Mummers' Curse Read online

  “Let’s get to the point, Doctor,” Mr. Field said with such familiarity and self-assurance that even my earlobes clenched.

  “Of course, of course.”

  “My child’s entire future is at stake.”

  His child sniffed victory and smirked at me.

  “I am, of course, aware of your concerns, and, of course, aware of the significance of a student’s grade point average.”

  “Particularly a senior’s.” Mrs. Field’s voice had a razor edge.

  Havermeyer nodded.

  I knew I was dead meat.

  He cleared his throat, still nodding, then spoke. “All of what I said was by way of making clear that this is why, as soon as this was brought to my attention, I realized there must be some grave perceptual or conceptual error on one or the other of the parties’ parts, or perhaps, on both of them. I am, however, more than positive that this is an issue we can resolve here and now, and amicably. After all, the teachers, students, and parents of Philly Prep are a team, all of us working together for the greater good, isn’t that so?”

  The Fields, my purported teammates, stared blankly. They really didn’t get it. Renata wrinkled her brow, giving the impression of one puzzling through what he’d said, and even I nodded once before I stopped myself. The action felt too much like lowering my head to the guillotine blade.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but Renata and I have already worked this out. There’s no need to involve the legal process. I don’t understand why any of this is necessary.”

  Mrs. Field tilted her head as if I were a ridiculous but interesting specimen. “This is necessary because a C is not a satisfactory working-out,” she said, her words slicing through the office. “A C”—she outlined the letter in the air, for fear, I assume, that I had not yet learned the alphabet—“is a mediocre mark, an ordinary, middle-of-the-road mark. My daughter is neither mediocre nor average. A C is not a first-rate, college-level entrance grade, and it will seriously impede and perhaps change the entire course of our child’s future.”

  I waited for Havermeyer to interrupt or redirect her.

  “A C is not the sort of grade Fields get,” Mr. Field said.

  Fields? We were talking about one girl named Renata.

  Was her poor work now pulling down her entire family name? I imagined the conversations between the Fields and Sally Bianco’s mother. Doom, doom, family name ruined, like a bad opera.

  Havermeyer did nothing except nod encouragingly to both of Renata’s parents.

  “We cannot allow one teacher’s blind spot, rigidity, and stubbornness to destroy our daughter’s future or ours,” Mrs. Field said. “We have plans for Renata, dreams that are now seriously threatened.” She shook her head. “I will not allow that to happen.”

  Having delivered her prepared speech, she tapped a long fingernail against the arm of her chair and watched me, a vulture waiting for me to die.

  Havermeyer harrumphed. Once, I’d thought that was a sound only comic-book characters made, but the choking, coughing, throat-clearing exhalation that bought time and meant nothing was his favorite word.

  I waited for him to say something more about grades, about fairness, standards, about anything, but instead, he looked at me. “Mizzzz Pepper?” he asked.

  I had no idea what response he had anticipated, so I murmured a noncommittal “Yes?”

  “Do you think there might be some way for us to take another look at Renata’s record and recalculate the grade for the semester so as to…” Even he couldn’t think of a graceful, dignified exit from that sentence. So as to placate her parents? So as to once and for all sell out, lose your last vestige of teacherly pride? So as to keep your job? All of the above?

  “She…she didn’t do her work, not at all.”

  “You lost it,” her mother snapped.

  “No, I—”

  “My daughter says you lost it! I trust my daughter.”

  More fool, you, if that’s the truth. But I moved on. “The one assignment she did hand in was copied. Plagiarized. Both girls therefore shared the grade, which would have been excellent, had only one of them written it, but was a failing grade of fifty when divided in two. They both knew the policy. So the C—that’s not even guaranteed yet. First, Renata has to make up a whole lot of work, and—”

  “From what I read in yesterday’s paper, you’re not exactly committed to the classroom,” Mrs. Field said. “It’s a career in journalism you’re after, isn’t it?”

  Havermeyer looked in need of major analgesics.

