Bitter Bronx (18 page)

Harrington

He left the note in Hannah's mailbox. He'd return to the mailboxes every hour to see if Hannah had retrieved the note. Finally, on his sixth trip, he saw that she'd emptied her mailbox. He still couldn't sleep. And all the while he did his chores, Hannah never mentioned the note.

She kept searching for patrons. She wore her white gloves. She wasn't unkind to Harrington, didn't punish him for his scribbles. But he couldn't leave the slightest dent in Hannah's life.

He would pace in his room all night, and for one instant he saw outside his agony: Hannah's door was open. And Harrington followed the path of his own dreamless dream. He entered the Princess's room. She was lying under the covers, with Harrington's note in her fist. She didn't object when he crawled under her blanket. And she didn't attempt to hide her scars. They were like crooked silver lines. Hannah's scorched skin. She could have been made of phosphorous or beaten bits of silver and gold. And while he lay next to her, her heart cupped in his hand, he thought of the Scooter. Perfect passion. What's perfect passion compared to Princess Hannah?

S
he wasn't tender with Harrington outside the borders of her bed. He was the princess's handyman. He never sat with her at supper or tried to fondle Hannah while she was giving him instructions about his various chores. The refugees seemed to know about Harrington's nighttime excursions into the princess's room, but when they smiled at her, she wouldn't smile back. The princess was occupied with money matters. She couldn't pay the electric bill. Harrington disappeared for two hours and returned with a hundred dollars. He'd taken the Scooter's advice and had become a highwayman. He'd cover his face with a handkerchief and rob whoever he could: motorcyclists, truck drivers, delivery boys. . . . He even held up an entire bus, though he wouldn't interfere with grandpas and grandmas.

She didn't ask him where he got the money, didn't comment on the Colt inside his pants. But he couldn't seem to have a conversation with her. The words wouldn't come. And then he gathered up his courage, shut his eyes, and said, “Tell me about your husband, Hannah, please.”

“There's nothing to tell. He was a son of a bitch.”

“But if he hadn't scalded you, we might never have met.”

“That's wonderful. Why don't you thank him, get in touch?”

‘‘I didn't mean that. But Scooter said he was jealous, and—”

“Jealous of what? He stole from me. And when I caught him at it, he figured he would burn me alive.”

“Hannah . . .”

“Stop talking, Harrington. Write me another letter.”

“I can't. I'm poor with sentences.”

“Not so poor,” she said.

She brought him into her room. It wasn't even midnight. She undressed Harrington and then undressed herself. She was like a mermaid with silver on one side. He kissed every silver wound.

Dear Hannah,

I dream in rainbows.

I trace all our scars in my sleep.

I'm a selfish man, in love with loving you.

I . . .

Harrington couldn't finish his letter. He had to play the highwayman. His princess couldn't settle with the butcher and her laundry service without his particular skills. But he was absentminded, thinking of words, when he should have concentrated on his next victim, his next mark. He put on his handkerchief mask a bit sloppily, half his mouth showing, and attacked a Chevrolet parked outside a deserted storefront. If he hadn't been dreaming, he might have sniffed the plainclothesman inside the car.

“Friend,” he said, like a pragmatic highwayman, “gimme your money, nice and slow.”

The plainclothesman shot Harrington in the groin. Harrington slapped him on the head with his Colt. Then he limped away. It took him an hour to walk the ten blocks to Hannah's mansion. He was crying. She wouldn't be able to greet the butcher with cash in her hand.

. . . in love with loving you.

He got to the dormitory. He couldn't see a thing. Blood was in his eyes. The Scooter found him, screamed, “Mother of God.” And Hannah rushed over from her desk, where she was wishing away all her liabilities, all her debts. She reached out, and Harrington tumbled into her arms. Ah, he felt secure against her damaged skin. He wasn't dreaming now. “Darling,” she said, just before he died.

MILO'S LAST CHANCE

H
e stumbled from school to school, became an embarrassment, suffering from periodic fits of silence in front of his students. The sachems at the Education Department didn't know what to do with Mr. Cartwright. He was much too young to retire. They couldn't reward him with a disability pension. He wasn't disabled. He met with lawyers and administrators at the department's new headquarters in lower Manhattan. It was, they said, Milo's last chance.

He was sent to a barrio in the South Bronx where no teacher or student had ever prospered. He would finish out his days in “Siberia” or wouldn't finish at all. It was a special high school for the hardest cases, housed in an abandoned fire station near Boston Road. He was a misfit in a school for misfits. But he felt comfortable around a bunch of kids who had already been condemned to a life of non-learning—the Bronx's own prodigal daughters and sons from housing projects that were little better than high-rise caves.

Milo himself was a prodigal son. He'd graduated from Columbia at fifteen, had been awarded a fellowship to study English literature at Oxford. But he began talking to Shelley and Byron and Keats in the middle of Manhattan. His father, a reputable accountant, decided to put Milo into a teacher training program at Hunter College. Education classes wouldn't tax his mind. But he began to drift . . . until he arrived in the South Bronx.

This revamped fire station was paradise. Its students could have been tailored for Milo. They expected nothing from him, nothing at all, and he sang to them about the poets who were still inside his head—Lord Byron with his clubfoot or the consumptive Keats, who spat up blood while he scribbled. Milo didn't analyze poems in class. He told them a hundred tales, and his students were in ecstasy. Byron and Keats could have lived in their housing projects. They knew plenty of people who spat blood or staggered around with a clubfoot.

His dad had bought him a studio on Jane Street as a kind of “insurance policy.” But Milo Cartwright felt estranged from this land of coffeehouses and pet hospitals and stores that sold nothing but cupcakes. He preferred the brick wilderness of the Bronx. He'd become an icon in the barrio, a secular saint—“Mr. C.”—who taught poetry without ever reading a poem.

