Saying Grace

  “Rue—Mrs. Bathhurst is here,” said Emily timidly from the open door. Chandler walked out of the office, leaving the report. The set of his shoulders said I Will Not Forget This.

  Martine Bathhurst must have passed him in the hall. She was a frail woman, underweight and defeated-looking. She had curly graying hair and huge eyes. She had one child in the school, an almost pathologically shy seventh grader called Leila. Leila’s father had died when she was ten. Martine worked as the hostess at Cafe on the Square and spent everything she had to send Leila to The Country School.

  Martine took a small cassette player from her handbag and set it on the desk between her and Rue. She pushed the play button. Rue heard a woman’s voice say, “…Okay? I’ll call you then. All right, bye-bye.” Then a dial tone. Martine was staring at the machine, so Rue did too. Next she heard an echoey noise of an open connection and what sounded like muffled words far from the phone. Then a heavily distorted voice said, “Hello, Martine. I’m going to kill your daughter, I watch her everywhere. I know when she’s home alone. I’m going catch her and kill her and fuck her when she’s dead.”

  Martine clicked the tape off. “This is the fourth one,” she said. “Leila’s so frightened she won’t sleep in her own bed. She comes to work with me at night and does her homework in the kitchen.”

  “Play it again,” said Rue. When she’d heard it she said, “Do you mind if Mr. Dianda listens?”

  Martine shook her head.

  When Mike had heard it he said to Rue, “It’s not a man, it’s a kid.” She nodded. Martine did too.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  “What is it we hear as he’s hanging up? What are those words?” Mike asked. He rewound the tape and listened to the end again and again with the volume up.

  “In the background. It’s “‘Hey you, something…’”

  Mike shook his head. “I think it’s ‘Hugh.’ ‘No, Hugh.’”

  They listened again. This time Rue thought she heard the same thing. A voice far in the background, muffled, as if the people in the background had hands over their mouths.

  “I have other tapes,” said Martine. “I erased the first one, but I got extra cassettes and I’ve kept the others.”

  Together they listened to three other tapes. The same message, with minor variations.

  “It’s the same voice each time,” said Rue.

  “Definitely.”

  “Do you know who it is?” Martine asked.

  Rue and Mike looked at each other.

  “We have an idea,” said Rue. “Could I keep these tapes?”

  Martine said she could.

  “If we can’t solve it you should go to the police. But give us a day or two.”

  Martine agreed. She left, unsmiling.

  “Why would they choose Leila?” Rue asked Mike.

  “She’s weak. She has a Don’t Hit Me way about her that makes you want to hit her.”

  Rue looked at her watch. “Where are they…Mrs. Ketchum’s class? Good.”

  Mike went to Lynn Ketchum’s class and explained briefly that he needed to talk to a few of the boys, one at a time. It was important that they not be able to compare notes. Lynn understood perfectly and gave a class reading assignment so that there would be no writing or talking that she didn’t see.

  Mike said “Glenn Malko, could I see you outside, please?” He watched the eyes. Hughie Bache, Jose French, and Robey Hearne couldn’t help but glance at each other.

  “Glenn,” said Mike when he had him outside, “someone has been leaving threatening messages at the Bathhurst house, and I think you know who it is.”

  Glenn stonewalled emphatically. Gosh, Mr. Dianda, that sounds like a terrible thing, I don’t know a thing about it.

  Next he asked for Hugh, who said, “Really? I don’t know anything about that, but I’ll tell you if I hear anything.”

  “It’s funny, it sounds like someone is talking to you on the tape.” He saw Hughie lose momentum for a second.

  “Me? Talking to me?”

  “It sounds like one of your crew saying, ‘Hey, Hugh.’”

  A pause. “I can’t explain that Mr. Dianda. I don’t know anything about it.” Mike let him go.

  Next was Robey Hearne, a nice kid, a Beta male, who was sometimes allowed to tag along with the Alphas. When Mike said, “I think you know who’s doing it,” he looked stricken.

