In the Dead of Summer
For Jane Walsh and Howard Pearlstein,
In the Dead of Summer
By Gillian Roberts
Copyright 2012 by Judith Greber
Cover Copyright 2012 by Ginny Glass
and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
Previously published in print, 1995.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold, reproduced or transmitted by any means in any form or given away to other people without specific permission from the author and/or publisher. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Also by Gillian Roberts and Untreed Reads Publishing
Caught Dead in Philadelphia
Philly Stakes
I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia
With Friends Like These
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
In the Dead of Summer
AN AMANDA PEPPER MYSTERY
Gillian Roberts
For Jane Walsh and Howard Pearlstein,
with Sisterly Love
Special thanks and gratitude to Susan Dunlap and Marilyn Wallace for sharing their considerable talents with me, and to the Emergency Muse Cooperative—Freddie Greene, Maggie Mascow, and Helen Preston—for riding to the rescue when needed.
Introduction
Some writers, and that includes me, describe writing a novel as being akin to an oyster discovering an irritant in its gut, around which it builds its pearl. Like the bivalve, the writer hopes to build something more than indigestion out of her nagging, persistent irritation.
At the time I wrote
In the Dead of Summer
, the world seemed full of radio voices railing against minorities, news stories about what we now label “hate crimes,” and reports of multiplying militia groups. All sufficiently depressing, but it was one small news item about a particularly horrific attack on a teen that became the irritant—though that seems too mild a word—that I could not ignore or forget. This book was therefore “built” around that scene as Amanda teaches a remedial summer school class to an eclectic mix of students.
Racial
tensions erupt, there’s a drive-
by killing, a Vietnamese student disappears, an African-American teacher is victimized and there are strange echoes of the tragic ending of
Romeo and Juliet,
a play Amanda wants to teach, not relive. Worst of all is her growing dread that the acts of hate are originating right there, at Philly Prep.
A decade and a half after I wrote this, w
e are
still grappling with many of the same social issues, but technology has managed to change with amazing speed. Philly Prep is moving ahead with the times and now has a “computer science” teacher and lab, although Amanda has no idea what the science of computers might be. One character listens to his music tapes on his Walkman, and at least four times while reading this, I wished Amanda could grab her cellphone and get help—but cellphones were in their infancy and nowhere near the radar of a high-school teacher.
And of course, to Amanda, the possibility that her story would be read electronically on a screen would have been the purest science fiction.
Enjoy both the technology and the story!
Gillian Roberts
July 2012
GREETINGS FROM THE BIG LEMON, FORMERLY KNOWN
as the City of Brotherly Love.
The good news: a Duke University study officially declared Philadelphia number one in the nation.
The bad news: the study had tested which American city had the highest level of hostility. We outmeaned the Big Apple.
The researchers hadn’t polled me, but truth is, if they’d questioned me the day of my summer school faculty orientation meeting, I wouldn’t have skewed their findings. Ten minutes into our prep session, I was skyrocketing off the hostility meter. My principal and his verbose inanities had that effect on me. So did the prospect of trying to teach in an under-air-conditioned building through the hottest weeks of the year.
My face hardened into what from the inside felt distinctly like a glower.
I have done my share of scowling, frowning, grimacing, and pouting, but this was my first glower. This was big-time, the face you made when the school doors clanged shut and you realized that while the lucky portion of humanity roasted weenies, you yourself would roast in the company of pubescents with whom you had nothing in common except a species designation.
This was the glower of being unable to remember why it was I had chosen to be a teacher. I was never naïve enough to be attracted by the pay, so what had it been? Had I really thought I’d make a difference? That I could single-handedly turn the tide of the twentieth century and make old-fashioned, nonelectronic, nondigitalized objects like books and ideas and written and spoken language valuable commodities again?
I had signed up for summer school teaching for economic reasons. But I’d also been excited by this particular program, working with teachers from all over the Delaware Valley and with students from all sorts of backgrounds. The exchange of ideas, the possibilities of the two months, were invigorating.
But ten minutes into our prep session it was obvious that Maurice Havermeyer, Ph.D., principal of Philly Prep, who had, as he pointed out, written the grant application that funded this program, was going to make sure nothing innovative or creative took place.
I submit to the bench example A: the memo in my hand from my leader. “Miss Pepper, in the light of our mandate to integrate cultural diversity sensitivity throughout the curriculum this summer, please be advised that a sufficient number of copies of
Romeo and Juliet
are in the book room. Also, we have access to a tape of
West Side Story,
if you requisition it three days in advance.”
