Читать книгу Death, Unchartered - Dorothy Van Soest - Страница 10

TWO

Summer 1967

“Do you need help, Sylvia?” Frank’s offer was less than enthusiastic. “Otherwise, I’ll go and finish organizing my office.”

I looked up from the boxes scattered around me on the kitchen floor of our new apartment to see him standing with one foot pointed away from me like he was ready to bolt. “Go on,” I said with a flick of my hand.

His lips brushed my cheek in passing as he headed for the door. There was a smell of stale beer on his breath. I listened to him turning the three locks on the metal door, lifting up the steel pole that dropped into a hole in the floor, then opening the door and letting it slam shut on its own without being locked.

On the same day Frank and I were married, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered in Mississippi. I sometimes wondered if that was why I was angry at Frank so much of the time. As if I held him accountable.

Now it was three years later, the summer of 1967 and hot. I was twenty-four years old, a passionate crusader for equal rights, civil rights, peace, and everything that small-town middle America had taught me, in subtle and not so subtle ways, not to be for, not to even think about. President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act two years ago had encouraged me, Martin Luther King Jr. inspired me, and the Black Power and anti-Vietnam War movements called to me. In such a tumultuous and hope-filled time, I could think of no better place to be than the Bronx.

I was, in fact, the reason we were here. Frank was in the seminary, and when it came time for him to make a decision about where to serve his yearlong internship, I dug in my heels and declared I would not go to any small town or to any church where the minister and his wife were hired as a team or seen as a unit. We decided that an urban church would be our best bet, which left him, in our particular denomination, with one choice: a small church in the Bronx consisting of one-third white old-timers who had remained members even after the neighborhood changed and they moved to the suburbs, and two-thirds black and Latino members who lived nearby.

Our apartment across the street from the church faced its round stained glass window riddled with holes. There was a difference of opinion among the members as to whether these holes came from stray bullets or baseballs or both. I looked out the kitchen window and saw Frank lumbering along the sidewalk by the church, then disappearing through the side door to his office.

I grabbed a wet sponge and wiped off the layer of soot that had accumulated on the windowsill since yesterday, resigned already to the daily ritual. Then I turned to face a stack of still-to-be-unpacked boxes that we’d hauled from Chicago in a rented U-Haul trailer hitched to the back of our beat-up Volkswagen van. I bent my knees and lifted up a box labeled Dishes. I was stronger than my whisper-thin ninety-pound body suggested. A spit of a thing, some people were insensitive enough to say to my face. If you stood sideways, you’d disappear, they’d laugh. I didn’t find it funny.

I dropped the box on the kitchen counter and started to open it, but the box cutter slipped from my sweaty fingers. I grabbed a paper towel and wiped my hands, then my forehead, my neck, front and back, and between my breasts. That was when I realized that while I was good at picking up heavy things, I didn’t always know what to do with them. I had forgotten that I couldn’t put the dishes in the cupboards until I did something about the roaches that had swarmed across the floor when I turned on the light last night. I pushed the box to the side and started to make a shopping list. To keep the roaches at bay, some repellent spray. To sprinkle along the baseboards, some borax. To wash out the cupboards, a strong disinfectant soap. The heat was unbearable. We needed a fan. The hot, steamy air was scrambling my mind.

In the bathroom I added more items to the list. Shower curtain. Toilet bowl cleaner. Clorox. More sponges. There was a miniature mushroom growing between the shower wall tiles, but instead of digging it out, which is what I would normally do, I decided to leave it alone, see how big it would get. I wondered if it might be edible.

In the living room, two tall windows covered by heavy metal security bars opened to a fire escape. An array of dingy underwear, worn jeans, and T-shirts hung on a clothesline operated by a pulley system stretching between two buildings. I added laundry detergent to the list and told myself I would not be hanging our clothes on that line for everyone to see. Little did I know, there would be a lot of things I would do in my time in the Bronx that I couldn’t have imagined myself doing.

