Language Arts (31 page)

These students—part of what was then a radical new reading and writing curriculum called Language Arts—first came to the attention of the Seattle Times when their teacher, Mrs. Eloise Braxton, submitted their creative writing for a citywide contest the newspaper sponsored that year: “Who will be the next century's storytellers?” The winner of that contest was one of Mrs. Braxton's students, Charles Marlow.

Seeing his name in the newspaper was like hearing it broadcast in the room, a summons to the principal's office for some behavioral infraction; Charles sank a bit lower in his chair and read on with trepidation.

Mr. Marlow, 59, still lives in Seattle and for over 20 years has been a Language Arts teacher at City Prana, a grade 6–12 private alternative school. When asked if his experiences in that inaugural program influenced his career choice, Mr. Marlow chuckled and said, “I suppose so. Mrs. Braxton was certainly a dedicated and memorable teacher and her methods probably had a great impact on all of us.”

That was the extent of it, thankfully.

Of those ten members of Mrs. Eloise Braxton's Language Arts class, eight were named in the original article; five of them gathered at the Seattle Center for this interview. A striking aspect of Mrs. Braxton's fourth-grade Language Arts class is how accomplished these former students have become, in a wide array of fields.

The article went on to list the credentials of the other interviewees—Astrid was referenced as
a Seattle neurosurgeon who lectures at teaching hospitals throughout the world
—and quote their reflections on their former predictions:

We'll be going to the moon and other planets in our solar system!

There will be lots of inventions that will help us learn things faster!

Everyone will have a telephone in their pocket!

We'll have ways of traveling underground like subways only much faster!

Seattle will be famous! Everyone will want to move here!

Cars will have a new kind of fuel!

And to those ebullient, optimistic predictions, Charles silently cataloged his own, as laid out in “Flipper Boy”—a great many of which had also come true.

•♦•

At the parent-teacher conference in the fall of 1962, Mrs. Braxton began by praising Charles extravagantly for his academic excellence, exemplary citizenship, and prodigious affinity for the Palmer Method. In all her years of teaching, she'd never seen anything like it, especially from a boy.

“Penmanship mastery seems to present a special challenge for males,” Mrs. Braxton remarked as she walked Rita Marlow around the classroom, “which is a great irony considering that both the Palmer system and its antecedent, Spencerian script, were male inventions. I have wondered from time to time if there isn't some physiologic reason for the gender disparity, some organic cause that could account for the way boy students consistently lag behind the girls in this area of study.”

Charles sat, waiting, a nonentity. Teacher and parent continued their tour of the room; Mrs. Braxton pointed with obvious pride to the many examples of Charles's handwriting on display throughout the room.

On a strip of orange construction paper thumbtacked to the wall where Mrs. Braxton exhibited art projects, Charles had lettered “The Monsters, Witches, Goblins, and Ghouls of Room 104.” Below this were class self-portraits. Charles had done a stiff, uninspired drawing of himself as a wizard; Dana's picture consisted of exuberant scribbles rendered in white crayon—they were essentially bedspring ovals grafted together to form something that looked like an electrified snowman with numerous extraneous appendages. Because this self-portrait had been the result of one of their lunchtime lessons, Charles knew that Dana had meant to draw himself as the White Rabbit from
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Rita Marlow nodded and emitted an occasional monosyllabic sound. Her eyes kept darting between the door and the wall clock, and she moved with jittery hyperawareness, like a spooked animal. Although she was by far the lighter of the two women, her stiletto heels struck heavily against the floor; in the morning, Charles would be able to track her movements by following a smudgy trail of black, half-moon-shaped scuff marks.

“Shall we wait a few more minutes for your husband to arrive, Mrs. Marlow?” Mrs. Braxton asked.

“No. That's fine.” Rita Marlow's voice was burred, crenulate, shiny, like the aluminum rim of a Swanson Turkey Pot Pie pan.

“Perhaps he'll be along later? Perhaps he's been delayed.”

