Man of the Hour (3 page)

“All right, what’s that got to do with this idea of being tested?”

He saw the boy hesitate and start to sink back down into his chair, sorry he’d raised his hand. It was going to be one of those make-or-break moments, David realized, where a kid either becomes part of the life of a class or starts the process of withdrawing and eventually dropping out.

“It’s all right,” he told Kevin. “Make your case. I got your back.”

The kid licked his lips. “’Kay.” He began slowly, as if he were bouncing a ball at the foul line. “Like last year? My family moved outta the Coney Island Houses and got a apartment in O’Dwyer Gardens.” He was talking about two massive housing projects a few blocks away from each other in Coney Island. “Anyways, these guys from my old crew at the Houses had a beef with my new boys in O’Dwyer. And then they both came to me and said what all am I gonna do when they have a fight on Friday night. Whose side am I gonna be on?”

“So what did you do?” David said gently, trying to protect the moment and keep the space open for the kid.

“I stayed home, by my moms,” said Kevin, trying to sound tough and unashamed of himself. “I was like just buggin’ out with the WB, and jacking the sound up so I wouldn’t hear them busting caps and the sirens outside and shit. And then in the morning, I found out my man Shawn De Shawn got shot in the head. They had him on life support for a month before they let him die. That was messed up, man. He was gonna play point guard for St. John’s.”

His voice trailed off and he looked down at his fingers, ill at ease over having exposed so much to the group. A couple of the other guys in the class started mumbling behind his back and pointing in contempt, but David cut them off with a cold stare.

“All right,
enough
,” he said, before turning his attention back to Kevin. “Thank you, Kevin. I give you props for opening up like that. Shawn was in my class, and for the record, I think you did the right thing. And if anyone disagrees, they can take it up with me personally after class.”

Okay, so it wasn’t “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” but to have a kid like Kevin let his guard down so much was a small miracle. The kind—along with having Elizabeth in his class—that kept David going year after year in spite of budget cuts, school board politics, and plaster dust drizzling down on his desk.

He cruised by Kevin’s desk, collecting the glove and quietly telling him, “Come talk to me later if you want.” The morning was developing a kind of unusual gravity, with kids dropping their hearts on their desks. He made a U-turn back toward the front of the class and used his booming voice again, trying to lighten the discussion a little.

“Okay, I don’t want to turn this into a therapy group or a talk show,” he said, picking up a piece of chalk. “I want to bring it back to the books. Because that’s what we’re here to talk about. Right? So can somebody else give me an example of a character in one of the books who’s either being tested or maybe even testing something?”

A Russian boy named Yuri Ehrlich slowly hoisted his arm in the fifth row, over by the radiators. He was a brilliant but unscrupulous kid, with long, straight brown hair and a disturbing habit of cheating when he didn’t have to, as if the old Soviet habits of beating the system were too deeply ingrained in him. David wondered if he’d change this year.

“Raskolnikov.” Yuri rolled out the name with a thick accent.

“Raskolnikov who chopped up the old widow and her sister?” David tossed him the mitt. “Should I have brought an ax instead of the glove to throw around today?”

Uneasy laughter. They were reading
Crime and Punishment
in Advanced Placement English, not in this class. But why make a deal out of it if the kid wanted to contribute?

“All right, I’ll bite. Why Raskolnikov?”

Yuri sat there, silent and brooding, letting the glove tumble to the floor.

“Maybe he means that Raskolnikov is testing the definition of what it means to be an extraordinary man,” Elizabeth Hamdy said earnestly, leaning forward on her elbows. She was taking A.P. for extra credit too.

“Okay, I can live with that,” said David, thinking this really was the day for heavy topics. “So does he succeed or fail?”

“I think he fails, because his definition of ‘extraordinary’ is flawed,” said Elizabeth in her perfect diction, obviously glad not to be talking about herself.

“Yuri, is that why you think he fails?”

A tensile moment of anticipation. Other kids looking at each other, checking their watches; David holding up his arms, wanting everyone to hush up and listen.

“No.” Yuri stared down at his red Converse high-tops. “He fails because he turned himself in.”

