Читать книгу The Lost Children - Mary MacCracken, Mary MacCracken - Страница 7

But all summer long the children of the school walked through my dreams, and in September I went back to the school to ask if I could work there as a volunteer teacher’s aide two days a week. The morning was warm and the windows of the school were open, and I heard again the piano as I climbed the wide wooden steps.

More strongly than ever the déjà-vu feeling returns; perhaps not this same school, but somewhere, sometime, I worked in a school such as this. There is a remembered knowledge that is certain without being specific.

I find the Director in her office.

“Good morning,” she says. “Can I help you?”

“I’m Mary MacCracken,” I remind her. “I was here last June. I … uh. Well, what I wondered was … do you think it would be possible for me to work as a volunteer with one of your teachers?”

“Oh, yes, I remember now. You were here with the other woman from the Junior League. Yes. Well now, let’s see. Yes … I think we’ll put you as a teacher’s aide with Helga. We’re delighted to have you, Mrs. … er – uh …”

“Mary,” I say. “My name is Mary.”

“Yes, of course. Mary. Go right on up to Helga’s room. As I say, we’re delighted to have you.”

I climbed the empty stairs slowly. There was no one in the room at the top of the stairs. As I stood in the hall indecisively a boy of perhaps nine or ten raced by me, his turtleneck shirt pulled completely over his head, screaming, “Jesus Christ, gonna go to Camp Lookout! God save us all!” He thundered down the stairs, and I wondered how he was able to judge their height and depth with his eyes covered.

A man came out of one of the rooms along the hall, smiled at me, and called softly to the boy: “Hey, Tom, it’s okay. Camp’s over, you’re in school,” and he walked slowly down the stairs toward the boy, who was now hesitating on the bottom step.

I continued walking along the long upstairs hall, looking in classrooms, searching for Helga’s room. They were all empty except for one classroom. A small girl watched in fascination an empty turntable revolve. A gray-eyed boy sat beside her, smiling and rocking back and forth, back and forth, until a young woman rose from the table where she was mixing paints and touched him, blocked the rocking with her hand, and he followed her back to the paint table.

A kaleidoscope of impressions was whirling through my head. Was this teacher Helga? And would she, too, be “delighted” to have me? As it turned out, she was not.

I found her finally in the bathroom with her class of four children. She was bent over the toilet bowl with a rubber plunger.

“God damn fucking stopped-up toilet. How can you toilet-train a child when the stupid toilet doesn’t even flush? Who are you?”

“Mary,” I answer. “The Director sent me to be your new volunteer teacher’s aide.”

Helga wields the rubber plunger even harder now – brown-gray hair flying straight out from her head, glasses slipping to the end of her nose. She must be fifty, arms strong and muscular, moving up and down, everything about her alive, filled with vitality. She is wearing a cotton housedress, and under it I can see wide shoulders, full breasts, narrower waist and hips – her legs strong and bare above worn, wet sneakers.

“For Christ sake,” she says in a strong German accent. “How many times do I have to tell her I don’t want any shitty volunteers? I have enough to do with the children. Go on now. Go tell her to assign you to somebody else.”

But I do not want to go. Intuitively I recognize in Helga the essence of the master teacher. I know that she is the one I want to watch; hers are the techniques I want to learn. In this school I do not feel humble or frightened or inadequate, as I often do with Larry. I am at home here and I merely smile at Helga and follow her back to her classroom, watching her quietly. I had never heard a woman swear like that before. The women I had known most intimately were lovely, quiet women – clean and soft, smelling faintly sweet, dressed always in good taste. I survey Helga in her cotton housedress and worn sneakers, and for the first time I wonder what “good taste” means.

Sunlight lies across the green linoleum floor. The walls are covered with children’s primitive finger painting; a large rocking chair is in front of the window, a low table with chairs in the middle of the room, a sandbox on the far side.

One of the boys stands in the sunlight watching the specks of dust move in the golden air currents. He is very small, perhaps five or six, with a small, square face and large gray eyes, black at the center.

Helga speaks to him. “Take off your sweater, Chris. Hang it up on the hook.”

Still he stands without moving, arms slack; only his eyes follow the golden specks of dust. I do not move to help, only watch as I sit on a corner of the sandbox, filling a muffin tin with sand and turning my muffins on a wooden board. Red-haired Jimmy sticks a crayon in each one and then pushes them back to the center of the sandpile.

