J. B. leans toward me, an intent look on his face. “It’s also strange that the article in the New York Times never mentioned the fact that the dead body was discovered on the CSCH building site. That might not seem unusual on the surface, might not even be considered to be a relevant fact. Except that Daniel Leacham, who’s an award-winning journalist with a reputation for being thorough, wrote the article. And I know he’s written several articles about CSCH in the past. So why didn’t he mention CSCH in the article? It isn’t plausible that he didn’t know.”
“What are you implying?”
“It’s curious, that’s all.”
“Call him,” I say. “Ask him.”
“I already did,” he says. “He was pretty evasive, but he piqued my interest when he said something about CSCH being an exposé waiting to happen. This is getting interesting, don’t you think?” He falls silent, and there’s an air of concentration about him, a tension in the air that I recognize as his suppressed excitement at the potential discovery of a new lead. “That’s why I’m going to New York,” he says at last.
“I’m going with you,” I say without skipping a beat. “I have to know if that dead boy was Markus, because if it was, then his death is my fault.”
FOUR
Winter 1967
Even though P.S. 457 was bleak and overcrowded, a physically and emotionally violent place, the energy of my thirty-five eight-year-old students lightened the building’s dull gray walls. It even freshened the air, despite the strange mildew smell that made my nostrils itch. From day one I set out to create for them a safe learning space from seven to noon five days a week. We followed the same routine every day so they always knew what to expect. I was quick to praise and encourage, and they, in turn, were eager to please. I kept the door closed to keep the sounds of other teachers’ voices, at the end of their nerves and at the top of their lungs, from filtering into our classroom. I never raised my own voice. I never had to.
During the first few months, I visited the neighborhood projects and crowded tenements and met with my students’ parents and other caregivers. I wanted to understand the circumstances in which they lived so I could better meet their individual needs in the classroom. I experimented with new ways of teaching and sometimes ran them by Frank.
“I have a brilliant idea,” I exclaimed one night when he was sitting in our faux-leather thrift store chair reading, as usual. He turned his book facedown on his lap and puffed on his pipe, which was a status symbol among seminarians. In many ways, we were a typical couple: me the annoyed and annoying wife, he the clueless and distant husband, who preferred reading to listening to me, who in spite of wearing tweed jackets with patches on the sleeves, watched sports and left the toilet seat up.
“Do you know the song Apples, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie,” I asked.
He nodded and took a sip from his glass of bourbon.
“Kids love it,” I said. “I have the record here. I could bring our little record player to school, maybe let my students dance to the song at first, get them loosened up a bit, you know? So this is what I’m thinking. I write the words on a big piece of newsprint with the key words I want them to learn to read underlined in red. While they sing along to the music, I point to the words. After a while, I turn off the music and point to the words again, see if they can repeat them after me. On another piece of newsprint, I post the words in a list, separate from the lyrics and in a different order, and have them read them by sight. You know what I mean? What do you think?”
“How much time will it take?”
I sucked in my breath and counted to ten while his question morphed from curiosity to criticism inside. “I don’t know how long it will take, Frank.”
“How do you know it will work?”
“I don’t,” I said with a drawn-out sigh. “But what I do know is that most of my students don’t know how to read. At least a third of them barely speak English. The rest of them are bored to death during reading time. ‘See Dick run. See Jane skip. Go, Spot, go.’ I have to do something different. I have to at least try.”
Frank grunted, took another sip of his drink, and went back to reading. When I started playing the record, he disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door. Late into the night I listened to Jay and the Techniques over and over again, stopping to write the lyrics in big black letters on newsprint, making sure I got them exactly right.
Early the next morning, I woke Frank and told him that because I had to carry the record player and the rolls of newsprint, I would be driving to school instead of walking. He groaned, rolled out of bed, and pulled on his jeans. It was his job to put the car battery in the van; after two of them were stolen, we kept it inside at night. He stumbled out of the apartment carrying the battery and leaving behind a trail of air sticky with residual irritation. He came back in, gave me a perfunctory peck on the cheek, and went back to bed.
My students’ faces lit up like never before as they danced and sang and shouted out the words, with and without the music. Every day they called out the titles of other songs and asked if they could learn to read with those, too. How could I refuse? Class preparation became the kudzu of my evenings. I was soon familiar with the late-night silence of the neighborhood and came to appreciate the absence of the sounds of screeching cars and of the human bustle of everyday life.
“You have an uncanny ability to focus,” Frank said almost every night around midnight when he headed off to bed.
That was, of course, his way of saying I was obsessed. Maybe he was right. I’d always been intense about mastering whatever I decided to do, and maybe I did work too hard. But I had high expectations of my students, too, and their growing confidence was obvious when their little chests filled with pride at the daily display of their accomplishments on the bulletin board. I always placed them right next to the achievements of their new cultural heroes—Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Matthew Henson, Charles Drew, Cesar Chavez, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali. My students and I were happy... until something happened that changed everything.
My class was working in their math groups. I heard a commotion, a banging noise out in the hall, and went out to investigate. I saw Anthony Frascatore, whose classroom was across the hall, slam a student against the wall, then pin him there by the collar of his shirt. He screamed at the student, his mouth mere inches from the boy’s ebony face: “What did I tell you to do?”
I swept toward him. “What the hell are you doing?” I said.
Frascatore looked surprised. He released his hold on the boy’s shirt, grabbed his wrist, and thrust him through the open classroom door. “Get back in there, and from now on you do what I tell you to do.”
“What are you doing?” I asked again. I was gritting my teeth so hard the roots hurt.
“Taming the animals in this zoo. What do you think I’m doing?”
“Assaulting a child.”
He sneered. “It’s called discipline, Mrs. Waters. You won’t find my students singing and dancing.”
I glared at him. He glared back. I crossed my arms, tucked in my chin, and stared.
“You do know that I’ve been teaching here for a long time, don’t you?” Frascatore glowered like he was about to slam me into the wall next.
“What I know,” I said, “is that you better never, ever let me see you lay a hand on any student again.”
He snorted. “Or what?”
“Or I will tell Miss Huskings what I saw.”
Frascatore clenched his fists, his face flushed. Then he turned on his heels, stormed into his classroom, and slammed the door.
I went back to my classroom, sat down at my desk, and tried to calm myself. You could have heard a pin drop, my students were so quiet. An hour later, when I hugged