A Hole in Juan Read online

  In any case, today was brisk and invigorating, and I was glad I’d decided to walk. School is only a few miles away, and city miles are interesting.

  This is probably a blot on my English-teacher-as-upholder-of-our-cultural-legacy report card, but I’m not a great fan of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It’s enjoyable reading, and it has many wise observations, and the countless times I’ve taught the book, I’ve shown proper reverence. But I knew myself to be a hypocrite.

  I, too, want to know, as did Thoreau, “what . . . is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life?” But given that desire, why hightail it away from community and variety to hole up in the woods? I’d stay in the city because one of the “true necessaries” of life is other people, and where better to study life than in the thick of it?

  My book wouldn’t have been called Walden. It would have been called Philadelphia.

  Besides, I’d read that Henry David took one of the “true necessaries” of life—his dirty laundry—home to Mom during his famous time of roughing it. As far as I’m concerned, there goes the integrity of life in the wilderness.

  My route to school always involves a taste of history whether I walk through Independence Mall or veer slightly to the north and pass the new Constitution Center, which is a visual pleasure even from the outside. I enjoy its combed and manicured green swath of lawn—my kind of nature—sweeping up to its sleek façade, and I’m proud of the city for creating this deserved and elegant celebration of an amazing piece of writing and thought.

  We’d tried making the place part of our communal outings, but Pip never looked excited by the idea, not even when we pointed out that the law was a part of the criminal justice system.

  I’m not sure he was happy that civilization had found a way to settle disputes without fists or guns.

  I hoped my students would be more enthusiastic when I presented the idea. I wanted to join forces with the social studies teacher, Louis Applegate, for an interdisciplinary unit that hinged on a trip to this center. I made a mental note to speak to him about it today. I knew we taught many of the same students.

  And with that thought I was into a teaching mode, and I mentally rehearsed the day. Anxiety about the seniors remained, but I was excited as well about the juniors’ poetry reading, and hoped nothing—not stage fright nor technical difficulties—would keep it from running smoothly. I was still in mild shock that they’d instigated the idea. I’d originally worried that it was a prank, a Mischief Night prequel, because why would students suddenly want to tape and broadcast their original poems?

  But they seemed sincere and appealingly innocent, so now I hoped it would be precisely as they’d envisioned it.

  When you walk, you see things you miss completely if you drive by, and not for the first time, I observed how Halloween had mutated from one night to a season. Halloween flags waved on poles, Halloween wreaths filled front doors, pumpkins were painted onto windows and jack-o’-lanterns, plastic and real, sat in entries and on sills. Half the magazine covers on the newsstand promised recipes or decorating ideas for All Hallow’s Eve. That dreadful cobwebby stuff ringed a shoe-repair shop’s window, black cats arched against imaginary moons, and scarecrows guarded produce in two groceries I passed.

  I peered into the window of a not-yet-open stationery store and considered a long rack of Halloween greeting cards. I really wanted to know what sentiments the holiday engendered.

  What were we so determinedly celebrating? Tricks and treats? Ghosts and goblins? Orange and black? Maybe we hadn’t come all that far from those Druid creatures who roamed the earth one night a year and needed to be appeased, although probably not with preprinted greeting cards.

  Next thing would be demands for a National Day of Haunting.

  I was still vaguely amused by the excess of it all when I entered Philly Prep and greeted our newest secretary, Harriet Rummell. The school had been running through office personnel almost on a weekly basis, and I wasn’t sure how long Ms. Rummell would be with us, either.

  This is not to say she had any of the flaws of the past secretaries. She was neither a hostile antagonist, a hoarder of school supplies, a twittering puzzle-happy incompetent, nor too terrified to function.

  Another thing the solitary Thoreau missed knowing about was how many and various are the ways in which co-workers can grate one upon the other.

  Harriet Rummell was a happy woman. Her happiness was based on how wonderfully well her life was going. I’m not knocking that, but Harriet also took it for granted that the entire world wanted to share the details of her joy, and nothing short of binding and gagging her would disabuse her of that idea.

  That, I’m knocking.

  Maybe even that wouldn’t be bad—except that it took so little to make Harriet happy, and not necessarily anything even mildly amusing. It simply took an event or idea that had happened to her.

  “Good morning, Miss Pepper!” She had sweet, small features. The horn-rimmed glasses that constantly slid down her small nose echoed and underlined the roundness of her face, as did her mop of brown curls. She was something like a child’s drawing—all circles and loops, and an almost eternal wide smile.

  She giggled. “Or should I call you Mrs. Mackenzie?”

  We’d been through this almost every day since I’d told her I had to change my personnel records, adding my student-husband to my medical insurance. Her joke was way beyond stale, but as I said, it took precious little to amuse Harriet, repeatedly. “I’m still keeping my maiden name,” I said as quietly as I could. “Just like I was yesterday. Our students already seem confused about most things. I’m trying not to add to their burden.”

  She giggled and beamed, shaking her curls as if she could not get over my wit. Once she’d regained control, she straightened her face into her all-business expression. “Big day, huh?” she said. “Derek Ludo was in, and he told me. As if I needed a reminder! How often do we tape an actual TV show here?”