Helga ignores Chris, giving him a chance to act on his own volition. She notices me and is obviously annoyed that I am still there. She no longer even addresses me directly but instead mutters toward the window concerning me.

“God in heaven. Give me patience. It is not enough that I must teach these children all day with no equipment, only leftover material and promises. Now they send me volunteers. Over and over I have told them I do not want the shitty volunteers. Volunteers to do for the children what they should do for themselves. Do they listen? No. Jesus, deliver me from these volunteers. They should take their shitty good works somewhere else.”

The last is delivered pointedly in my direction and I bend my head in concentration on my muffins.

One last remark from Helga: “Ah – well. It does not usually take us too long to get rid of them, does it?”

Helga chooses now to ignore me. All morning she never looks again in my direction. Instead, she turns once again to Chris. Her voice lifts, half a command, half a seduction: “Come now – get off that sweater and we’ll have a bit of a rock before the day begins.”

Chris slides his eyes from the dust specks toward Helga, not moving, only looking.

She settles herself in the rocking chair and sets it in motion. “Come along now,” she calls, “get along.”

And, unbelievably, the slack, motionless figure becomes a boy. Awkwardly he takes off his sweater and hangs it on a hook beneath his name, CHRIS, and then crosses the room and climbs into the wide lap of Helga. And with her legs spread wide and her foot tapping she sings to him:

“Camptown races is my song – do dah, do dah. Camptown races all day long, all the do dah day.” And if the words are wrong, it does not bother Helga or Chris.

I watch them and then, noticing an empty coffee cup lying beside the sandbox, I go next door to the bathroom and fill it with water.

“Not this one,” I say to myself as the water runs into the cup. “You will not be rid of this volunteer so easily, Helga.” And I smile at her as I carry the water back to the sandbox.

So began our relationship, Helga’s and mine, and my education. I learned more from this strong, loving woman than from any psychology or education course I have ever taken; more than from any book, no matter how distinguished the author. I watched her, remembering, imitating, gradually doing. She breathed life back into the children. Often I watched her gather a child in her arms – one who had gone off to a corner, retreating from the world. Helga would gather him up, blow on his neck, murmur some foolish joke into his ear, take his hand, start the record player, and then dance with him around the room. Her favorite dance was the polka, and as she skipped and stomped in her sneakers, gray hair flying, half carrying her small partner with her, she would sing, “There’s a garden, what a garden, only happy faces bloom there, and there’s never any gloom there …” And gradually the child would return, the faraway look would go out of his eyes, and he would seem once more to be alive, to be back in this world.

There was about Helga such a strong sense of living, of vitality, that as she came into bodily contact with a child – rocking him, holding him from attacking himself or others, kissing him, pushing him – her vitality, her excitement, her desire of life were almost visibly transferred to the child. She could not have told me any of this herself; she was totally absorbed in her work, in her children – so much so that even at the end of the same day, if someone had asked her to describe what methods or techniques she had used to solve a problem, she would not have been able to relate what she had done. She would not even have tolerated the words “methods” and “techniques”; she was the totally natural therapeutic teacher. I was privileged to be able to watch her, and I knew it. A dozen times a day I would find myself silently saying, “Yes, yes,” as I watched her with the children. It was a feeling of silent applause and I knew I must pay attention to it.

She had that rare quality of being alive, involved in, excited by, her world. Whether this is learned or an inherited talent I am not sure, but it was one of her most valuable tools in reaching these children: the electricity that was vibrant in her reached across and touched the child, often before words could.

Helga’s husband Karl worked at a clerical job; their only son was grown, living in the West, They lived in a small upstairs apartment in a two-family house, saving money all year in order to travel. Each winter during Christmas vacation they went to Puerto Rico; in the summer they rode bicycles across Europe. Looking at Helga, I would think of my own friends, my own life, our large homes, all our possessions – and yet Helga had achieved a freedom, a sense of joy, that was absent in my own life.

It was not that she always had an admirable response or even a proper one. She did not. She was no saint. But the thing was, she did respond! She was alive, she was human, she cared, and she showed us that she did. There were no pretenses to Helga. What she felt, she communicated, and because there was no veneer it came through straight and clear.

