The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (8 page)

Miss Cox was P.S. 5's dominant figure. I suppose she was in her mid-fifties when I met her, but you would no more think of her in terms of age than you would ask how long gravity had been around. She was tall and broad-shouldered, although surprisingly thin when viewed from the side. Her face was wide, but even so her features seemed crowded together: a prominent hooked nose with a red birthmark on one side, large deep-set glittering eyes beneath thick eyebrows, full, rather pendulous lips accented by bright red lipstick and dyed orange hair, which was so thin that her white scalp showed through. Her taste in clothing was expressive to the verge of eccentricity. Her long skirts, a different one for each school day, were made from what looked like upholstery fabric, and she wore white satin blouses with stand-up collars, padded shoulders, and full sleeves that buttoned tight at the wrist and rippled with each gesture, like a swordsman's shirt in a cloak-and-dagger movie. She often tucked two or three patterned silk handkerchiefs into a broad leather belt, and these fluttered around her as she moved, as did the long-tasseled oriental scarf she draped over her shoulders, its ends flipped over her wrists. She wore copper bracelets and long loops of colored glass beads that swung and rattled and clinked with her quick, angular movements. The timbre of her voice ranged from rich chocolate-contralto speech through to cascading soprano laughter.

Miss Cox was determined to broaden the minds and lift the spirits of every slum child whom Fate had placed in her care, and the classroom over which she reigned for more than a quarter of a century reflected both her mission and her personality. In her exquisite Palmer hand she wrote aphorisms and maxims in various colors of chalk on the blackboard, reminding us that 'The lost minute can never be recovered', or enjoining us to 'Reach for the stars', or warning us that 'Senseless haste is the enemy of speed'. She added new admonitions and adages when she thought the old ones had had time to soak into our collective unconscious, but because she often had to erase to make space for classwork and illustrations, it was not uncommon for only fragments of the maxims to be left on the blackboard for a week or two: messages such as 'Reach...' which was what a cowboy said when he drew his gun on a bad guy, or 'Senseless haste is... ', a baffling existentialist affirmation. There was a pin board covered with layers of constantly refreshed pictures from National Geographic and other magazines showing us what life and people were like in Africa, Asia and Europe, so we wouldn't get the idea that the universe ended at the corner of Pearl and State Streets. “There is a whole wide world out there, children, and it's yours for the taking.” And there was a large modern globe next to a globe showing the world as it was conceived during the Age of Discovery. She often compared these two to demonstrate that the accepted truths of a given time can change, and that there are new truths all the time. Most interesting of all to me was what Miss Cox called an orrery, a complex model of the solar system with wires and strings and a crank that she would sometimes turn so we could see the relative motion of the Earth and its moon, and the other seven planets (no Pluto because the orrery was pre-1930). And there was a scuffed and battered upright piano on which she played every morning, lifting her wrists high from the keyboard and holding that graceful balletic gesture for a moment before slamming down on the emphatic chords of the morning sing-song, which she believed was good for both our lungs and our souls.

Covering every surface—tables, windowsills, bookcases, the piano top—was a gallimaufry of broken pottery, driftwood snarls, 'interesting' bits of rock, twisted metal... anything she thought might inform or inspire our aesthetic sensibilities and make us realize that beauty was all around us; and hanging from the nails she had pounded into the walls with the heel of her stout shoe, there were swatches of fabric and ribbons and feathers and colored paper, anything that caught her eye and seemed stimulating.