Playing the role of a good—meaning dutiful—preacher’s wife was one thing I knew I couldn’t do. I went into the bedroom, where Frank’s Bible on the bed stand provided more evidence to me of how impossible it was for me to see things the way he saw them. I didn’t pray. I didn’t read the Bible. I slept during church services, and I hated the songs in the hymnal because they didn’t have a gospel beat. I thought that requiring seminarians to learn the Greek language was the height of absurdity.

I didn’t know who or what God was, and I never had. I was too young and had too much of my life ahead of me to worry about whether there was a heaven or a hell, and as far as I was concerned, we should be worrying about the hell on earth that too many people were already being forced to live instead of worrying over an afterlife.

Maybe it was our religious differences that made me irritated with Frank so much of the time. It had been so different when we first met, as freshmen in college. I had been awed by his intelligence and his certainty about his place in the world. I liked the way he noticed things about me—the food I ate, the smell of the lavender soap I used in the bath, even when the split ends on my blond hair needed trimming. He noticed me like no one had before, and it was intoxicating. So when this superior being chose me, I married him, never stopping to think about whether or not I loved him.

I couldn’t pinpoint when it happened—I guess it was gradual—but at some point he stopped noticing me, and the things I had admired about him became an irritation. His inquiring mind started to feel like criticism, and in the face of his superior intellect and certainty, my own insecurity was magnified.

My reflections were cut short by the sounds of screaming children out in the street. I walked over to the window. Someone had opened the fire hydrant in front of the church full blast, and scores of kids, of all ages and in all kinds of dress and undress, were having the time of their lives running through the spray.

Frank and I would not be having any children. I’d thought it was my fault. So had Frank. He encouraged me to see a doctor, which resulted in both of us being tested, and it turned out it was his fault, not mine. I had thought I wanted kids, but now that I knew we couldn’t, I wasn’t sure anymore. Frank, on the other hand, didn’t take it well, and we stopped talking about it.

As I watched the kids outside now, I told myself it was all water under the bridge. Then I grabbed my keys, locked all the locks behind me, and went out to join in the fun, pinching my nose against the warring cooking smells in the hall. On the second-floor landing, I bumped against a hunched-over man who, in his heroin-induced nonexistence, didn’t notice. The first-floor foyer reeked of pine-scented disinfectant and stale urine. I held my breath and raced out onto a sidewalk layered with grime and broken glass and spray paint.

The building super sat to the right of the door in front of his street-level apartment. He seemed to be a permanent fixture, his stomach bulging under a graying T-shirt, his wrinkled skin exposed between his shirt and pants, and hanging over the edge of his rusted folding chair.

“Good morning,” I said. “Quite the scorcher today, isn’t it? How long do these heat waves last?” I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, made a few more attempts at conversation, and then said, “Well, nice talking to you.”

“Yup, you too,” he mumbled as I turned to walk away. I smiled. I would try again tomorrow.

The throng of children running through the water from the hydrant grew larger, their squeals louder as they pushed each other and floated pieces of paper and sticks in the flooded street. For a few seconds I almost forgot that the deck of life was stacked against them, almost believed that their playfulness might be powerful enough to outwit society’s best efforts to extinguish it. I ran across the street, plunged into the spray with my mouth open, and swallowed a mouthful of water. The escape from the scorching heat was heavenly.

All of a sudden, the children stopped playing, and I realized they were all staring at me like they knew who I was better than I did: a white do-gooder residing temporarily among people living on the margins. Any idealistic notion I’d had that their squealing was the sound of resilience vanished. There was nothing romantic about children having to play in a flooded piece of street with foul garbage floating around their bare feet and ankles. They should have a real swimming pool, with chlorine in it, and a lifeguard to keep them safe.

I left and went back into the building, having learned my first lesson: that there was nothing romantic about poverty, and nothing honorable about living in its midst when you had a choice.