If a child, as he gradually learned or rediscovered words, came to Helga saying, “Kite,” Helga would listen, repeat, “You like the kite. Ah – get it then. Get the kite. Let’s see it now, this red kite.”

And now Jimmy, excited by the sight and feel of the kite, tugs Helga’s arm: “Kite. Fly kite. Fly kite.”

Helga sits back on her heels from where she has been kneeling beside the boy and says, “Ah, fly the kite. So you think we should fly the kite, leave our papers and crayons, and go fly the kite. Is that what you think?”

Jimmy, ordinarily listless, pale as milk beneath his red hair, hops up and down with excitement. “Fly kite, Helga. Go fly kite.”

Helga grins, satisfied with her work, with the extra words she has managed to extract from Jimmy, and says, “All right, you monkey – we’ll leave the work and go fly the kite.”

And soon all of us – the four children, myself, and Helga – have on our jackets and are trudging out to the field beyond the school, Jimmy carrying the kite. Then they run, the small red-haired boy and Helga in her sneakers. They run holding the string of the kite together, getting it started – until suddenly the kite lifts and sails up high, like hope itself, flashing, tipping against the sky, and we cheer and clap our hands.

I cannot remember now how many weeks it was before Helga spoke to me. I remember that I felt no resentment because of her silence. It seemed to me a logical thing: she was trying to do something important, and volunteers got in her way; it was natural that she be impatient with me. At the same time I had no intention of leaving.

There were other teachers in the school who were good. I watched them in morning assemblies and in the playground and at lunch, but none of them rang the bell for me the way Helga did. Her children grew faster than any others, became independent sooner – or so it seemed to me. I knew I could learn more from her than from anyone else. Whether she liked me or not was not essential. I was not lonely. I did not need her friendship; I needed her example.

For instance, I watched her teach Sarah to walk. Sarah did not walk at all when she first came to school. She was five, with pale yellow hair and the fine, silky skin of a baby. She was a week late starting school because she had been ill, so I was there when she came that first day. Her mother carried her up the stairs to Helga’s room, spread a blanket, and laid her on the floor. There Sarah curled up on her side, her thumb in her mouth. Helga said nothing; but after the mother had left, Helga slipped the blanket from beneath Sarah, folded it, and put it in the back of a closed cupboard. The little girl whimpered and cried, the other children circling around her as I have seen a flock of sea gulls do when one of the birds is injured. The morning was ruined, the children upset and fretful; no work could be done with Sarah mewling, crying, there on the floor. Another teacher might have let her keep the blanket that first day while she adjusted to the school. Not Helga. She would set no such precedent in her classroom – a five-year-old child was not treated like an infant, left lying in a blanket.

Finally Sarah moved. Painfully, slowly, she crawled across the floor, stopping every few minutes to rest, then continuing her slow, tortuous journey as we watched, holding our breath. She made her way directly to the cabinet where Helga had put her blanket, and scratched with her tiny hands at the door. Helga picked her up then and carried her to the rocking chair, talking to her, mixing German words with English:

“Come now – come now, little one. It is all right. Everything will be all right. I know you now; you cannot fool Helga. You are smart and you can move. You try to fool us, ja? Lying there, sucking on your thumb. But you are smart, ja? You know just where I hid that blanket, and when you want it enough and I do not bring it to you, then you yourself go to get it. Ja, ja, my little one, my pretty golden one, we will teach you to talk and to walk.”

Helga rocked her then and sang to her. Each morning after that, Helga greeted Sarah at the front door and carried her up the stairs herself. She did not wish to explain to Sarah’s mother what had happened to the blanket – that it now lay discarded beneath a box of old records in the recesses of the cabinet. Before long, it would disappear altogether. Dealing with parents or the public was not one of Helga’s strong points; she left that to the Director.

Sarah crawled more and more on the green linoleum in Helga’s room, gradually strengthening arms, legs, curiosity, as she explored the room. A small rag doll was her favorite toy. She would find it and play with it long hours at a time. One morning, before Sarah arrived, Helga moved the doll from the floor to the top of one of the low cabinets. Another frustrating, miserable day for all of us – worse than the first because now Sarah had a temper. She not only whimpered and whined; she screamed and kicked her heels against the floor in rage – but two days later she stood for the first time, pulling herself up until she could reach the top of the cabinet, reach her doll. And when she had it safe in one hand, balancing herself with the other to stay upright, she laughed out loud in triumph. Helga let her have her triumph, shaking her head, saying, “Ah, you, Sarah, such a girl. You are too smart for me. Too smart for old Helga. You find that doll no matter where I put it.”

