Among School Children (7 page)

But to be a teacher implies parts of most of those roles and of some others, too. Decades of research and reform have not altered the fundamental facts of teaching. The task of universal, public, elementary education is still usually being conducted by a woman alone in a little room, presiding over a youthful distillate of a town or city. If she is willing, she tries to cultivate the minds of children both in good and desperate shape. Some of them have problems that she hasn't been trained even to identify. She feels her way. She has no choice.

At the end of the day, after the intercom had announced, "We have some birthdays," and had named the birthday children and then had sent everyone home, first the ones who went on buses and then the walkers, Chris would gather up her own homework and go to the door. She'd look back one last time, to ask of Room 205 if she'd forgotten something, and shut off the lights. She'd head down the hallway, past half a dozen doors like her own. She'd shove her keys in her mailbox in the office, and often she would stop a moment to exchange pleasantries with the chief secretary, Lil, who would be standing behind the long, motel-like reception desk.

Grandmotherly, white-haired Lil was the only person in the school whom
everybody
liked. Her admirers included the children who chronically ended up sitting in the bad-boy chairs—these children were mostly boys—outside the principal's office. While they sat there waiting to get yelled at by Al, Lil would talk to them. "I'm
very
disappointed with you." They'd smile sheepishly. In the middle of one day that fall, Chris came through the office and found Lil leading a group of tough-looking boys in song. She had them singing "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean." It was a most improbable scene, Lil behind the counter wearing a small smile, and the tough-looking boys in their muscle T-shirts sitting there with heads thrown back, belting out that song. Sometimes at the end of the day, Chris would find Lil dealing calmly with the typical sort of unpredictable problem, as on the afternoon that fall when, around two o'clock, a drunk staggered into the office saying he had to pick up somebody or other at noon, and it had to be explained to him that he had come to the wrong place at the wrong time. "Thank God for Lil," Chris often thought. Chris wondered if the school could function without her.

Chris would head out to the parking lot, her pocketbook and her bulging blue bookbag bouncing. She usually appeared to be in a hurry even when she wasn't. She'd stride toward her small yellow station wagon. It had a baby seat in the back. As a girl, Chris had imagined herself driving such a car, a station wagon equipped for children. She had foreseen a bigger one with wood on its sides, like the cars that mothers drove on the wholesome TV shows of her youth.

To the west, the top of a crane in the Sullivan Scrapyard poked up above the chain link fence along Bowers Street. To the south were flat-roofed factory buildings. In the small park to the north beside the parking lot, the trunks of saplings were still wrapped in cloth, like racehorses' legs. There weren't many other trees in sight. Beyond the park stretched a weedy patch of vacant lots, and then old red brick apartment buildings with wooden porches, laundry hanging on clotheslines on those porches.

Kelly School is in an old industrial and residential part of Holyoke, a neighborhood long known as the Flats. Yankee investors, mostly from Boston, invented Holyoke in the 1840s out of the whole cloth of a small farm town. Immigrant Irish laborers built the city, damming the Connecticut River at its falls and making it flow through what would become the Flats, along an ingenious network of canals that fed falling water to the turbines of long blocks of tall brick mills. Holyoke was sométhing new in America, one of the nation's first planned industrial communities, and the Flats was an essential part of the city's engine. For a time, around the turn of the century, Holyoke produced more paper than any other city in the world, staining the wide Connecticut a variety of colors all the way down to the city of Springfield.

Chris Zajac—née Christine Padden—spent the first two years of her life in this neighborhood. Her apartment building had stood just a couple of now half-demolished blocks to the north of the school. Her father worked about a half mile away, in the mill of a giant paper company called National Blank Book. He was a section leader, a subforeman, in the shipping and receiving department. He had walked to work among shoulder-to-shoulder crowds of men with lunch boxes, down streets that old-timers remember as having been clean. Perhaps they were cleaner in memory than they ever were in fact, but back then, in the late 1950s, the Flats still looked like a thriving part of a thriving city. But even by then Holyoke's industries had fallen into a decline, which by the 1970s became altogether visible.

