OUT RUNNING ERRANDS on Broadway one steamy morning, I ran into Toby Glickstein, an old classmate from the Cochrane School.
“Missed you at the reunion,” he said, shaking my hand.
Cochrane was the all-boys school on West Seventy-eighth Street, with a reputation for top-notch teaching and a student body made up of the city’s smartest young Jewish princes in jackets and ties. Toby and I had been on the debate team together, as well as delegates in Model UN (Malta for me, Pakistan for him). Cool we’d never been, in truth—princes, neither. But academically we had thrived.
Still, that was ten years ago; I hadn’t seen him since. Physically he’d changed little: short, with small feet and hands, close-cropped wiry hair, and freckles. An enthusiast and a thinker. A tendency to squint gave him the myopic air of an entomologist or a stamp collector.
We exchanged news about ourselves in the usual shorthand. I told him about getting my doctorate and my desire to teach, self-consciously making it sound as though I was currently weighing offers from several unnamed colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Then I asked him what he was doing with his life. Toby, it turned out, hadn’t strayed far: he was the Cochrane School’s deputy admissions director. Mrs. Hogan, the longtime director, was due to retire next year, he told me, and he thought his chances of succeeding her were good.
Once, caught in a stupid seventh-grade dare, I’d managed to slip a thumbtack onto a chair on which the dreaded Mrs. Hogan was just lowering herself. My friends and I waited breathlessly for her cry of outrage, but to our disappointment and amazement there appeared no sign—not so much as a twitch of her thin lips—that the woman had experienced anything at all. Later, however, seeking me out in the crowded hallway between classes, she demanded that I shake her hand like a gentleman. When I warily obliged, she gripped me hard. To my shock I felt the sharp point of the tack puncture the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger. “That will teach you!” she hissed in my ear, a terrifying smile never leaving her lightly whiskered face.
“Speaking of retiring,” Toby said, “did you hear we lost Maddox? He turned sixty a few months ago and announced he’d had it. Moved to Florida as soon as classes were over.”
This was news. Bill Maddox had been a legendary teacher at Cochrane for some thirty years. Taking his class on the American legislative process my junior year had been my first step toward a notion of what I might want to do with my life one day. The term had culminated in a trip to Washington, where Maddox, with his Georgian roots, proved to be incredibly well connected. His hands chopping the air, his good-ol’-boy drawl ringing through the corridors of the Capitol, he not only relished the chance to introduce us to the real-life figures who worked the levers of power but filled us with a reverberating echo of his own passion for the give-and-take of politics, the byzantine machinations and garrulous obfuscations of our great democratic experiment.
“Maddox was the best teacher I ever had,” I told Toby. “Who could replace him?”
“Somebody good,” Toby said. “I’m on the search committee and the pressure’s heating up.” He plucked a business card from his shirt pocket and gave it to me. “Keep in touch, Julian. And any ideas, let me know.”
After he walked off, I stood looking at the card. It was beige, crimped in the center, still faintly humid from having spent the morning in his shirt pocket. Tobias Glickstein, it said. Cochrane School. There was a phone number.
I turned up the avenue toward home.
Recalling Maddox and his gift for teaching had brought back to me some vestigial memory of learning—a time of relative innocence when a fifteen-by-twenty-foot windowless room with a dozen desk chairs and a few pieces of chalk had seemed world enough for the full measure of my curiosity. A time when I believed I could learn everything that could be taught under the sun. Maddox, of course, knew better than this. He was not a mere politician, trying to snooker us with empty promises. Nor was he some ego-ridden Harvard biggie like Davis, who dealt only in the certainties of his own accomplishments. I remembered him as the rarest of birds: a teller of essential stories, a backroom bard in love with our wide eyes and our listening. His medium was democracy’s sediment, the greasy workings, the engine under the hood and the unseen hands that had put it there. Over the years he’d fashioned this humble material into a glorious gospel, and like all true apostles he would not be ignored. His hands flapped, his lips smacked, his teeth flashed. He was tall and somewhat pear-shaped; he loved to bellow. Lightning-quick, he’d have you singled out, a thick digit (usually the middle one) jabbing at you from across the room: “Mr. Rose! Tell me a story about the longest filibuster in the history of the goddamn universe…. Mr. Glickstein! Talk to me about how LBJ mustered the count for the Voting Rights Act. If I’m not mistaken, it all began in the men’s washroom….”
Once, thrashing his arms as he acted out a paranoid rant that Nixon was said to have directed at an aide, Maddox accidentally gave a boy named Chuckie Klein a blow to the face. Blood came gushing out of Chuckie’s nose. For a moment teacher and student appeared stunned, staring slack-jawed at the ruby stream puddling on the floor. Then Maddox coolly reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, none too clean, and, tossing it to Chuckie, resumed his lecture: “So there it is, gentlemen. Let no ignoramus ever try to tell you that politics isn’t a battlefield.”
When less than an hour later Toby received my call requesting an interview for Maddox’s vacated teaching position, he said, “The thought occurred me, Julian, but you sounded as though you had lots of big-time offers out there. You sure you want to go for this? I mean, Cochrane’s an excellent school …”
“I’m sure.”
Next morning the interview process began. It lasted a week and all through it I held on to the outlandish fantasy that Maddox, out barbecuing behind his condo in Boca Raton, would somehow catch wind of my candidacy and feel inspired to fly back to New York to interrogate me himself. What a time we’d have! The gleam in the eye, the stories traded: “So, Mr. Rose, Harvard not good enough for you? The young pup returns triumphant, just as the old coonhound heads out to pasture?”