The sachems downtown didn't bother him. Milo was getting results. He would find a rare prodigy—a girl from Senegal or a boy from Martinique—who dared dream of college, and Milo tutored such prodigies, helped them write a decent composition. He encouraged students to start their own little library, bought them their first bookcase. He now had a makeshift office, a closet really, without a window or proper ventilation. He'd become the school's guidance counselor in addition to his other chores. This school for outcasts had never had a guidance counselor. It never needed one until Milo came along. Suddenly it had candidates to the best colleges.

He often ate lunch in his office. But one afternoon he drifted into the cafeteria, and there she was, wearing the same purple lipstick. He shivered at the sight of her. Her eyes burrowed into him like bullet holes.

“Are you so stuck-up, Mr. C., that you can't even acknowledge one of your old flames?”

“I never had a flame.”

He'd been a student teacher at William Howard Taft nine or ten years ago. And she was a wildflower of the West Bronx—tall and voluptuous, she could dazzle you with her purple lipstick and big brown eyes. She was notorious in the neighborhood as the mistress of a married fireman. The principal had been looking to toss her out of Taft. But Tanya Greenblatt never misbehaved within the school's walls. And yet she flirted with Milo, who couldn't have been that much older than Tanya. He was drawn to the boldness of her brown eyes. But he never saw her outside of school. He didn't dare. He was an apprentice, a teacher on trial.

And once, while Milo was monitoring exams, he caught her copying from another student. He didn't want to hurt Tanya Greenblatt, but his own attraction had demonized him, and he found a way to claw at the girl. He should have warned her first, but he sent her to the principal. She was thrown out of school.

And here she was, working as a scullion in a cafeteria. Several of her teeth were missing. She had a gray streak on her left eyebrow, as if some bad angel had visited Tanya and left its mark. She was still in her twenties and looked like some ruined Cleopatra. But it terrified Milo to be near her. He was still drawn to Taft's wilted wildflower.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I shouldn't have reported you to the principal.”

Her face softened. And she was almost beautiful again, even with the gaps in her mouth. He couldn't reveal how much he had liked her, not in the middle of the cafeteria, with students and teachers spying on him. She'd been working at this renegade school a whole year, had seen Milo in the halls many times, and didn't want to trouble him with her own troubles—at least that's what Milo imagined.

And then she disappeared, wandered out of the cafeteria and never came back. He might have gotten her address from the school clerk. But he wouldn't bother a gap-toothed goddess who wanted to be alone. And he suffered. He'd had few friends. Locked into himself, he lacked the simplest powers of seduction. He could commune with the dead, debate with Byron and Keats, and talk about them to kids who had such a hard time reading a book. He struggled with his students until they began to sing out words like some wild soprano. The principal, Dr. Muldoon, was in awe of Milo. Letters from Harvard and Yale shot across his desk like missiles from another land. Dr. Muldoon was enjoying his new fame.

But Milo was miserable, haunted as he was by Tanya and her missing teeth. He'd drift through the cafeteria, hoping he could conjure her up with the squeeze of an eye—his own feeble magic failed him. And while muttering to himself in a composition class, his coat covered in chalk as he tried to explain the difficulty of gerunds, he found Tanya Greenblatt in the front row. Had she arrived on the wings of her own bad angel? She had a notebook now, and she clung to his words as he scratched a sentence on the board in his own strange scrawl.

The young lady arrived without our noticing
who she was
.

His students couldn't find the hidden observer, couched right in front of the gerund.

“
Our
,” he said. “That lone word sneaks in like a snake and corrupts the sentence.”

“Then pluck it out, Mr. C.,” said Marguerita of Boston Road.

“And what would happen? The young lady in the sentence would lose all her marbles. She'd be living in a dream, and couldn't even notice who she was.”

“She wouldn't be no different than my mom and dad,” said Walter of Charlotte Street. And the whole class started to laugh, except for Tanya Greenblatt. Milo still didn't know what she was doing here. He couldn't stop gazing at her. He might lose his own marbles and disappear inside a gerund.

Dr. Muldoon was signaling to him from the door, and Milo stepped into the hall. They were confederates of a sort, the first ones in the wilderness of the South Bronx to own a Phi Beta Kappa key. Tanya Greenblatt was a special case, said Dr. Muldoon. She should have gone into an adult education program, but this school was also special, having risen out of the ruins. And since Tanya had once worked here, Dr. Muldoon had his own “legal window.” She could audit Milo's classes, and Milo could become her referee.

“What kind of referee?”

“You'll tutor her in your spare time.”

Milo could sniff his own destruction. He'd never survive Tanya Greenblatt. But how could he contradict a principal who had graduated from Fordham and considered the Bronx as his own fief? Dr. Muldoon had gone into the housing projects last week with half a dozen guards to rescue a student held hostage by some local drug lord. Milo had decided to come along. The dark halls and broken elevators terrified him, but he was Dr. Muldoon's good-luck charm. The drug lord had been a student of Milo's at Christopher Columbus. He wore a bandanna around his head and had one glass eye.

“Hey, Teach, you 'member me? I loved all that shit. I'm still crying over John Keats.”

The hostage was let go. And Milo went back to his own little war with college admissions officers. He still performed his acrobatics in class, still danced with a piece of chalk in his fist, still hypnotized his students with tales of Byron crossing the Hellespont with his clubfoot as a rudder, but Milo himself had no rudder once Tanya stepped into his office. He wanted to knead her flesh, kiss her until her mouth was blue with mad desire.