As the city's population fell, from nearly seventy thousand at the peak to about forty thousand in the 1980s, the buildings of the Flats deteriorated. Some mills were abandoned. In the name of urban renewal—and partly in order to limit the size of the growing Puerto Rican population—City Hall presided over the demolition of many old apartment blocks. Most dramatically, the Flats burned. For years, flames lit the nighttime sky over Holyoke. Fires started in old wiring. Pyromaniacs and people bent on personal vendettas and professionals interested in insurance money set fires, and several were fatal. The fires changed the landscape utterly. Although they had abated now, the phrase "burned out" was still occasionally used in the hallways of Kelly School to explain why a child had vanished from the rolls.

Lately, the state and federal governments had put up money to rebuild part of the Flats, and landlords had actually renovated some apartment buildings. The far northern section of the neighborhood made local optimists declare, "It's coming back." The place was clearly in transition, but its next direction wasn't really clear. The train station in the Flats, which H. H. Richardson himself designed, now housed an auto parts store. On many streets, vacant lots accumulating trash and weeds surrounded lone, sooty red brick apartment buildings, which had the outlines of vanished neighbors etched on their side walls. They didn't look it, but even the most decrepit of those buildings had become valuable. Because so many buildings had disappeared and inexpensive housing was scarce in the region, and because the state and federal governments guaranteed a lot of rents, real estate speculators had lately moved in on the Flats and other run-down parts of Holyoke. They'd buy a tenement in the Flats or South Holyoke or Churchill, jack up the mostly subsidized rents, refinance the building, and, sometimes, sell it for a handsome profit. So far they had not greatly improved the majority of buildings.

Kelly School is in the Flats, but not exactly of the Flats. The people involved in its creation, back in the 1970s, had imagined Kelly School the cornerstone of the revival of the neighborhood, the phoenix rising out of the ashes of the Flats. They had built it into the side of a hill, on the high ground of those riverine lowlands: an imposing, complex structure of right angles, made of yellow brick with black asphalt trim along the eaves of its flat roofs. Its plexiglass dome stuck up like a tank turret. The designers gave it not just one but two fine, expensive gyms, in the hopeful thought that these would draw the community to its school. But the custodians locked up the school after hours now, because vandals had worked over the locker rooms.

Al Laudato liked to show visitors the front side of his school. He'd point to the saplings in the park and say, "When those grow up, hey, it's going to be beautiful here." He'd mark off with gestures of the hands a stretch of clean yellow brick wall that extended a mere twenty feet on either side of the front door. "From there to there we don't have any." Al meant there was no graffiti on that wall. "We're lucky here," Al said. He meant here at Kelly School, and he wasn't joking.

The school was still the newest and fanciest in the city. But walk around to its taller side and graffiti was everywhere: boasts and threats such as
BORN TO ROCK THE FEMALES
and
WANDA THE PATA YOUR ASS
is
GRASS
, and many nicknames such as
VAMP, PITO, COSMIC, DAZE
, but only one reference to the staff inside, a reference to Al, which read,
LAUDATOS DICK
. In the evening, the school grounds became essentially unregulated territory. Then it belonged partly to thieves and vandals. Someone had busted all the exterior lights that were set high up on the walls, and someone had managed to pitch old bicycle tires over the lofty light stanchions. Rocks had dented and fractured sections of the wooden walls of the elevated walkways connecting the building's two wings. Those scars and the whitened patches on ground-floor windows, left by burglars who had tried to burn their way in, and the graffiti, which flowed across every surface reachable from the ground, across the brick walls and vandalism ordinance signs and ground-floor classroom windows and doorways (one of which always stank of urine in the morning), all gave the building a very melancholy aspect. Here and there on nearby side streets, old pairs of sneakers hung by their laces from telephone wires. In Holyoke, as in larger cities, hanging sneakers are small-time drug dealers' inexpensive advertising. After hours especially, the school looked like a fortress, lonely and despised.

