August 1988

There is a certain forlorn emptiness about a school yard in summer, but as summer draws to a close the excitement begins to return. Teachers drop in to arrange their rooms and put up decorations to welcome the new classes. Janitors find themselves busier, making sure that all the repairs that were put off from the previous year are done before the children arrive.

Most of all, the difference is the children. For a few days after school is out in the spring they continue to come in twos and threes, habituated, but during the middle of summer they are gone. As mid-August arrives, they begin to return, peeking shyly into the rooms that will be theirs, greeting friends they have not seen since summer began, and making the acquaintance of the teachers they will have during the coming year. By the time of the teacher preparation days that precede school, no day passes without dozens of little hangers-on, sad for the ending of summer but anxious for a change.

Neil came back on campus August twenty-sixth. Evelyn Rawlings, the secretary, drew a sketch map. It wasn’t much of a campus. There was one old building in the California schools style, with broad expanses of window and wide eaves covering a concrete walkway. All four classrooms and the office faced outward. There was no hallway. North of that building and parallel to it was a quad made up of portable classrooms, and beyond that was an open playground. Off to the left was a high cyclone fence; beyond it was the elementary wing.

There were sixth, seventh, and eighth graders on Neil’s side of the fence. Neil would teach sixth grade language; the other language teachers, Carmen de la Vega and Pearl Richardson, taught seventh and eighth. Glen Ulrich taught math, Tom Wright taught P.E., Fiona Kelly taught science, and Donna Clementi taught history. There was a Spanish speaking aide, Delores Zavala, to help in the language classes. Clementi, Richardson, and de la Vega all had classrooms in the quad of portable classrooms. Neil had one of the four classrooms in the older building.

He found his room open and occupied by an extremely pregnant and extremely irritable woman. He knocked on the doorframe and said, “You wouldn’t be Gina Wyatt, would you?”

She wiped the sweat out of her eyes with the back of her hand and snapped, “And just why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, I was told that Mrs. Wyatt would be having her baby in July, so you must be somebody else.”

“That’s what the doctor told me, too, but he was wrong. And frankly, right now I wish I was someone else. Someone who wasn’t pregnant in August.”

“I’m Neil McCrae.”

“Congratulations. You inherit the oven.”

Neil came on into the room and looked around. There was more than the typical pre-school confusion. Gina had boxes scattered all about the room, perching on student desks and spilling over onto the floor. She was moving books, papers, games, bright paper cut-outs, and a hundred other things Neil could hardly identify from box to box in a systematic fashion. But the logic of the system behind her sorting evaded Neil.

One wall was made up of steel framed windows from waist to ceiling. The upper row of widows swung inward and the lowest row swung outward. Both rows of windows were jacked open as far as they would go and the door was open, but the other three walls were bare of windows and there was no cross-ventilation. The air seeped in the door and heat drove it out the upper windows, but it was a slow circulation despite the wind outside. The room was sickeningly hot. more Monday

Outside the window, the children had gone back to class. The only sounds in Campbell’s office were the faint whisper of voices coming from the office beyond. Neil had run down like a wind-up toy before his story was finished.

Campbell was leaning back in his chair with his eyes half closed. He had hardly moved for ten minutes, and his face remained neutral. When it became apparent that Neil could say no more, Campbell said, “That is when Dr. Watkins called me, and asked me to take you on for a year?”

Neil nodded.

“Why didn’t you just quit? Move somewhere else permanently?”

“Who would hire me now? I have to stay there or give up teaching altogether. But as long as I am visible, there are those who will keep the community stirred up against me. Dr. Watkins suggested that the only solution was for me to take a leave of absence, teach in another state for a year, and then come back after passions have cooled down.”

Campbell scowled, “So I am elected. Jim Watkins is asking a lot of an old friendship. What would he have done if you had decided to stick it out?”

Neil answered miserably, “He was going to hire another teacher to take my classes and let me sit for a year, drawing pay and doing make-work around the office.”

“And you couldn’t accept that?”

“The humiliation would have killed me.”

Campbell sat upright and ran his hands through his hair. “All right,” he said, “here is my answer. You say this Alice Hamilton was never a victim. Maybe. I am inclined to believe you because Dr. Watkins vouches for you. But I also have a responsibility, so I am going to ask some questions of my own.

“When you were tutoring this girl, did you smile too often? Did you sit too close? Did you pat her innocently on the arm, and did you hands linger just a little too long?”

“No!” Neil snapped.

Campbell raised his hand. “Of course your answer is ‘no’. But can I believe you? Did you lead that girl on? You’re a good looking young man, and a fifteen year old girl is five gallons of hormones in a short dress. Are you completely innocent?”

Neil sat for a long time, staring at his hands. Finally he said, “I tried to keep a completely professional relationship between us. It is possible that she misunderstood me. I can’t be sure. I have never been able to read minds, especially the minds of fifteen year old girls. But I didn’t do anything that seemed wrong at the time; and no matter how hard I look back at my actions, I see nothing I am ashamed of, and nothing I would change. Except that I was a fool to have tutored her in the first place.”

