Sons from Afar (11 page)

“Why did you feel sorry for him?” James asked.

“There was something sad about Frankie—as if he didn't belong—something lost—I could see it in his eyes. He was the youngest, you see, and the only boy. It's always hard being the youngest.”

“Why?” Sammy asked.

“Everybody else is quicker, and more clever, and does things for you, I saw this over and over again in my classroom. You get to feeling helpless and you get to like that feeling. It's hard for
youngest children to
do
anything with their lives. They seem to give up more quickly.”

She didn't know what she was talking about, Sammy thought, and she was making him angry. Let James talk to her.

“Besides which, I suspect Frankie's older sisters babied him. Oh, it was a perfectly nice family, very respectable. They were plagued by the bad luck of the times, but everyone was. They owned a confectionary. Verrickers made good candies, I remember them. The parents had started it when they were newly married—and they were hardworking people. Well, you had to be, to keep going through those hard years, especially with a business of your own, a small business. Frankie was like a changeling in that family. He used to make up stories, about himself, about his real family—wealthy, of course, and his father was a war hero, his mother a beauty, Frankie the only child. He had a vivid imagination, Frankie did; he could write stories I'd have sworn were the truth if I hadn't known better. I tried to help him understand, I'd try to tell him how hard his father worked, and his mother and sisters too, and how lucky he was to have them. But he thought they were stupid—he said that and, in a way, I could understand why he thought that because he was so quick and clever and imaginative, which they weren't. You could say he lived in a dream world, or an imaginary world, but he had a streak of realism that almost frightened me. He would tell me that it didn't make any difference how hard they worked and the terrible thing was that he was right. The family barely scraped by.”

What was so bad about that? Sammy wondered.

“Of course Frankie was always in trouble at home, of one kind or another. I'm sure he was provocative at times—he was a terrible liar and sometimes—well, once, I'm pretty certain, he was the one who took a dollar bill I'd left in my coat pocket.
He said he wouldn't ever do that, not to me, but I wasn't sure I could believe him. And I'm not sure I can blame him, either. Life was harder on Frankie than on the rest of us, because he had so much imagination and so many dreams. He was always telling me about what he'd do, what he was going to do, how rich he would be—I was a great favorite of his, you see, and he often came back to visit my classroom, until he graduated into the high school. We had a particular relationship. I thought, sometimes, that I should have asked if he could come live with me. I didn't know then that I wouldn't ever have children of my own, so I never thought seriously about it, but we had such a particular relationship. I could control him, more than anyone else. His family couldn't understand such an intelligent boy, such a spirited little boy. I always wondered what Frankie would do in his life. After he was expelled I lost track of him, although I sometimes still think I'll see his name in the papers, as a scientific discoverer, or one of those entrepreneur businessmen. The kind who take huge risks and amass huge fortunes. He seemed such a sad, intelligent little boy. He'd have been in the gifted program, if we'd had one then. Are you boys in gifted programs?”

Not on your life, Sammy thought. James was, but James didn't say anything about that.

“You said he was expelled,” James asked Mrs. Rottman.

“Yes, from the high school.”

“Does his family still live in Cambridge?” James asked.

“Goodness no. They went bankrupt, in the late forties. I think Mr. Verricker had died by then, and his wife, too, and the daughters were trying to run the business. It's sad, really, because they'd hung on through the Depression and they'd hung on through the war years, with all the shortages, and then—just as times were getting better—they went bankrupt. They moved out of the area
years ago. But Frankie had already left home by then, as I understand it.”

“What was he expelled for?” James asked, as if he wanted to hear everything bad that he could, Sammy thought.

“Nobody told mc, except that it was something serious. Well, it would have had to be, wouldn't it? Perhaps they wanted to spare my feelings. I'd like to think so. People sometimes want to be kind.” Her hand reached out for a chocolate cookie, which she bit into thoughtfully. “I hadn't seen him since he was in sixth grade, at that time.”

Sammy figured she was finished, and he tried to catch James's eye so they could leave. James just took some more cookies, and kept on eating.

“Is there anyone who might have known him in the high school? Anyone like you, who has been a teacher here all their lives?” James asked.

“All his life,” Mrs. Rottman corrected.

“Yes, all his life.”

“No, I can't think of anyone, personally. There are lines drawn, you see, between the elementary and high school teachers. Quite a gulf lies between us. High school teachers do look down on those who teach in elementary school.”

“I never thought of that,” James answered, as if that was something worth caring about.

Sammy was glad that James seemed to know what to say to this woman. He squirmed in his seat and thought about this little boy Frankie. It sounded like Frankie could have been anything he wanted to be, in his life, if he was so smart, and a natural leader. A liar, too, Sammy thought, and probably a thief—this Frankie reminded Sammy of himself.

“I don't want you worrying about Frankie, if he is your father,” Mrs. Rottman told them. “Sometimes, in a family, there's one
child who is just different. Like a changeling child. Frankie was like that—he had so much potential, bright, imaginative, he never seemed to run out of energy and he looked just like an angel. He was the most beautiful child I ever taught, in all my years. He simply didn't fit in among the Verrickers. There's Mr. Ferguson, of course, but he's always been in administration. He never taught in a classroom, except for occasional substitution. He came to the high school as assistant principal in the last years of the war, because he'd had rheumatic fever, you see, and so wasn't physically qualified for military service. He might well have known Frankie.”

“Do you know where we could find Mr. Ferguson?” James asked.

“Why at the high school, of course. Now I think of it, he'd probably know when Frankie left school. Do you think you'd be able to find the high school?”

