I COULD ONLY HOPE that Troy was telling Bailey he didn’t want to go to our crackpot school. Sometimes you have to come right up to the threshold before you realize you’d rather not cross, and that’s what Troy was feeling now, I said to myself. But then I wondered why he’d be arguing with his father. If anything, Bailey was making one last effort to keep him from Our House. Either way, what could be done about it now? I sat back on the sofa beside Quinn, and when some minutes passed without a sound from the door I began to calm down. If Troy did walk into this room, I’d still have a chance to tell my parents. I could do it today, after school, or take them aside at the lunch break. So what if Troy was obsessed with Brie? It’s not as if he knew about Tino. Sure, it wouldn’t be long before he found out, but if I acted fast and my parents made a decisive move and tossed the lech out on his ear, there was nothing, really, to worry about.
Linc was doing his best to reestablish order. He introduced the Moonies to the Mormon missionaries. “We were talking about communism, but let’s not get into a political debate. This is supposed to be a religion class.”
“Politics and religion are the same,” Tino said.
Linc rubbed his chin where his beard used to be, a habit he’d had since shaving it. “We have separation of church and state. It’s in one of the amendments.”
“The First Amendment,” I put in.
“Right,” Linc went on. “We’re here to talk about marriage, and I’d like to thank Brother Drexel and Brother Sidell, and Thomas and Ketzia, for coming this morning. I’m going to ask each of you to give a brief overview of your church’s marital practices, traditions and ceremonies, and then we can all have a conversation.”
The Mormons were quick to address polygamy, noting straight off that their church had abandoned the practice in 1890. They admitted that their founder, Joseph Smith, had more than thirty wives, and many of the original church leaders, including Brigham Young, had followed the polygamist tradition of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Smith had professed that no man was to take another wife unless the Lord directed it, and contrary to the stereotype, only a handful of Mormons in the early years practiced plural marriage. “Today you’d be excommunicated for it,” Brother Drexel said. “It’s absolutely, positively not tolerated. And that’s a good thing, in our opinion, because one could argue that polygamy is a form of adultery. And adultery is a terrible sin.”
It was not long after this, in the middle of Brother Sidell’s talk about Mormon dating and courtship practices, that the doorbell rang again. I knew who it was and had no choice but to answer it.
Thankfully, Troy was alone; the champagne Cadillac pulled away as I was letting him in. His hair was greasy and his face had broken out. He looked as if he’d had a long night, and I detected the smell of alcohol emanating from his skin. Introducing myself, I reminded him that we’d met at the election party last year. He nodded but seemed not to recall. I caught him up on what was happening in class in a way that I hoped would convey that it was hardly worth his while.
Without a word he walked into the living room. The Mormons were just sitting down and the Moonies taking their place in front of the mantel. I offered Troy my seat on the sofa and took a pillow on the floor nearby.
Thomas and Ketzia were talking now. I had assumed they were a couple, but they said they had yet to go through the Gate of the Blessing Ceremony, and when their time came they would surely not marry each other. “The True Parents decide who we marry. They’re the only ones who know the right match for us, and together with our partners we will create large families devoted to love and peace and a more wonderful world,” Ketzia explained.
“And why do you think Reverend Moon decides who you end up with?” Tino asked rhetorically. “Because he charges each of you suckers a hefty arrangement fee. That’s why he marries you off by the thousand. How do you think he became a multimillionaire? Good deeds?”
A vein swelled in the middle of Thomas’s forehead, and he was about to respond when my father interrupted. “Let’s be civil here. I want to pause a minute anyway to introduce our newest student. Troy Dornan is a junior and he attends Our Lady of Perpetual Help. He’s going to join us part-time and I hope you’ll all welcome him.”
Everyone said, “Hi, Troy,” then my father had us go around the room and give our names. “Don’t worry. You won’t be tested on this,” my father continued. “But I bet you know some of these people already. Maybe you could say something about yourself, like how you came to be interested in Our House.”
