Twenty-One

IF YOU SIT DOWN AND FIGURE IT OUT, YOU’LL FIND ONLY A HANDFUL OF HOURS during all of high school when learning is possible.

Ninth grade drowns in a hormonal swamp. As has been mentioned, twelfth grade is a wash. In any grade at any time, attention spans snap when atmospheric conditions are too exciting, as when it rains or snows, or does neither and is perfect, including all of spring. All Mondays are lost to laments at another week’s beginning, and all Fridays are treated as early weekends. During first period, students are too bleary to think; during the period before lunch, they’re too hungry to think; and during last period, they’re exhausted. Days and sometimes weeks are spent preparing for and recovering from vacations, and in those few slivers of time with no other excuse for goofing off, kids get sick.

The flu was the excuse-of-choice for half the senior class today. There was a big concert at the Spectrum tonight, and they needed to be rested for it.

The loyal remnants of the class and I were reviewing, at their request, the mechanics of assembling their term paper notes. I launched into a well-worn monologue. “The researcher is a detective,” I said. “The question that needs answering is the mystery, and clues are scattered all over. The truth is in fragments, pieces that in themselves might not seem relevant or important. The research sleuth finds and assembles the pieces until they form the whole picture and answer the question.”

Two pigeons landed on the windowsill. I forgot to mention that learning also stops for wildlife, however prosaic the species. I droned on above the giggles of my students, ignoring them and the pigeons, who had mistaken my sill for a motel. Luckily, from what I’ve unwillingly observed, pigeon foreplay is pretty much for the birds, so it wasn’t all that long before the hope of tomorrow was watching me again.

But their bored faces made it clear that after the avian live porno show, an illustration of how to cross-reference a note card was an anticlimax in several senses.

“Then we break the topic down into its questions, its subcategories, so that when we find an interesting tidbit, we can decide where it belongs, and can see where we need more information…” My voice dribbled off, but the class didn’t seem to mind, so I stopped a moment and thought.

Unlike my students, I was really listening and hearing. My familiar detective-research paper analogy had suddenly struck me, and I mentally filled three-by-five cards, trying to put together my own clues.

Somebody coughed, and I returned to teaching, discussing coding the cards so they’d know who said what, then moved to coding cards for the sub-subjects on their outlines. “Say there’s a category called Arguments Against or Evidence Proving whatever—the existence of Atlantis, or Elvis, or reincarnation,” I said.

Evidence. What would go on those three-by-five cards? The book. The corpse. The bullet. The motive. The beatings of Lydia Teller.

I went on automatic pilot, answering a question, even making sense, I think; but my mind was now fixed on what had started this nightmare: the beatings of Lydia Teller and what might have ended it, the last beating of Lydia Teller.

At what point during the night of the murder had it happened? Lydia said that Neil’s lawsuit and Fay’s claims and Adam and Eve’s harassment pushed Wynn to the explosive point, that he hurt her. But she also said he wouldn’t do it in front of anybody. So she was beaten after they left, after she claimed to be locked upstairs.

Neither Neil, nor Fay, nor Adam and Eve had mentioned bruises, not even after the news said that Lydia Teller had often been victimized. Surely, even if everybody else were oddly oblivious, Eve Wholeperson would have seized on such an obvious case of brutality.

“Allow for surprises,” I told my class. “For information not on your outline, something you couldn’t have anticipated, something that doesn’t agree with what you thought was so. Be flexible.” There was a collective, tolerant sigh. The assumption that they would rush off to a dusky stack where they’d make discoveries in obscure texts was ludicrous, but we humored each other because we all knew it was an inflexible given of the curriculum that I present this to them.

They listened, their minds undoubtedly on tonight’s concert. And I spoke, my attention stuck on Lydia’s bruises.

Dead men don’t beat their wives. Wynn Teller had vented his frustration with his life, his double whammy of professional and personal pursuers, on Lydia, and then he’d been killed.

Somebody doubled back. Or somebody new entered.

Or, what made the most sense, Mackenzie had been right all along and Lydia, beaten and desperate, pulled her grandfather’s gun off the wall and well and truly ended her misery.

The class snickered. I realized my hand was up, the chalk still on the board where I’d written Neil and Fay with arrows pointing at them, and hurt after? and lying?

For the rest of the hour, I tried not to chew gum and walk at the same time. Except when I kept teaching and looked out the window one more time. And again saw a woman with a royal-blue coat and a gray, unpretentious car, and all too probably, a gun in her black leather purse, waiting.

Waiting for me.

