Teacher Man: A Memoir (5 page)

From my chair in the kitchen I could see what she was doing in the bedroom, taking my roses one by one and placing them delicately among, between and around Norm’s roses, standing back, looking at them, using my fresh roses to prop up the roses of Norm that were going limp, stroking the roses, his and mine, and smiling as if one set of roses was as good as the other.

She must have known I was watching. She turned and smiled at me, suffering, nearly blubbering, in the kitchen. They’re beautiful, she said again. I knew she was talking about twenty-four roses, not just my dozen, and I wanted to yell something at her and storm out like a real man.

I didn’t. I stayed. She made stuffed pork chops with applesauce and mashed potatoes and it tasted like cardboard. We went to bed and all I could think of was my roses mingled with his, that son-of-a-bitch in Vermont. She said I seemed low in energy and I wanted to tell her I wished I was dead. It’s OK, she said. People just get used to each other. You have to keep it fresh.

Was this her way of keeping it fresh? Juggling two of us at one time, stuffing her vase with flowers from different men?

Near the end of that spring term I met Seymour on Washington Square. How’s it going? he said, and laughed as if he knew something. How’s the gorgeous June?

I stammered and shifted from one foot to the other. He said, Don’t worry. She did it to me, too, but she had me only two weeks. I knew what she was up to and I told her to go to hell.

Up to?

It’s all for old Norm. She has me up, she has you up and Christ knows who else she has up, and she tells Norm all about it.

But he goes to Vermont.

Vermont, my ass. The minute you leave her place he’s in there lapping up the details.

How do you know?

He told me. He likes me. He tells her about me, she tells him about you, and they know I’m telling you about them, and they have a hell of a time. They talk about you and how you don’t know your ass from your elbow about anything.

I walked away and he called after me, Anytime, man, anytime.

I scraped through the teacher’s license examination. I scraped through everything. Passing score on the teacher examination was sixty-five; mine was sixty-nine. The passing points came, I think, through the kindness of an English chairman at Eastern District High School in Brooklyn who judged my demonstration lesson and my good luck in having a skimpy knowledge of the poetry of the Great War. An alcoholic professor at NYU told me in a friendly way that I was a half-assed student. I was offended till I thought about it and realized he was right. I was half-assed all around, but promised that someday I’d pull myself together, focus, concentrate, make something of myself, snap out of it, get my act together, all in the good old American way.

We sat on chairs in the corridors of Brooklyn Technical High School waiting for interviews, filling out forms, signing statements declaring our loyalty to America, assuring the world we were not now, nor had we ever been, members of the Communist Party.

I saw her long before she sat beside me. She wore a green scarf and dark glasses and when she pulled off the scarf there was a dazzle of red hair. I had the yearning ache for her but I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction of turning to look.

Hi, Frank.

If I were a character in a novel or movie I would have stood and walked away, proud. She said hi again. She said, You look tired.

I snapped at her to show her I was not going to be polite after what she did to me. No, I am not tired, I said. But then she touched my face with her fingers.

That fictional character would have pulled his head back to show he hadn’t forgotten, was not going to soften because of two greetings and a few fingertips. She smiled and touched my cheek again.

Everyone in the hallway was looking at her and I thought they were wondering what she was doing with me: she was that gorgeous and I was hardly a prize. They saw her hand on mine.

How are you anyway?

Fine, I croaked. I looked at that hand and thought of it roaming across Norm’s body.

She said, Are you nervous about the interview?

I snapped again. No, I’m not.

You’ll be a fine teacher.

I don’t care.

You don’t care? So why are you going through this?

There’s nothing else to do.

Oh. She said she was getting a teacher’s license to teach for a year and write a book about it. This was Norm’s suggestion. Norm the big expert. He said education in America was a mess and a muckraking book from inside the school system would be a best-seller. Teach a year or two, complain about the terrible state of the schools, and you have a big seller.

My name was called for the interview. She said, How about coffee afterwards?

If I’d had any pride or self-esteem I would have told her no and walked away but I said, OK, and went to my interview with my heart pounding.