Troy had not spoken since he’d walked in the door; he was such a stranger to me that I didn’t even remember the sound of his voice, which was vaguely adenoidal.
“I know Brie,” he said. “And I know something else. She’s fucking that guy.” He pointed at Tino. “And I became interested in your school because I wanted to see for myself what kind of place lets students fuck their teachers.”
I can’t recall exactly what happened next, whether the Moonies and the Mormons just gathered their flowers and books and took off, or which of the kids quit school that day, or the next, or the day after that. I would have liked to see the expressions of everyone in the room, but I was sitting too close to my mother, father and Linc to glimpse their faces, and could only see Cinnamon, who registered little surprise, and a handful of students in profile who had turned their heads, as I did, toward Tino and Brie. In that moment everyone must have been searching their memories for retroactive signs: Brie asking Tino to be her tutor-collaborator, the way she followed him around, laughed at his jokes, nodded her head at his outrageous ideas, the furtive looks between them, the sexual charge that up until now most of the students mistook for an energy in the air, the freedom of knowing that here at Our House, unlike anywhere else they’d known, they could “Act first. Ask permission later.” Those words, on the banner that Cinnamon had designed, rose like an epitaph over Tino’s and Brie’s heads.
I remember Brie getting up and running out the door, and Troy following behind her.
A long silence fell over the group before my mother asked, “Well?”
That’s when Tino stood up, slowly, as if having to rise to his feet were a great inconvenience.
“Well?” My mother repeated, raising her voice.
Tino shook his head and tightened his bandanna, and for the first time since he’d arrived, he had no defense, no offense, nothing to say. He walked out of the room, and when he climbed the stairs to go up to the third floor, the house was so quiet we could hear his footsteps fade.
The next day our numbers dropped by half, and by the end of the week we had fewer than ten—things fell apart that swiftly—and the phone kept ringing.
“You answer it,” my mother insisted.
“Why me?” my father said.
“It’s your school. This was your idea. I’m done with all of this!”
My father went into their bedroom and shut the door, and a half hour later stormed out to find my mother and rehash the conversation, though she didn’t want to hear it. He’d talked to the bishop and the headmaster at St. Sebastian, to Stephanie’s mother and Sister Donovan, who took the OLPH kids back in a single sweep. Bailey’s call, on the Friday of that week, sent my father into such a rage that he knocked all the books off his homemade shelves and left them in a pile on the floor. Walking into their bedroom, my mother tripped over the books and screamed, “You’re such a child. You think a tantrum’s going to get you out of this one?”
“He might take away our house or refuse to give us another lease,” my father said.
I sat at the top of the stairs with Quinn. Lucky Molly was off at school. Cinnamon had shut herself in her room; I’d hardly seen her in days. Two nights before, after my father had threatened to pummel him and drag him to the precinct, Tino had disappeared, just slipped away, and hadn’t been heard from since.
There was the sound of a book being kicked across the floor, then my mother’s voice: “I can’t believe you’re worried about the lease right now. This isn’t our house anymore. It was always a house of cards.”
“What kind of attitude is that? You give up so easily. We can get the students back. Tino’s off the faculty. If he tries to return, Mazzocca will bring him in on trespassing charges. I can call up the parents today.”
“It doesn’t matter, Pete. No one’s going to let their kids back here.”
“We still have some students. We can keep going.”
“No we can’t. You’re worrying about a lease and a school that are doomed, that don’t exist anymore,” my mother said. “You want a real concern? We could be talking about statutory rape. Brie is sixteen, and if her parents press charges, Tino won’t be the only one in trouble. They could sue us, too.”
“They’re not going to press charges. Stephanie’s mother told me so. The relationship was consensual. That’s why Brie’s not letting her parents pursue this any further.”
“What happened was illegal and incredibly wrong. I don’t care how you look at it,” my mother said. “There was exploitation.”
“There’s no such thing. Tino took advantage.”
My father paused for a moment. “That brings me to the major point—what did we do wrong?”
