The Body Human

  And then I saw Jeff Connors, leaning against the window wall, arms folded across his chest, and his expression as he watched the fighting girls told me everything I needed to know.

  I took a huge breath, letting it fill my lungs. I bellowed at top volume, and with no facial expression whatsoever, “Freeze! Now!”

  And everybody did.

  The kids who didn’t know me looked instantly for the gun and the back-up. The kids who did know me grinned, stifled it, and nodded slightly. The two girls stopped pounding each other to twist toward the noise—my bellow had shivered the hanging fluorescents—which was time enough for me to limp across the floor, grab the girl on top, and haul her to her feet. She twisted to swing on me, thought better of it, and stood there, panting.

  The girl on the floor whooped, leaped up, and tensed to slug the girl I held. But then she stopped. She didn’t know me, but the scene had alerted her: nobody yelling anymore, the other wildcat quiet in my grip, nobody racing around the room. She glanced around, puzzled.

  Jeff still leaned against the wall.

  They expected me to say something. I said nothing, just stood there, impassive. Seconds dragged by. Fifteen, thirty, forty-five. To adults, that’s a long time. To kids, it’s forever. The adrenaline ebbs away.

  A girl in the back row sat down at her desk.

  Another followed.

  Pretty soon they were all sitting down, quiet, not exactly intimidated but interested. This was different, and different was cool. Only the two girls were left, and Jeff Connors leaning on the window, and a small Chinese kid whose chair was probably the one hurled at the chalkboard. I saw that the crack ran right through words printed neatly in green marker:

  Ms. K|elly

  Engli|sh 8E

  After a minute, the Chinese kid without a chair sat on his desk.

  Still I said nothing. Another minute dragged past. The kids were uneasy now. Lateesha said helpfully, “Them girls supposed to go to the nurse, Mr. Shaunessy. Each one by they own self.”

  I kept my grip on the girl with the torn blouse. The other girl, her nose gushing blood, suddenly started to cry. She jammed her fist against her mouth and ran out of the room.

  I looked at each face, one at a time.

  Eventually I released my grip on the second girl and nodded at Lateesha. “You go with her to the nurse.”

  Lateesha jumped up eagerly, a girl with a mission, the only one I’d spoken to. “You come on, honey,” she said, and led away the second girl, clucking at her under her breath.

  Now they were all eager for the limelight. Rosaria said quickly, “They fighting over Jeff, Mr. Shaunessy.”

  “No they ain’t,” said a big, muscled boy in the second row. He was scowling. “They fighting cause Jonelle, she dissed Lisa.”

  “No, they—”

  Everybody had a version. They all jumped in, intellectuals with theories, arguing with each other until they saw I wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t trying to sort through it, wasn’t going to participate. One by one, they fell silent again, curious.

  Finally Jeff himself spoke. He looked at me with his absolutely open, earnest, guileless expression and said, “It was them suicides, Mr. Shaunessy.”

  The rest of the class looked slightly confused, but willing to go along with this. They knew Jeff. But now Ms. Kelly, excluded for five full minutes from her own classroom, jumped in. She was angry. “What suicides? What are you talking about, uh…”

  Jeff didn’t deign to supply his name. She was supposed to know it. He spoke directly to me. “Them old people. The ones who killed theirselves in that hospital this morning. And last week. In the newspaper.”

  I didn’t react. Just waited.

  “You know, Mr. Shaunessy,” Jeff went on, in that same open, confiding tone. “Them old people shooting and hanging and pushing theirselves out of windows. At their age. In their sixties and seventies and eighties.” He shook his head regretfully.

  The other kids were nodding now, although I’d bet my pension none of them ever read anything in any newspaper.

  “It just ain’t no example to us,” Jeff said regretfully. “If even the people who are getting three good meals a day and got people waiting on them and don’t have to work or struggle no more with the man—if they give up, how we supposed to think there’s anything in this here life for us?”