* * *

The Not-a-Garage Sale began its preview at the end of the school day. Philly Prep was justifiably afraid the students wouldn’t reenter the building on the weekend and would spend their allowances elsewhere. So Friday afternoon was dedicated to their wallets. To my astonishment, the students willingly accommodated this cynical ploy, behaving as if the sale were a treasure hunt. Tim Clark showed me his favorite earring—a fly-fishing lure—discovered at the sale a year ago. Mirri Langdorf said this was where she’d found her Spanish mantilla. “My signature accessory,” she added with pride. Sackett Smith had discovered an ancient camera with a bellows. It didn’t work, he explained, but it was so radically great he kept it on the dashboard of his car.

The book stall was to the right of music, another lonely category where round black disks of varying rpms waited in vain to be adopted. Records and books had become collectible oddities. I had become old.

I had little to do besides watch America’s youth find accoutrements, which I did for as long as I could. Then I decided I had more important things to stare at, like Lydia, presumably still out there waiting for me. I asked Charlie Pickles, a sort of seller at large, to cover for me.

I peeked into the office as I passed it. Helga, still at work, gazed affectionately at her computer screen. Maybe she was delving in that mysterious ogzmic file of hers. I turned the corner toward the staircase and, for perhaps the first time in history, my reaction to Helga was a smile.

But a short, aborted one that turned into a choke and came out a rasp that had meant to be a scream. I was hammer-locked from behind. I kicked backward—with difficulty, as I was on the first step—and twisted my entire body away. The hand let go and I fell, hard, onto the steps.

“Did I scare you?” Neil Quigley looked surprised and goofier than ever, holding a Mylar balloon that said IT’S A BOY!

“Congratulations,” I gasped. My feet were every which way and my rear end hurt. I stood and limped to the marble foyer, from which I could more easily escape.

He reached in his topcoat pocket. I put my hands up over my face and pushed at the glass inner door. “Here,” he said, putting something in my hand. I stared at a thick cigar that you just knew was particularly odiferous. It had a wide baby-blue band repeating the balloon’s message.

If you ask me, there’d be more justification for exclamation points and amazement if there were a greater variety of possibilities. If there were a chance of giving birth to a halibut, a Corinthian pediment, or even a full-grown man. But with a fifty-fifty probability, a mere two choices, why such astonishment? “And the baby’s at Jefferson,” I said.

“What?”

“Where’s your baby?”

“Did you expect me to have him on me?” He patted his pockets and laughed nervously. I got some satisfaction because my question apparently frightened him the way various characteristics of his did me.

“Well?”

“I expected you to ask his name, or his size, or how Angela’s doing,” he said.

“Well, I’m asking where Angela’s doing.”

“She’s still in the hospital.” He looked very troubled.

“How come Jefferson?” I backed another step away.

“Mandy?”

“We went to Lankenau. You had me drive you there. It’s not even in the same direction. How come?”

“Oh, boy,” he muttered. He offered me another cigar, but I declined. “I’m embarrassed. Her allergy doctor’s at Lankenau, and her first G-Y-N was there, and I drove her there a million times, but two months ago, when things got complicated, she switched to a specialist at Jefferson and she took the bus for those appointments, and yesterday I…a failure of memory?” His shoulders slumped, so that with his balloon, he looked like a sad clown painting on velvet. “I acted like a dope, didn’t I? And it was worse after you left—you should have seen me insisting she was there, practically storming the maternity ward.” He laughed, then grew solemn. “Angela didn’t think it was funny. How Daddy Went to the Wrong Hospital is going to be the first story she tells the kid.”

As soon as he said the word daddy, he blushed. “He’s a cute little guy,” he added softly, and he blinked hard.

I knew that daddies could kill, but the odds were against a sentimental one carrying a Mylar balloon, who couldn’t remember which direction to head under stress. Still. “What color is your car?” I asked. His cohort might have been a clear thinker.

Neil’s turn to back off. “Green, same as ever. Do other men have their cars painted while their wives are in labor? Is it a custom I forgot?” He smiled nervously.

I smiled for real for the fist time.

“Look,” he said, “I can’t help noticing that bruise on your forehead. What happened? Has a doctor seen it? You’re—forgive me but you’re acting pretty weird.”

“Me? I’m fine, but you’re pretty weird, not even telling me his name and who he looks like and whether he has hair and how much he weighs and how Angela’s doing.”

The baby had amassed an amazing amount of statistical data in his two hours of life. I aimed Neil toward the gym, fleetingly remembering that I had meant to do a Lydia check, but deciding that if she was freezing out there, she could continue to do so. There was a gratifying burst of applause when Neil entered carrying his balloon.

