Benchley, Peter - Novel 06 (7 page)

 
          
 
"No." He shook his head. "It's
unfair."

 
          
 
''Unfair? Unfair to who? What about unfair to
Jerome? You want to let one stupid-ass rule destroy a boy's life?"

 
          
 
"Really, Mrs. Peniston ..."

 
          
 
"Really what? It isn't like he can't
read. It isn't like he can't count. I don't care what the board says. Suppose
they said you had to pass knitting. Would that be fair?"

 
          
 
Mr. Joslin spread his hands. "I don't
make the rules."

 
          
 
Ivy fought to compose herself one final time.

 
          
 
"Mr. Joslin, I am a poor person. I am a .
. ." She paused, commanding herself not to abase herself by playing the
black fugue. "... an immigrant. I work for a living. I have a son who has
a chance to make his way—more, to make a contribution. Aren't we the kind of
people this country says it wants to help?"

 
          
 
"Indeed. And it does. It gives you
..."

 
          
 
"Except when it really counts." Ivy
stood, and the movement freed her, let slip the dogs of war. "You could do
it, Joslin. You could, but you won't. And you know why? 'Cause you're scared
shitless." She walked to the door.

 
          
 
Joslin was wary. He would have been frightened
if she had stayed seated. A shopping bag could contain anything, A gun. Mace. A
Molotov cocktail. But she had gone to the door, so he felt safe saying,
"I'm sorry you refuse to understand."

 
          
 
"I understand okay." She opened the
door. "I understand that you stink."

 
          
 
Outside, Ivy sat on the dirty red brick steps
and closed her eyes, squeezing back tears of rage. For a few seconds she let
herself wallow in a mire of venom and self-pity, hating Joslin and her Navy man
and
Washington
and the
United States
and poverty and being black.

 
          
 
Then a hand touched her shoulder and a voice
said, "You okay, lady?"

 
          
 
She opened her eyes and looked into the face
of a tall boy with a bookbag slung over his shoulder, who said, "Need a
Pepsi?"

 
          
 
"No." Ivy shook her head.
"Thank you."

 
          
 
"There's a machine inside."

 
          
 
Ivy nodded. The boy bounced up the steps.
"Hey!" she called after him, and he stopped. "Did you pass
typing?"

 
          
 
"Don't take it till next year. But I
will, no problem." The boy grinned.

 
          
 
"How d'you know?"

 
          
 
"There's ways'."

 
          
 
"How you cheat a typing test? Can't cheat
a machine."

 
          
 
The boy grinned again, and touched a finger to
his temple and turned into the school building.

 
          
 
Ivy wanted to chase him, to shake his secret
from him. But she didn't, because it wouldn't do any good. To convince Jerome
to cheat—even assuming she could arrange with his typing teacher for a special
reexamination—would be a no-win crusade. If she succeeded, she would destroy
his respect for her and for the ethical code she had bludgeoned into his head
for seventeen years.

 
          
 
It wasn't worth it. If there was cheating to
be done, she'd have to do it for him. Without his knowing.

 
          
 
She found her watch. She was on the early
shift this week, but there was still plenty of time.

 
          
 
She headed westward, not bothering to keep
track of street numbers. She knew that if she moved west for a while she'd be
near work and could orient herself then. Direction never had to be confirmed.
Even in a city, her interior compass performed flawlessly, an integer in her
genetic code, passed down through three centuries of island people for whom a
sense of direction and a sensitivity to coming weather were life-and-death
instincts. She knew innately where the sun was and which way it was going, so
as she walked she could keep her mind focused on its business, leaving only one
channel open to be alert for traffic lights and weirdos.

 
          
 
Problem. There was no way Jerome was going to
get a high school diploma from
George
Washington
Carver
High School
this spring. Could she appeal to the school
board? Out of the question. If Joslin wasn't about to bend the board's rules,
the board wouldn't be about to go over his head to do something it wasn't
inclined to do anyway.

 
          
 
Problem. Without a diploma, Jerome had no
chance of landing a job with DTCo. Was there anyone to appeal to at DTCo.? No.

 
          
 
Problem. If Jerome didn't get the job with
DTCo., he would become a statistic this summer—one of the fifty percent of
black youth unemployed—because except in the broad area of numbers and
machines, Jerome had the ambition and intellectual curiosity of an armchair.
Ivy had had to coach him, cajole him, threaten him, into a B-minus in his
English course, reading the books aloud to him, making up quizzes for him to
take at home, drilling him in names by making each name a number and playing
programming games with the numbers.