The period buzzer went off.

“Yuri, you’re scaring me.” David went to pick up the glove. “The rest of you give me three to five pages on this subject by next Friday.”

With the change-over between classes, the hallways exploded in sound and visual chaos. Students stood around in exclusive circles and insolent clusters, as if daring people to pass.

Nasser moved by them gingerly, feeling just as invisible as he had felt when he was a junior here, repeating the grade, four years ago. Everything looked the same, except for some red-white-and-blue bunting on the walls. The green-tiled walls, the dull streaky floors, the chipped mahogany banisters, the names of war veterans and valedictorians of years past painted in gold letters on brown plaques, the sports trophies in glass display cases, the posters celebrating Italian American week with pictures of famous actors, pop singers, Christopher Columbus, Leonardo Da Vinci, and pasta dishes. But the feeling was a little bit different. He no longer wanted to fit in here, he told himself. He no longer wanted to be one of them. Let them swagger by, talking in code, flirting, fighting, making incomprehensible private jokes. With their bared midriffs, their pierced noses, dyed hair, black nail polish, foul language, their tight and baggy clothes, their frank appraising stares. Seeing him but not seeing him. Someday a Great Chastisement would befall all of them.

On the other side of the building, David Fitzgerald hiked a black Jansport book bag over his shoulder and walked past the gauntlet of kids on his way to the office. The inside of the school was like something dreamed up by a fun-house designer. Long, dark hallways that didn’t go anywhere, stairwells that didn’t connect from floor to floor, offices with tiny windows. Traffic patterns loosely based on Boston and Tijuana. Acoustics appropriate for a heavy-metal concert or a Manhattan restaurant. Buzzers going off for absolutely no reason.

A group of loiterers in front of the boys’ room called out to him.

“Yo, what’s up, Mr. Fitz?”

“Yeah, look out, don’t step on me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

“Yo, you’re scaring me, Mr. Fitzgerald!”

Though he had a few inches on most of the kids, occasionally a hand would reach out to touch him on the head or the shoulder, either mockingly or affectionately. It was hard to tell at times. But there was something comforting about it anyway. A kind of assurance that he had a secure place in this intricate little municipal beehive.

“Yo, Mr. Fitz, you gonna call my parole officer for me?”

“Mr. Fitz, you gonna talk to my moms? Right?”

“Yo, Mr. Fitzgerald, how’s the bike?”

Oh yes, the bike. An old-fashioned Schwinn with a banana seat he’d picked up for five dollars at a sidewalk sale. He’d first developed an image as an eccentric because of that bike. Some years back, he and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Renee had been living in Park Slope and he’d ridden it to school a couple of days a week, instead of taking the subway. So he became the bicycle man. Even after they moved back to Manhattan and he started taking the train again, he was still “the bicycle man” to the kids. He had a reputation to uphold. Funny Mr. Fitzgerald. Weird Mr. Fitzgerald. Not a bad thing. It was an identity. A way for people to think about him. One time he brought a baseball glove into class when they were talking about
The Catcher in the Rye.
So that became another part of his mythology. Mr. Fitzgerald brought in props. Now every year he had to bring in the glove for the imperfect hero discussions. The kids expected it.

“Yo!” he shouted out to a Dominican kid called Obstreperous Q from his seventh-period class, who was sweet-talking a girl by the fire stairs. “Come by my office later. I got that book of García Lorca poems I was telling you about.”

When David arrived at the door of the English Department office Donna Vitale was standing in the doorway, waiting for him. Donna with her frizzy straw-colored hair, her wonderful warm shining smile, and her one wayward eye staring slightly out into space.

“You have a visitor,” she said.

“Tell me it’s not Larry coming to complain about my programs again.”

Larry Simonetti, the school’s principal, had been in a state of high fret for the past week, ever since Albany issued a report calling the school “one of the ten worst-managed” in the city. Test scores were fine, but the school had ricocheted from scandal to scandal in the last twelve months. There was the security guard running away with the ninth grader, the falling bricks that seriously injured an eleventh grader last spring, and of course the $75,000 from the annual budget that was mysteriously missing. The governor himself was scheduled to come next week and give a speech about “taking back our schools,” possibly as a prelude to announcing his own candidacy for President.

