In 1918 you read “The Lady of the Lake” in grammar school, in 1918 you read the “Lay of the Last Minstrel” (Who was she? Yee-hee-hee!). But how pretty some of the words were: “’Tis merry, ’tis merry in the good greenwood where the mavis and merle are singing.” And you had to bring Mom to school because of your grin — at which your singing teacher took offense — for nothing, as Mr. O’Reilly had warned you, and you were humiliated, standing in front of the class saying you were sorry, and blubbering: Hatchet-faced, bespectacled Miss Bergman. Ira hated her forever, hated her to this very day.
How he hated Miss Bergman! He would hate her all his life, hatchet face in eyeglasses, hate her for the gratuitous humiliation she had inflicted on him, punishing him so inordinately for a grin that somehow twisted his face into a mask that people didn’t like. And even now, as he typed, old man as he was, his resentment at the injustice done him returned. Sixty-five years later! Who else of her music class would remember all through life, as he remembered — and appreciated — and could still sing — the songs she had taught them:
A tinker I am. My name’s natty Dan.
From morn till night I trudge it. .
Of course, everyone whispered, a “stinker I am” (and perhaps his grin over that had gotten him into trouble). Still, how he enjoyed the song, relished that double entendre about being a lad of mettle.
He had departed from his text, the yellow second sheet beside him, wandered from himself abroad, as Tom O’Bedlam said, included all sorts of unforeseen, extraneous material. It was the prevalence of the war undoubtedly, the ubiquitousness of the war in everyone’s life that swerved him off course. Lame excuse, but (he heard himself sigh): Again and again, what bitterness welled up in him over the accident, at the terrible deformation that was its consequence. Bootless his grudge against fate, and yet he couldn’t help it: indicative of the depth to which the inner life had been scarred, a whole life long, mutilated, a whole life long. Fortunately, fortunately, and more than fortunately, there was M.
Well. .
The first image that always occurred to Ira, the teacher whose face Ira always saw first when he thought of P.S. 24 (perhaps after that of Mr. O’Reilly), was his General Science teacher, Jewish and tired-looking — he, too, like Mr. Sullivan and some of the others, may have had second jobs after school — Mr. Steifen: looking over his shoulder at the class with worn, weary face, as he demonstrated how to find the center of gravity of the cardboard triangle hanging in front of the blackboard. . or as he showed the awesome weight of the earth’s atmosphere, when he turned off the heat of the Bunsen burner under the sheet-steel gallon can, screwed the top on tightly, and while he spoke, so patiently, sadly, a mysterious force suddenly crumpled the can; it fell in upon itself before the awed, incredulous eyes of his pupils, as if by wizardry.
Next, in no definite order, Mr. Kilcoyne. He taught Civics or Government, or something of the sort. A big man, in his early forties, not too tidy, an oyster of mucus might adhere to his fibrous mustache — which some of the kids said was foam off the beer he drank in the café on 125th Street where he had his lunch. He commuted to work from the small dairy farm he owned in Yonkers. His familiarity with every aspect of dairy farming, and his willingness to impart his knowledge, made him easy prey for the tough, case-hardened gamins in his class: who, choosing the right moment, perhaps after a talk on the order of succession to the presidency, might pop up with: “How d’you milk a cow, Mr. Kilcoyne” (usually not so blatantly irrelevant as that, but something close).
Mr. Kilcoyne hesitated.
“We never seen a farm,” Victor Pellini pleaded.
“No. Well, the first thing you’ve got to do is wipe the udder clean, with a cloth and good sudsy warm water—”
“De udder?” Hands were raised, those of harriers in wait, accomplished accomplices — like Vito or Guido Spompali. “De udder what?”
“No, no. I didn’t say other. Udder. That’s the bag under the cow. That’s where the teats hang from.”
“Is dat what you grab?”
“One in each hand, yes.” Mr. Kilcoyne milked the air. “And after you strip ’em. .”