  “Me?”

  “Yes. I think you know. Don’t you?”

  Robey looked panicky.

  “I don’t know if you know Leila, Robey, but she and her mother live alone, and they are both very very frightened. And I think you also ought to know that if we can’t solve this here, within the school community, we will turn the tapes over to the police.” Mike held his gaze steadily as he said this.

  After a long pause, Robey said, “I wasn’t there, but I heard about it.”

  “Did you? Who told you?”

  Robey was terribly uncomfortable, but he said, “Glenn and Hughie.”

  “And did one of them make the calls?”

  “No, it was Kenny Lowen.”

  In Rue’s office, Glenn denied it, Hughie denied it, and Kenny Lowen denied it. Robey said he didn’t want to get them in trouble, but they had even told him at recess last week what the message was. Rue asked him to repeat it but he couldn’t bring himself to say the F-word to her. He had to go outside and tell it to Mr. Dianda. Asked who else knew, he said Jose French, although Jose hadn’t been with them either. Eventually Jose confirmed that he too had been told by Glenn and Hughie that they’d watched Kenny make the phone calls. He made them from Hughie’s house in the afternoons, before Hughie’s parents came home from work. When Rue asked why Leila, none of them knew. Jose said Leila danced with Kenny once at a middle-school dance.

  Rue was amazed at the volume of calls that poured in on her that afternoon and evening. There were people whose children had told them disturbing things about Kenny. There were friends of the Lowens who said pointedly that an offense committed away from school and not in school hours was not her jurisdiction. And there were parents and teachers of the eighth grade who were sick of dealing with Kenny and wanted him gone.

  The next morning, first thing, she had a visitation from Kenny Lowen, flanked by his mother and father. The two parents looked fiercely at Rue. Corinne Lowen was so upset she was shaking.

  “We’ve had a long talk with Kenny,” said Corinne, “and he has something to tell you.”

  “I’m ready to hear it,” said Rue, expecting a confession. The Lowens were ethical people, and she knew they would take this seriously.

  With that, Corinne pulled from the paper bag she was carrying a finely bound copy of the Torah. “This Torah was given to Kenny on his bar mitzvah by his grandfather.”

  Kenny looked at Rue with a face as calm as an untroubled brook. His shining hair was combed neatly across his forehead, black as crow’s wings. He wore a clean oxford-cloth shirt, with a Star of David on a chain around his neck. He put the Torah on his knee and his left hand on the Torah. He raised his right hand, as if he were in court. “I swear on this holy book,” he said, looking straight at Rue, “that I never made threatening phone calls to the Bathhursts or anybody else.” He handed the book to his mother, and she put it back in her paper bag.

  The Lowens stared at Rue. She stared back at them.

  “Well,” she said at last, “I understand.” The Lowens rose and walked from the room. When she was sure they were out of the building, she put her head down on her desk and yelled toward the office next to hers, “Miiike!”

  Rue was glad she was scheduled for her weekly lunch with Chandler that day. She wanted him to hear this one from her.

  “I have to act before the end of the day, but I wanted you to be warned before I do it. They’re not going to go quietly,” said Rue.

  “Now wait a minute. The boy came into your office and swore on a bible, in front of his mother. Isn’t the Torah a Jewish bible
?”

  “It is, but…”

  “You have no proof except the unsupported accusations of his classmate.”

  “Classmates. Three. And they all correspond exactly to the tape.”

  “Maybe they’re out to get him.”

  “Chandler—they’re good boys with no reason to lie. Kenny Lowen is a terrorist. If I let this go, there’ll be no stopping him. This boy is not in normal bounds.”

  Chandler remembered that Terry Malko had said to him much the same thing, but he was too angry at Rue for what she had done to Oliver Sale to see anything her way.

  “I’ll tell you what—if my child came into your office and swore on a Bible in front of her mother and God and everybody, and you didn’t believe her, I’d go to court and have you pounded into the ground halfway to China.”

