The Widower's Tale (19 page)

Oh would you?
Ira could remember thinking in that moment, feeling the bile rise in his throat. Betty was a woman who'd come of age in the scrappy sixties yet seemed averse to confrontation of any kind. "This is outrageous," said Ira, "and it's absurd, and it's ... insulting."

"I agree with you," Betty said, yet still she spoke in that funereal tone. "But the cat is out of the bag, and I--"

"And you're too much of a wimp to stare it in the face."

Betty was silent. She did not look angry, only embarrassed.

"I am one of the favorite teachers here, and you know it," Ira had said. "How could you even listen to that man for one second?"

She shook her head, still unable to speak.

"Oh," said Ira. "Because he has money. And two more children--those perfect little Aryan
twins
--yet to add their aid-free tuitions to the coffers. Let's see. Has he agreed to finance a new set of play equipment? A minivan for field trips to the science museum?"

"This is so painful, Ira. Because as you know, people like the Caldwells are the ones who make it possible for the Sanchezes and the Wozniaks--"

"People
like the Caldwells,"
Ira said slowly, his voice quivering, "ought to be publicly shamed. As should the people who condone their behavior."

Ira watched Betty fight back tears.

"I deserve that," she said quietly. "But I am going to lay out the options here. One, we do the so-called right thing and we stand up to Willard Caldwell. Either he takes his child out of The Very Beginning--along with his money and probably a few of the other families in his tax bracket--or he decides to take you, and us, to court. He's already got Ramsey seeing a therapist--"

"A therapist?" Ira bolted up from his chair, his rage kinetic, but found himself penned in by the tiny office and its shelves overflowing with the director's "special situation" books on how to talk to a child when a parent is ill, when a pet dies, when Grammy loses her mind, when sex rears its head a little sooner than convenient. Nothing about when a rich parent blackmails you into firing your goddamn best teacher.

"Well, sorry, Betty, but I'll see that bastard in court." Anthony would get him the best possible defense attorney. Willard Caldwell wouldn't know what had hit him. This story would make the front page of the
New York Times
.

Betty had stood as well. She walked up to Ira and took him by the shoulders. She forced him to accept her embrace, close and strong. After a moment during which neither one moved a muscle, she stepped away and took her chair. "Sit down," she said calmly. She waited to see if Ira would follow her command, which he did, and if he would unleash further venom, which he didn't. He was breathing fast, but he decided to listen, not to flee.

"One of the reasons you're a favorite teacher here is that you are dedicated to this school. You are not a transient. You are not some starry-eyed girl waiting to find a man and go have children she can call her own. You are rare." She stared at him for a long moment and then said simply, lovingly, "Ira."

He began to breathe more easily.

"Ira, if you say so, we--I and two of the board members who know paranoia and bigotry when they see it--we will go to the mat for you. I'm afraid there would be an investigation of some kind ... of you, no matter what I say. If you want to go through that, we'll do it together. But I want you to stop and think about The Very Beginning. What would happen to the school. The media alone."

"Right," said Ira. "Not me. I'm not supposed to think about what would happen to me."

"Ira, I've spent this entire week--day
and
night--thinking about almost nothing
but
you." She smiled, briefly. "I've made a lot of telephone calls. Some of which I am not proud to have made. But here's something good. I hope you see it that way, because I do. A professional friend of mine runs the nursery school of everybody's dreams," she said. "And she has an opening. Which, by the way, pays more than what you make here. And I've already told her about you."

"The whole story."

Betty had laughed, sardonically, heartily. "Oh no, Ira. No. I have met enough families in my career, heard enough unsavory stories, to know that you never tell more than necessary. If you want to stay honest. And out of trouble."

The two of them had walked, in silence, down the hall to the Green Room. Ira had looked around the classroom--musty, too brightly lit, its carpet inescapably dingy; the cinder-block walls, despite their vibrant color, a little depressing--and the emotions that filled him felt liquid. First came grief, then fear, and last of all fury. He faced Betty.

"Can I ask you something?"

"Please." She gave him her first genuine smile.

"Did you know I was queer when you hired me?"

Her face fell. "Ira, do you think that would have mattered? Of course not."

