Larry Kearney

 

from POWER & MISERY

Mary Heslin is my new English teacher. Miss Heslin. She’s teaching an honors English class and a bunch of us have been thrown into it as freshmen. When she walks into the room in front of us, I catch my breath. She’s entirely self-possessed and lovely and walks from the hip, womanly, long-legged, and her hair is a sweet honey color and her hips are wide and her eyes just huge. I can hear the Irish in her voice and I know her parents were born there. Her face is delicate, clear and rose-tinged with soft rose mouth. She’s much of the Christmas tree and the life of the mind and the unbearable sweetness. And the attentiveness of big womanly eyes like a bright disturbance in the air, in my head — of possible life to be lived. In this huge industrial block of passageways, there she is and I’m home, sort of. I have a place here every day at a certain time — all I have to do is make her happy.

I’ve been saved by a woman again, and oh, my mother hates it, hates her. Before they’ve even met she can read how it is with me and hates her. My father had hoped for some response to the world of engineering, and science in general, but here I am back again in the vagaries of fiction, poetry looming behind like the end of any chance at a real man’s life.

Cooper’s in my class (Arthur), an owlish kid with a set face and very smart eyes, and Potegal (Michael), exuberant and enthusiastically squinty, smart too, and Reiman (Jeff), sardonic, and Abravenel (Eliot), hip before his time, and Lederman (Perry), fragile but lasting, and Prever (Phil), dreamy and savage and lost, and Ornstein (Bob), shambly and unexpected, and Parenti and Rasala and Kleiman and Luba and Golub and God knows who.

We’ve all been set aside in Miss Heslin’s world and it’s something familiar, something I’m used to, and feels a lot more like 185 than McKinley, a good thing, and we all, I think, watch her move across the room, back and forth in front of us, with a kind of surprise, that she could be so young and look like that and have taken us aside for the whole four years. We’re going to get close and know it. There’s no way out.

She chain smokes with long, elegant fingers. She wears stockings and high heels and simple, straight-down, stiff skirts and white blouses that are a bit little-girlish, like her mother dressed her. “I knew a Jack Heslin,” my father says, “see if her father’s name was Jack.” My mother says nothing.

I couldn’t ask something like that. I can barely speak to her at all though I can feel her like a cool hand on my forehead when she looks at me, when she considers me.

The head of the department is Mr. Cahill, a big shambling Irishman with nicotine-stained fingers, Parkinson’s disease and terrible breath. He loves Mary to death and gives her what she needs, in this case four years with the same kids every day and carte blanche to do what she wants.

The first year is nothing and she struggles trying to stay inside the curriculum when her mind wanders much like ours (she’s seven years older). But just before we quit for the summer she seems satisfied, like she’s just won a concession, and tells us we’re each going to have to read the second edition of the Norton The American Tradition in Literature, cover-to-cover, and we better be ready when we get back. From Governor Bradford to Hawthorne to James T. Farrell (remember? remember him?) to Eliot, Hemingway, Stevens . . .

Green is the night
Green kindled and appareled.

She orders the books for us and they’re fat. We’re proud of how fat they are and how far set apart we are and how we’re assumed to be capable. I think so. I think that’s how most of us feel.

I take it home and show it off. I’ll impress my father, my mother doesn’t much care. Of course I’ll read it, a little bit every day, all eleven hundred pages. Of course I will. For her I’ll do anything. Of course.

It is she who walks among astronomers.

But it’s summer and I’m thirteen and in love with Carol and she’s everywhere, every morning around in front or back in the alley or up on the fifth floor in the other wing of the building. Out in the twilight when we sit on the stoop next door, when it’s too dim to be in the back alley.

The transistor radio is a new thing. Suddenly there are radios you can put in your pocket, tinny, terrible sounding things that bring in the twilight shows, before Alan Freed - Peter Tripp, like that - and we listen attentively, evaluating the music.

Johnny uses ‘cute’ too much. he thinks cute is good. He likes the Lennon Sisters on the Welk show too, which is kind of odd because he’s a big, offhand-strong guy who keeps his Winston’s rolled in his t-shirt sleeve. A Catholic kid. Who knows?

[I’m not a Catholic kid, am I? I don’t know. I’ve been baptised by my aunt. And now there’s suddenly Mary Heslin and she’s Catholic to a fine, aesthetic degree, sexuality all mixed up with purity and white blouses and her supple waist, God, don’t think that way.]

The Lennon Sisters are hell to me, but In the Still of the Night is fine, and You're a Thousand Miles Away. Sarah Vaughan has a hit with Poor Butterfly, and that's heaven.

We sit and we talk in the twilight with the music going on behind, sometimes stopping for it, and what we talk about are the Mysteries, deep and bloody in their unspoken presence.

We don't talk about our parents, ever. We don't talk about politics. Religion is confined to what Father Connelly said to Johnny in the gym. I know we talk about the mysteries because there we are forever in the twilight, looking into it and holding the rhythm, all around the edges of the pit.

Johnny and Tony talk.

I respond, mostly.

Carol's quick, and bright in her speech.

Paul's a little younger and just interjects.

Kenny always says the wrong thing and never gets the rhythm right, the offhand declarative diminuendo.

Eddie's nuts but manages sometimes to fit himself to the sentences.

Down on the next stoop is Joanie with Downs syndrome, a rolled-up newspaper and a surprisingly sharp tongue. She yells at us sometimes, out of nowhere, like the call of a parrot next to your ear in a pet store.

