When he emerged from his office, the hush of the library suddenly became the silence of the tomb, as everyone thought it best to hold their breath, stifle their coughs and delay any page-turning until his gaze had completed its searchlight sweep of the room. The only one making any noise was Jimmy Kuhn, who was seated at the reference desk with three of his female classmates, none of whom were in a strategic location to observe any sudden eruptions from the assistant headmaster’s office. The girls were highly amused by whatever Jimmy was saying, and Jimmy was as oblivious of Norman Laney’s looming presence as he was of the total quiet that had descended over the rest of the student body gathered in the library, or even the general pall that had hung in the air all morning because of the news that Karen Ritchie’s mother had died unexpectedly last night at age forty-five. With three deliberate steps forward, Mr. Laney curtailed the giggles of the girls, and the abrupt end of their delight with the unsuspecting Jimmy caused him to turn around and face the seething fury of Norman Laney’s enormous bulk.
“Jimmy Kuhn!” screamed Mr. Laney. “WHERE ARE YOUR BOOKS?”
Caught off guard, Jimmy stammered. “Locker,” he sputtered. “They’re in my locker. The bell rang and I—”
“HOW DARE YOU COME TO STUDY HALL WITHOUT YOUR BOOKS!” thundered Mr. Laney. “It IS true, isn’t it, that you DO know how to read?”
Scattered tittering erupted throughout the library, but if Mr. Laney had wanted to, he would not have been able to pinpoint any of its sources. Instead he remained intent upon Jimmy. “You HAVE achieved LITERACY in the course of your high school education?”
“Ah—yes,” Jimmy said, as if he weren’t entirely sure what literacy was or whether or not he had achieved it. But he had the instincts of a true performer, and playing dumb was a role that came quite naturally to him. “Yes, sir,” he repeated more affirmatively. “I have definitely achieved—” he paused. “What did you call it?”
The students now broke out in open laugher, and Jimmy turned around to smile gratefully at his audience.
“THEN PROVE IT!” roared Mr. Laney. “OPEN THE FIRST BOOK you CAN FIND AND STICK YOUR HEAD IN IT! PERHAPS SOME OF ITS ERUDITION WILL SINK INTO YOUR BRAIN THROUGH THE PROCESS OF OSMOSIS!”
As Mr. Laney set off down the hallway leading out of the library, Jimmy turned back to the girls. “What’s up with Fat Boy?”
“Karen Ritchie’s mother died last night,” whispered Tina Johnson.
Jimmy shrugged. He may or may not have achieved literacy, but he definitely had not achieved the maturity to understand what either death in general or the death of Karen Ritchie’s mother in particular had to do with him. It was doubtful if he ever would. “I don’t even like Karen Ritchie,” he said. “Frizzy haired little Jewish girl.”
The girls giggled as appreciatively as they dared.
* * *
Near the end of the hallway, Norman Laney turned right abruptly and entered the office of his colleague Elizabeth Elder. She had not so much an office as a sanctuary in which fluorescent lights had been banished and a large Oriental rug completely covered the linoleum floor. At her own expense, she had arranged for the ceiling tiles and strip lighting to be removed in exchange for a smooth, painted surface. In the rich glow of the desk lamp which was the primary source of light in the room, all her mahogany furniture looked even more antique than it was. Three of the walls were covered with reproductions of Gobelins tapestries. On the wall by her desk hung stern portraits of ancestors whose grim faces were illuminated by spotlights overhanging the frames. (The joke among students was that she used these portraits as models for her own grim visage, and needed them nearby so she could practice between classes.) The anomaly in her décor was the plush leather armchair which could withstand the girth of Norman Laney much better than the straight-backed needle-pointed chairs she indicated for any other visitor.
Mr. Laney plopped down in his chair and simultaneously produced an apple. As he bit savagely into it, he looked more horse than human, with his lips peeled back to reveal a formidable row of large, bared teeth. Juice from the fruit flew as far as Elizabeth Elder’s desk. It was clear that the apple was not only a mid-morning snack, but also an object on which he could inflict his vengeance. Elizabeth Elder remained unflinching, and waited patiently for Norman Laney to speak his mind, her steady, piercing gaze trained intently on him above her reading glasses.
