Fire in the Ashes (28 page)

“I don’t know what to say. Some of the students didn’t like it but, to me, it was like it pretty near destroyed me.…”

While he was in New York, he said, “No surprise—you know
me
! I went back to B & N. I was looking at a book about Polanski.”

The name had slipped away from me. He reminded me Polanski was a film director—“very controversial.”

He said he finally bought the book and went outside. “But then, ten minutes later, I went back and said I’d
changed my mind and asked if I could have my money back. The cashier said, ‘Is there a reason why?’ I told her, ‘I just thought that I was ready for this, but I’m not.’ ”

I asked him if she seemed surprised by this.

“No,” he said. “She was sincere. She looked at me with understanding eyes.”

He said he had to fill a form out to explain why he returned it.

“What did you write?”

“The same thing I said to the cashier.”

“You wrote that down?”

“Yes,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason.” I could not explain to him why it struck me as amusing that he’d written out an explanation that was quite so personal.…

October of his senior year: The headmaster told me he had no question in his mind as to whether Jeremy would graduate. It was time, he said, to start to think of colleges.

A month later, when parents ordinarily would travel with their children for meetings with admissions officers, or for formal interviews, one of the older teachers at the school offered to drive with Jeremy to several colleges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The counselor’s home was close to Boston, so he invited Jeremy to stay there with his family on some weeknights and extended weekends, which would make it easier to visit several campuses that were clustered in this area or only a short drive away.

But, in the end, after all his visits to New England colleges, he told me he’d decided that he wanted to be closer to his home. He settled on a college in one of the outer suburbs of New York, about an hour’s train ride from the Bronx. Strong letters of support from his teachers and headmaster and a successful interview proved to be decisive. In spite of his uneven grades, he was granted a financial package that included a large scholarship.

Once his college plans had been assured, Jeremy enjoyed his final months at school. His theater group did one last play. His English teacher and his wife took him out to dinner twice. But he was increasingly thinking about home.

In the weeks after his graduation, he called to tell me he was “catching up on things I didn’t know about at home” or “that I forgot to ask about” in the final months at school. Most of them were pleasant things—about his mother and his grandma, and his father’s sister, who was visiting from Florida but had left soon after he returned. A cousin that he didn’t like had been staying in his bedroom, but he said that he was “very happy to report” that “this unpleasant person has gone back to Puerto Rico.”

All the news, however, was not cheerful. One evening in the summer, he called to tell me of some information he’d been given by his mother. His voice was sad. His words were plain. No prefatory ambiguities. No linguistic games.

“It concerns a little boy who has the HIV. I knew this boy since he was born. He’s the cousin of my nephew on my uncle’s side.…

“And there’s just one other thing. He’s not alone in this. He has an older sister and she has the HIV infection also, and she takes the same three medicines her brother has to take—only he has to take more.

“Their mother has the sickness too. She’s in Lincoln Hospital. So they’ve been living with their old grandmother. Every time their mother leaves the hospital, my mother says she goes back to the street. You know the market at Hunt’s
Point? That’s where she goes. My mother says that she’s infecting other people now.”

His mother also told him that the younger of the children was more advanced in illness than his sister. “The doctor said the little boy might only have another year. Jonathan, I
have
to go and visit with this boy. Would you go there with me?”

It was early August then. I told him I’d be in New York for the week preceding Labor Day and promised I would go with him.

We met at 59th Street and took the train that went to Yankee Stadium, which was near the children’s home. The boy was standing near the door when we came in, but leaning on a chair. He was wearing shorts and sneakers and a jersey and was playing with a yo-yo, although in a desultory way. Seven years old, a light-skinned boy, very pale, he spoke almost inaudibly. He had been in first grade the preceding year, when he went to school at all. But his teachers didn’t feel that he had learned enough, or was well enough, to move on with his class. So he’d be in the first grade again.

The older child, nine years old, who had responded more successfully to treatment, seemed to lead an almost normal life. She liked school, liked her teachers, liked to dance, had a lot of music videos. She said she loved a singer named Marc Anthony, whose salsa music and good looks—“he’s so cute!”—had made him very popular with girls and, as I gather, grown-up women too. She chattered gaily about unimportant matters while the grandmother, who was in her fifties but looked older, moved slowly through the living room and dining room and kitchen in a grim and patient way, a solemn and somewhat foreboding figure.

The grandmother opened the refrigerator door, at my request, and showed me where she kept the children’s medicines—Retrovir and Epivir were two that I had seen before in homes of other families in the Bronx—and then
excused herself because, she said, she had been feeling ill and needed to lie down.

The children sat with Jeremy and me around a table in the dining room. The nine-year-old was talking about things she liked to eat. Her favorite things, she said, were Chinese food, McNuggets, and SpaghettiOs. She said she liked fried chicken too but it was “a mess to eat—your fingers get too greasy,” with which Jeremy agreed. The boy said that his favorite things were pancakes and French toast.

“He pours the syrup on!” his sister said, touching his shoulder gently.

She said that he liked Sesame Street, and a program known as Zoom (which has since gone off the air), and he still watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—and she said that she still watched it too. The child brightened up when she said Mr. Rogers’ name. He whispered in a hoarse but almost cheery voice, “The Land of Make Believe!”

I told them I had visited the studio in Pittsburgh once and saw The Land of Make Believe and got a close look at the trolley. The nine-year-old asked me if I’d also seen the closet in which Mr. Rogers used to put away his coat and shoes and find his sneakers and his sweater. I told her that I hadn’t seen the closet but I saw his sweater because Mr. Rogers had it on when I was there.

Jeremy asked the little boy if he knew Mr. Rogers’ song about the “neighborhood.” The child said he did. So Jeremy leaned across the table to the boy and hummed the song, inviting him to sing. He didn’t have the strength to sing so Jeremy sang the words instead. The child smiled and tried to sing the final words himself.