 
          
 
Final problem. If Jerome became a statistic.
Ivy might as well lead him to the jailhouse steps and wait for them to come out
and arrest him, for it was as inevitable as high tide that someone would get
hold of Jerome's itching fingers and idling mind and turn them to no good. He
was naive as a puppy and playful as a kitten, which would have been fine if
they lived in some place like McLean, Virginia, or Chevy Chase, Maryland, where
there were things to do like tennis and golf, and where simple mischief didn't
have a bad name, instead of in the Northeast ghetto, where many of the most
popular games were played with toys from the Charter Arms Company and almost
all frolic ended either in blood or in custody.

 
          
 
Conclusion. Jerome must get a high school or
high-school equivalency diploma within the next two weeks. He must have
physical possession of the piece of paper, because it said, clear as day, on
the DTCo. application, "Proof of eligibility will be required."

 
          
 
Question. How to acquire a diploma?

 
          
 
Option. Wait till graduation day and have
Jerome put a stocking over his head and mug a graduating senior and steal his
diploma. Rejected. Joslin would hear about it, and because he couldn't possibly
be as stupid as he was bullheaded, would dope it out.

 
          
 
She called up every name of every friend and
acquaintance from every comer of her life—her childhood, her Navy sojourn, the
people at work, her neighbors—hoping to find a clue to access any of them might
have to a high school diploma.

 
          
 
Nothing.

 
          
 
She told herself to keep trying, reminded
herself what her friend, Mr. Pym, always said: Free enterprise means you're
free to help yourself, 'cause it's for sure no one else is gonna help you.

 
          
 
Mr. Pym. Maybe he'd know.

 
          
 
Don't be foolish, giri. He's a caterer. What's
a caterer know about getting hold of a high school diploma? More'n you know,
that's a bleeding fact. Besides, if he doesn't know how to do it, maybe he
knows somebody who knows.

 
          
 
Mr. Pym knew a lot about a lot of things you'd
think he'd be bone-ignorant about. Like
Bermuda
customs. Last year, Christmas time, Jerome
had made some video games for his Bermuda cousins— made them, out of scraps of
videotape and discarded cassettes he found at work—and they seemed like perfect
presents until Ivy learned that Bermuda customs wouldn't understand homemade
video games and would slap a duty of about $300 on the two dozen games.

 
          
 
Mr. Pym learned about the dilemma during idle
chitchat at his apartment one afternoon, and he said simply, "Give them to
me." Said he had a client who traveled to
Bermuda
all the time and the customs people trusted
him.

 
          
 
Lo and behold! The tapes arrived in
Bermuda
duty-free, delivered to Ivy's sister,
Doris, by a shy white man in a dark suit and a gaudy Sportshirt. They were the
hit of the season.

 
          
 
She owed Mr. Pym one. No, she owed him a
bundle, if she counted all the little favors he'd done for her—like giving her
free pain pills for her bad knee—since that day a year ago when he'd seen her
coming out of work and her shopping bag had hemorrhaged and spilled her watch
and her lunch box and her support hose and her Odor Eaters all over the avenue.
Most people passed her by, but Mr. Pym collected her stuff and found her a new
shopping bag and accompanied her all the way home.

 
          
 
She wanted to pay him back for all his favors,
but there wasn't any way. She couldn't offer him money. She couldn't cook a pie
for him: He had professionals cooking pies for him all day long.

 
          
 
He said he didn't want anything, and he seemed
to mean it. He seemed genuinely interested in her, in who she was and what her
life was like, now and before, and where she worked and whom she worked for and
what she liked and didn't like about everything. He said he was a collector of "people
trivia," and he encouraged her to notice funny offbeat things that
happened at work.

 
          
 
The trouble was, the people she worked with
were a bunch of downtrodden whiners with whom Ivy had nothing in common, and
their problems were neither funny nor offbeat— children in jail, children on
drugs, hardhearted landlords and afflictions of every orifice and organ of the
human body.

 
          
 
If she was going to call Mr. Pym and ask for
help with the high-school diploma problem, she wanted to be able to bring him a
present, and if she had any hope of rooting out a tidbit that might brighten
his day, it would have to concern the people she worked/or.

 
          
 
Coincidentally, today might be a good day for
such a discovery. Normally, all the offices had been dusted, swept, scoured and
waxed, had had all loose papers removed, bagged and burned by the time she set
to work on the hallway floors. But when she worked the early shift, it was she
who cleaned some of the offices and removed the papers during the last couple
of hours of her work day, and because of the high-level goings-on that always
crackled around the building it was common for several people to work late. If
she kept her eyes and ears open, she might be able to pick up something that
would help balance her relationship with Mr. Pym.

 
          
 
Ivy looked up and found herself in
Lafayette
Park
. She checked her watch. Still early. She
had plenty of time to make herself a cup of tea in the employees' locker room
and look up Mr. Pym's Plat du Jour Caterers in the Yellow Pages. She crossed
Pennsylvania Avenue
and turned right.