A Hope in the Unseen (36 page)

Barbara considers this for a moment, examining a pair of argyles, before offering a counterpoint. She’s talking to Neddy, but, like everything else she says this weekend, she’s most mindful of what Cedric is hearing. “Well, they work hard and do whatever they have to do to get ahead, to get to the next step. The problem with black people is that someone gets a little more than them, everybody jump on him, saying he think he’s better and all. For Asians, it’s a goal that everybody get better and everybody get in on it. They come over here, living fourteen to an apartment!”

“There are a lot of Asians at Brown, and they stick together here, too,” Cedric mumbles, letting Barbara know he’s been listening, as he pulls on a leather hat that no one at Brown would be caught dead wearing and looks at himself admiringly.

By nightfall, everyone is back on the terra infirma of College Hill. It’s the big Saturday dinner rush of parents weekend, and Barbara, wanting to do what Brown parents are supposed to do, asks Cedric about restaurants. He’s heard of a place called Adesso, and soon she leads the family there. It’s the area’s restaurant of choice just off Thayer, with blond wood, ficuses, California stylish cuisine, and a fifty-minute wait.

The Jennings contingent leaves its name with the hostess and walks back into a long alcove hallway lined with chairs, almost all filled with laughing parent—child clusters, mostly white. Barbara spots an elegantly dressed Hispanic family a half-dozen seats away, a mother and father talking animatedly to a daughter. A black family is vacating a table and making for the exit, the father folding his credit card receipt and putting it in his wallet.

Barbara sees some faces of color but feels little comfort. There is nothing to match the conspicuousness of poor and black—the lot, she is certain, of only one family she knows among the dozens here.

Eventually their name is called, and the Jennings family is led to a table. Barbara looks at the menu and then looks again.

“I never spent this much money on food, ever,” she whispers to everyone and no one. “What could they do to the food to make it worth this much?”

But the hive is buzzing all around—chattering clusters seeming to close in from all sides—and she pushes down the list of wood-grilled entrees.

The waitress, a platinum blonde practicing her pronunciations, arrives and describes the specials. Barbara orders the shrimp and scallops
on angel hair pasta special; Cedric, shrimp and chicken over rigatoni, off the menu; and Neddy, the half-moon spinach-stuffed pasta with mascarpone sauce.

As the waitress leaves, everyone sits in silence, breathing lightly. Barbara looks at the yellow pansy in a flute vase on the table.

“Is that some kind of red sauce on that flower?” she says, and everyone looks. Seems to be marinara.

They all begin looking for things, trying to find seams in the restaurant’s elegant fabric to ease their discomfort. A complimentary appetizer comes and is set near Cedric.

“This is beet flan,” the waitress says, and everyone nods meaningfully at the news until she’s gone.

Barbara looks at it, perplexed, and then at Cedric. He takes her cue and begins gazing at the little round plateau of reddish mold. “What’d she say it is?” she riffs, leading on the others. Cedric pokes at it with his fork. “Oh Gaawwd. It moves!”

Evan Horowitz and family are within earshot at the next table, talking about plans for their upcoming winter vacation in Hawaii, Evan’s classes (“a piece of cake,” he chortles) and goings-on at home in Connecticut, one long stretch of unself-conscious discourse suited to this place, Brown University, and the presumption of ongoing success.

Meanwhile, at the Table of the Marinara Pansy, the discreet charms of the upper-middle class have been shrunk to the manageable notion of beet flan.

“Go ahead, Lavar, try it,” Barbara says. “You the family pioneer.” He ventures a spoonful.

“Alpo,” he says. “It tastes just like Alpo,” and they laugh good and loud, not caring who hears them. The waitress comes by to check if everything is satisfactory, and Cedric asks her, “People actually eat that beet stuff?”

The blonde looks both ways and leans in conspiratorially over the table’s corner between Cedric and Barbara. “If you wanna know the truth,” she whispers, betraying an up-the-hard-way East Providence patois, “we’ve been scraping it off the plate all night.”