  “No,” I said, “that was a—I—what that man wrote has nothing to do with my classroom practices. Or the truth.”

  Mr. Field spoke directly to Dr. Havermeyer. “If what I’m hearing from you and your staff is a no, then consider our daughter withdrawn from this school, and speak to our lawyers from this point on.” He stood up as he spoke.

  “Please. Have a seat. This can be worked through.” Havermeyer’s voice and entire history made it clear that we weren’t going to work this through via the Fields. I was going to work this through, i.e. give Renata whatever she, her parents, and my headmaster wanted. Do whatever it took to keep the tuition coming in and prevent a lawsuit.

  The air in the room and even the supply stored in my lungs had been siphoned out. How was I going to live without a job? How was I going to live with a job as a performing pet willing to do any trick that pleased the people with the money?

  And the world wasn’t exactly begging for impractical, dreamy-eyed former lit majors. I’d wind up with the displaced licorice factory workers.

  “Miz Pepper?” Havermeyer let the real question hang unsaid.

  “I—I—” I couldn’t frame a sentence, couldn’t agree with this bargain with the devil, and couldn’t afford to refuse it. I was working hard to avoid crying with anger and frustration. Mrs. Field tapped the wooden arm of her chair. Mr. Field smoothed the crease in his slacks. Renata considered the wall, studied it.

  Havermeyer, however, looked concerned. It is possible that he noticed that I was on the verge of either hysteria or catatonia. “Perhaps you’d like time, Miz Pepper, to work out the way we can best handle this?”

  I nodded.

  “Then this will, ah, be handled?” Mr. Field asked.

  “Of course, of course. Didn’t I say so all along?”

  “She’s my child, after all,” Mrs. Field said. “We only want the best for her. A parent’s duty, after all. An A would certainly help on her application form.”

  I had heartburn without having eaten anything. “My class,” I said. “Have to get to…first period’s about to …”

  Havermeyer nodded. “Of course. Far be it from me to hinder a dedicated teacher from fulfilling her obligations.”

  “Thank you for seeing to this,” Mr. Field said to Havermeyer. “We appreciate your taking the time.”

  “It’s my pleasure and obligation,” my leader said.

  I nodded by way of farewell and bolted out of there. Helga barked my name. “Messages. You have more. You’re supposed to pick them up first thing each morning, as you should remember.”

  My mail box was, indeed, loaded. Mackenzie had been sarcastically impressed that the article spared mention of my address, but of course, it said where I taught, so the end result was the same. Anybody could find me.

  This time I heard from Andrée Jansheski, the hairdresser, who hoped she hadn’t said anything out of line, and reminded me that her salon was not a place of gossip, and what was it that I was planning to put in my article, anyway, and if I still wanted a haircut, it’d be on the house.

  And from a girl I went to junior high with who thought I would have been married and have changed my name by now, or was I staying with the maiden name for feminist reasons, but anyway, she was collecting for a violent-crime victim’s charity and thought I might want to donate memorabilia.

  “I really wish,” Helga began.

  I nodded. “I’ll just bet you do.” I walked out of the off
ice, still flipping through pink slips. The one that caught my attention said only, “Grassi wants to talk.”

  I called Dolores at lunchtime. “Yeah?” she asked. “What?”

  “I don’t know. You called me.”

  “Me? Oh, that. I was blue, so Stephen called for me. I nearly forgot.”

  That family was an odd organism, treating Dolores like an eggshell-thin piece of porcelain when she seemed anything but. When last seen, she hadn’t seemed too debilitated to lift a phone. In fact, she’d been swaggering and royally pissed with me and Emily Semow both. And the time before that, she’d seemed pretty much perked up by the idea that Vincent Devaney still carried a torch for her.

  I envisioned that torch as real, not metaphorical, and pictured Vincent as an Olympic runner with the flaming object in his hand, racing for Dolores, trying to pass the torch on New Year’s Day. I had to think more about that.

  “About the message,” I prompted. “You wanted to say…?” I waited. Nothing. “Do you want to come here, to the school, and talk to me?”

