Aloft, Washington–Tel Aviv
August 17, 1973
Maybe it’s the hour or the altitude. The plane is black dark, I’m writing by a cone of light from the overhead hole, and the bouncing is making these lines straggle and wander like my thoughts. I should quit and try to sleep, but I’m wide awake. So okay, let me get a slug of booze from that fetching little El Al stewardess with the flirty dark eyes, and I’ll try to close out Townsend Harris with Mama’s audacious art plates coup. If not for her, I might never have graduated from Harris; certainly my transcript would have been a crippling disaster. The Green Cousin rescued me, brick in hand, so to speak, and she is entitled to this credit item after the hard time I’ve been giving her, and considering the shape she is in at the moment.
I still suspect Mom will bury all the doctors now waiting on her, and Lee and me, too, but at the moment she is hospitalized in Jerusalem, and I’ve been summoned to her bedside. She took it into her head to visit Zaideh’s grave on the Ninth of Av. That’s an old custom, praying at one’s parents’ graves on this day which commemorates the fall of the two temples, but one isn’t expected to fly six thousand miles to do it, not at her age. That was strictly my mother’s idea. That she can’t see, hear, or walk worth a damn, and keeps coming up with mortal symptoms, is for the doctors to worry about. She just bashes on.
Of course I’m concerned as hell.
***
Well, about the art plates. I’ve mentioned the lunatic importance of art at Townsend Harris. All students, semester after semester, had to turn in designs or pictures called “plates.” There’s no way I can tell you why a student’s career hung on his ability to draw and color pictures. Art was called a “diagonal” subject, like Latin and English. I can’t account for that label, either, but if you failed a “diagonal,” you couldn’t graduate.
Now, I never could draw or color for sour apples. I still can’t. After the Arista fiasco, I stopped caring about Townsend Harris, and as for the art plates, I just didn’t do them. I had to turn in eight plates in my senior year; and as I fell behind in art, doodling while the rest of the students daubed out still lifes, posters, landscapes, and whatnot, the teacher, a cold-eyed blond prig named Langsam, warned me that I was heading for my doom. Nobody could fail art and escape a ghastly fate, said Mr. Langsam. A few days before final exams I awoke to this predicament, and sat up nights at home doing desperate things with crayons and watercolors. Maybe Mr. Langsam would even have liked what I concocted. I never knew what pleased that ice-blooded fusspot, and my stuff did have a Picasso grotesqueness about it. But there’s no saying, because on the last day they were due I absentmindedly left those eight plates on a trolley-car seat.
When I realized this I got excused from school, took a cab to the car barns, and raised a hullabaloo, but the plates were gone. I told my sad story to Mr. Langsam, shedding genuine tears, and he listened, glacier-faced, and flunked me. He really couldn’t have done anything else, but there was no compassion in the man. We were alone in his office, and he took out his marking book with an arctic smile. “Well, Mr. Goodkind,” he said, “this is some kind of record, anyway. Your final semester mark in Art Diagonal A-Four is exactly zero.” His pen swooped in a round flourish. “There we are. Zero. I regret that you cannot graduate. You may go, Mr. Goodkind.”
He never dreamed, of course, that that wasn’t the end of it; but then, he had never dreamed of a person like my mother. Next morning there she stood with me in Mr. Langsam’s office. The night before, preparing my parents for the shock of my first school failure since kindergarten, I had warned them that with this black mark on my record I could scarcely hope to get into Columbia or any other good college.
“We’ll see about that,” said Mama. “I’ll go and talk to him. You made the plates, didn’t you? Why, I saw them myself. They were beautiful. I never heard of such injustice. What’s this man’s name again?” She wrinkled her nose at me.
“Langsam,” I said.
“An anti-Semite,” Mama said, stabbing a stiff forefinger in the air.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Mama,” said Lee. We were all at the supper table. “What are you talking about? How could the teacher pass him? Without even seeing the plates?”
“Is that David’s fault? Somebody stole them on the streetcar.”
Gray-faced and weary, Papa said to Mom, “Maybe he can draw more pictures. Or maybe they’ll let him go to summer school and make it up.”
“Why should he? I’ll talk to that man tomorrow,” said Mama. “That Mr. Langsam.”
And so there she was, bright and early, confronting him. I must say that, in this context, Mr. Langsam did look extremely gentile, though the notion had not struck me before. He was also a thoroughly thunderstruck gentile. He had a lot of trouble taking in Mom’s purpose, which was to get him to pass me in Art Diagonal A-4. “Mrs. Goodkind,” he said in a cautious quiet way, as though soothing a madwoman with an ax, “your son didn’t do the work, so how can I pass him?”
“He did do the work. All of it. He did eight beautiful pictures—what do you call them?”
“Plates,” said Mr. Langsam.
“Plates, yes. Plates. Eight fine plates. One of flowers, one of a wonderful red horse, and the Empire State Building, and—”
“He did not submit any such plates in class, madam. He sat at his desk for five months, doing nothing.”
