The Wednesday Wars (25 page)

"I just don't want to be him already."

"But you have similarities. Meryl Lee showed me your drawing. It was wonderful. Anyone can see that you have the soul of an architect."

"Maybe," I said.

"But you want to decide for yourself," said Mrs. Baker.

I nodded. I wanted to decide for myself.

"And you're afraid," said Mrs. Baker, "that you won't get the chance."

"That I won't get the chance to see what I can do with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune," I said.

"Not many people do," said Mrs. Baker. "Even Hamlet waited too long."

The sirens wailed, as if to remind us that there was supposed to be
absolute silence.

"This is ridiculous," Mrs. Baker said again. "Here we are in the middle of Act III, and we have to leave Shakespeare to curl up underneath a desk for an atomic bomb drill, which is, by my count, the sixteenth time you've practiced curling beneath a desk, as if anyone needed to practice curling beneath a desk."

She rolled her eyes.

Then she seemed to make a sudden decision.

She gave up patrolling the aisles and walked back to the Coat Room. She seemed to be rummaging around. And then suddenly, there was a crash and a splatter, and almost instantly the entire classroom smelled like Long John Silver and his crew were yo-ho-hoing over bottles of rum. Lots of bottles of rum.

Mrs. Baker's voice came out of the Coat Room. "It seems that the crock with Mrs. Kabakoff's pilgrim cider has fallen from the top shelf. Would you please run and bring Mr. Vendleri?"

I did. When he came into the classroom, his eyes widened. "Smells like a brewery in this classroom," he said.

"Indeed," said Mrs. Baker. "You'll have to air it out after you mop up the cider."

"You can't stay in here with a smell like this," he said.

"Do you think so?" said Mrs. Baker. She looked at me. "Then we shall have to go on a field trip."

"Afield trip?" I said.

"We are going to survey points of local architectural interest."

I thought for a minute.

"Are there any?"

Mrs. Baker had pulled her white sneakers out from her lower desk drawer. She looked up at me. "Yes," she said.

We walked together to the Main Administrative Office—where all the secretaries were scrunched up under their desks—and Mrs. Baker explained to Mrs. Sidman that our classroom smelled like a brewery, and that she certainly did not think that she could keep a student there, and that she would like to take the opportunity to go on a field trip while Mr. Vendleri cleaned the room.

Mrs. Sidman had one eyebrow raised the entire time she was listening, but Mrs. Baker had her arms crossed, and you know how convincing that can be. So Mrs. Sidman agreed, and Mrs. Baker filled out a form, and one of the secretaries crawled out from beneath her desk and called my mother, and then we got into Mrs. Baker's car and she drove me around and showed me all the points of local architectural interest.

We crossed over the Long Island Expressway to the north side of town, and meandered down side roads until we stopped beside the Quaker meetinghouse. "This was built in 1676. Think of that, Holling. When it was built, people were still living who had been alive when Shakespeare was alive. A hundred and fifty years ago, it was a station on the Underground Railroad. Escaped slaves hid right here."

We meandered down more side roads. "That's the first jail house on Long Island," Mrs. Baker said. "It has two cells, one for men and one for women. The first man to occupy the cell had stolen a horse. The first woman had refused to pay the church tax because she was not a member of the church. She wanted to define freedom for herself. Think of that. You can see the bars in the windows where she would have looked out."

We drove out to the east side of town and circled Hicks Park. "This has changed a great deal over the years, but it was once Hicks Common, where the first settlers of the town grazed their cows and sheep. Those larger oaks—no, the oaks, Holling, over there—were probably saplings then. And the building backing up against the park—that clapboard building there—is Saint Paul's Episcopal School, where British soldiers were housed during the American Revolution. The silver communion ware it owns was made by Paul Revere, and one of the original Hicks family members hid it in a cellar so it wouldn't be stolen during the war."

