A Hole in Juan (3 page)

Erroll’s lost self had once seemed to be hiding in long-distance trucking school, later in a course on how to become a supersalesman, followed by a year’s worth of acting lessons, two semesters of computer repair instruction, preparation for a real estate license, and now, in taxidermy school. Harriet had—“Of 17

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course!” she said brightly—assumed the burden of supporting the two of them as Erroll slogged up and down the learning curve.

I was tempted to shake the blinkers off her eyes, but the woman was so happy with her freeloader, it would have been cruel.

“Erroll’s like you that way,” she was now saying. “Maybe all real achievers are creative visionaries. Just yesterday, he was so concerned about getting a groundhog’s tongue right he was in torment. He’s such a perfectionist, and tongues are really difficult, you know. All kinds of tongues, not just a groundhog’s.”

I nodded, smiled, tried not to think about groundhog tongues, and turned to check my mailbox. I found a lighter than usual deposit of detritus. “This all?” I asked.

She nodded sagely. “The headmaster didn’t have any messages today.” Although she chortled at most everything, she was always solemn about Maurice Havermeyer, who emphatically deserved to be laughed at. Harriet dropped her voice to a reverent hush when she said even his title. Judging by her tone, “the headmaster” was almost in a league with Erroll the would-be taxidermist.

“As I was saying,” she went on, “this groundhog caused him so much trouble—”

She was put on hold, and my question of who wanted a stuffed groundhog in the first place remained unasked, when Juan Angel Reyes entered the office.

The new science teacher was a dapper man who looked as if he slept in a clothes press, rigid in dress and deed, from what I’d gathered. He’d been quickly nicknamed “Dr. Jar” by the students, a put-down that made fun both of his obsession with monogramming his clothing and possessions and with what I’d been told was his repeated reminders to his classes that he was about to receive his doctorate and that as soon as he had it, he would have no more to do with this school and its dim students who were unworthy of him. He was here for the money, pathetic GILLIAN ROBERTS

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as that amount was, and the flexible schedule he’d been offered.

But once his monogram becomes J.A.R. Ph.D., he’d be in a high-paying research job in a heartbeat.

I’m sure he never put it that way, but that was the message the students heard, larded with contempt for the lot of us.

“Good morning!” Harriet all but trilled.

Reyes nodded—almost a bow. He didn’t seem one for small talk, particularly if it was taxidermy-based, and to Harriet’s credit, she understood that. Reyes made the nod-and-bow gesture to me as well as he passed. I smelled cigarettes on him, as I had other mornings. It surprised me once again. He seemed fastidious to a fault, and
eau de
cigarettes didn’t go with that. I could envision him carefully changing into a Victorian smoking jacket of an evening and lighting a pipe, or a ceremonial cigar, but not requiring the sort of nervously urgent preclass smoke his aroma suggested.

He emptied his mailbox and gave the pickings a cursory glance, then looked back at me. “You teach seniors, too, do you not?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Some of them.”

“You teach the class with the tennis boys and their girls? That Steegmuller and Wilson and—”

I nodded again. A goodly portion of the school’s tennis team was in one section, but even so, referring to them as “the tennis boys” and to their girlfriends as “their girls” seemed off.

He cleared his throat and turned his back to Harriet. “May I ask you something?”

One more nod.

“Have you noticed—in your room—have the students misbehaved? I mean more than whatever the norm for this school might be?” He kept his voice low, as if this were an urgent but secret question.

I could have answered him directly. These were the students I’d been worrying about. I could have shared my concerns, but I didn’t, because Dr. Jar was so reserved and held back and angry 19

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about finding himself here among the peons that it was hard to step closer, to agree, to become a colleague and share the distress.

“What do you mean by
misbehave
?” I asked instead. “I’ve heard about a lot of pranks lately. Halloween-related pranks. Orange and black paint missing from the art room, the mustard packets gone from the lunchroom.”

“I mean . . . worrisome behavior,” he said. “I do not consider them pranks.”