  He leaned back against the window and grinned at me: triumphant, regretful, pleading, an inheritor of a world he hadn’t made. His classmates glanced at each other sideways, glanced at me, and stopped grinning.

  “A tragedy, that’s what it is,” Jeff said, shaking his head. ‘ ‘A tragedy. All them old people, deciding a whole life just don’t make it worth it to stick to the rules. How we supposed to learn to behave?”

  “You have to get control of Jeff Connors,” I told Jenny Kelly at lunch in the faculty room. This was an exposed-pipes, flaking-plaster oasis in the basement of Benjamin Franklin Junior High. Teachers sat jammed together on folding metal chairs around brown formica tables, drinking coffee and eating out of paper bags. Ms. Kelly had plopped down next to me and practically demanded advice. “That’s actually not as hard as it might look. Jeff’s a hustler, an operator, and the others follow him. But he’s not uncontrollable.”

  “Easy for you to say,” she retorted, surprising me. They look at you and see the macho ex-cop who weighs what? Two-thirty? Who took out three criminals before you got shot, and has strong juice at Juvenile Hall. They look at me and see a five-foot-three, one-hundred-twenty-pound nobody they can all push around. Including Jeff.”

  “So don’t let him,” I said, wondering how she’d heard all the stories about me so fast. She’d only moved into the district four days ago.

  She took a healthy bite of her cheese sandwich. Although she’d spent the first half of the lunch period in the ladies’ room, I didn’t see any tear marks. Maybe she fixed her makeup to cover tear stains. Margie used to do that. Up close Jenny Kelly looked older than I’d thought at first: twenty-eight, maybe thirty. Her looks weren’t going to make it any easier to control a roomful of thirteen-year-old boys. She pushed her short blond hair off her face and looked directly at me.

  “Do you really carry a gun?”

  “Of course not. Board of Education regs forbid any weapons by anybody on school property. You know that.”

  “The kids think you carry.”

  I shrugged.

  “And you don’t tell them otherwise.”

  I shrugged again.

  “Okay, I can’t do that either,” she said. “But I’m not going to fail at this, Gene. I’m just not. You’re a big success here, everybody says so. So tell me what I can do to keep enough control of my classes that I have a remote chance of actually teaching anybody anything.”

  I studied her, and revised my first opinion, which was that she’d be gone by the end of September. No tear stains, not fresh out of college, able to keep eating under stress. The verbal determination I discounted; I’d heard a lot of verbal determination from rookies when I was on the Force, and most of it melted away three months out of Police Academy. Even sooner in the City School District.

  “You need to do two things,” I said. “First, recognize that these kids can’t do without connection to other human beings. Not for five minutes, not for one minute. They’re starved for it. And to most of them, ‘connection’ means arguing, fighting, struggling, even abuse. It’s what they’re used to, and it’s what they’ll naturally create, because it feels better to them than existing alone in a social vacuum for even a minute. To compete with that, to get them to disengage from each other long enough to listen to you, you have to give them an equally strong connection to you. It doesn’t have to be intimidation, or some bullshit fantasy about going up against the law. You can find your own way. But unless you’re a strong presence—very strong, very distinctive—of one kind or another, they’re going to ignore you and go back to connecting with each other.”

  “Connection,”
she said, thinking about it. “What about connecting to the material? English literature has some pretty exciting stuff in it, you know.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. But no books are exciting to most of these kids. Not initially. They can only connect to the material through a person. They’re that starved.”

  She took another bite of sandwich. “And the second thing?”

  “I already told you. Get control of Jeff Connors. Immediately.”

  “Who is he? And what was all that bullshit about old people killing themselves?”

  I said, “Didn’t you see it on the news?”

  “Of course I did. The police are investigating, aren’t they? But what did it have to do with my classroom?”

  “Nothing. It was a diversionary tactic. A cover-up.”

  “Of what?”

