Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World: A Novel (18 page)

I pulled back a chair and crouched down, got eye level. “Hope, don’t you like school?”

“No.”

“All your friends are here. We’re going to have a swell time. I have a lot of fun games planned for later. Won’t you come downstairs?”

“Leave her be, Pete. I’ll stay up here with her. She’ll be okay. Look at this drain.”

Sure enough, it was backed up to the rim; piled cups and glasses loomed like a crystal city submerged beneath soapy water that stung my wounds when I reached in for the food trap. I cleared space around the drain and slithered the flexible copper snake into the pipe. It went a foot. I could not force it farther.

“Fuck.”

“Not in front of children, Pete.”

“Right. Sorry.”

I administered a couple more futile plunges with the snake. Meredith watched over my shoulder. Whatever was in there, it was really in there.

“Do we have Drāno?” I asked.

“You’re not supposed to pour Drāno through standing water, I don’t think.”

“Hmn. Maybe this’ll drain out over time. We can pour Drāno in later.”

I re-coiled the wet snake and bent down to peer at Hope beneath the table. She’d gathered herself into a ball, pale child’s arms tightly wrapping dirty knees. Her staring eyes were wild.

“Don’t make me drag you out of there.”

“Pete!”

“Okay, okay. Relax. I was only kidding.” And then, to Hope, this warning: “If you get behind in your lessons you’ll have take-home makeup assignments.”

On the way downstairs I made sure to shut the basement door, locking the bolt securely from the inside, to prevent any more intrusions.

The kids, all nine, were sitting quietly on their trunks. All except Tim, who was still in his brother’s lap, rocking, whimpering.

As I came down the creaking steps David raised his hand. “Mr. Robinson?”

“Yes?”

“I need to change him.”

“Can it wait?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

How very tiresome. “All right, go ahead.” David hoisted his brother and headed for the stairs, but I blocked his path. He said, “It’s best if I do this in a bathroom.”

“I don’t mind if you do it here. You can rest Tim on top of the furnace. The rest of us will continue with class, and you can listen in.”

David didn’t look enthusiastic about changing his little brother on the furnace, but I insisted it was okay, he didn’t have to be squeamish, it wouldn’t distract the rest of us in the least. Finally he gave in and retired to the back of the basement, where, in dim, forty-watt light, he unsnapped Tim’s jumper. I took my place behind the podium. I kept the plumber’s snake by my side. Susy and Brad sat at attention in the first row, ready to jot notes. Matt and Larry hunched forward like hoodlums in their seats. Steven and Sarah, sharing the trunk behind the Harrises’, made a sweet couple. Next came Jane. Near her feet the bison mascot rested on its sunk-in drain grating. I exclaimed, in my best oratorial style, “Everybody, repeat after me. Diversity! Tolerance!”

“Diversity. Tolerance,” said Susy Jordan.

“All of you. Diversity! Tolerance!”

“Diversity. Tolerance.”

“That doesn’t sound very convincing. Louder now. Diversity! Tolerance!”

“Diversity. Tolerance.”

“Much better. Again with feeling. I want to
hear
you. You too, David. Raise the rafters. Together now. Diversity! Tolerance!”

“Diversity! Tolerance!” the youths chorused.

“Excellent. That’s your class motto. Learn it and don’t forget it.”

It was also, I’d decided, a perfect centerpiece slogan for the mayoral campaign. Listening to those kids chant gave me such a high.

“How’s it going, David?” I called to the boy performing childcare at the back of the room.

“Almost finished, Mr. Robinson,” waving a soiled disposable diaper in the air. Its sweet, rotted-fruit smell filled the room. The Harris twins, having gotten a whiff, held their noses and trembled with church giggles. Getting Matt and Larry to hush was easy—all I had to do was make a reproachful face and subtly caress the copper tail of the plumber’s snake dangling like a live thing over the leather edge of the upended trunk/podium. Meanwhile David was searching in vain for a place to dispose of brother Tim’s used diaper. Missing from the basement was a garbage can. The one available cardboard box was in use as toy storage. I told David to please fold the diaper neatly and slide it beneath the furnace.

“Mr. Robinson?”

“Yes, Susy?”

“What are those spots on your arms?”

