When We Argued All Night (11 page)

—What's he doing these days? Beatrice London asked.

Harold mentioned the junior high where Artie taught social studies. He said, He's quite a guy.

—He certainly is! said Beatrice London cheerfully, but then she stood up, putting her folded newspaper into a large purse. My stop. Nice to see you! and as the train doors opened, she hurried out, her head down, her free hand held stiffly, bent away from her body.

A
rtie preferred teaching current events to the established curriculum, and his students knew all about the investigations of Communists in the city schools, among other subjects, but he taught the expected units when pressed by his chairman—who liked him—on New York history or the five boroughs. He'd taken his classes to explore Staten Island and the Bronx, places they'd barely heard of. Once he failed to count and lost a child who lingered in the Museum of the City of New York when the rest of them had left. The boy asked directions, and when they got back, he was waiting on the front steps of the school. Artie hadn't missed him. He blamed the children, and after that assigned buddies, and yelled at the group if they lost track of their partners.

—That's not my job, he said, keeping track of you kids. My job is knowing and thinking. How am I supposed to keep you straight, just a lot of interchangeable children?

He'd test them. Okay, you, he'd say suddenly. Who's your buddy? Gary? Okay, which one is Gary? The kids teased him for not knowing their names and sometimes insisted they were who they were not. Once a class almost convinced him that a stranger was Gary.

Artie didn't remember their names, but he knew each child and worried about them until Evelyn knew them all too, though not by name. They'd be the Boy with the Dead Mother or the Girl Who Flunked Spanish. As Brenda grew older and learned to read, she had insisted that her father should learn the names of the children. She read his roll book and learned them herself. Naturally, Artie made it a game. Who's the kid who got sent to a psychiatrist? he said once.

—Lydia Maturo, Brenda said promptly.

—Artie, she shouldn't know that! Evelyn said. Nobody should know that! Carol's listening too.

—My kid has sense, Artie said. She won't go all over the neighborhood, talking, and if she did, what difference would it make? Lydia Maturo doesn't live around here. Carol is playing with her dolls—she's not paying attention.

B
renda knew that Carol always paid attention. If you ever meet someone called Lydia Maturo, Brenda told her sister when they were alone, don't be surprised if she seems crazy. Someday there might be reason to use this piece of information. It could somehow help Brenda rescue Carol when a problem came along that Artie and Evelyn couldn't solve. Brenda knew that her mother often cried in the bathroom. Evelyn criticized Artie when he left his things around, told Brenda secrets, or didn't mark his students' papers until late at night.

Brenda thought it was unimportant that her father did these things. Her father could speak in the voice of a horse, and for years Brenda had not been certain that an invisible horse named Prancy didn't live under their kitchen table. Artie could sing and whistle and make up limericks; she herself had known how to make up a limerick since she was four. He had opinions about everything, from what her teacher did to what the president did. Sometimes he got so angry with the government that he screamed at her, his eyes flashing, as if it were all her fault.

As Brenda grew up, she tried to understand why her interesting father was boring, while her boring mother was interesting. Brenda would rather walk around the block with her mother than have an adventure with Artie, even though Artie's adventures involved distant subway lines, dusty museums, obscure parks with names he made up, like the Forest Primeval. When he got angry with her, they both shouted. Other people might notice, but only she was ashamed. Brenda valued her father's praise more than her mother's, though she never could learn anything he taught her, like tennis. His eye on her was thrilling. But even when Artie was angry, he was tiresome, and she eventually decided it was because though you couldn't guess in advance what he'd think up, once you knew, you knew what he'd say about it, and he'd insist so hard there was no room for conversation.

W
hen Harold first became a teacher, he had avoided looking into his students' faces, especially the Negro children's faces. Boredom and hostility are easy to detect. He looked over their heads or out the big windows at the side of the room. When he joked, nobody laughed. By the end of each day his hands were covered with chalk dust, and when he smelled it on his body or clothes, he doubted everything he'd believed about the power of literature and his own power to teach it. He wanted to be a professor, teasing out the meaning of Hawthorne and James with graduate students. Instead, he taught
Green Mansions
and
The Mayor of Casterbridge
, books that existed only to be taught in high school.

