She stood on the escalator, part of an angled tableau of people, all frozen in position as if someone had yelled ‘B-O-S-T-O-N – Boston!’ like ‘London’ in the kids’ game. First, they had to take one escalator, then another, as they reached the parallel rumbling underground world that stretched out deep beneath the great city. Up in the daylight, you never thought about the lit-up roaring trains boring their way below like worms on speed. But on the ‘T’, you were in another universe, the city forgotten, time counted as the lapse between stops, some a few minutes, some longer, Davis, Porter, then Harvard, a little longer, then Central, Kendall, and then – oh, suddenly, joyously! – Charles/MGH, out of the catacombs and up into the blue-skied fresh-aired city and across the river, where everyone could catch their breath for a few glorious minutes, take in the spring sunshine as it was reflected off the water and the city ranged in tall gleaming blocks on the other bank before the darkness overtook again. Then Park Street, and change over from Red to Orange Line.
They were doing an extract from Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. She had been late, rushing as much as possible without falling through drizzles of snow to Milford Hall. Good at least that she lived close by.
‘Sorry, folks,’ she had said, trying to catch her breath as she slung her coat on the back of her chair, and pulled off her gloves and scarf. Her cheeks were bruised with cold. She rubbed her hands together, mentally taking attendance so she could enter it into the register at the end of class. One person missing.
‘So…’ she said, looking around and smiling. ‘Good weekend?’
There was a chorus of ‘yeses’, one mournful ‘no’ from her Greek student.
‘How come, Themis? Couldn’t have been your reading for this class! I couldn’t possibly have given you a shorter piece!’
‘No, Professor,’ she said, ‘I had to write a paper for my history class.’
Tara laughed. ‘That’s why you’re here, aren’t you? So – Sandra Cisneros. Anyone take a guess where she’s from?’
‘Is she Spanish?’ said Megumi.
‘No, Mexican,’ said Rasheed.
‘Yes, Mexican-American, to be precise. Her parents were Mexican, she was born in Chicago in 1954 – yes, centuries ago – and moved with her family between Chicago and Mexico City all her childhood,’ said Tara. ‘The piece we’ve just read is from her novel, same name.’ She turned to the blackboard to write ‘Chicano’ and ‘Chicana’ on it. ‘What do you think these words mean?’
‘Well, Chicano, it sounds male, and Chicana, female,’ said Emilio.
‘Good. Cisneros is a leading writer of the Chicano school of literature, which is a group of Mexican-American writers, so we’re talking about immigrant writing, things by people who moved here from Mexico at different times.’
‘So because she is woman, she is Chicana,’ said Emilio.
‘That’s right.’
Emilio smiled smugly at his classmates.
‘Oh, get over yourself,’ Rasheed said.
‘So, who’s going to tell me what the story’s about?’ Tara said, looking around. Danisha. She wasn’t in class today. She was usually the one who jumped in at this stage, words and ideas rushing out of her. ‘Where’s Danisha today?’ No one seemed to know. ‘Bojan, don’t you have a class with her?’
He shrugged. ‘Biology 1, but it meets later.’
‘Right, where were we? Yes, someone tell me about The House on Mango Street.’
‘It’s from the point-of-view of a young girl, maybe eleven or twelve?’ began Megumi.
‘Good. The girl’s name, which we don’t find out in this bit, is Esperanza Cordero – what else about her?’
‘Her family moves from one bad house to a worse house in a bad neighbourhood,’ said Shwimmy. ‘So what’s the big deal?’
‘So how does the girl feel?’ said Tara. ‘C’mon, guys.’
‘Bad?’ said Emilio, looking around at everyone. He had always played to the gallery, that one. The class giggled.
‘She feels horrible,’ said Rasheed. He passed a rough hand over his forehead. ‘I mean, think about it, six people in one tiny rundown house with one tiny bathroom, no place at all for anything, when what she wanted was a big beautiful house with real stairs and a yard and trees and space for her dreams! And the nun, her own schoolteacher, being disrespectful, when she finds out where the girl lives!’
‘So?’ said Shwimmy.
‘So? So? The nun is supposed to see everyone as equal in the eyes of God, right? Not look down on her because she’s poor!’
The rest of the class relaxed. They were off the hook while those two fought it out.
‘Guys, guys, so what does the house stand for? Do you think it stands for anything?’
‘Her self? Her identity, I mean. Her dreams?’ said Themis, waking up from her history nightmare.
