Among School Children (31 page)

Claude looked up at Chris and declared, "I'm with you ninety-five percent of the way!"

Claude looked earnest. Had he just misspoken, or did he mean that? Chris looked down at him. Then she took him by the hand. For most of the expedition, Claude ambled happily along holding hands with Mrs. Zajac.

Woods surrounded them, inviting groves with orangey, pine-needled, fragrant forest floor. They strolled down neatly bordered paths in the shade of tall white pines and soon found themselves beside a lovely village green, all set about with maple trees. Sturbridge Village is a village that never was. Buildings of the 1830s were reconstructed here in a forest in central Massachusetts. How lovely the buildings looked now, reconstituted straight and square, in coats of white paint that would never grow old and peel. The Towne house, a white federalist mansion that once belonged to a successful New England merchant of Charlton, Massachusetts, sits at one end of the green. At the other, on a little rise, the tall, porticoed Center Meetinghouse, a Baptist church in its former life, presides over the town common.

The village gleamed in spring sunshine. The hardwoods were in leaf, the flowers blooming in the gardens behind white picket fences. People in period costume, the living mannequins of the village, passed by Mrs. Zajac's class. A young man in a straw hat and breeches with suspenders walked along an edge of the common beside a pair of perfect oxen, groomed as if they were racehorses. Young women walked by in long dresses and white bonnets. Judith gazed after them. She looked down at the wool tights she wore under her skirt—the nearest thing to pants she was allowed to wear, being a proper Pentecostal daughter—and, laughing, Judith said, "I got these at K Mart." All the children were smiling, chattering happily. Mrs. Zajac was smiling. At the tinsmith's shop, Felipe just had to touch some of the authentic items on display, in order to make them real. Alice told him, in a whisper, that he wasn't supposed to touch. Felipe yelled out, "She's always yellin' at me!" And Chris turned back, still holding Claude's hand, and said, "Okay. No grouches."

They stopped in at the handsome little Greek Revival Thompson Bank, and the elderly guide in his banker's frock coat talked to them about old currency and commerce. Dick asked hopefully, "Did they have bank robbers?" Chris took them on a short detour to the bakehouse, where they got tollhouse cookies, the treat that she remembered best from her own schooldays. A few of the children had no money. Chris got out her purse so that everyone could have a chocolate chip cookie. She gave in to their request that they stop at the souvenir and candy store, and she regretted it a little. Ashley bought a bag of candy that must have weighed a pound. Chris told the chubby girl please not to eat it now, but the next time Chris looked, Ashley had devoured it.

Chris kept an eye on Ashley during a lot of that springtime ramble through the model village. The girl troubled her. Ashley hung back when the others crowded up to the edge of an exhibit. She wore a pair of dowdy brown double-knit stretch pants, clothes that had long since fallen out of fashion among her peers, who preferred blue jeans. In her mind, Chris fumed at Ashley's mother: "What does it cost to buy her a pair of jeans?" (Chris had not quite realized her special objective of the fall. She had now managed to meet every child's parent, except Ashley's. She had tried. She'd asked Ashley to tell her mother it was very important that she come to the last parent conference. The next day, Ashley had sidled up to Chris's desk and said, "My mother may not be able to come. She says it depends on what kind of day it is, or whether she has something else to do.")

The class filed into the reconstructed one-room District Schoolhouse, where a young and rather nervous-looking woman was playing teacher. The school had wooden desks with inkwells but otherwise looked familiar. The class sat down. Felipe, wondering just how much the past resembled the present, shouted a question at the young play-teacher: "Do you put anybody outside if they're bad?"

"I might," said the scowling young woman. "Or I might try to embarrass you. Or I might bring you up here and make you hold logs for a while."

Victor had arrived at the schoolhouse with his class at the same time. "I'll have to try that," he whispered to Chris.

"And I might use this," said the teacher, holding up a short rod, an authentic ferrule, "on your hand or your bottom."

"Where can I get one?" whispered Victor to Chris.

"Anybody ever take you to court for hitting a kid?" called Felipe to the teacher.