“Yes, well, in any case, let's do get started. I know you have other families to see this evening.”

“All right, then.” Mrs. Braxton indicated the chair where Mrs. Marlow should sit, waited for her to extract her cigarettes and lighter, supplied her with an ashtray, and then took her place behind her desk. “I must begin, Mrs. Marlow, by saying what an absolute delight it has been having Charles in my classroom this year . . .”

Out came the cursive-writing tablets and reports and spelling tests and attendance book; Mrs. Braxton droned on about Charles's successes. His mother inhaled deeply on her cigarette; she seemed to relax slightly, but did not smile. The minutes passed. Still no one acknowledged the subject of all this praise. Still Mr. Marlow didn't come.

“In conclusion,” Mrs. Braxton said, “Charles is a model student, a great help to me, someone the rest of the class looks up to and emulates.”

That's a joke,
Charles thought.

Mrs. Braxton fixed her eyes on him for the first time that evening, and for one heart-arrested moment he thought she'd mind-read his unvoiced smart-aleck observation.

“Charles, I've selected you to be part of a pilot program at our school, an experimental curriculum that will be introduced in January. It's called Language Arts.”

She held up a textbook:
Language Arts: A New Approach to Discovering the Joys of Reading and the Elements of Creative Writing.
Its cover illustration showed a small group of wholesome-looking children sitting in a circle that included a very pretty young woman, presumably their teacher. The children held opened books in their laps; one child was reading, and the others were raptly attentive. Everyone looked very happy.

Mrs. Braxton went on to explain that a small number of fourth-graders—“only the very best and brightest children, you understand, from each of the two fourth-grade classes”—would be leaving their classrooms each day for a period of thirty minutes; they would spend this time in the library with her.

Charles understood that this was meant to represent some kind of award, another rung on the ladder toward academic heights, but he was concerned.
Who will be teaching everybody else?
he wondered.

In answer to this unspoken question, Mrs. Braxton added that Mrs. Hurd, the other fourth-grade teacher, would be working with the remaining students on learning to
diagram sentences.
Charles had no idea what that meant, but it did sound less appealing than
Language Arts
.

Rita Marlow, by this point, had all but left the premises. Her eyes were glazed, her teeth were clenched, and the quieting effects of smoking had abated; she'd begun jiggling and circling her foot, frequently switching the cross of her legs, the way she habitually did when Charles's father was late or, as in this case, a no-show. All that was missing from this portrait was her martini glass.

But upon hearing the phrase
diagram sentences,
she roused herself to quasi-attentiveness. “Sentence diagramming,” she said. “We learned that in parochial school. Isn't that important?”

“Well, yes, indeed, it is true that in the past, sentence diagramming has been a feature of elementary-school education”—and now it was Mrs. Braxton's turn to glance at the clock—“but this new curriculum gives children the chance to absorb the mechanics of language in an intuitive manner. The thinking is that by reading excerpts from literature, they will come to understand what constitutes good writing, well-crafted sentence structure; this will enable them to be better thinkers and more expressive and creative writers.”

“I liked diagramming sentences,” Charles's mother said. “It was . . . direct.”

Mrs. Braxton grinned. “Well . . .”

Rita Marlow stood up and extended her hand. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Braxton. I'm glad to hear that Charles is doing well.”

Mrs. Braxton began walking them to the door. “Oh, and there is one last thing you should know.”

“Yes?”

“Charles has taken on quite an unusual and heroic role within the classroom.”

Both parent and student looked puzzled. Rita Marlow glanced at her son. “Charles. Heroic,” she repeated dully.

“Oh, yes. Without any prompting from me, Charles has become quite a help to Dana McGucken.”

Rita Marlow shook her head. “I'm sorry, I don't understand.”

Mrs. Braxton looked at Charles and cooed affectionately, “You haven't said anything, have you?” She placed one of her puffy, sharp-nailed hands on Charles's shoulder, a gesture that froze him to the spot. “I suspected as much. That's very like you, Charles, to be so humble.”