“So he did them at home. That was allowed, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but I didn’t see the plates.”
“Mr. Langsam, would I lie to you? He did them, and they were fine, take my word for it.”
“Madam, how am I supposed to mark eight plates I never saw?” Mr. Langsam ran both hands through his thick blond hair, staring at Mom with appalled watery eyes.
“Am I asking you to give him A-plus? I’m asking you not to wreck a boy’s whole career, just because some thief stole his briefcase. My son has never failed any subject in his life. Not once.”
Mr. Langsam at last said she’d have to talk to Mr. Hutchison. If Mr. Hutchison wanted to take the responsibility of passing me, that was all right with Mr. Langsam.
Hutchison, head of the art department, was the toughest marker in the school. Mom didn’t know that. She marched me straight across the hall into his office, and went through the whole thing again. Mr. Hutchison, a dour long-jawed man, sat shuffling art plates, chewing on a cold pipe, and shooting me disbelieving looks from under shaggy iron-gray eyebrows.
“Madam, Mr. Langsam is absolutely right. I can’t possibly order him to pass your son,” he growled when she finished. “I never heard of such a thing. He didn’t submit the work, and that’s that.”
“Then who do I talk to?” Mom inquired.
Hutchison’s jaw sagged open, showing big yellow teeth. He stuffed his pipe with tobacco, staring at Mom as though she had horns or tusks.
“Well, it won’t do you the slightest good,” he said, “but you can take it up with Mr. Ballard, if you want to.”
So down we went to the school’s main office, though I well knew we had come to the end of the line, and that it was hopeless. It’s hard to say just what Mr. Ballard’s position was. He wasn’t the director of the school. That was Dr. J. Hampton Hale, a remote presence in an inner office never profaned by student feet. Dr. Hale’s name appeared on school proclamations and on diplomas, but he showed up only at rare assemblies, in the form of a little gray pharaoh-visaged man who did not speak. Mr. Ballard did the speaking at assemblies.
Mr. Ballard was a mountainous fellow with great shoulders and bulging eyes. The students in the school believed that Mr. Ballard regularly copulated with the two school secretaries, Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby, and also with the librarian, Miss Jamison; and not because he was irresistible—on the contrary, he was a repulsive blubbery hulk, any way you looked at him—but simply because they were frightened of him and had to submit to his horrible advances. Mr. Ballard was the man who sentenced you to the jug, and sneered away your excuses for tardiness or other crimes, and summoned parents to discuss your failings, and, in short, gave the final decisions in all school matters. There was no appeal from Mr. Ballard, and he was a steel wall of total contemptuous negativism. He had heard every possible sob story and alibi a student could produce in every conceivable tight spot, and his invariable replies were two: “No,” or “Jug.”
Well, he couldn’t jug Mama, but he could say “No,” and he did, loud and flat, popping his eyes at her in the terrifying way which dried up students’ excuses and tears, and undoubtedly caused Miss Reichman, Miss Jacoby, and Miss Jamison to yield their poor bodies to him.
But this time he was dealing with Sarah Gitta Goodkind, the big yoxenta, an entirely different breed of female. Mama faced him, waited until his eyes sank back into their sockets, and then asked, “Are you the head of this school?”
The eyes popped out again in amazement, and I believe Mr. Ballard answered before he thought. “No. That’s Dr. Hale.”
“All right,” said Mama, “I’ll talk to Dr. Hale. Where do I find him?”
“No! You can’t talk to Dr. Hale.”
“Why can’t I? My son is a student in his school, isn’t he?”
Mr. Ballard forced out his eyes to their farthest bulge, like a batrachian’s, and he powerfully croaked, “Dr. Hale is a very very busy man, and nobody sees Dr. Hale unless—”
“Is that Dr. Hale’s office?” Mama interrupted, pointed at a polished wooden door with a highly visible sign on it:
DR. J. HAMPTON HALE
DIRECTOR
For once in a long career, Mr. Ballard could not reply either “No” or “Jug,” so he mutely nodded, and Mama made for that inner office. For such a huge and heavy man, Ballard moved with surprising quickness to block her, and in an instant there they stood toe to toe at Dr. Hale’s door.
It must be clear to all readers of this narrative that my mother by and large has been, down the years, something of a trial to me. My feelings about her are mixed. But as that picture rises in my mind’s eye—Mama, red-cheeked, middle-sized, buxomly pretty, her bright eyes blazing up at that King Kong of a No-sayer; and Mr. Ballard looking down at her with shaken wariness, his eyes shifting at his harem slaves, Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby, who were taking in with fascination this brave challenge to their insatiable sultan—I have to tell you that I admired her, that I saw she was a mother of the old school, a mother like a mother bear or tigress, a mother with enough fight in her to face down half a dozen Mr. Ballards in order to see a Dr. Hale. What did it matter that she was in the wrong, preposterously in the wrong, that her nerve was incredible, trying to get me a passing mark in Art Diagonal A-4 when I hadn’t turned in any art plates? She was magnificent. She was MAMA.