One evening he was on the phone with Artie, who was telling a long story about his own students. Harold was bored but prolonged the conversation to avoid helping Myra with Nelson. He felt disloyal to his wife, his child, his friend, his work. For a man with a hardworking conscience, he noticed, he rarely did the right thing.

—So the little bastard stepped on my foot, Artie said. Still hurts.

—Why did he step on your foot?

—What I was just telling you. Unresolved conflicts with the bourgeois classes. He said he tripped.

Harold pictured the boy. Then he realized he was picturing not a stranger but one of his own students, a small, muscular Negro kid whom the others respected, though he was short, because he was fast and powerful. Artie's student was younger, of course—different from the boy Harold was thinking of, whose name was Elwin Hunt. But Harold continued to think of Elwin, lithe and swift—unlikely to trip over anything—tripping over Artie's foot, almost dancing onto Artie's foot.

—This kind of teaching, Harold said slowly. This kind of teaching, it's the most important thing there is.

He forgot Artie in the imagined sight of a boy he had been unwilling to look at but had apparently memorized, Elwin with his short legs and big feet and unlikely speed, his ears—the boy had big ears on a small head. Ears sometimes grew first.

—What are you talking about? Artie said.

—I'm doing what I should be doing, Harold said.

—And you think I'm not? Artie said. I told you to get a job with the Board of Ed for years. Now you're giving me a song and dance?

—No, no, Harold said. I was thinking aloud.

This was the work he was supposed to do, this was the work that joined his love of literature with his miserable greed for social justice. He got off the phone doubting himself. Maybe he'd be just as afraid on Monday.

He was not. He began to like the people he taught, these creatures between children and adults. He began to type stories and essays he found for them onto mimeograph stencils, then run them off. He learned how to get the mimeograph machine to work without tearing the stencils. By his second year he was famous for it: they'd call him when the machine jammed. He joked and cajoled his students until they cared about what he'd found.

Harold joined the Teachers Union, though everyone knew it was full of Communists, and he talked Artie into joining as well. The TU worked in the Brooklyn streets with poor kids, worked on integration, worked on civil liberties. The Teachers Guild, he said to Artie—the tamer union—was more interested in pensions.

T
he first time Artie went to the cabin without Harold—Harold and Myra now had part ownership and encouraged him and Evelyn to go—he made up his mind to learn to swim. Evelyn could swim a little, but though she loved the sounds and smells of the woods, she didn't like having to cook in the makeshift kitchen, and she seemed to hold the lake responsible. She took a brief, hasty swim each warm afternoon, as if it were required, then didn't get wet again. Artie, one eye on the girls, watched her while she splashed a few feet, out where the water came up to her neck. She made more noise than Harold did when he swam and produced more foam. She thrust her head in its white rubber bathing cap back and forth.

In anticipation of this week in the country, Artie had taken a book about swimming from the library, and he tried to persuade Evelyn to read it. Her sense of humor had become more acid with motherhood, and the way in which she found Artie's suggestion funny hurt his feelings.

—Okay, he said, you're the expert. I merely note that you can't swim ten yards without getting tired.

—I merely note that you can't swim at all, she said. So Artie decided he could teach himself to swim without getting the book wet, not an easy proposition. He forced himself to walk quickly into the cold lake because Evelyn was watching—or maybe he could even be seen by one of the people in the few quiet houses that now were spread around the lake—and leaned forward, gingerly putting his face in the water while holding his breath. Eventually he learned to turn his head to one side to take a breath and let it out under water. He dared to open his eyes. He practiced the flutter kick while holding onto the dock, to which a canoe was now tied. By the end of the week he could propel himself a few yards through the water.

