Margot decided THAT THE BEST WAY TO TALK HAL Pearson out of the Venice trip was to attack him with the full arsenal of her persuasive skills while garbed in a tight sweater. To this end, she prepared to surprise him in his classroom directly after school.
On a Monday afternoon, Margot left her office early and drove from downtown Philadelphia to Cherry Hill. Carla, who had acted in the manner of an undercover detective planning a stakeout, had informed her sister that middle-school classes ended at 2:58 P.M.—a time that neatly encapsulated the nature of middle school itself, where the sense of counting minutes was combined with the sense of their unutterable dullness. Carla had ascertained that the first round of buses would have departed by 3:16, but that teachers were obliged to remain in the school until the second (or late) bus left. Thus, if Margot left her office at 2:17, she would, barring a jackknifed tractor-trailer on Route 70, arrive at just the right moment to catch poor, unsuspecting Hal Pearson alone in his classroom, in a perfect position to be browbeaten.
As Margot entered the school at the designated time, having parked her BMW in the spot marked Assistant Vice Principal, the corridors had the desolate look of a recently abandoned war zone.
The pungent odor of adolescent sweat permeated the air, making it necessary for her to hold her breath for a few seconds to become acclimated. As she passed various rooms on the way to Hal’s—she had gotten the precise location from Carla in a detailed map e-mailed to her the night before—she saw disheveled teachers erasing the boards, picking up stray papers on the floor, and shoving books into their briefcases in preparation for going home. The general feeling was one of lassitude and exhaustion—except as she approached Hal Pearson’s room, where she could hear lively voices in conversation.
Carla had failed to interrogate Stephanie on the subject of Hal’s after-school activity. Teachers had a policy that they would be briefly available at the end of the day for consultation—but the policy was a perfunctory one, students being generally disinclined to consult them. In Hal’s case, however, they did, owing perhaps to the genuine pleasure he seemed to take in their presence. Children of middle-school age, not unlike people of any age, tend to be sensitive to the response of others and will be grateful and forthcoming to anyone who appears to like them. This simple but much-ignored rule of behavior could, if properly applied, transform the education of adolescents. Of course, it would require the difficult feat of liking a group of individuals who display very few obviously likable characteristics.
Hal Pearson was one of those rare souls who could see the freshness and wonder that lay beneath his students’ surly, inarticulate facade. As a result, there was always a motley collection of young people milling about in his classroom after school. Today there were three who had draped themselves loosely over the desks and chairs.
Margot paused at the door, waiting for an opportune moment to announce her presence. She wondered at first if the students were there for some sort of club, and if Hal was their faculty adviser. But the absence of a clear agenda made this seem unlikely. It then occurred to her that perhaps the students were being punished
for bad behavior or late homework. But the benign atmosphere belied this theory as well.
“So what is it you guys want to discuss?” Margot heard Hal ask. His tone threw her. Had she, during her own extensive academic career, ever heard a tone of such genuine goodwill expressed by a teacher toward a group of students? If so, she could not recall it.
“Commas,” said a girl in low, very wide-leg jeans, a skull-and-crossbones T-shirt, and multiple piercings in ears, nose, and eyebrows. She looked like someone who, even at the age of thirteen, you wouldn’t want to tangle with in a dark alley.
“Ah yes, the uses and abuses of the virgule,” said Hal. “That’s French for comma—you never know when you might want to impress the French. What don’t you understand about commas?”
“Everything,” said a large boy in a football jacket. “They say they taught us to use them somewhere back in, like, the third grade, but I must have been absent.”
“Yeah,” said the girl, “they always say they taught you stuff. That’s how they get out of teaching it.”
“They probably did teach it,” said another boy wearing headphones, “only you were in the bathroom or something.”
The girl glared at him. “So are you saying you learned it?”
“No, but that’s ’cause I wasn’t listening,” said the headphoned boy.
“Enough with the origin of your ignorance,” said Hal. “If we try to arrive at first causes we’ll never accomplish anything. I’ll explain commas if you want to listen. If not, you can just hang out.”
“I’ll listen,” said the girl with the piercings.
“Gimme what you got on commas,” said the husky boy.
“Okay, let’s start by seeing what you know,” said Hal. “When do you use a comma?”
“When you pause,” said the girl. “‘I saw him—pause—walking down the street.’”
“I wouldn’t pause there,” said the husky boy.
Hal nodded. “Not everyone would pause there.”
“I thought a comma was supposed to mark a pause.”
“Yes,” said Hal. “But you can’t decide to put in a comma just because you happen to pause. It has to be a generally agreed-on pause.”
“So how do you know where a generally agreed-on pause is?”
“That’s where the rules come in,” said Hal with an air of triumph. “Rules generalize about things—like pausing. Which doesn’t mean you might not pause somewhere else occasionally. It’s just that you don’t put in a comma unless the general pause rule holds.”
“Sort of like a traffic light,” said the boy with the headphones, who, though his ears were covered, appeared to be following the conversation closely.
Hal threw the boy a Jolly Rancher. “Excellent analogy, Spencer.”
“But you would pause if, say, a rabbit ran across the road,” said the girl, “even if there wasn’t a traffic light. In that case, there’d be no comma.”
“Right you are, Monica,” said Hal, throwing another Jolly Rancher to the girl.
“Sometimes you have to stop at a traffic light even if there’s no traffic coming in the other direction. Is that like using a comma even if you don’t actually need to pause?” said the boy in the headphones, warming to the exercise.
Hal threw a third Jolly Rancher. “Fine extended analogy.”
“I wouldn’t stop if there wasn’t traffic,” said the husky boy. “I’d run the light.”
“And you’d get a ticket,” said the girl. “You’d get an F on the paper.”