From crawling to walking to climbing that long flight of stairs to Helga’s room. At first Helga stayed where she could cushion the fall if it occurred. Then, as confidence grew, she moved on ahead so that Sarah could see her there, have incentive to move ahead – not begging or pleading with the child, simply waiting, expecting her to be able to do it. And she did. Even then Helga’s praise was short – one word: “Good!” – brief, clipped: “Hang up your coat now. We’re late.”

Helga, wise, strong, letting Sarah savor the pride in her own accomplishment, not setting up a new dependency. Even the morning, many months later, when Sarah came up the whole flight, breaking away from her mother at the door, walking fast, climbing without holding on, up the stairs, up to Helga – even then her kiss on Sarah’s neck was brief, and she said only, “You’ve a lot of energy today, girl. Come and help me.” And they went together to do battle against the toilet.

Helga and I had one thing in common, and it was one of the things that made me sure that I must work under her, learn from her, rather than from another teacher. Helga and I had the same basic language. Even though our native tongues were different – she born in Germany, I in America – we both had a body language and communicated best through it, trusting it more than words. It was less tricky, more complete. It is more than merely touch: people touch each day and communicate nothing. Body language is the first language – the way the mother speaks to the child long before he can understand her words. As she holds him, bathes him, feeds him, she is telling him of love or anger or irritation. So, too, Helga spoke to her seriously emotionally disturbed children, many of whom had rejected verbal communication, and they listened to this body language. Most of her touching was light and firm and quick. She used it to communicate affection, support, pride in the child; usually she touched the back, shoulders, arm, or head; she used it alone or with a few simple words. She also used another kind of touching. It was really more holding. It said in effect, “I am here. We will survive.” She reacted this way during violence, when a child tried to kick her or bite himself – holding him, restraining him from the destructive act and at the same time comforting him with the solidness of her body. When violence explodes inside a child, all things seem unreal, and the solid strength and warmth of another human being who is not driven away or shattered by it makes the terror more controllable.

Never, however, did she use this body language to express her own anger or irritation. Striking a child may cause him to become fearful of your touch, and this is too valuable a tool to lose, too high a price to pay for momentary frustration. Instead, Helga swore. She cursed as I had never heard a woman do before, and it seemed to harm the children not at all.

If I do not remember when she first addressed me directly, I do remember when she first called me by name.

It was in the spring of that first year, more like summer really although the official date had not arrived. Yellow daffodils had already flooded the hills and fields where we had sailed our kite. Nick, our one male teacher, had put up swings under two of the apple trees, and whenever we could we took the children there in the late morning to play and relax before lunch.

I was pushing Chris on a swing – pushing him from in front instead of from behind so that I could see his face while I played with him. A small game had developed between us: he would straighten and stiffen his legs as the swing approached me, and then laugh out loud as his feet hit my hands and I pushed against them, sending him arcing gently back. Helga had taken the other three children to play some sort of game with Nick’s group. Since Chris was not very good at games, always running, hitting, biting, Helga had stated, “It is a good day for a swing for Chris,” and I had known I was to do this. I loved being with Chris anyway – his very stubbornness fascinated me. Bright as a button, he refused to speak a word; perfectly toilet-trained for months now, he would deliberately pee on the Director’s foot when she brought visitors to our room for “public relations.” She handled it well, though, not even blanching as the brown leather of her shoe turned slowly darker and a puddle formed around it as Chris stood still, looking out the window, smiling, with her hand stroking his head.

In any event, I was totally absorbed in my game with Chris and, thinking we were alone, had even started hamming it up a little as I had with my own children, making funny faces, pretending to be knocked backward when his feet hit my hands. I thought he was beginning to say something: was it “More” – “Mo, mo”? I had not heard footsteps, and was startled when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned quickly. Unexpectedly, Helga was standing beside me.

“Mary,” she said, calling me by name for the first time, “these are for you.” She stretched out her hand toward me and it was full of small wild strawberries. We ate them there together, standing in the sun, sharing the sharp, sweet taste, the grittiness. Since then I have been given many other gifts and some honors, but none has meant more to me than this. Helga had acknowledged me; I was sure then that I could teach.