Fire in the Ashes (27 page)

“The truth is that the school he’s now attending has not served this young man well. But we saw a spark in him, an appetite for learning, that we frankly do not always see in students who arrive here from much better schools and have had more thorough preparation at the time when we admit them. I think that he can handle it and, as tough as it may be at first, I can promise you that at this school we don’t give up on anyone too easily.”

The school, however, did not have a large endowment. He asked me, therefore, if I could assist him in finding a potential donor to provide a scholarship for Jeremy. At Martha’s intervention, a generous and wealthy man who had worked in the administration of Bill Clinton agreed to pay for Jeremy’s tuition. As in Pineapple’s case, Jeremy’s acceptance by the school included a condition, set by the headmaster, that he must repeat a grade because the school believed he would need the continuity of three full academic years to graduate successfully.

As summer came, his mother and the pastor made sure he would have the clothes he’d need for fall and the New England winter. The poet counseled him, in his old-fashioned and didactic way, about the effort he would need to bring to bear “to organize” his eager but “undisciplined mentality.” When the moment came to leave New York, he packed his bags and favorite books and all his treasured writings, and headed off, still a very youthful-looking boy, with that mixture of excitement and last-minute disarray I pretty much expected.

He didn’t call me for about ten days. When he did, I could see that he was calling from another person’s number. He said the school librarian had let him use her phone.

“She’s sitting here beside me. Would you like to say hello?” Then: “Oh no! She had to go upstairs.…

“Anyway, I have to go, or I’ll be late for study hall.”

He didn’t yet sound organized.

In the first six months of boarding school, Jeremy bombarded me with voice mails.

“FLASH!” he said one night that fall. “I’ve been on a roll this week. Check out a book called Tender Is the Night—page 184. Also page 83. Also page 101.…”

Another night: “Hey, Jonathan! It’s me! If you’re there, pick up! If you’re not, don’t pick up! I’m in my dorm. Writing an essay. I’ll be up ’til midnight.”

“Actually,” he said, when I called him back, “I’m working on two essays. They’re for different classes.

“The first one: Why do people pass the blame for things they do to someone else? I started with Adam blaming Eve who blamed the snake who probably blamed someone else. Then Pharaoh blaming the Hebrews. Then Hitler blaming the Jews. I also quoted Jesus, but not as the son of God. I said that, whether you believe in him or not, he was an important prophet and philosopher.…

“Essay number two: I wrote about my life at home. You know, about my father? How he’s there but isn’t there? I tried to do it in a way that will not be hurtful, in case he ever reads it.

“In history the other day we had a talk about the nineteen twenties. I found it of great interest that the Charleston
and the flappers with their notoriety and a certain looseness, which is not the same as immorality, not necessarily, were all the craze just before the market crash and people jumping out of windows.

“I asked my teacher whether it was okay to say this was ironical.”

In November: “A new experience this morning at assembly. We listened to a chamber group. I think it’s known as ‘an ensemble.’ ”

“Do you know which group it was?”

“The name escapes me,” he replied.

“But you enjoyed it?”

“Shall I speak the truth?”

“Why not?” I said.

“I found it very boring.”

On a more respectful note, he told me that his English class had started reading Shakespeare.

“Which play?” I asked.

“Richard,” he said.

“Richard the Second?”

“No. The Third.”

I told him I had never read it, so he rapidly delivered a summation of the part that he’d already read. He spoke of Richard as “a hunchback—villainous, born premature, dogs howling at his birth because he was so ugly.” He said that Richard was “tormented” and “tormenting,” “the victim of his own obsession,” and connected this with a theme familiar in the writings of his favorite author. “You’ll recall
The Tell-tale Heart? There’s a line there where he talks about his own obsessive thoughts. ‘It is impossible to say how first the idea got into my brain, but, once conceived, it haunts me night and day.’

“My teacher says it’s good for us to look for these connections.…”

In January, he reported, students in his English class did
independent essays. He had chosen “Children’s Rhymes” because his English teacher told him that a number of these rhymes originated in events of history.