On the south side of town, we passed Temple Emmanuel. "That is the fourth temple on that same site," said Mrs. Baker. "The first building was burned by lightning, the second by British soldiers who found out the congregation was supporting the Revolution, and the third by arsonists. In all those fires, the ark holding the Torah was never damaged. It's still there today."

And on the west, on the far outskirts of town, we drove past what looked like a garden shed. "The first abolitionist school," Mrs. Baker said, "where Negro children could come to learn to read and write and so escape the ignorance that slavery wanted to impose. Right there, Holling, is the true beginning of the end of slavery."

I never knew a building could hold so much inside.

On a bright blue day when there wasn't an atomic bomb on any horizon, when the high clouds were painted onto blue canvas, when tulips were standing at attention and azaleas were blooming (except for the ones in front of the Perfect House) and dogs were barking at all the new smells, I saw my town as if I had just arrived. It was as if I was waking up. You see houses and buildings every day, and you walk by them on your way to something else, and you hardly see. You hardly notice they're even there, mostly because there's something else going on right in front of your face. But when the town itself becomes the thing that is going on right in front of your face, it all changes, and you're not just looking at a house but at what's happened in that house before you were born. That afternoon, driving with Mrs. Baker, the American Revolution was here. The escaped slaves were here. The abolitionists were here.

And I was here.

It made me feel sort of responsible.

Before we got back to Camillo Junior High, we passed Saint Adelbert's—"built almost a century ago with the pennies of Italian immigrants," said Mrs. Baker.

"Let's go in," I said.

Mrs. Baker paused. "Would your parents approve?" she asked.

"It's a point of local architectural interest," I said.

So we went in.

It was the first Catholic church I'd ever been inside, mostly because Catholic churches are supposed to be filled with idols and smoking incense that would make you so woozy that you'd give in and start praying on your knees, which Presbyterians know is something that should not be done. But it wasn't like that at all. We came in, Mrs. Baker dropped some money into the offering box, and we walked down the main aisle. The afternoon light slanted down through the high windows, so that up close to the ceiling the air was flecked with glowing gold specks. Down below where we were, it was shadowy and warm. I ran my hand over the dark wood of the pews, worn smooth. There was no carpet, so we could hear our own footsteps as we walked toward the altar, where a crucifix hung suspended—a pale white Christ with bright red wounds.

For a hundred years, people have been coming together in this dark, I thought, breathing quietly and evenly. For a hundred years. It made me wonder.

"Mrs. Baker," I said.

"Yes, Holling."

"I have a question."

"Yes."

"It doesn't have anything to do with points of local architectural interest."

"That's all right."

"After the game at Yankee Stadium, when Mel Stottlemyre took you up to meet the boss, did you ask him to have Kowalski and Associates do the renovations so that Meryl Lee could stay?"

A pause.

"Whether or not I spoke about the renovations to Yankee Stadium is not something you need to know, Holling."

"Then I have a second question."

"Does this one have anything to do with points of local architectural interest?"

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"If an atomic bomb drops on Camillo Junior High, everything we've seen today will be gone, won't it?"

Another long pause.

"Yes," she said, finally.

"And it really doesn't matter if we're under our desks with our hands over our heads or not, does it?"

"No," said Mrs. Baker. "It really doesn't matter."

"So why are we practicing?"

She thought for a minute. "Because it gives comfort," she said. "People like to think that if they're prepared, then nothing bad can really happen. And perhaps we practice because we feel as if there's nothing else we can do, because sometimes it feels as if life is governed by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune."

"
Is
there anything else we can do?"

She smiled. Not a teacher smile.

"Two things," she said. "First, learn to diagram sentences—and it is rude to roll your eyes, Holling. Learn everything you can—everything. And then use all that you have learned to grow up to be a wise and good man. That's the first thing. As for the second..."

I lit a candle in a Catholic church for the first time that afternoon. Me, a Presbyterian. I lit a candle in the warm, dark, waxy-smelling air of Saint Adelbert's. I put it beside the one that Mrs. Baker lit. I don't know what she prayed for, but I prayed that no atomic bomb would ever drop on Camillo Junior High or the Quaker meetinghouse or the old jail or Temple Emmanuel or Hicks Park or Saint Paul's Episcopal School or Saint Adelbert's.