I returned to selling books and watching the new father hand out cigars. I’m glad it wasn’t Neil, I thought as I transacted a sale. I always knew it couldn’t have been. But of course, I had also always known it couldn’t have been Lydia, because it was too horrible to think of a life so trapped that the only way out leads to prison. I didn’t want it that way, but I was beginning to accept it.

Forty-five minutes and similar nonstop thoughts later, I again turned the book business over to Charlie Pickles. He looked peeved, but then, he generally does. I said I had to leave for a call of nature. I did. A call of my nature.

Once in the hall, I reached into my shirt pocket and realized I had left my classroom keys at the book stall. I started back, then wondered what I’d tell Charlie Pickles. Besides, I didn’t need a second story panoramic view, only a glance.

The gym had high wire-meshed frosted windows, facing the alleyway. Across the hall the auditorium, which sided on the square, had clear but impossibly high windows. The only first floor lookout seemed the one from the principal’s office, guarded by the hound from Hell-ga.

I turned back toward the staircase, planning to try doors until I found an unlocked classroom, when I remembered the window backstage. I also remembered my stashed treasures: the wholesome and not-so-wholesome books, and Sasha’s cape. Two birds with one, etcetera.

I went up the stage steps and back behind the curtain. My memory hadn’t failed me. The cracked tan window shade was up. I peered out. The only person I saw across the way had dreadlocks and a red backpack, and the gray car had been replaced by a purple and white finned number. Lydia had given up on me. I could breathe easy for a while.

It felt so good not to be afraid, I laughed with relief and went in search of my goodies.

This is where I fell on Monday, I remembered idly.

So, for symmetry’s sake, that was where I fell on Friday, too. Down, splat, with a thunk and a clatter, bruising whatever places had been spared on my staircase flop and whatever sense of dignity I had left.

I was surrounded by moldering upholstery, heavy velvet curtains, and a partial backdrop of celestial blue with fluffy white clouds. Musty, maybe, but peaceful as can be. I climbed to my feet and looked around more closely, carefully retracing my steps. And then I saw the cane—a showy sort that Martha Thornton might use for a tap dance, red and silver candy-striped, and realized that I had done the thunking and splatting, but it had done the clattering. Which had to mean it had been propped up.

Like a trap. Like something else had been rigged Monday, had tripped me the same way Monday.

I stood very quietly. I would grab the books and the cape and be on my way. Except that the books had been moved, and were not on the chair but on a nearby table, as if a housekeeper had come in to tidy. The chair had been turned to face another chair. To make a bed, I thought. And Sasha’s cape was flung like a throw or blanket over one of them. At the other end, a small carpet was rolled into a pillow.

I thought I heard a shuffle, movement, but it was only my own heartbeat gone wild. I very carefully tiptoed to the end table and picked up the stack of books.

There were too many and the top one was unfamiliar. Great American Plays: 1950-1960. PROPERTY OF PHILLY PREP LIBRARY was stamped inside.

I tried to convince myself that it had been here all along, left by an absentminded player long ago. I looked around more carefully and realized the furniture arrangement was not quite as haphazard as I’d first thought. The two chairs together. The end table next to it.

And on the floor at its side, a carton removed from onstage. I knew that was so because this one still had a shipping tag addressed to Sasha Berg.

But its contents weren’t from Sasha anymore. Not the three white yogurt cups and lids, wrapping paper from various sandwiches, an empty pudding container, apple cores, banana peels, or the small plastic bag of uneaten celery sticks, which seriously annoyed me. You should have to eat everything you steal, including vegetables. Especially vegetables.

“The Phantom.” I didn’t think I had said it, let alone said it loudly, but the words flew up above the sets and expanded into the cavernous maze of ropes and supports. I belatedly clapped my hand over my mouth.

Wait till that silly commercial art teacher heard that her schnecken hadn’t been an inside job. Some poor but clever street person had figured it out, found a way to nest back here and forage at night.

And in the daytime? Like right now? I was suddenly in that nightmare where you have to flee but can’t. My feet grew and melded to the stage floor and had nothing at all to do with my brain or my needs.

Get out, I told myself. Get out, I told the intruder. Sad, but you can’t be here. I thought of the children. He could be dangerous. I thought of myself. “Help!” I cried. “Help!”

“No!” a voice thundered. Low, rumbling, frightening. I fought to catch my breath, squinted, looked and finally saw an enormous bulk halfway behind the flat.

I couldn’t tell who he was or if I knew him. I couldn’t tell much of anything.

He reached around the canvas backdrop. Now things were clearer, especially his hand silhouetted against a backdrop of cumulus clouds, and two other things.

First, that was a gun in his hand, and second, I was in deep trouble.