I said good morning to the three examiners, but they’re trained not to look at teacher candidates. Man in the middle said, You have a couple of minutes to read the poem on the desk before you. After you’ve read it we’ll ask you to analyze it and tell us how you’d teach it to a high school class.

The title of the poem described how I felt at that interview: “I Would I Might Forget That I Am I.”

Bald man on the right asked if I knew the form of the poem.

Yes, oh, yes. It’s a sonata.

A what?

Oh, I’m sorry. A sonnet. Fourteen lines.

And the rhyme?

Ah…ah…abbaabbacdcdc.

They looked at one another and I didn’t know if I was right or wrong.

And the poet?

Ah, I think it’s Shakespeare. No, no, Wordsworth.

Neither, young man. It’s Santayana.

The bald man glared at me as if I had offended him. Santayana, he said, Santayana, and I almost felt ashamed of my ignorance.

They looked grim and I wanted to declare that asking questions about Santayana was unfair and unjust due to the fact he was in no textbook or anthology I ever looked at in my four dozing years at New York University. They did not ask but I volunteered the only knowledge I had of Santayana, that if we don’t learn from history we’re bound to repeat our mistakes. They looked unimpressed, even when I told them I knew Santayana’s first name, George.

So, said the man in the middle. How would you teach this poem?

I babbled. Well…I think…I think…it’s partly about suicide and how Santayana is fed up, and I’d talk about James Dean because teenagers admire him and how he probably killed himself subconsciously on a motorbike, and I’d bring in Hamlet’s suicide soliloquy, “To be or not to be,” and let them talk about their own feelings about suicide if they ever had any.

Man on the right said, What would you do for reinforcement?

I don’t know, sir. What is reinforcement?

He raised his eyebrows and looked at the others as if trying to be patient. He said, Reinforcement is an activity, enrichment, follow-up, some kind of assignment where you clinch the learning so that it’s embedded in the student’s memory. You can’t teach in a vacuum. A good teacher relates the material to real life. You understand that, don’t you?

Oh. I felt desperate. I blurted, I’d tell them to write a hundred-and-fifty-word suicide note. That would be a good way of encouraging them to think about life itself, because Samuel Johnson said the prospect of hanging in the morning focuses the mind wonderfully.

Man in the middle exploded. What?

Man on the right shook his head. We’re not here to talk about Samuel Johnson.

Man on the left hissed. Suicide note? You would do no such thing. Do you hear me? You are dealing with tender minds. Jesus Christ! You are excused.

I said, Thank you, but what was the use? I was sure that was the end of me. Easy to see they didn’t like me, my ignorance of Santayana and reinforcement, and I was sure the suicide-note idea was the last straw. They were high school department heads or had other important jobs and I disliked them the way I disliked anyone with power over me, bosses, bishops, college professors, tax examiners, foremen in general. Even so, I wondered why people like these examiners are so impolite they make you feel unworthy. I thought if I were sitting in their place I’d try to help candidates overcome their nervousness. If young people want to become teachers they should be encouraged and not intimidated by examiners who seemed to think Santayana was the center of the universe.

That is what I felt at the time but I didn’t know the ways of the world. I didn’t know that people up there have to protect themselves against people down here. I didn’t know that older people have to protect themselves against younger people who want to push them off the face of the earth.

After my interview she was already in the hallway, knotting her scarf under her chin, telling me, That was a breeze.

It was no such thing. They asked me about Santayana.

Really? Norm adores Santayana.

Did this woman have any sense at all, ruining my day with Norm and that damn Santayana?

I don’t give a shit about Norm. Santayana, too.

My, my. Such eloquence. Is the Irishman having a little tantrum?

I wanted to hold my chest to calm my rage. Instead, I walked away and kept walking even when she called, Frank, Frank, we could be serious.

I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, repeating, We could be serious, all the way to McSorley’s on East Seventh Street. What did she mean?

