Bitter Bronx (19 page)

“Ms. Greenblatt, why did you waylay Dr. Muldoon? You could have gone to another school, with students your own age.”

Her broken smile ruined whatever resolve he had.

“
Waylay
is a word that's way over my head.”

Milo began to mutter. “It's like lassoing someone, putting him into a corral.”

“I did put him into my own corral,” she said. “Why would I want to be around other wrecks my age? It would be like looking into the mirror. And I'm not blind. You're the miracle man, with your Harvard and Yale. Well, Harvard me.”

“It's not that simple.”

“Make it simple,” she whispered.

M
ilo's hell began. He couldn't corral Harvard or Yale for Tanya Greenblatt. Her college boards were abysmal. There were too many gaps in her dossier. She confessed to him that she'd been a lap dancer at a downtown titty club until one of the clients broke her face. The club wouldn't help her. This crazy client had too much pull. She hired a lawyer, but someone broke his face, too. She became a nomad, like Milo, wandering from club to club, until no club would have her.

“But you had a job at this school,” he said.

“And then you came along, my old flame. I couldn't bear the memories. I was fond of you at Taft.”

“We barely spoke. And weren't you in love with a fireman?”

“A fireman with six wives. He lent me out to all his friends—no, I fancied you.”

“I was a student teacher,” Milo had to insist. “I wasn't in any shape to flirt. I'd had a kind of breakdown. I was supposed to have a university career. My mom and dad had high hopes. I won a fellowship to Oxford. I was summa cum laude.”

“What's that?” she growled with a playfulness that unsettled him. He didn't have to close his eyes to imagine Tanya dancing on his lap.

“It means with the highest honors. But I couldn't really profit from it. I never became an Oxford don. My problem started at public school. I kept skipping grades until I was much too young for the students around me.”

“And I'm much too old,” she said. “But why didn't you kiss me once at Taft, or give me a little feel? I would have cooked for you, kept you fit. And while my fireman and his pals were poking me, I dreamt of you.”

“I couldn't,” Milo muttered. “I was afraid. You were such a wildflower.”

“Wildflower,” she whistled between the gaps in her teeth. “I like that.”

Milo wanted to cry. He was already half-crazed. She kicked the door closed, held his head in her hands, and dug her lizard's tongue into his mouth. He'd never had such a kiss. And she must have had her own radar. She slid out her tongue and leapt into a chair just as Dr. Muldoon entered Milo's office.

“You'll help Ms. Greenblatt, won't you, Mr. C.?”

So he stayed with her after class, after every student was gone and there was no one but the custodian and the cook, who had to prepare next week's menu. The school's patrolmen had fixed the metal detector and returned to their precinct. And Milo had to risk his own skin. She wouldn't tell him where she lived, and she wouldn't come downtown with him to Jane Street. He had to fumble with her in that dark office. It was preposterous, with Tanya sitting on his lap while he helped her with her SATs.

I'm a retard
, he told himself,
a retard in the middle of a high school romance
. Yes, yes, she'd been his old flame, the one flame he'd ever had. He worried that he might get caught in this little closet of an office. It would be the end of his career; not even his Phi Beta Kappa key could save him. But he was addicted to Tanya, and he couldn't cut it off. His students must have known. Tanya always sat in the front row, purring at him under her breath.

“Language is monstrous,” he'd say, trying not to look at Tanya's legs. “Sentences are made with the Devil's own music.”

“What does that mean?” asked Sheleela of Sheridan Avenue.

“Look at the way we group animals. We say a herd of elephants or an army of caterpillars. That's sensible, isn't it? But what about zebras?”

Sheleela stared at him. “Don't zebras have their herd?”

“Perhaps,” said Milo. “But we still talk about a zeal of zebras, a rumba of rattlesnakes, and a shiver of sharks.”

“That's cool,” said Milo's brightest student, a boy from Pakistan. “A shiver of sharks.”

