side facing away from Ron. One flip-flop was dangling off the end of his foot. He did not respond to Ron’s first question.

Finally he said in a voice that was barely audible, “Did they tell you why I am at home?”

“They told me that you had trouble leaving the house.”

“That’s a joke,” said the boy.

“What do you mean?”

“I never leave the house. I never leave the basement.”

“You will,” said Ron.

“Sure,” said James. “I will.”

Ron tried to turn the conversation back to history but James didn’t respond. Ron said, “Why don’t we call it a day. You have plenty of work to do.”

“Will you come back or am I too much of a freak?”

“I don’t think you’re a freak at all,” said Ron.

“Yeah, right,” said James his voice trailing off.

He did not get up to see Ron out the door.

 

When Ron drove back to his house, he checked his mailbox as he normally did. He was surprised to see that he had mail. Usually when his checks came from tutoring, he knew to be expecting them, but he had just gotten that check last week. This was a postcard and Ron was half expecting that it was some advertisement until he recognized the handwriting on the other side.

Ron,

I won’t be coming to visit. I have decided to move in with Keith. Good luck.

Robin

He turned the card back over to the front and saw that it was a picture of the Guthrie Theater. He turned it to the back and reread it. He walked up his stairs heavily and found a small plate in front of his door with four cookies that were wrapped in a napkin . He opened the door and went in and threw the cookies and the postcard into the garbage.

He walked into the front room and then walked back out to the kitchen. He just couldn’t face being alone in the apartment right then. He dropped the book-bag that was still slung over his shoulder onto his kitchen table, locked his door and went back down the stairs.

He turned on his car and began to drive not sure where he was going. Then he was on the Parkway and heading south.  At first he thought that he was going to drive to Rahway, but quickly he knew that was a silly idea. He thought about how he developed an attachment to people and places and how once the people were gone, he revisited the places hoping for the same feeling to still be there. He found that it was people and place and time and when all three did not come together, then it was different.

He got off the parkway at Elizabeth and drove down to Cherry Street where he and Robin had lived in their last apartment in New Jersey together. His car rolled passed the place slowly and he looked and saw a weird familiarity combined with an emptiness that reassured him of his earlier thoughts: people and places and time. Now the place just had ghosts. The car continued down the street and went passed his old apartment. An image of the fire sprang up in back of his eyes and seemed to be calling to him. He continued down the street and turned off onto a main street and realized why he had come here.

The French Maid was a go-go bar.  Ron had not been able to afford to go to it when he lived in Elizabeth but now he had extra money from tutoring and he could not remember the last time that he had been with a girl. He wanted to sit in the dark with some wine and stare at them gyrating on the stage and imagine that they were twisting and wiggling for him as he listened to the loud bar songs.

He walked into the club and the music almost blew him back out the door. It blared painfully loud. The room was filled with a haze of smoke and spotlights burned down on the rectangular stage. There was a pole on each end of the stage and 3 girls wearing G-strings and tiny bras were twisting and turning to the incredibly loud sound. Ron slid into bar chair and almost immediately a barmaid in French Maid t-shirt was in front of him putting down a cocktail napkin. She was chewing gum and had short dark hair.

“What can I get you, honey?”

“Some white wine please,” said Ron.

She was gone in a wink and back with a large tumbler that was filled to the brim with white wine. Ron laid a twenty dollar bill down on the bar and it too disappeared almost before it hit the wood. When she returned with his change it was all in single dollars.