I drank beer after beer, ate liverwurst and onion on crackers, pissed mightily in McSorley’s massive urinals, called her from the public phone, hung up when Norm answered, felt sorry for myself, wanted to call Norm again, invite him to a showdown on the sidewalk, picked up the phone, put it down, went home, whimpered into my pillow, despised myself, called myself an ass till I fell into a boozy sleep.

Next day, hungover and suffering, I traveled to Eastern District High School in Brooklyn for my teaching test, the last hurdle for the license. I was supposed to arrive an hour before the lesson, but took the wrong subway train and arrived half an hour late. The English department chairman said I could come back another time, but I wanted to get it over with, especially since I knew I was on the road to failure anyway.

The chairman handed me sheets of paper with the subject of my lesson: War Poems. I knew the poems by heart, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Does it Matter?” and Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.”

When you teach in New York you’re required to follow a lesson plan. First, you are to state your aim. Then you are to motivate the class because, as everyone knows, those kids don’t want to learn anything.

I motivate this class by telling them about my aunt’s husband, who was gassed in World War I and when he came home the only job he could find was shoveling coal, coke and slack at the Limerick Gas Works. The class laughs and the chairman smiles slightly, a good sign.

It isn’t enough to teach the poem. You are to “elicit and evoke,” involve your students in the material. Excite them. That is the word from the Board of Education. You are to ask pivotal questions to encourage participation. A good teacher should launch enough pivotal questions to keep the class hopping for forty-five minutes.

A few kids talk about war and their family members who survived World War II and Korea. They say it wasn’t fair the way some came home with no faces and no legs. Losing an arm wasn’t that bad because you always had another. Losing two arms was a real pain because someone had to feed you. Losing a face was something else. You only had one and when that was gone, that was it, baby. One girl with a lovely figure and wearing a lacy pink blouse said her sister was married to a guy who was wounded at Pyongyang and he had no arms at all, not even stubs where you could stick on the false arms. So her sister had to feed him and shave him and do everything and all he ever wanted was sex. Sex, sex, sex, that’s all he ever wanted, and her sister was getting all worn out.

The chairman in the back of the room says, Helen, in a warning voice, and she says to the whole class, Well, it’s true. How would you like to have someone you have to give a bath to and feed and then go to bed with three times a day. Some of the boys snicker but stop when Helen says, I’m sorry. I get so sad over my sister and Roger because she said she can’t go on. She’d leave him but he’d have to go to the veterans’ hospital. He said if that ever happened he’d kill himself. She turns around to speak to the chairman in the back of the room. I’m sorry over what I said about sex but that’s what happened and I didn’t mean to be disrespectful.

I admired Helen so much for her maturity and courage and her lovely breasts I could hardly go on with the lesson. I thought I wouldn’t mind being an amputee myself if I had her near me all day, swabbing me, drying me, giving me the daily massage. Of course, teachers were not supposed to think like that but what are you to do when you’re twenty-seven and someone like Helen is sitting there in front of you bringing up topics like sex and looking the way she did?

One boy will not let go. He says Helen’s sister shouldn’t worry about her brother-in-law committing suicide because that would be impossible when you didn’t have arms. If you didn’t have arms you didn’t have a way of dying.

Two boys say you shouldn’t have to face life without a face or legs when you’re only twenty-two. Oh, sure, you could always get false legs, but you could never get a false face and who would ever go out with you? That’d be the end and you’d never have children or anything. Your own mother wouldn’t want to look at you and all your food would have to come through a straw. It was very sad knowing you’d never want to look in the bathroom mirror anymore for fear of what you might see or what you might not see, a face gone. Imagine how hard it was for the poor mom when she had to decide to throw out her son’s razor and shaving cream knowing he’d never use them again. Never ever again. She could never actually go into his room and say, Son, you’re never gonna use these shaving things anymore and a lotta stuff is piling up here so I’m gonna throw them out. Can you imagine how he’d feel, sitting there with no face, and his own mother telling him, in a way, it was all over? You’d only do that to someone you didn’t like and it was hard to think a mother wouldn’t like her son even if he had no face. No matter what condition you’re in your mother is supposed to like you and stand behind you. If she doesn’t, where are you and what’s the use of living at all?