Among School Children (8 page)

Shortly after she got married, Chris went with Billy to live in Florida. Billy had a job down there on a newspaper. They moved into rooms in a suburban-style complex of furnished apartments, along with many transient military families—there was an Air Force base nearby. Chris had no friends and nothing much to do during the day while Billy worked. The women Chris met in the apartment complex actually talked about brands of laundry detergent, just like housewives on TV. She watched a lot of talk shows, doing her own talking to the screen. At Communion at a local church, the priest looked at her and said softly, "You're Irish, aren't you?" Afterward, outside, the priest took her hand and told her he could tell from her looks she was Irish. It made Chris think of home, and of the elderly men who would peer at her and say, "You don't look Polish. You must be Irish. Oh, you're one of the Padden girls, eh? I knew your father. He was Mayo. Your mother's people are Kerry." She did not belong in Florida. The air smelled wrong. The palmetto bugs that got into their apartment horrified her. She went to the bathroom armed with a slipper to ward them off. Easygoing Billy said they could make soup out of them. "Poor Billy. He was trying to make everything so nice for me, and all I did was complain." Chris couldn't joke wholeheartedly about the bugs until she got safely back to Holyoke. Then she told everyone, "They weren't bugs. They were birds!"

Back in Holyoke, the
Transcript-Telegram
had a job for Billy. Chris's exile in Florida lasted just one long month. "Hell on earth." Returning, she saw the city through the fog of tears, as she had last seen it, when she'd thought she was leaving it for good. It contained all she really wanted. It was a place where she could live according to the obligations of affection, among people who had known her as a girl, among family, old friends, and such comfortingly familiar sights as that boy from the old neighborhood, the one who used to be described as "a little simple," now physically a man, sweeping the sidewalk on Dwight Street every morning as she drove to school. Except for her wedding trip to Bermuda, the sojourn in Florida, and a few other brief visits away, she'd never had a reason to go more than several hours' drive from home.

Six hundred and twenty students had enrolled at Kelly School this year. Thirty were black, 11 Asian, 265 "white" ("Anglo" won't do in Holyoke, which annually stages the nation's second largest St. Patrick's Day parade), and 314 Hispanic, which mainly meant Puerto Rican. As always, the numbers would fluctuate throughout the year, but in a sense would remain the same; about a fifth of the students would leave, to be replaced by a roughly equal number of newcomers. About 60 percent of the children came from families receiving some form of public assistance. By design—the system was desegregated in the early 1980s—Kelly School's student body conformed statistically to the citywide population, and so did the student body in Chris's class.

Holyoke's borders enclose some working farms, some forest, and a gigantic mall beside the interstate, one site around which the new, suburban Holyoke is growing. Kelly School took in a fair cross-section of the city. Its territory included a suburban area, which looked like Anywhere, U.S.A.—one-story ranch houses, some modest and some grand. But only one bus from Kelly climbed into that region, and it didn't carry anyone from Chris's class.

Most of Kelly School's children came from neighborhoods in the old city. Seen from above, from the interstate, this old part of Holyoke is all smokestacks and church steeples. It has always been a city of labor and religion. Boosters advertise Holyoke as the birthplace of volleyball and as the place where the kitchen product Lestoil was invented. In the old days, an ethnographer could have mapped it by its churches: Mater Dolorosa and St. Jerome's in Irish and Polish Old Ward Four; Precious Blood and Perpetual Help in South Holyoke, where Masses were French Canadian in liturgy and music; Immaculate Conception and Holy Rosary in the French and Irish Flats. Holyoke's small black population always had a Baptist church, now situated near the projects on Jackson Parkway. Uptown Protestants still have an Episcopal and a Congregational church, and uptown Catholics have Blessed Sacrament and Holy Cross, Chris's mother's church. Sacred Heart—Chris's church—in formerly Irish Churchill, now holds Masses in Spanish as well as English. The ten thousand parishioners who used to go to French Precious Blood, in the lower ward of South Holyoke, have dwindled now to about forty, while clustered around that old Catholic church are many little storefront Pentecostal ones with Spanish names above their doors. Holyoke remains a balkanized city. The divisions used to be more numerous. Only one sharp ethnic division exists anymore—between Puerto Ricans, the latest newcomers, and practically everyone else.