Ron sipped and sat back to watch. Slowly his eyes and ears adjusted. He drank from the glass again. One of the dancers was in front of him and shimmying her hips back and forth and smiling down at him. Ron watched her and grinned back. She stayed on the ends of his eyes for about ten seconds and then she strutted away proudly and took up position in front of another guy. Ron watched as the guy stared at her and then saw the man take a dollar bill and hold it out. The dancer sat on the bar floor and then hopped down and held her breasts out to the dollar bill. The guy slipped it between them and the girl squeezed them closed on it and then hopped back up on the stage. Ron thought, so that’s how it’s done. The girl stood in front of the man who had given her the dollar and then turned and bent over and looked at him from between her spread legs. She waved to the guy and then moved away, strutting and moving her eyes down the bar. As Ron watched, he saw a pattern develop. Two of the girls would dance against the poles and on the stage but the 3^rd girl would walk along the bar and deftly pull the skimpy bra to the sides revealing her nipples to the men who would then slide the bill towards her.  She would clasp it in her fingers and then squeeze her breasts alongside them as she moved on to the next man. A girl could get called down for a tip, but then she went right back up on stage until it was her turn in the rotation to work the bar. Not every guy would tip her and as she moved along the bar she would smile and wiggle and watch to see if the man’s hand moved towards his money. If it did not she would toss her head to the side like she was discarding him and move to the next patron.

The bar walk signaled the end of her set and then she would disappear and a new girl would come out and begin to work a pole walk the stage and one of the other girls would come down from the stage and begin to work the bar. It was continuous.

Ron waited nervously as he saw the girl coming to his side of the bar and beginning to make her way from one stack of bills to the other. He reached out dutifully and folded his bill lengthwise and when the redhead was in front of him and standing straight and wiggling her shoulders and making her breasts shake back and forth, he extended his arm. The bill projected out from his fingers and poked her in the chest as she leaned towards him. She clasped and smiled for him. He had been awkward and didn’t get a chance to feel her smooth breasts slide along his fingers. He would do better next time. The hour went by in a comfortable haze of light and sound and wine.

 

 

 

Chapter 40

Ron’s tutoring appointments were sporadic. The process was involved. He would get a call from the Learning Disabilities Testing Coordinator or the LDTC as she was known and then he would go in and meet with her to get his assignment. The length of time that the students were on what was called “bedside instruction” varied depending upon their injury or condition. In the winter months, he would wind up tutoring every afternoon and sometimes all day on Saturdays. The money was nice. It was far more than he was being paid at the school but there was a catch. Ron was not certified and Quimpy had made arrangements for this lack of credentials never to be mentioned. It was Quimpy whose job it was to keep a record of the certificates and so Ron’s was never mentioned. The plan was that if he was ever asked that he would admit that he had lied and Quimpy would say that he thought that his secretary had kept them all on file and would have mentioned it to him if there was a problem.

Mostly Ron was given the kids who had been excluded from school because they had drug problems. The Superintendent’s strategy was just to keep those kids on bedside indefinitely.  But this afternoon’s case was different. Ron was ushered into the office of the school’s psychiatrist and sat with him and the LDTC.

Charles Rothstein had been doing the job of school psychiatrist for about twenty years. He was a thin man with a very short gray beard and closely cropped hair. He spoke with a New York accent that Ron placed somewhere like Brooklyn. Charley began by asking Ron about his other two cases.

“So how are the fuck-ups doing?”

Ron smiled and shook his head. “Well they show up most of the time, but the only work that gets done, gets done while I am there with them. They don’t really believe in homework.”

“If they understood what school was about in the first place they wouldn’t be in this situation would they, Ron?”

“I don’t know,” said Ron. “They aren’t bad kids. They’re just, like you said, fuckups.”

Charlie nodded and teased, “And that’s why Quimpy recommended you for them. He figured that if anyone would understand how to work with fucked up kids that it would be you.”

“Yeah, said Ron. “I’m not sure how to take that, but thanks.”

“If they give you too much shit, just remind them that this is their only chance of getting any credit for the year and to have a new start next year. You’ve got them over a barrel and don’t hesitate to use it if you have to.”

“I know.”

“Now, James Devin is a whole different matter.  This kid is seriously fucked up. He’s a normal sixteen year old kid who is going through his father’s drawer one day looking for rubbers or who knows what, and he finds a picture of the old man dressed like a woman and sucking some guy’s dick.”

Ron involuntarily glanced over at the LDTC but her face was an inscrutable mask.