  “I’m sure they will. But Chandler—he’s guilty. He’s frightened Leila Bathhurst and her mother out of their wits. He’s made anonymous threats against Cynda Goldring and probably stolen money from her. I’ve got to protect the school, and frankly I’ve got to protect him. He needs help, and his parents are in complete denial.”

  “God, I hate this feel-good babble. Could we stick to English?”

  “Sorry. I thought that was the clinical term.”

  “Why don’t you give Kenny a warning, and then if he gets caught at anything else, we can talk about something stronger?” Chandler demanded.

  “He won’t get caught again. We’ve got one chance, and it’s right now.”

  “And if you take it, the Lowens will sue the shit out of us. The school, Rue. The Board. They’ll sue me, Rue.”

  “But…”

  “Leave it a minute. Let’s talk about the curriculum reports,” he said.

  Rue stared at him.

  “I thought we agreed to drop that,” she said.

  “You agreed, I didn’t. The academic policy group has decided that every teacher will write up a full year’s curriculum, starting now for the remainder of the year, and report weekly, in writing, on her progress through agreed-upon material.”

  “Weekly? In writing? Chandler, we’ve been through this! You can’t just add hours a week to their work week. They’re already so underpaid that it’s embarrassing.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Our salaries are well within the norm for independent schools in California.”

  “They’re not within the norm for other professionals. Dentists, for instance, or doctors or engineers.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that crap! These are elementary teachers, for christ sake. They spend their days with ten-year-olds! That’s why we want to monitor what they’re doing!”

  “I see. Because we pay them badly, they don’t deserve our respect?”

  “Respect is paid in coin of the realm. Give me an honest answer, if you can. Is Catherine Trainer bright?”

  “I think she’s as bright as Marvin Schenker.”

  Marvin Schenker was a retired local dentist whose great square blue stucco house abutted the campus. He had taken the school to court on the average of once every two years on claims ranging from his tulip beds having been ruined by the cook’s cat (the culprit turned out to be a skunk who lived under his porch) to a complaint that a temporary classroom ruined his view, even though the classroom faced only a toolroom and garage, neither of which had any windows.

  “Rue—why do people become teachers?”

  “Because they love children. Because they remember the difference a good teacher made in their lives, and they want to make that difference to someone else.”

  “You know what I think?”

  “Tell me.”

  “I think they become teachers because they’re like children themselves. They don’t really want to compete in the real world. They may be bright, they may not, but they want to live in this cocoon where we’re all a family, and you’re the mommy and I’m the daddy.”

  Rue stared at Chandler.

  “So you think what we do here is not the real world,” she said.

  “Not compared to running IBM. Designing rockets. Sitting on the Supreme Court. Frankly, no.”

  Rue drank some water and ate the last of her asparagus.

  “Thank you for sharing. I think at this point we had better agree to disagree.”

  “If Lloyd Merton had what it takes to get a six-figure job in industry, or to go to med school or law school, would he be pissing his life away in fourth grade making thirty-two thousand dollars a year?”

  “Yes! Lloyd Merton graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale!”

  “He did?”

  “Yes, he did!”

  “Well, Rosemary Fitch, then.”

  “Look, if you don’t think what we do here matters, then why are you on this Board?

  “I do think it matters! Of course it matters! It matters too much to leave it all to people who get paid the same as my cleaning lady!”

  “If it matters, why don’t you pay them as much as you pay your dentist? I think forty dollars an hour would be about right. More for teaching kids like Kenny Lowen, charge those like root canals.”

  They were talking so loudly that others in the restaurant were beginning to stare.

  “You’re talking nonsense,” said Chandler rudely.

  Rue was wondering why she shouldn’t plunge a fork into his heart.

  “Will you please call a faculty meeting and explain the new policy?”

  “No, I will not. I can’t ask my faculty to take an hour a week extra from the time they need for grading and course preparation, and I certainly can’t ask for more of their own time. Is there some way we can compromise?”