She was quite well aware that Norman’s atrocious eating habits and table manners were deliberately exaggerated to help him separate his friends from his enemies. Those in Mountain Brook who accepted him, loved him and believed in him were invariably inclined to overlook his grossness. Those who disliked him, distrusted him, feared him and generally believed he had no business being accepted in Mountain Brook society often betrayed their true feelings when forced to witness Norman’s gluttony. Although Elizabeth had been a proven friend for decades, she knew better than to irk him at a time like this by even the slightest movement of a single facial muscle. She kept her face perfectly blank as she watched him devour the apple.
Still he didn’t speak, but extended his left leg and rocked it back and forth in agitation.
“So he finally killed her,” he said, taking another savage bite of the apple.
“I wouldn’t talk like that outside this office,” Elizabeth Elder warned him.
“Well that’s what I’m saying to everybody I know,” he replied, with another defiant bite. “He killed her,” he said, through a mouthful of apple.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she killed herself.”
“Same thing. Living with him was murder. Or suicide. Whatever you want to call it. But he’s the one who killed her.”
There was a moment of silence in which Elizabeth Elder’s exasperation ultimately took the form of speech.
“Really, Norman,” she said. “You could get yourself in a lot of trouble with loose talk like that. That man would love nothing better than to vent himself in some kind of lawsuit against you.”
“He’d never win.” Norman’s leg rocked more rapidly back and forth.
“Oh, yes he would. You’d go bankrupt in a week from legal fees. That’s all the victory he would need. And how well do you think our beloved head of school would handle this kind of complication?”
“You’re right,” he conceded in a reversal that would have surprised anyone who didn’t know him as well as Elizabeth Elder did. She was equally unfazed by his abrupt change of subject.
“Franny has agreed to do Raisin in the Sun for Theo,” he said. “I’m still looking into it, but I think it’ll be the first time any school in the state of Alabama has put on the play. That’s good for a Birmingham News story, and Theo will be a shoo-in for Yale. I’m going to send a videotape as supporting material.”
“It’s not the play Theo wants.”
“Who cares what Theo wants?” said Norman. His voice rising, he leaned forward in the chair and narrowed his eyes, as if Elizabeth Elder were his adversary and not his dearest friend and colleague. “I am not going to allow Theophilus Jackson to play a British aristocrat in the voice of a Southern Negro.” He elongated the vowels of this last word to such an extent that it sounded like “knee-grow,” and he rapped his knuckles on Elizabeth’s desk.
Unruffled as ever, Elizabeth said calmly, “He’s going to accuse us of being opposed to color-blind casting.”
“Who’s opposed to color-blind casting?” Norman snapped back. “This has nothing to do with color-blind casting. This has to do with the fact that The Importance of Being Earnest is not going to be the fall play. A Raisin in the Sun is the fall play. If Theo Jackson plays that role as brilliantly as I know he can, he might find himself accepted into one of the finer Ivy League institutions in this country despite his low B average and abysmal SAT scores.” Norman’s foot rocked violently, as if trying to match the vehemence of his tirade.
“What if Theo refuses the part?”
“Let him. We have plenty of other students who could play that part.”
“No other male students who also happen to be African American.”
“Exactly!” Norman almost shouted. “Then Theo will see that this has nothing to do with color-blind casting, but about getting himself into Yale. And hopefully, it won’t be too late.”
He thrust his hands on the arms of the chair and hoisted himself up. Elizabeth Elder’s eyes followed him as he rose ponderously. “Norman,” she said, in the voice of a mother bringing a wayward child to account.
His eyes met hers as he stood upright in front of her desk. “Who’s going to see about Karen?” she said.
“I am, of course,” he said, adopting for his part the voice of the aggrieved child who has been wrongly accused.
“Let me know what you find out.” She shook her head. “It’s a bad way to start the school year.”
He turned to leave, but then looked back. “Incidentally,” he said. “What’s Jimmy Kuhn still doing here? I thought he wasn’t coming back.”
