Sons from Afar (10 page)

James just stood there, in front of the desk. He didn't say a thing. Sammy would have butted in and explained, but he was busy keeping his laughter down.

“Well—?” Mrs. Wylie asked James. She held the phone in her hand, her fingers ready to dial it. She looked at him over the top of her glasses, which were already slipping back down her nose.

“I didn't come about a job,” James said, finally spitting it out.

She put the phone back in its cradle. Her cheeks stained pink. She covered her face with her hands, and giggled behind them. Then she sat up straight and secretarial, looking right at James. “You shouldn't have let me think you had,” she told him. “This job is enough to drive me crazy without your help. You'd probably have been a big help, too, you have that look about you. I hope somebody shows up. What is it you want then?”

“I'm wondering how to find out if somebody went to school in Cambridge,” James said. “It's sort of—a genealogy project. This is my brother who came with me.”

“Ah,” she said, her eyes going back to Sammy. He nodded at her to say hello. She nodded back. “Now I see,” she said. “I've made a mistake.” She was ready to enjoy her mistake, but James didn't give her any time.

“I was wondering if you could show me any records from—I'm not sure, about forty years ago.”

“Oh no,” she said. Her glasses dropped down to the end of their chain. “If you had any idea of what state those records are in, in the first place, after years and years of understaffing—but you can't just go through school records. It's not allowed. They're confidential.”

James just turned away as soon as she said that, giving up right away.

“Don't you even know a name?” Mrs. Wylie asked, half getting up from her chair. She looked at Sammy, as if she were apologizing: “He didn't even tell me a name.”

“Verricker,” Sammy answered. “Francis Verricker.”

“I've never heard of him.”

James had turned back. “What about any family with that name?”

“Not that I've heard of. But then, you see, this is the Board of Education and I wouldn't have the local names to mind the way the schools would, or teachers. You said it was forty years ago?”

“That's an estimate,” James told her. Sammy could see that James was hoping again.

“Probably, then, you'd do better to talk to someone who was here at that time, in the schools—exactly how old is this person you're trying to trace?”

“We don't know. We think he'd have been in grade school
thirty or more years ago. If he went to grade school here. Is there anybody left from that long ago?” Sometimes Sammy worried about James. He hoped so hard and gave up so easy.

Mrs. Wylie pushed her glasses back up her nose. “It doesn't seem such a long time to me, young man.”

“Oh. I'm sorry,” James said. “I didn't mean that.” Sammy grinned.

“It sounds like an imaginative project,” Mrs. Wylie took pity on James, ignoring his embarrassment. “I never had anything so interesting to do in school, not that I remember. Almost a detective story, isn't it?”

“I guess,” James agreed.

“Mrs. Rottman—wait—I just thought of her—Mrs. Rottman might remember him. I wonder why I didn't think of her right away.” Mrs. Wylie's hands moved eagerly to a Rolodex file and she toppled over a tall stack of papers. She caught the papers before they fell to the floor, and stacked them neatly. “She taught grade school for years, and then she was the principal, for twenty years. I've only lived here for five years, but—if this Francis Verricker went to school in Cambridge she'd remember him. I could call her and ask. Shall I? She's retired now, of course, but she's as sharp as ever. She's only been retired for the last two or three years. The board gave her a rather fine ormolu clock. Do you want me to call her and ask if she knows of Francis Verricker?”

“I'd—” James began, but she cut him off again.

“If she does, she'll be able to tell you about him. Unless—it wasn't Franc-es, was it? Oh dear, have I gotten it wrong? It's so hard when you don't see the name written out.”

“No,” James told her. “He's a male. That's no problem. I'd be grateful if you would call,” he hinted. He tried to glare at Sammy, because Sammy was in serious danger of getting an attack of the giggles. Mrs. Wylie's mind ran around like a chicken in a coop,
pecking after corn, running after something else, clucking away. Sammy liked chickens.

Listening, Sammy expected her to say something that would tell them that this Mrs. Rottman never heard of Francis Verricker, but he heard instead, “They'll be very pleased, I'm sure. Yes, I'll send them right over. They look like nice boys, Mrs. Rottman.”

