How did your interview with Ferone go yesterday?
See you at Faculty Frolic this afternoon!
Bea
Dear Miss Barrett,
Joseph Ferone of your official class is absent today, but you neglected to fill out Postal card #1 (Reason for Absence).
Sadie Finch
Chief Clerk
Dear Sylvia,
Do you happen to have an aspirin?
Please send it to nurse's officethey got me to cover it while she's lying down.
Mary
FROM: JAMES J. MCHABE ADM. ASST.
TO: ALL TEACHERS
DURING TODAY'S ABNORMAL SCHEDULE TEACHERS SHOULD KEEP DISRUPTION AT A MINIMUM. THERE WILL BE A SERIES OF THREE BELLS REPEATED FOUR TIMES TO INDICATE EARLY DISMISSAL.
FACULTY FROLIC WILL BEGIN PROMPTLY AFTER THAT.
TEACHERS MUST NOT PUNCH OUT BEFORE THEIR REGULAR TIME.
JJ McH
Sylvia!
May I borrow your phonograph? School phonograph doesn't work.
Alsostage curtain is stuck. Can you spare a couple of tall kids to be curtain-pullers?
I hope you like the show. All is madness down here. Music, lights, props, costumesnothing works. Manheim forgot all his lines, Yum-Yum is absent, and there are hoodlums (not ours) lurking in the auditorium.
It augurs well
Paul
FROM: JAMES J. MCHABE, ADM. ASST.
TO: ALL TEACHERS
DUE TO UNUSUAL CIRCUMSTANCES THERE IS NO ONE PATROLLING THE HALLS AND ENTRANCES TO CHALLENGE UNAUTHORIZED VISITORS. TEACHERS WITH FREE TIME ARE TO REPORT TO THE OFFICE FOR PATROL ASSIGNMENTS.
JJ McH
Sylvia!
Urgent! Can you get from one of your kids a Japanese fan and some hair lacquer? If no fan is available, a ping-pong racket will do.
Hurriedly,
Paul
(Will you come backstage to help with makeup?)
TO: ALL TEACHERS
Please ignore previous instructions about today's bell schedule. There will be a series of four bells repeated twice to indicate early dismissal. Three bells repeated four times indicates fire drill and we wish to avoid confusion.
Sadie Finch
Chief Clerk
Sylvia!
Can you spate two more boys (husky) to hold up backdrop? It got unglued. Also need an obi ask around. Well be ready in a few minutes. Be sure to yelclass="underline" "Author, author!"
Paul
(Or any wide sash)
TO: ALL TEACHERS
Please disregard bells. There has been a delay in the Faculty Show. Keep students in rooms until further notice.
Sadie Finch
Chief Clerk
TO: ALL TEACHERS
Please disregard previous notice about disregarding bells, since most students are now in auditorium.
Sadie Finch
Chief Clerk
FROM: JAMES J. MCHABE, ADM. ASST.
TO: ALL TEACHERS
BECAUSE OF UNRULINESS IN CLASSROOMS, TODAY'S EARLY DISMISSAL TOOK PLACE EARLIER THAN ANTICIPATED. TEACHERS ARE TO PROCEED TO AUDITORIUM AT ONCE.
JJ McH
PART XI
53. Up the down staircase
December 22
Dear Ellen,
I'm writing this from the hospital, where I am bedded down with a fractured foot; nothing serious, but a nuisance, since Ill be laid up during the busiest time of the term: the holidays!
I was wounded in the line of duty. I might even say above and beyond. I was felled by an unhinged door with a pagoda on it.
I was not attacked or knifed; I fought no issue; proved no point. I had merely gone backstage, in the auditorium, to help Paul during the Faculty Frolic.
That whole afternoon was as macabre as a newsreel Mardi-Gras bobbing towards its grotesque denouement. Harry Kagan, as Clarke, prissy at the lectern; teachers in blue jeans and sneakers licking oversize lollipops or ostentatiously pulling bubble gum from their mouths in an exaggerated attempt at playing the good sport. Remember what's-his-name at Lyons Hallthe professor who used to perch on the windowsill in shirtsleeves and suspenders, munching a sandwich to show that he was one of us? Here was the same kind of phony camaraderieonly it got wilder and wilder. Teachers with skipping ropes, balloons, yo-yos; teachers in Japanese kimonos, pencils stuck in their lacquered hair, singing and dancing in a kind of parody of a parody: the Barringer "Mikado," to the stamping and whistling of kids jammed into the auditorium; and a separate, desperate whistle from McHabe. That was during the garbage-throwing.
I must explain that some outside kidsfrom a neighborhood gang, or students on suspension, or dropoutswho somehow got wind of the fact that there was a show going on, gained entry into the auditorium with contraband garbage, which they proceeded to throw around. They must have aimed it at the stage, but it landed on the audience: our kids. Naturally, ours threw it right back; they threw it back at ours; and so it went, back and forth, for a few rank moments. The auditorium, being windowless, and overflowing with the overflow of both X2 and Y2 kids, was already stifling. Eventually, the visitors were ejected, the garbage was trampled until it got lost, and the show went on.
I'm sure the songs were clever; it was impossible to hear because of the commotion. By this time I was backstagethat's when the pagoda fell on my foot. Or rather, the backdrop, which was a door, painted black with a red and gold pagoda on it. I don't know where it had originally been hingedpossibly a bank; it was heavy as metal. It hurt like hell.
The doctor says I am lucky. I could have had a crushed instep, instead of "a simple fracture of the base of the fifth metatarsal." My foot will be in a cast for a few weeks, but Ill be well in time for the new term at Willowdale.
Right now I'm in a kind of limbo: Because of clerical errors and snarled red tape, I'm not officially out of Calvin Coolidge, nor officially in Willowdale. The only thing I'm sure of is that I am in the hospital, lying brazenly in bed in broad daylight, while someplace bells are ringing and classes are changing and kids are waiting. Kids in schools all over the city, all over the country, pledging allegiance to the flag in assemblies, halls, classrooms, yardshundreds of thousands of right hands on the heart, hundreds of thousands of young voices droning the singsong: ". . . one nation under God in/divisible . . ." Someplace kids are taking a test, frowning, clutching pens, chewing pencils, thinking, thinking in a kind of silent hum. Or arguing in bus or subway about something they had discussed in class. Someplace a solitary kid sits absorbed in a book in a library.
It's absence that makes me so nostalgic. For I must remember, too, the drudgery and the waste. Frustration upon frustration, thanklessness, defeat. The 3 o'clock exhaustion; the FTG fatigue (The Sophomore Slump, the Senior Sorrows). And getting up for early session; in winter, dressing by electric light to punch in before the warning bell, to erase the obscenity from the board, to track down the window-pole, to hand in before 1, before 2, before 3 ...
And "misunderstandings of feelings." (How often I find myself quoting a student!). And the gobbledygook, and the pedagese, and the paper miles of words.