The Man in the Woods (2 page)

“I ... don’t know.”

“Better find out.” The window closed. The bell rang. Helen had no time to run back and find her locker number.
History
, she reminded herself. Because she loved it, at least for this class she felt prepared.

The history teacher, Mr. Brzostoski, was considered an oddball. That, Helen had concluded the day before from the amount of puzzlement in the classroom. The first thing he had said was that Brzostoski was too long a name to say and that everyone should call him Mr. Bro. The second was that the textbook was dull as dishwater and he would use it only as much as he had to. These openers had made everyone suspicious but hopeful that he might be easy. He dashed this hope by saying he expected every student to think and not just memorize and that he intended to be very tough. This had thrown the whole class into a silent tailspin.

Helen liked him. When she arrived at his class late, he didn’t ask her why. He was eating a banana and simply nodded to her and gave her a thin blue essay book. He asked her to write everything she knew about the American Revolution.

The rest of the class was already sweating over this assignment. Helen took a seat in the back and began to write. The American Revolution, like the many historical events where England had been in the wrong, was a favorite subject of her father’s. His buttery Irish brogue, which he turned on and off at will, rang in her ears. She filled six pages easily. Then on a blank sheet at the back she began to draw.

Helen was good at hiding the drawings she made in her notebook. None of the teachers at St. Theresa’s had really minded her doing this. Helen was the school artist and had been since she could remember. Still, she didn’t like hurting their feelings and pretended always to be taking voluminous notes while she was really caricaturing the teachers and her classmates or drawing political cartoons, which she saved for the delight of her father.

For eight years the nuns had asked the same simple artwork for every season of the year. Leaf tracings in October, turkey cutouts at Thanksgiving, angels at Christmas. Helen’s turkeys were always distinguishable from the rest in the row that hung above the blackboard. There was always great expression in the eyes, and she usually added something extra, like a Pilgrim being devoured by his own turkey. Her angels dove athletically across St. Theresa’s windowpanes in December, and one Easter she had done a large poster showing a mass of frightened chicks and rabbits pursued by a savage band of children. She had titled this “We Celebrate Our Lord’s Resurrection by Torturing Innocent Animals for Profit!”

One day Sister Ignatius Paul had sat her down and shown her a certain page in the Sunday school book.

“What do you think of that, Helen?” she had asked.

On the page was an enormous hand, its wrist disappearing into a cumulus cloud above. In the hand were jewels, and the jewels dripped down to a bunch of miniature people, snatching at them from below.

“In olden times,” Sister Ignatius read aloud to Helen, “jewels and money were called
talents
. Nowadays Our Lord gives us gifts, or talents, when He wants us to carry out His work in a special way.

“What do you think of that?” asked Sister Ignatius, as if she’d hidden jelly beans up the sleeve of her habit as a surprise reward for the right answer.

“The thumb is drawn wrong,” Helen had observed seriously, and she had redrawn the hand properly on another piece of paper. It was then that Sister Ignatius told her that God had given her a special gift, a great gift, and she must use it to glorify His name. Sister had added that it was possible that God had chosen Helen because her mother had died. This part was unclear to Helen, as she could draw extraordinarily well even before her mother had taken sick, but she supposed that God had known about the shape of things to come ahead of time.

Mr. Brzostoski had eaten three bananas during the course of the class. Helen was so hungry she could barely look at them. She could have eaten a banana skin. The bell rang, and slitting the drawing out of the blue book, Helen passed in her composition with everyone else.

“Wait a minute!” said Mr. Brzostoski. He caught hold of her arm as she passed his desk. “That too!” he said and tweaked the drawing out of her hands. He looked at it for just a second and then said, “Come see me after school, please.”

Helen stood in the doorway. The history class pushed by her on its way out. The homeroom class was piling in. “Out of the way!” yelled someone, and she followed a pink Shetland sweater miserably back to Miss Podell’s room.

Why did I have to do that!
she yelled at herself inside her head. It was a bad start to her favorite subject. It was a bad finish to a terrible day, but, then, terrible days always snowballed themselves into disasters at the end, and today had been of the worst kind. She hoped against hope that Mr. Brzostoski would not look at the drawing too closely. She prayed that if he happened to be a right-wing Republican who hated Democrats such as her father, he wouldn’t hold the drawing against her for the rest of the year.

