Among School Children Read online

  Kelly School is in the Flats, but not exactly of the Flats. The people involved in its creation, back in the 1970s, had imagined Kelly School the cornerstone of the revival of the neighborhood, the phoenix rising out of the ashes of the Flats. They had built it into the side of a hill, on the high ground of those riverine lowlands: an imposing, complex structure of right angles, made of yellow brick with black asphalt trim along the eaves of its flat roofs. Its plexiglass dome stuck up like a tank turret. The designers gave it not just one but two fine, expensive gyms, in the hopeful thought that these would draw the community to its school. But the custodians locked up the school after hours now, because vandals had worked over the locker rooms.

  Al Laudato liked to show visitors the front side of his school. He'd point to the saplings in the park and say, "When those grow up, hey, it's going to be beautiful here." He'd mark off with gestures of the hands a stretch of clean yellow brick wall that extended a mere twenty feet on either side of the front door. "From there to there we don't have any." Al meant there was no graffiti on that wall. "We're lucky here," Al said. He meant here at Kelly School, and he wasn't joking.

  The school was still the newest and fanciest in the city. But walk around to its taller side and graffiti was everywhere: boasts and threats such as BORN TO ROCK THE FEMALES and WANDA THE PATA YOUR ASS is GRASS, and many nicknames such as VAMP, PITO, COSMIC, DAZE, but only one reference to the staff inside, a reference to Al, which read, LAUDATOS DICK. In the evening, the school grounds became essentially unregulated territory. Then it belonged partly to thieves and vandals. Someone had busted all the exterior lights that were set high up on the walls, and someone had managed to pitch old bicycle tires over the lofty light stanchions. Rocks had dented and fractured sections of the wooden walls of the elevated walkways connecting the building's two wings. Those scars and the whitened patches on ground-floor windows, left by burglars who had tried to burn their way in, and the graffiti, which flowed across every surface reachable from the ground, across the brick walls and vandalism ordinance signs and ground-floor classroom windows and doorways (one of which always stank of urine in the morning), all gave the building a very melancholy aspect. Here and there on nearby side streets, old pairs of sneakers hung by their laces from telephone wires. In Holyoke, as in larger cities, hanging sneakers are small-time drug dealers' inexpensive advertising. After hours especially, the school looked like a fortress, lonely and despised.

  A humble setting has one advantage. When grace descends, it is hard to miss. Heading for her car one fall day, Chris was greeted by the sight of a little battered automobile festooned with flowers in the school parking lot. Red, pink, orange, yellow, purple flowers were stuck in every crevice of that car, into keyholes and cracks around the doors, the windows, the hood, the gas cap. One flower was inserted into the broken shaft of the radio antenna. The car belonged to one of the Puerto Rican teachers. Many of her fourth-grade students had recently come from the island. They had sneaked out at lunchtime to decorate the car of their maestra.

  Beauty always lurked somewhere in the school, but when Chris looked at its assaulted exterior, she felt depressed. This was her school and the Flats was part of her city and fully half of her class came from the neighborhood. She would say to herself, "I don't know why people want to destroy things." She felt sincerely puzzled, as well as sad and angry.

  The apartment building where she had lived her first two years had been torn down. She didn't miss it, because she didn't remember it. She'd never really known the Flats. She knew it now only through car windows and, vicariously, through her students.

  Most routes out of the Flats lead across the canals and then uphill. Chris always took the shortest way, down Bowers to Appleton, under the railroad trestle, past an ivy-covered brick factory that looked like a castle, and across the first two canals, the western boundary of the Flats. From there it wasn't far up to High Street, the center of the old commercial downtown.

  A lot of High Street, both the sidewalks and many buildings, had been repaired, but the storefront businesses still included a military recruiting station, a dance studio, a pornographic bookstore, and, near the corner of Appleton and High, a Salvation Army depot, where in the morning lines of people would stand waiting for breakfast. "I don't know if it'll come back or not," Chris often said when driving across High Street. Like many natives, she felt nostalgic for old Holyoke. She had also found that she preferred—infinitely preferred—living in Holyoke to leaving it.

  Homesickness ran in Chris's family. Her mother had felt it keenly during those two years when Chris was a baby and the family had lived in the apartment in the Flats. Chris's mother had grown up in a small frame house in another part of town, in what Chris called "the lower-class Highlands." Her parents didn't have a car back then. Mrs. Padden would put the infant Chris in the baby carriage and walk back to the Highlands, out of the Flats, across the covered footbridge that still spans the railroad tracks, and up the hill, through the center of the city, through Old Ward Four, leaving behind smokestacks and tall Victorian brick factories and apartment blocks with their many-storied wooden porches, and walking into the narrow, tree-lined streets of her real home. Nearly every day, Chris's mother would make that journey, to spend a few hours where she'd been raised.

  Most people think they will never come to resemble their parents, until the process is complete and they don't mind anymore. "I'm being like my mother now." Chris was saying that to herself more and more often these days, when, for instance, she found she just had to clean up her family room before she could sit down in it. Her mother would visit Chris and Billy's house and would reposition items in Chris's refrigerator. When her mother left, Chris would put the items back where she liked them, and laugh. "I'm being like my mother now."

  Mrs. Padden said that she could hear her voice in Chris's sometimes, but that Chris got her quick tongue from her father, and that Chris resembled both of them in her cautiousness. "I was a very, very timid person," said Mrs. Padden. "My mother told me that. I was afraid of Santa Claus." She went on, naming one of Chris's sisters: "Now my Mary was different. She was more adventuresome than Chris." As a young woman, Chris's sister had quit her job and gone off with a girlfriend on a bus, to see the country. "Chrissy said to me, 'I don't know how Mary could do that.' I don't know where Mary got her adventuresomeness. It must be someone in our past. But Chrissy was forward to a certain extent. It could've been third or fourth grade. It might have been second. She came home and said they were having a play at school, and the teacher asked if anyone could sing, and Chris said yes, she could sing. She sang the song, and I think it was something like, if you didn't have rain, you couldn't have flowers. To get up and sing on the stage in front of all the people, she had to have some kind of courage."

  In fact, Chris was quite adventurous in a local sense. A colleague of Chris's, who knew only the Chris who taught school, once said, "If I had to sum Chris up in one sentence, it would be: Chris is not afraid to try new things." What did make Chris afraid was the idea of leaving home. She had tried leaving Holyoke once, and once had been enough.

  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.