~

After passing the New York City teachers’ exam and signing a loyalty oath, which I was uncomfortable about but signed anyway, I was assigned to teach third grade at P.S. 457, which was an easy ten- to fifteen-minute walk from our apartment. At the teachers’ orientation meeting, I learned that I would teach my class during the morning shift, from seven to noon. Another third-grade class would use the classroom from noon to five. The two classes would have to share books, bulletin boards, supplies... everything. How were we supposed to do that? The principal said it was an unfortunate situation but she knew everyone would make the best of it like they always did. Everyone but me seemed to consider it normal.

Once the orientation session was over, I spent a couple of hours working in my assigned classroom with my teacher-mate, a woman in her midsixties who was more interested in what she was going to do when she retired at the end of the year than she was in children. After leaving the school, I went directly to the parsonage for dinner with Pastor Paul, his wife, Linnea, and their two handsome sons.

Pastor Paul was Frank’s internship supervisor, but he preferred to think of himself as Frank’s spiritual guide and on occasion treated him like a third son. When I arrived, everyone was sitting at the round picnic table on the patio in the back, a slab of concrete between the church and the house. My neon-pink dress with huge lime-green dots was shockingly short and as out of place here as it had been in the school auditorium. I’d heard someone whisper “Since when did we start letting sixteen-year-olds teach” when I walked in. Everyone but me must have gotten the dress code memo, because all the other teachers wore suits. I spent most of the meeting tugging at the hem of my dress and running my fingers along the edge of my hair where it was trimmed above my ears and trying not to feel like a fish out of water.

“Hur står det till?” Pastor Paul’s warm smile and soft voice belied his massive six-foot-three presence. “So how was it today?”

“Worse than I expected,” I said.

“God works in mysterious ways,” Pastor Paul said. “Maybe P.S. 457 is your calling like this ministry in the Bronx is mine.”

I winced at his religious assumption and tried to hide my discomfort by reaching for a slice of watermelon and dropping it on the plate in front of me. I poked it with my fork, cut off a piece, and brought it up to my mouth.

Linnea Winston gave her husband an indulgent smile and an affectionate pat on his arm. “Paul likes to believe we’re here because of divine intervention,” she said. “He doesn’t want to admit that no other church in the denomination was willing to hire a black pastor, much less one with a white wife.” She ran her fingers through her wavy blond hair.

“And two black sons who might want to date their daughters.” Jake, who was a month shy of turning seventeen, laughed like he thought what he’d said was hilarious.

Fourteen-year-old Ronnie joined in. “What do you mean? We’re half Swedish, aren’t we?”

“Yeah, and we’re probably both gay, too,” Jake countered. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his jean shorts and leaned back in his chair, laughing.

Everyone cracked up. Frank and I had been told, before deciding to come to the Bronx, that Pastor Paul had been asked to leave his last church, in Connecticut, after he invited a gay couple to join the congregation. I’d liked this family even before meeting them, and now I liked them even more.

“Hey,” Jake said, still laughing. “Be glad the Supreme Court finally declared our parents’ marriage legal.”

“To us!” Ronnie lifted his glass of lemonade. “Thanks to Loving v. Virginia, we are bastard children no longer.” The two brothers toasted each other with a clink of their glasses.

I couldn’t help but wonder what it must be like for them to navigate a world of prejudice, and if their joking was a way to disguise hurt and anger. But there was no hint of rancor in their humor. It even seemed pure in a way. I glanced at Frank, who was laughing as hard as anyone, knowing that if I told him what I was thinking, he’d accuse me of being too serious.

“Enough,” Linnea said with a giggle. “Time to eat.”

The laughter subsided as plates and bowls were passed around the table—hamburgers with pickles and onions on the side, potato chips, coleslaw, potato salad, and brownies.

I took a bite of my hamburger. “Mmmmm, this is delicious. I don’t know how you do it.” I wiped the juice from my chin with the red and white checked napkin that matched the tablecloth.