“And there's more,” said Milo. “A charm of hummingbirds, a parliament of owls, a murder of crows.”

Tanya raised her hand, blinking at him with both eyelashes. “Mr. C., I can imagine owls sitting on their branch like a parliament. But why a murder of crows?”

“It must come from medieval times,” he said. “You see, crows were great busybodies; they loved to perch on the ramparts of some castle and peck at the garbage. An invading army would follow these crows right into battle. And for a castle's defenders, these cawing black birds became an ominous sign, a murder of crows.”

The students stared at Milo with suspicious eyes.

“That's some awesome shit,” said Sheleela. “It's either brilliant or the stupidest thing I ever heard—or both.”

There was a nervous ripple in class. Students could feel that curious heat in the first row. They resented Tanya and the stranglehold she seemed to have on Mr. C. Would they peck her eyes out, like a murder of crows? Would they snitch on her to Dr. Muldoon?

Milo's little world was about to crumble. He was desperate, and desperately in love. He offered to marry Tanya if she would leave his class. She cawed at him. “Not until you get me into college.”

He couldn't do much with her test scores. But he knew the admissions officers at some of the smaller colleges. He helped Tanya write her college essay, where she talked about everything from purple lipstick to lap dancing. He was like a warrior attacking an enemy with his own murder of crows. He got her into a tiny college in Maine; it was the best Milo could do; Tanya would be on probation her first year, but she'd still belong to the freshman class.

She clutched the college's letter as if she were in a trance. She stopped attending Milo's class, wouldn't even sit on his lap one last time. She vanished without a word. His closet at school became a closed-in hell. All he could think about was his lap dancer. His students took pity on him. They reminded Mr. C. to comb his hair. They knew more about Tanya than he ever did. She'd been doing the rumba with Dr. Muldoon, they said. She was Muldoon's pet rattlesnake. She wore his Phi Beta Kappa key when she wasn't with Milo.

He didn't know what to believe. He wanted to run from this school. But where did he have to go? He couldn't confront Muldoon. The principal would throw him out on his ass. There were no other problem schools beyond this badland—it was the end of the line for Milo. So he martyred himself for his students. He was as ferocious and cunning as a shiver of sharks in his letters to college admissions officers. He dared the best colleges
not
to accept his students. He got one into Harvard, two into Yale.

But it was Dr. Muldoon who received most of the credit. He was the star of a PBS special about the sudden resurrection of the Bronx. Milo was only on camera for a couple of seconds. But the crew followed Dr. Muldoon into his home in Riverdale, filmed him with his wife and daughters. Milo half expected to see Tanya Greenblatt lurking behind the sofa somewhere . . .

His students were disheartened by the film. They'd cackled like crows for PBS, paid homage to Milo and Lord Byron, but their performance had been hacked to pieces.

“Where the hell was Lord Byron? We never mentioned Muldoon, and that mother was all over the place.”

“Sheleela, watch your mouth,” he said. “You won't be able to talk like that at Yale.”

“Then Yale will have to suffer,” she said.

Milo had one bit of solace. His best students came back to visit him from their college dorms. They sat with him in his closet. They kept in touch long after they graduated.

Milo even heard from Tanya Greenblatt. She scribbled a note to him from the woods of Maine.

Dear Mr. C.,

I was better off as your wildflower.

The kids at college never liked me much. They told me I dressed like a whore. I quit school and started to work at a club in town, the Hanky-Panky. I married the manager, Mr. Forrest. I have two babies now and a shitload of relatives. My husband still has me working at the club between all the diaper brigades.

You call that living? I smile when I remember that lingo you taught us about shivering sharks. I'm sorry what I did to you, sneaking behind your back with Dr. Muldoon. But why didn't you take me in your arms once or twice when I was at William Howard Taft? I would have stuck with you, I swear it.

Faithfully yours, Mrs. Delmar Forrest

Mayflower Hill, Maine

He thought of riding a bus up to Mayflower Hill and rescuing her from the Hanky-Panky. But the police would have considered him insane—a high school teacher from the Bronx trying to tear a mother away from her brood.