The class crowded up to the edge of the visitors gallery inside the potter's shop. Their eyes grew wide, their mouths hung open, as they watched a pot emerge from a spinning lump of clay under the hands of the neatly costumed potter. "That's
fresh!
" said many voices.

The academic objective of this expedition was, of course, to have the class glimpse a time that seemed primitive compared to their own. But no nineteenth-century village could ever have looked so thoroughly kempt, serene, and civilized as this one. The mud and blood of everyday life were not displayed. In Sturbridge Village on that sunny day, the past looked like a vast improvement on the present that most of the class came from. Then again, even a more accurately harsh version of this village might have looked like an improvement.

Judith and Arabella, the class's two most religious girls, stuck close to each other. They held hands now and then. They walked together down the tidy paths, across the covered bridge, which was fragrant with the smell of old wood, past the wonderfully costumed guides. They stopped to listen to the birds singing in the trees. The village inspired the two girls. Arabella, who lived in the mostly rebuilt section of the Flats, remarked, "I'd like to leave Holyoke. People walk around with big radios, and they're always yelling."

"I'd like to leave, too," said Judith. Both girls' voices were happy. "But the radios don't bother me."

The class circled back, walking beside the mill pond. Claude stopped to gaze into the waters, wishing he had brought his fishing gear. Chris took him by the hand again. Their last stop was the Freeman Farm, a little farmhouse painted brick-red, with a gambrel roof of cedar shakes. They poked around inside awhile, then came to rest outside, a band of now weary travelers on a dreamy springtime afternoon. They clustered around Chris beside a split rail fence, Mrs. Zajac and her class gazing out on a patch of plowed ground. All around they saw neatly fenced-in pastures, cultivated fields and hayfields, and beyond, horizons of tall trees. Sounds of traffic from the Massachusetts Turnpike drifted through the woods. A rooster crowed from the barnyard.

"Where the horses are?" Pedro asked Chris.

Judith stood beside Chris at the fence. Judith, from a family of Puerto Rican farmers who had lost their land, gestured at the field before them, its new corn crop sprouting. "My father would love this," she said to Chris.

Time to go back, and Chris calling loudly from the front of the bus, "I want to congratulate my class. You behaved very well." Chris ambled down the aisle and sat on an armrest among the girls. They sang while the boys snickered and listened intently. The girls broke into "Miss Suzie":

"...And broke her little—
Ask me no more questions..."

Hysterical laughter.

"...The boys are in the bathroom
Zipping up their—
Flies are in the meadow..."

"Let's sing it again!" said Kimberly.

Chris rolled her eyes and tapped her own breastbone. "I know that one. That's as old as I am. Wait a minute. Wait a minute." She sang, on key and sweetly, to the tune of "Molly Malone":

"In Holyoke's fair city,
Where girls are so pretty..."

Other girls gathered. "Want to sing, Ashley? Want to sing, Courtney?" asked Chris. She said, "When I was in grade school, my friends and I used to have a song we'd sing and kick our legs out." Looking at Judith, Chris added, "I grew up in a part of Holyoke called the Highlands." Then Chris sang:

"We are the Highlands girls.
We wear our hair in curls.
We smoke our sisters' butts.
We drive our mothers nuts."

And Judith and Mariposa sang more jump rope songs for Mrs. Zajac, including some in Spanish:

"
Tu madre, tu padre
Viven en la calle
De San Valentine...
"

The girls sang:

"Shake it, shake it, shake it,
Shake it all you can,
So all the boys around the block
Can see your underwear."

Courtney did the shimmy in the aisle to this tune, her blue eyes looking old and sad. Chris watched her and felt a little sad, and worried, too. They sang for Mrs. Zajac, who shook her head, a satire of a TV ad that was going around Holyoke:

"Come back to Jamaica,
We'll hijack your plane,
We'll steal all your money,
And feed you cocaine."

