Evan Hunter
Criminal Conversation
This is for my daughter,
— And so the conversation slips
Among velleities and carefully caught regrets
Through attenuated tones of violins
Mingled with remote cornets
And begins.
Excerpts from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” and “The Waste Land” in COLLECTED POEMS 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by Harcourt Brace & Company, copyright © 1964, 1963 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
1: December 21–December 30
Luretta Barnes was the smartest girl Sarah taught. Rap as poetry, poetry as rap was a good concept. Luretta disagreed with it.
“Ice-T ain’t Allen Ginsberg,” she told Sarah. “No way you gonna compare Soul on Ice to Howl. No way, Mrs. Welles.”
A scholarship student, Luretta was the only black girl in the entire sophomore class. The only one now taking a stand against rap as poetry.
“You want to call it doggerel,” she said, “that’s fine by me. But poetry? Come on, Mrs. Welles. Callin’ rap poetry is like callin’ Michael Jackson Pavarotti.”
The other girls all laughed.
Luretta soaked it up.
Gorgeous fourteen-year-old with a smile like starshine, hair done up in ten thousand braids, little colored glass beads strung in them, could have been a model in an instant, wanted to be a lawyer. She’d somehow learned from one of the other girls that Mrs. Welles’s husband was a lawyer in the DA’s Office. One day, she stopped Sarah in the halls, asked if her husband could use a good assistant. Sharpen pencils, empty trash baskets, whatever, it’d beat her after-school job at McDonald’s. Sarah said she was pretty sure all such jobs were civil service, which meant taking an exam and so on. She said she’d ask her husband, though. Michael had confirmed it.
“He’s missin’ out on a future star,” Luretta had said, grinning her celestial smile.
Sarah was now qualifying the comparison, hedging the lesson so that rap could be considered protest poetry, or perhaps poetic commentary, in much the same way that Lennon’s or McCartney’s lyrics for the Beatles could rightfully be considered such.
“‘Eleanor Rigby,’ for example,” she said, “is really a poem of protest, wouldn’t you say? An elegy for the lonely? A cry for pity? And it’s social commentary as well, isn’t it? Eleanor keeping her face in a jar by the door? Father MacKenzie giving his sermon and no one showing up for it?”
Most of these fifteen-year-olds knew “Eleanor Rigby,” but just barely. To many of them, the Beatles might have been a quartet of strolling Elizabethan minstrels. McCartney was in his fifties, after all, an old man in the eyes of these precocious adolescents. Sarah plunged ahead regardless. She’d have brought in some of her own tapes if she’d known she’d be taking this tack — which, by the way, wasn’t a bad one. Instead, she was winging it now only because Luretta had taken her unexpected position.
“Or what’s ‘I Am the Walrus,’” she said, gathering steam, “if not a protest against England’s tax laws? All the graphic references to death and dying? You’ve all heard the expression ‘Nothing’s sure but death and taxes,’ haven’t you?”
No one had heard the expression. Smartest kids in the city of New York here at Greer, none of them had ever heard about death and taxes or, for that matter, “I Am the Walrus.”
Except Luretta.
“Lennon was a poet,” she said. “You’re comparing pigs and pork chops, they’re not the same at all.”
“Excuse me, but who’s Lennon?” one of the girls asked.
“Spare me,” Luretta said, and rolled her lovely brown eyes.
“John Lennon,” Sarah said.
“Wasn’t he the man some nut shot outside the Dakota?” another girl asked.
Good lesson to teach sometime, Sarah thought. The way people are remembered. Would Woody Allen be remembered as a child molester or as the preeminent director of his time? Would Oliver North be remembered as a hero to his country or a traitor to the sacred precepts of democracy? And would John Lennon, after all was said and done, be remembered solely as the man some nut shot outside an apartment building on New York’s Upper West Side?
The bell rang.
“Nuts,” Sarah said, and smiled.
She said this every day at the end of each and every one of her classes. It was an absolutely genuine expression of regret; she really did hate the sound of the bell that signaled the end of a class. But it had become nonetheless something of a signature trademark.
Luretta came up to her.
“That might’ve been condescending,” she said. “Calling them poets just ’cause they’re black.”
“Good point,” Sarah said. “We’ll discuss it next time.”
Michael always sided with their daughter. No matter what the issue, he always came down hard on Mollie’s side. He was doing the same thing now. Sarah thought she’d made her point clearly enough at the dinner table. There was no sense putting up a Christmas tree when they’d be leaving for St. Bart’s on the twenty-sixth. Today was the twenty-first. Even if they managed to get it up and decorated by tomorrow night...
“And by the way,” she said. “Anything taller than six feet is out of the question.”
“Six feet! That’s a shrub, Mom!”
This from Mollie.
Twelve years old, secure in the knowledge that her father was defending her case and the verdict was already in. They had just come down from their apartment. It was close to seven thirty and snow was falling; it made Sarah feel even more like Scrooge attacking the Cratchits.
“Even if it’s decorated by tomorrow night,” she said, picking up her earlier thought, “we’ll be gone on Saturday, and we won’t be back...”
“We can enjoy it while we’re here,” Michael said, grinning like a bribed judge and looking brawny and woodsy in an olive-green loden coat with toggle fasteners, the hood pulled up over his head.
“Sure, for four whole days,” Sarah said. “We won’t be home till the third. By that time, with no one here to water it...”
“We can leave a key with the super.”
“I don’t like him going into the apartment when we’re not here.”
“I’ll give him ten bucks.”
“Give me the ten bucks, Dad,” Mollie said. “I’ll stay home and water it.”
“Sure you will,” Michael said, and Mollie giggled.
“Who’ll put up the lights?” Sarah asked.
Last-ditch stand. Plea bargaining.
“I will,” Michael said.
“No taller than eight feet,” she said.
“Deal,” he said, and took her hand and winked at Mollie.
They walked through the gently drifting flakes, scanning the trees lining the sidewalk, holding hands and deliberately matching strides as if they were still in college together, strolling across campus. At five-eleven, Michael was three inches taller than she was, but her legs were long, and she had no trouble keeping up. She had dressed tonight in jeans and boots and a navy peacoat, a red woolen hat pulled down over her short blond hair. Mollie rushed ahead of them, eager to find a suitable tree, gushing over every huge one that caught her eye.
“Mom!”