Elizabeth sighed. “His mother was up here last week, begging Tom Turbyfill for one more chance.”
“But why?” Norman turned back around to face Elizabeth fully again. “He’s perfect Mountain Brook High School material.”
“I think that’s what his mother’s afraid of.” Elizabeth pursed her lips.
“I will not have this school used as a babysitting service for spoiled rich kids!” said Norman, wagging his finger at Elizabeth as if she were the culprit. “You and I have worked too hard to turn this school into something else. I’ll just have to try harder,” he said, turning again to leave. “The boy is so obtuse he doesn’t even know when someone is making his life miserable.”
“Only two more years to go,” Elizabeth said with another sigh.
“No!” Norman declared bluntly. “He’s got to go before next year. I refuse to be associated with the school of which Jimmy Kuhn is a graduate. Let me know if you hear anything.” He left the office with as little preamble as he’d entered.
* * *
Back in his own office, Norman Laney discovered a yellow Post-it note which must have just been placed there by the secretary from the main office while he was talking to Elizabeth Elder. “Midge Elmore called. Wants you to call back.” Normally Norman might have waited a day or two before subjecting himself to a phone conversation with Midge Elmore, but today he seized the receiver and jabbed fiercely at the buttons as he would have liked to jab his fingers in Jimmy Kuhn’s idiot eyes. If anyone knew the details of what had happened last night, it would be Midge Elmore.
“What have you heard?” he asked as soon as she answered, not bothering to greet her or identify himself.
“Oh, Norman,” she said. “I’ve just come from there.”
“You’ve been to the house?” he said, temporarily taken aback. But yes, he recalculated quickly, this was why he loved Midge Elmore. She was one of the few people he knew who could do the simple, obvious thing without hesitation. It was she who would do what would either never occur to anyone else, or be immediately dismissed as impossible, unthinkable.
“I called Brody’s as soon as they opened,” she said. “But I thought it best to take the tray myself rather than have it delivered. I didn’t think they’d want just anybody coming over there.”
“Midge, you are a miracle of Southern womanhood,” he said.
From the sound she made in reply, he could tell what deep satisfaction she got from this compliment. And he meant it too. Times had changed, even as far south as Birmingham, Alabama, where it often seemed there was no such thing as change. But sometimes it did happen, for the better as well as the worse, and now the news of a death did not automatically summon the world to your door with condolences and trays of food. Especially if you were as universally and thoroughly disliked as Warren Ritchie, whose family wasn’t even from Birmingham anyway. Even worse, Warren’s people had come from “up North,” and try telling anyone in Birmingham that not all “Yankees” were “Jews.” Norman himself had tried and failed repeatedly over the years. Once he had even brandished the New York Times obituary of Warren’s father, which made it clear that the family wasn’t even Yankee, let alone Jewish. Although Warren’s father more or less moved to the Northeast in prep school, his family came from Chicago. But the response he got was always the same: Of course Warren denied being Jewish—who wouldn’t? In Alabama, the New York Times was not a source deemed trustworthy or even noteworthy. Besides, anyone who had ever met Warren Ritchie had the most crucial and conclusive evidence right in front of them: everything about his conduct and personality was completely “Jewish.” And Birmingham was a town where Jewish people had to go to their own country club.
However, Midge Elmore had always been a direct and untrammeled conduit for the culture in which she lived, and that culture told her that when somebody died, you took over food. Her society was the authority which dictated her life, and she was its most faithful minion, carrying on traditions and ideas long after they’d been discarded by almost everyone else. God love her, thought Norman, with her beauty parlor helmet hair, fluffed and teased and sprayed with rigid regularity three times a week, as if it were indeed a form of protective clothing, or battle gear, she needed in order to face the world. She couldn’t have been more different from Susan Ritchie, the California girl with her long straight hair and aviator glasses. It was a credit to both of them, Norman thought, that they had forged such an unlikely alliance.
“I wanted to let you know,” she continued, in the bolder voice of a woman who had just been recognized as a miracle of Southern womanhood, “that I told them it came from the school.”