But the kids had heard enough. Heads ducked under desks whose owners sought figment property on the floor, while faces contorted in glee. Tits. A teacher talking about tits. What could be funnier? Gone for that period at least was the succession to the presidency of the United States.
Dickensian, Ira thought. Not altogether: It happened often enough so that it survived a half-century in memory; more than that, it survived three score and seven, as Lincoln might have said. The predominant farm-type individual with his normal-school teaching degree, the once-average American faced by sly little first-generation urban rapscallions: “So you grab ’em by de tits, Mr. Kilcoyne?”
“Teats. An udder has teats.”
Mr. Kilcoyne might have been duped. But Mr. Sullivan was not to be fooled with. The first day of class he brought out his shillelagh, a massive cudgel, which he slammed twice or thrice on the desk, and invited anybody to get funny. Nobody did. He was a badly crippled man, stunted, grotesquely stooped, and compelled to get about with two canes. A gentle, long-suffering man underneath his pose of cantankerousness, with a disproportionately large head on whose temples blue veins crinkled like miniature lightning, Mr. Sullivan never touched a pupil, relying instead on his bitter, sarcastic comments that stung the most mischievous into behaving, and very few ever misbehaved in Mr. Sullivan’s class. He had a vestige of a brogue, and something that was worse, a speech defect that in any other teacher would have destroyed all possibility of his controlling a class of Harlem slum toughies, shillelagh or not. Perhaps it was merely an attribute of his brogue: he “shushed” every “s.” “Shtand up,” Mr. Sullivan would say. “Shit down.”
Behind his back they called him “Shitdown Shullivan,” but nobody dared smile when ordered to “Shit down” in his class. He taught English — he was a C.P.A. and moonlighted after school hours as an accountant for several small firms.
“Yoursh truly, Johnny Dooley,” Mr. Sullivan taught his class how to conclude a business letter. “Bad, worsh, wursht,” Mr. Sullivan mocked the scholar faltering over the comparison of an adjective. Or he might vary reproach with “Shikk, shikker, dead.” And for the poor, stumbling reader’s benefit: “Vosh von haben gaben schlobben, gaben schlobben haben.” And one day, to Ira’s zany-pretending, shame-faced chagrin, when he was called on to read and explain the passage from James Russell Lowell’s “The Vision of Sir Launfal” that went “Daily with souls that cringe and plot, we Sinai’s climb and know it not.” Ira did explain; but with so much protective, self-disparaging antic of demeanor that Mr. Sullivan snapped in waspish rebuke, “Thatsh right. Make ’em laugh. You know more than any of ’em. But make a boob o’yourshelf. Shit down!”
Flustered, ears burning, Ira sat down. Mr. Sullivan had found him out, had seen through him. Mr. Sullivan knew who he was.
Mr. O’Reilly, the principal, was gaunt and gray, with a tic ever creasing his lean, severe face. In his sober vestments, unvarying dark clothes, he looked more like a priest than a school principal. Perhaps it had once been his aim to be a priest. He must have worn the wing collar and tie of conservative attire of those days, or perhaps even more conservative, more old-fashioned, the high, stiff collar and cravat that Pop wore in his wedding portrait of 1905. Whenever Ira tried to visualize him, Mr. O’Reilly always wore a high, stiff collar — but turned backwards, like a priest’s. Energetic, though surely in his early seventies, he was wont to enter an English class with startling quickness, shut the door behind him, and stand listening a minute, his probing blue eyes scanning the faces before him. Then, with rapid, decisive nod and movement of hand, he would take over the class. First, he would detach his starched cuffs and placing them like upright cylinders on the desk, take a piece of chalk in his hand, and face twitching, write on the blackboard: “Time flies we cannot their speed is too great.” And he would ask for a volunteer who thought he could punctuate the string of words correctly? No one could. He had an endless store of these devices; he seemed to come with a fresh supply for every grade: “What do you think we shave you for nothing and give you a drink.” How should the barber punctuate this sign so it would be free of ambiguity? These and so many more.