He folded her letter under the green mat on his desk at school, near the gum erasers and abandoned ballpoint pens. College admissions officers phoned him several times a month, as if he were the scout of a fabulously successful franchise. But he no longer heard the voices of Byron and Keats inside his head.

ALICE'S EYES

1.

I
was crazy about the old man.

He'd rescued me when I was at the home for bad boys in the Bronx. He grew up near Hunts Point, and the Bronx was still his bailiwick. He made his bundle manufacturing paper bags and buying up real estate. He had a townhouse in Greenwich Village and a horse farm near Santa Fe, but he'd become the angel of mercy at Spofford Juvenile Center.

We were sitting in the warden's office, sipping coffee from paper cups.

“What kind of name is that?” he rasped. “Ricardo Rosenwasser.”

I told him. Mom was a Latin beauty and Dad was a rabbinical scholar who ran away from home. They were the Romeo and Juliet of the South Bronx . . . until they died of an overdose and I went to live with one of Dad's maiden aunts.

“Why should I help you, kid? There are a lot of juvenile offenders with a handsome IQ.”

I looked that billionaire in the eye and said, “Because I'm going to save your ass.”

He liked that. He was Martin Gorman, the prince of paper bags, and he called up a judge right from the warden's office. In fifteen minutes I had a brand-new fate. I was allowed to leave Spofford every morning and attend classes at the Bronx High School of Science.

And I've had a long ride on Martin Gorman's coattails ever since. I graduated cum laude from Cornell and was eleventh in my class at Harvard Law. I'm chief litigator at Burnside, Ebel & Gold, one of the most feared law firms in Manhattan. We're ruthless, and most of the ladies on a jury panel cannot resist my charm. I'm six feet two and bear an astonishing resemblance to Brad Pitt.

But all that charm hasn't been able to help the old man. He's lost his appetite. I can't even sit with him at the Four Seasons. He'll stare at his crab cakes and start to cry. He swore to me that his health was fine. So what the hell has happened?

He's been hibernating at his horse farm. I flew out to Santa Fe. I found him dozing on his verandah in the middle of the afternoon, hidden under a fancy horse blanket and a baseball cap that cost him ten grand. It had once belonged to Mickey Mantle, he said. I wanted to sue the memorabilia show that had swindled him. But he liked to dream in the Mick's old cap.

His horse farm was actually a hacienda—it covered half a dozen very brown hills. He couldn't have been much older than seventy-five, but he looked like a man in a death mask.

“Ricky, I can't eat. I can't sleep.”

His butler brought me a burrito with hot sauce and a Corona in a tiny tub of ice.

“Mr. G., if it's about one of your wives, I can . . .”

“No, no, it's not matrimonial,” he said. And he began to weep like a child. I wanted to take him in my arms and carry him home to Manhattan. I couldn't function amid all that mesquite and brutal sunlight.

“Whatever's wrong,” I said, “I can fix it.”

“Not this,” he muttered. “Not this.”

Now, all of sudden, he was willing to talk, and I listened to his tale. He was morose, he said, after the Bronx began to burn. “Rick, I can still feel fire on my face, and that was almost forty years ago.” But it didn't prevent him from gobbling up foreclosed properties. He waited ten years until the fires died and then rebuilt in all the rubble. He hired superintendents for buildings that morphed out of the debris. But he quarreled with one of his supers, a Dominican who could do repairs in his other buildings. This super—Tiny Batista—was stealing sinks and pipes. Tiny was six-four and weighed two hundred pounds. He had a five-year-old daughter with dark eyes and would ferry her about on one shoulder, like some luxurious parrot, show her off to everyone in the barrio. And Gorman felt so betrayed, so belittled, that he decided to punish Tiny in front of his little girl. He arrived in a patrol car. The police were always escorting him around the Bronx.