Among School Children (20 page)

At the end of the day, Clarence sat quietly at his desk, trying to fill out the form Chris had given the boys, an application to become a Boy Scout.

"Mrs. Zajac?"

"Yes, Clarence?"

"What do a-d-d-r-e-s-s mean?"

"Address," said Chris. She thought he simply couldn't read the word.

But Clarence knew less than that. He said, "Yeah. What do 'address' mean?"

Chris looked at him. Had he ever openly confessed to such basic ignorance before? She was surprised. She said offhandedly, "Where you live." And Clarence went back to filling out the form to be a Boy Scout.

He didn't know what "address" meant? Well, children sometimes had surprising gaps in their basic knowledge. Chris didn't give the episode much thought just then. But, in Judith's terms, Clarence had begun to come out of hiding. It had been a long day for Chris, and a terrifying one for Clarence.

It is remarkable how much of the time of how many adults in a school one child can command simply by being difficult. The meeting happened Thursday. Past the long desk in the office and into the windowless, overheated conference room at a little before noon went a parade of five experts on troubled children. Chris went in, too. The only person missing was Clarence's mother, though she had been officially notified again.

When, about an hour and a half later, the parade came out of the conference room, Clarence was no longer a member of Chris's class. The news traveled quickly through the office. Clarence would go to an Alpha class as soon as paperwork permitted. Chris was flushed, all the way from her forehead to the collar of her blouse. The fringes of her black hair were damp. Her face looked grim. She hurried toward her classroom.

As she thought of it later on—and it was a long time before she could stop thinking about it—the situation was impossible. Nobody had told her ahead of time that Clarence might be sent to an Alpha class
this
year. She hadn't had time to find a settled attitude. But even after the decision was made and she had all too much time to think, she still didn't know how to feel.

Chris worried about Clarence. She had reason. To send him away was to tell him the same old news: he was a problem; he had failed. And to help Clarence by placing him in a special class among a number of other notoriously unruly children—might as well say his behavior would improve if he was made to join a street gang. She couldn't argue for doing that to him.

And yet at the same time, removing Clarence from the class seemed like a just solution. He had not committed any acts of extreme violence; he hadn't thrown chairs at other children or come to school with weapons. But he did beat up and intimidate other kids. More and more since Christmas, he had begun to seem like a wrecker in the room. Was it fair to let one child's problems interfere with the education of nineteen other children, many of them just as needy as Clarence? When she looked back and imagined herself saying, "No! I don't want him taken away," she imagined herself feeling just as guilty as she would have if she'd said, "Yes, by all means, Alpha." In retrospect, sending Clarence to Alpha seemed like a decision to accomplish something that was probably right by doing something that was probably wrong.

She had one awful, sinking fear. Had she wanted, deep down, to get rid of Clarence? She hadn't acted on that desire, but had she felt it? "I don't want to get rid of him. I don't!" she told Paul, the sympathetic vice principal, later. "I mean"—she looked up at Paul—"I do and I don't."

Would Clarence suffer? Many educators feel that separating children thoroughly from the mainstream of school is never a good idea. But as such programs go, Alpha looked reasonable on paper. Clarence would go to a class of only ten children, with three adults in charge: an aide, a trained, full-time counselor, and a head teacher who was reputedly adept. Alpha classes did have an evil reputation, but everyone had taken pains to tell Chris that the class picked out for Clarence was different. The new teacher was first-rate. She'd really turned that program around.

Chris wanted to see the class for herself. She had asked Al, in the doorway to his office, "I don't suppose I could go and see that class sometime?" She had sounded at that moment like shy Juanita asking permission to go to the bathroom.

Al had said, "No. But don't worry about it." He reasoned: "I can't allow her to do that. I can't let a teacher go up there and say, 'Oh, no, I can't send him there.' It's not for her to make that decision."