  “Your school?” I heard a shudder. “I really don’t feel up to travel.”

  As if I were phoning from Kuala Lumpur, instead of two handfuls of city streets away. She was playing Baby Grassi. “Well, then?” I asked. “You want to talk now?”

  “I, ah…” I thought I heard her say “that teacher” to someone, but her hand was over the mouthpiece of the phone and her words were muffled. “Okay,” she said when she returned. “I wanted to tell you that I hope you’re not saying anything in your article that would be…embarrassing. No, wrong. My family has suffered enough with the talk going around.”

  “That is certainly not my intent,” I said.

  “Then, you aren’t going to say anything about my engagement?”

  “Why would I? I’ve said it a hundred—I’m not writing about you or any specific Mummers.”

  The awful thing is, the more I had to protest this very point, the more interesting Jimmy Pat’s life and death became. He’d lived and died a Mummer. Born into the tradition, a neighborhood boy, gambled with and borrowed from other Mummers. Fought with Fabian over Mummer embezzlement. His friendship with Vincent was twined around the Mummers, and Vincent’s alibi was locked into parade behavior. He’d make a great symbol to hang the article on. I felt excited about the possibilities of the article for the very first time, and I could see a shape to it.

  “Because it isn’t true,” Dolores said. I had trouble remembering to what she referred. “You’ve been with Emily so much maybe you think…but it just plain isn’t true. Jimmy Pat and me, we’d have been married next week.”

  I could still hear male rumbling in the background. “Jimmy Pat never would’ve shamed me and my family that way. To call off a wedding after everybody’s invited, everything is done? Because there’s suddenly somebody else? That’s impossible. Worse even than leaving a girl at the altar. He wouldn’t do it.” Her voice lowered. “He wouldn’t dare to do it.”

  My mind spun with the possibilities of a feature about him, but that didn’t mean I’d have to touch on Dolores’s tender pride. Maybe.

  “Because if you printed anything like that, it would be…” I could almost feel her hand cover the mouthpiece for a moment. Then she returned, “…slander. Libel. One of those. I would sue.”

  Goodie. I could have dueling lawsuits and wind up not only unemployed in my real profession, but also in one that was completely imaginary.

  “Don’t drag my name in the dirt,” Dolores said. “I know journalists get weird about sources and things like that. I watch TV, I know about the ethics thing. Just don’t. It wouldn’t be good for me. Or for you.”

  “What do you mean?” I said softly.

  “What does it sound like I mean?” And she hung up.

  Had I just been threatened, or had she simply meant it would defame her supposed honor and do me no good to be sued for libel?

  I mused over this, one eye on the frosty door pane, deciding whether to brave the outside for quality sustenance or to simply rehydrate one of the instant-soup tubs stashed in my desk drawer. And while I peered outside and pondered, Vincent Devaney came down the stairs.

  For obvious reasons, our relationship had grown strained, and we both sighed at the same moment. And then there was nothing to do but attempt a smile. Assuming his innocence, and I so wanted to, time would cure the impasse if we kept our balance during it.

  “Sorry about that business with Fabian this morning,” he said. “He’s a little on the edge.” He nodded in the direction of the lunchroom.

  Fabian wasn’t on the edge. He was in free fall without a net. Vincent was much too forgiving of his clubmate’s behavior, and that made me still more leery of my coworker. I also hadn’t retrieved the soup, but I walked with him because I wanted to talk about this morning. About lots of things, in fact.

  “He’s crazy,” I said. “And dangerous. He admits taking money, and he’s terrified somebody’s going to tell the cops, and Jimmy Pat knew about it.”

  “You think Fabian?” Vincent said.

  I didn’t commit, but I tilted my head a bit so as to suggest that I surely wasn’t ruling that out.

  “You’re not going to do something dumb now, are you?” Vincent asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t want anything to do with a murderer, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Ah, he wouldn’t…Fabian’s loud, but…”

  “You guys really stick together, don’t you? Everybody’s angry with one another—but protecting one another, too.”

