The Grievers (9 page)

O
n a good day, Neil’s commute was two hours long. That Friday, however, was not a good day, and he let me know it as I shoved my giant dollar sign into the backseat of his car. An overturned tractor-trailer had snarled traffic on I-95 for the better part of the morning, so by the time he got to work, he was already late for lunch. In practical terms, this meant that he’d have to stay at his desk until eight or nine that night, depending on how late our meeting with Ennis ran, or he could spread the hours out over the course of the following week. Either way, it meant less time at home and more time at his desk, all because some moron in a tractor-trailer took a turn too quickly.

And, Neil failed to add, because some moron dressed like a giant dollar sign had committed him to a lunchtime meeting he could have easily gone without. That my costume was shedding tiny flakes of green and gold glitter all over his backseat didn’t make matters any better, nor did the fact that I was wearing a pair of lime-green stockings under my cargo shorts. At least the boots made sense, I told myself as I untied the balloons from my wrist and wrestled them to the rear of the car. Or they
would
make sense, anyway, if the morning’s weather report proved right and we got the rain we’d been promised.

“Have you thought about working from home?” I asked, pulling the puffy white gloves from my hands as if doing so might offset the effect of the stockings. “Telecommuting. The virtual office. I hear it’s the next big thing.”

“That’ll never work,” Neil said. “I need to be in the office. I’m a different man behind a desk—as any stenographer will tell you.”

“You have a stenographer?” I asked.

“No,” Neil said. “It’s a line.”

“Right,” I said. “Groucho Marx.”

“
A Night in Casablanca.
”

“I was about to say that.”

“Sure you were,” Neil said.

“Just tell me one thing,” I said, trying to hide my ignorance by giving Neil the only Marx Brothers line I was reasonably sure of. “Why a duck?”

“Too easy,” Neil said. “
The Cocoanuts.
I’m all right. How are you?”

If he objected to my ridiculous choice of footwear, he didn’t let on, just like he didn’t balk when I told him about Ennis’s request for an audience or even when I asked if he’d give me a ride. Instead, he just asked where and when to pick me up—two questions I could answer with relative ease. Everything else about the situation had me stumped.

“What do you think he wants?” Neil asked as we motored toward the highway.

“Ennis? What do you think he wants? More money.”

“Yeah, but why us? We’ve already proven that we’re no good at this kind of thing.”

“What can I say? Maybe the guy believes in second chances.”

“Guilt is more like it,” Neil said. “We failed him once, so now we’ll need to prove ourselves.”

“What? Redemption?”

“It worked at the Academy.”

“Yeah, but we’re adults now.”

Neil glanced at my boots and then at the balloons in his rearview mirror, but he didn’t say a word. Elvis Costello was singing on the radio. Neil cranked the volume and lowered his windows. As the world flew by at sixty miles per hour, we became children again—or pretended to, at any rate—belting out song lyrics with the wind whipping all around us. It wasn’t freedom, exactly, but a small part of me wondered what would happen if Neil laid a heavy foot on the gas and kept going—past the Academy, through the city, over the Delaware, and straight out to the Jersey shore. Could we have a do-over, I wondered? Could we win back the infinite possibility of childhood? If we drove fast enough and played our music loud enough, could we ever outrun the ghost of Billy Chin?

But the sky was already turning gray, the music proving just a little too loud. By the time we were bouncing along the narrow, broken streets that led to the Academy, Neil had raised the windows and turned down his stereo as if suddenly remembering that he was an adult now and that adults had to at least pretend to prefer the staid to the stimulating, prudence to risk, comfort to danger.

B
ACK WHEN
I was a junior, I fell asleep on the bus one morning, and by the time I woke up, the Academy was six stops behind me. It was as far into the neighborhood as I’d ever been, and when I got off the bus, a little girl started chasing me, singing
white, white, white, white, white, white honky
as I ran to school. Less than a block from my destination, I crashed into a homeless man’s grocery cart, spilling its contents across the sidewalk and eliciting a string of expletives from its owner.

Apologizing profusely as the little girl laughed at me from across the street, I offered the man my last five dollars, which he took, but not without wrapping his hand around mine and refusing to let go. He was touched by God, he said, and he had the power to heal me. The man was bald, his hands were sticky, and the rattle in his chest sounded like a Geiger counter. The only way to make him let go of me was to promise to repent, so I did, then ran the last fifty yards to school where I rolled up my sleeves and scrubbed the length of my forearm over the sink in the men’s room. I was still scrubbing when I heard a toilet flush and saw Frank Dearborn appear in the mirror behind me.

“Fooling around with the natives, Schwartz?”

“Oh,” I said, trying to laugh it off. “You saw that.”

“The kid was a little young for you, don’t you think?” Frank checked himself out in the mirror next to mine. “And somehow I doubt she’s one of the chosen. What would your mother say if you brought home a
goy
?”

“I told you before, Frank—”

“And a child, no less,” he said, aping Jackie Mason. “And not just a child, but a—what’s the word I’m looking for Schwartz? The word your people use for—you know—African Americans?”

I knew the answer but didn’t want to say it.

“Wait a second,” Frank said, snapping his fingers. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

“
Schwartzer
,” I said to myself as he spoke the word aloud.

“Well, that explains a lot,” Frank said. “And, really, who am I to judge? If that kind of thing makes you happy, Schwartz, then
mazel tov
, I say.”

