Heir to the Glimmering World (2 page)

Despite fits of shame or irritation, I was not sufficiently humiliated by this system—or lack of system—until the night before my eleventh birthday, when my father uncharacteristically announced that he was arranging for a treat. This was extraordinary: usually my birthday was the start of a long spurt of gloom. "On this day," my father would say, "eight years ago, Jenny left me." And the next year: "On this day, nine years ago," and so on. It had been the same all through my earlier childhood.

"It's eleven years tomorrow," he began that evening, "since I lost my Jenny."

But this time I was ready to argue.

"Lena told me she didn't die on account of me. It was afterward, from leukemia. Lena said leukemia's a cancer that gets into your blood."

"Lena told you this? When?"

"Last week. When she brought back the wash."

"You shouldn't listen to any of these women," my father said. "Especially not that one."

"I think I even remember her a little—my mother. She was lying down. I think I remember that. Right over there," I said.

"You remember my wife?" My father's bald scalp reddened; he stared. "It's not possible. She was just giving birth. She gave birth on the sofa, before the doctor came. You shouldn't pay attention to a silly witch. These are all dishonest people—I see it in their kids all the time. They believe in cutting corners, they're brainless, and they'd bribe you blind. If I could afford it, I'd get off their goddamn street, I'd move out of this one-horse goddamn town."

My father, even when I was included, almost never said "we."

"I wish I could have a birthday party," I complained. "Everyone else in my grade gets to have one."

It was then that my father said he would be sure to have some kind of treat for me, he couldn't figure exactly when—but it depended on my carrying a packet of papers down the street that very evening to Lena's house and letting her know it was my birthday.

"Tell her the stuff'll help the kid with tomorrow's test," he said.

I hated going to Lena's house—the rooms smelled of cat dung. Lena had two sons; the younger one wore corduroy knickers, and these too smelled of cat. Timmy, the older one, was in my father's geometry class. He was drudging but sluggish. In payment for Lena's tending to our laundry, my father now and then gave him private lessons.

A day or so later my treat arrived. "Treat": it was an odd word for my father to have used; it settled between his teeth with an ironic click. The treat was a crumbling, lopsided cake with urine-yellow frosting. It leaned like a fallen-in shack, and the artificial lemon icing was so bitter it stung.

"Now that's what I call cake cast upon the waters," my father said. "Isn't that fine? Lena made it for you, and Timmy brought it over before you were awake. Not that the kid was in much of a mood."

"It's not fine. It's not a treat. It's disgusting," I said.

He told me then that the packet he had asked me to deliver was a complete midterm geometry exam: it contained all the questions and all the answers. But it was a discard. It was not the exam he had intended to give the following day; it belonged to the year before.

The cake was still squatting on the table when Lena came storming through our back door.

"You did that on purpose!" she shrieked. "You sent over the wrong test, and my boy put in four hours breaking his head over it, and all the time you knew it was the wrong test!"

"Now wait a minute," my father said. "The wrong test, what are you talking about?"

"How could he pass it, if it wasn't the one you gave them in class? You gave them a different one! You got my son all balled up! See this thing?" She thrust her finger into the soft downward flow of collapsing yellow cake. "Give your kid an idea of what you did to my kid."

"Now wait a minute," my father said again. Pedagogical repetition was his way; it was a type of cunning. "Practice with an old examination is eminently useful, it's recommended. Practice makes perfect, yes?" A sly glint crept into his eye. "You didn't expect me to dishonor myself and my profession, did you? You didn't expect me to hand your son the contents of an examination in advance, did you?"

But I saw that she
had
expected it; she had assumed it, and my father had understood she would assume it. They were complicit: that was what lay in their agreement to barter—value for value. But my father had let down his side of the bargain. He had let it down in order to punish Lena for denying the hour of my mother's death. And she, in throwing together that travesty of a cake, was punishing my father for his betrayal of her boy. Wasn't he her son's teacher and helper? Shouldn't he have done what a man whose underwear she scrubbed, whose toilet bowl she cleaned, ought to do?