And Ballard—Ballard gave way before Mama! With an indistinct mutter like, “I’ll have to talk to him first,” he disappeared inside the door. A long wait ensued. Mama stood there at the closed door, I stood beside her, and Miss Reichman and Miss Jacoby pretended to busy themselves with paperwork, while they kept glancing at each other, at Mama, and at the door, clearly thrilled to the bone by this high moment in their sexually harassed lives.
The door opened.
“The answer is NO,” thundered Ballard, appearing in the opening. Under the arm that held the door, I could see Dr. Hale at his desk, head down, writing. “Your son has FAILED in art, madam. That is Dr. Hale’s decision, and it is final.”
Ballard’s mistake was holding the door ajar instead of shutting it behind him. He did not yet realize that he was dealing with a woman who at fifteen had beaten up a stepmother twice her size, who had once taken on a big watchman with a brick, and who, where her jewel was concerned, did not know manners or fear. Mama ducked under his arm, dragging me along. “Just let me explain something to Dr. Hale,” she said, and there we were inside the holy of holies of Townsend Harris Hall. Too late Ballard groaned, “No, madam, you can’t go in there. No!”
The gray head at the desk lifted. The pharaoh visage stared lifelessly and wordlessly at Mama, and then at Ballard. Mama plunged straight into the story of the lost plates. Dr. Hale listened without changing either his expression or his position: an arm on his desk, a pen in his hand, a school director in sandstone. At these close quarters this immobile figure frightened me more than Ballard did. He was Ozymandias, King of Kings. I looked on him and despaired.
Not Mama. With the most cheerful rectitude in the world, she appealed to him to pass me. As she summed it up, the choice was simple: mar an unblemished record, wreck a brilliant career, destroy a possible future President’s life, or pass I. David Goodkind in Art Diagonal A-4.
Dr. Hale’s visage turned slowly to Mr. Ballard, who stood beside the desk in ill-contained fury. “Well, the circumstances are unusual,” he said in a weak, mild, high little voice. “If the boy has never failed anything, it would be a shame to let a mishap mar a perfect record, wouldn’t it? Let us give him a D minus in Art Diagonal A-Four.”
Mr. Ballard’s eyes popped out bloodily. It was awful to behold. He was struck speechless, but Mama wasn’t. She at once interjected, “Is that a passing mark, Dr. Hale?”
“Well, it isn’t failure,” said the director in that same meek small voice, “but it’s nothing to be proud of.”
“You’re a great man,” said Mama, and we left.
So it was that, besides passing Art Diagonal A-4, I learned the dread secret of Townsend Harris Hall. Dr. Hale was not Ozymandias, King of Kings. He was Oz, the great and terrible, actually a softhearted fraud; and that was why he had that bug-eyed raper of secretaries and librarians in his outer office.
***
And so it is that I sit here in an El Al airplane en route to the Holy Land, more than a little swozzled by the three scotches I have downed while scrawling out that scene. The little stewardess with the black eyes either has taken a shine to me, which I find hard to believe, or else she has nothing else to do but spring at me with a fresh drink as soon as I empty my glass.
Who can say how my life would have changed, had I failed that diagonal? I would have spent an extra semester at that school, might never have gotten into Columbia College, let alone the law school; never met Mark Herz, never joined Tau Alpha Epsilon, never worked for Goldhandler, or lived in April House, or met Bobbie Webb. It all turned on Mama’s great moment at Townsend Harris, which happened exactly as I’ve described it; except of course that I don’t know that Mr. Ballard really had his will of those three meager females. Anyway, they are surely gone, all four of them, their rumored orgies over, their dust buried who can say where, their very names forgotten, except in this tale. I’m glad I wrote out the story in drunken haste. I owe it to Mama; swift recovery and long life to her! She has the virtues of her faults, or she could never have overborne Langsam, Hutchison, and Ballard to get at the wonderful wizard of Oz.
Now for some sleep before we land in Israel and I find out how she is. The airplane windows are growing light. Sandra’s eyes just fluttered, and she muttered in her sleep and turned on her side. That’s right, Sandra. She showed up yesterday morning in dirty jeans, carrying a duffel bag—she’d been attending a summer writing workshop in Idaho—and said she heard I was going to Israel and she wanted to come along. No explanation, and here she is.
Maybe before this short trip is over I’ll find out what Sandra is up to, and then again maybe I won’t. Sandra plays a devious and dirty game with me, which you might call “Sweat Blood, You Old Bastard.” We have an exceedingly tangled relationship, and I love her too much to write another word about it. I suspect she loves me. Consult your local psychoanalyst on why some daughters enjoy breaking their fathers on the wheel. Oddly, reclining there in the next seat in the dawn, Sandra reminds me a lot of The Green Cousin.