But Maddox never did materialize. Instead, for my troubles I found myself trapped in a small room with Mrs. Hogan.
The years had not been kind to her. She had shrunk visibly and her whiskers had multiplied, though her voice was the same steel trap it ever was.
“What a surprise, Julian, to hear from Tobias about your sudden interest in coming back to teach.”
She hadn’t forgotten about the tack incident, that much was clear.
In her office I noticed a ficus plant, several volumes of the National Directory of Secondary Schools, and framed photos of her husband, her two red-faced daughters, her Siamese cat. “Mrs. Hogan is a person too,” I kept repeating to myself like a mantra, as the interview wore on and on.
And seated in one corner of my mind, dressed in the garish checks and plaids that were his uniform of choice, Maddox softly drawled, “Well, son, you’re up to your neck in it now.” While in the opposite corner of my mind—the mind that seemed to be in the process of losing itself—simultaneously Davis appeared, dressed in one of his dark power suits, with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, and he too was talking to me, and though I tried to block out his voice, the words sneaked through anyway: “If you won’t ask her for yourself, then at least do it for the party. Because I’ll tell you, nothing makes the old boys happier than a pretty face….”
In the end I got the job. I found a place to live too, and on the first of September my father and I rented a U-Haul and moved my things to a tiny studio apartment on West Ninety-seventh.
His housewarming gift was the corduroy sleeper sofa, along with other furniture odds and ends from his storage bin in the basement. With the help of the super of my new building we got everything through the door and into the middle of the apartment.
The room was stifling; we were both drenched in sweat. At my suggestion we went around the corner to a bar on Amsterdam I knew, and sat in its stained shadows, drinking cold bottles of Tecate. A cool enough place to rest. Through the tinted front window we could see out to the street: a fire hydrant had been opened illegally and three giddy dark-eyed children were darting in and out of the gushing flood. Then a bus drove by, lofting a sheet of dirty water toward the sidewalk, and the kids scattered, laughing and cursing in Spanish.
Inside the bar, my father raised his bottle and tapped it against mine.
“To your new life, Julian.”
I tried to smile. “So that’s what this is?”
I could not remember ever being in a bar with him, sitting here like this in the middle of the day. After our exertions he looked depleted, wan, and I worried that helping me move in the heat had been too much for him. He wasn’t a young man. A sudden image of him having a heart attack flashed before my eyes—he would be pale just like this—and then, in the cavelike surrender of the bar, I felt a nugget of helpless love for him break free of its hidden moorings and rise to the surface of my consciousness.
“I ever tell you about your mother’s and my first apartment?” he said.
“No.” He had told me once or twice, but for some reason, now, I wanted to hear him tell the story again.
“Across town, Eighty-ninth and Second,” he said. “Well, it was major for us—our first apartment, and on the Upper East Side, no less. All those rich people! Of course the reality was a little different. The place was a hundred and ten bucks a month, which back then was a good chunk of my salary. And it was hardly bigger than your studio, except the landlord had decided to milk it for all it was worth by dividing it into four rooms.” He grinned. Lifted by this local act of remembrance, color had returned to his cheeks and his posture had improved. “Four closets was more like it. We slept in one of them, cooked in the second, ate in a third. The fourth was going to be for you kids when you finally arrived.”
Still faintly smiling, he took a swallow of beer. He looked out at the street and the kids playing there in the flood of water.
When he turned back, his eyes were charged with feeling and his grin was gone.
“I remember measuring that room for a bunk bed,” he said. “All we had was an old yardstick. I laid it on the floor, marked the place with my thumb and scooted it along. That’s how we did everything back then. Eight and a half by five and a half, that room was. A closet. But big enough for a bunk bed. Big enough for kids.”
He finished his beer. His eyes found mine in the smoky mirror above the backbar, and through the bottles of tequila and Cointreau and triple sec he saw me looking at him.
“That was my favorite room, Julian. My favorite room. Just knowing that one day soon you’d come along and sleep in it.”
My first memory:
I am in a bathtub that is, to me, as big as a room. He is on his knees on the white tiled floor, smiling down at me, face like a moon, his elbows resting on the rim of the tub, his hands drifting in the warm water beside my legs and feet. Short dark hairs cover the backs of his hands: an underwater forest.
I reach out and grip his wrist with both my hands. “Hold my breath?” I say.
He grins. His teeth are white. He is bigger and younger and more hopeful than he ever will be again. “Sure,” he says. “Hold your breath. But not too long.”
With one hand he helps pinch my nostrils closed, to keep the water out. The other hand he puts behind my head. Shutting my eyes, I take a breath so deep it puffs my cheeks out into a single balloon. “Don’t forget to come back,” he teases, then lays me back like a holy child. The warm water closes over me. Once under, I let my eyes open. His face beams down at me through a penumbra of rippling light. His lips are moving.
“I see you,” I think he’s saying. “I see you.”
This is the test I have conceived for myself, the only one that can tell me what I need to know. My cheeks are straining to hold enough life. As the oxygen disappears, my lungs replenish it with courage. My mind is everywhere, and just beginning. I am hearing the world as it might be.
I paid the check. He moved stiffly, his body already mapping tomorrow’s soreness, joint by joint. We went outside, into the sticking heat and the smell of baked trash. The kids had gone, but the water was still pouring from the hydrant.
On the corner we parted with a brief hug. We would go to our own places now. I envisioned the cluttered heap of things sitting in the middle of my floor, the windows sealed shut with fresh paint.