The frosted pink sweater bobbed down the stairway. Helen rushed to follow it back to her homeroom and her lost, sealed locker.

Why didn’t I at least draw a fashion model or a Swiss chalet on a mountainside?
she asked herself. Helen had never in her life drawn either of these things, but they were popular subjects among the girls in art class.

The girl in the Shetland sweater was seated next to Helen in homeroom. A few minutes before the bell rang she tapped Helen’s left arm politely. She wanted the attention of the girl sitting on Helen’s right.
Glad to help
, thought Helen, patting the second girl on the sleeve. She watched them.
Oh, what I’d give
, she calculated,
to have gleaming blond, feathered hair like that. Such blue eyes too.
The girl in the pink sweater was the type who blushed easily when boys said things and always joked that she was on a diet when it wasn’t true because boys stared at that kind of graceful, well-groomed, well-filled-out sort of girl. Instinctively Helen tried to flatten out the curly hair that grew obstinately out instead of down from her head. She cursed Aunt Stella silently for giving her bangs. Aunt Stella didn’t understand curly hair. She had thought bangs would be the solution to Helen’s problem, but when they were cut, they just curled themselves into a frizzy sausage on her forehead. If Helen could never hope to look like the girl in the pink Shetland sweater, well, at least just maybe she could be friends with her.

Across Helen’s desk the two girls shared a whispered confidence, both of them leaning in toward Helen. Helen listened, wide-eyed, as if the conversation were the most important she’d heard in her life.

“Let’s go down to the
Whaler
office after school and pick up our booster tags,” said the blonde.

“Great!” answered the other girl, who was dark and equally pretty and grown-up-looking. Helen felt included. After all, they were both planting their elbows on her desk. She was about to ask what booster tags were and if she could come along with them when Miss Podell’s ruler smacked a book on the front desk like a gunshot.

“This class will not be dismissed until I get sixty seconds of silence!” Miss Podell announced, looking daggers at Helen.

The girls on either side of her melted back into their seats giggling. They looked at each other, not at Helen.

She squeezed her eyes shut until the bell. She thought of Jenny Calhoun again. Houston was two thousand miles away.
You’ll make new friends!
said Aunt Stella in Helen’s mind.
Start with a friendly smile, and in no time you’ll forget all your worries!
Aunt Stella made new friends every time she went to the beauty parlor. She did not understand how hard it was. What right did Helen have to hope these two old friends would want her tagging along anyway? Luckily she hadn’t embarrassed herself by asking to be included. Besides, Helen told herself, she should have known better. One look had convinced her that these two girls would one day be cheerleaders or baton twirlers. They would have boyfriends soon, if they didn’t already.

In the old days, a hundred years ago, she’d learned over and over in school, poor people waited hand and foot on rich people. They tipped their hats and licked the boots of the wealthy. Rich people with servants and mansions hardly gave the poor their table scraps, much less held conversations with them.
That
may have gone down the drain years ago, Helen thought, but it was certainly still true in high school. Cheerleader types simply didn’t associate with frizzy-haired new girls who looked two years too young, locked themselves out of their lockers, and drew political cartoons.

Mercifully Miss Podell forgot about her sixty seconds of silence almost the moment she announced it. The bell rang, and the class surged out toward the early buses.

Helen was sure, as she wended her way up to the history room, that the last catastrophe of the day lay waiting for her with Mr. Brzostoski. He was probably Polish, she decided. Most likely the Russians had tortured his family to death and he had escaped to America, where everything was beautiful and wonderful. He probably didn’t like criticism of anything modern or American and would hate her for her drawing. He would probably think she was a Communist.

Helen stood in the history room doorway, patiently watching him eat another banana while he marked his attendance sheets. Suddenly he noticed her and smiled.

“Your six pages were excellent!” he said. “Where did you learn so much history?”

“From my father,” Helen answered, smiling too and looking at his banana hungrily.

“Hungry?”

“Oh,
am
I! I locked all my stuff in my locker this morning by mistake. My lunch too.”