“Tell me you didn’t just ask that question. You take no responsibility?”
“They hid it well. I had no idea.”
“You should have. We all should have been paying better attention. You’ve known that Tino was capable of this. You should have kept an eye on him.”
“I should have been watching him? What about you? That bastard would never have come here if you hadn’t invited your brother.”
“Either way, Brie’s parents could sue us for failing to protect their child. You think we have money problems now? Imagine the legal fees.”
“They’re not going to sue,” my father insisted.
“Why haven’t they called? They’re pretty much the only ones. I bet they’re consulting lawyers.”
“You’re being rash and paranoid. Just give it a couple weeks. You watch, the storm will blow over.”
“And you’re being delusional. The school is finished,” my mother said. “I don’t want this anymore.”
Their argument would haunt me for a long time. I’d known for months about the affair and had meant to say something. Even after it was exposed I planned to come clean. Who knows if speaking up would have made a difference? As my mother said, we were living in a house of cards. Still, I’d been afraid to tell my parents, and that fear had become a burden. Or perhaps a part of me was still angry enough with my father for setting me up and knocking me down that I’d wanted to pay him back, and did so with my silence. I’d never heard of statutory rape, and the shock of those words brought home for me the seriousness of the transgression, and my own culpability. It didn’t matter that Brie was a flirt and had gone after Tino. One of our teachers had crossed a line. I’d known this and kept it to myself. It was one of the few secrets that I would keep to this day.
Toward the end of the weekend, my father called a meeting of the Fellowship of Chester, only without the cat, the fellowship or the veil of secrecy. He corralled me in the parlor and didn’t seem to care if others could overhear us. He said he wanted me to take over the class on Monday. “No more Moonies and Mormons. No more mumbo jumbo. We need to get serious and move on to history. Can you work something up about the presidents?”
“But I’m just a kid.”
“Science and technology was a hit. Kids get into it more when their peers run the show.”
“I don’t know, Dad.” I was quickly losing faith in democratic education, and found myself longing for the old structures.
“Oh, come on. We’re in D.C. The city’s a virtual amusement park of American history. We’ve got to pull out all the stops, make it fun. I asked Molly to see if Amy Carter can get us a tour of the White House.”
“What did she say?” This perked me up, however briefly.
“She’s looking for a bargaining chip. She wants that damned tree house.”
“But Tino’s gone. It’s never going to happen.”
“Your sister has managed to stay out of most of this, and I want to keep it that way.” My father looked older by the light of the window, as if gray hairs had sprouted overnight. “Let me handle this. You put your mind to that history class.”
I watched my mother move around the house, quietly now, in a kind of trance. She put away dishes, books and knickknacks, wiped down shelves and countertops, made notes to herself, as if taking an inventory. Though I wanted to think she was bringing order back to the place, I knew it was just as likely she was making a new plan.
All I could do was wait and see and follow my father’s wishes. I’d begun reading about Herbert Hoover, and with only a day to prepare I figured I should go with my latest research. The following year would mark the fiftieth anniversary of Hoover’s election, so he seemed a decent subject for my first time running the class. But as I filled out note cards for the talk, my mood darkened. Hoover had been in office just seven months before the stock market crash and the onset of the Great Depression, and he was one of the least popular presidents of all time, joining a shortlist that included his eighth cousin once removed: Richard Nixon. The 1929 crash was not Hoover’s fault any more than the looming economic crisis was Jimmy Carter’s. But people needed someone to blame, and rumors had swirled among the hungry and unemployed that Hoover was so callous that dogs whimpered at the sight of him and roses wilted at his touch. One woman summed up the country’s exasperation in 1932: “People were starving because of Herbert Hoover. Men were killing themselves because of Herbert Hoover, and their fatherless children were being packed away to orphanages ... because of Herbert Hoover.”
When I told Molly that it was my turn to teach, she put her newest LP on the turntable: Annie, the Depression-era musical that was the current Broadway smash. I planned to play one of the tracks in class to liven things up: “We’d like to thank you, Herbert Hoover...”