She was right. The cuts and scratches, formerly reddish, light abrasions, had, over the course of the night and the early morning, blossomed into purplish volcanic flowering splotches. Had the thorns responsible for these welts contained some malevolent toxin? The pain, now that I paused to think about it, to consider it, was acute. I grimaced, told Susy not to worry, it was nothing, an allergic reaction perhaps; and she said, “There’s a
big
one on your neck.” Then suddenly Tim was crying again, unintelligible sputtering howls that charged the basement air with anxious chaos. I shouted at David, “Would you mind keeping him quiet?” David stuffed a pacifier in Tim’s face. Sarah, who’d been watching, over her shoulder, the entire changing operation, reprimanded David for his lack of gentleness.

“Mind your own business,” he told her.

Sarah turned to me for support. She was an ace flirt for a toddler; she had those enormous eyes, that moist, father-seducing grin. I think it is fair to say that the feelings she aroused in her teacher are best left, in the interests of seemliness, undiscussed. I said to her, “Generally, methods of child rearing are considered to be discretionary. Who can tell us what ‘discretionary’ means? Anyone? Yes, Susy?”

“Private?”

“Close enough.”

Sarah pouted. Under her breath, yet loud enough to be heard, she growled, “
Monster
.”

The whole class tensed. You could feel it. The silence was immaculate, breathless, complete. Even Tim quit his yowling. It broke my heart to have to exercise discipline on a cutie like Sarah. I had no choice. I addressed the class in a sonorous voice, “It is my sad burden to advise you all of the consequences of calumny and slander in the classroom.”

They looked nervous. This at least was gratifying. I waited awhile in order to let the kids worry sufficiently (a tried-and-true discipline technique—abject silence), before continuing, “Sarah, please rise and come forward.”

She got to her feet. Attempted unsteady progress toward the head of the class. She was, obviously, unnerved. I encouraged her to
please
get herself moving, and I asked her, “What do you think we ought to do with you?”

She gazed floorward. Her shoulders were trembling. Sarah’s soft lips moved, but no sound came out.

“Class, what should we do with Sarah?”

It was only a matter of time before a hand went up. Then another. And another.

“Steven?”

“I think Sarah should apologize.”

“Thank you, Steven. David?”

“Let her stay late after school and write a hundred times or something?”

“Make her do blackboard-washing duty,” offered Jane, though there were no blackboards to wash.

Leave it to Susy. “Expel her.”

After that I didn’t hazard calling on the Harris twins for their suggestions. There’s a limit. I pointed to a musty unlit corner of the basement, where fungus carpeted the floor and web-enshrouded water pipes plunged down through holes in the ceiling. The straight-backed chair, the one from the living room, sat facing a wall.

“Go over there and sit down, young lady. When you’ve decided you feel ready to behave, maybe you can come back and try to be a member of this class.”

Sarah walked to that chair like she thought it was electric. Her auburn-curled head bobbed low; her arms hung at her sides as if drained of life. I couldn’t help noticing how the basement’s lamplight cast Sarah’s shadow onto the dark far wall: as Sarah walked away from the light, so did her shadow—diminishing, rapidly, in height—walk away from us; it was as if a phantom Sarah were speeding away on a long journey. It was heartbreaking. It was too much for Jane, alone at the back of the class, to bear; she broke down sobbing. Tim spit out his pacifier and joined in. The noise became gruesome. I shouted, “Hey! Hey!” as the wailing swelled to higher and higher intensity. Sure enough, the knob of the basement door at the crest of the stairs began rattling, and Meredith’s muffled voice tumbled down from on high. “What’s all that crying? Pete! Why is this door locked?”

“It’s okay, honey. No problem. No need to worry. Everything’s under control,” I called, merrily.

And, to the kids: “Let’s all settle down. All right?”

Then, loudly: “Listen up and I’ll tell you about a time before democracy was born. A time when affliction and suffering were the bread and water of daily life. Ignorance and rampaging diseases governed men’s lives. Diversity in all its forms was punishable by death or imprisonment, and you were guilty until proven innocent.”

Well, the children did listen. They craned forward on their storage trunks. Their eyes opened wide, their weeping diminished; they wore studious faces. Sarah, her face to the wall, even little Sarah seemed to tune in—you could see it in her hypererect posture. Of course, that might’ve been the chair. For my part, I was in the groove, gathering steam and rolling through the terrible centuries, telling tale after tale to the finest audience in the world.

