In the Dead of Summer (7 page)

But life, as they are always insisting, does go on, as does time. The weekend passed, and by Monday, via some strange chemistry, Vo Van’s meaningless urban death seemed to have settled all of us down. Now, in the third week of summer school, I finally stopped physically bucking and rearing, and my morning class also seemed to have resigned itself to its hot-weather fate.

We finished
Romeo and Juliet.

April Truong burst into tears at the ending. “Why?” she said. “Why must such things happen? I don’t understand people.” The class glared at her, but she seemed oblivious. She was pure intensity, giving off energy like the filament burning in the center of a lightbulb.

“There’s nothing harder to understand,” I answered. “All our plays and novels are attempts to comprehend a little piece of the puzzle. That’s why they were written; that’s why we read them. And this one,” I said, still seeing the hideous ballet of the young man across the street arcing backward in his last leap, “this one touches on issues that are certainly still relevant, like the hatred that led somebody to shoot that boy Friday afternoon. Or, like the hatred that I was told about last week as well. Against an African-American woman whose only offense seems to be the color of her skin.”

They switched off all visible emotion and watched me impassively. I was lecturing, hectoring, but I couldn’t help myself. What else was there to do except go on record against the viciousness?

“The Montagues and Capulets had it easier,” I said. “At least murder had to be done by hand back then. Shakespeare wrote this play a long time ago, about a time even longer ago—and what has changed? Three days ago, in front of our eyes, a young man was murdered, and for what?”

Expressions grew stony, and I realized, with a mixture of nausea and shame, that what was news to me was not to them. That they’d seen other people blown away in their neighborhoods, that Vo Van was one more statistic on a long list to them, and they were not impressed that, unlike them, I had been spared until now. They watched me from a great distance.

April was still absorbed by Shakespeare. “I was thinking that it was a good plan of Juliet’s,” she said. “She could not openly defy her parents. But if Juliet did not lie and pretend, Romeo wouldn’t kill himself. So everything is her fault.”

“Maybe she was given bad advice,” I said. “And they both were young and unlucky. And Romeo was impetuous—he acted before he thought things through.”

“I thought they would be
happy
,”
she said.

“What
is
this,” Model T asked. “Carrying on about
Shakespeare
?” His pale clone, Guy, echoed him. “Yeah, what is this?”

“But it is so sad,” April said. “So scary.”

For her, raised in a completely different tradition, the play was filled with tension and mystery. She had been in suspense straight through, hoping for a happy ending, wishing the young couple well and becoming heartsick when fate worked against them.

The rest of the class was less affected. Rina was still up to her nostrils in hormones. Toy Drebbin was still convinced that a future devoted to towing cars need not include poetry or plays. Woody Marshall glared on, but I took that to be his unfortunate natural expression and not a manifestation of any personal hostility. Miles Nye had burst into class that morning with another installment of his improvised curriculum, presenting the “R and J hand puppets.” Romeo was a frog and Juliet an antelope, for reasons that escaped me, and instead of dying (“too passive, too
then
,” Miles had insisted), they killed their parents and anyone else who got in their way.

So the day lumbered on, and the boy who’d been shot receded from the center of our attention. By lunchtime the crimes we were examining were Verona’s ancient ones.

Flora claimed to be cramming for an exam, and ate lunch alone in her classroom, with food, a highlighter, and a book as her only company.

Maybe she really did have a test coming up, but I was afraid that instead she regretted telling me about the phone calls and somehow had come to see me as part of the enemy camp. I didn’t know what to do about either my fears or hers.

At the end of the day I sat waiting for April, looking at the morning paper. I’m not sure why I ever look at it, except as an antidote to any possible pleasure I might be getting out of life. You’d think we’d learn from the past. I remember that Thomas Jefferson said he did not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and he felt infinitely happier for it. I used to sneer at the idea, but no longer. No news was good news.

Once again, the rule held. Global self-destruction, ethnic cleansing, tribal wars, and terrorist bombings. Everybody part of an in-group that furiously wanted the “outsiders” dead and gone.

Locally, there’d been two more shootings on Sunday night, and a Baptist church vandalized, with three smashed stained-glass windows and red-paint graffiti on the front doors.

“Miss Pepper, I am here now.” April was intense about everything—Romeo and Juliet, her history project, and the less dramatic subject matter of crisping her diction and smoothing the kinks in her grammar.

“My paper for Mr.
Dennison
,” she said, trilling out his name. One of our earliest exercises was the pronunciation of his name, because she referred to him so often, and not by his nickname. “Mr.
Dennison
,” she said, her syllables only slightly thickened, “he is instructing us about the Boston Tea Party. About the patriots.”

She wasn’t the only female constantly referring to him. Not by a long shot. Phyllis-the-politically-correct-and-sibilant-hyphenate, whose marital status was still murky—she referred to one man as her “erstwhile husband” and another as her “so-called husband”—remained in hot pursuit, as did Edie Friedman. The two women’s competition for the prize had been the first week’s entertainment. They’d bared their teeth in false smiles as each of them, almost on a daily basis, appeared with home-baked “surprises” they’d had sudden urges to create. Never had the Philly Prep lunchroom contained such elegant cuisine.

Phyllis and Edie upped the ante, day by day, producing more and more esoteric delights. Figs wrapped in filo, and fruit tarts the size of one’s thumbnail, and meringues swirled into swan shapes.

Five drove them crazy by seeming bent on a democratic appreciation of every offering. No favorites, and a decided lack of a sweet tooth. With one of his charismatic smiles, he most often declined their baked goods. The rest of us snarfed his rejects.