Lena had intended my cake to be ugly and bitter. And my father had intended to mislead her boy.

It was not strange that I could see all this: I knew my father. It came to me in a flood—the silliness and the malice, the pathos and the pettiness; a simple-minded vengeful woman, her inadequate son, my father's tiny preposterous plots; and then our household, our sterile and constricted small cosmos. A formal feeling, palpable and gossamer, fell over me like a skein. It was as if I had been caught in a fisherman's net and lifted out of a viscid sea. From then on I was able to resist my father at nearly every point.

My resistance took the form, at first, of a furious domesticity. I was old enough to do laundry and clean house, and every afternoon after school I taught myself a repertoire of easy meals. Because my father had long ago declared that we were vegetarians, I never had to touch meat. But I began to make order; my object was to rid us of those women. I scraped an aged layer of annealed oil off the inside of the oven. I stood on a chair and painted all the kitchen shelves. I shopped cautiously and hoarded pennies. The greengrocer, who knew me by name and often gave me, gratis, a basketful of back-of-the-store vegetables that were still usable but not quite salable, one day called out, "You're growing into a shrewd little thing, Rosie!"

I did not feel shrewd. I felt formal, even puritan. I had turned myself into a mad perfectionist. I lived by an inflexible schedule: school; homework; supper; and then, sometimes until midnight, ironing my father's shirts. My father had little to say about this change in our way of life. When I asked for grocery money, he silently handed over his wallet and let me take what I needed.

This skin of formality covered over my mannerisms and the pitch of my voice, and even the march of my sentences. I took over my father's typewriter and practiced typing with the help of a manual and became proficient—I was enamored of the methodical rows of letters. My speech was stilted. I had at that time been reading
Jane Eyre,
and admired the gravity and independence of a sad orphanhood. My own try at gravity and independence was a way of escaping the wilderness of my father's imagination. My goal was utter straightforwardness: it made me prim and smug. I fought chaos and sought symmetry, routine, propriety.

But it soon came clear that though I could make household order, I could not make order of my father's mind. One winter evening, without so much as a warning, my father's principal rang our doorbell and strode in, spraying snow.

"Now Jack," he said, "what's this about Euclid and the Hebrews?"

"We call the Mediterranean a sea," my father said, "which makes it sound insuperable. Better to think of it as a pond, yes?" It was his most serenely teacherly tone. "In ancient days the old sailing ships went back and forth and across, year in and year out, carrying more than goods for trade—"

"What in God's name," the principal roared, "did you tell your eleven o'clock geometry class this morning?"

My father continued mild. "I told them it wasn't merely goods that were traded. It was knowledge, information, education."

"What you told them was that King Solomon invented geometry! You told them Euclid got it all from the Hebrews! From King Solomon!"

"It's perfectly possible," my father said. He was buoyant; he was thinking well of himself; he expected admiration if not confirmation. "All sorts of ideas traveled across the pond. Of course we can't be precisely certain of the timing—"

"Stick to the textbook! Stick to the problems in the text! Stick to the Pythagorean theorem! I tell you, Jack, pull something like this again, and you're out of a job."

This colloquy was unfolding in what passed for my father's "office"—his desk and chair in a corner of the foyer. I hid myself in the kitchen, huddled out of sight: I was in absolute fear. What if my father were really sent away? How would we survive? It seemed to me he was growing more and more reckless.

Three years later he was dismissed. King Solomon had nothing to do with it. I was then fourteen ("Fourteen years since my Jenny's gone"), and had almost finished my sophomore term in high school; the ignominy descended on both of us. Our school—Thrace Central High—was small. It served only our town, and a few students from the failed farms nearby, where old abandoned barns decayed on weedy miles of neglected land. Most of the farm people had long ago departed. Syracuse was to the north of us, Troy to the east, Carthage to the west. Our shabby Thrace, with its depressed Main Street, was the poorest of these nobly named upstate places. The others were more fortunate: Syracuse had its university, Troy its shirtmaking, Carthage its candy factory. Thrace had nothing of value—men out of work, or discouraged families on their way to Albany, looking for work. Most of the town boys tolerated no more than two years of high school; the girls went further. This annoyed my father. Girls, he said, though they were born to multiply, were incapable of doing mathematics; I was his prime example.

