The Widower's Tale (18 page)

"How are the little Trumps and Trumpettes of tomorrow?" asked Anthony. He kissed Ira on the mouth. When he stood back, he feigned a look of horror. "Good grief, could this be
dirt
in your ear? Don't tell me there's actual, real-live dirt in Matlock."

"Oh stop," said Ira, though he leaned in to second the kiss. "Your jokes are growing tiresome, you know that?"

Anthony was browsing through the cupboards and fridge. He still wore his tie but had abandoned his jacket in the living room. "How's perciatelli with feta, mint, and olives? I bought rosemary bread at Ooh La La."

"Skip the feta; I could eat the goat." Ira held up his paint-stained hands. "We've entered the decorating phase. It's looking practically palatial."

"No more slumming it for you," said Anthony. "Like, do these kids know what a tire swing is?"

"You have got to stop. Really." He had been looking forward all day to telling Anthony about taking the children up into the tree house for the very first time. Anthony had been impressed when Ira told him about Robert Barnes, how he'd helped build an actual hotel in a tree, and about Arturo, who had grown up in three different countries and spoke all three languages well. But when Ira had mentioned Celestino, how he'd briefly joined their team and had made such a difference, Anthony had interrupted with "Noblesse oblige, Matlock style. Migrant workers as flesh-and-blood people!"

"Anthony."

Since starting at Elves & Fairies, Ira felt he had to censor himself whenever he talked to Anthony about his work. Anthony was a high-end divorce attorney in Boston, and it was certainly easy to make fun of the capitalist pigs with whom he schmoozed on a daily basis, but he also did pro bono work in Lothian's family court, representing mothers who'd once been prostitutes and crackheads, children who'd been beaten and maliciously starved. Anthony despised the citizens of the much wealthier nearby towns who, as he put it, wouldn't know juvy from the juice-box aisle at Whole Foods.

"Did you catch this?" Anthony pushed a copy of the
Globe
across the counter. It was folded open to the West Suburban section. The largest headline read,
ECO-VANDALS STRIKE AGAIN: Four Towns Coordinating Search
.

The dateline was Matlock. Ira sighed and picked up the paper.

It looked at first like a series of elaborate practical jokes, but apparently it's war. "Today's incident is the third to hit Matlock, and it is downright weird," commented Capt. "Cap" McCord, the bucolic town's police chief, as he described the latest act of sabotage. Early this morning, a 46-year-old female citizen of Matlock who wishes to remain anonymous walked out of her house to discover that seven bicycles had been locked tightly together around the body of her car. According to Capt. McCord, "The vehicle's windshield had a big sign glued onto it. The sign said, PEDALS, NOT PETROL. The bikes were junk--rusty, some without tires. We are investigating whether they were taken from the local transfer station. That might give us a lead."

Almost simultaneously, in neighboring towns Ledgely and Weston, citizens awoke to similar displays of blatantly "green" bravura. In Ledgely, a homeowner who had not locked his residence returned from work to find every lightbulb within the premises replaced with a compact fluorescent. LET THERE BE FUTURE, read the sign affixed to his front door....

"Can you believe it?" said Anthony. "I thought my lunch would come out my nose."

"It's not so uproarious if you're in Matlock," said Ira. "Some of the parents want to hire independent detectives. People are pretty pissed off."

"Did you get to the part about the letter? They may be lunatics, but these guys have got balls."

Ira skimmed a few paragraphs till he read,
The police departments of all four towns in which these pranks have been perpetrated received the same letter. Reporters have not been shown the full text, but Capt. McCord revealed a key message: "The DOGS have been unleashed." The acronym of this previously unknown organization stands for Denounce Our Greedy Society. Some are claiming it's terrorism; others are saying, "It's about time!"

Unable to help himself, Ira burst out laughing. "The DOGS? Oh my God."

"Isn't this just too fabulously in their face? And I'll bet the bozo cops who get paid top salaries to work in these towns are bumbling around like a bunch of Inspector Clouseaus. Can you honestly feel sorry for any of those people?"

Ira said, "I do admit it's a challenge," but he knew how prim he sounded.