“How did the kid take it?” said Ron.

“Not very fucking well at all,” said Charlie with a bitter laugh. “He locked himself in his basement and he hasn’t come out since.”

“Oh Jesus,” said Ron.

“Now I’m trying to get him some good shrink help but we don’t make house calls and the kid refuses to come out. If we can’t get him some education, the boss wants to move on him for being an incorrigible truant and have him turned over to the courts. Which, I believe, will complete the job of totally screwing the kid.”

“Ok,” said Ron thoughtfully. “What do you want me to do?”

“Teach the little fucker.”

Ron laughed, but Charlie was no longer smiling. “I have spoken to his teachers and everyone is going to be cooperative here. Just give us something that we can use to say that the kid did some work and they will pass him. If that doesn’t work, I’ll have you made the teacher of record and you can give him his grades.”

Natalie, the LDTC, spoke for the first time. “We don’t think that it will come to that and we have seen some of the work that you have been able to do with kids that wouldn’t do anything for other tutors.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Ron.

“Just do enough to get it done,” said Charlie. “I think this is a temporary condition and if we can help this kid enough to get him into counseling by the summer time, I think he’s got a chance.”

“Where’s the father now?”
Natalie said, ”That’s the other thing, when James found the pictures, he brought them to his mother who had no idea,” at this point she dramatically rolled her eyes, “and she threw the father out. They are getting a divorce.”

Charlie broke in, “So now on top of everything else, the kid thinks that he was responsible for ruining his family.”

“I can understand that,” said Ron. “My parents are divorced.”

“But not cause your father sucked dick and had pictures taken of himself doing it,” said Charlie.

They gave Ron a pile of books and assignments and a phone number and then he left the office and walked out through the line of cubicles thinking about how much more professional this school looked than his did.

He drove back into Clifton’s border section with Paterson and rang the bell for his other tutoring appointment. Dennis Mooney was caught selling pot at the school. Ron had been working with him for about a month. Dennis was a blonde kid with a bad complexion and poor hygiene. Ron didn’t particularly like going to the house because it smelled bad and he always felt like itchy when he left. He rang the doorbell and heard movement inside, then Dennis’s face behind a curtain. Dennis said from the other side of the door, “I can’t do it today.”

“Come on Dennis,” you know what they said about missed appointments. They have to pay me anyway.”

“No offense Mr. Tuck, but I really don’t give a fuck.”

Ron shook his head. “Ok Dennis, see you next time.”

Ron got back into his car and drove home. He thought to himself that he shouldn’t care. He was getting paid.  The school was just covering its ass because they didn’t want Dennis in the building. And Dennis didn’t give a fuck. Why should he? But images of a bleak future for the kid haunted Ron all the way back home. He stopped off at a new Chinese restaurant that had just opened up down the street from him and ordered some hit spiced shredded beef with carrots.  He sat at the desk in his front room and ate the food out of the container while he reread Macbeth and thought about the next day’s classes.

 

Chapter 39

 

Ron’s seniors sat in front of him with expectant faces.  He had taken attendance. He had explained that because of the lost day yesterday that it was necessary to get right to work.

“Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s strangest plays.  It was written after the death of Queen Elizabeth and Willie was doing a few things. Mainly he was kissing up to his new King, but at the same time he was instructing him on how to be a king. Now that is a delicate thing to do and you will see his genius in doing it.

People in the theater are frightened of this play. The legend is that it’s bad luck to mention the name in a theater and so they always refer to it as The Scottish Play. There are all kinds of stories of bad things happening, people being killed during performances, theaters burning down. Lots of weird stuff and then, of course, there are the witches.” Ron stopped and looked at their faces. He was checking to make sure that none of them had drifted. “What is the word in Spanish for witch?”

“Bruja,” they said in a chorus.

“And what does it mean to be a witch?”

“Sometimes it just means an old woman,” said Connie Gonzalez.

“I think it means a sorceress,” said Imelda Cruz.