“You told them it came from the school?” he asked, momentarily confused. “The food? You said the school sent it?”
“I thought it would mean more to them that way.”
“Brilliant,” he said. “Absolutely brilliant. What do we owe you?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I wanted to do it.”
In gratitude, he lowered his voice and adopted the conspiratorial tone Midge herself used when exchanging gossip. “What happened? Did she kill herself?” He leaned over his desk as if Midge were on the other side and he was straining to hear her reply.
“Oh, it’s awful, Norman,” she said.
He sighed inaudibly and leaned back in his chair, wondering if he would have to pay the full price of a conversation with Midge Elmore. When she devolved into non sequiturs, the outlook for receiving quick, direct information was not promising.
“How’s Karen?” he said.
“To pieces,” she said. “They both are. I’ve never seen him in such a state, ever. I didn’t even want to go inside—just leave the tray and tell them we were all thinking about them. Norman—” here she lowered her voice to her trademark tone of secrecy. “He pulled me inside the house and would not let me go. I was the only one there and he would not let me go. He kept me there for three hours.”
“That’s what he gets for being such a jackass,” said Norman, biting into his third apple of the day. “Was it an accident, or did she deliberately take too many pills?” The time had come to prod the conversation along.
“He did tell me that she was on Valium. But you’re not going to believe this—”
He found himself leaning forward over the desk again as she lowered her voice even further. Naturally he had suspected, but had not known for sure what sort of medication Susan Ritchie had been taking in order to live in the same household with Warren.
“He took me into the bathroom, Norman,” she said. “Showed me the bottle and counted out all the pills right there on the counter. Said every pill was accounted for according to the prescription and the date it was picked up. He saw her take one pill last night, just like she did every night at bedtime. None are missing from the bottle. He made me look at the label and read the date. Then he insisted I read the date out loud. He was distraught.”
“Do you know what I heard?” said Norman, with his mouth full. “When one of his suits wasn’t ready at the cleaners, he called them up and threatened to sue. Said he was trying a case the next day and wanted to wear that suit, and if he lost the case they could expect legal action. Can you imagine? Is that true?”
“They wouldn’t take Susan’s business anymore,” said Midge by way of reply. “She had to start using another cleaners.”
So it was true. He bit thoughtfully into the apple.
“Warren wasn’t even sure she was—gone—until the ambulance came and the paramedics couldn’t resuscitate her. The doctor at the hospital said they’d need to do an autopsy to find out what happened.”
“Is he going to?”
“Yes.”
Norman leaned over and threw the apple core into the overflowing waste basket beside his chair. The interest and usefulness of this conversation were almost over, and he stood up at his desk as if to signal the end. “Can I rely on you to do me a favor, Midge?” he said, as if she were the only one he could trust with an important request.
“What is it?” she said.
“Call over there and tell Karen that she needs to come up to school this afternoon and get her assignments.”
Midge was scandalized. “Oh, no, Norman,” she said. “Her brothers are flying home today and that child’s not in a fit state to go anywhere. I was going to come get her books and whatever the teachers want to send home and take them over to her. She can’t leave the house. She’s incapacitated.”
“Tell her to CAPACITATE then,” he snapped, his voice approaching the decibel level he used on the likes of Jimmy Kuhn. “She needs to get out of the house and away from that man. The sooner she gets back into the school routine, the better off she’ll be.”
“Maybe I could pick her up and bring her,” said Midge dubiously.
“You do that then,” said Norman sternly, knowing full well that Midge liked nothing better than an unequivocal directive from a respected authority. “Why don’t we say three-fifteen. Just after school’s out. I’ll see you then.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Three-fifteen. I’ll expect to see you both in my office.” He softened his tone and became the co-conspirator once more. “You’ll let me know anything you hear,” he said. “Oh—and Midge?” he added. “One more thing.”
“What is it?”
“What was on the tray from Brody’s?”
* * *
No sooner had he hung up the phone than Tom Turbyfill appeared at his open door, tapping gently to announce his presence. Norman began rifling through the papers on his desk, as if so absorbed in his work that he wasn’t aware of his visitor.
