The Crazy School (7 page)

At least he’d left the cape at home.

“Nice of you to drop by,” he said, staring me down as he stroked the beard that didn’t quite hide his double chin.

I mumbled an apology.

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He turned a half-step and pointed a chubby fi nger at Tim. “I believe you had a question?”

Tim nodded, a faint tinge of red rising to his cheeks. “I just . . . last night in the dorm . . . ?”

Santangelo smiled encouragement.

“I was on duty with Simon and Cammy?” Tim continued. “So during bed check, we found graffi ti in the upstairs hallway, and we felt pretty sure we knew who’d done it, but I’m not real comfortable with how that was handled, you know?” He coughed and put his hand on his chest. Sookie’s remedy gesture.

“What made you uncomfortable?” asked Santangelo.

“Well, even though it seemed pretty clear-cut that it was Forchetti, he didn’t do a turn-in right when we fi rst asked him about it, so we got him back out of bed and brought him down-stairs to the living room.”

Santangelo tilted his head to the side, listening, nodding.

“It was already pretty late,” said Tim. “And he wouldn’t own up to . . . wouldn’t
own
doing it at all, so after about an hour, Cammy told him to kneel on the fl oor with his hands behind his back. This is in North, you know? It’s a stone fl oor? Like slate or something . . . so then it was after midnight, but we made him stay like that. On and on.”

“How long?” asked Santangelo.

“Three hours.” Tim’s eyes brimmed. “He was, you know, crying. Shaking. Legs all cramped. I should have said something, but Cammy and Simon have been here so much longer.”

Santangelo shot his chubby fi nger straight at Tim. “How
dare
you!”

Everyone fl inched at the bellowed words, and I don’t think I was alone in expecting him to jump down Tim’s throat for having allowed Forchetti to suffer.

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“You little piece of
shit
!” Santangelo stomped around in a small circle, screaming. “How
dare
you question what we do here?”

Tim bowed his head.

Santangelo slammed a fi st against the chalkboard, his legs apart. “
Look
at me.”

Tim peeked up, tears gathering at the corners of his eyes.

“What’s your name?”

Tim mumbled.

Santangelo cupped a hand to his ear. “Louder.”

“Tim?”

Santangelo swept an arm around the room, his sleeve fl apping. “If I was one of these kids,
Tim,
I’d shove your goddamn head right through this chalkboard.”

Tim sobbed, a bubble of snot expanding at one nostril.

The good doctor sighed. “You’re disgusting. You make me want to puke. You make
all
of us want to puke.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Santangelo.”

“Doesn’t he make us want to puke?” Santangelo looked at random people around the room—Cammy, Mindy, New Guy Pete—his eyes boring into them one by one until they blushed and nodded.

Tim absorbed each betrayal, caving into himself by degrees.

Santangelo turned back to him. “Stand up.”

The accused rose to his feet, shivering.

Santangelo smiled. “I think we all agree that you should fi re yourself, Tim.”

“Yes, sir. I’d like to fi re myself.”

“I think we all agree that you’re lucky to have found a community that
cares
enough about you to let you keep your job after such an appalling lapse in judgment.”

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Tim looked up at him, broken.

Santangelo nodded to himself. “Any other school, doing the important work we do here . . . well, you’d be packing your bags, Tim. Out on the street.”

“Yes, sir, Dr. Santangelo.”

“You’re a lucky man, Tim.”

Tim nodded.

“You’re a lucky man because we believe in forgiveness here at the Santangelo Academy. We believe in love, and we love
you,
Tim. All of us in this room, unconditionally. No holds barred.”

The good doctor glanced around the room again, waiting for everyone to nod.

Tim pulled a cuff down over one hand, used it to wipe his eyes and nose. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”

Santangelo spread his arms wide, palms toward the ceiling, then fl ickered his fi ngers at the crowd until someone started to clap. He stood there like some storefront preacher as the applause caught and spread around the room.

He brought his hands closer together, directed at Tim. “Come here, son. Something tells me you could use a hug.”