And so it had gone on, the discussion about class and geography, about immigrant lives that they could have had no knowledge of, having travelled across continents to study in this expensive private university. She had wanted to unsettle them, at least one or two, get them to think differently about the world, their privilege, other people’s lacks. Danisha should have been here. She could lay things bare, take them down to the marrow. The smart kid every teacher hoped to have in class.
She went up to East Hall to check her mailbox. Stuffed amidst a bunch of publishers’ flyers and department memos and a battered letter from home was a note. It was from Danisha.
‘Prof. (it read), I really needed to see you Friday in your office hours.’ Had she forgotten Tara’s announcement that she had postponed them to Monday, since she was going to be away? ‘The dean called me in about my academic performance, and gave me a form. But my other instructors refused to sign. I really needed your signature urgently, to keep me in classes. Now they may be kicking me out.’
Kicking her out?
They couldn’t do that.
Not without consulting her.
Not if she had anything to do with it.
She saw Megumi and Bojan coming up the stairs towards her office. ‘Sorry, guys,’ she said, ‘something’s come up, I have to rush to the dean’s. Can you come back in a while?’
As much as the snowy path would permit, she ran around the wide quadrangle to the squat white colonial-style building placed diagonally from Sumner Hall, down to the basement. Joe Milner, her classmate, was coming up the stairs. ‘Hey, Tara, what’s up?’ he said.
‘Hey, Joe, problem with student, catch you later.’ She forced herself to walk down the stairs.
At first, no one would tell her anything. ‘Danisha Newton? I don’t know the case,’ one woman behind the counter said. Why was the admin staff always so grim, so unhelpful? The woman spoke to a man sitting behind a desk beyond the glass counter who looked up at her, and then went back to his work. Someone else came up behind the counter. ‘Oh, yes, she’s been removed from good academic standing, starting from next semester,’ she said, looking through a file.
‘But why? Why wasn’t I, her English teacher, consulted?’
‘Well, she should have told you. We gave her a form. Guess there was a deadline for the signatures. She needed at least one from one of her instructors to stay in classes,’ the woman said, not interested.
‘How can there be a deadline for something like this?’ she said, louder than she had meant to.
‘What do you mean, Professor?’ The woman looked up at her.
‘A deadline when it concerns a student’s academic future?’
‘I don’t know all the details, Professor. I don’t make the decisions. Danisha Newton was on probation after last semester. That’s all I know.’ The woman got busy with some papers.
‘Probation? What do you mean, probation?’
‘Academic probation, Professor.’
Who was she, Patience on a monument? What could she mean? Her best goddamn student on academic probation? Tara smiled so she wouldn’t have to leap over the counter and strangle the woman and throw her fat foolish carcass to the coyotes, if any, down in the Fens.
‘So, is the dean available? Can I see her?’ she said, keeping her voice to a minimum, her tone reasonable.
‘No, Professor, she’s not in. You need to make an appointment, in any case.’
‘So when can I see her?’ She was Patience on a monument.
The woman looked through the appointment book, taking her time. ‘To-to-to-to-to-to-to…’ Her eye travelled line by line. ‘I can put you down for Wednesday, 3 p.m., at the earliest.’
‘But that’s too far off, too late!’ she said.
The woman stared at her, pencil hovering over the appointment book. She was not going to make an entry and then have to scratch it off, spoil the perfection of her book for every capricious instructor who came by.
Bloody woman, with that fat affectless face, illiterate highschool dropout, probably. What did she even know? How did she even matter? Did she know a kid’s life was on the line here? What would make her care? Only if it were her own kid?
‘Sorry, I understand, yes. Thanks, that’s fine, please put me down,’ she said. ‘Tara Kumar, English Department.’ As she turned to leave, she could sense the women shaking their heads and saying something along the lines of ‘Freaking foreigners, what did they think, they could just barge in on the dean?’ to each other.
She had a sudden idea, turned back again to the counter. They fell silent.
‘Would you happen to know who Danisha’s adviser is?’ she said. They didn’t. Well, she would have to find out, have a word with her or him, try and sort things out. That could be one way to go.
Back in her office, she met students. She had to get in touch with Danisha. The number was there somewhere, at home, like all the other students’. She would have to fix this somehow. The poor, poor kid.
Time had worked itself loose after that. She had gone home, found the number, heard the phone ring off the hook. No answering machine. She had called Bojan. Danisha hadn’t shown up in class. Obviously not, silly of her. She had called Danisha’s home again. And again. And again. And again.
