Raising Jake Read online

  I have been a reporter at this newspaper longer than I have ever been anything else. I didn’t love the place, and much of the time I didn’t like it, but I did fit in here, and now I’ll never be coming back. I guess I should be crying, but I’m not. I’m just numb over how such a momentous thing could happen so abruptly.

  I don’t know what my next move will be. For that reason I’m almost glad I have to go to my son’s school, to find out what this fuss is all about.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Being fired doesn’t fully hit you until you leave the building, look around, and take your first breath as an unemployed person. I’m standing there on Sixth Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and the sidewalks are jammed with people, and all I can think about is whether or not they have jobs. They’re all in motion, and they all seem to have destinations. You know you’re in trouble when you’re jealous of strangers.

  It’s Friday, and Friday is a big day for firing people, if only for clerical purposes. I can’t be alone in this fix. I don’t want to be alone in this fix.

  I head west and north, in the general direction of my son’s school, my blood tingling as if it’s been carbonated. The sidewalks are peppered with young people wearing Walkmans, or iPods, or whatever the hell they call the latest thing they need to ensure that they’re amused every waking hour of the day. The sight both bothers and pleases me. On the one hand, these kids are missing out on the sidewalk sounds I’ve loved my whole life. On the other hand, it impairs their ability to concentrate and keeps them good and stupid, and a whole generation of stupid kids buys me another five years in the workforce. Or so I thought until today, when a stupid kid fired my rapidly aging ass.

  I walk all the way to the school, and as I enter it the smell is exactly as I remembered, an all-boys’ school smell, a testosterone and no-showers-after-gym-class odor. It hangs in the air like an arrogant, dangerous cologne, and I get the feeling that if a fertile woman walked in here and took a deep breath, she’d miss her next period.

  On my way to the headmaster’s office I pass a series of carved marble plaques featuring the names of all the school’s headmasters, dating back to 1732.

  Seventeen thirty-two! This place has certainly been around. Part of what you’re shelling out for is its history, and right there at the bottom of the newest plaque is the name of the guy who phoned me, the latest keeper of the flame, etched into the marble: Peter Plymouth. How fitting that a guy named Plymouth should have his name carved into rock. His start date is carved in next to his name, with a dash next to it. When he dies, quits, or gets fired, a guy with a hammer and chisel will chip in his departure date. This has got to be the only school in Manhattan where part of the tuition fees go toward a stonecutter.

  There’s a secretary seated at a desk in front of the headmaster’s office, a sixtyish, owl-shaped woman with her hair up in a tight gray bun. She’s perfect for this place, the kind of woman no young male will lose valuable study time to over masturbatory fantasies.

  I tell her who I am, explain that I have a one o’clock appointment. At the sound of my name her eyebrows go up, a clue to me that I’m in for some serious business. It happens to be one o’clock on the dot. She gestures at the closed door and says, “Go right in.”

  But I can’t. Just being in a school setting has made me timid. I have to tap on the door first, and only when the voice from the other side tells me to come in am I able to do it.

  It’s a big room, with windows facing out on the branches of a sycamore tree. Headmaster Peter Plymouth sits at a wide mahogany desk with his back to the windows. He’s wearing a dark blue suit, a white shirt, and a black tie, and his long, bony body seems to rise from his chair in sections, like a carpenter’s ruler. His hair is cut short, his face is unwrinkled, and his handshake is hard and dry. He gestures for me to sit down before returning to his own chair.

  A lot had been made of this headmaster’s appointment the year before, because he’d graduated from the place twenty years earlier, gone to Yale, and then begun an academic career that took him from campus to campus all over the Northeast, with a “year out” somewhere in the middle, when he got a grant to write a book about Great Sailboat Races of the 1930s.

  I know all this stuff because the school bombards my mailbox with letters, keeping me abreast of this kind of news. I throw out most of the mail without reading it, but there was something about the “Return of the Prodigal Son” memo that caught my eye.

  So now we’re both seated, looking at each other. He’s giving me a bit of time to drink in the diplomas, the awards, the ribbons, and the sailing trophies that adorn his office. There’s even a ship in a bottle, right there on his desk.

  “Well,” he begins, “you have quite a son.”

  I have nothing to say in response to this. It means nothing—it could be good, it could be bad. If this were a tennis match, he’d have just served the ball into the net. I’m willing to sit and wait for as long as I must for his second serve, which is even weaker than the first.

  “I’m sorry to drag you in here like this,” he ventures. “I know you’re busy.”

  That would have been true an hour earlier, when I had a job, the kind of job this man couldn’t do in a million years. He’s never been in a newsroom full of frantic people, with editors yelling for copy and copyboys rushing around and hysterical reporters using the word “fuck” as a noun, a verb, and even an adverb (i.e., “You are the fucking slowest copyboy in the world!”).

  No, Mr. Plymouth’s pressure is a different kind of pressure, the pressure to get the boys placed in Ivy League colleges so the school can maintain its prestige and continue to have desperate parents clamoring to hurl their money at him.