  “Could be a lot of things. Jeff will use whatever he hears to confuse and mislead, and he hears everything. He’s bright, unmotivated, a natural leader, and — unbelievably — not a gang member. You saw him — no big gold, no beeper. His police record is clean. So far, anyway.”

  Jenny said, “You worked with him a little last year.”

  “No, I didn’t work with him. I controlled him in class, was all.” She’d been asking about me.

  “So if you didn’t really connect with him, how do I?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” I said, and we ate in silence for a few minutes. It didn’t feel strained. She looked thoughtful, turning over what I’d told her. I wondered suddenly whether she’d have made a good cop. Her ears were small, I noticed, and pink, with tiny gold earrings in the shape of little shells.

  She caught me looking, and smiled, and glanced at my left hand.

  So whoever she’d asked about me hadn’t told her everything. I gulped my last bite of sandwich, nodded, and went back to my room before 7H came thundering up the stairs, their day almost over, one more crazy period where Mr. Shaunessy actually expected them to pay attention to some weird math instead of their natural, intense, contentious absorption in each other.

  Two more elderly people committed suicide, at the Angels of Mercy Nursing Home on Amsterdam Avenue.

  I caught it on the news, while correcting 7H’s first-day quiz to find out how much math they remembered from last year. They didn’t remember squat. My shattered knee was propped up on the hassock beside the bones and burial tray of a Hungry Man Extra-Crispy Fried Chicken.

  “…identified as Giacomo della Francesca, seventy-eight, and Lydia Smith, eighty. The two occupied rooms on the same floor, according to nursing home staff, and both had been in fairly good spirits. Mrs. Smith, a widow, threw herself from the roof of the eight-story building. Mr. della Francesca, who was found dead in his room, had apparently stabbed himself. The suicides follow very closely on similar deaths this morning at the Beth Israel Retirement Home on West End Avenue. However, Captain Michael Doyle, NYPD, warned against premature speculation about—”

  I shifted my knee. This Captain Doyle must be getting nervous; this was the third pair of self-inflicted fatalities in nursing homes within ten days. Old people weren’t usually susceptible to copy-cat suicides. Pretty soon the Daily News or the Post would decide that there was actually some nut running around Manhattan knocking off the elderly. Or that there was a medical conspiracy backed by Middle East terrorists and extraterrestrials. Whatever the tabloids chose, the NYPD would end up taking the blame.

  Suddenly I knew, out of nowhere, that Margie was worse.

  I get these flashes like that, out of nowhere, and I hate it. I never used to. I used to know things the way normal people know things, by seeing them or reading them or hearing them or reasoning them through. Ways that made sense. Now, for the last year, I get these flashes of knowing things some other way, thoughts just turning up in my mind, and the intuitions are mostly right. Mostly right, and nearly always bad.

  This wasn’t one of my nights to go to the hospital. But I flicked off the TV, limped to the trash to throw away my dinner tray, and picked up the cane I use when my leg has been under too much physical stress. The phone rang. I paused to listen to the answering machine, just in case it was Libby calling from Cornell to tell me about her first week of classes.

  “Gene, this is Vince Romano.” Pause. “Bucky.” Pause. “I know it’s been a long time.”

  I sat down slowly on the hassock.

  “Listen, I was sorry to hear about Margie. I was going to…you were…it wasn’t.…” Despite myself, I had to grin. People didn’t change. Bucky Romano never could locate a complete verb.

  He finished floundering. “…to say how sorry I am. But that’s not why I’m calling.” Long pause. “I need to talk to you. It’s important. Very important.” Pause. “It’s not about Father Healey again, or any of that old…something else entirely.” Pause. “Very important, Gene. I can’t…it isn’t…you won’t…” Pause. Then his voice changed, became stronger. “I can’t do this alone, Gene.”

  Bucky had never been able to do anything alone. Not when we were six, not when we were eleven, not when we were seventeen, not when he was twenty-three and it wasn’t any longer me but Father Healey who decided what he did. Not when he was twenty-seven and it was me again deciding for him, more unhappy about that than I’d ever been about anything in my life until Margie’s accident.