“Like what?”

“Many things. Supplies go missing. Dropping bottles, glass tubing, that sort of thing, and then they reappear—and disappear again! Chemicals, too, acetone, sodium, agar-agar—maybe more. One day last week, all the beakers were gone when class began. And then I find them neat and tidy in the back room, on a high shelf. Then, Friday past, I’d scheduled a retest.” He pursed his mouth and shook his head. “They do not study. They do not apply themselves.”

Had he read the description of the school before taking the job? Surely there were lots of positions for science teachers, so why pick a school that specialized in students who didn’t function well in large, traditional schoolrooms?

“They failed miserably on the first examination.”

“All of them?”

“Most. And they behaved as if it were my fault!”

I personally believe that if an entire class does poorly, the teacher should at least consider his own culpability. If a subject falls in the forest and nobody understood it, how can you be sure you taught it? However, this wasn’t the time to share my philoso-phy.

“You’d think I had deliberately cheated them,” he said, “with their carrying on about their grades, especially the big sports boys. Whining about how they had a game and couldn’t really study. Why should I care? I was destroying their chances at college, they said. I was destroying their lives.” He said all this without a smile, with no appreciation of adolescent hyperbole.

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“In order to appease them, this one time, I rescheduled the examination, and gave them fair warning that it would of course be a new test, but ultimately, that was not to be because there was a fire drill if you recall.”

I did. It had nearly derailed the original poetry-reading session. The kids were sufficiently shy and awkward about performing and the fire drill interrupted them precisely when they’d mustered their courage. It broke the mood and moment, and then, when it was learned that it was a false alarm, that somehow demoralized them. I’d had to become a cheerleader, all but waving pom-poms and leaping into the air to get them back on track.

“Yes, well, then,” he continued. “Only when we were all downstairs and outside did I realize that three of the class members had never showed up in class. They joined us, so to speak, on the sidewalk.”

“Are you saying those kids pulled the—”

“I have said nothing except what I have said. I am a scientist and I rely on verification before reaching a conclusion, and at this point, I have none. I am merely reporting the facts of the matter, which I find disquieting. James, Nita, and Seth were not in class where they belonged. All three had reasons. One was at the counselor’s office and forgot to get a note. The other was feeling ill and had been in the bathroom, and the third . . . I don’t remember, but there is no reason not to think they had their excuses at the ready.”

I tend to discount students’ exaggerated reports on faculty failings. I’m sure they provide equally distorted reports about my classroom to other teachers, but they were right about this man; he was not easy to like.

“The net effect,” he said, “was that the alarm and drill dimin-ished the time available to the point where I was unable to administer the retest.”

“What will you do?”

“Their original marks stand. I see no other recourse. They’re 21

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a bad lot, all of them. Infuriating. I regret passing up other job offers.”

I felt a moment’s pang on behalf of the students who’d had nothing to do with setting off the alarm—if, in fact, anyone had purposely done it. It had been known to go off when the humid-ity was too high, or the electrical system in the school was overloaded. “I meant about the three students who weren’t in class. I know them, and they’re good kids.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Nita and Seth are good students as well. I can’t imagine they’d have any reason to do something like that.” James—

Jimmy—less so, but he seemed contented with being a C student, and in fact, he’d told me with some pride that meant he was

“the norm,” which showed that he’d picked something up in math class. His family was wealthy and he knew they’d find a college that would be a fit for his agility at tennis and his ability to pay full tuition. He didn’t have to set off alarms to meet his personal goals.

“These students are a disappointment. Sloppy thinkers, lazy, only interested in their petty lives,” he said. “If they’re so worried about college, they should have worked harder the first eleven years of school.”

I’d heard grumbles about how tough he was and, of course, that translated into how unfair he was. But that was so common as to be generic and since I was in favor of higher standards, I had tuned the complaints out.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why prevent a retest when you did poorly on the original? Why avoid a chance to do better?”