Hal threw both of them a Jolly Rancher. “One for you too, Greg, for your interesting insight into social transgression.” He then looked out at the group with an expression of pure joy. “You guys blow me away,” he said. “You gotta all go into philosophy. Promise me you’ll take Intro Logic with Mr. Muller next year.”
“Mr. Muller is a dick,” said the headphoned boy.
“Perhaps he is,” said Hal in a noncommittal tone, “but with your gift for the subject, it wouldn’t matter.” The students appeared to consider this for a moment. It had never occurred to them to separate the subject matter from the teacher. “But we haven’t gotten into the rules of commas yet,” Hal continued. “Where to put the traffic lights—that’s the hard part.”
“I like the analogy part better,” said the husky boy.
“You gotta blend abstract thinking with concrete,” said Hal, “or all you’ve got is bullshit.”
“Good point,” said the headphones. “Hit us with the comma rules.”
Hal took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and was about to put some examples on the board when he happened to look toward the door.
“Margot Kaplan!” said Hal, shocked into stating the obvious.
The students looked over. Noting Margot’s appearance and Hal’s flustered manner, they picked up their backpacks and filed out of the room. Hal gave a distracted wave and muttered, “To be continued.”
“You seem to have them in the palm of your hand,” said Margot, walking into the room with a certain tentativeness. She had originally imagined striding forward and cowing him with a few sharp words. But the scene she had just witnessed had a humbling effect. Her own memories of middle school were of teachers who were always either castigating kids for not doing what they should or patting them on the head for regurgitating what had been taught to them by rote. The idea of lazing around for an impromptu philosophical discussion of comma usage was not within the parameters of her experience. That sort of learning—of knowledge examined and savored—was something she had known only in college and law school, and then only on very rare occasions. To see such a thing done with pleasure and affection in a seventh-grade classroom was, to borrow from Stephanie’s vocabulary, awesome.
Hal meanwhile had regained his balance. “To what do I owe the
honor of this visit?” he asked in a light tone that could not mask his obvious pleasure. “Don’t tell me that you dropped by for a quick comma review.”
“No,” said Margot quickly, “I mastered punctuation on the job, where I discovered that a misplaced comma could cost my client thousands in bail.”
“Maybe you can be a guest speaker in my class. You can explain how the comma can literally affect life and liberty. These kids like to see the practical aspects of what they learn.”
“I’d say they do pretty well with the philosophical aspects,” said Margot. “You certainly got a high-level discussion out of a rather pedestrian topic.”
“There, I agree with you. I never stop being surprised by the wealth of analogies that students bring to bear on their experience. We talk about adolescence as the period of raging hormones. To me, it’s more like the period of raging metaphor.”
“Nice thought,” said Margot. “You oughta be a teacher.”
Hal smiled.
“But I’m here on other business. I need a favor.” The phrasing slipped out; it wasn’t the way she imagined the conversation going at all.
“At your service,” said Hal, meaning it. He had thought to have effectively squashed the romantic in himself. Burned in love at some point in the distant past, he had had only casual relationships since. Usually they started as friendships, then dipped into something vaguely sexual, coming out on the other end as friendship again. He had begun to feel that this was the natural way of things in the modern world, romance having given way to comfort and convenience.
But Margot Kaplan had an entirely different effect on him. She brought the romantic impulse, long dormant, to the surface. He wished he could be assigned some difficult, even dangerous, task to perform on her behalf.
“‘Come, bid me do anything for thee,’” he said, borrowing the
lines that Benedict spoke to Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and making a broad, facetious bow as he said them.
Margot’s look suggested that quoting Shakespeare might not be the best tack to take with her right now. Her tone grew more severe: “Then abandon this harebrained scheme of going to Venice with my mother.”
Hal’s expression changed. “That, I’m afraid, I cannot do,” he replied. “It’s something that involves more than just me. Your mother wants to go—she’s counting on it. And I could never sleep at night if I let her down.”
“So you’re saying you’re doing all this for her!”
“Not entirely. I grant that she’s sparked my curiosity. But I wouldn’t take the trip, and I’d cancel in a minute, if her heart weren’t set on going.”
“She’s an old woman. You’ve gotten her worked up over a delusion.”
“But is it harmful? Your mother is full of knowledgeable detail about the period and the city, not to mention the Bard. If nothing else, it would be a shame for her not to see Venice again.”
“Again? You actually believe that she lived there in another life?”
“I don’t believe or disbelieve,” said Hal. “I suspend my disbelief.”
“But digging around under the floorboards of some old house, searching for ridiculous artifacts?”
“Lost sonnets.”
“Whatever—it’s creepy. I can’t condone it.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hal. “As I said, I could never bring myself to disappoint your mother. I don’t think you could either, if you were in my position. So the least you can do is tell her it’s okay—that you won’t be angry at her for going.”
Margot considered this. “Does she think I’m angry?”
“Yes—and she’s a little afraid of you. More of you than of your sister.”
“And do you think I’m scary?”
“No,” he said carefully, “scary isn’t the word I’d use.”
“What word would you use?”
“Formidable, maybe.”
“So you’re saying that you want me, formidable woman that I am, to give you and my mother my blessing for this trip?”
“Yes,” said Hal, “your blessing would be nice.”
“Well, then,” said Margot, taking a breath, and then speaking with uncharacteristic recklessness: “I’ll do one better. I’ll go along.”
Hal stared at her.
“She’ll need me there for support and to keep an eye on things,” she continued hurriedly, “and I have a week coming to me at the firm, so I’ll have no problem taking off.” She paused and seemed to get better hold of herself, her voice assuming its more familiar sarcastic tone. “I was looking for a vacation spot, anyway,” she added. “I always wanted to see Venice, and it will be nice to have a native show me around.”