  Bucky recited his phone number, but he didn’t hang up. I could hear him breathing. Suddenly I could almost see him, somewhere out there, sitting with the receiver pressed so close to his mouth that it would look like he was trying to swallow it. Hoping against hope that I might pick up the phone after all. Worrying the depths of his skinny frantic soul for what words he could say to make me do this.

  “Gene…it’s about…I shouldn’t say this, but after all you’re a…were a…it’s about those elderly deaths.” Pause. “I work at Kelvin Pharmaceuticals now.” And then the click.

  What the hell could anybody make of any of that?

  I limped to the elevator and caught a cab to St. Clare’s Hospital.

  Margie was worse, although the only way I could tell was that there was one more tube hooked to her than there’d been last night. She lay in bed in the same position she’d lain in for eighteen months and seven days: curled head to knees, splinter-thin arms bent at the elbows. She weighed ninety-nine pounds. Gastrostomy and catheter tubes ran into her, and now an IV drip on a pole as well. Her beautiful brown hair, worn away a bit at the back of her head from constant contact with the pillow, was dull. Its sheen, like her life, had faded deep inside its brittle shafts, unrecoverable.

  “Hello, Margie. I’m back.”

  I eased myself into the chair, leg straight out in front of me.

  “Libby hasn’t called yet. First week of classes, schedule to straighten out, old friends to see—you know how it is.” Margie always had. I could see her and Libby shopping the week before Libby’s freshman year, laughing over the Gap bags, quarreling over the price of something I’d buy either of them now, no matter what it cost. Anything.

  “It’s pretty cool out for September, sweetheart. But the leaves haven’t changed yet. I walked across the Park just yesterday—all still green. Composing myself for today. Which wasn’t too bad. It’s going to be a good school year, I think.”

  Have a great year! Margie always said to me on the first day of school, as if the whole year would be compressed in that first six hours and twenty minutes. For three years she’d said it, the three years since I’d been retired from the Force and limped into a career as a junior-high teacher. I remembered her standing at the door, half-dressed for her secretarial job at Time-Warner, her silk blouse stretched across those generous breasts, the slip showing underneath. Have a great day! Have a great five minutes!

  “Last-period 7H looks like a zoo, Margie. But when doesn’t last period look like a zoo? They’re revved up like Ferraris by then. But both algebra classes look good, and there’s a girl in 7A whose transcript is incredible. I mean, we’re talking future Westingho
use Talent winner here.”

  Talk to her, the doctor had said. We don’t know what coma patients can and cannot hear. That had been a year and a half ago. Nobody ever said it to me now. But I couldn’t stop.

  “There’s a new sacrificial lamb in the room next to mine, eighth-grade English. She had a cat fight in there today. But I don’t know, she might have more grit than she looks. And guess who called. Bucky Romano. After all this time. Thirteen years. He wants me to give him a call. I’m not sure yet.”

  Her teeth gapped and stuck out. The anti-seizure medication in her gastrostomy bag made the gum tissue grow too much. It displaced her teeth.

  “I finally bought curtains for the kitchen. Like Libby nagged me to. Although they’ll probably have to wait until she comes home at Thanksgiving to get hung. Yellow. You’d like them.”

  Margie had never seen this kitchen. I could see her in the dining room of the house I’d sold, up on a chair hanging drapes, rubbing at a dirty spot on the window.…

  “Gene?”

  “Hi, Susan.” The shift nurse looked as tired as I’d ever seen her. “What’s this new tube in Margie?”

  “Antibiotics. She was having a little trouble breathing, and an X-ray showed a slight pneumonia. It’ll clear right up on medication. Gene, you have a phone call.”

  Something clutched in my chest. Libby. Ever since that ’93 Lincoln had torn through a light on Lexington while Margie crossed with a bag of groceries, any phone call in an unexpected place does that to me. I limped to the nurses’ station.