“Not everyone did poorly on the original, just the majority.

As a point in fact, as you suspected, Seth and Nita performed adequately.”

“So they wouldn’t want a re—”

“You are once again putting words into my mouth. In any GILLIAN ROBERTS

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case, I don’t believe that making sense is one of their priorities. As I said, there has been a series of events, this only the most recent.

Pipettes in the wrong drawer, a bell jar missing two days, then back, five thermometers gone—but then there they are, in the sink. I think they do it just to prove they can. A crucible tong, sodium, and an evaporating dish are still missing, and who knows where they will turn up. Somebody thinks this is funny.”

His eyebrows had pulled close to each other. “They are a spiteful group and they are taunting me for reasons I do not yet comprehend.”

“They? Who?”

His lips tightened now. His entire face moved toward its center and he lost more of his good looks with each squinch. For once, he seemed less than absolutely sure of what to say. “Who knows who removes things, then returns them? I thought once Erik Steegmuller was the one, and that girl Nita, or maybe her friend Allie, and then Seth and Jimmy. Others, too, like Wilson.

Each time, I think I know who, but then somebody else seems the culprit. It’s all of them. They are all after me.”

I envisioned the seniors, disorganized except on a court with a coach’s guidance. Who among them would bother? Would think of a plan of harassment and carry it out? And why?

“I refuse to bend to adolescent perversity.” He spoke softly, but I nonetheless felt he was lecturing me.

“It might help to talk with your class about what’s going on,”

I said.

He pulled back from me.
Recoiled
would be more accurate.

“As far as they’re concerned,” he said, “I have noticed nothing of their shenanigans. I will never honor their actions by acknowledging them.”

“Maybe it’s a sort of hazing—a good-natured testing of the newcomer.”

“Good-natured! It’s—it’s anything but! It’s disruptive, and—”

“No,” I interrupted him. “To answer your initial question, no. I haven’t had any incidents like the ones you described.” I felt 23

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hypocritical, giving him only the literal truth. I wasn’t missing supplies and I couldn’t correlate the fire alarm with any of my students. Plus, I was now feeling less anxiety about that class. It appeared that the sullen agitation in English class might well be the aftermath of the struggle between the students and Mr.

Reyes. He was to blame for some of my woes. I didn’t like the way he characterized them, even though they were mostly sloppy thinkers, and self-centered, and lazy.

They were Philly Prep’s bread and butter. Kids who didn’t perform adequately elsewhere, who needed smaller classes, more personal attention. What had he expected? Embryonic rocket scientists filling his classroom’s chairs?

“Thank you for your time, then,” he said, and he huffed out at top speed.

I stared after him, a good-looking, intelligent, yet unattractive man. While physics might not be his special field, he was a scientist who surely knew that for every action there was an equal reaction. And so forth and so on until, I thought, it was an avalanche of reactions, tumbling into my classroom in the form of hostile seniors.

It was hard to know who’d made the first move, or to tell whether Juan Reyes was being persecuted or was, in fact, the per-secutor himself.

But I could almost see the dangerous pendulum swinging—

action, reaction, wider and wider, more and more out of control.

What I couldn’t see was a way to stop it.

Three

Dr. Jar’s war wouldn’t leave my mind. If he refused to confront the students about what he considered deliberate attacks on him, how could he even find out if they were real?

If they were real, what did the students have to gain by their pranks, or were they blindly reacting?

If their plots to annoy him were unacknowledged, what would they need to do next to be noticed?

And how did I extricate myself from their loop so that I could have a decent semester with my seniors?

As I climbed the stairs, I saw Nita Kloster and Allie Deroche who were not only best friends, but also the girlfriends of best friends—Donny Wilson and Erik Steegmuller—two of what Juan Reyes had called the “tennis boys.”

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I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their body language seemed overly animated for early morning. Their heads shook and nodded, agreeing and disagreeing, their fingers pointed down the hallway, they shrugged, frowned, and each in turn took a deep, theatrical breath.