The class re-entered Holyoke; on the Willimansett Bridge. By the time they got there, the bus had quieted. Chris and most of the children gazed out the windows. The old bridge, made of steel and painted green, looks as if it were constructed from a grown-up version of an Erector set. To the right is a dark railroad bridge and the tail of a rapids below. Down to the left the brown river grows lazier. It flows south beside brick mills, between muddy banks. A couple of discarded fuel tanks, half rotted now, sat in the shallows. On the far river bank, on the Holyoke side, garbage decorated the few trees.

Up ahead loomed the vast complex of brick mill buildings where Chris's father spent most of his working life. Chris used to pick him up here, when she was in high school and her father had lent her the car. The sooty bricks of industrial Holyoke seemed to stain the air on that sunny afternoon. There was litter on the river banks, litter in the weeds entwined in the metal fences along the roadway, litter down side streets and in vacant lots.

The bus crossed the bridge and carried the class back through the lower wards. They had left a village that tried to re-create the mid-nineteenth century. They came back to a city that had in fact been founded then, and might still serve as a model of a nineteenth-century industrial town. The bus passed some new stores and a couple of apartment houses with the soot removed and solid-looking front doors, buildings renovated by a nonprofit organization called Nueva Esperanza—"New Hope." But all around those few examples of real human progress stood buildings with windows boarded up in plywood and covered with graffiti. The bus passed lots made vacant by old and recent fires. If one looked closely down side streets, one would have seen, here and there, pairs of sneakers hanging from the wires.

Heading back to Kelly, they went down Cabot Street, then past streets named Franklin and Sergeant, names that honor some of the city's founders and their invested capital, long since returned many times over and withdrawn. For the most part, people with Spanish surnames now live on streets named for New England Yankees. But in this part of town street and surnames have never coincided. Some people say that the lower wards were beautiful back when O'Malleys and Fleurys lived on Cabot Street. This was a fine part of town, some people say, before the Puerto Ricans came. The delicate brickwork around the windows and along the eaves of many grimy tenements suggests that once the lower wards looked comelier. But probably the lower wards have always looked better just a while ago. They did not look like model neighborhoods one hundred years back, when the city was still growing. In 1875, a report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics described the worker housing of Holyoke as follows:

Holyoke has more and worse large tenement houses than any manufacturing town of textile fabrics in the state, and built in such a manner that there is very little means of escape in case of fire. The sanitary arrangements are very imperfect, and in many cases, there is no provision made for carrying the slops from the sinks, but they are allowed to run wherever they can make their way. Portions of the yards are covered with filth and green slime, and within 20 feet, people are living in basements of houses three feet below the level of the yard.... There are also quite a number of six and eight tenement houses, with only one door at front and none at back, over-crowded, dirty and necessarily unhealthy....It is no wonder that the death rate, in 1872, was greater in Holyoke than in any large town in Massachusetts, excepting Fall River, and if an epidemic should visit them now, its ravages would be great.

Citing this report in 1939, the author of the only full history of Holyoke wrote without irony: "The squalor and filth in which Irish and French Canadian immigrants lived in these years is partly attributable to their lack of any knowledge of the most elementary rules of sanitation."

The tired children smiled out the windows of the bus. They passed by Judith's father's church. Judith spotted her sister in a window in the apartment above and waved. It was a warm day in the lower wards, and many women sat by their windows, looking out.

Chris sat at one of the empty children's desks, shoulders rounded, sunglasses resting in her hair. "Well, did you all enjoy yourselves?"

"That was the best trip I ever had!" shouted Felipe.

"Besides having fun, I hope you learned something about American history."

They crowded around her, showing her the presents they had bought for their parents at the gift shop.

"I got this wine jelly for my mother," said Claude. "It tastes just like wine."

"Claude! You're going to give that to your mother, and you just stuck your finger in it." Chris's voice contained no vehemence. She sat and smiled toward the window. Claude froze, the jellied finger in his mouth. Arnie showed her a ring he had bought, one fashioned from a flat nail. "It's
real
metal," he said.

"Oh, Arnie, that's nice."

Ashley stumbled over a chair, and Chris went to her, helped her up, and sat by her for a private conversation. Chris called her "dear heart." "It's usually Claude who has something happen to him.
You
can't do this, Ashley."