He slapped me on the back and left me to my scrubbing.

I told Neil all of this if only to bridge the silence between us as the Academy came into view—a massive, walled-in fortress sitting tight among the crumbling homes of the neighborhood it had called home for well over a century. Although surrounding enclaves were slowly giving way to gentrification, the Academy had, in recent years, taken advantage of the fact that the homes on the block immediately to the north were virtually unlivable. Demolition had begun the previous December, and by the time Neil and I arrived on the scene for our audience with Ennis, the homes were gone. In their place lay a fenced-in parking lot shaded by baby sycamores.

“Say what you want about Ennis,” Neil said as a security guard waved us into the lot from his air-conditioned booth. “But the guy’s doing a hell of a job fixing the place up.”

Neil parked his Pontiac between an Audi and a Lexus and told me to be careful when I opened my door. The last thing he needed, he said, was a lawsuit from some seventeen-year-old trust-fund baby for scratching the finish on his car.

Across the street, the Church of Saint Leonard stood tall behind the gray stone walls that surrounded the Academy. Just like we called the Academy
the Academy
, we referred to the Church of Saint Leonard simply as
the Church
, as if there were no other. Back when Neil and I were students, there was talk, however idle, of tearing the whole thing down because it had fallen into such disrepair that a renovation would cost more than the building was worth; but under Ennis’s leadership, the alumni association had raised enough money to replace the roof, chase the pigeons out of the steeple, and restore the building’s marble façade to the gleaming glory of its heyday.

Passing beneath the stone archway that led to the Academy’s courtyard was like stepping back in time and halfway across the world to a filmmaker’s notion of what the renaissance might have looked like if it had been designed with teenage boys in mind. To the left stood the newly restored Church with its towering white columns, brass doors, and polished marble steps. Straight ahead, the Academy appeared to recline in ageless, stolid rectitude, an unassailable stone bastion of learning and tradition. Between the two was the faculty parking lot, where even the cars appeared to come from an earlier century, particularly compared to the newer makes and models parked in the student lot across the street.

Inside, teenage boys swarmed all around us in a frenzy of bad skin, rumpled sport coats, and loose neckties, and the stench of puberty hung in the air like an unsavory stew of mushrooms, onions, and gym socks.

“The human body takes many strange forms,” Neil said, wading through the sea of pimply teens. “Can you believe this used to be us?”

“You, maybe,” I said. “But I was never this young.”

A black and white photo of the freshman class was tacked to the bulletin board outside the cafeteria. There were no goofy faces in the bunch, just a small regiment of serious boys scowling at the camera and pretending to be men.

A
FTER CHECKING
in with the registrar, Neil and I climbed two flights of steps and followed a narrow hallway to the byzantine suite of offices that once belonged to the faculty, but which Ennis had, over the years, commandeered as his efforts at raising money took on monstrously successful dimensions. Raising a finger when his secretary showed us to his office door, Ennis wrapped up a telephone conversation and told us to please have a seat.

The carpet was a deep shade of red, and the walls were lined with books:
Siddhartha, Man’s Search for Meaning, Twilight of the Idols
, and dozens of others with equally intimidating titles. Was Ennis a closet philosopher, I wondered, or were the volumes mere props pilfered from the Academy library to make him look smarter than he really was?

“Gentlemen,” he said as Neil and I sank into a pair of soft, leather easy chairs. “I wish we could be meeting under better circumstances, but it’s always good to see a pair of familiar faces.”

Ennis’s eyes fell on my rubber boots and green stockings, but when I opened my mouth to explain, he looked away as if he’d just caught me listening to a Barry Manilow record or touching myself in a toilet stall. Some things were better left unmentioned, his sudden, awkward silence said as a small refrigerator hummed under his minibar.

“As I was explaining to Charley the other day,” Ennis continued, focusing his attention on Neil so as not, I supposed, to concern himself with my fashion sense, “we have a few options in terms of—remembering—your friend most effectively.”

“Billy,” I said. “Can we please use his name? His name was Billy.”

“By all means,” Ennis said. “We want to remember Billy as he was. Kind, loyal, generous. A true scholar and a man for others. A paragon of Noblac ideals, if you will. Did you see the Church on your way in?”

“It was hard to miss,” Neil said.

“That was my first campaign,” Ennis said. “I hate to use the word
capitalize
, but Brother Timothy’s passing made the project feasible—at least in terms of economics. You remember Brother Timothy, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Brown robe, thick glasses. A bit of a donkey fetish.”

Neil coughed into his fist. Ennis looked sideways at me, then went on with his speech.

“As tragic as it was, Brother Timothy’s passing gave our community a sense of focus. It allowed us to reflect upon the larger ideals of the Noblac order and how central they are to all of our lives. It gave us an opportunity to remember what service, scholarship, and loyalty mean to everyone who’s ever been touched by the Academy in one way or another.”

“Or touched by Brother Timothy,” I said.

“Death has a way of drawing people together,” Ennis said, ignoring me completely. “A way of reminding us of the values we share. This death, the death of your friend—of Billy—has the potential to bring a sizable portion of your class back into the fold. A brief letter to inform everyone of his passing. A memorial service here at the school. Maybe a few words about his friendship and what it meant to you. I’m sure you can see how such gestures might be effective in helping us reach our larger goal.”