“And then what happened?” the kids would eagerly demand whenever I paused for breath.

“He received the tongue screws and never was able to utter a word again, but using blood as ink, he wrote a diary of his dying days in a worm-plagued prison cell, and was declared a martyr,” I would tell them.

Or:

“They took hold of her and viciously tore the flesh from her sides, only to discover that her smile grew, and she was in ecstasies for her pain.”

Or:

“Flames leapt into air, licking the tender soles of their feet, and yet they sang on, a great chorus of voices offering exaltations on high.”

Later, during a generalized discussion of fortified castle keeps, I brought forward the 1:32-scale model, which I carefully showed around, in order to point out salient features of bastille design.

And when we got to the rack—when we got to the rack, I
knew,
before the familiar queries had barely flown from those six-, seven-, and eight-year-old mouths—I
knew
the very questions the students would ask:

“Did the torturers leave the people on that thing for a long time?”

“Did you get taller?”

“Could you get torn in half?”

“One at a time,” I implored, raising in the air a steady if scarred hand. I wanted to savor the moment. Those upturned faces before me seemed the faces of angels; pure and spirited, they radiated light. It’s a light every teacher lives to bathe in: the luster of the young soul.

“Mr. Robinson?”

It was Sarah. She was sitting in her chair, forsaken. She seemed so far away. Her head was turned to face her peers, and her eyes were full of longing.

“Yeah, Sarah?”

“I think I’m ready to join the class now.”

“Are you?”

“I think.”

“And what makes you think you’re prepared to come back and be one of us?”

All eyes regarded her. We waited. It was a tense moment before Sarah, whispering, explained, “It’s dark here. I don’t like it.”

What we were witnessing was nothing less than a practical demonstration of the plight of the pariah. I took the opportunity for a brief discussion of caste, class, and the thorny social problems surrounding taboo violation and the exclusion and/or integration of individuals and groups according to religion, ethnicity, and “lifestyle.”

After which Susy raised her hand and suggested, from the front row, “Make her prove she’s ready!”

She was so excited, she inadvertently (or so it seemed) struck her brother in the side of head with her elbow. Brad screamed, pitched forward from his seat, and collapsed to the floor. Susy gazed coolly down at her brother and said, “Stop crying, baby.”

And to me, she explained, “He pulls this all the time at home, Mr. Robinson.”

I wasn’t sure. There are widely ranging schools of thought concerning children who act out dramas of suffering. Do you hasten to their aid? Or do you leave them to sort themselves out, dignify them with the autonomy necessary for growth and individuation? I elected to follow the boy’s sister’s lead. Fortunately, the distressing noises of Brad were soon drowned by hearty cries from the Harris twins: “Let’s see if Sarah’s ready to be one of us!”

Up went a chant: “See if she’s ready. See if she’s ready. See if she’s ready. See if she’s ready.”

It was like a pep rally, or a political convention: total group dynamics, increasing frenzy, catcalls from the ranks of the class. Even overweight Steven got caught up in the excitement of the moment, stamping his feet and motioning with a fist in the air. In the back of the class David, the better to wave his own arms, plunked his infant brother belly-up on the leather edge of their trunk.

Then Susy was on her feet, standing tall before her classmates. Light from the overhead bulb made a shining halo of her hair. And down at her feet: her brother, one hand holding his head, the other reaching out to touch the hem of his sister’s dress.

Susy waited for the ruckus to die down. She rested her gaze on Sarah. And said, simply, “The rack.”

Well.

I’ll admit I was feeling less than one hundred percent that Monday morning. There were, for instance, those sprouting purple welts; no telling the effect, on the brain, of these venomous blemishes. I’d gone without sleep, and it’s a sure bet I was running a fever, even a considerable one. Should I have seen it coming, that inaugural—and, as it turned out, final—session of the Pete Robinson Institute, when all the kids (injured Brad excepted; he continued to worm around on the floor, like a hurt animal) turned to see what I would do?

Likewise, how much responsibility must I bear, for what eventually, inevitably occurred, simply because I suggested using the flat, hard surface of a leather-decorated steamer trunk, and Matt and Larry Harris’s strong young arms and backs, in lieu of a real rack?