A small victory won. Barbara offers a warm, winking smile to the
waitress and seems to settle into her blond-wood-and-polished-chrome chair. The Jennings clan, she feels, has something to bring to this room, as well.

The entrees come and everyone eats hungrily, while Barbara talks between bites of shrimp about Cedric’s graduation speech. “Oh, how Dr. Jones’s face changed when you started into that Dreambusters thing.”

“Everyone’s always hearing about how well Cedric did, when you did good yourself,” she says earnestly to Neddy.

“Back then, they didn’t even keep the grades as GPAs,” Neddy says with mild disinterest as she spears a half-moon and pushes it through the cheese sauce.

“Yes, you
were
good,” Barbara continues, undeterred. “You’d a gotten a 3.6 average or something, if they’d figured it up.”

Neddy wipes her lips with a coral cloth napkin and smiles sympathetically at her mother. “Let’s be real. I was a B to C student. I wasn’t like Lavar.”

But Barbara presses on, spinning a story from her own youth. “I used to pass my math homework around the room to the other kids, so they could get the answers all right, too. And the teachers never caught me.”

From across the marinara pansy, Cedric beams. “You were good, too, weren’t you?” he says, his eyes locking onto hers, his face rosy with pride.

They are the only people in the room. “Yes, Lavar,” she says. “I was good, too. I was very good.”

B
y Sunday morning, Barbara and Neddy are already thinking about Washington. They both have to work tomorrow, and it’s seven long hours to D.C., so they angle to leave before lunch. After their one night at the Holiday Inn—Barbara’s funds now all but depleted—they pack up the suitcases and catch a cab to Cedric’s dorm for a brief farewell.

Other than last night’s dinner, there has been no interaction with
the weekend’s army of mostly white baby boomers, so many of whom are coming full circle to beloved campus life. The spirit, for those parents, was summed up by one mother Barbara overheard in the Adesso waiting area last night: “It’s a funny feeling being back at college,” she said to her daughter, “but I guess you never can go home again. Isn’t that Thomas Wolfe, dear? Or someone?”

Such sweet sentimentalities, felt by most parents now packing up their cars, are as foreign to Barbara as the 1960s counterculture—a mostly white phenomenon, after all. “Negroes” and their plight were, of course, part of the progressive discussions that swept campuses and helped set political and moral codes for this huge generation. Yet blacks made up only 6.4 percent of the U.S. college population in 1968.

Barbara, poor as a teenager during the 1960s and as an adult in the 1990s, has spent her life on a parallel plane. Threading her way through packed cars in the dorm parking lot, she reflects that she doesn’t connect with any of it.

Ascending the eastern stairwell of the Andrews dorm, Neddy tagging close behind, she looks up to see an attractive white family descending.

“Are you Barbara Jennings?” says a high, clear woman’s voice.

Barbara blinks and stops on her step.

“Hi, I’m Bernadine Dohrn.”

Barbara looks at her dispassionately. “Oh, hi,” she says, befuddled.

“It’s very nice to meet you. I’m Zayd’s father,” says Bill, sensing that Barbara may not know who they are.

“We admire your son enormously,” Bernadine adds. “He’s a great kid.”

“Yeah, uh-huh,” Barbara says, perplexed by such cloying, white-hot affection from people she’s never met.

“This is Zayd,” says Bill, pulling his son forward by the arm. Zayd bows his head toward Cedric’s mom and smiles wanly.

Barbara, though, seems genuinely pleased. She knows Cedric likes him. “Oh, yes, Zayd! It is nice to meet you,” she says warmly before she and Neddy move purposefully by the contingent and continue up the steps.

“Well, maybe next time we’ll get to see you, spend some time together,” says a clearly dispirited Bernadine to Barbara’s passing left shoulder. She gets a sidelong nod as response.

Up one flight, Barbara turns to Neddy, feeling a residue of fatigue from the weekend’s low buzz of tension from not belonging here, from worrying that she may embarrass her son. “You know, I think I’m ready to go home,” Barbara says softly. “It’ll actually be nice to get back.”

