Dissembling, Alexa stood up and bent forward to kiss the pink doughy cheek (they would not, so long as a kiss lasted, see each other’s dismay), but the earphones reined her in inches short of her goal.
Loretta completed the gesture.
“Well then—” (after this memento mori) “—let’s go into my shambles, shall we?” Alexa, smiling, disconnected herself from the viewer.
“It’s out the door and around the corner. The school is spread out over four buildings. Three of them official landmarks.” She led the way, lumbering down the dark hall and chattering about architecture. When she opened the door to the street the wind reached into her dress and made a sail of it. There seemed to be enough orange Wooly© on her to rig up a fair-sized yawl.
East 77th was innocent of traffic except for a narrow, not very busy, bicycle path. Potted ginkgos dotted the concrete and real grass pressedup voluptuously through the cracks. Rarely did the city afford the pleasure of ruins, and Alexa drank it in.
(Somewhere she had seen a wall, all built of massive blocks of stone. Birds rested in the cracks where mortar had been chipped away and looked down at her. It had been the underside of a bridge—a bridge that had lost its river.)
“Such weather,” she said, lingering beside one of the benches.
“Yes, April.” Loretta, who was still being blown apart, was reluctant to take the hint.
“It’s the only time, except for maybe a week in October, that New York is even viable.”
“Mm. Why don’t we talk out here then? At least until the children claim it for their own.” Then, once they’d plunked themselves down: “Sometimes, you know, I almost think I’d like the street rezoned again. Cars make such a soothing noise. Not to mention the graft I have to pay.” She made a honking sound through her nose, expressive of cynicism.
“Graft?” Alexa asked, feeling it was expected of her.
“It comes under ‘maintenance’ in the budget.”
They regarded the windy month of April. The young grass fluttered. Strands of red hair whipped Loretta’s face. She clamped a hand upon her head.
“What do you think it costs to keep this place going for one school-year—what do you think?”
“I couldn’t begin to … I’ve never … ”
“A million and a half. Just slightly under.”
“It’s hard to believe,” she said. (Could she have cared less?)
“It would be a lot more if it weren’t that half of us, including me, is paid directly from Albany.” Loretta went on, with aggrieved relish, to render an accounting of the school’s finances circumstantial enough to have satisfied the Angel of Judgment. Alexa could not have felt more embarrassed if Loretta had begun to relate the unseemliest details of her private life. Indeed, between old school chums a friendly titbit or two might have helped restore a lapsed intimacy. In the old days Alexa had even once been in the same room while Loretta was getting laid by the Geology lab assistant. Or was it vice versa? In any case there had been few secrets between them. But to bring up a subject like one’s own private income so blatantly, and then to dwell upon it this way— it was shocking. Alexa was aghast.
Eventually a hint of purposefulness became apparent in the drift of Loretta’s indiscretions. The school was kept alive by a grant from the Balanchine Foundation. Beyond an annual lump sum of fifty thousand dollars, the Foundation awarded scholarships to thirty-two entering students. Each year the school had to round up a new herd of qualified candidates, for the grant was conditional upon maintaining a sixty/forty ratio between paying and scholarship students.
“So now you see,” Loretta said, nervously dallying with her big zipper, “why your phone call was such a boon.”
“No, I don’t see, entirely.” Was she angling, God forbid, for a donation? Alexa tried to think of anything she might have said on the phone that could have given Loretta so false an estimate of G.’s tax bracket. Their address, certainly, couldn’t have led her to this mistake: West 87th was distinctly modest.
“You spoke of working for the Welfare Department,” Loretta said, with a sense of having laid down all her cards.
The zipper, having reach aphelion, began to descend. Alexa stared at it with candid incomprehension.
“Oh, Alexa, don’t you see? You can scout them up for us.”
“But surely in all New York City you don’t have any trouble finding thirty-two candidates? Why, you told me there was a waiting list!”
“Of those who can pay. The difficulty is getting scholarship students who can meet the physical requirements. There are enough bright kids in the slums, especially if you know what tests to use to find them, but by the time they’re ten years old, eleven years old, they’re all physical wrecks. It’s the combination of a cheap synthetic diet and the lack of exercise.” The zipper, rising, snagged in orange Wooly©. “The grant is from the Balanchine Foundation—oh dear, now see what I’ve done—so there has to be at least a pretense of these kids becoming dancers. Potentially.”
The zipper wouldn’t budge. The movement of her shoulders slowly spread apart the opened top of the dress, creating a vast decolletage.
“I’ll certainly keep my eyes opened,” Alexa promised.
Loretta made a final attempt. Somewhere something ripped. She rose from the bench and forced an operatic laugh. “Let’s repair inside, shall we?”
On the way to the office Loretta asked all the questions she’d so far neglected—what sports Tancred played, what programs he watched, what subjects he was most apt at, and what his ambitions were, if any.
“Right now he’s talking about whaling. In general we’ve tried not to coerce him.”
“Is coming here his own idea then?”
“Oh, Tank doesn’t even know we’ve applied. G. and I—that’s Gene, my husband, we call each other by our initials—we thought it would be best if we let him finish out the semester in peace where he is.”
“P.S. 166,” Loretta said, just to prove that she had gone over the application.
“It’s a good school for the early grades, but after that… ”
“Of course. Democracy can be carried too far.”
“It can,” Alexa conceded.
They had reached the shambles, which was neither an office nor a bedroom nor yet a restaurant altogether. Loretta rearranged the upper part of her person inside a maroon sweater and tucked the lower, grosser half of herself out of sight behind an oak desk. Alexa at once felt herself more friendly disposed to her.
“I hope you don’t think I’m being too pokey?”
“Not at all.”
“And Mr. Miller? What does he do?”
“He’s in heat-retrieval systems.”
“Oh.”
(G. would always add, at this point, “I fight entropy for a living.” Should she?)
“Well. Most of our parents, you know, come from the humanities. Like us. If Tancred should come to the Lowen School, it’s not likely that he’ll ever follow in his father’s technological footsteps. Does Mr. Miller realize that?”
“We’ve discussed it. It’s funny—” in evidence she laughed, once, meagerly, through her nose “—but it’s actually G. who’s been more in favor of Tank coming here. Whereas my first thought was to enroll him at Stuyvesant.”
“Did you apply there?”
“Yes. I’m still waiting to hear if he’s been accepted.”
“It would be cheaper, of course.”
“We’ve tried not to let that be a consideration. G. went to Stuyvesant, but he doesn’t have good feelings about it. And while I enjoyed my education well enough, I can’t see that it’s enriched my life so awfully much more than G.’s that I can feel justified in my uselessness.”