Before his new job in Matlock, Ira's contempt would have been no less vehement than Anthony's, but now he clammed up at dinner parties where their friends threw stones at the wealthy--the landed liberals, Anthony called them. After all,
they
were wealthy liberals, too. Ira and Anthony might live in a frontier neighborhood in Lothian, where the closest thing to a grocery store was a deli with stale sandwiches, canned beans, and a pit bull in the back room, but they had two cars and could shop with abandon at the Fresh Pond Whole Foods and the uppity food boutiques of Faneuil Hall. Unlike many of the rich suburbanites Anthony scoffed at,
they
would never face the cost of putting kids through college. As Ira had recently learned, making smug, class-based assumptions was more than foolish; it was hypocritical.

Back at The Very Beginning, a signature end-of-year tradition had been the teachers' assembly of a keepsake book for each of their little students. In mid-May, teachers from all four classrooms spent a week of late nights together, sorting through snapshots, photocopying Raffi song lyrics, three-hole-punching sheafs of construction paper and binding them together with yarn, to produce
Our Amelia
and
Our Zach
and
Our Keesha
--each one a story, in pictures, poems, ballads, and handprints, of that child's year in the Red, Blue, Yellow, or Green Room. Ira had been through three years of this tradition; in retrospect, he was amazed by how respectfully, even lovingly, the teachers went about this laborious task. Even if Amelia or Keesha or Zach had been a whiner, an instigator, or a know-it-all, Ira and his colleagues regarded each child as just that: a child, still very much in the making, faults eminently forgivable, character embryonic at best.

That's why Ira had embraced early education in the first place, despite the lousy pay. Small children made mistakes. They bragged and bullied. They were sloppy. They cried and yelled at the least provocation. They were exhausting and often stunningly rude (on purpose or not). But there was still a decent chance that you could help guide them toward a future free of the xenophobia, self-righteousness, and cowardly inhibitions that afflicted many of their parents.

Yet it was this sweet tradition--it was, to be precise, the celebration of
Our Ramsey
--that ultimately drove Ira from a job he loved and at which he was damn good. From this unjustified disgrace, Ira had learned a grave and bitter lesson about what you should and should not share about your personal life.

Lothian was a town with a surprisingly broad social spectrum--something else that Ira had treasured about The Very Beginning. After he'd landed the job, he and Anthony had decided that they should leave the city and fully embrace a community that could use their skills. Over three years, Ira's classroom included the four-year-old children of cops and cashiers, university professors and aspiring sculptors, accountants and bankers, waitresses and sanitation workers. There were children to match every color in the Crayola Multicultural Markers box, children whose parents owned two houses trading Legos with children who shared a bedroom with two siblings and whose parents' preferred language was definitely not English. Since the abolition of rent control in Boston, Lothian was a town where Ph.D.'s lived beside auto mechanics. Ira used to call it a "true cultural crossroads." Now he tried not to talk about it at all.

Ira had believed that most of the parents who sent their preschoolers to The Very Beginning shared his pride in its diversity (a word that now left a bitter taste in his mouth). When Betty, the director, had hired him fresh out of his master's program, Ira had been secretly certain that being not just a man but a gay man gave him a double edge over all the eager single white women, even those who'd put in a few years of teaching already.

Anthony had joined him for the staff party at the start of his first year, had even helped him give the Green Room a fresh coat of paint in a new, more stylish shade, a bright urbane kiwi to replace the tired old kelly green of poster paint and Playskool toys. The two of them socialized with some of Ira's fellow teachers (all straight) and even, by the third year, with a few couples whose children he'd taught in the Green Room. It was typical for the little girls to have their first crush on Ira, and the mothers with whom he was most familiar (those who came in to read stories or serve snacks) would make jokes to Ira like "Now please let her down easy!" and "Oh if poor Alexa only
knew."
One mom, standing next to Ira on the playground at recess, had actually told him, "I know this sounds perverse, but sometimes I wish Chloe could grow up and marry a gay man. You understand women so much better than the guys we get to choose from!" Ira had forced a congenial laugh.