Then it sounded like someone had snatched up the phone. A voice said, ‘Who’s this?’
She had told the woman who she was, asked for Danisha.
‘You people ought to be ashamed of yourself, what you’ve gone and done to our poor girl,’ said the voice.
‘What’s happened? Can I speak to her, is she well?’ Tara had said, the ever-ready acid building and spilling in her stomach.
‘Yes, she’s well. She’s very well. She’s dead, is what she is, the poor child.’ The voice broke into tears.
‘Dead? How can she be dead?’
‘Killed herself, is how. Swallowed her momma’s sleeping pills. Dead, she found her, when she came back from the hospital in the morning, yesterday. You people should be ashamed. You think you can do anything.’ There was a muffled sob. The line went dead.
She had stumbled to the bathroom, all feeling turning into an upsurge of bile. She should have known. She should have done something. She should not have been away. How dare Danisha do this? Dare to throw it all away, not given them a second chance? Not trusted her, told her the truth?
What was the truth?
She had called Malia, first friend, mother confessor. Only the answering machine came on.
She had had to break the news the next day to her class. Themis and Emilio wept. She had wept, too, not minding where she was. The others had stared, their expressions matching the descriptions she had read of war victims: faintly stunned, uncomprehending, like a link had come undone.
A truth bigger than them all.
The three weeks left in the semester had gone by, she couldn’t remember how. She had been another person. At least, she hadn’t been what she had been before. No one could have known, for she had covered it up well. Not housemates, not classmates. People must have been shocked when she had informed the department, gathered up her research materials, given up her room, and gone home, to India. For good. Malia had seemed not to understand. Or maybe she had understood only too well. She had not forgiven Tara for leaving her behind, for having a whole other country she could run away to at will.
She got off the Red Line at Park Street, and switched to the Orange. The crowd was subtly different now, somehow harder, more alien, more big city, with the small university-town feeling left behind on Longfellow Bridge. There were a lot of professionals, workers, young black students dressed in their own idiom, headphones strapped protectively around their heads, only the thump-thump-thump of bass telling you something about the music they were listening to. This was not another world; it was the same world, just at another level. It was about class–race–place, class– race–place, from Cambridge, on the other bank, to Roxbury and Ruggles, all the way up to Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain, the very last stop, where she would get off.
Danisha would have been close now to the age she had been then.
At student records, the woman had been sympathetic when she heard a brief version of events eight years old. ‘Our records are confidential, as you know. So I can’t give you a number or address. Why not try a newspaper,’ she said, rooting around in a desk. ‘Here, these people from the Globe may be able to help you.’
She had got a name, an address, a number, gone straight off to Roxbury. It had turned out to be an old housing project. Danisha had lived on the sixth floor. She knew before she had rung the bell that nobody was home. An old African-American woman had peered at her from the next apartment.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’ she had said.
‘I’m looking for Tamara Newton,’ she had said, feeling guilty under that gaze.
‘And who’s asking?’
‘My name is Tara. Tara Kumar. I used to teach Danisha, her daughter.’
The old woman came out of her door, using her walker. ‘Look here, whoever you are, don’t bother Tamara. Dani’s been dead and gone a long time. You leave her mama alone, you hear me. She’s a good woman. She doesn’t need any more trouble. You people leave her be.’
She had waited till evening, called and introduced herself to Danisha’s mother.
There was a silence at the other end. ‘And what is this about?’
‘Could we meet?’
The other woman sighed. ‘Fine, I finish at the hospital at two o’clock tomorrow. Can we meet somewhere close by, maybe near Forest Hills?’
Tara suggested meeting at the Arboretum, at least there would be space and air, and the trees to protect them.
She got off at the end of the line. A poster for a college fund for black students caught her eye right across from where the train doors opened. It had the picture of a laughing, vivid young black girl on it. Underneath it said: ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste.’
She walked out of the ‘T’ station to be met by a strongish breeze. She pulled her jacket closer, cold even in the bright spring sunshine. There was a bus to the Arboretum but it was only about ten minutes to the main entrance and she had time, so she decided to walk. The pavements were deserted, and people in cars looked at her as they drove past, unused to seeing someone walking. The air turned fragrant as she went up the hill to the main gates but she was not prepared for spring lighting up the trees with every sort of pink there was.