“Sorry to disturb you, Norman,” said Dr. Turbyfill.
Norman looked up from his desk, as if just noticing the headmaster’s arrival. “Come in, come in,” he said, with the deliberately false joviality of a much too busy man trying to act cordially nevertheless.
“No need. No need,” said Dr. Turbyfill. “But I just wanted to let you know—it has been brought to my attention—that we should do something to show our sympathy for the Ritchie family at this most difficult time.”
“Already taken care of,” said Norman, trying hard to keep the loathing and contempt from creeping into his voice as the headmaster’s words echoed in his ears. It would be hard to say what grated most; the list was long. For one thing, there was the pompous delivery of one cliché after another. Then, the way he skipped a full beat between each word, so he sounded more like a robot than a human being. Worst of all perhaps was his scrupulous avoidance of any linguistic contractions, as if this testified to the learning he had acquired over many years.
He calmed a bit after noticing that Dr. Turbyfill was indeed impressed with Norman’s foresight. “Food tray from Brody’s,” he said in answer to the raised eyebrows. “The works. Delivered this morning.” He sat down and began searching in one of his drawers, as if he really did not have time just now to prolong the conversation.
Tom Turbyfill pursed his lips. “We will have to look and see just how much we have budgeted for expenditures of this nature.”
We? thought Norman Laney. Would that mean Dr. Turbyfill and Mrs. Hessler, the accountant? Dr. Turbyfill and Norman Laney? Or was that a more royal we?
“Didn’t cost the school a dime,” Norman shot back, briefly meeting Tom Turbyfill’s eyes before resuming the search of his drawer. “I got Midge Elmore to donate the tray on behalf of the school.”
“Excellent. Excellent,” said Dr. Turbyfill, his round full moon of a face expanding even further as he beamed his head-of-school smile. “I can see that you are way ahead of me. I will count on you to write the appropriate notes to the Elmore and the Ritchie families. Thank you, Norman.”
Yes, I’m way ahead of you, thought Norman, all but slamming the desk drawer in disgust as Tom Turbyfill walked back down the hall.
Just then he happened to remember that Elizabeth Elder’s husband had been a suicide many years ago. It had happened long ago, before he knew her, and she never spoke of it to him, so he had no idea how much pain the memory could still cause her. One thing he was sure of, however: Elizabeth was not the block of stone she could make herself appear to be. She was simply a woman of decorum and discipline and above all, professionalism, who did not allow her private self to infiltrate the performance of her professional duties. In other words, she was the opposite of himself, and he did not know how he could get along without her.
* * *
That evening when he got home, Norman was greeted by the strong smell of his favorite meal—a leg of lamb—which was too expensive and too much trouble to be served except on special occasions. Dropping his bulging briefcase down in the hall with a sigh, he said, “Thank you, Mother.”
“I heard the news,” she replied in her familiar rasp. “When I got off the phone with Phyllis, I called the Pig and put in my order. Phyllis took me down there after lunch. I knew you’d need a boost.” She exhaled a large cloud of smoke from her twenty-third cigarette of the day.
Sitting there in her established place on the sofa in their tiny living room, she looked the exact opposite of both the willowy silhouette associated with her Virginia Slims cigarettes and the pen and ink Picasso nude hanging on the wall above her head that had been left to him in Bella Whitmire’s will. What the seventy year-old Norma Laney most resembled was in fact a toad. Her short, squat body sprouted incongruously thin arms and legs, and her head seemed to peer out just above her collar bone, her neck having disappeared some years ago, along with her girdle, which could no longer contain Norma’s expanding contours. A large fleshy mole on her left cheekbone and the customary croak of her voice completed the effect.
She was the person most dear to Norman Laney in all the world. From earliest childhood, his monstrous obesity had set him apart, not only from other children, but from all other human beings, including his own father, as if he were not exactly a member of the human race. He had grown up with the instinctive knowledge that he would never be able to live what is called a normal life. By the time he was an adult, he had long understood that he would never get married, never have children, and never have a family other than the one he was born into. But if even a fraction of the gossip he heard on a daily basis could be believed, his domestic situation was far better than that of most married couples in Mountain Brook. He gave his mother the full credit for that, and considered it a privilege to share a home with her.