Alone of all the teachers at PS. 5, Miss Cox never had trouble maintaining order, despite her willingness to let us move about the classroom with a freedom that other teachers didn't dare to permit, lest it lead to stampedes, even insurrections. She would suddenly order us out of our desks and onto our feet whenever she decided that it would be good for us to move our bodies in 'free dance' to the thumping rhythms of her piano. The sheer mass and intensity of her personality awed the class into good behavior. Even the sullen older boys who sat, root-bound, in small desks at the back of the room responded when she smiled dazzlingly at them and chanted in two bell-clear notes, “pos... ture, gentlemen! Pos... ture!” They would sit up straight, although they did so with the bored listlessness necessary to affirm their roles as tough kids. She used to bring in large prints of famous paintings to show to the class, and she would tell us why they were famous and what we should look for “...because art is for everybody.” In addition to the usual third-grade subjects, she introduced us to the joys of elocution and clear diction, “...because ideas are expressed in words, and the clearly spoken word reflects a clearly understood idea.” I leave to your imagination the sounds produced by the tough older boys in the back row when obliged to 'round their vowels' and 'be mindful of terminal consonants'. But they would do their best, then they'd glower around the class, daring anyone to laugh... or even smile. I loved the sound of her 'elocution' voice and I was a natural mimic, so it wasn't long before I was imitating the precise diction and rich pronunciation of radio actors as I talked animatedly to myself in the course of the intricate story games that occupied most of my free time; but I always fell back on the flat, dental sound of urban New York when dealing with people on North Pearl Street because that was the only sound they took seriously. When that aggressive street speech was bolstered by profanity, it was more likely to produce respect and compliance than the fruity sounds of Claude Rains or Orson Welles, which would probably have earned me a sneer and a fat lip.

Each afternoon as four o'clock grew near, the allure of freedom would become too great to ignore, and your soul would twist within your body with the need to be elsewhere. Over the teacher's head in every room of P.S. 5 there was a Regulator clock whose long hand did not crawl around the dial but remained frozen for an eternal fifty-nine seconds then suddenly clunked to the next minute, giving a jab of excitement to hundreds of young bodies, stiff with accumulated boredom and yearning to run screaming out across the macadam playground and down the street. But not in Miss Cox's third grade, where we enjoyed the inestimable privilege of ending our school work twenty minutes early, when she would say calmly and without breaking the flow of whatever she had been talking about, “...and now we have five minutes to tidy up the classroom... silently!... and then it will be storytime.” With busy—but silent!—efficiency, we lifted our hinged desktops and put away books and pens then closed them... silently!... then the assigned chair-straighteners set about their task (always girls, as boys tended to scrape the chairs across the floor), and the book-putters-away and wastepaper-basket-emptiers discharged their responsibilities, and the window-closers (the big older boys at the back of the class) manipulated long wooden poles with blunt brass hooks at the end to close the windows which Miss Cox insisted be open at least a crack during class, even in winter, because “the brain requires oxygen”, and the best student of the preceding week (me, usually) collected the blackboard erasers and took them out onto the iron fire escape, where he clapped them together vigorously until the chalk dust was dispersed into the air. When this privileged functionary was daydreaming, as often he was, he would forget to stand upwind of the erasers and would return to the classroom with white eyebrows and hair, to the scoffing amusement of the big boys. “Yeah, sure. The smart one!”

Then, for the last quarter of an hour, Miss Cox would read to us, not dull, stuffy 'good' fiction, but cracking stories with plenty of action and danger, and with kids as the heroes. She would act out all the roles, letting her voice become tense with danger or breathless with excitement or hysterical with fun. Sometimes these stories came from Miss Cox's collection of children's books with pictures of boys and girls in outdated clothes, other times she would read from handwritten notebooks, for Miss Cox was a writer of children's fiction, although, she admitted, “...as yet to be discovered.” She somehow always managed to be at a moment of danger or discovery when the Regulator's minute hand lurched to straight up, and the school bell jangled. All the class would groan and beg her to read on, just to see what happens next, but she would shrug fatalistically and close the book until the next day, reminding us that “If you always leave the table a little bit hungry, you will never sit down without an appetite.” With this, she would slowly turn over one hand so that the fingers pointed to the cloak room at the back, and that was the signal that we were free to leave. That gesture was the boundary between the world of school and the world of freedom, and as Miss Cox, Queen of Chaos, sat smiling, we would rush back and grab our jackets and hats off their hooks, pushing and shoving and babbling and playing tricks, and on snowy days, those of us who had rubbers or galoshes would hop around on one foot, slipping on the still-wet floor and pinching our fingers to pull them on. Then we would dash out of the cloakroom and immediately slow to a walk and stop babbling because each student said, 'Good-bye, Miss Cox' as he passed her on his way to the door, and she would hold each of us in turn in her affectionate gaze and say: Good-bye, Joseph or Mary-Elizabeth or Margaret, always using the full name rather than nicknames, to the slight discomfort of a Bart who was Bartholomew or an Al who was Aloysius, and we would go out into the hall more orderly and better behaved than any other class because we had had a moment to let off steam in the cloakroom.

