‘Well, we all hope so, don’t we, Mr Bowden? Smoke if you like. It’s supposed to be off-limits on school property, but I’ll never tell.’
Thank you.’
Mr Bowden took a half-crushed package of Camel cigarettes from his inner pocket, put one of the last two zigzagging smokes in his mouth, found a Diamond Blue-Tip match, scratched it on the heel of one black shoe, and lit up. He coughed an old man’s dank cough over the first drag, shook the match out, and put the blackened stump into the ashtray Rubber Ed had produced. Rubber Ed watched this ritual, which seemed almost as formal as the old man’s shoes, with frank fascination.
‘Where to begin,’ Bowden said, his distressed face looking at Rubber Ed through a swirling raft of cigarette smoke.
‘Well,’ Rubber Ed said kindly, ‘the very fact that you’re here instead of Todd’s parents tells me something, you know.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does. Very well.’ He folded his hands. The Camel protruded from between the second and third fingers of his right. He straightened his back and lifted his chin. There was something almost Prussian in his mental coming to terms, Rubber Ed thought, something that made him think of all those war movies he’d seen as a kid.
‘My son and my daughter-in-law are having troubles in their home,’ Bowden said, biting off each word precisely. ‘Rather bad troubles, I should think.’ His eyes, old but amazingly bright, watched as Rubber Ed opened the folder centred in front of him on the desk blotter. There were sheets of paper inside, but not many.
‘And you feel that these troubles are affecting Todd’s academic performance?’
Bowden leaned forward perhaps six inches. His blue eyes never left Rubber Ed’s brown ones. There was a heavily charged pause, and then Bowden said: ‘The mother drinks.’
He resumed his former ramrod-straight position.
‘Oh,’ Rubber Ed said.
‘Yes,’ Bowden replied, nodding grimly. ‘The boy has told me that he has come home on two occasions and has found her sprawled out on the kitchen table. He knows how my son feels about her drinking problem, and so the boy has put dinner in the oven himself on these occasions, and has gotten her to drink enough black coffee so she will at least be awake when Richard comes home.’
That’s bad,’ Rubber Ed said, although he had heard worse — mothers with heroin habits, fathers who had abruptly taken it into their heads to start banging their daughters… or their sons. ‘Has Mrs Bowden thought about getting professional help for her problem?’
The boy has tried to persuade her that would be the best course. She is much ashamed, I think. If she was given a little time…’ He made a gesture with his cigarette that left a dissolving smoke-ring in the air. ‘You understand?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Rubber Ed nodded, privately admiring the gesture that had produced the smoke-ring. ‘Your son… Todd’s father…’
‘He is not without blame,’ Bowden said harshly. The hours he works, the meals he has missed, the nights when he must leave suddenly… I tell you, Mr French, he is more married to his job than he is to Monica. I was raised to believe that a man’s family came before everything. Was it not the same for you?’
‘It sure was,’ Rubber Ed responded heartily. His father had been a night watchman for a large Los Angeles department store and he had really only seen his pop on weekends and vacations.
That is another side of the problem,’ Bowden said.
Rubber Ed nodded and thought for a moment. ‘What about your other son, Mr Bowden? Uh…’ He looked down at the folder. ‘Harold. Todd’s uncle.’
‘Harry and Deborah are in Minnesota now,’ Bowden said, quite truthfully. ‘He has a position there at the University medical school. It would be quite difficult for him to leave, and very unfair to ask him.’ His face took on a righteous cast. ‘Harry and his wife are quite happily married.’
‘I see.’ Rubber Ed looked at the file again for a moment and then closed it. ‘Mr Bowden, I appreciate your frankness. I’ll be just as frank with you.’
Thank you,’ Bowden said stiffly.
‘We can’t do as much for our students in the counselling area as we would like. There are six counsellors here, and we’re each carrying a load of over a hundred students. My newest colleague, Hepburn, has a hundred and fifteen. At this age, in our society, all children need help.’
‘Of course.’ Bowden mashed his cigarette brutally into the ashtray and folded his hands once more.
‘Sometimes bad problems get by us. Home environment and drugs are the two most common. At least Todd isn’t mixed up with speed or mescaline or PCP.’
‘God forbid.’
‘Sometimes,’ Rubber Ed went on, ‘there’s simply nothing we can do. It’s depressing, but it’s a fact of life. Usually the ones that are first to get spit out of the machine we’re running here are the class troublemakers, the sullen, uncommunicative kids, the ones who refuse to even try. They are simply warm bodies waiting for the system to buck them up through the grades or waiting to get old enough so they can quit without their parents’ permission and join the army or get a job at the Speedy-Boy Carwash or marry their boyfriends. You understand? I’m being blunt. Our system is, as they say, not all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘I appreciate your frankness.’
‘But it hurts when you see the machine starting to mash up someone like Todd. He ran out a 92 average for last year’s work, and that puts him in the ninety-fifth percentile. His English averages are even better. He shows a flair for writing, and that’s something special in a generation of kids that thinks culture begins in front of the TV and ends in the neighbourhood movie theatre. I was talking to the woman who had Todd in Comp last year. She said Todd passed in the finest term-paper she’d seen in twenty years of teaching. It was on the German death-camps during World War II. She gave him the only A-plus she’s ever given a composition student.’
‘I have read it,’ Bowden said. ‘It is very fine.’
‘He has also demonstrated above-average ability in the life sciences and social sciences, and while he’s not going to be one of the great math whizzes of the century, all the notes I have indicate that he’s given it the good old college try… until this year. Until this year. That’s the whole story, in a nutshell.’
‘Yes.’
‘I hate like hell to see Todd go down the tubes this way, Mr Bowden. And summer school… well, I said I’d be frank. Summer school often does a boy like Todd more harm than good. Your usual junior high school summer session is a zoo. AH the monkeys and the laughing hyenas are in attendance, plus a full complement of dodo birds. Bad company for a boy like Todd.’
‘Certainly.’
‘So let’s get to the bottom line, shall we? I suggest a series of appointments for Mr and Mrs Bowden at the Counselling Centre downtown. Everything in confidence, of course. The man in charge down there, Harry Ackerman, is a good friend of mine. And I don’t think Todd should go to them with the idea; I think you should.’ Rubber Ed smiled widely. ‘Maybe we can get everybody back on track by June. It’s not impossible.’
But Bowden looked positively alarmed by this idea.
‘I believe they might resent the boy if I took that proposal to them now,’ he said. ‘Things are very delicate. They could go either way. The boy has promised me he will work harder in his studies. He is very alarmed at this drop in his marks.’ He smiled thinly, a smile Ed French could not quite interpret. ‘More alarmed than you know.’
‘But—’
‘And they would resent me’ Bowden pressed on quickly. ‘God knows they would. Monica already regards me as something of a meddler. I try not to be, but you see the situation. I feel that things are best left alone… for now.’