“Both of those things are true in this case. But it also means a servant of the devil. Witches were a big thing in Shakespeare’s time. The King, his name was James, actually wrote a book about how to identify witches.”

“Sometimes it means a prostitute,” said Barbara Rodriguez.

Ron noticed that his Spanish students were the only ones responding and realized that he had to get the other girls involved again. It was a tough balancing act to meet the needs of some students in this school without alienating others. “Well, in the English tradition, it doesn’t really mean that. And besides, these women were so ugly that they would have had to pay men.”

The girls giggled nervously and Ron wondered if he should have said that but he went on. “Ok so he’s kissing up to the King and he is also writing a great play about ambition and obsession. Now the language is going to be difficult, but I’ll help you through it and last year many of the girls told me that this was their favorite book for the year. So let’s get started. I want notebooks out there are going to be lots and lots of notes. But right now, just listen.”

Dutifully they looked up at him. It amazed Ron to see their faces and he felt this incredible surge of power and responsibility.  He wondered for at least the one hundredth time how Lashly could have ever allowed himself to become sexually intimate with his students. It just wasn’t even close to fair.

He started dramatically. “Now there is this war, a civil war. I’ll explain later why it was being fought. But one of the main guys on Macbeth’s side went over to the enemy and convinced this guy Norway to attack Scotland. And some of the Scottish troops fought with the traitor. Now our guy Macbeth, we’ll call him Mac.” There were more giggles. Ron liked to call Shakespeare Willy and to shorten or give slang names to the characters. He felt that it made the play more accessible. The other teachers in the English department had scoffed disdainfully when he mentioned the idea at a department meeting. “So Mac sees the traitor and wades across the battlefield killing people as he goes.”

Ron mimicked Mac, wading into the class shoving the desks with the girls still in them back until he made a path for himself.

“Mac’s like a superhero,” said Connie.

“Yes, he is. He’s a very brave and forceful fighter.” Ron fixed his eyes on Imelda, who was sitting in the last row. He pushed his way towards her, making a mess of the configuration of the room. Finally, he stopped in front of her desk. “Then Mac takes his sword and unseams him from the nave to the chops,” said Ron, quoting from the play. “Which means he sliced him open,” he turned to the class and pointed to his navel, and then traced a line up his chest to his throat, “from here to here. Then he cuts off the traitor’s head and holds it up on the end of his sword and lets up a loud whoop.” Again Ron mimicked Macbeth’s action and whooped, just as he saw Irene Emanuel at his door.

The principal entered the room and the girls sat up very straight and tried to look studious in the mess of a classroom. Some went so far as to open their books and to look down. She looked at them for a long moment and then let her eyes take in the disarray of the room and then she finally settled her gaze on Ron.

Ron grinned at her and said triumphantly and with an absurd confidence and enthusiasm, “Come in Sister, we are just starting Shakespeare.”

“Let’s do hope the building survives the play, Mr. Tuck. May I see you for a moment?”

“Yes Sister. Straighten out the desks, girls and start to look at the first scene. I’ll be right back and remember, notebooks out.”

Ron went to the door with the nun. She smiled at him and said, “Please don’t get them all worked up so that the rest of the day is spent talking about what Mr. Tuck said or did in their other classes again.”

Ron lowered his head in mock penance and said, “No Sister I won’t, but the language is hard for them and if I don’t get them hooked into it early, I think it will really be a tough go.”

“Well, I’m happy that I don’t have to follow your act, Mr. Tuck,” she said  with her pursed lips, but by now he knew her well enough to be able to tell that she wasn’t really upset. “There’s a meeting of the faculty council after school and after a very short meeting of the whole faculty to discuss what happened yesterday.  Do not discuss any rumors with the girls today until I have had a chance to meet with the faculty and then we’ll have the council meeting afterwards.”

“Yes Sister.”