“No, it’s not Larry,” said Donna. “It’s a blast from the past. I told him he could wait at your desk.”

“Thanks, Ms. Vitale.”

He started to move past her, but she caught his elbow “I also wondered if I could talk to you about coming over for dinner next week,” she said softly.

He stopped short, flattered but awkward, suddenly feeling like a bashful ape. How did women handle this kind of attention? “Um, can I get back to you on that, Donna?”

“You got the number.”

He wondered if he was missing a great opportunity here, waiting to see if he could still work things out with Renee. Ms. Vitale was smart, she had ballast, and something about her suggested a kind of rowdy availability. You could imagine sitting up in bed, drinking beer with her.

“But don’t wait too long, David.” She brushed by him on her way to the Xerox room. “I might not be around forever.”

He continued on into the office. A narrow little blue room, off a main corridor, with a dozen desks for the twenty teachers in the English department. The junior staffers were expected to roam like nomads and put their papers and books down on any surface that happened to be clear, while the senior teachers hunkered down and defended their areas like mangy old primates. Three students loitered inexplicably by the water fountain and a work-crew guy stood on a ladder pulling down parts of the ceiling, looking for God knows what hazardous materials. A tattered print of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream
adorned a wall above an overstuffed file cabinet, and a group of painters stood around with dripping rollers, trying to freshen the room up for the governor’s visit.

The visitor was sitting in David’s chair, studying the papers on top of his desk and the placard above it with the Melville quote
God keep me from ever completing anything.

What did that mean? Nasser wondered. He’d never trusted this one, this Mr. Fitzgerald, with his patient smile and unruly brown hair. He’d sat in the back of his class for a whole term, too bored yet too intimidated to speak up. Feeling the work was both above him and beneath him. Not understanding most of what was said; not getting the jokes; not liking the fact that he’d been left back once already and was older than most of the other students. And especially not liking it when Mr. Fitzgerald would call on him in class, asking him to explain what he thought of
The Great Gatsby
or
The Deerslayer
or some other immoral American book. It was humiliating, like being stripped naked in front of the other students. He stammered and stuttered, wanting to crawl under his chair, while this man read him immoral poems and tried to force him to think and speak in an uncomfortable way.

He’d dropped out soon after that. But there was another part of Nasser that was confused, being back here. The weaker part that needed to talk to someone about the things he’d seen. He remembered how he’d watched other students talk to Mr. Fitzgerald, sharing jokes and intimate secrets after class, and how he’d wished he could unburden himself to someone that way.

“It’s Nasser, right?” David set down his bag and offered his hand, grateful for the excuse to ignore the pink phone message from Visa lying amid the piles of uncorrected papers from his five classes on his desk.

The thought of the $2,500 he owed on his credit card made the back of his neck ache.

The visitor looked up, startled, with luminous brown eyes, just like his sister’s. “I am surprised for you to remember me.” His handshake was limp and cautious.

“Sure, I remember almost all my students.”

Not that he’d done much worth remembering, this Nasser. Just sat in the back, looking pissed off all term. There was a certain number of kids like him every year, maybe twenty, thirty percent. The unreachables. Who either didn’t speak the language or just didn’t give a damn. After all these years, David accepted that triage went on in the classroom. You helped the ones who were going to make it and made the best deal you could with the ones who wouldn’t. And once in a while, you found a gem in the gravel. There’d be a kid like Kevin Hardison, of no special promise, yet somehow you could find a way to buff him up and make him shine. You could signal him that there were life and ideas and mystery on the other side of the great divide of adulthood; it wasn’t all just driving on the expressway, flipping burgers at Mickey D.’s, and selling drugs on the corner. High school was the last chance at true democracy, where everyone stood more or less equal. So you went to the wall for these kids. You bought extra books for them, went to their Friday-night basketball games, talked to the social workers when they had problems with their parents, took their phone calls from Rikers when they got in trouble with the law.