  “Don’t apologize,” I say. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

  The headmaster opens his desk drawer and pulls out a couple of sheets of loose-leaf paper covered in jagged, spiky writing I immediately recognize as my son’s.

  “I’d like you to look at this,” he says softly. “It’s an essay your son composed yesterday in English class. It was a little exercise in spontaneous expression, assigned by Mr. Edmondson. The topic was ‘The Cold Truth.’”

  “The cold truth about what?”

  “That was entirely up to the student. He could take the title and go any which way with it. I think you’ll be interested in your son’s choice.”

  He passes the pages to me. I take my time getting out my reading glasses, which I’ve only begun to wear after decades of squinting at the green glow of computer screens. I’m a little bit nervous, I’ll admit, but at the same time it’s a joy to read something that’s actually been penned by a human hand for a change, however disturbing it might turn out to be.

  THE COLD TRUTH

  by Jacob Perez-Sullivan

  You don’t know it when you’re a kid, because nobody tells you, but the key to life is being in the right clubs, pretty much from the time you start walking.

  Nobody sells it to you that way—in fact, they try to spin it the other way, so that it seems important to embrace and understand as many different kinds of people as you can in the course of your lifetime—but the truth is, that’s not the truth.

  Far from it. It’s important to get into the right preschool, because this will naturally lead to the right elementary school, followed by the right high school, and then, of course, the right college.

  The college is to this process what the orgasm is to the sex act. Anyone who makes it all the way through the other schools only to drop the ball when it comes to college has not understood the process. You don’t belong to exclusionary groups all your life just to start mixing in with the general population at age eighteen. It makes a mockery of your entire life, not to mention the monumental waste of your parents’ money.

  The clubhouse life is a true commitment, made first by the parents and then by us, the students, by the time we’re old enough to ride a two-wheeler. We get the point. Nobody has to spell it out for us. It’s not a complicated or so
phisticated strategy.

  The saddest thing about the clubhouse life (there are many sad things, but we only have fifteen minutes to write this essay) is the fact that we only get to know each other. A school like ours is careful to stir the occasional African-American or Hispanic into the mix, but that’s not for the benefit of those students, who are hand-picked for their apparent harmlessness.

  No, those students are here so that the rest of us won’t freak out every time we go to a cash machine and there’s a member of a minority waiting behind us.

  This is part of the clubhouse process—recognizing the fact that now and then, we must step outside the clubhouse, whether we like it or not. Step out, and then quickly step back in. And shut the door fast, lest an outsider follow you inside.

  You’re either in a good club, or you’re in a bad club. The walls are there, whether you see them or not. It’s all about the walls, and which side of the walls you’re on.

  That’s the cold truth. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t fair, but it’s the cold truth. I can only hope the day will come when this sham just cannot go on, and the entire system collapses under the weight of its own bullshit. Maybe then, life will be fair.

  When I finish reading the essay I continue holding the pages, just to stare at the symmetry of my son’s handwriting. It’s a beautiful thing. Nothing has been crossed out. It just flowed out of him, as if he’d been waiting all his young life to express these thoughts. And yet, according to the headmaster, he’d knocked it out just moments after getting the assignment in “spontaneous expression.”

  At last I look up at the headmaster, whose face is as blank as a blackboard on the first day of school.

  “Quite an essay,” he ventures. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I certainly would.”

  “Naturally Mr. Edmondson was alarmed when he read it, and quite rightly he brought it to my attention.”

  “Alarmed?”

  “Of course! This is clearly just a peek into something much more disturbing that your son is experiencing. It’s the reason I called you here.”

  “You called me here because my ex-wife is out of town. I know I’m number two on the emergency phone call list.”

  “Mr. Sullivan, I hardly think this is the time to quibble over parental rivalries.”

  “Have you spoken with my son about this essay?”

  His face darkens. “That’s another reason I called you. Yes, I have spoken with him. Sometimes students do things like this in an attempt to be satirical. If that were the case, well, fine. We could all just laugh it off. But according to your son, he meant every word of it. Every single word.”

  “I’m sure he did.”

  “We gave him the chance to apologize, and he refused.”

  “Apologize for what?”

  Mr. Plymouth’s eyes widen. “Mr. Sullivan. Did you read the essay? He called this school a sham! He wants the entire system to collapse!”

  “Under the weight of its own bullshit,” I add helpfully.

  “That’s how he put it, yes. He wasn’t exactly subtle about it.”

  “What did he say when you asked for an apology?”

  “He said, and I quote, ‘I wouldn’t have written it if I didn’t mean it.’”

  “He saw through your game.”

  The headmaster falls back in his chair, as if he’s just been hit in the chest with a medicine ball. He stares at me in wonder. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, he saw through your game. You. This place.” I gesture at the walls of his office. “He got to the guts of your game. He saw the Wizard of Oz, hiding behind the curtain. That’s what’s bothering you, Headmaster Plymouth.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The headmaster stares at me in openmouthed disbelief.