It was a foregone conclusion that the adults who were the most comfortable with knowing he was gay were the educated, wealthier ones. Around the others, especially those from more conservative cultures, he tried not to be self-conscious. He had reasoned that people like the Sanchezes, the Ngs, and the Wozniaks were too busy making a living to think about such things anyway, let alone stand around flirting with their children's nice, cute gay teacher from New York. Still, when Ira talked with hard-hat dads like Victor Wozniak, he found that, instinctively, he turned his natural effusiveness down a notch.

So when it happened--when the bigoted shit hit the fan--he was stunned to see the blow come from one of the families he had seen as social allies. In the fall of that year, Ramsey's parents had hosted a cocktail party for new parents at their renovated double row house. Ramsey's father, a man who made money from money, could have bought a house in Charlestown if he'd chosen to stay in the city, but it wouldn't have been so large. Willard Caldwell liked to brag that a team of wild horses couldn't drag him to the "snootier" suburbs; he wanted his five children to grow up with people "of all kinds."

Anthony had happily attended the party with Ira. Toward the end, they found themselves chatting about marriage equality with a few of the mothers. They'd all had a bit too much Merlot when one mom said to them, so loudly that it turned heads, "Isn't it so great that we live in this fabulous state, especially now that Mitt's on his way back to Utah? Can you believe the rest of this country and its puritanical stupidity? Only
here
could you guys actually tie the knot. And why
shouldn't
you?"

After that, Ira saw Ramsey's dad only two or three times in school. His wife made all the drop-offs and pickups, always rushing to buckle Ramsey into his car seat at the end of the day so she could make it to Cambridge in time to pick up the older kids at their private school. At midyear, Betty mentioned to Ira that Ramsey's family had requested a switch to the Blue Room, supposedly because he wanted to be with a playmate there. But the Blue Room had been full, so Ramsey had stayed with Ira.

Two other little boys were pulled from the Green Room that winter--one because the family was moving, the second because he got into a magnet program for special-needs children.

At the school auction that spring, Ira noticed a clutch of dads in one corner, looking at him repeatedly as they drank and gossiped. Anthony said, "Oh sweetheart, they're just speculating about our sex life. Straights have such pathetic fantasies sometimes. They can't help themselves, poor things." Ira had smiled, knowing that Anthony was one of the best-looking men in the room.

And then came the end of the year: the good-bye parties with the tearful moms, the cubbies emptied, the children's keepsake books passed out, the homely homemade teachers' gifts accepted in return. Over the next week, Ira and his colleagues scrubbed their classrooms, waxed floors, tallied craft supplies and packed them away for the summer in Rubbermaid boxes.

On the final day, after most of the teachers had left, Betty had called him into her office and shut the door. On her desk sat
Our Ramsey
, its cover a splashy apple red that Ira had picked to match the boy's bold, physical nature.

"Ira," Betty said, "we have a very difficult situation on our hands."

"We do? Oh dear." He assumed that the
we
referred to an alliance including him.

Betty turned Ramsey's book to face Ira. She opened it to a photo of Ramsey blowing out the candle on his birthday cupcake. The picture had been taken by Ira's assistant, Heather. Ira knelt beside Ramsey's tiny chair, laughing gaily (yes, gaily), one arm around the boy's shoulders. Betty turned to a later spread. On the left was glued a sheet of simple music entitled "The Mammal Song."
Ramsey's favorite mammal is the camel
, Ira had written below. On the right was a snapshot of Tunes Time. There was Ira, leading them all, and in his lap sat Ramsey. Sitting in the teacher's lap was an honor that all the children vied for; Ira was careful not to play favorites.

Ira looked at Betty, smiling, clueless.

"Ira." She sounded mournful. "Willard Caldwell believes that you have established an inappropriate closeness with his son."

Ira had burst out laughing, remaining, for one more second, baffled.

"You understand what's going on here."

By then he did. "Absolutely nothing. That's what."

Betty reminded him that Willard had recently joined the school's board of directors. "I'm afraid he's been having conversations with other parents, and he's made suggestions about the children who left the school--your room--in the middle of the year. I wish I had been aware of all this talk sooner, because I would have put a stop to it, Ira."