A humble setting has one advantage. When grace descends, it is hard to miss. Heading for her car one fall day, Chris was greeted by the sight of a little battered automobile festooned with flowers in the school parking lot. Red, pink, orange, yellow, purple flowers were stuck in every crevice of that car, into keyholes and cracks around the doors, the windows, the hood, the gas cap. One flower was inserted into the broken shaft of the radio antenna. The car belonged to one of the Puerto Rican teachers. Many of her fourth-grade students had recently come from the island. They had sneaked out at lunchtime to decorate the car of their
maestra.

Beauty always lurked somewhere in the school, but when Chris looked at its assaulted exterior, she felt depressed. This was her school and the Flats was part of her city and fully half of her class came from the neighborhood. She would say to herself, "I don't know why people want to destroy things." She felt sincerely puzzled, as well as sad and angry.

The apartment building where she had lived her first two years had been torn down. She didn't miss it, because she didn't remember it. She'd never really known the Flats. She knew it now only through car windows and, vicariously, through her students.

Most routes out of the Flats lead across the canals and then uphill. Chris always took the shortest way, down Bowers to Appleton, under the railroad trestle, past an ivy-covered brick factory that looked like a castle, and across the first two canals, the western boundary of the Flats. From there it wasn't far up to High Street, the center of the old commercial downtown.

A lot of High Street, both the sidewalks and many buildings, had been repaired, but the storefront businesses still included a military recruiting station, a dance studio, a pornographic bookstore, and, near the corner of Appleton and High, a Salvation Army depot, where in the morning lines of people would stand waiting for breakfast. "I don't know if it'll come back or not," Chris often said when driving across High Street. Like many natives, she felt nostalgic for old Holyoke. She had also found that she preferred—infinitely preferred—living in Holyoke to leaving it.

Homesickness ran in Chris's family. Her mother had felt it keenly during those two years when Chris was a baby and the family had lived in the apartment in the Flats. Chris's mother had grown up in a small frame house in another part of town, in what Chris called "the lower-class Highlands." Her parents didn't have a car back then. Mrs. Padden would put the infant Chris in the baby carriage and walk back to the Highlands, out of the Flats, across the covered footbridge that still spans the railroad tracks, and up the hill, through the center of the city, through Old Ward Four, leaving behind smokestacks and tall Victorian brick factories and apartment blocks with their many-storied wooden porches, and walking into the narrow, tree-lined streets of her real home. Nearly every day, Chris's mother would make that journey, to spend a few hours where she'd been raised.

Most people think they will never come to resemble their parents, until the process is complete and they don't mind anymore. "I'm being like my mother now." Chris was saying that to herself more and more often these days, when, for instance, she found she just had to clean up her family room before she could sit down in it. Her mother would visit Chris and Billy's house and would reposition items in Chris's refrigerator. When her mother left, Chris would put the items back where she liked them, and laugh. "I'm being like my mother now."

Mrs. Padden said that she could hear her voice in Chris's sometimes, but that Chris got her quick tongue from her father, and that Chris resembled both of them in her cautiousness. "I was a very, very timid person," said Mrs. Padden. "My mother told me that. I was afraid of Santa Claus." She went on, naming one of Chris's sisters: "Now my Mary was different. She was more adventuresome than Chris." As a young woman, Chris's sister had quit her job and gone off with a girlfriend on a bus, to see the country. "Chrissy said to me, 'I don't know how Mary could do that.' I don't know where Mary got her adventuresomeness. It must be someone in our past. But Chrissy
was
forward to a certain extent. It could've been third or fourth grade. It might have been second. She came home and said they were having a play at school, and the teacher asked if anyone could sing, and Chris said yes, she could sing. She sang the song, and I think it was something like, if you didn't have rain, you couldn't have flowers. To get up and sing on the stage in front of all the people, she had to have some kind of courage."

In fact, Chris was quite adventurous in a local sense. A colleague of Chris's, who knew only the Chris who taught school, once said, "If I had to sum Chris up in one sentence, it would be: Chris is not afraid to try new things." What did make Chris afraid was the idea of leaving home. She had tried leaving Holyoke once, and once had been enough.