night, after Anne-Marie had gone to bed with her incontinent doll and my mother had finally fallen into a shallow, rasping sleep, I opened High School Subjects Self-Taught and began to learn those random, unconnected facts that have clung to my memory ever since: the Great Wall of China was begun by Shih Huang-ti, Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day of 800 AD, sulfuric acid is H2SO4, the three kinds of solid-state carbon fuel are peat, lignite and anthracite. Although age and illness now cause me to forget things that happened yesterday, hundreds of facts gleaned from that book more than sixty years ago are still with me. I even remember where they were on the page.
I stayed home taking care of my mother for two weeks after Christmas vacation was over. When she was well enough for me to leave her bedside and go back to RS. 5, I found Miss Cox's room stripped of its decorations, its blackboard aphorisms, the swatches of bright cloth and paper, the inspirational objets trouvés. Even the piano and the fascinatingly complex orrery were gone. Miss Cox was dead.
What?
She's dead.
...Dead?...
...and in her place was a dry-voiced man with pallid, rain-colored eyes and creases of bitterness at the corners of his mouth. He stood looking out over our heads as our slant-eyed principal explained to the class that Miss Cox had been in a glee club that dressed up in old-fashioned costumes every Christmas and sang carols on downtown street corners, urging passing shoppers to donate for Christmas baskets for the poor. Miss Cox had caught a cold which had developed into pneumonia and...
...Dead? Just like that? I could not believe it.
In the middle of that afternoon, I slammed my book shut, suddenly angry. Why did people have to die? Like my grandfather had died that Christmas two years earlier when his car skidded off the road in a blizzard! And like my mother might die with her next bout of lung fever, leaving Anne-Marie and me alone!
The new teacher asked me why I wasn't copying the arithmetic problems on the board. I didn't answer. He leaned over my desk and in a cigarette-smelling hiss said that the principal had told him I was Miss Cox's favorite—high IQ and all that—but to him, a pupil was just a pupil. He didn't have pets. Did I understand that?
I looked up at him. Then, without answering, I turned my eyes and looked out the window.
Aware that the class compared him unfavorably with Miss Cox, the new teacher—my memory does him the favor of not retaining his name—often sneered at the unorthodox methods of the eccentric woman he had replaced. Under his firm hand the big boys crammed into little desks at the back of the room soon reverted to their sullen, class-distracting ways, and he told me that he couldn't understand how I had been Miss Cox's pet, considering that I never raised my hand to answer questions, hardly ever did my homework, and wasted the class's time with my wisecracks and skylarking. One day he said something snide about his predecessor's peculiar belief that funny clothes made the creative teacher. I got up and walked out of class, while he called after me: Come back here! You just come right back, you hear me?
I spent a fair amount of that year sitting on a bench outside the principal's office, awaiting punishment, and I went into the fourth grade with lower than average grades. By the time I passed on to the fifth, my chronic daydreaming, my satiric sallies at the expense of teachers who got a fact wrong or mispronounced a word, and my newfound role as class clown made me even more dreaded than the often-flunked kids who threatened the peace of the class from their desks at the back of the room. So much for the 200 IQ.
I have often wondered what happened to Miss Cox's intricate orrery. Old pale-eyes probably threw it out, the turd.
$7.27 A WEEK
Aid to Dependent Children paid a 'rent allowance' of twenty dollars a month directly to our faceless slum landlord
I stayed home taking care of my mother for two weeks after Christmas vacation was over. When she was well enough for me to leave her bedside and go back to RS. 5, I found Miss Cox's room stripped of its decorations, its blackboard aphorisms, the swatches of bright cloth and paper, the inspirational objets trouvés. Even the piano and the fascinatingly complex orrery were gone. Miss Cox was dead.
What?
She's dead.
...Dead?...
...and in her place was a dry-voiced man with pallid, rain-colored eyes and creases of bitterness at the corners of his mouth. He stood looking out over our heads as our slant-eyed principal explained to the class that Miss Cox had been in a glee club that dressed up in old-fashioned costumes every Christmas and sang carols on downtown street corners, urging passing shoppers to donate for Christmas baskets for the poor. Miss Cox had caught a cold which had developed into pneumonia and...
...Dead? Just like that? I could not believe it.
In the middle of that afternoon, I slammed my book shut, suddenly angry. Why did people have to die? Like my grandfather had died that Christmas two years earlier when his car skidded off the road in a blizzard! And like my mother might die with her next bout of lung fever, leaving Anne-Marie and me alone!
The new teacher asked me why I wasn't copying the arithmetic problems on the board. I didn't answer. He leaned over my desk and in a cigarette-smelling hiss said that the principal had told him I was Miss Cox's favorite—high IQ and all that—but to him, a pupil was just a pupil. He didn't have pets. Did I understand that?
I looked up at him. Then, without answering, I turned my eyes and looked out the window.
Aware that the class compared him unfavorably with Miss Cox, the new teacher—my memory does him the favor of not retaining his name—often sneered at the unorthodox methods of the eccentric woman he had replaced. Under his firm hand the big boys crammed into little desks at the back of the room soon reverted to their sullen, class-distracting ways, and he told me that he couldn't understand how I had been Miss Cox's pet, considering that I never raised my hand to answer questions, hardly ever did my homework, and wasted the class's time with my wisecracks and skylarking. One day he said something snide about his predecessor's peculiar belief that funny clothes made the creative teacher. I got up and walked out of class, while he called after me: Come back here! You just come right back, you hear me?
I spent a fair amount of that year sitting on a bench outside the principal's office, awaiting punishment, and I went into the fourth grade with lower than average grades. By the time I passed on to the fifth, my chronic daydreaming, my satiric sallies at the expense of teachers who got a fact wrong or mispronounced a word, and my newfound role as class clown made me even more dreaded than the often-flunked kids who threatened the peace of the class from their desks at the back of the room. So much for the 200 IQ.
I have often wondered what happened to Miss Cox's intricate orrery. Old pale-eyes probably threw it out, the turd.
$7.27 A WEEK
Aid to Dependent Children paid a 'rent allowance' of twenty dollars a month directly to our faceless slum landlord
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