In honor of the meal she had prepared, they opted to have dinner in the miniscule dining room wedged between the kitchen and the living room. Calling it a room was going a bit far, as it was really more an alcove of neutral space buffering the two larger rooms on either side, but it just did allow for a small table and four chairs. It was only when this furniture was put in place that Norman and his mother had realized how completely it obstructed the passage between kitchen and living room, especially for people of their size. They now had to use the hallway when going from one of those rooms to the other: an aggravating but necessary inconvenience for those who wished to live like civilized human beings.
To Norman Laney, there were only two types of people in the world, and these types had nothing to do with race, social class, ethnic origin, financial position or even formal education. In his classification system, you were either a civilized person or you were a barbarian. Of course, the particular Southern society in which he now made his home was filled with barbarians who considered themselves civilized people. But this was infinitely preferable to the Southern society he came from, which was filled with barbarians who didn’t even try to act like civilized people.
The elite, all-white enclave of Birmingham where Norman lived was populated by wealthy, well-educated citizens who lived their lives according to certain standards of sophistication. They shopped at Saks in Atlanta and Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. But despite the advantages of living in their little pocket of privilege, “the Tiny Kingdom” of Mountain Brook, far too many of them shared the same backwards mentality and values as the rest of their underprivileged state. While they would never use redneck or white trash language like the “n” word, many still regarded black people as either niggers or freed slaves who were lucky to get paid what they did. When Martin Luther King, Jr., had written his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” twenty years ago, they had been mixing martinis up on their mountain, just like they always had, just like they always would. They appeared not to notice the Civil Rights Movement. It was just something that happened downtown, a place where they didn’t live. However, it was probably too much to hope for, that they would be affected by the Civil Rights Movement when they were living in a place designed to look like it hadn’t even been affected by the Civil War: a lush Garden of Eden modeled on the image of the Old South, where every house was a mansion, every woman was a belle, and every darkie was happy to work there as a maid, a yardman or a waiter at the country club. The refinement of this genteel world of Southern ladies and gentlemen was strictly cosmetic; underneath was all the ugliness of the unenlightened ideas and beliefs from the dark ages of Southern history. As far as Norman Laney was concerned, discrimination based on race, religion, gender, and all the rest was uncivilized behavior. Unfortunately, Mountain Brook was devoted wholeheartedly to perpetuating all these forms of discrimination, because without them, their country clubs and debutante societies would have been meaningless.
Norman figured his job, as an outsider who had gained extraordinary entrée into this exclusive world, was to introduce true civilization in place of its thin veneer. Lots of people thought he was just a social climber. Lots more hated him personally, resented his intrusion, were disgusted by his appearance and looked forward to the day he would die of the heart attack they all predicted. But just as many loved him and welcomed him, even if they didn’t always know what he was up to. At any rate, he got invited to all sorts of wonderful parties and received piles of Christmas presents. And as a lover of life on a scale as grand as his own girth, he found that he tended to love most people in that life, especially if they dressed well and served good food at their parties, which, in Mountain Brook, they invariably did. Nevertheless, he had a higher calling. If he had been asked to define his own personal mission in life, he would have said he was trying in his own small way—or rather, in his own large way [laughter]—to lead a charge against the ranks of barbarians who dominated and controlled his world. He conducted this campaign as a crusader for Art and Culture, which were the most powerful forces in the war against barbarians.
Who are the barbarians? he was often asked, and to avoid antagonizing his enemies even further, one definition he frequently provided applied mainly to residents of New York City. Barbarians were easily identifiable by any number of criteria, he would say, one of which was: if you didn’t have a dining area in your home, you were a barbarian, or at least, you were living like one. He had even used this example in the classroom last spring, when teaching the stanzas about the typist and the house agent’s clerk eating food out of tins in “The Waste Land.”