  “Let me put it this way. If you cost the school thousands of dollars in legal fees by firing a student who swore on a bible he was innocent, I’ll tell you what part of the budget it’s going to come out of.”

  “You can’t hold the faculty hostage, we have lawsuit insurance….”

  “With a ten-thousand-dollar deductible. You cannot have your way on every issue, all the time. You’re the one who brought up compromise.”

  They stared at each other for a long time. When the waiter appeared, Chandler ordered dessert, so Rue ordered black coffee. The negotiation began.

  Rue had two shocks before bedtime that night. The first was administered in the parking lot of Tagliarini’s mall, where she had walked after school to get a couple of inches of smoked salmon as a treat for Henry. When she came out into the parking lot it was the last light of the short winter afternoon. In the far corner, in front of a yogurt shop that was always empty at this time of year, she saw the dark green Maserati convertible that belonged to Margee Malko. It was the only Maserati in town, as far as Rue knew, certainly the only one with license plates that said GR8HIPS.

  In the driver’s seat was a man who looked, from the back, like Terry, but Rue couldn’t be sure because he was locked in a kiss with a woman who was definitely not little blond Margee. Rue was almost jealous…imagine being so in love you would neck in your wife’s car in a parking lot the size of the Tagliarini mall, in a town the size of Seven Springs. She had less than no desire to kiss Terry Malko, handsome though he was in a sort of meaty way, but it had been many years since she had been out of-her-mind in love like that. She hoped she didn’t know the woman.

  She wanted to step backward into the store and into the moment before she saw them. It was such bad news for Margee, for Terry too, for little Chelsea, and for Glenn, who was making a rocky beginning to adolescence.

  But having not stepped back fast enough, she found out in the next instant what bad news this was for her too. The woman kissing Terry was Ann Rosen.

  Ann Rosen, former president of the Board, was perhaps the smartest person on it, and had for years been Rue’s staunchest ally. Mr. Rosen never came to school events, but Rue believed he was an artist of some kind. Ann was a lawyer, as was Terry. And she was running for mayor.

  “What can they be thinking of? Do they want to get caught?” she asked Henry. She w
ished she’d gotten twice as much smoked salmon. Life was too short to do without, if it was going to be full of this sort of shock.

  “I doubt it. In my vast experience, when people do that kind of thing it’s because their apertures have closed down to about here,” he made a tube with his hands and looked through it at Rue’s face, “and the only thing that is real to them is each other.”

  “You certainly can’t choose a place like that to park and imagine no one will see you, unless you’re fairly impaired. What am I going to do?”

  “Nothing. You’re going to pretend you didn’t see it and hope it goes away.”

  “Does that kind of thing go away?”

  “I think it can. If you can give it up, and if you have nerves of iron.”

  Rue thought about Margee, about Terry, about Ann, and felt terribly sorry for what was coming.

  The second shock of the evening arrived by telephone. Though shock is the wrong word. It was at first just a curiosity, mildly disturbing, but soon forgotten.

  The phone rang during dinner. She reached behind her to the phone on the kitchen wall, as she never would have done when Georgia was at home, and answered it. Although Henry was in the middle of a description of the young father whose brain he had trepanned that morning.

  Rue held up her hand apologetically. It might be Georgia, the gesture meant. If it’s anyone else, I’ll get rid of them.

  But when she said “Hello?” no one answered.

  She said “Hello?” again, and listened. After a time she said, “If you can hear me, I can’t hear you. If we have a bad connection, please call back.” Then she hung up.

  “Nobody there?” Henry asked.

  “I thought there was. I could hear breathing,” she said. He looked up from his plate.

  “Who would do that? Any candidates?”

  “Not really,” she said, not truthfully. It could certainly be Kenny Lowen. But it could be any copycat in the school community, since the Leila story was all over town. What she thought of was the look of frustrated rage she’d seen on Jerry Lozatto’s face when their suit was heard, earlier in the week, and the judge ruled against the Lozattos.