“ ‘Ring Around the Rosie,’ I’ve discovered, takes us
way
back into history. ‘Ashes, ashes, all fall down’—that’s about the plague. The one in London, in the sixteen hundreds.

“ ‘Humpty Dumpty had a great fall’—that’s King Richard. All the king’s men were Richard’s men. A king who lost his crown.…”

He also had opinions about certain rhymes he didn’t think we ought to read to children. “ ‘This little piggy went to market. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none.’ Why do we want to rub it in? Why would we want to tell these things to children?

“ ‘Lady Bug, Lady Bug’ is pretty awful, too, if you think about the words. ‘Your house is on fire. Your children are gone.’ Is that the sort of thing we
really
want to read to kids before they go to sleep?

“ ‘When the wind blows, the cradle will rock. Down comes the baby, cradle and all.…’

“No wonder children have bad dreams!

“ ‘Itsy-bitsy spider, climbing up the spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain. Itsy-bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.…’

“It’s like Sisyphus. He’s never going to succeed. You end up feeling kind of sorry for the spider.”

I asked what got him into writing about something so unusual.

“Once my teacher set me off,” he said, “I kind of kept on rolling. I went to the librarian. She was a great help to me. I found a lot of writing on this subject.

“Anyway, my teacher liked the paper.”

In March I drove out to the school so that I could talk more with his teachers. His English teacher made the point that in his essays Jeremy was temperamentally resistant to conciseness. “In his papers he will seldom find the shortest line from ‘here’ to ‘there.’ He relies on finding nuggets of excitement to string out his writings, which is what enlivens them but also makes it very hard to grade him.”

“Trying to find exactly where he’s heading,” I remarked, “is something like a treasure hunt.”

“At least the treasure’s there,” the teacher said.

I’d been invited to have dinner at the school, but Jeremy had asked permission to go into town with me to a pizza restaurant that was popular with students. On the way, he asked if we could stop first at a stationery store that was near the restaurant. He said he’d bought a picture as a present for his mother—it was a reproduction of a print by Rembrandt—but that he forgot to buy a frame. We stopped at the store. He had the money crunched within his hand. He picked out an inexpensive wooden frame, and then we went for supper.

We didn’t have much time to eat because his theater class was doing a rehearsal of a play—The Inspector General. As we came in, other students filled him in on changes they had made. “Oh no!” he said, but then assured them, “It’s okay.” I stayed to watch the beginning of the play, then headed back to Boston.

Spring break: He met me in Manhattan. We went to a different bookstore for some reason, not the one in Union Square. When we left and went down in the subway, we got confused and took the wrong train—the Number 5 train, not the Number 6—to go back to the Bronx. We got off at Third Avenue and had to walk for several blocks.

As we walked, he told me of a story he had just
completed for his school newspaper. The story was about the poet, Mr. Castro, but he hadn’t turned it in because, he said, he was “having problems” with a couple sentences.

“If you were writing a story,” he asked, “and you said a character was ‘senile’ and ‘simpatico,’ do you think the person would consider that a compliment?”

“Simpatico,” I said, was certainly a compliment, but I told him it would not be flattering to say that somebody was “senile.”

“What does ‘senile’ mean?”

I was surprised he didn’t know. When I told him, he said, “Oops! I think I have to fix it.”

Rain had started. The two of us were getting soaked, but he seemed oblivious to this and kept on asking questions. “Have you ever heard of people,” he inquired, “who walk into the middle of the street and throw themselves in front of cars?”

I told him that I’d never heard of people who actually had thrown themselves in front of cars but that I’d seen stories in the paper about people who would go to court and pretend they had been injured by a car, or on the train, or at the place they worked.

“That’s what I had in mind,” he said.

“Do you know the reason why they do it?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think the word is … ‘damages.’ ”

“Damages—for what?”

He reached slowly for the word and finally answered, “Trauma.”

“Where did you hear that word?”

“One of my teachers,” he replied.

“Did you ask him what it means?”