The genius of committees is that they can make decisions that no one would want to make alone. Chris didn't have the authority to say what would be done with Clarence. She was simply the most knowledgeable witness about the boy and his effect on her class. The person who had final say, the director of Church Square and Alpha, didn't know Clarence. He had run into situations in which teachers simply wanted to use Alpha to get rid of troublesome children. But he figured that couldn't be the case here or he'd have heard about Clarence back in October, not now in March. He was impressed that Chris intended to keep her troublemaker for the rest of this year. Thinking back, the director would say, "We need more people like that, who don't want to give up on the kid."

So to him, Chris's descriptions of Clarence seemed completely credible. Chris's account convinced him that Clarence belonged at Alpha. "I heard her saying she'd done everything possible." In effect, it was decided that Clarence be sent away partly because Chris was willing to keep him.

Clarence might have been a model pupil if someone could have staged the commotion of a core around him every week or so. For most of the following week Clarence didn't know what was happening to him, but he sensed danger. Maybe Mrs. Zajac's special gentleness warned him, but then again, he did not, the whole week that followed, give her many reasons for not being gentle.

There was a deep intelligence in Clarence. But it had been directed mainly toward the arts of escape and evasion and sentry duty. It would have seemed misdirected almost anywhere, except in a school for infantry or on some city streets. He didn't become angelic overnight. Yet everything that Chris had hoped to bring out of Clarence—with rewards, detentions, praise, lectures, and scoldings—he now delivered without being asked. He didn't hit or threaten anyone. Just like that, he stopped talking back to Chris. And he did his work. For several days Chris did not know what to make of the metamorphosis. She did not let herself.

When on Friday morning, the day after the core, Mrs. Zajac announced the weekly spelling test, Clarence looked up at her and said, "I didn't study." She didn't answer. Halfway through the test, he blurted out again, "I didn't study!" He sounded angry, maybe a little frantic.

With plain curiosity on her face, Chris said softly, "Clarence, I appreciate your honesty. But if you didn't study, what do you expect me to do about it? You haven't done your work all year."

Clarence stared at his paper, full of misspellings, and his mouth hung ajar, as it had when he spotted his mother in the doorway that time after he'd raided her purse, or the other day when strangers kept arriving.

The following Monday, when Chris wrote down the homework assignments on the back board, Clarence, whose attention usually wandered at this time, turned around and watched her with his pencil poised. "I'm gonna need two books tonight," he said loudly. "
Three!
" he cried.

When she asked them to turn in their topics for their astronomy reports, Clarence cried out, "Report? On what? What's it about?"

She explained.

He wrote furiously.

Normally Clarence didn't like being sent to the board to do a problem in front of the class. During a grammar lesson the first week after the core, he volunteered to go up and punctuate a sentence. The one Chris gave him had the word "buildings" in it. Clarence stared at the sentence. He turned back to Chris. "Wha wha what's that word right there?" He pointed at it, his face all earnest expectation and his mouth hanging open.

On Tuesday morning, Clarence didn't do his pirouettes or linger over the menus on the closet door. He sat right down and did his penmanship, and then he asked her if he could take the attendance sheet to the office, a job that in their community was bestowed only on children who had done their homework.

When Chris went to the Teachers' Room that morning during spelling, she paused over the coffee machine and decided to take the pot of decaffeinated. She hadn't slept well for days. That problem was much worse. Maybe, she told herself, the reason was caffeine.

It would be "unprofessional" to get very upset about Clarence's leaving. Unprofessional. Sometimes that term seemed to apply best to teachers who used it most often. And yet it would apply to her in this case if she let her feelings show. Everyone involved had tried to do the best thing for the boy and for her class. Alpha was not a terminal illness. These things happened in school. This problem Chris was having with her sleep should not have to do with Clarence. She'd have to figure it out by herself. She couldn't talk it out the way she usually did. Professional colleagues didn't discuss such things. It just wasn't done.

She couldn't even really talk to Mary Ann about it, though Mary Ann gave her the chance. "It's so sad," Mary Ann said. "Just because this happened, yesterday I walked in your room, and he's being perfect. Today I walk in, and he's being perfect. Ohhhh."