But on Monday morning only four students came to school: Quinn, Senedu and two recent recruits from the baseball team. Too humiliated to hold a regular class, my father told us to hop in the ailing van, and we drove to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where I’d never been but always wanted to go.
At first we took in the permanent exhibits as a group, but when the baseball kids began to linger too long at the sports memorabilia, my father gave up trying to keep us together and told everyone to meet at the Foucault pendulum, in the main transept, at noon.
***
I wandered around with Quinn, passing objects like Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk, George Washington’s waistcoat and breeches, Warren G. Harding’s monogrammed silk pajamas, the top hat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre the night of his assassination and the coffee cup that had held William McKinley’s last drink. I stopped to cast my eyes over the exhibits, but I wasn’t transported back in time the way I’d thought I would be, this close to touching the past.
Quinn, too, had an abject look about him. I saw him walk right by the collection of Edison’s electric lightbulbs and settle at the Foucault pendulum a good hour early. I joined him at the railing under the huge flag that had flown over Fort McHenry and inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” We didn’t mention the flag or say a word, just watched the heavy brass bob swing forward and back with the rotation of the earth. We stood there long enough for several tourists to tire of the pendulum and move on.
“So what are you going to do?” Quinn’s voice echoed off the ceiling collars.
“Looks bad” was all I could say.
He gripped the railing with his slender hands. “I’m thinking of going back to Cardozo. It’s still early in the year. I can catch up with the work. If I want to do something in this world, I have to go to school.”
“I understand.”
“I’d rather stay, believe me. But I’ve been through this before, and last time I stayed it didn’t go so well.”
“What do you mean?”
“I really appreciated what you told me the other night, Daniel, and I wish we could have stopped everything from going up in flames. I bet I’m the only one you’ve talked to, aren’t I?”
“It’s true,” I said.
“Well—” Quinn cast his eyes downward and followed the lazy swing of the bob. “A year ago or whenever it was—has it only been that long?—I told you about my friend Anthony taking your flags and TV and then moving to Cleveland. I gave his whole story, from his mom falling off that bridge to all the families he stayed with over the years, and how the road always led back to Horizon Foster Home. I didn’t tell you that the first thing he always did when he moved in with a new family was to find the nearest library and spend all his time there, because books were more like home to him than any house he knew. And remember how I told you that when the Kurtzmans came along all that changed?”
“Well, it’s a true story except for one thing. There is no Anthony. He doesn’t exist.”
“What do you mean?” At that moment I felt a shiver of recognition, almost like a double take, as if I’d seen someone I recognized passing on the street.
“You know what I mean.” He was still watching the pendulum.
“You’re Anthony?” I asked.
“I hope you’re not mad,” he said in a quiet voice. “I didn’t like the way we were tossed out of that house, and I guess I blamed your family. But when I got to know you all and saw you were okay, I didn’t want you to think I was some kind of criminal.”
“So you don’t live with your parents down the street? You made all that up?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Where do you live?”
“The foster home down on Fourteenth, but I try to avoid the place.”
“And what happened to your parents?”
“I told you about my mom. What I didn’t say is that she was probably crazy. They have a name for it now, and I hope it doesn’t catch up with me. She said my father could be anywhere or nowhere, and claimed to know only three things about him: he was light-skinned, he was from New York City, and his first name was Anthony. Sometimes I borrow his name, try it on for size. I figure he owes me that much.”
I took a moment to gather my breath, then asked Quinn if he’d ever tried to look his father up. He rubbed his mustache, which hadn’t thickened in the year that I’d known him, and I reminded myself that he was still a kid, not much older than me. He explained that every time he came back from a fostering arrangement that hadn’t worked out, his caseworker would post a notice among the scores of similar pleas on the Family Court bulletin board at D.C. Superior Court. He saved the first of these, which read: Unknown Father: You have an 8-year-old son. His mother, who passed on March 12,1970, said your name was Anthony. You have light skin and you are from New York City. Please contact Horizon Foster Home, 1702 14th Street NW.