Often Miss Cox would begin story time by reading a short poem, which nobody liked as much as the stories, although some girls pretended to, trying to convince somebody that they were more refined than boys. She tried to tempt the boys to taste the riches of verse by occasionally reading things like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”, which she described as a cowboy poem, but all that stuff about the lady known as Lou seemed awfully gushy to us, although the gunfight in the dark was pretty good. Shortly after I returned to Miss Cox's class the following September to begin the third grade in earnest, she read the class Kipling's “Gunga Din” and told us that she would give any boy who could recite it a 'special treat'. I checked it out from the library and memorized it, despite the funny spelling that was supposed to represent a cockney accent. After rehearsing before my admiring mother and long-suffering sister, I informed Miss Cox that I had “Gunga Din” down by heart, and she told me that the 'special treat' was not so much for me as for the entire class: I would be allowed to recite the poem to them! Both the class and I felt terribly let down, but I went to the front of the room and ground my way through the poem, lavishing generous measures of histrionic excess upon the last gasping words of the mortally wounded water-bearer. Later, I would learn to play to my audience under similar circumstances, sheltering myself from their mocking antipathy by making fun of the poem, or the assignment, or myself, or them; but this first time on stage I had no armor but melodramatic sincerity as I shifted roles and bitterly lamented my recent death, manfully fighting back the tears as I made what was, for a leather-hearted white soldier, a difficult confession: “You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” Throughout my recitation, Miss Cox listened, her eyes closed in receptive ecstasy, while my classmates tried to distract me by rolling their eyes or pretending to strangle themselves with both hands.

Each grade of elementary school has its own ethos, its own shibboleths, its own taboos, even its own jokes that linger through the summer in the chalk-dusty air to be rediscovered, dusted off and found hilarious by each succeeding wave of children. Each generation of third-grade kids at P.S. 5 was intensely loyal to Miss Cox while under her thrall, but the moment they became sophisticated fourth-graders they felt obliged to ridicule her and to disdain the next batch of adoring third-graders. Boys would mock her by speaking in a snooty, fluting voice, and even the best-behaved girls sometimes put their heads together and giggled at her bizarre clothes. It was universally accepted that she was 'crazy'.

Miss Cox was a teacher for all students. Her inexhaustible flow of information, ideas, images and inspiration was sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of the brighter minds and send them into books to learn more, while average students learned enough to do well in the fourth grade, and the bumptious tendencies of the dimmer kids were allayed by the unaccustomed attention and individual recognition she gave them. She embraced all her students with her absorbed, responsive gaze as she reached out for them with her rich, many-layered voice; and she was in almost constant physical contact with us, placing her hand on the shoulder or head of one while she answered another and looked into the eyes of a third, somehow giving every one of us the feeling that she was aware of your particular needs and interests or, sometimes, of what mischief you'd been up to.

Miss Cox was a uniquely colorful example of those generations of splendid, often lonely, women who devoted their lives to teaching in urban slums, small towns, and one-room rural schoolhouses from the last third of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, women whose personal sacrifice made American public education effective despite its innate weaknesses of structure, organization and resources. Most of these martyrs to learning never married; in many school districts they weren't allowed to. They lavished upon succeeding generations of children the energies and talents that other women put into marriage and motherhood, energies and talents that a modern woman might devote to a career in commerce, government or industry, the doors to which professions were either closed to women at that time, or just barely ajar. Grand and noble though the achievements of these lay saints were, no compassionate or just-minded person would want to see a return to such exploitation of talent as was necessary to make a jury-rigged and neglected educational system work.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note5#note5” ??[5]?