James shot Sammy a look filled with triumph. “See?” he would have said, “See, I told you so,” if he could have said anything; Sammy didn't respond. He listened as Mrs. Wylie explained how to find Two Water Street, even though he needn't have bothered, with James paying such careful attention. “Good-bye,” she said to them. “I'm sorry you weren't here about the clerking job.”

“I'm only fifteen anyway. I'm too young.”

“You could get work papers. But, there's no need, if you don't want a job, is there?” Her phone rang and she picked it up. “Board of Education, Mrs. Wylie speaking.” Her phone voice sounded as if nothing ever confused or upset her.

“Thank you,” James said from the doorway. “Really, thank you.”

She smiled and raised her free hand in farewell. “He's in a meeting at the moment. May I take a message?” her smooth voice asked. Her fingers scrabbled around the littered surface of the desk for a piece of paper; her glasses slid down her nose and tinged against the telephone receiver. “Yes, of course,” she said calmly, tipping over a container of pencils.

Outside, the boys turned down the sidewalk. Two blocks west, then four or five north would bring them to the end of Water Street. “That was lucky, wasn't it?” James said. “But it makes sense. A place like this, where a lot of people stay in the places where they were born, there was bound to be somebody who was around then. It makes sense. We were smart to come up here.”

He walked on silently for a while, then stopped, dead. He
turned to face Sammy. Now what? Sammy wondered.

“She knew him. Our father. This Mrs. Rottman, she actually knew him.”

“I was there,” Sammy reminded him.

James started moving off again. Weird. His brother was weird, Sammy thought. That wasn't his problem, though, so he didn't mind. This was a nice street, neat houses set on bright green lawns, the trees spreading out green branches and a big old magnolia with thick, bushy, black-green leaves. The leaves were green overhead. The air smelled fine, green and sunny. Sammy felt good. Let James worry about where they were going and whatever it was he thought he'd find out. Sammy concentrated on feeling good. “You should have taken that job,” he teased James.

James ignored him, so Sammy argued about it.

“Really. I mean, what you don't like about most jobs is the hard physical work, but filing and typing, you'd be really good at those. Think of it James, if you'd stayed there, you'd have earned maybe fourteen dollars before we had to go home.”

James shook his head.

“And only gotten your hands dusty,” Sammy went on.

“There would have been papers to fill out, so she'd have found out right away, or at least by the time I left, so it wouldn't have worked,” James said. “I'd have done whatever, all those hours, and I wouldn't even get any money, because it's illegal to hire people under sixteen, without the right papers. And a board of education is practically a government office. So I'd have just lost the time entirely.”

Sammy shook his head. “They have to pay you for the work you've done. Even if you couldn't keep the job. When you do the work, they have to pay you.”

T
he houses on Water Street were older, three-story clapboard buildings mostly painted white, with porches on the second stories. The street ended at the Choptank River, broad here, the distant shore a low smudged line of trees. Sammy would have liked to go sit on the thick concrete wall that ended the street, to watch the sunlight glimmer along the water, but James turned in at a white wrought-iron gate. The short walk was edged with neat little mounds of flowering plants; the grass of the lawn stretched green and neatly trimmed along to the river.

Mrs. Rottman opened the door before James even raised his hand to knock. “You must be the two boys,” her gentle voice said. “It was nice of you to come by. Come in, come on up. I have the second floor apartment.”

She led them up a flight of stairs, down a narrow hall past a living room filled with fat chairs and a fat sofa, all covered with brightly flowered materials, and out onto the second-story porch. She sat them down on white wrought-iron chairs. The iron flowers and leaves cut into Sammy's backside and thighs. No matter how he shifted his weight, he couldn't get comfortable. James frowned at him, but Sammy couldn't see why he had to sit there, and be so uncomfortable, and sit still.

James was sitting still, with his arms on the hard armrests, as if the sharp pointed design of the seat was perfectly comfortable.
Sammy didn't believe that for a minute. The chairs even looked as if they'd be bad to sit on—he couldn't figure out why anyone would want to buy them, unless they liked being uncomfortable.