“I don’t have a sister,” Quinn said. “I thought of Becca and Rachel Kurtzman as sisters. And maybe somewhere out there I have a half sister or something. But now it’s just me.”
“I had no idea.”
“I’ll be fine. In a few years I’ll call you up to invite you on the maiden voyage of my zeppelin. We’ll sip champagne over the Serengeti and follow the migratory herds. Don’t worry about me.”
“You can still stay at the house, you know, even if you go back to Cardozo. We’ve got the extra room.”
“That’s nice of you, Daniel. But I went all the way to Cleveland once, only to turn around and come back here. I can’t follow you all wherever you’re going.”
“But we’re not going anywhere—”
Quinn gave me a knowing look and said nothing more.
Below us the pendulum swung forward and back, like a slow-motion wrecking ball.
Quinn didn’t leave right away. He waited until the end of the week, after the baseball kids had failed to show on Tuesday and Senedu had appeared with his mother on Wednesday, asking if everyone was playing a trick on him. My mother explained that it wasn’t a trick; there had been a problem with the school and she was incredibly sorry but he would have to find some other place to go.
“You can still help me with my English?” Senedu asked.
“I can’t,” my mother said. “It’s going to be impossible.” She hugged him quickly and wiped her eyes.
Quinn reassured Senedu’s mother and offered to walk him over to Cardozo and sign him up the following week. He even agreed to tutor him after school. “Where do you live?” he asked.
“Above the Blue Nile on Eighteenth Street,” Senedu said.
“I’ll pick you up on Monday.”
On the same afternoon that Senedu and his mother had showed up to an empty school, Molly returned with the happy news that she’d gotten us a group tour at the White House.
“So you’ve made friends with Amy Carter?” I asked.
“I’d like to,” she said. “But those girls just surround her. I had to get the tickets from a Secret Service man.”
“Do you think the president will be there? Can we have our picture taken in the Oval Office?”
Molly played it cool. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Thrilled that I’d finally have a chance to step inside the White House, where every president since John Adams had lived, our travails momentarily slipped my mind; I wanted to tell someone right away, and my first impulse was to call Cleo. I ran upstairs and dialed her number—Factotum Frank answered—and I was waiting for her to come to the phone when I found myself sitting on my parents’ mattress, looking at the graffiti Quinn had painted on the wall, and recognizing for the first time that the flame-like letters spelled Anthony. And that’s when it hit me that Quinn really was going to leave, that the students had decamped already and weren’t coming back, that when my mother said she couldn’t tutor Senedu anymore, she meant she didn’t know where we’d be in a month, a week, tomorrow. Brie’s parents could call anytime to press charges, and Tino had vanished, leaving the rest of us to answer for his crimes. ,
I was going to invite Cleo to the White House, but now I didn’t want to talk to her at all, didn’t want to face the humiliation of what had happened to Our House, all in less than a couple weeks. She had warned me months ago, then warned me again: If you’d just told your parents, they could have done something. You have to talk to them, Daniel. But I hadn’t listened, and the house of cards had fallen, and here I was waiting for Cleo to come to the phone. Why? So she could say I told you so?
I hung up but remained on my parents’ bed.
A minute later the phone rang.
I thought about answering it. No doubt Frank had told Cleo it had been me on the line. I could pick up and say, Sorry, our phone’s been acting up, ask her to meet me at Pierce Park in order to buy myself time to think. I’d called her too hastily. I needed to gather my thoughts. The phone was ringing a second time when I noticed, next to my mother’s tilting wardrobe box, several more boxes, which she must have dragged out of the closet in her frenzy of organization. Next to the boxes was a roll of packing tape.
I picked up the phone but said nothing.
Cleo said, “Hello.”
And then I gently put the phone back in the cradle.