“He said to look it up.”

“What does it mean?”

“Something that happened to you once,” he said, “and it affects you later on.”

“Is that what the dictionary says?”

“Something like that,” he replied. “But right now”—tapping on his head—“I’m giving you my own opinion.”

It turned out he wasn’t going to his mother’s house but was going to sleep over at his grandma’s. At the front door of the building, as he was about to press the buzzer, he squinted up into the sky, in which the rain was coming down much harder now. He suggested that I come upstairs to get dried off and “have a cup of soup” and “meet my grandma and my cousin.”

I told him that I didn’t think I had the strength to get into a conversation with his family at this hour.

“Jonathan, I promise you that ‘conversation’ will not be a problem.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“You won’t understand a word they say! None of them speak English.”

When I said that I’d feel kind of strange to sit there and not talk to anybody in the room, he looked at the rain again but finally pressed the button to release the door. Even then, he held the door and watched me as I headed down the street in the direction of Brook Avenue.…

On my final visit to the school that year, I drove out early in the afternoon to talk with the headmaster. He said that Jeremy was doing “reasonably well,” although his grades in math were poor—“marginal at best.” He did observe that Jeremy seemed to have “inordinate amounts” of very minor health complaints or “curious small accidents” that coincided closely with the days when he had papers due. “When students pass in papers late, if it happens frequently, teachers sometimes dock them by a grade or two.” He said he didn’t see this as a matter of immense concern and urged me not to speak of it with Jeremy for now.

I stayed on campus late enough to meet with Jeremy before he went to study hall. We were sitting on the front
steps of the library, with the dorms behind us and the playing fields and countryside below. I took the opportunity to ask him something that was often in my mind ever since he had arrived here for the first semester. Beneath the cheerfulness that was apparent when he spoke about the friendships he was making and the obvious excitement he was taking in his literary classes and another theater course, I asked him if he ever felt displaced at all to be within this academic setting and this small New England village, so far from New York.

He thought about his answer before saying, with a prior qualifier that he often used in order not to give offense, “Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy here. I like my teachers very much.” He said he liked his English teacher in particular. “But there’s a certain word you know.…”

He said this with a look that seemed to presuppose I’d know the word he meant, then hesitated, so I asked, “What word?”

“The word is ‘home.’ And home, for me, is where my mother is.”

For a moment, he looked very lonely.

I asked him, “Do you ever cry?”

“I’ve taken a policy not to cry,” he answered. “But if you ever see me weep, you will know that it’s because I’ve hurt my mother’s feelings.”

His love for his mother was at the core of his existence. The fear that she might ever undergo a feeling of abandonment was in his mind continually.

In the fall of 1998, his second year at boarding school, he told me that his class was doing European history. “Modern history. League of Nations, rise of the dictatorships, Mussolini, genocide in Germany, equivocation
of the French, Ribbentrop and Molotov, Chamberlain, et cetera.… Oops! Sorry! I forgot one other minor thing. The Russian Revolution.”

In the spring, he reported, they were doing U.S. history, but he said, “It’s not in strict chronology. I mean, it’s not in sequence. Like, the teacher wants us to examine certain themes. This month, for instance, we’re into race relations, starting from the Civil War and up until these present days.

“And we had a speaker here. Someone that you know. His name was Robert Coles. Dr. Coles, I ought to say. I saw a sadness in his eyes. I went up to speak with him.”

I picked up with interest on his words.

“What did that look of sadness mean to you?” I asked.

“A man with nothing false about him,” Jeremy replied. “He doesn’t hide his feelings. Transparency? Sincerity? Am I using the right words?”

In the same semester he had a course in which his teacher introduced the class to Aeschylus, Euripides—“and, you know, the other Greek tragedians. Then we did some modern authors such as Shaw and Pirandello. Also Strindberg. Also Ibsen and Eugene O’Neill.”

Near the end of the spring, he went on, “my theater teacher brought us to New York. We saw three plays, one by O’Neill—it was The Iceman Cometh.