Mrs. Rottman had set out a tray on the table the chairs were grouped around. It was a round tray, with a pitcher of orange juice and three glasses on it, and a plate of store-bought cookies, the expensive kind that came in little paper sacks. She sat down in the chair between them and poured glasses of juice. “It's been some time since I had children come to call on me. You can imagine that this is quite a treat for me.”

Her voice didn't sound like what she looked like. She looked, with her short gray-white hair cut straight and held to one side by a metal barrette, with a square face and square mouth and little blue eyes behind square glasses, with her square sensible dark suit and square sensible low-heeled shoes, like an army sergeant. But her voice sounded soft, gentle, pillowy. “I never had children of my own,” she said, handing around the glasses of juice. Sammy shifted in his seat. “Because I was widowed so young. The children I taught have been my children. Mr. Rottman was killed in the war, in North Africa. That broke my heart, but I had my work, and my children.”

She looked back and forth at them. Sammy, holding the glass in one hand, tried to find a comfortable position.

“Don't squirm so. Have a cookie? These chocolate ones are my favorites. Try a chocolate one.”

Sammy didn't want anything but to be standing up, which he couldn't. James, however, scarfed up a handful of cookies and smiled at Mrs. Rottman. The whole thing was already enough to make Sammy sick.

“Now, we can get down to business, can't we?” Mrs. Rottman said, as if she were talking to little kids who wouldn't know what business really was. “Why would you want to know about Francis
Verricker?” She smiled at Sammy. He didn't smile back. “Frankie is what I called him. You can't call an eight year old Francis, can you? He was in my third-grade class, the very first year I ever taught school. But why are you asking about him?”

Sammy just looked at James: let James answer that.

“Well, we're—actually, it's me, and Sammy just came along to keep me company—I'm doing a genealogy report. For school,” James added, when she didn't respond.

“I'm afraid I don't think that's true,” Mrs. Rottman said. Sammy could have laughed. “But I've always said, and told my teachers this, children need to be able to keep things private. Children need to have secrets. So I'll let you keep this one. I'll tell you what I remember about Frankie, but I don't want you to think you've fooled me.”

“Yes, ma'am,” James said.

She bowed her head at him, like some queen of England. “Your name is Tillerman, not Verricker, so I can only assume it's something to do with adoption, something to do with finding your true parents. One hears so much of such things, these days. I think, myself, it was better when the adopted children knew nothing about it. Children need protection—at least until they're old enough, and strong enough, to take care of themselves. Don't you agree? How can we expect children to understand what the world is like?”

She seemed to expect them to answer that, but even James couldn't think of anything. He munched down a couple of cookies and looked serious. He finished off his glass of orange juice. Finally, “Yes,” he said. Mrs. Rottman didn't say anything. “I wonder,” James said, “can you tell us when it was that Francis Verricker was in third grade? We don't even know when he was born.”

“That was 1938. My first year. He'd have known me as Miss
Rowan—isn't that a pretty name? I was sorry to lose my maiden name, even though the initial is the same, which helps. It wasn't until my second year of teaching that I married. So I was Miss Rowan to Frankie, and he—he was special to me. I couldn't have said so at the time, it doesn't do to play favorites—but he was very dear to me. He was such a bright little boy, you see, and he looked like an angel, big eyes and curly hair and such a sweet face. Not a goody-goody angel, but the kind of little angel God would especially care for, a mischievous little angel who could make God laugh. Frankie was naughty, a very naughty boy, and he was often disobedient, but I could understand why. His behavior never bothered me the way it did some other people. Bright children, especially boys, have such a hard time behaving in school. The other children are so much slower, and you can't ask an energetic little boy to sit patiently by all day long, day after day, can you? Frankie—why he'd remember everything he ever heard or read, and he was so curious about everything—there wasn't anything that got by that child. He was a natural leader, too, and the other children would do anything he told them. Sometimes, what he told them to do wasn't very nice. But you couldn't help loving him. He had such a bright little face, such a happy laugh—even when I had to scold him, or punish him, he didn't hold it against me. I often felt so sorry for him.”