“Well, first you fire up the grill,” Jake said, laughing again.

“No, I mean, how did you take this drab little patch of cracked concrete and make it into such a beautiful little sanctuary? And the parsonage,” I pointed toward the back door, “it’s so... so... normal.”

“Nobody’s ever accused us of being normal before,” fourteen-year-old Ronnie cracked.

“Tack så mycket to Linnea here.” Pastor Paul winked at his wife.

“See what I mean?” Ronnie said. “You know any other black man who speaks Swedish?”

Everyone laughed, me included. “I don’t mean normal, normal,” I said. “More like ordinary. No, I guess what I mean is that your home is such a contrast to everything else around here.”

“We want you to think of it as yours while you’re here, right, Linnea?” Pastor Paul said.

“A shelter from the storm,” she added with a smile.

“So what do you think of P.S. 457,” Ronnie said. “I went there when we first moved here. I thought the building was falling apart around me.”

I put my silverware down and held my head in my hands. “It was built for a thousand students,” I said, “and they’re expecting over twenty-five hundred. That’s more than twice the population of the town where I grew up. The playground is filled with mobile classrooms, and that still doesn’t solve the overcrowding.”

“So how are they going to manage?” Pastor Paul said.

“By running the school in two shifts,” I said. Everyone shook their heads and made tsk tsk sounds.

“A way to make two schools out of one,” Linnea said.

“Is Miss Huskings still the principal?” Ronnie asked. “She was one scary lady. And creepy?” He lifted his hands up in mock horror. “She used to roam the halls to check on what was going on. We were all afraid of her.”

“I’m a bit intimidated by her, too,” I said. “I get the impression she’s supportive of the teachers but that you’d better not cross her.”

“You can always quit,” Frank said.

I stared at him. Quit? I picked up my hamburger, licked away the mustard oozing from the side of the bun, and bit into it. Three years of marriage and four years of dating before that, and my husband still didn’t have a clue who I was.

~

The first day of school finally arrived, delayed for two weeks by a teachers’ strike that I didn’t understand. At five minutes before seven, the gymnasium was packed, teeming with brown-faced children and pale-faced teachers. I stood with my back against the concrete under a sign in thick black marker posted on the wall that said Mrs. Waters, Third Grade, Section 8. My heart skipped a beat at the sight of the thirty-five students gathered around me, a surging swarm of curiosity and anticipation in a rainbow range of Bronx skin tones. I smiled at them. Some of them smiled back. Others stared, wide-eyed, like deer caught in the headlights.

“Welcome to the zoo,” I heard someone to my right say. I turned to see a short, squat man with a handlebar mustache, about ten years my senior, wearing a wrinkled off-white short-sleeve shirt. A blue and tan striped tie dangled at his neck. With a sinister smile, he waved his palm in mock blessing over his students, who, unlike mine, stood at attention in a straight line. The sign on the wall behind him said Mr. Frascatore, Fourth Grade, Section 1.

“It’s pretty noisy and crowded in here, all right,” I said, trying to be pleasant.

“An extension of the neighborhood.” With a look of scorn on his face, he tipped his head toward the heavy-duty wire mesh covering the towering gymnasium windows along one wall. “Better be careful out there. You could get punched in the face at any time for no reason at all, or worse yet, stabbed in the gut. My name’s Anthony, by the way.”

“I’m Sylvia.” I paused, then added, “I live within walking distance of here. We moved here this summer.”

He snorted and dipped his head toward my students. “They are trainable. But don’t expect them to learn anything.” Then he smiled, exposing square, yellow teeth.

An ice cube settled in the pit of my stomach. I crossed my arms and looked down, kicked at an invisible piece of dirt on the floor. I wanted to say something, but didn’t. I was new, and it was my first day of school. And, having grown up in a family that was averse to arguing, I’d never developed a knack or an appetite for overt disagreement. I turned away from his negative energy, tried not to engage with him or make it seem in any way that I agreed with his reprehensible views.