  I bit my bottom lip. Nobody but Harriet would define videotaping a poetry reading for the school’s closed-circuit system as a TV show.

  “Bet you’re excited,” she said. “Mrs. Producer herself.”

  Nobody was the producer. Derek Ludo was one of the school techies helping the juniors broadcast their poetry to those schoolmates who wanted to see it.

  “I hope it’s not out of line for me to compliment you, my not being a teacher and all,” she said, “but you do come up with such creative ideas, like a TV show!” She nodded emphatically and pushed her horn-rimmed glasses up her nose again.

  “It’s not really all that—”

  “It’s a quality I value in people.”

  The muscles of my back twitched. I knew where she was headed—where all Harriet conversations headed. We were en route to Erroll Davine, her fiancé.

  Harriet had been engaged to Erroll Davine since she graduated from high school. By using my sleuthing powers—Pip would be proud of me—and by virtue of her incessant chatter about Erroll, I had figured the engagement to be twelve and one half years old. “Erroll’s had a hard time finding himself,” she’d said by way of explanation.

  Erroll’s lost self had once seemed to be hiding in long-distance trucking school, later in a course on how to become a supersalesman, followed by a year’s worth of acting lessons, two semesters of computer repair instruction, preparation for a real estate license, and now, in taxidermy school. Harriet had—“Of course!” she said brightly—assumed the burden of supporting the two of them as Erroll slogged up and down the learning curve.

  I was tempted to shake the blinkers off her eyes, but the woman was so happy with her freeloader, it would have been cruel.

  “Erroll’s like you that way,” she was now saying. “Maybe all real achievers are creative visionaries. Just yesterday, he was so concerned about getting a groundhog’s tongue right he was in torment. He’s such a perfectionist, and tongues are really difficult, you know. All kinds of tongues, not just
a groundhog’s.”

  I nodded, smiled, tried not to think about groundhog tongues, and turned to check my mailbox. I found a lighter than usual deposit of detritus. “This all?” I asked.

  She nodded sagely. “The headmaster didn’t have any messages today.” Although she chortled at most everything, she was always solemn about Maurice Havermeyer, who emphatically deserved to be laughed at. Harriet dropped her voice to a reverent hush when she said even his title. Judging by her tone, “the headmaster” was almost in a league with Erroll the would-be taxidermist.

  “As I was saying,” she went on, “this groundhog caused him so much trouble—”

  She was put on hold, and my question of who wanted a stuffed groundhog in the first place remained unasked, when Juan Angel Reyes entered the office.

  The new science teacher was a dapper man who looked as if he slept in a clothes press, rigid in dress and deed, from what I’d gathered. He’d been quickly nicknamed “Dr. Jar” by the students, a put-down that made fun both of his obsession with monogramming his clothing and possessions and with what I’d been told was his repeated reminders to his classes that he was about to receive his doctorate and that as soon as he had it, he would have no more to do with this school and its dim students who were unworthy of him. He was here for the money, pathetic as that amount was, and the flexible schedule he’d been offered. But once his monogram becomes J.A.R. Ph.D., he’d be in a high-paying research job in a heartbeat.

  I’m sure he never put it that way, but that was the message the students heard, larded with contempt for the lot of us.

  “Good morning!” Harriet all but trilled.

  Reyes nodded—almost a bow. He didn’t seem one for small talk, particularly if it was taxidermy-based, and to Harriet’s credit, she understood that. Reyes made the nod-and-bow gesture to me as well as he passed. I smelled cigarettes on him, as I had other mornings. It surprised me once again. He seemed fastidious to a fault, and eau de cigarettes didn’t go with that. I could envision him carefully changing into a Victorian smoking jacket of an evening and lighting a pipe, or a ceremonial cigar, but not requiring the sort of nervously urgent preclass smoke his aroma suggested.

  He emptied his mailbox and gave the pickings a cursory glance, then looked back at me. “You teach seniors, too, do you not?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “Some of them.”

  “You teach the class with the tennis boys and their girls? That Steegmuller and Wilson and—”

  I nodded again. A goodly portion of the school’s tennis team was in one section, but even so, referring to them as “the tennis boys” and to their girlfriends as “their girls” seemed off.

  He cleared his throat and turned his back to Harriet. “May I ask you something?”

  One more nod.

  “Have you noticed—in your room—have the students misbehaved? I mean more than whatever the norm for this school might be?” He kept his voice low, as if this were an urgent but secret question.

  I could have answered him directly. These were the students I’d been worrying about. I could have shared my concerns, but I didn’t, because Dr. Jar was so reserved and held back and angry about finding himself here among the peons that it was hard to step closer, to agree, to become a colleague and share the distress. “What do you mean by misbehave?” I asked instead. “I’ve heard about a lot of pranks lately. Halloween-related pranks. Orange and black paint missing from the art room, the mustard packets gone from the lunchroom.”

  “I mean . . . worrisome behavior,” he said. “I do not consider them pranks.”

  “Like what?”