F
ive blocks downwind of campus, just before the road curves to the gritty row houses of East Providence, is a pillared neo-Georgian mansion. The oldish building, cut into honeycombed medical offices, has a winding staircase, milky glass partitions, and strange medicinal odors. It is filled on most days with senior citizens on Medicaid.

But, once an hour or so, a frazzled student can usually be seen sitting in a corner chair of the waiting area, counting seconds and looking out a tall window onto the parking lot. He is here to receive $40-an-hour academic life support: upstairs, quick right, second door on the left.

The office is small, eight feet by ten feet, and Helaine Schupack, the tutor, likes it that way. She and the student are never far apart, hovering, shoulder to shoulder, over her narrow desk, mercilessly dissecting a term paper or gleaning the five trenchant points from a thirty-page chapter of gobbledygook. The walls are bland and mostly blank. No distractions. Nowhere to run.

Helaine is a very good tutor—the lucky students end up here. She is known around Brown by administrators and professors (her husband, Mark, is an emeritus professor of economics), and referrals come, randomly but steadily, from around the university’s circumference. Maybe a student is dragged to an academic dean’s office by an especially attentive dorm counselor. Or some eagle-eyed professor realizes that the drooping wallflower in the last row is going to fail the midterm. Or, possibly, a savvy parent detects the scent of suppressed panic in a late-night
phone call. Those and countless other instances often lead to a skulking, furtive trek for kids ranging from foreign students with language problems to, as Helaine often says coyly, “some kids of the famous.”

No names, please. She knows they don’t like to come here, any of them. So they don’t tell anyone.

Tardiness and missed appointments are common. She looks at her watch: it’s 4:19
P.M.
on the first Friday in November. “Is his name pronounced Cedric or Ceeedric,” she mutters to herself. Whichever way, he’ll soon be twenty minutes late.

Helaine—a wiry bantamweight of an indeterminate age above fifty, just over five feet with a gray moptop, the gaze of a hawk, and quick, precise hands—pulls a thin file marked “C. Jennings” from a drawer. She reads a letter in it from Donald Korb. He’s been trying to get this student to see her since early September. Helaine remembers Korb well. When she was helping run a learning disabilities center through Massachusetts General Hospital a few years back, she tutored Donald’s son, David. He was in high school at the time and hitting some academic shoals. Donald was delighted with the results: David went on to the University of California at Berkeley and is now working for Citibank in New York.

Donald was acutely concerned about Cedric being overmatched at Brown. At least that’s what he told Helaine when he called in mid-September in his effort to set up today’s meeting.

There’s thumping on the stairs. A tallish black student, breathless and murmuring apologies, stumbles in. Helaine looks up at him. He’s a little gawky, with a gentle, open face, but a nice-looking boy without the standoffish pose she sees in a lot of her black students. “You’re lucky, you’re my last of the day—I can stay late,” she says, clipped but affable. She taps him on the shoulder to sit down.

In a moment, she fires off a long list of questions, her clipboard poised: any allergies? any family members prematurely gray? any relatives who stutter? She then asks Cedric to write a sentence so she can carefully examine the way he holds his pencil.

These are some of the strange, medicine-man tests to identify learning disabilities. For most of her charges, she quickly identifies
some strain of learning disability (a broadly applicable label) that allows them special provisions for test-taking and general classwork.

“Have you ever had any trouble in school?” she asks, because she hasn’t hit any obvious LD markers. “Always a good student?”

“I guess,” he shrugs.

“Well, in any case,” she says, putting aside her clipboard, “let’s talk about your writing.”

In a phone call earlier in the week, she told Cedric to bring some papers on which he is now working. Today’s session comes a few weeks after midterms, and he’s carrying two major midsemester papers that are due next week. He tells her he’s been working on the papers since early October, writing and rewriting, and he’s even gone to the student writing office to spruce them up. He hands over his latest draft of the shorter one, an analysis of a Richard Wright short story, “Fire and Cloud.”