 

After classes the faculty congregated in the convent. Students who normally stayed for after school activities were told to report to the cafeteria, where two of the nuns were assigned to supervise them. Not too many of the girls attended. Most took the opportunity to crowd into the corner store where Ron still got his coffee twice a day. Those who went to the cafeteria either disliked the luncheonette or were forbidden to go there by parents, whose punishments made it not worth the risk.

Ron took a few drags on a cigarette as he walked the outside route to the convent.  When he rang the bell, an elder sister who no longer taught but spent her days with housekeeping and cooking answered. “Yes?” she said warily.

“I’m here for the faculty meeting,” said Ron.

“Are you from the police?” asked the nun her face was pudgy and her steel rimmed glasses continued to regard him with suspicion.

“No, Sister, I’m a teacher at the high school.”

She sniffed the smoke that was radiating from him and challenged him. “At this high school?”

“Yes Sister. My name is Ron Tuck.”

She scrunched her face into a sneer, stepped back from the door and opened it wider. “Oh,” she said.  As he walked passed her, she caught the odor of cigarette smoke on him, and she shook her head in disgust.

“As all of you know, we had an unfortunate incident that occurred yesterday. I know that I told you there was a gas leak and for that I apologize, but that stretch of the truth was necessary.  It seems that a man, a street person really, we used to call them hobos when I was younger, was found to have met the lord in our basement. We have all prayed for the repose of his soul and I invite you to join me now in doing so again.” She led them through an Our Father and 3 Hail Marys. “May his soul and all the souls of the faithfully departed through the mercy of God rest in peace”

Ron felt like they were all doing penance for the dead guy. When the prayers were finished, Irene Emanuel continued. “Now I know there have been lots of rumors swirling about and most of them are utter foolishness. There was no foul play that occurred on our school grounds and it is important that we get that message out when we are asked. It is also important that we do not let this unfortunate incident distract us from the business at hand, and so it is my hope that after today we will hear no more about it. However, people being the way that they are, if you are asked by parents or by students and they have further questions, please direct their calls to me. They should not be calling the rectory or anywhere else to engage in their quest for details.” She enlarged her eyes and pursed her lips with the word “details” elongating it and pausing both before or after it to ensure the fact that her meaning was very clear. “Now, unless there are any other questions, many of us have students waiting and I suggest that we resume our duties.” After this last line she smiled and stood adding, “I wish to thank you all for your anticipated cooperation.”

Clearly questions were not being encouraged.  But Doris who had been at the school longer than Irene Emanuel and did not have a particularly high opinion of her since the nun had stopped giving her the last period of the day off and allowing her to leave school early, raised her hand.

“I would like to know if the school is safe,” said Doris loudly.

“Of course, we are safe,” said Irene Emanuel with look of mock shock and real condescension on her face.

“Well how did the bum get into the basement?” persisted Doris.

“Father is checking into that and we are having the maintenance man and two of the church deacons checking all of the locks on doors and windows to make sure that this can’t ever happen again.

Doris turned to Marsha and muttered sarcastically, “Oh, now I feel safe.”

Irene Emanuel heard her as did most of the people in the room. But Irene just chose to ignore the quip and made note that Doris would never have a late afternoon prep again. The meeting adjourned and people either left for the day or made their way back over to the school.

The girl who was to be seen by the faculty council that afternoon was not given the option of leaving and coming back or of going to the cafeteria. She was seated in one of the hard back chairs in the principal’s office with her secretary as visible evidence of her misdeeds. Ron knew the girl very well. Her name was Immaculada Santiago and she had been in his reading class the year before. He liked the girl but knew that she was an airhead who had minimal interest in reading writing or, Ron would have suspected, any of her other classes. She had a boyfriend. She was there marking time until she got married.  She had had her “Fifteens” coming out party in the fall and soon after she had formally began dating her brother’s best friend. Ron knew why she was there. The girl was excessively late to school and to her classes. The end of each class required a trip to the lavatory where she primped and studied herself in the mirror. Re-combed her hair, washed her hands and put on hand lotion to make sure that she did not chap. This was her second visit to the council. The first had come after she had amassed her initial ten lates. If the teachers had marked her to the minute, that would have taken less than a week, but most let it go saying that was just how Immaculada was.  Now she had amassed twenty lates and it was required that a parent join her for this second appearance before the faculty council. Her mother sat next to her staring at her shoes and wondering how long this nonsense would take.