  “Many things. Supplies go missing. Dropping bottles, glass tubing, that sort of thing, and then they reappear—and disappear again! Chemicals, too, acetone, sodium, agar-agar—maybe more. One day last week, all the beakers were gone when class began. And then I find them neat and tidy in the back room, on a high shelf. Then, Friday past, I’d scheduled a retest.” He pursed his mouth and shook his head. “They do not study. They do not apply themselves.”

  Had he read the description of the school before taking the job? Surely there were lots of positions for science teachers, so why pick a school that specialized in students who didn’t function well in large, traditional schoolrooms?

  “They failed miserably on the first examination.”

  “All of them?”

  “Most. And they behaved as if it were my fault!”

  I personally believe that if an entire class does poorly, the teacher should at least consider his own culpability. If a subject falls in the forest and nobody understood it, how can you be sure you taught it? However, this wasn’t the time to share my philosophy.

  “You’d think I had deliberately cheated them,” he said, “with their carrying on about their grades, especially the big sports boys. Whining about how they had a game and couldn’t really study. Why should I care? I was destroying their chances at college, they said. I was destroying their lives.” He said all this without a smile, with no appreciation of adolescent hyperbole.

  “In order to appease them, this one time, I rescheduled the examination, and gave them fair warning that it would of course be a new test, but ultimately, that was not to be because there was a fire drill if you recall.”

  I did. It had nearly derailed the original poetry-reading session. The kids were sufficiently shy and awkward about performing and the fire drill interrupted them precisely when they’d mustered their courage. It broke the mood and moment, and then, when it was learned that it was a false alarm, that somehow demoralized them. I’d had to become a cheerleader, all but waving pom-poms and leaping into the air to get them back on track.

  “Yes, well, then,” he continued. “Only when we were all downstairs and outside did I realize that three of the class members had never showed up in class. They joined us, so to speak, on the sidewalk.”

  “Are you saying those kids pulled the—”

  “I have said nothing except what I have said. I am a scientist and I rely on verification before reaching a conclusion, and at this point, I have none. I am merely reporting the facts of the matter, which I find disquieting. James, Nita, and Seth were not in class where they belonged. All three had reasons. One was at the counselor’s office and forgot to get a note. The other was feeling ill and had been in the bathroom, and the third . . . I don’t remember, but there is no reason not to think they had their excuses at the ready.”

  I tend to discount students’ exaggerated reports on faculty failings. I’m sure they provide equally distorted reports about my classroom to other teachers, but they were right about this man; he was not easy to like.

  “The net effect,” he said, “was that the alarm and drill diminished the time available to the point where I was unable to administer the retest.”

  “What will you do?”

  “Their original marks stand. I see no other recourse. They’re a bad lot, all of them. Infuriating. I regret passing up other job offers.”

  I felt a moment’s pang on behalf of the students who’d had nothing to do with setting off the alarm—if, in fact, anyone had purposely done it. It had been known to go off when the humidity was too high, or the electrical system in the school was overloaded. “I meant about the three students who weren’t in class. I know them, and they’re good kids.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Nita and Seth are good students as well. I can’t imagine they’d have any reason to do something like that.” James—Jimmy—less so, but he seemed contented with being a C student, and in fact, he’d told me with some pride that meant he was “the norm,” which showed that he’d picked something up in math class. His family was wealthy and he knew they’d find a college that would be a fit for his agility at tennis and his ability to pay full tuition. He didn’t have to set off alarms to meet his personal goals.

  “These students are a disappointment. Sloppy thinkers, lazy, only interested in their petty lives,” he said. “If they’re so worried a
bout college, they should have worked harder the first eleven years of school.”

  I’d heard grumbles about how tough he was and, of course, that translated into how unfair he was. But that was so common as to be generic and since I was in favor of higher standards, I had tuned the complaints out.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why prevent a retest when you did poorly on the original? Why avoid a chance to do better?”

  “Not everyone did poorly on the original, just the majority. As a point in fact, as you suspected, Seth and Nita performed adequately.”

  “So they wouldn’t want a re—”

  “You are once again putting words into my mouth. In any case, I don’t believe that making sense is one of their priorities. As I said, there has been a series of events, this only the most recent. Pipettes in the wrong drawer, a bell jar missing two days, then back, five thermometers gone—but then there they are, in the sink. I think they do it just to prove they can. A crucible tong, sodium, and an evaporating dish are still missing, and who knows where they will turn up. Somebody thinks this is funny.” His eyebrows had pulled close to each other. “They are a spiteful group and they are taunting me for reasons I do not yet comprehend.”

  “They? Who?”

  His lips tightened now. His entire face moved toward its center and he lost more of his good looks with each squinch. For once, he seemed less than absolutely sure of what to say. “Who knows who removes things, then returns them? I thought once Erik Steegmuller was the one, and that girl Nita, or maybe her friend Allie, and then Seth and Jimmy. Others, too, like Wilson. Each time, I think I know who, but then somebody else seems the culprit. It’s all of them. They are all after me.”

  I envisioned the seniors, disorganized except on a court with a coach’s guidance. Who among them would bother? Would think of a plan of harassment and carry it out? And why?

  “I refuse to bend to adolescent perversity.” He spoke softly, but I nonetheless felt he was lecturing me.

  “It might help to talk with your class about what’s going on,” I said.