The following year Artie and Evelyn paid Harold and Gus to rent the cabin for two weeks in July, and that became their habit. Brenda especially loved it—well, they all loved it, but Brenda would disappear, walking as far as she dared, returning late, or she'd go into the woods with a book and not be seen for hours. Evelyn had learned to drive and announced that she'd never liked swimming in the lake, with its rocks and weeds. Schroon Lake village, a few miles away, had a sandy beach with lifeguards. Artie insisted there was nothing like swimming in front of the cabin (I can dive from bed into the water! he said, though he couldn't dive), but on warm afternoons Evelyn slowly drove the girls down the long driveway and onto the paved road to Schroon Lake. She unfolded a canvas chair and watched Brenda and Carol, who ran in and out of the water and splashed around under the lifeguard's eye. Later, they walked up the hill, back to Route 9, and bought ice cream.

Harold, who could go to the cabin whenever he liked—he and Artie both had cars now—found that he disliked being there with Myra and Nelson. They seemed to pick the hottest days of the summer for their vacation, and though it was cool at night, the days were slow and lazy, the hum of insects reproachful. Myra loved sleeping in the sun, getting browner, and Nelson, as he grew, carried rocks into the water and brought them out again, but Harold wanted to walk long distances, wearing out his restlessness so he could write. A few times he went alone, in fall or spring, for a weekend, and then the cabin was all he had dreamed of, except that he felt guilty for leaving Myra alone in the city with Nelson. Sometimes the shouts of children from houses across the lake made him look up from his book and think wistfully of his own child, who was more baffling and troublesome than children ought to be. Sometimes a fisherman's motorboat interrupted the dense, layered quiet, but then the quiet returned.

B
y the fall of 1951 Harold had long since learned to relax in the classroom, looking from one student to another, watching them think, watching them for the fun of it while they wrote or thought up answers to his questions. He caught himself making unconscious, habitual gestures, the kind students notice and laugh at, but he didn't care. He tapped his chalk excitedly on the blackboard, making little dots, and the students joked about how many little dots they'd earned. This year another kid had big ears: Kenneth Duggs, tall and difficult, bright, with small, tight features. Sometimes their noses grew even before their ears, but Kenneth's nose hadn't grown yet, and maybe it would stay as it was, made tiny by his ears. He had a dark-skinned, tense face that sometimes forgot itself and looked curious. Harold couldn't resist the curious ones.

One Saturday, early that fall, a police car moved on a group of boys loitering late in the evening, some on the sidewalk and some in the East New York street, and Kenneth Duggs was struck by the car—knocked over so his head hit a fire hydrant. He died later that night in the hospital. Harold would never find out if his nose would have grown, if he would have suppressed or indulged his curiosity. A student phoned him late that night. Awakened, astonished both by the news and the child's willingness to phone him, he began to cry. He put on his clothes, his hands shaking, and drove through the dark streets to the corner where a crowd was gathered, almost outnumbered by police cars. Harold stood at the edge of the crowd, in tears, for a long time. He saw no one he knew.

The papers carried the story the next day. The officer said he hadn't seen Kenneth with his dark skin and dark clothing, but witnesses said the street was bright with streetlights and headlights, and there was no reason for the car to move forward, certainly not so fast. On Monday, older teachers put their arms on Harold's shoulders and told him not to let the kids talk for too long about Kenneth's death. There was a ceremony in the auditorium, and Harold also went to the funeral, in a Negro church. The other teachers were almost as upset as Harold, but when neighborhood protests and marches kept happening—people wanted the officer brought up on charges—most of the teachers avoided the subject. Harold and his students talked of little else. They marched, they spoke out in impromptu meetings at churches. He found himself talking to their parents, drinking coffee in their kitchens. Harold was horrified and thrilled. The chairman of his department heard what he was doing and urged him to stop. I respect you for this, he said, but it's not a good idea.

Harold thanked him and went on to the meeting at the church, where he'd already agreed to speak, but he knew what the chairman meant. When Artie heard about it, he was exasperated.