Jeremy had said he viewed it as an obligation to visit with the children, but it didn’t feel like something dutiful while we were there. And, once the taciturn and brooding older woman had excused herself to go upstairs, the mood within the dining room took on a little of the normal
lightness that is common among children who are relishing the final days of summer before they go back to school.

When we left, we decided not to take the train, and so we walked the fifteen blocks to get back to St. Ann’s. Jeremy was quiet. He asked me only a few questions in regard to possibilities he’d heard about that had to do with “cures for HIV”—or, as he quickly edited his words, “not really cures,” but “cures that make you almost well and almost like a healthy person for a while.”

I told him I believed that he was right. There was no cure for HIV but, as best I understood, there were medications coming out of research that seemed to have had promising results in countering the symptoms that had ravaged HIV-infected people up to now. The nine-year-old, who seemed so energetic that I wouldn’t have suspected she was ill if I had not been told, might very likely live for many years—long enough to benefit from these medications. The little one appeared to be less likely to survive because his strength already was so low. Still, as I said to Jeremy, there was no way to know. Perhaps, with one more miracle, one more advance in research, one more medication that had not yet been approved but was in the testing phase for now, he might prevail as well.

Jeremy told me he was thinking of the way the nine-year-old had touched her brother’s arm when he said that he liked pancakes and French toast.

“ ‘He pours the syrup on!’ Why do I remember that?”

I told him I was thinking of that too. “Maybe it was reassuring for us to be told that he enjoyed his food, that he had any appetite at all.”

“Pour it on!” said Jeremy.

The college Jeremy had chosen was intimate and small, and this made it possible again for him to capture the attention of instructors. It was traditional in its course of studies and had not genuflected to the growing pressure to provide careerist training at the cost of arts and letters, which, of course, appealed to him tremendously, although it would present some difficulties for him when his studies were complete. For now, at least, it seemed that he had made a good decision.

The first semesters were given over largely to the kinds of courses that are introductory in nature (“General Education” was the defining term). For the one elective he was allowed to take, he chose a course on cinema and theater in the modern era.

For several weeks this was all he talked about when he called me on the phone. “Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut.… Also, Ingmar Bergman, who did The Seventh
Seal. He was Scandinavian.… This week, we were looking at René Clément, who made a film called Plein Soleil—‘Purple Noon’ in English. We also saw a German film about an angel who comes down into our world, unseen at first by anyone but children, but then, of course, he falls in love, so he decides upon an action of renunciation.”

“What does he renounce?”

“The wings of angels,” he replied.

“There’s a connection here to Brecht, my teacher says. In other words, this kind of work does not oblige us to suspend our disbelief. The film is just a film. The play is just a play. That’s all it is. You don’t need to believe it.”

On another night, sometime in October: “There’s a musician named Carl Orff who put on performances in the Nazi era. He was a collaborator, I am sad to say, but he interests me enormously. He worked with classical and medieval themes. He’d find these poems by Latin writers and he’d turn them into musical theatricals.

“Carmina Burana—that’s the title for a series of these pieces. Wait a minute.” He put the phone next to his CD player and played the section starting “O Fortuna,” then read the lyrics to me. “ ‘O fortune, like the moon, you are always changeable, ever waxing, ever waning.…’ I don’t think you’d ever want to say that to a girl. It might hurt her feelings.

“The person who got me into this happens to be a student here. She’s from Staten Island. I heard her play this and I loved it and went out to buy it. It sounds much better if you play it really loud but I’d be in trouble if I did that at this hour.”

In December, he reported he was working on a paper. “It’s supposed to be on something very personal. So I decided I would do it on the school I went to in the Bronx. You know, where they put me into isolation?”

I told him I had not forgotten and I said that I would like to read the paper once it was complete. He sent it to me when he passed it in before the holidays.

“At this school I went to,” he began, “I felt like a loner, marching, as a certain writer put it, to the piping of a different drummer. There were a group of other students like me who presented a real problem for the faculty, so they developed an unusual approach to annihilate this problem.

“It was five minutes before the end of yet another school day when the principal announced that changes would be made on the Monday that was coming. She avowed, ‘Many students will not be admitted to their classrooms. They will be removed and put into a separate room. We should not feel sorry for these students. They are the deviants who do not care about you or about themselves.’

“On Monday, we were cast into a room that displayed the word ‘Confinement’ on the door. Other students on their way to classes would look in and stare at us.…

“As for education, we were given ‘sheet work.’ It didn’t matter to them if you did it. One day I fell asleep and no one woke me up. We had no teacher in the room, just someone to guard us and make sure we didn’t leave.

“Finally, I figured out why they were doing this. I think they hoped that some of us would get the message that they didn’t want us there, so they could be rid of us, although I’m sure the school would have denied this. Anyway, it seemed as if the principal’s new order was having this effect. Students in our little group were dropping out because their parents realized that the school had given up on them. A blemishing malformation of their minds was taking place, or had already taken place.

“The second time I was in confinement, the students who had not dropped out elected me to go and bring their protest to the principal. I realize now that I was
quite intemperate. ‘You and this cesspool of a school,’ I told her, ‘will regret this act of malice. The only deviant in this school is you. You should have put yourself into confinement.’

“Not long after that, I left the school and transferred to a school in Massachusetts. I often wondered if I left from anger or humiliation. I now know that I left out of a wish for vindication. I have struggled ever since to show that schools should never write off any student because they regard him as an inconvenience.”

In January, just before the end of term, Jeremy developed what he said was bad bronchitis. “The college nurse said I had a temperature of 100-plus degrees. So I couldn’t finish up a paper that I had to do for social science. The teacher says that I can turn it in next week. But I’ll be docked because it’s late.”