Several children in Chris's class this year came from Old Ward Four, just uphill from the Flats, a mixed neighborhood now of whites and Puerto Ricans, generally poor. It is a greener neighborhood than the Flats, with more wood frame houses and far fewer vacant lots, but it too has apartment buildings and run-down sections. Chris's father grew up in Old Ward Four when it was simply called "the Ward." He lived with his parents in an apartment block near Dwight and Pine, now one of several notorious distribution points for narcotics. Chris had fond memories of visiting relatives in the Ward, but both she and her mother made a point of not driving through there anymore. The boarded-up storefronts and graffiti made them imagine Chris's father saddened. "If your father could see this now," Chris's mother had said to Chris the last time they had driven through that neighborhood together. And Chris had said, "He'd turn over in his grave."

In Holyoke, geographical elevations and incomes have always roughly coincided. In general, the higher up you go, the whiter the population, the fewer the vacant lots, the taller and more numerous the trees, and the larger the houses. The fewer the children, too. Hispanic Holyoke is very young, while white Holyoke has aged. Uphill from Old Ward Four the Highlands begins. In the middle of the Highlands stands a patch of woods—the Dingle, the so-called Highlands Dingle. This deep hollow, dense with trees, has long been the haunt of children eager to experiment with the adult side of life. Generations have worn footpaths among the trees on their way to growing up. The Dingle was another place of significance in Chris's life, one in which she had never set foot.

Twenty years ago, in the halls of junior high, Chris hugged her books to her chest and tried to look as though she didn't care while two girls—best friends of hers just days ago—sang, "Chris is a bay-bee." Chris had refused to go with them to the Highlands Dingle. Her friends were going to meet some boys there after school. Chris wasn't ready for necking in the bushes. She was always a very good girl. She rarely missed CCD, the weekly catechism classes, even in her high school years, when she'd grown to dread them. Her two erstwhile friends set several other girls on her. For a while, until she found a new circle to join, Chris walked the halls of junior high alone while those more daring, would-be bad girls taunted her with "Bay-bee," "Jerk," "Bay-bee." Chris went home from school in tears. As a teacher, Chris had always worried about children being mean to each other. Maybe the job itself keeps a teacher's childhood in view. Occasionally, Chris ran into one of that faction of former tormentors. Chris still couldn't muster more than mere civility toward her.

The Dingle is also a boundary. North of it, the world changes utterly. The upper-class Highlands begins. This used to be mill owners' country. "Don't you wish you'd lived in Holyoke in its heyday?" Chris once asked her best teacher friend, Mary Ann, who had grown up in Holyoke, too. Mary Ann said, "No. Because we'd have been cleaning other people's houses then." In fact, both of Chris's grandmothers had worked as maids in the upper-class Highlands. Chris remembered visiting a grade school classmate who lived in this fancy part of town. When she came home, Chris asked her mother why they didn't have a black maid, too. "Because you already have an Irish one," her mother replied. But Chris had just been curious. She didn't remember pining for a maid, or for a house in the upper-class Highlands.

Chris had three students this year who came from that part of town. Many of the houses there are large and still look grand enough to require maids. They have become less expensive than in the city's heyday.

Chris herself had come from the neighborhood south of the Dingle, her mother's old neighborhood. It was mostly to tease her mother that Chris liked to call it "the lowerclass Highlands." In this mostly white section of one- and two-family houses, trees stand along the side streets. On the busier streets are some gas stations and body shops and stores and an occasional apartment building. Workers and not owners have lived in this neighborhood, but for many immigrants to the city, moving here has meant a figurative as well as a literal ascent from the Flats and the other lower wards. Chris had spent the rest of her childhood in this part of the Highlands, in a single-family house that her parents bought when they left the Flats. Her mother still lived in the house. Chris always stopped there on her drive home from school.