The Phyllis and Edie show ended its run after ten performances when Five absented himself from the lunchroom altogether. He decided to use the hour as conference time—he said my work with April had inspired him—and he seemed as popular with his students as he was with the female staff. I’d squelch a surge of jealousy when, on my way back to my room after lunch, I’d see half a dozen students crumpling sandwich wrappers as they concluded an hour with Five. I’d seen it and squelched it again today.

I hoped the attraction was that his side of the building was cooler than mine.

“I thought to study psychology,” April now said, “but I am writing this paper and I am wanting to study politics as well.”

I hated interrupting her flow of ideas with usage corrections, but that was my job. “I want to,” I said. “I want to study politics in the future—in college, perhaps? And I want to study politics now, too.”

“I
am
study politics now!” she said. “Mr.
Dennison
is instructing.”

In my next life I am going to teach something simpler than English, a language as complicated as all the different people and tongues that put it together. “I am studying politics now,” I said weakly. “I’m glad you’re enjoying your history class. And how’s the paper coming along?”

She turned a sheet toward me. On it was typed
The Wretched Refuse.
“From the poem on the Statue of Liberty,” she said.

I’ve never appreciated that line of the Lazarus poem, or even the sentiment. I looked at the lovely and earnest young woman across from me and could not bear to think of her as “wretched refuse.” Even more, I didn’t want her to think of herself that way. “How about ‘Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor’ as a title, instead?” I suggested.

“Somebody else has that.”

Pushing the issue would be insensitive. I began a chart on past, present, and future tenses. It was good to busy ourselves, good not to keep one ear cocked for the sound of another gun going off across the way.
Yesterday
,
I
—I wrote in the first column.
Today, I—
and
Tomorrow
,
I—
in the next two.

“Yesterday, I wanted—what did you want yesterday?” I asked.

She flushed, looked at her hands and shook her head.

“This is an exercise,” I said. “Say anything. It doesn’t have to be true. I hope this will help you understand how to use the verb
to want
.”

Whatever her discomfort or shyness, she was too obedient a scholar to refuse. “I—yesterday, I was want—”

“Yesterday, I wanted,” I said gently.

“I wanted to see my friend.”

“Good!” I wrote
I
wanted
in the first column. “And if it had been your friend’s idea, you could say to her, ‘You wanted to see me.’ And if you were talking about still another friend, you would say, ‘She wanted to see me,’ but if we were talking about now, today, this minute, the present, do you remember what you would say?”

“I want to see my friend.” It was a lament, not a usage exercise.

“You’re right, but you sound so sad,” I said softly.

“I think that maybe to want in the past is better than to want now. It is
sad to want what cannot be. Look what happens to Juliet and Romeo.”

Look what happened, I thought, but I didn’t say it out loud. Instead, “Do you want to talk about what’s troubling you?” I asked, but as the word
want
came out of my mouth, I felt suspended between the lesson we should be doing and her obvious agitation.

Through bits and pieces offered during other after-school sessions, I knew her family was large and hard-pressed. Her older brother Thomas had dropped out of school and didn’t really help the general finances, and there were younger siblings. Her parents were both employed, but America was expensive. Her own job, every night till eleven, was at a nice café, but the manager bothered her and made her uncomfortable. Still, she said, it was a job.

She sighed. “I thought here it would be…”

“Here? At Philly Prep?”

“Yes, that. But more, in the United States…”

Her power slowly failed. The April Truong lightbulb was dimming.

“I thought…” She shook her head.

She was young and bright and beautiful, but her fine bones, delicate features, and shining fall of jet hair now added together to make the very portrait of loss and desolation.

“April,” I said, “I’m concerned. Can I help you in any way?”

“It is too late,” she said softly. “He is dead. The boy on the street.”

“You knew him?”

She nodded. “Vo Van is—was—my brother’s friend. Is
…
very scary.”

“Who shot him?”

She set her jaw as if to keep it from moving. For a moment her eyes widened and she seemed on the verge of saying something more, but then she shook her head, as if chastising herself. “Vanny had enemies,” she said. “His group, they do such things.”

For the first time in our brief acquaintance, I didn’t believe April, didn’t think she was telling me the truth. Her truth, that is.

She pushed the “Wretched Refuse” paper toward me. “My work,” she said, reminding me of what we were supposed to be doing.

Her family had given and received one combined gift the previous Christmas—a computer for all to share, because her father believed, with some validity, that full Americanization and success could come only to those who knew how to use the machine.

“Mr.
Dennison
,” she said with a sudden burst of her usual enthusiastic energy, “he is not yet to the immigrants. He is telling us about the Founding Fathers.”

Founding Fathers are not considered immigrants, for appallingly ethnocentric reasons. What the language is saying is that obviously, before them, there was no
here
to which they could emigrate. They presumably created the
here
,
and native populations be damned.

“I am trying to—is this said right?”

I nodded.

“—to write about then and now. Differences. Reactions to people coming here. Laws. I am interested mostly in immigrants now. People like me, my family. Or,” she said with a touch of wryness, “like them.”

Her head gracefully tilted toward the newspaper on the edge of my desk. She wasn’t looking at the headlines about ethnic cleansing. She pointed, instead, at a senatorial candidate’s call to “Close Our Borders.” If she’d looked a little longer, she would also have spotted a story about another illegal boatload of Chinese indentured servants trying for the Golden Mountain. One day, one page, two don’t-give-me-your-tired-and-poor stories.