But Chris looked away and, as if reciting, hurriedly said, "But I also have to consider the other kids in the room. And there are no real alternatives. I think that's not a great statement about Holyoke, but I don't know what other towns have to offer. There's always the danger he'll be influenced by the other kids there. But that's balanced by the fact that there's a full-time counselor there, and everybody says the teacher's excellent."

She couldn't even talk to herself openly. Chris went home the day she gave up caffeine, had a pleasant evening with Billy and the kids, and thought, "Thank God. I'm over whatever it was," and then she woke up in the middle of the night, gritting her teeth.

She said to Billy, "I think this is the first kid who's ever left my room this way."

Billy said, "No, it isn't. You had one your first year at Sullivan."

"I did?"

"Yes," said Billy. "If you say the name, I'll remember."

"Oh!" she said. "But he came out of a program like Alpha, and I only had him two weeks." She laughed, remembering that boy. "Everything I said, he used to give me the finger." That was long ago, and she'd had nothing to do with that boy's being sent away.

Chris began to feel the way she had the year her father died. She had hated teaching most of that year. Ordinarily, she would have tried to understand her difficult students and have looked for remedies, but that year, seven years ago, a lot of her class became unconquerable antagonists who wouldn't behave, wouldn't work, and wouldn't learn. Chris called that "the year I thought I was burnt out"—the term is very popular among teachers; it carries an unfortunate note of finality; at the very moment when a teacher needs to search for ways around her unhappiness, "burnt out" suggests that there is nothing she can do.

In Chris's childhood household, her mother had been the organizer and chief disciplinarian, a cheerful one. Spankings were infrequent. Her parents sometimes raised their voices, mostly at Chris's brother, but real anger came over her father so rarely that everyone in the family remembered this incident: her brother had thrown a wooden block at Chris. He missed. The block crashed through a window. Up the stairs in a moment, really shouting, came her father. Her brother got beneath his bed. Her father stood over the bed, trying to lift it. He shook it. Her brother, on his back underneath, held on to the metal frame for dear life. Chris yelled in fright. Then her father let go of the bed, and he started to laugh.

Jim Padden is remembered as a thin, quiet man with a quick wit. "Pretty good on the repartee, eh?" he'd say to Chris's mother when he'd gotten off a good one. He and Chris's mother had a way with children. Chris and her siblings and their friends usually chose to play at the Paddens'. Chris's brother remembered a time when a friend of his hurt his leg badly playing in the street. His friend didn't want to be taken home; he wanted to be taken to Mr. Padden.

Even at his death, her father was still drawing a crowd. Hospital workers who had gotten to know him during his long illness drove all the way out from Boston to go to the funeral and wake. In Irish parlance, "wake" is also a verb, evocative of a heritage that is both pious and mystical, as in, "We waked Jim Padden last night." No one wakes the departed by recalling his faults, but the testimonials at her father's wake were impressive: from the young man who'd worked under him and whom Jim Padden had talked into going back to school; from several men who remembered how Jim Padden would forgo his own chances at earning overtime so that they, who had young families, could get the money instead; from men who'd had him as a boss and remembered being sick and Jim Padden, who almost never took a sick day himself, covering for them.

Her father didn't drink or boast. "He wasn't one of your—I hate to say it—bullshitting Irish," Chris would say. For her, his memory defined the term gentleman. He had not made it very hard for Chris to please him. He loved to read, and she decided she did, too. They often talked about books, describing ones they'd liked to each other. He would take her to the library and bookstores and book fairs as other fathers take children to baseball games. He didn't preach to her about college, but she knew he wanted her to go. In that household, youthful expressions of ambition were taken seriously. Both her parents felt that teaching was the right profession for Chris. When playing teacher with her siblings on the stairs, Chris was allowed to write on the wall opposite the landing, which cannot have been a small concession in a house as tidy as the one Mrs. Padden always kept. When Chris made the National Honor Society, her father put the newspaper clipping that mentioned her name inside his wallet, where it crumbled after many showings.