There isn’t much in life I can control. But surely viewing
West Side Story
again, hearing Richard Beymer pretend to sing “Maria” again, was one of those few things.
English departments are always the designated carriers of culture. That’s okay with me. But nowadays they’ve also been appointed society’s repair people. When attitudes, values, discipline, job application skills, etiquette, and sensitivity training are required, the English teacher is the appointed handyperson. Other instructors teach their subjects. We are supposed to teach Life, and if only we taught a little harder or better, all would be well with the world.
Havermeyer’s memo implied that he had extended the multicultural mandate to other departments as well, although I knew that was a pose. What variety of diversity could he dream up for the math teacher? To use both Arabic and Roman numbers, perhaps? And were foreign language teachers required to teach languages other than their subject, to maintain the PC quotient?
My leader had avidly pursued this lucrative summer gig, during which we became something akin to a magnet school. Instead of classrooms filled only with our usual population of overprivileged underachievers, this summer we also had underprivileged underachievers. Scholarship kids. Recent immigrants. Experimental kids, or, more accurately, adolescents who were part of a public-private educational experiment.
Be careful what you ask for. Having gotten what he wanted, Maurice Havermeyer, whose Ph.D. is probably in Euphemisms, was panicked. He apparently had just now realized that diversity implied differences, and he seemed terrified by the concept. He stood on the auditorium stage and mopped his broad forehead. “We anticipate a most unique session for this venerable establishment,” he said.
Redline that sentence, Maurice, beginning with the royal
we
and crossing out the redundant
most
before unique. I wanted to tape his mouth shut until he learned to speak. I entertained myself by wondering what would happen if I rushed onto the stage next to Havermeyer and did a simultaneous translation into comprehensible English.
“It is heartwarming to discern so many old and for-the-moment new visages,” he said. I controlled the urge to gag. About thirty visages sat sprinkled around the auditorium. We didn’t know each other well enough to clump or huddle, because most of the summer staff was imported and Havermeyer had not seen fit to introduce us before he began his Ode to Diversity. We would have comfortably fit into a classroom. But that would have encouraged intimacy, or a sense of equality, concepts that appealed to Havermeyer only when applied to others. So he spoke down from above and kept us feeling like marooned survivors on an archipelago.
“It is a pleasure,” he intoned, “to experience the fresh air of change as it wafts into Philly Prep.”
This produced a ripple of rueful laughter. Any fresh air would have been welcome, but virtually nothing wafted from the ancient air conditioner except exhausted, endlessly recycled gasps.
Havermeyer frowned. His script hadn’t included a pause for snickers. And then he got it. “Ahhh,” he said, “as you are obviously aware, we are experiencing temporary difficulties with our climate control apparatus. Remember, this building was constructed long before man knew how to manipulate his environment, temperature-wise. Please bear with us, particularly during this unseasonable heat which in any case, I trust, will ebb forthwith.”
Forthwith, indeed. And unseasonable? What calendar, what climate, had he been studying? This was summer, the infamous season of get-out-of-here, when anyone who could afford to do so escaped.
Even two hundred years ago, when one-tenth of the population died in four months of yellow fever, the disease was blamed on the summer climate. Philadelphia was always a low, level town, perhaps the hottest and dampest of all the seaports—hotter even than Charleston, Savannah, or the West Indies, people said. I know this because my semisignificant other, C.K. Mackenzie, was recuperating from a shell-shocked leg that itched beneath its cast in the summer heat, and was making sure he stayed depressed by reading and sharing more than I ever wanted to know about the 1793 Great Yellow Fever Epidemic. “Now that was a
really
bad summer,” he was fond of saying. That was supposed to make us feel better about his leg and my teaching obligations.
In any case, Havermeyer’s “unseasonable” tag was a lie, an excuse for not having had the air-conditioning system fixed in time. “But in any case and any clime—” he now said, pausing to give us time to admire his ability to create an archaic, annoying segue from the wretched air-conditioning to the work ahead of us. We all, from what I could see, managed to contain our awe. “—we must all keep a cool head this summer.”
I wondered if he’d let us vote as to whose cool head we could collectively keep.
Havermeyer waved the list of summer students’ names and their schools of origin. We all had copies of it, so that nobody had to say words like
poor
or
black
or
Asian
or
Latino
out loud. Despite the fact that motivated young adults—or people who loved and believed in them—were paying good money so they might sweat through physics, geometry, French II, and writing skills, their odd names, their
diversity,
Havermeyer implied, translated into a dire potential for civil uprising. He made everything that had intrigued me sound inflammatory and to be avoided.