Under cover of the still-burgeoning ovation, Lulu leaned down until her chin grazed my shoulder, and whispered “Get me the fuck out of here before I really
do
puke.”

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“

9

“We’ve got half an hour before fi rst period,” said Lulu.

“Want some real coffee?”

“I would worship you forever,” I replied.

The two of us set off for her apartment at a caffeine-hungry trot.

Teachers lived across the road in a defunct motor court. Its Laundromat-Colonial façade sported tissue-thin brick face and a tilted horse ’n’ carriage weather vane.

Lulu scraped her front door inward across a mauled arc of shag carpet. Santangelo had bought the place complete with fi xtures and furniture: The toilet ran constantly, and you could still see where they’d unbolted the coin-op Magic Fingers unit from her Formica-swathed headboard.

“There’s hazelnut or vanilla-raspberry,” she said.

“The Harlequin Romance Line of caffeinated beverages,”

I said, collapsing into a splayfooted Jetson-esque armchair.

“Hazelnut, please.”

Lulu skipped around behind the kitchenette’s jutting counter to fi ll her Mr. Coffee carafe at the sink, then dumped three 5 9

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scoops of perfumed grounds into the fl uted sheaf of a paper fi lter.

“That Santangelo,” she said. “I just can’t stand it.”

I sighed agreement.

“I mean,
really,
Madeline. I just sat there watching that man, thinking I could be back at the front desk of the Econo Lodge, joking around with decent people.”

She reassembled Mr. Coffee and set him brewing. “Makes me miss the old commercials for these things,” she said.

She patted the top of the unit, then startled me by singing, “ ‘Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’ ” in her clear, heartstring-plucking soprano. The notes lingered, sweetening the room.

“Don’t stop,” I said.

“ ‘Joltin’ Joe has left and gone away.’ ” Spoken, not sung.

“ Hey hey hey,” I answered, disappointed.

“Maybe we should follow suit,” she said, spanking her hands together. “I could load my car right now and be at Mother’s farmhouse in half a day. Get back my old job at the Econo Lodge. They
liked
me there. I liked
them
.”

“You’d have to leave the kids,” I said. “Abandon them to the predations of Mindy and Santangelo.”

“And Tim, that abject pitiful worm,” she said rubbing her knuckles across her hair in frustration. “Please give me a goddamn cigarette.”

I did.

“Those tiny little minds, Madeline. Colorless, narrow, and utterly lacking in joy.” Lulu started to pace, trailing Bette Davis wreaths of smoke. Fuming, literally. “I am not willing to admit defeat. Someone has to stand up for
joy
.”

“You do,” I said. “You are.”

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The room had begun to smell like hot, sweet air freshener.

When the drizzle of coffee slowed, she pulled fl owered mugs from a high cupboard.

“That fi rst week we were here,” I said, “when they were breaking us in—” I started.

“All those
meetings
!” Lulu said handing over my mug.

“I had hope for Santangelo,” I said, consuming a candied swallow. “He seemed to have a spark. He said some intriguing things.”

“We both wanted to believe him. Believe
in
him.”

I savored another drag of Camel, another sip of coffee.

During one of those early meetings, Santangelo had explained why he’d banned both vices on campus. “We used to let the kids smoke,” he’d said, “if they were of age and had their parents’ permission. Not in their dorm rooms, just in a couple of designated areas outdoors.”

It had been hot that day. Late summer.

He walked along a row of French doors in the Mansion’s library, all of them open to let in any longed-for afternoon breeze.

“The thing is,” he continued, “whenever these kids run away, they go looking for a means of defi ance—fi rst thing, every time.

A lot of them are here because they’d become addicts. Kid hits the road, right away he’ll go score.”

Santangelo paused to lean back against a column between doors. “We lost a boy who’d been with us for three months—

took off and hitchhiked home to Boston. Six hours after he left campus, he OD’d on heroin. The police found him dead in a park.”

We were all leaning forward, perched on the edge of our chairs and sofas.