Thrace Central High employed only one other math teacher, a man who wore pocket handkerchiefs as if they were flags and flaunted three names: Austin Cockerill Doherty. He was unmarried and much younger than my father. The principal was impressed with him and thought him a superior teacher; my father took this as a preference and a slight and smarted over it. "I've got twice the brains," he said. He had chosen Austin Cockerill Doherty for an enemy, and dubbed him "the Tricolor," because of the bright handkerchiefs and the three names; and also because Doherty had inherited money and every year summered in the south of France. "That fellow's free as a bird," my father would mutter.

For some reason—my father believed the principal was behind it—all the available boys were assigned to Doherty's classes, while my father was left with the girls. This meant that his "load," as he called it (though sometimes this was transmuted into "my toad," which led to "my frog," and then "my hog," and finally "my pigs"), was three times heavier than Doherty's, and also, he claimed, three times stupider. His stupid pigs were all girls.

My father plotted his revenge and made me his accomplice. Now that I was in his school, we would—too often—run into each other during the day, which embarrassed us both. Usually, when I spotted my father heading in my direction, I would instantly change course and dart away. I hated it that my classmates might think me overprivileged, dangerous, in the camp of the enemy, because my father was a teacher. As for my father, he simply did not like to see me there.

But on this occasion, when we happened to pass in the corridor—it was late June, the last day of the semester—he whipped me aside and put a hand on my shoulder. His grip was hard. "Rosie," he said, "do me a favor, will you? I've got a curriculum meeting late this afternoon—got to sit in the same pew with the goddamn Tricolor, can't be helped. What I need you to do is go into the office and pull out the grade sheets for Doherty's Algebra 2-B. You'll find 'em right there in the file."

"You mean after school? Go in the office after school? But nobody's there, by then they've all gone home, it's all locked up."

"I'll give you the key. Just go in and get the stuff and take it home for me."

"If you've got the key, can't you get it yourself?"

"It has to be done while I'm in the meeting. So I won't be held responsible. Look here, Rosie," my father said, "it's
important.
"

That night my father sat at his desk for two hours, comparing lists: his girls and the Tricolor's boys.

"You're not fiddling with Mr. Doherty's grades, are you?" I asked.

"Fiddling? What's fiddling? Of course I'm fiddling, can't you see? If those cretins in the office did what they're supposed to do, I wouldn't have to put in all this extra time, would I?"

"I mean tampering."

"Where'd you get an idea like that? I could get thrown out for that."

"Then what are you doing?"

"Improving my students, that's all. Giving the pigs their due."

It was my job to return Doherty's sheets to the file, again after the office staff had left; and then the term was over. Doherty sailed away for the summer, and I still did not know what my father had done.

What he had done (I learned this long afterward) was a cheater's dream. Whatever grades Doherty had set down for his boys, my father made sure his girls surpassed. He elevated every mark of every girl he taught. His aim was to mock the Tricolor and admonish the principal—to prove that a really fine teacher could take a roomful of sows' ears and turn them into silk purses. Despite stealth and theft, it was a harmless scheme. It pleased the girls, who thought they had performed better than they knew, and my father was certain there was no way he could be found out.

He was not found out. His dismissal came about because he had given passing grades in algebra and geometry—both of them necessary for graduation—to a student who had never set foot in either class.

I was that student.

"You can't go with the Tricolor," my father had announced early on. "Not in his class, no siree. I wouldn't give him the satisfaction. I've got a kid who can't do math? None of his business. And it's too goddamn awkward to have you in with me. Tell you what," he said. "I'll fix up the paperwork, no one'll ever know the difference. I'll slip you through the cracks, what d'you say?"

"But then I'll never know how to do algebra. Or geometry either."