My father, alone, hadn’t given up. Linc and Cinnamon, who’d endured the long, slow failure of the commune and did not seem eager to hang around only to watch history repeat itself, had already sent out letters to friends, looking for leads. My father called them quitters, and with near fanaticism turned his attention to new recruits. He opened the yellow pages on the kitchen counter and went down the list of schools, cold-calling administrators one by one. He left messages on dozens of answering machines, and my mother called him a fool. “Before long, every headmaster in the city is going to know what happened,” she said. “Even if you do round up a few strays, Bailey’s going to shut you out of this house.”
“He’s more reasonable than you think, Val.”
But on Monday Bailey called in a most unreasonable humor and told my father that he’d known about the scandal for weeks but didn’t want to get involved. “I’m just the landlord,” he’d said. Recently, however, Brie’s parents had started to bother him at work. They claimed that Troy was harassing their daughter, calling her three or four times a day and lurking outside their Georgetown home. On the night that Troy discovered Tino and Brie’s affair he had secretly followed her from her house to the Georgetown University library, where she told her parents she went to do homework, then from the library to her trysting place.
The rumor about Tino’s dragging a mattress under a bridge turned out to be untrue. In fact, he’d befriended a National Park Service employee who, perhaps in exchange for drugs, gave him a key to a historic building, the Old Stone House, so he could use it after hours. Bailey reported that Brie was still not willing to press charges, which had made her parents turn their frustrations on Troy. “It’s not my kid who’s been banging some teenybopper. It’s your faculty, Pete. What are you going to do about it?” My father promised that Tino would never return, and asked Bailey if he could meet him for lunch to talk about the future; Bailey disdainfully agreed.
My mother asked when this meeting would take place, and my father said on Wednesday afternoon, which was the time we were scheduled to visit the White House. “You can go on without me,” he suggested.
“I guess you don’t care about Molly.” My mother crunched down hard on a Tic Tac.
“It’s not that I don’t care. We’re talking about our survival. Wednesday was Bailey’s only free day this week. I’m going to flatter him like there’s no tomorrow and see if he’ll write us up a new lease.”
“I don’t want a new lease.”
“We’ve come all this way, Val.”
My mother had no reply, and on Wednesday morning I put on my best clothes—a striped oxford shirt, chinos and loafers, vestiges of my Lake Bluff Academy wardrobe—and hopped in the van with my mother, Linc, Cinnamon and Molly.
But when we arrived at the southeast gate of the White House, a sign was posted: NO TOURS TODAY.
Molly was already crying by the time my mother got to the security guard to ask what the hell was wrong.
“Important press conference,” the guard said.
My mother shook the tickets. “But we have a special appointment. My daughter is a classmate of Amy Carter’s.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. No tours. You’ll have to call to reschedule.”
When my mother badgered him, the guard did not say what the press conference was about, but we could see a flurry of activity—the bustle of journalists and cameramen—beyond the gate. And later that night we’d hear that President Carter’s embattled budget director, Bert Lance, had resigned.
Back at the house, my mother told Molly and me to pack our bags. “We’re leaving,” she said.
“Where are we going?” I asked, still reeling with disappointment.
She ignored me and stormed upstairs.
“But I have school tomorrow,” Molly whined. “I’m already in trouble for missing today.”
After our mother had gone up to her room to pack more boxes, I assured Molly that this would only be another trip down Livid Lane. “We’ll go to the Potomac River and watch the sludge drift by, and when Mom calms down we’ll drive home and everything will be back to normal.”
I packed a box of books and my biographies and filled my suitcase with clothes. So sure that my mother was bluffing, I left my portraits of the presidents on the walls. Molly and I hugged Linc and Cinnamon goodbye, but they didn’t look as certain as I was that we’d see them in an hour or two. Then I helped my mother load her wardrobe box and the carriers with the meowing cats into the van.
I told myself this was all for show, unwilling to admit how much I shared my father’s stubborn optimism. Before my mother pulled away and headed up 16th, I took one quick look—at Linc and Cinnamon waving on the porch, at my tower and Quinn’s Our House blimp still high on its tether above the trees—refusing to believe that I wouldn’t see this place again.