The Crazy School (27 page)

“Really? Gerald, that’s fascinating. I had no idea!” I said, 2 6 0

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sounding all fakey-fake, like my mom when there was a guy in the kitchen and she suddenly became incapable of opening pickle jars. Still, Gerald seemed pleased and fl attered.

“Pineapples, Sharon fruit, and many leaf confi gurations,” he burbled on. “Of course, in some plants, the numbers don’t belong to the sequence of F’s—Fibonacci numbers—but to the sequence of G’s—Lucas numbers—if not to even more anoma-lous sequences.”

“So it’s not, like, universal, then.”

“Well, you couldn’t really call phyllotaxis a law. It’s more accurate to think of it as a fascinatingly prevalent tendency.”

“Phyllotaxis? Is that anything to do with fractals?”

“You’re interested in fractals?”

“Oh, I think they’re great, even though I’m not sure I fully understand the full range of their applications,” I said, looking deep into his eyes with a little blink blink myself.

“They’re for describing things that are, like, bumpy, right?”

I asked, fi nger to lips, the confused ingenue. “Coastlines, the stock market?”

Had Gerald looked any more ecstatic, I would’ve worried he was about to bend me over the table and spank me out of sheer glee.

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38

We were all hauling salad bar and tables back to the walls for après-lunch Sitting, but Gerald was still talking a blue streak.

“That is, the Mandelbrot set is the
subset
of the complex plane consisting of those parameters for which the
Julia
set of . . .”

His voice kept blurring in and out—phrases like “certainly include Mikhail Lyubich
and
Jean-Christophe Yoccoz, at the very least,” alternating with the “Waaah,
wuh-WUH waaaaah”

of adult speech in Charlie Brown specials.

I was ready to throw myself at Mindy’s feet and beg for enough contrapuntal iddoo-widdoo cuddwy-wuddwy that I might hope to achieve spontaneous combustion and thus end my agony.

“. . . realized that prices having theoretically infi nite
variance
did in fact follow a rather more Lévy-stable model,” Gerald went on, “such that our comprehension of
fi nancial
markets—”

“Financial markets?” I shrieked, grabbing the man by his cheesy lapels. “Gerald, you’re a goddamn
genius
!”

He blushed, stepping back from the praise.

“Seriously,” I gushed, “you’re blowing me away with the staggeringly lapidary sublimeness of your erudition, here!”

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“That’s awfully kind of you, Madeline,” he mumbled, looking down at his now bashfully pigeoned toes. “But I can’t say I’ve made any original contribution. For goodness’ sakes, Mandelbrot’s 1975
Les objets fractals: forme, hasard et dimension
alone—”

“Don’t go trying to hide your light under any bushels. You’re all, like—I mean, why aren’t you on Wall Street?” I said, laying a gentle hand on his wrist. “Why aren’t you teaching at, I don’t know, Harvard?”

“Madeline, I used to imagine that I’d . . .” But he stopped there, looking like he might be on the verge of tears for a moment.

“Gerald?”

“I had no choice. My reason for coming here overrode all other considerations. Money, pride, reputation
. . .
” And then he did tear up. Turned his head to the side so I wouldn’t see.

Too late.

“Gerald, if you ever want to talk about it . . .” I started.

“I would, I think.” He looked around the shabby room, at everyone drawing chairs back into yet another torturous circle.

“I’d like to talk about it with
you
.”

I sent up a little prayer of apology to Markham. “I would consider it an honor, Gerald. I really would.”

“Doesn’t seem like we’ll have any chance of that now though,”

he said. “Maybe we could have a cup of coffee in my apartment after we’re done with this session?”

The dining hall went quiet as people started taking their seats.

Gerald chose a place next to me on the fl oor, holding my hand throughout our next two hours of Sitting.

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39

I spent the entire Sitting session wondering how not
to accept any more Gerald-prepared beverages—especially alone with him in his apartment—while trying to steel myself against the desperate urge to yank my hand out of his.

It was, after all, he who’d had control of my jacket, with the consequent opportunity to plant Fay’s broken necklace on my person. Gerald the spy, Gerald the probably-killer, Gerald the close personal friend of Santangelo, who’d set me up to take the probably-rap.

Gerald, the guy who creeped out Wiesner, for God’s sake.

And yet he’d planted a little green tendril of doubt.

Here we’d spent all this time—me and Dean and Markham, with his brigade of hungry young associates—trying to fi gure out whether the man’s deep dark raison-de-resignation secret was having gotten busted for dabbling in smack or groping innocent little Japanese schoolboys.

But something about the way he’d gotten all weepy made me hope he really was just a prissy, old-maidish guy in Sears, 2 6 4

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Roebuck wing tips, with his “rubbers” and his exacting OCD

chewing of each bite at every meal.

Still, I was having a hard time maintaining my conviction that he was secretly this totally ruthless amoral killer of children and grabber of dicks. Part of me wanted to give him the benefi t of Markham’s lawyerly “alleged” on all of it. Not least because I could totally see how the dick-grabbing allegations had worked like a get-out-of-jail-free-card charm for Wiesner and Mooney’s third roommate—a card
I
might have considered playing, had I ever been unlucky enough to do time here myself in my misspent youth.

Bad enough being Santangelo’s hireling. We teachers could just walk out whenever the going got nasty. The kids had
Arbeit Macht
“Free to Be” day after day, with those stupid iron butterfl ies fl opping around the gate just to rub it all in.

But when Gerald gave my hand another little squeeze, I knew for damn sure there was no way I trusted him enough to risk fi nding out whether any cuppa joe at his place—fl agon with the dragon
or
vessel with the pestle—brimmed with “brew that is true.”