"It will certainly matter from now on, won't it, Betty?"

"Ira, let's not have this conversation."

"Right. Let's not," he said. "Please leave me alone here, would you?"

Ira had walked out of The Very Beginning for the very last time that afternoon. And for the first time in his life with Anthony, he had kept to himself the events of the day. He had pleaded end-of-year exhaustion and gone straight to bed. He had slept late the next morning.

When he got up, he went out and walked, walked, walked. He walked himself into a rage, into a determination that, fuck The Very Beginning, he would go to court. If Anthony had not worked late that night, or if he had called Ira before Betty did, before she gave him the number of her counterpart at Elves & Fairies, who knows what might have happened?

He made the phone call. A phone call wouldn't hurt. Evelyn answered the phone and, when he mentioned Betty, became effusive. Oh, she told him, Betty was her idol. What a crusader that woman had been when she started The Very Beginning in the late 1970s. "You're too young to know this," said Evelyn, "but back then Lothian was a town where passing motorists closed their windows and locked their doors. People like Betty weren't scared by that."

The children in Ira's room, the Birches, were smart, well mannered, and eager to please their teacher. Whatever bitterness he harbored, it was hard not to feel fortunate to be in this place. Every afternoon, once the Lunch Bunch departed, Ira would walk to the back of the long hall and just stand at the great window overlooking the pond, taking in the miracle of so much wild, verdant nature so close to the city. The surface of the pond was silver in places, scattered with scarlet leaves in others. Nearly all the trees were naked now, so the sun seemed actually brighter, nearer, as winter approached. On afternoons like this one, its radiance on the unshaded roof of the barn made some of the rooms uncomfortably warm.

He enjoyed the view for a few minutes as he sipped his tea. This had become a ritual now. As he gazed out, a canoe appeared, gliding from the hidden corner of the pond. Robert and his friend Arturo paddled toward shore.

They came out to Matlock once or twice a week, even now that their work on the tree house was finished. Ira wondered how they found the time. He remembered how completely enmeshed he'd been back in college and grad school. He could hardly believe he'd actually written all those papers, aced all those tests. Now, his evenings were spent watching TV, talking current affairs with Anthony, or going to parties. That night they were going to yet another black-tie benefit, invited as usual by one of Anthony's brahmin-wannabe clients. What was tonight's cause? Inner-city poetry programs? Battered spouses? Autistic children? Ira had once loved these parties, but now that he'd drunk champagne in every hotel ballroom within twenty miles of the Pru, they had begun to seem as phony as their charities were deserving.

He returned to his classroom to tidy up. Heidi had left early, for a dentist appointment. Because their room faced west, it was stifling by late afternoon. Ira cranked open a window.

As he removed paintings from the clothesline where the children had hung them to dry, he heard the young men outside, pulling the canoe to shore.

"Turo, you're insane," said Robert.

Ira heard the canoe being dragged through the reeds, the oars rattling against the aluminum shell.

Turo said, "You have to decide what matters."

Robert laughed. "That's a pretty complex question, man. Like, isn't that part of why we're in school to begin with?"

Turo laughed. "To fiddle while Rome burns."

"I really can't let you use my car anymore. This whole thing is--I don't know ..."

"Creeping you out? You want me to move? Would you feel safer?"

"Jesus, no, dude. No way."

"Think about what's urgent. You have my total, rock-bottom respect, whatever you decide."

"I'm just ... oh Jesus, look at the time. Clara's got tickets to that symposium on torture."

"Did you tell Clara?"

"WTF, Turo, you think I'm off the deep end?"

"I'd understand it. If you did. But you have to let me know. I have to look after the interests of the group as a whole, not just mine."

Robert laughed harshly. "Are we friends or what? You don't judge my life, I don't judge yours."

"Word," said Turo. "Thanks, man."

By this time, Ira was standing with his ear against the screen.

"Ira?"

He jumped and turned toward the door. "Oh, Evelyn!" He veered away from the window. "Eavesdropping," he said. "I fully admit it. Idle ears and all that."

"On whom?" Evelyn seemed, thank heaven, amused.