The street of Chris's childhood is only two blocks long and barely wide enough to allow for parking. Her mother's house has a front porch, like most of the others on the block. Mothers used to stand on their front porches in the evening, calling the children in, their voices caroling up and down the street. A dozen children lived in the house next door, and their mother's nightly call—"Jim-eee, Mare-eee, Bill-eee..."—sounded like a song. On the first days of school each year, Chris's father would assemble the children of the neighborhood for snapshots, out in front of the Paddens' patch of privet hedge, and there were so many children on the street back then that not all could fit in one picture. Now hardly any children lived nearby. "How times have changed!" Chris's mother sometimes said. For Chris, ever since her father had died, seven years ago, the whole neighborhood had felt incomplete, but it looked much the same, and she was glad to have the house in the family still, to connect her to her father and to her childhood. She had known Holyokers who could not wait to get through high school and clear out of town. But she thought she was lucky to have a street like this to go back to every day, and to have a stubborn mother who refused to move.

Chris remembered walking with the neighborhood kids to school, and, in later years, walking home along this street arm in arm with a couple of girlfriends, kicking out their legs in unison, as in a chorus line, and feeling risqué while they sang:

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

Her mother's house is white and small and very tidy inside. Everything looked much the same: the landing at the top of the stairs, where Chris used to play teacher with her smaller siblings, and her bedroom off that landing, the small, dark-stained desk still placed by the window. Chris could not recall a time when she hadn't wanted to be a teacher. In this house she conceived her ambition and also realized it, planning her first real lessons at that old desk when she was still unmarried, staring out the window and wondering what to do about her troubled pupils. From that window, she could see a part of the old brick firehouse, now closed up, where years ago indulgent firemen—Holyoke's firemen were less busy then than now—had let Chris and her friends play hide-and-go-seek. They would step into the firemen's big boots, which came up to Chris's hips, and hide behind the firemen's coats, which hung like drapery from the wall.

Chris's infant daughter spent school days with Chris's mother. It was a cozy arrangement, and Chris felt lucky for that, too. Coming by to pick up her baby, Chris usually stopped awhile to have coffee with her mother. Chris and Billy lived in another neighborhood nearby, newer than the Highlands but quiet and shaded by big trees.

The last part of her route home took Chris near the high school and one of the junior highs. Through her windshield she sometimes saw former students among the youthful, homeward-bound crowds on the sidewalks, and she would glance at them to see if they were carrying books—a good sign—or clinging to paramours—a bad one. Some days that fall as she drove home, her mind was full to bursting with thoughts about her class, the most worried, heated ones about Clarence. On those days she'd go inside and head right for Billy or for the phone to call her best Holyoke friend, Winnie. Most days a good talk was all Chris needed to clear her mind for home. She tried to guard against continuing at home the mannerisms of her school life. Sometimes, though, she'd enter the house and start giving Billy step-by-step instructions about some household chore, or she'd start wagging an index finger at him—her "teacher finger," as she said—and she wouldn't realize what she was doing until Billy said, "Chris? I'm not one of your students, Chris."

But if she could not always get completely untangled from her teacher self, she always felt relieved to get back to the kind of visible order in which she had been raised. Her neighborhood was just a few minutes from the Flats but a world away. People here pruned their shrubbery, mowed small front lawns and larger back yards, and kept up modest houses like her own. Her brick house, built in the 1950s, had previously belonged to a pediatrician. Not long ago a Puerto Rican family had moved in a few blocks away, and they had told Chris that an anonymous caller had welcomed them to the neighborhood by asking, "Can I get you to burn down some buildings for me?" But in general, serenity reigned on her street, and inside her house. Chris often said that her house was a mess. Her standards were high. She and her once-a-week cleaning woman kept it very neat. Last year cockroaches had invaded classrooms at Kelly School, and Billy had made her leave her bookbag outside the front door of their house, just in case she had brought home more than a few worries and mannerisms.

The year was in full swing now, days going by like a blurred landscape out the windows of a train. It was dark outside when she started her homework around seven o'clock, after washing the dishes and helping Billy put their children to bed. The beige carpeting in the dining room was soft under her stockinged feet. The wallpaper was of a calm pattern and cool colors, dark blue flowers against a white background. She sat at a round table made of blond oak, her grandmother's table. She remembered sliding around on her bottom under it, playing cowboys and Indians as a child.