Sammy couldn't sit there any longer on that chair. He was up, putting his glass down on the tray, and heading back down to the front door while James was still saying thank you to Mrs. Rottman. Sammy let himself out the front door. He didn't want to stay inside that iron fence, not for another second, so he waited for James in the street.

When James finally came out, all he said was, “Your manners are rotten.”

“So what?” They walked on to the corner, not in step. “She's pretty stupid,” Sammy pointed out to James, who hadn't seemed to notice that.

“Not stupid, just—not objective, everything started with how she felt.”

“Stupid,” Sammy clarified.

“But don't you ever wonder?”

Sammy didn't bother answering. James would go ahead and say what he wanted to anyway.

“I mean, we can only know what we know.”

That was pretty stupid, even for James.

“I mean, if somebody is always fair to me, and considerate and all that, but is rotten to other people, can I say he's rotten? And if they tell me he is, how can I believe them, if all of my experience is that he isn't? Like Gram, when we first got here and everybody said she was crazy or something, but she wasn't crazy at us.”

“People just expected her to be like what they were like. And she isn't,” Sammy said.

“But if they thought she was crazy she might as well have been. If you see what I mean.”

“You have to let people be what they are,” Sammy protested. “She never was, no matter what anyone said.”

“So how can you know what's really true?” James wondered.

Sammy couldn't see what this conversation was about or where it would get them. He stopped at a street corner and asked James to take out the map. The high school was outside of town, to the south. “Do we have time to walk that far?” James worried.

“It's maybe two miles,” Sammy said, studying the map. James stopped. “Too far.”

“Okay.” Sammy folded up the map and gave it back to James.

“Do you think it's too far?”

Sammy shrugged. This was James's idea, let him make the decision. It wasn't too far for Sammy, but this wasn't his idea.

James didn't move. He looked all around, as if there were an answer hiding somewhere behind the corner of one of the houses, or up in a tree. “Unless we walk pretty fast. The average walking pace is about three miles an hour, and average is pretty slow. So it might not be too far.”

“Okay,” Sammy said.

“We have a couple of hours, it shouldn't be too far.”

As far as Sammy could see, there was only one way to find out.

“I don't think it's too far,” James decided.

They walked along at a good pace, through the town, out past residential areas and then the outlying houses, farther apart, and then farmlands. “How much farther do you think it is?” James asked.

“We follow this road until it crosses a main road, and the school's right there. Want to quit?” Sammy chose that word on purpose.

“No,” James said.

Sammy slowed down a little, to match his brother's flagging pace.

“I was thinking,” James said, “about what Mrs. Rottman said about him. If he was as smart as she said, and she is probably right about things like that because she's a teacher, he could have become almost anything. Like she said.”

“Yeah, but he didn't,” Sammy pointed out.

“I wonder why.”

“Dicey said the police were looking for him, in Provincetown.”

“She told me, you don't have to repeat everything Dicey said. I already know it. Sometimes, you're just like her,” James said.

“Good,” Sammy answered.

The land emptied around them, uncultivated fields overgrown with weeds and grass and saplings. Walking fast made the warm day start to feel hot. Sammy rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. It would be a good day to play tennis, windless and clear. He wished Mina hadn't already gone back to school, because there wasn't anyone else he could play tennis with.

“I wonder where the family is now,” James said, beside him.

“Does it matter?”

“Maybe not, except—just because they left Cambridge
doesn't mean they left the area. They could have started up business somewhere else around here.”

“I've never heard of any candy business around here.”

“But we haven't lived here all that long, and we don't travel around. For example, if I wanted to start up a confectioner's business, I'd go to Ocean City, where there's a big tourist season. Wouldn't you?”

Sammy wouldn't want to start up a candy-making business, so he had no idea what he'd do. A distant plane droned across the sky. Following the little dark shape with his eyes, he missed the first sighting of the high school.

“There it is,” James said, and his pace increased, as if—now that he could actually see their destination—he had the strength to hurry to it. The school looked fairly new, long and low, surrounded by parking lots. Sammy caught a glimpse of several macadam tennis courts off behind one of the wings that spread out from the main building. Windows were open, but it was quiet outside. They headed for the doors with a flagpole in front of them; that would be the main office.

In the office, a secretary looked up at them. “We want to see Mr. Ferguson,” James said.

“Down that hallway, through the glass doors, turn left, and it's the third door on your right,” she told them, without really looking at them. When they found the door she'd directed them to, it had
ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL
painted on the glass.

“He still has the same job he had when he came,” James said.

“How do you know?”

“Because it's what Mrs. Rottman said. Don't you remember?”

Sammy hadn't been paying attention. “Are you going in, or what?” he asked.

James knocked on the glass with his knuckles and a man's voice told them to come in. They entered a short narrow room
with only one window, high up on the back wall. A gray-haired man sat behind a desk under the window, facing the door. He had a pouchy face, pouches of skin under his eyes and his jowls hanging down pouchy. He looked at them without saying anything, his watery blue eyes not curious, as if he already knew what they were going to say and what he was going to say. He had a thermos on his desk and some manila folders, but no phone. He poured himself a cup of coffee out of the thermos, without saying anything, then looked back at James and Sammy, disliking them.

“Well? Well?” he finally said. “Come on up here. Move it, boys.”

They went up to the desk. Sammy let James stand a little ahead, because it was James's business. He watched Mr. Ferguson's pudgy fingers turn a pencil, over and over. He could feel the man's boredom with them, and his dislike for them, coming across the desk at him like heat from an open oven door. Well, he didn't care.

“Spit it out. Who sent you and what did you do.” Mr. Ferguson put down the pencil and opened a drawer to take out a thick pad of detention slips. “And give me your passes.”

“We don't have any passes,” James said.

“Why not?” the man demanded, his voice growing larger and more threatening.