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He crossed his arms, pausing to gaze deep into the eyes of one person after another, around the room. “Another boy broke into an old shed in Stockbridge. His thing was huffi ng, anything with fumes enough to get him off and dull the pain he was in.

He found a quart of paint thinner and some rags—sucked down the vapors until he passed out, holding a lit cigarette. The shed caught fi re, but they got him out in time.”

Santangelo turned to look out over the broad expanse of lawn.

Everything shimmered in the summer heat.

“The thing is, what we’re asking these kids to do, the kind of work this place is about—well, it’s damn hard,” he said. “We force them to confront the most painful experiences they’ve ever had: molestation, beatings, rape . . . instances of cruelty that will break your heart and spirit just hearing about them after the fact.”

Old hands around the room nodded at this.

“It’s no wonder the kids want to run away when we’re pushing them to feel the impact of those horrors honestly. The damage . . .” he said, shaking his head sadly, then turning to face us again. “I can tell when a kid is ready to bolt. It’s always when our work here fi rst starts to become truly meaningful.

They want to shut down, to escape from having to relive the worst of it, and from having to see
themselves
honestly, without the comforting fi lter of denial.”

Santangelo walked along the row of windows again, serious, his hands clasped at the small of his back. “Perfectly natural response. One we in fact expect, even strive for. We just don’t want to lose the child in the process of trying to save him.”

Someone coughed behind me.

“I realized,” Santangelo continued, “that the best way to protect them was to set the boundaries close—give them avenues 6 2

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for rebellion that might satisfy their appetite for defi ance but without killing them.”

Tim raised his hand. “Can you tell us what those were?”

“Caffeine and nicotine,” said Santangelo. “I made those the forbidden fruit. Kid hits the road now, I guarantee you his fi rst impulse won’t be to score smack. He’ll feel compelled to get his hands on a pack of smokes and a black coffee.”

Tim nodded as I wondered whether the female students rated a mention.

“Works like a charm,” said Santangelo. “Half the time these days, they don’t even make it to the Mass Pike. We’ll get a call from the night cashier at some gas station mini-mart. Kid will still be standing outside when the school van pulls up—big Styrofoam cup of bad joe in one hand, Marlboro in the other.”

Tim waved his hand again. “So you ask
us
to give up coffee and everything for, like, solidarity?”

Santangelo nodded. “You have to be doing the same kind of work on yourself as the kids are. If you don’t have as much at stake as they do, you can’t ask for their respect, and we can’t help them.”

Tim beamed in response to that. “That’s so true, Dr.

Santangelo.”

Santangelo beamed right back.

Even then, captivated as I was by Santangelo’s charisma, I fi gured there was more to it.

For one thing, I’d caught a back-window glimpse of the honking big brass-and-copper espresso machine that glittered at the center of the man’s kitchen counter.

As the semester had progressed, I began to suspect that the thousands of petty rules he expected his employees to comply with—not to mention the fear and exhaustion that doing so 6 3

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engendered—were designed to keep us off balance, to break us down. Like, say, boot camp in the Marine Corps, or not being allowed to go to the bathroom during EST seminars back in the day.

He wanted us on edge. Vulnerable. Hankering for a cool chalice sip of Flavor Aid after he’d run us ragged on the Long March.

Good for the program.

Good for the disease.

Good, most of all, for Santangelo.

Lulu barged into my musings. “Want a refi ll?”

“Bet your sweet ass,” I said, lighting myself another Camel before I tossed her the pack.

If nothing else, this place had gotten me well in touch with my inner sixteen-year-old boy.

And he was pissed off.

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10

By the time lunch rolled around, I was actually hungry after loading my plate with salad and a hunk of lasagna, I joined the other teachers at a corner table.

Lulu patted the empty chair next to her, then resumed her conversation with Pete.

I’d barely peeled off the top layer of dessicated pasta when Santangelo rose from his seat across the room. The sight of him extinguished conversation table by table. He cleared his throat, and the last voice winked out midsentence.