“Don’t listen to him.” It was the teacher to my left, a sturdy, bosomy middle-aged woman. The reddish-blond hair tied up in a loose bun on the top of her head contributed to the confident look she had of someone who belonged here and knew her way around. She rolled her eyes in Anthony Frascatore’s direction and reached out to shake my hand. “My name’s Bonnie. Bonnie Goldmann. I teach third grade, too. Welcome to P.S. 457. Looks like we made it. We lost a couple of weeks because of the strike, but it could have been worse.”

“What was the strike about?” I asked.

“Depends on who you ask. I support my union.” She gave Anthony a look that I didn’t understand and spoke to him more than to me. “But, in my opinion, walking out now was a mistake. Unnecessary... and counterproductive.”

“The UFT has to take a stand,” Frascatore said. “We have show that OHB board and those ATA folks we won’t compromise.” He swiveled the upper part of his body toward me, saw the confused look on my face, and scoffed. “See that, she doesn’t even have a clue what I’m talking about.”

He was right. All those acronyms—OHB? ATA?—sent a blush up my neck and onto my cheeks. Bonnie gave Frascatore a swat on his arm. “So how much did you know, big shot, when you were new?” She turned toward me. “Forget about him. He’s always like that.”

“I signed up as a UFT member,” I said, “so of course I know the United Federation of Teachers is our union.” I made a face with my lips, an apologetic shrug. “But otherwise he’s right. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

She slipped her hand through my arm, pulled me close and spoke in a low, confidential voice. “OHB is the Ocean Hill—Brownsville school district, where the mayor is conducting a community control experiment in an attempt to improve the quality of education in the black community. A school board made up of folks from that community is in charge of the Ocean Hill—Brownsville schools. It’s a good thing, in my opinion, for the community to have power over how its own schools are run. The ATA is the African-American Teachers Association, which supports community control. The UFT, our union, opposes it.” She pulled away from me then and turned toward Frascatore, raised her voice. “And you know, Anthony, that there would be no need for the ATA if the UFT had lived up to its mission and commitment to integration and civil rights.”

Frascatore stuck his thumbs between the waistband of his black slacks and his belt and leaned back on his heels. “Look, when you’re in a battle, Bonnie, you rise or fall as one unit, you look out for each other. You can’t have a bunch of Muhammad Alis in the ATA marching off to the beat of another drummer to fight a different war.” He marched in place and his shoes squeaked on the gymnasium floor. Then he winked, squeezing together the lids of his left eye and holding it like that for too long to be joking or teasing. Long enough to ridicule but not long enough to be a threat.

The seven o’clock bell rang with a deafening blast that shook the windows and reverberated through my insides. On cue, all the students in the gymnasium silenced themselves and formed lines in front of their assigned teachers.

I smiled at my students and pointed to the sign on the wall. “Good morning! My name is Mrs. Waters, as you can see, but I would like you to call me Ms. Sylvia, okay? May I hear you say it, please?”

“Good morning, Ms. Sylvia.”

One voice rang out over all the others, a voice strong, sure, curious, and ready, a voice deep for a girl, for any child her age, with a resonance that welcomed me in like an open door to a mystery, offering a gift of discovery, an adventure.

“Ms. Sylvia! Ms. Sylvia! My name is Mentayer LeMeur and I have a question about your name.” The girl’s smile was contagious.

“Yes?”

“Why? I mean, why does the sign say your name is Mrs. Waters, but you want us to call you Ms. Sylvia?”

“Good question,” I say, stumped. “It’s what I prefer.” I could see the “why” expression on her face, the questions written all over it: Why do you prefer your first name? Why say Ms. instead of Mrs.? I cleared my throat and smiled at her. “And now, class,” I said, “if you would please follow me.”

As I turned toward the exit, I saw, from the corner of my eye, a smirk on Anthony Frascatore’s face.