The faculty council met in the lay teachers’ lunch room. On the days when these meetings were held, there was a note attached to the inside of the front door by Irene Emanuel reminding the teachers that there was going to be a meeting that afternoon in the room and that it should be in “presentable condition.” This year’s council consisted of Ron, Sister Bernadette, Marsha and Irene Emanuel. Bernadette and Ron conspired as often as they could to keep the girls out of trouble and Irene Emanuel knew that it had been a mistake to allow Bernadette to serve on the committee. But she had volunteered and garnered support and although Irene Emanuel, who could have blocked her appointment with the choir rehearsals as an excuse, had allowed things to move forward.  Ron had been given the job as chairperson of the committee, an election that both startled him and most of the rest of the faculty, who were sure now that the school was going to ruin. The truth was that Irene Emanuel ran the committee and every other committee in the school and she could, if she chose, overrule the council’s decisions as the principal’s discretion, but she did like the appearance of democracy.

They sat around the round table and Ron read through the card that had the dates of Immaculada’s unexcused latenesses on them. Then he read the additional excused latenesses and did some quick math in his head.

“Immaculada,” he said gently, “you are late almost half of the days that school is in session. Can you tell us what’s wrong?”

Mrs. Santiago shot Immaculada a feigned look of anger and then moved her hair to the side and stared out the window and tapped her long manicured fingernails on the leather purse that she held on her lap. The girl put her head down and muttered, “I don’t know. I will try harder,” looking up after the last statement with the absurd hope that her promise would be enough. It was what her mother had told her to say.

But Bernadette was having none of it. “Are you unable to get out of bed early enough?”

“Immaculada was almost indignant. “No Sister, I get up every morning at 5:30.”

Irene Emanuel said simply. “School begins at 8 am.”

Bernadette looked at Mrs. Santiago. “What time does she leave the house?”

The mother and the girl exchanged a worried look. The mother set her jaw and said, “I’m not really sure, Sister Bernadette.”

But Bernadette already knew where she was going with this. She had seen it before. “Do you come straight to school when you leave the house?”

Immaculada stared straight down like she wanted to burn a hole into the floor. “No Sister.”

“Do you go to your boyfriend’s house?”

Her face was so flushed and her voice was barely a whisper. “Yes, Sister.” Then she began to cry. Ron felt sorry and was moved by the sight of the tears rolling down the girl’s rouged cheeks. The women were not.

Bernadette now sat back. She had heard what she expected to hear.  She knew that the girl was going to her boyfriend’s house to make his bed and to help his mother and learn to cook his meals in the way that he was accustomed to having them prepared. She knew that this happened with full knowledge and probably the support of Mrs. Santiago.  It was all a matter of priorities.

Irene Emanuel directed herself to Immaculada. “Do you understand that a continuation of this behavior can result in you being asked to leave this school?”

The girl was sobbing now. “Yes Sister.”

Then Ron spoke up. “Does your father know about this?”

The girl abruptly stopped crying. The look of fear that blazed onto Mrs. Santaigo’s face was evident. The tension in the room became immediately thick.

The older woman leaned forward and looked at Ron. “Please, Mister. Please don’t say that you are going to tell him.”

Now everyone was uncomfortable. Irene Emanuel broke the silence. “I don’t think that there will be any reason to involve anyone else as long as this behavior is corrected. However, this Saturday and next Saturday morning, Immaculada, we’ll see you at the convent at 8 am so that you can work off the time that you owe us.”

The principal escorted the mother and daughter out of the room. They both looked as if they had been tortured. Bernadette leaned over and whispered to Ron. “He’d beat both of them for shaming him.”