Campbell seemed to consider Neil’s answer, nodding slowly in the quiet of his office. Finally, he said, “I will recommend that the board hire you for one year. We have a teacher who is going to have a baby about July, and wants a year off to spend with it. You would be teaching English to sixth graders. But — and hear me well on this — I intend to tell your whole story to our school board, and I will be watching you every minute. You don’t have tenure here. I don’t have to show cause before I can fire you. If you mess up even once, you will be out of here before you know what hit you. Can you live with that?”

“I don’t like it, but I can live with it,” Neil replied. “I’ve had to live with a lot of things I don’t like recently.”

“Remember this,” Campbell went on. “I am not Jim Watkins. I am not your friend. I won’t go out on a limb for you. I won’t do anything for you but give you a chance. Just one chance! Screw up, and you are gone.”

# # #

Ten minutes later, Neil drove away from the school, heading east on Kiernan, then turned off the main road. He parked beneath the afternoon shade that stretched out from an orchard. He got out, took off his tie and jacket and threw them into the back seat. He loosened his collar and plucked the sweat soaked shirt away from his back.

As he leaned against the fender, he said to himself, “I don’t ever want to go through that again.” more tomorrow

“I began to tutor her after school. We were reading Julius Caesar at the time. She could read the words plainly, and she could work through the antique phrasing to get at the literal meaning. But it didn’t mean anything to her. She didn’t grasp the story behind the story, and when I would point some of it out to her, she just looked at me like I was speaking another language.

“Four weeks later, I gave an essay test on Julius Caesar. She took it carefully, wrote neatly, and filled her blue book. But when I read it, it contained nothing except bare facts and a few of the things I had told her. There was no evidence of her own thoughts.

“I gave her a C, and she accused me of seducing her.”

# # #

It was quiet in Campbell’s office. The voices of children playing in the yard outside filtered through the windows. Neil continued, “I don’t think she ever meant to make the accusation. I think she rehearsed saying it, playing with the idea, but she had never intended to carry out her fantasy. Once it slipped out, she was trapped. There was no turning back.

“She told her father that I had offer to give her an A if she came across. She wouldn’t file charges with the police, but she couldn’t keep him from taking it before the school board. It was a circus. Her father called me a perverted vulture preying on innocent young girls and I called his daughter a liar. It was like being on trial, but without the safeguards. The chairman of the school board did his best, but it got rowdy.

“Alice said I had been coming on to her all year. She said she finally gave in, and we had sex behind closed doors in the classroom, every Tuesday after school.”

Neil had to stop long enough to swallow back his bitterness.

“I never laid a hand on her, and I always left my door open. I told the board that. I said she was lying. She said the same about me. We both said it loud and ugly.

“It was the door that settled the matter. Alice claimed that it was always closed; I said it was always open. One of the board members went to get the janitor in charge of that wing. He told the school board that the door had been open every afternoon. He even remembered hearing Alice and me talking about Julius Caesar.”

Campbell shifted in his chair, and said, “So the board didn’t act?”

“Between her lie about the door and her refusal to talk to the police, it was pretty clear that she was making it up. The board tabled the matter. Hamilton circulated a petition to have me fired, and several hundred signed it. Then some members of the board came to me quietly and asked me to resign for the good of the community.”

“But you didn’t?” Campbell said.

“How could I? It would have been the same as admitting guilt. Besides, I was getting mad.

“The school board rejected Hamilton’s petition. The story ran in the newspaper the next day, with my picture on the front page. One of the board members said that their hands were tied by tenure. There was nothing they could do.” 

That was when his troubles really started. Every day for the next three weeks, there was a parent in the back of each of Neil’s classes, taking notes and watching every move he made.

“I could take all that,” Neil said, “but when April came and it was time to sign up for fall classes, parents started coming to Dr. Watkins quietly, one by one, asking that their children not be put in with me.

“Until then, I had been dealing with a vocal minority. Now I was forced to realize that for every parent who was convinced of my guilt, there were ten more who weren’t sure of my innocence. It was the last straw.” more tomorrow

May 1988

The heat of summer had already settled into the Central Valley of California by May. Coming down from Oregon, Neil McCrae felt it as soon as he dropped down out of the mountains, even though it was still early morning. By the time he reached Redding, sweat was collecting between his back and the car seat. The wind coming in through the window made the heat bearable, but the air was viscid.

Rolling southward, he passed the sentinel towers of Sutter Buttes. On his right, the coast range lay dry and golden; on his left and further away, the Sierras were lost in heat haze. All around him the valley was tabletop flat and impossibly green. Sacramento drew up, became a brief nightmare of traffic, noise, and ozone, then receded behind him. He changed freeways and the quality of the land changed as well. It was still green and alive, but the coast range had receded into the distance. The flatness seemed to go on forever, and now the valley was heavily peopled. The land along the highway was dotted with houses and farms, small towns and wineries. There was a used-up look to the land near the freeway. Neil could see hardscrabble apartment houses with dirt lawns and abandoned cars, a blown down drive-in theater, and a canal bridge made from an old railroad flatcar. Out beyond the highway fringe, the land was deeply green; dull and uninteresting to the long view, but vital and alive close up. Everywhere there were flowers. The oleanders which had been planted in a continuous hedgerow down the center of the divided highway were in full pink, red, and white bloom.