  “This is not a game,” he says evenly.

  “Come on.”

  “Mr. Sullivan—”

  “Listen, I know what it’s like. I write for the New York Star, and every once in a while I’m interviewing somebody who can tell the angle I’m working, you know? He can tell I’m trying to get him to say something I need to make my story work, and he just won’t give it to me. Happens maybe once every hundred interviews, and when it does it really stings, but what can you do? Not everybody’s an idiot.”

  “We’re going off on a bit of a tangent here—”

  “No, we’re not. This is the exact same thing we’re talking about. When someone’s wise to your racket, it can be very unsettling.”

  The headmaster nearly flinches at the word “racket.” The thoughts spinning through his skull are are as obvious as the zipper headlines in Times Square. How he wishes he’d waited until Monday to deal with this matter, when the boy’s mother will be back in town! Suddenly, his idea of an emergency is not such an emergency. The real emergency is me, here in his office, and now his problem is simple: how do I get rid of this guy?

  “What we do here,” he says, “can hardly be referred to as a racket.”

  “I would apologize for my choice of words, sir, but the selection of the right word at the right time just happens to be my business.”

  He lets out the tiniest of snorts. “Yes, well, for the New York Star.”

  Now he’s stepped in it. His face flames up and he regrets what he’s said, but it’s too late. He’s insulted a customer, and the customer is always right—and at this school, the customer is almost always white.

  “Well, sir,” I say, “you may not think highly of the product I help produce, but like it or not it’s what makes it possible for my son to be educated within these hallowed halls.”

  He holds up his hands, palms out. “Forgive me.”

  “Forget it. I knew how you felt about it before we ever met. Not all of us get to write about sailboat races. Somebody’s got to crank out the ugly stuff. That’s just the way it is.”

  His face gets even redder. He’s surprised that I know about his sailboat book. I don’t look like the kind of parent who reads school bulletins.

  He clears his throat and gets to his feet. This is a pretty good tactic on his part, I must admit. He’s easily six inches taller than me, and what he wants is that rush he’ll get from glowering down at me.

  But it can only work if I stand up and go toe-to-toe with him. So I remain seated, gazing straight up into his remarkably hairless nostrils. He must use one of those rotary noise hair clippers.

  He’s in a bad spot. After a few moments he sighs, sits back down, and does the only thing left for him to do.

  “What do you say we call your son in here?”

  “I think that’s a good idea.”

  He tells his secretary to send for my son, then drags a chair over and sets it so that the distances between all three chairs are equal. A perfect triangle. The loyalties could go any which way.

  And then, silent as a sailboat, my son glides into the room.

  I’m jolted by his appearance. I hadn’t seen him over the past weekend, because the whole senior class had been taken on an overnight trip to the Catskill Mountains, and in the less than two weeks since I last saw him he’s actually grown a beard. It’s a fairly thick beard for a kid not yet eighteen years old, as black as coal and startling against his light complexion. His hair is nearly as dark as the beard, shoulder length and parted in the middle. Jake’s dark features come from his mother, who’s Spanish. That creamy white Irish skin comes from me. His sea-green eyes are anybody’s guess.

  Those eyes have a serenity I can only dream of for my bloodshot brown ones. He’s wearing corduroy pants, a black shirt, and scuffed boots. The mandatory school tie hangs around his neck in a big, wide loop, as if he’d been condemned to death by a hangman who’d suddenly changed his mind and let him go. He’s as slim as a jackrabbit and if he held out his arms and crossed his feet, you might just think him capable of changing water into wine.

  As always, the sight of him makes my heart ache. How can he suddenly have a beard, this boy I remember with peach-fuzz cheeks? In the time his be
ard was growing in I was working late, or getting drunk, or watching old movies in the middle of the night. What was he doing, besides not shaving? Did he think about me even once during the two weeks I haven’t seen him, not counting the pathetic “How’s everything?” phone calls I make every day or two? It’s just the latest in an endless series of gaps in our relationship. The gaps have jagged edges, and they bite right into my soul, if a fallen Catholic like me can be said to have a soul.

  Jake doesn’t seem surprised to see me. He looks at me and nods, not happy, not sad, and most amazingly, not nervous.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Hello, Jake.”

  He turns to the headmaster and gestures at the empty chair. “Is this for me?”

  “Yes, it is, Jacob. Please sit down.”

  Almost nobody calls him “Jacob.” He’s been “Jake” ever since he was a baby, but not to his mother, who chose the name and loathes the nickname. “Jake sounds like the name of a cardsharp,” she always complained. In any case, Jacob-Jake sits in the chair, leans back and crosses his legs, the very poster child for Not a Worry in the World, Inc.

  The headmaster, on the other hand, looks as if he could use a drink. “I was talking to your father about your essay.”

  “I figured, Mr. Plymouth.”

  “As I recall, you said you stand by what you’ve written.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And you’re not sorry about what you’ve written?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So what you’ve written here is how you truly feel about this school. You believe it to be a sham.”