Markham had said poison was most often the female weapon of choice, but Gerald wasn’t exactly the butchest guy who ever came down the pike. If he
had
killed Mooney and Fay, the idea of him having done it with a gun or a knife or a blunt instrument in his soft moist grip strained credulity to the point that only dogs could hear it.

So, coffee was out, if he’d been anywhere near the carafe. And I wasn’t about to go to his apartment, either.

I wondered if he’d come to Lulu’s and talk there over some of her Mr. Raspberry-Hazelnut Fufu, or even up to our place 2 6 5

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in Pittsfi eld for Bustelo, with the side benefi t of Dean’s bulk backing me up.

In the end, my plotting was rendered pretty damn moot during the next break when Dhumavati walked up to me and Gerald and told me to follow her back into the meeting room across from the dining hall. After shutting the door behind us, she turned to me, stern. “Did you know Fay was pregnant?”

“I guess that means the autopsy results are back?” I asked.

She ignored that. “And did you know they were planning to hit the road, she and Mooney?”

“Dhumavati, look, I—”

“What were you thinking?
Were
you thinking?”

“I was thinking that Mooney was sitting there with his hand bleeding all over me, and I fi gured he needed someone to talk to about why, and I didn’t know what to do, since I had no idea whether or not Santangelo would react to the news by screaming at him that someone should shove the poor kid’s head through a wall. So I told Mooney that
yes,
I’d wait for a few days before I told anyone.”

“And do you accept any responsibility for the way that decision turned out?”

“For the fact that somebody killed them, Dhumavati? For God’s sake, what the hell does one have to do with the other?”

“So you’re okay with letting yourself off the hook because something even worse happened to two of our students than running away from the safety of school? I don’t
think
so, Madeline.”

“I
do
think so, Dhumavati. I’m sorry.”

“I presume you mean you’re sorry about failing to act responsibly, immediately following that conversation with Mooney.”

“No. I mean I’m sorry to hear you describe what they wanted 2 6 6

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to run away
from
as ‘the safety of school.’ And I’m even more sorry to come to terms with the likelihood that you actually believe it. What happened to all your talk about standing up to David?”

“This has no bearing on my relationship with David.”

“Of course it does. Fay and Mooney
died
here. At this school. Is that what you call safety? I want to believe you know better.”

“What’s at issue here is your decision to set yourself above the rules of this community.”

“Rules I thought
you
questioned as much as I do.”

“Madeline, you have to take responsibility for the conse-quences of the choice
you
made.”

“You’re going to claim with a straight face that keeping a confi dence is worse than murder? Seriously, listen to yourself—

that’s talking
what,
like, apples and machetes?”

“No, that’s talking a staff member who can’t think clearly enough to protect the students in her care, or the future of this school as a whole.”

“And what exactly would it have changed had I told you that Fay was pregnant? Let’s presume that somehow it would have prevented her death, and Mooney’s, although I don’t see how.

But okay, say it did, then what?”

She tried to answer, but I kept going. “I’ll tell you what the hell would’ve happened. Santangelo would’ve sent her home to her family so they could all gang up and force her to bring the pregnancy to term, right?”

“That wasn’t your concern.”

“Who the hell’s concern
was
it, then? Who the hell’s should it have been?”

“She was a minor, Madeline.”

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“Not as of Tuesday. Fay was legally an adult when she died.”

“And that’s what you were waiting for? That’s why you kept this information to yourself?”

“I kept it to myself because I’d given Mooney my word. I agreed to respect their confi dence until she turned eighteen.

That was the condition he set for telling me in the fi rst place.”

“You could have told
me
.”

“And what would you have done? Told David she was pregnant? Would that have changed anything?”

“We can’t know that.”

“Without David, she never would have gotten pregnant,”

I said.

“What?”

“David’s the one who banned the use of birth control on campus in the fi rst place. I mean, that’s certain to keep a bunch of teenagers from fornicating and knocking each other up, right?

Make sure there’s no sex education. Make sure they don’t have access to even condoms. There’s a goddamn brilliant plan.”

“Madeline, you are out of—”

“Out of what? Line? Bounds? Patience? My mind? You know better than this, don’t bullshit me.”

She was livid. Fuming. “That’s your projection.
And
evidence of how very deeply you’re in denial about your own part in the fate of those two poor children.”

“I wish I
could
be in denial about my part in their fate.

Because what I should have done was tell Mooney to grab Fay before that ambulance came, and run like hell. That’s the only hope of safety they ever had.”

“That’s ridiculous. He’d almost certainly have bled to death.”

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“Did it make any difference in the end? I could have saved
her
.
We
could have saved Fay, Dhumavati—you and me—if only we’d had the courage to break the rules just once. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that Fay’s life mattered less to you than the goddamn rules do?”

I waited for her to say something, anything.

“I want you to meet with Sookie. And I want you to do it now,” she replied.

“Dhumavati, you’re breaking my heart,” I replied.

I sat down on Sookie’s love seat.

“This wasn’t my idea,” I said.

“Does it have to be?” Sookie asked.

I gestured toward the typewriter on her desk. There was a half-written document sticking out of its platen.

“You’re obviously busy,” I said.

“Dhumavati felt it was important I make time to meet with you.”

“Dhumavati seems to feel it’s important I open up to you about the part that my lack of spiritual and psychiatric evolution played in Mooney’s and Fay’s deaths.”

“You seem angry.”

“Ya
think
?”

“Want to talk about it?”

“My attorney has instructed me not to discuss Fay and Mooney with anyone on campus, so no,” I said.

“That seems like a perfectly reasonable precaution under the circumstances.”

“I appreciate your saying that.”

“Thank you,” she said.

We looked at each other.

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“So where does that leave us?” she asked. “Is there anything you’d like to discuss that your attorney didn’t prohibit? I understand you’ve been through a lot this week.”