“Instead of preparing a meal, they’re just opening cans of food!” he had proclaimed, pounding the desk with his fist. “Rather than creating an evening ritual of beauty and grace, they’re just gobbling down the groceries!” He had pronounced it “gro-ce-ries,” with equal accent on all syllables. “There is no spiritual or emotional exchange of any kind! It’s just an animal act-i-vi-ty, followed by further animal act-i-vi-ty, all on the same sofa! If televisions had been invented by the time T.S. Eliot wrote his poem, they would have been watching TV while they ate their dinner!” Confident that at least half the members of his classroom had dinner in front of the television, he had made it sound like the ultimate act of barbarity. Of course—although Norman and his mother would never eat food that came out of a can—they usually ate their own dinner on TV trays while watching their favorite programs in the den. But tonight’s meal deserved a place on the dining room table, along with one of those particular bottles of wine he had been saving for Christmas time.
“Honestly, Mother,” he said, chewing thoughtfully over her question about Karen’s state of mind. “She looked more frightened than anything.” The image of Karen’s face as it had appeared that afternoon in his office rose before him. The delicate white skin was even more pale than usual, and the fine network of blue veins at the temples seemed to throb as if in fear of imminent attack. She had uttered hardly one syllable, which was unfortunately typical of her, and her big brown eyes were glassy with terror. Norman was used to seeing terrified students and even junior faculty quake before him in mortal dread. The magnitude of his body combined with the thunderous roar of his wrath could strike terror into God himself. But Karen had no reason to fear his fury. She was that student who was so quiet and self-contained you forgot she was there until you graded the papers and realized she’d scored highest on the exam or written the best essay in the class. But this was in itself a different kind of problem. Usually with students of her intellect, he was able to form a deep bond that went far beyond the normal relationship of teacher and student or even protégé and mentor. He became almost a surrogate parent who helped these special pupils navigate the shoals of adolescence, explore their intelligence, contemplate their futures and finally hurl themselves into their independent lives with all the force of his weight and good wishes behind them. But not so with Karen. He had never even been able to strike up a real conversation with her, let alone a meaningful connection. Much as he tried, she had never become one of his darlings; she remained only a diligent and dutiful student with him, and he had never succeeded in reaching the individual within.
What had happened that afternoon in his office was only one example of his overall failure to communicate or connect with her. Asking Midge Elmore if she would collect Karen’s schoolwork from the front office, he had then turned around and told Karen he didn’t give a damn when she handed in that work or how many days off she had to take from school. That wasn’t the real reason he’d called her up to the campus. What he really wanted was to see how she was doing and give her a chance to talk to somebody if she needed to. In reply, she said nothing for so long he was beginning to think she was never going to open her mouth the whole time she was there. When she did respond, it was clear she hadn’t understood him at all. She seemed to think he was angry that she’d missed a day of school and might have to miss one more, for her mother’s funeral. He had merely sighed, and she continued to stare at him as if in abject terror.
Norma’s eyes narrowed exactly as her son’s did when possessed by some fury of either emotion or thought. “He doesn’t beat those children, does he, Norman?”
“Oh, no, Mother,” he was quick to reply. “He’s not that kind of barbarian. Sometimes I wish he was, though.”
“Norman, you don’t mean that.”
He ate for some moments in contented silence, sopping up the rich gravy with one of the Sister Schubert’s dinner rolls and complimenting his mother on the mint sauce which she made herself from the fresh mint leaves he grew out back on his little postage stamp of a patio.
“What I mean is: I’d know exactly what to do, and I can assure you, I would not hesitate to do it.” Spearing a bite of potato, carrot and lamb, he continued to speak with his mouth full. “You know I’ve had to do it before, and I would not hesitate for one second to do it again, just because this is Mountain Brook.”
His mother nodded, remembering quite well the incident of child abuse in her son’s first year of teaching at the public high school in Pratt City, the blue collar enclave just west of Birmingham where she had spent her married life and raised her two children.
As Norman continued to enjoy his leg of lamb, even picking it up to get with his teeth those tender morsels that liked to cling to the bone, he contemplated the problem of a different kind of abuse, which left no telltale bruises or broken bones, but had a child apologizing for missing school on the day of her mother’s death and shaking in her shoes when someone who would be her friend tried to offer sympathy and comfort. He had no idea how to combat this kind of abuse any more than he knew what had made her father such a barbarian in the first place.