"Robert Barnes. But anthropologically, if you know what I mean. Aren't college students fascinating, their culture and language? Can you believe we were ever that young?"

"Well, you were that young far more recently than I," said Evelyn.

Ira busied himself stacking the children's paintings. "Will you look at this one?" He held up Marguerite's painting of seals basking on rocks. Though her rendering was crude--a row of blue-gray lumps, etched with linear smiles and crooked whiskers--it did capture a certain modest joy one associated with these animals, at least in the wild. Which was where Marguerite was used to seeing them, off the porch of her family's home on some northern isle whose name Ira had never even heard. The kind of obscure that denoted elite.

Evelyn stood beside him, expressing her admiration. She studied the pictures still hanging on the line.

"Everyone painted the animal they'd most like to be," said Ira.

"These are wonderful," said Evelyn. "But you could have a Freudian field day, couldn't you? Which of the Birches would like to be a--what does this say?"

"Anaconda," said Ira. "That's Rico."

Evelyn smiled mischievously. "A boy with a single mother wants to be the largest snake on earth."

"Not to nitpick, but I think the largest snake is a python of some kind." He added quickly, "Look at this one, look at Neve's incredible peacock--can you believe this tail?" Back at The Very Beginning, Betty would never have made a salty remark about a child's artwork. Ira liked Evelyn, but sometimes he felt uncomfortable with her wit, as if it might be a test of his dedication. Which of course it wasn't.

"Maybe this would be a good start for your class auction project," said Evelyn. "Maybe a folding screen laminated with paintings like this. It's not too soon to start getting organized." Ira was relieved that the subject had turned a corner. Until she added, "Can you imagine what some of these parents would pay to own an object like that for their child's room?"

About what they'd pay for a fourth car, no sweat
.

They spoke about Ira's kids for a few more minutes, and then Evelyn left, telling him not to stay too late. As always when she left after one of these drop-ins, Ira had to sit down and wait for his equilibrium to return. He couldn't shake the memory of his last day at The Very Beginning, when Betty had appeared in the door of the Green Room and asked him to come to her office.

I should be in therapy, thought Ira. This is pathetic.

Inner Ira chipped in,
Oh listen, honey, buck up
. Everybody
ought to be in therapy. But everybody isn't
.

In five years together, they'd never had such a fight. The worst part was that Ira had seen it coming for three days, ever since his first conversation with Evelyn Fougere. Waiting for Anthony to come home, he'd sat in the living room, a bottle of wine on the coffee table, watching the clock on the kitchen wall, just waiting. He hadn't been able to bear the thought of music, certainly not TV or uppity NPR, so he drank. That he wasn't much of a drinker only made it worse.

At 7:41, Anthony had walked in the door. Right away, he'd seen Ira's face and the bottle of wine (containing very little) on the table before him.

"Ira? Sweetie? What is it?"

"Well." Ira prepared himself for the line he'd decided on hours before, after getting Evelyn's call with the offer (providing his background check was clean; thank God that schmuck Willard Caldwell wasn't in the FBI). "So the good news is, it looks like I'm getting a new job with a bigger paycheck."

Anthony sat down on the chair across the table from Ira. He looked predictably stunned. He said, "So ... I think I need to hear the bad news first. Hazard of my profession." He reached for Ira's glass, filled it with the last wine in the bottle, and took a sip. He waited.

Ira tried not to cry, but he failed. "I got the ax." This was not the second line he'd rehearsed.

Barely five minutes later, having skimmed as quickly as possible through the essential part of the story, Ira was telling Anthony about Elves & Fairies. He spoke in a manic rush. He had made himself stop crying. He described Evelyn as if she were his new best friend. "Her husband is
Maurice
Fougere, that amazing architect who designed the children's museum we went to with your niece. Do you remember those windows in the ceiling?"

"I don't care if her husband is Mark Fucking Wahlberg." Anthony wore a look of contempt at the brink of violence. He had finished the wine. He stared for a moment at the empty glass. When he got up and went to the kitchen, Ira assumed he would fetch another bottle of wine. Or water. That would be wise; his head already ached. Ira heard water running, but he also heard what he knew was the sound of Anthony's briefcase, the clips snapping open.