I prayed for Lieutenant Baker, missing in action somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam near Khesanh.

I prayed for Danny Hupfer, sweating it out in Hebrew school right then.

I prayed for my sister, driving in a yellow bug toward California—or maybe she was there already, trying to find herself.

And I hoped that it was okay to pray for a bunch of things with one candle.

***

That afternoon when I came back home, the station wagon was gone, and the Mustang was gone, and the whole house was empty.

Even the mailbox was empty, except for a flyer for my sister from the Robert Kennedy campaign, announcing that he would be stopping on Long Island before the New York primary. My sister would have flipped.

And I realized that the biggest part of the empty in the house was my sister being gone. Maybe the first time that you know you really care about something is when you think about it not being there, and you know—you really know—that the emptiness is as much inside you as outside you. For it so falls out, that what we have we prize not to the worth whiles we enjoy it; but being lacked and lost, why, then we rack the value, then we find the virtue that possession would not show us while it was ours.

That's when I knew for the first time that I really did love my sister. But I didn't know if I wanted more for her to come back or for her to find whatever it was that she was trying to find.

See, this is the kind of stuff you start to think about when you're reading
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
You just can't help being kind of melancholy—even though if you had to play him on stage at the Festival Theater, at least you'd be a prince and wearing a black cape instead of being a fairy and wearing yellow tights.

And that's why, when my sister called that night—long after my mother and father had gone to bed, when she knew that I would be the only one awake to pick up the phone—I started to cry right away.

And she did, too.

Both of us not saying anything, just crying into the telephone.

What jerks.

Somewhere in between all the crying, I heard that she was in Minneapolis—which I guess is on the way to California—that she was alone, that she had exactly $4 left in her pocket, that she didn't know what she was going to do since a bus ticket to New York City cost $44.55, that I couldn't ever, ever, ever, ever, ever tell Dad or Mom that she called because she couldn't bear to hear what they would say to her and she wasn't sure if they even would say anything to her, and what was she going to do now?

I guess she hadn't found herself.

"Where are you?" I said.

"In the bus station. How else do you think I'd know that a ticket to New York City costs $44.55?"

"Is there a Western Union window there?"

"Of course there's a Western Union window here. All bus stations have a Western Union window." She paused a moment. I guess she was looking around. "Holling?"

"Yes."

"I don't see a Western Union window here."

The operator told us that we were almost out of time and we should deposit thirty-five cents for another three minutes.

"I don't have any more coins!" yelled my sister.

"Get to the nearest Western Union station tomorrow morning," I said quickly. "I'll—" Then the phone went dead. All because of a stupid thirty-five cents in coins. Like Bell Telephone was going to go bankrupt because of one phone call from Minneapolis to Long Island in the middle of the night.

I didn't know if my sister had heard what I'd said at the end. But the next morning, I was waiting outside the Commerce Bank on—I'm not kidding here—Commerce Street when it opened at 10:00. This may not sound like a big deal, but if you knew that Commerce Street was only a block over from Lee Avenue, and that I'd been hiding from eyes that would have wondered why I wasn't in Camillo Junior High for the last hour, you'd be impressed.

I handed my $100 Salisbury Park savings bond to the teller.

"Aren't you supposed to be in school?" she said.

"I'm a little worried that an atomic bomb might drop on it," I said.

"Probably the school will make it through the day," she said. "What do you want to do with this bond?"

"I need to turn it in for cash."

She looked at the date. "If you turn it in for cash now, you'll only get fifty-two dollars. If you hold on to it, in just a few years it will be worth a hundred dollars."

"I don't have a few years," I said.

"Because of the atomic bomb?"

"No."

She turned the savings bond over and looked at it again. "Do your parents know that you're cashing this in?"