She addressed the rest of her remarks sotto voce
,
as if shielding Charles from potentially upsetting information. “Dana is one of our
special
children, Mrs. Marlow. Thanks to Charles's attention and friendship, Dana has shown tremendous improvement. You have a lovely boy there, Mrs. Marlow.”

“Ah. Well, thank you again for your time, Mrs. Braxton. Good night.”

Mrs. Braxton stood in the doorway, smiled her toothiest smile, and waved. “See you tomorrow, Charles!”

Rita Marlow walked briskly down the hallway toward the exit door that led to the school parking lot; Charles had to jog slightly to keep up. As soon as they were out of hearing range, she reached into her purse for another cigarette and hissed, “Where the
hell
is your goddamn father? And who was that boy your teacher was talking about? Some friend of yours?”

Before she could inquire further, the door swung open and there he was, wearing an impeccably clean suit that made him seem to shine against the dark autumn night.

“Hello, Char-Lee!” Dana bellowed, rushing toward them willy-nilly but coming to a full stop at the last possible moment. He began bouncing excitedly on his toes. “Mom! Look!” he called. “Look at this boy! It's Char-Lee Mar-Low! Come on, Mom! Say hi to Char-Lee!”

Following behind Dana was a diminutive, pale-complexioned woman wearing a dark pink coat with a matching hat, white gloves, and sensible low-heeled shoes. Her facial features were delicate, unremarkable, and almost completely overpowered by large black-rimmed glasses. But she gave off a feeling of great calm and kindness. Charles had expected something more eccentric, more flamboyant from a person who let her child wear white suits to school every day.

“Hello,” she said as she drew near. Dana straightened his arm to its full length and pointed, his finger coming within inches of Charles's nose. “It's Char-Lee Mar-Low, Mom!” he announced again. “We make loooo
-puh-zzzzz
!”

“It's very good to meet you, Charles,” Mrs. McGucken said. “Dana has told me so much about you.” She extended her hand. “How do you do, I'm Sylvie McGucken.”

Rita Marlow—who'd been caught unaware by these social niceties—struggled clumsily to re-situate her handbag on her forearm and free her hands from her pack of Camels, lighter, car keys. She averted her face to exhale a cloud of smoke over her right shoulder and then took Mrs. McGucken's hand. “I'm Rita Marlow. Nice to meet you.”

“Charles has been such a wonderful friend to my son.”

“Oh?”

Dana continued to bounce on his toes and began pivoting from side to side, smiling broadly, breathing quickly, his eyes roaming the ceiling in a happy way, as if following the movements of a monarch migration.
“Aaaaahhhh!”
he sang. His mother touched him lightly on the padded shoulder of his white suit coat. “Aaaaahhhh,” he said again, at half volume.

Rita Marlow kept smiling aggressively at Mrs. McGucken in a way that went far beyond mere exclusion. She wasn't just ignoring Dana, Charles realized; she was
repelling
him.

“Char-Lee is my friend,” Dana said.

She was
afraid
of him.

“Dana talks about your son all the time,” Mrs. McGucken said.

“Me and Char-Lee make
loops!
” Dana added.

“Dana has never been so excited about coming to school.”

“We
eat
loops!”

“That's nice,” Rita Marlow offered, her smile beginning to fossilize. “Well, we don't want to keep you. Good night.”

“All right, Dana,” Mrs. McGucken said. “Let's say goodbye to Charlie and his mom and go see Mrs. Braxton.”

“Goodbye, Char-Lee, goodbye, Char-Lee mom, hello, Mrs. Brack-ton, we are heeeeere!”

Dana resumed singing his butterfly song as he and his mother made their way down the hall. Charles turned around just before the heavy double doors of the building swung closed to see that Dana's head was craned back toward him and he was waving.

•♦•

When he got to school Monday morning, Charles found that there was already another voicemail message from Alison reminding him of their appointment at the bank.