Mr. Bro handed her a banana. “Eat!” he said, and to it he added a Hershey bar. Helen was pleased to see that despite all the bananas he was not a health-food freak. He held her cartoon up. “This,” he said, “is the best drawing to pass my desk in years.”

The pleasure that burst like a tiny firework inside Helen must have shown in her face, and Mr. Bro was evidently waiting for it. He smiled even more broadly. “Now we have work to do,” he announced.

Helen had been sure that pleasure itself had ceased to exist the moment she’d left St. Theresa’s and come to New Bedford Regional. “Work?” she asked.

“You know the
Whaler
downstairs? The school paper?”

“I think so. Down in the basement of the other building?”

“That’s it. Now listen. The editor of the
Whaler
, Jerry Rosen, is a big shot. He wants only one thing in his life.”

“What’s that?” asked Helen.

“He wants to go to Yale. But he needs a scholarship. He wants to win the ten thousand dollar grant that the City of New Bedford gives out every June. He knows he’ll win it hands down if he gets the prize for journalism that the state awards every year to the best high school newspaper. Jerry is a very good editor, don’t get me wrong, but he has a soft spot.”

Mr. Bro coughed, twisted his ring, and looked Helen square in the eyes. “I usually don’t talk to students this way,” he said, “especially brand-new ones, but ... somehow it’s hard to think of you as brand new.” He grinned. Then he began writing a note on a yellow legal pad.

Helen felt also that Mr. Bro wasn’t brand new like her other teachers. She listened.

“I want to help Jerry,” Mr. Bro went on. “He isn’t a wealthy boy. He’s a good editor and a fine student, and he deserves to go to Yale. His soft spot, unfortunately, is his girl friend, Beverly Boone.” He kept writing, seeming to choose his words carefully. “Beverly’s going to be the death of Jerry’s state journalism award. She does these awful, sappy editorial cartoons for the
Whaler
every week. Last year I was faculty advisor to the
Whaler
, and Jerry was managing editor. I couldn’t get him to stop printing these disgusting little caterpillar drawings she turns out. Now the time has come to get Jerry to print an editorial cartoon with some guts to it.”

Helen nodded. “But,” she said, “if you couldn’t get him to change his mind last year when you were advisor, how can you get him to do it this year when you’re not?”

Mr. Bro grinned again, this time mischievously. “Beverly’s gone into business,” he said smoothly. “Now she cuts her little smiley-faced caterpillars out of copper, enamels them in livid colors, bakes them in the school kiln, and sells them at drugstores. She makes a pretty penny at it using school materials! I haven’t told the principal, but if I do, he’ll stop her. She’s making a private profit off the school. She says it’s an art project, but it’s a business. If I stop Beverly using the school kiln, she’ll hit the roof. Jerry Rosen will do anything for Beverly. He’s in love. If I tell him to run your cartoon instead of Beverly’s caterpillars or else, he will. Believe me. It will help the
Whaler
. It will help Jerry win his state journalism award and get his scholarship. I’m doing him a favor. He must put some ideas and controversy into that paper, or he’ll fail. If I have to give him a little nudge in the right direction, he’ll do it, and since he won’t listen to reason, he’ll listen to Beverly.” Mr. Bro clipped his note on top of Helen’s drawing. “Another thing,” he said softly. He began straightening the papers on his desk. “You see, what you have in that drawing is an idea. It’s funny, and you are a very talented artist, but the important thing is, it’s full of heart and caring. It’s got thinking behind it. The caterpillars ... I can’t tell you what a waste I think it is that such claptrap is printed, even in a school newspaper. Beverly has the heart of a Hostess Twinkie. Now ... go down to the
Whaler
office. Give Jerry this cartoon and this note, and you’ll be in like Flynn!”

“Thank you, Mr. Brzostoski,” said Helen a little breathlessly.

“Bro,” said Mr. Brzostoski. “Bro is much easier.”

She turned around once more in the doorway, but he was already busily locking up his drawers. Then her feet were running down the empty hall toward the
Whaler
office. There, she knew, either acceptance as warm as a tropical sea or a still greater disaster to end this day of wretchedness awaited her.