“Well, he is Jewish, you know,” was the Birmingham explanation, but besides the fact that Warren wasn’t Jewish, his parents had been kind and gentle people whose primary failing appeared to be their liberal social conscience, which had brought them to Birmingham in the first place. Apparently they were a childless couple in their forties when Warren came along unexpectedly and miraculously, years after they had ceased to hope for children. Of course they had doted on their only child, and obviously had spoiled him with their worshipful attention to his every need and desire. That was Norman’s explanation.
“He’s not Jewish,” he had said to somebody on the phone that afternoon. He couldn’t remember who—so many people had called him to gossip about Susan’s death that day. “He’s not Jewish; he’s a narcissist.” “Oh,” Grace had replied vaguely. Had to be Grace. “I didn’t know we had any of those in this town.”
Well, Norman had thought grimly to himself, we have at least one in this town: he was fairly certain that was Warren’s particular form of barbarity. Warren now wanted the undivided attention and admiration of the world, which simply wasn’t to be had in Birmingham, despite his many accomplishments. However polite people might be to him in their Southern way, they would not ask him to their parties or invite him to join their country club. But Warren would never stop trying to ascend to those heights, and everything was put in service to this grand ambition, including his wife and children. Of course he got it all wrong. For example, no one cared that his children went to Ivy League schools. Even if his daughter went to the best college in the country, she would never be one of Birmingham’s debutantes. And it wasn’t what college your children went to; it was the sorority or fraternity they pledged at Bama. Yet Warren’s ego made him a fool despite his supposedly high IQ. He believed that a forceful demonstration of his own superiority—reflected of course by his wife and children—was all he needed to endear himself to those who were so clearly his inferiors in intelligence, education and professional achievement. His failure to penetrate the inner sanctums of Mountain Brook society only made him try harder in all the wrong ways to gain friendship with people who had nothing to offer him except admittance into their exclusive social world, which was committed to nothing so much as to keeping people like him out of it.
“Can I get you some more?” said his mother.
Norman shook his head.
“Do you think you could ask Midge to step in and look after Karen this year?” she asked.
Interesting idea. Midge would do it, if he asked. But it gave him another idea. A better one.
“No, Mother,” he said, laying down knife and fork with sudden determination. “I think I’m going to step in.”
Shaking her head, Norma pushed up from her chair and began clearing the table. “I don’t know what you’re thinking,” she said, “but I hope it doesn’t put us back in Pratt City.”
This was her favorite and most effective way of warning her son against the excesses to which he was prone. Their hometown of Pratt City was located near what had once been the state’s largest coal seam, and the town had begun as a mining community which supplied that coal to the steel mills in the post-Civil War industrial city of Birmingham. Norman’s great-grandfather and grandfather had both worked in one of the mines. His father had worked in the nearby blast furnace, where he’d been killed in a deadly explosion. Norma’s dearest dream for her bookish and freakishly fat son was for him to somehow obtain a college education that would be the only thing capable of catapulting him into a world more suited to appreciate his special gifts of mind, soul and even body. Not only had he been granted that college degree, he had also been granted unheard-of welcome into the aristocratic world of Mountain Brook and its most distinguished and select private school. It behooved him to be content with that, because there were plenty of people who thought he had no business being in Mountain Brook in the first place, certainly not at dinner parties or the country club. But he constantly pushed for more, more, more. It had ever been his way.
Naturally it took a lot to put the brakes on the world’s largest Puck when he was determined to make mischief, but whenever Norma felt the need to apply those brakes she said, “I’ll be waiting for you in Pratt City when they finish kicking you out of here.” This was a prospect guaranteed to get him to think twice before committing his next act of folly or derring-do. Norma’s vexation with her son’s foolhardy bravado was matched only by her boundless love for his valiant heart and princely soul, which galloped full speed ahead in its ridiculously fat beast of burden, while tilting at every windmill and leaving the world a better place than he found it. She lived in constant dread that he was headed for a fall.