Neil McCrae drove southward through the hot, thick air, through a tunnel of flowers, into a new and hostile country, leaving behind him all he had known.

At Salida, he took an exit onto Kiernan Road. Now he was surrounded by orchards. Orderly, man made forests stretched away on both sides of the road, narrowing his view and hiding the flatness of the valley. The dust beneath the orchards was dappled heavily with sunlight and shade.

Three miles further east, Neil tuned into the parking lot of Kiernan School. He stood beside his car, letting the wind dry his back, then slipped on his sport coat and crossed the tarmac. The surface had been renewed recently; it stuck to his feet as he crossed and sent waves of heat all the way to his knees. He entered the blessed coolness of an air conditioned office

Two children were waiting for the secretary’s attention. Neil watched them as he waited his turn. They were both about ten. One was a dark girl who stood quietly, gripping the edge of the countertop with tense fingers. She spoke a few words too softly for Neil to hear, received a scrawled note, and slipped outside, walking wide around Neil as she went out the door. The other child was a boy with dirty blonde hair, skinny and pale, with heavy glasses too large for his face. He stood twisting his hands together and squirming in place until the secretary got time to talk to him.  He wanted to call his mother. The secretary asked his reasons, refused him, then had to argue with him sharply before he left. He slammed the door as he went out. There had been a rehearsed quality about the exchange, as if the boy had known that he would be refused.

When it was Neil’s turn, he said, “I’m Neil McCrae. I have an appointment with Mr. Campbell about a teaching position.”

# # #

William Campbell was a short, spare man with graying hair. When he rose from behind his desk to shake hands, there was no welcome in his face. more next week

Here is the table of contents for Symphony in a Minor Key

The Ides of March
May 1988
August 1988
Day One
September 1988
Parents
Reading
Theory
Interlude
Halloween 1988
Evaluation
Discipline
Cooperation
Terror
Losses
Rumors
English
Sex Ed
Confrontation
Home

The Ides of March, a prolog which sets up the situation, occurs late in the previous school year in another state. In May, Neil applies for work at Keirnan school. During August he prepares for the coming school year.

Day One is very early September. Now it would be early August. Halloween announces itself, and Christmas occurs during the chapters Evaluation and Discipline.

Terror happens on Martin Luther King Day. That is not a political statement. That is the day in my real world that a school shooting happened in a nearby city. I had made an agreement with myself to match my fictional world with the real one, so this day took me places I would never have gone on my own.

Home happens at Cinco de Mayo (the fifth of May) as the school year is winding down.

I wrote an honest story. Everything that happened, could have happened in my real world. Many of these things were close analogs to things that did happen.

I never faced false accusation, but I was aware every day that I might. That is what it means to be a male teacher in America today.

The Ides of March

Where were you when the world ended?

For Neil McCrea, the world he had built for himself ended on a gray Friday afternoon in March, at eleven minutes after two, among familiar surroundings. 

Neil was teaching his sixth period class, literature for high school seniors — feeling end of the week weariness, counting the minutes until the end of the day, and passing back student papers he had spent far too many hours correcting. He stepped carelessly between the backpacks, purses, and spills of schoolbooks that littered the aisles between the rows of desks. With Shakespeare and Lincoln and Martin Luther King watching from posters on the wall while the day faded outside, he called his students’ names and handed back their essays.

Alice Hamilton sat at the back of the third row. She was blonde, spoiled, and at least half as pretty as she thought she was. Neil dropped a bluebook on her desk and moved on to the next student. Then he heard the hissing intake of her breath. 

She slammed the bluebook down and screamed, “How could you! How could you give me a C after all I did for you!”

Neil just stared, too astonished to respond.

A slow flush rose up Alice’s neck and spread across her face; then she leaped to her feet and fled the room. Neil watched her go, carrying his hopes and dreams with her.

Innocence is no shield, when the world ends.

=========================================

So begins Symphony in a Minor Key, a novel written in real time, before the concept of real time was ever heard of.

Briefly, I started teaching when it became apparent that I could not make a living by writing. It was a day job at first, but it was a very satisfying day job that I eventually held for twenty-seven years, and from which I eventually retired.

About five years in, I decided to write a novel about teaching. I also decided to write of a fictional school year while a real school year was progressing. Rainy day in my world; rainy day in the book. Opening day on opening day, Christmas on Christmas, and so on. If you look at the table of contents (tomorrow’s post) you will see how that worked out.

Despite what Alice Hamilton implies, Neil is a good guy. Take my word for it. He’ll explain it all to you over the next several posts.

Today is August 12. I’ll be telling the tale as a serial, beginning September 12 to give myself time to get organized, and carrying on to something close to May 11. That is fairly close to a school year but, although I wrote this in real time, their Christmas and Halloween probably won’t fall exactly on our Christmas and Halloween.

Stick around. I think you’ll like it.