  “Like family, I guess,” he said. “You fight, you make up, you say things, but in the end, you’re one thing, and you stick together. Take care of each other.”

  “Well, somebody took care of Jimmy Pat, all right.”

  We walked in silence. “I’m going to the club tonight,” he said. “There’s stuff to take apart, store, you know. Fabian’ll be there, most likely. Maybe he’ll say something, I’ll know more.”

  “And then what’ll you do?”

  Again he said nothing. Didn’t matter. I knew the answer. You didn’t turn on family. Unless, of course, it was your neck or theirs.

  “Any, ah, news?” Vincent finally asked.

  I shook my head. “And that business in the paper about my article? It’s rank nonsense. I haven’t started writing yet.”

  Vincent looked overly grateful.

  “And if—when—I do, I won’t put anything in about you, what you told me. The Dolores stuff. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I think that, but you never know what’s going to turn up in the press.”

  I thought of what the reporter yesterday had written and nodded. “But there is something I’d love to know,” I said. “For my own curiosity, not the article.”

  “So this’d be off the record?”

  “Sure.” Where was that record? When had I become Brenda Starr, and what did this say about how we judge people? Was it that easy to create a persona? I say I’m something and voila I am? “Off the record,” I said in a saucy journalistic tone. “Look—no tape recorder, no notebook.” No reporter, if he had any common sense left.

  His turn to nod, giving me permission to ask away.

  “How did you find out that Dolores wanted to see you the day of the parade?”

  First he looked surprised, then he frowned in concentration, shaking his head. “I don’t remember.”

  “Did she phone?”

  He frowned some more. “No,” he finally said with an air of discovery. “She wrote.”

  “To your house?”

  “To the club, around a week before the parade.”

  “A letter with a stamp?”

  “Why? What kind of question is that? I don’t…yeah. Sure. It must have. It was a Christmas card, actually, a Season’s Greetings.”

  “You said she wrote.”

  He nodded. “On the card, not separate.”

  “You remember what it said?”

  We w
ere near the lunchroom, but we paused at its door for more privacy. “‘Two o’clock, January first, my corner.’ That’s what it said.”

  “My corner?”

  “Hers. I knew what she meant. And then it said, ‘Please. Important.’ And then, D, with a heart around it.” He sighed. “I knew she was going through something bad. This was after I saw her crying that day, you know? I mean… I was her…old friend.” He apparently no longer saw himself as her Romeo, and it seemed to diminish him. The possibilities in his life had narrowed since last we’d talked about Dolores and her summons.

  “I assume this message was in her handwriting.” We went into the faculty lunchroom and spoke in low tones as I turned the heat on under the kettle.

  He shrugged. “Sure. Been awhile since I’d seen it. A little more grown-up now, I thought. Besides, you could tell she was upset. It was a little wiggly, like she was nervous, know what I mean? Green ink.”

  “But her writing, correct?”

  “What are you getting at? I think so. But it’s not like we used to write letters. In high school, if she sent me a card, it always had a heart around a D. So that was her signature, sure.” He retrieved a paper bag from the refrigerator and unwrapped a sandwich. “Why?”

  “Just wondering.” The kettle shrieked, and I had to run upstairs for the soup stuff.

  I found the cardboard containers and chose corn chowder, closed the drawer on the remaining tub, and once again left the room. Not a memorable lunch, but it would get me through the day.

  My path was blocked by Sally Bianco. “Did you read it yet?” she asked. “My essay?”

  I hadn’t. “I, ah, skimmed it. I’m looking forward to a closer read tonight.”

  “I’m so nervous you won’t like it. My mother, she said my ideas about honor, like you asked for, were tarnished.”

  Her mother sounded like the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. “Oh, please. You have honor aplenty. You’ve atoned enough, been punished sufficiently for your sins. Let go of it. I have.” This was a blatant lie. I was being sued, pressured, possibly endangered by the aftereffects, of her fall from grace.