They were to meet at the visitors’ centre. She still had ten minutes left. There was an art exhibition on by a local artist in the lecture hall, laboured pencil sketches of bole and canopy. She took several deep breaths to clear her head. She picked up a flyer. Why had she done this? What was she going to say to Danisha’s mother? Eight years down the line, sorry your daughter died, sorry I couldn’t save her?
She began to feel closed in and sweaty. A man and a woman walked in, glanced at her, and went straight up to the beginning of the display. She took a turn around the room, then went back to wait near the entrance to the building. She saw a tall, thin, light-skinned woman walk up the path. Could that be…?
She came in, looked at Tara, held out her hand. ‘I’m Tamara Newton. I’m guessing you are Ta-ra – Ku-mar, is it?’
‘You look nothing like Danisha!’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. I mean, thanks for agreeing to see me.’
The woman smiled slightly. ‘That’s fine. So what’s this about?’
‘Shall we walk, it’s rather hot in here?’ Tara said, playing for space and time.
Out in the air, she said, ‘Danisha was perhaps one of my best students. I’m sorry I didn’t make an attempt to see you then, right after she … Well, the thing is, I felt responsible, as if I’d killed her, well, conspired to kill her anyway, I went away home at the end of the semester. I’m so sorry, so sorry.’
‘Ms Kumar…’
‘Please call me Tara.’
‘Tara, then – so you didn’t finish your PhD?’
‘How did you…?’
‘Oh, Dani told me. I guess you told the class right at the beginning that you were a PhD student?’
‘No, no, I finished. I just wrote my dissertation from home.’
They walked on in silence for a bit amidst the trees waking up from their winter sleep.
‘Danisha was such a bright girl. I mean, she was dyslexic but I never graded her on how she wrote, just how she spoke in class and what she wrote.’
‘How did you find out about the dyslexia?’
‘Her spellings – there was a pattern – the things she said in class were so smart. It didn’t fit.’
They walked in silence. A man with a dog went by.
‘Did she say anything? About why, I mean,’ Tara said. She saw the expression on the other woman’s face. ‘I’m sorry, forgive me, I’m an insensitive fool, even bringing this up.’
‘She left a note,’ Danisha’s mother said. ‘A single line.’ She told Tara what it was. She made a sound that was close to laughter. ‘Not a single error in it, you’ll be happy to know.’
Tara looked up at the trees, their newborn leaves.
Nothing gold can stay.
To her horror, she felt tears streaming down her face. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘how can this possibly be worse for me?’ She dug around in her bag for a tissue and blew her nose hard. ‘I was away when she came by to get my signature. I’d announced it in class.’
‘Well, she’d been on probation, as you probably know.’
‘No, I didn’t. She never said.’
‘Well, I didn’t know either. She kept it from me, too. Thought I’d be disappointed. I guess the other instructors wouldn’t sign off.’
‘Why did she wait till the last minute? Why didn’t she say anything at all!’ Tara scrabbled in her bag for another tissue, rubbed her eyes. She stopped.
What she had done? She had made the poor woman relive her own horror story – the black mother’s horror story – for no reason other than her own need to work through things.
How could victim become consoler? How had she expected comfort from the one who, like countless women before her, had seen her beloved, her child, taken from her? Like Stowe’s Eliza, she had gone to a place where tears were dry.
‘So,’ Danisha’s mother said, glancing at her watch, ‘I’m not exactly sure what you want. She’s been dead eight years, Ms Kumar. My child’s never going to come back. What do you want of me?’ She could feel the woman’s anger and bitterness rise off her like vapour from the trees. ‘I mean, if you’re looking for forgiveness, god knows for what, for – absolution – I’m not your average black redeemer, Ms Kumar, like in the books and the movies and the myths. If you want everything made all right, try Whoopi Goldberg.’
Tara said nothing.
‘And, anyway, what makes you think you’re that important?’ Danisha’s mother said. ‘You think you could have saved Dani? Nobody could have saved Dani. Not even me. There were just too many things. God knows I tried. Maybe I was too hard on her. But I just wanted her to have a happier life than mine, wanted her to be everything that I couldn’t be.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Tara said. ‘I’ve thought only of myself. After all these years, I’ve brought back things you probably wish to forget.’
Danisha’s mother looked at her. ‘It’s not like I don’t think of her every day, Tara,’ she said. ‘She was my daughter, I can’t help it. Nobody needs to remind me of her.’