We talk about baseball, sometimes, in season (no football, no basketball). We talk about music all the time. We talk about movies. We talk about the neighborhood. We talk about the building and who's gonna move, who's crazy and who's dying. And how to make it hot for the Swain sisters. And how to live in the twilight. And what's on the tv, later.

We talk to make the rhythm that keeps us in the world. There are rhythms that just roll if everybody's sharp, relaxed and easy -- inside them we're whole -- long random thoughts and the light going down slowly.

There are jokes told, all rotten. There are memories of kids who are gone - Cynthia, Beryl. There are whispers about Bobby and what's wrong with him, and how he was born in a Japanese prison camp. There are moral questions. Could you really go to hell for all the things they say you'll go to hell for? They’re for the Catholics. There are sex questions, unasked because everyone has to pretend to already know.

We all want to be whole in the rhythm and it doesn't matter if I'm separating and my head is somewhere else and I think about books and dark things because so do the others — think about their own strangenesses and deep things (under the rhythm the still places) — and the things I think about are no better. Just different, just stuck-up.

Not even that, not really, not much at all. I remember an afternoon when I'm so seized by a chapter in The Brothers Karamazov that I read it out loud to Carol and Paul and they listen politely, maybe even like it. We’re under a blanket in a cold back stairwell. I'm not a snob, I'm an enthusiast, and I hear the rhythms plainly and honor them.

[I'm an innocent spy and deep in my head are the things my mother has put there secretly and my father's trusting eyes. I've been a double agent for years.]

There's Lawrence at the Fleetwood, inside, with my mother and father, there's Larry at the Fleetwood, outside, with the other kids, and there's Kearney at Tech. The three barely touch. The vocabularies are different.

Tech is offhand, rapid-fire information back and forth — 'fucking,' as rhythmic springboard – and the occasional lapse into meaning when it's possible in that special safe air that comes around sometimes, seldom.

'Here, here's something of mine but don't fucking break it.'

The Fleetwood is scaled back with less theorizing and mental aggression — our places have all been assumed already. We don’t swear as much and when we do it’s more attached to the situation than it is in Tech. Current events and the existence or non-existence of God don’t figure in. We know each other very well indeed. We know the boundaries.

And home? At home I can’t think what we talk about. Walking through the halls of Tech, I can’t remember how we talk. It’s all in code. When an easy passage comes — some offhand talk about politics or a movie or a book or my father’s early life — I’m grateful and almost happy. When the tension is down on the rooms, it’s hell. There could be balled lightning playing at the windows.

[Where I sat so long looking at the street that it’s a chunk of my being, head against glass, the light changing and the pigeons whirling dark then light, the different sides of their flying bodies.]

The one thing shared by all three worlds is their utter lack of spoken honesty, though of the three the world of the stoop comes closest.

In Tech it’s not even an issue — be honest about what?

In the Fleetwood the world is a matter of understood boundaries — we all share the griefs of the secret insides of our apartments, and we all know it. Grief isn’t for discussion. Grief is the stuff of the family.

At home it’s not even possible to think about. Say how I feel? Would my father say how he feels? Of course he wouldn’t. My mother’s feelings are flung into the dark corners like balled-up clothing, but we never talk about them. When she does, there’s no coherence and they’re never mentioned again. Anything can happen and never be mentioned again.

[Except by the darkening colors in the air and the overpowering sense of twilight.]

My feelings aren’t even discussed in my head. My feelings are something I have to keep from embarrassing me. My feelings could kill me. My feelings are the stuff of sunken valleys in the brain with a monomaniacal light on, way back in the trees. My rage is the wind at end of the world (the wind at the village’s outskirts). If someone asked me how I felt, for real, I wouldn’t know what to say. I couldn’t even write it down. I have a lot to learn and no breathable air in my head.

[Terrible and deathly and choking so the head gets no air and the eyes grow flat, not the feelings killing but the other way around. Not the feelings killing but the drag of the mass of the rage and grief you’ve got stored from your chest to your forehead sucking emptily at you so you have to find fake isolation and fake sleep and fake medication and fake talk and fake love and the killing (you think) of the pain leaves you nothing so you die in misery — inside, outside, all around.]

And over all everything like a billowing air is the pull of the womanly and the dream of the warm penetration — lost mind, lost pain.

[“to bruise themselves an exit from themselves,” The Ship of Death says of apples falling to the ground and I’m stunned in a good place, it sinks in me and it’s mine. A piece of me changes slightly and something new has risen in my head and it isn’t the poem I read and it isn’t (I find out quickly) something to imitate. It’s just something alive and it offers endlessly. It was a thin book with gold letters and it was just there on the shelf in the library, lost among the novels, and I picked it up because of the name, The Ship of Death, and it never left again, nor the orange light on the oak shelves of books when I picked it. It’s how I’ll spend the first half of my life — bruising myself an exit from myself. The problem will be that I don’t understand yet that the apple falls by itself, without will, and lands on the grass in the nature of things.]

Something is gone. I look at the other kids and they’re moving away. Not that we were intimate, or spoke to each other about important things, but that I could look around me in a classroom, or in the back alley, and see them with they’re own hauntings and pains and things to hide. I’d always been able to see, and go out to, but now I’m curling up with a mystery, with mysteries, and the others are getting to be outside and unknown and I’m not much interested in even speculating unless the misery is so intense and overpowering that I poke at it lightly and turn away, horrified.

I am who I was but I’m not. I need to write my name on things. I need to look around for an interesting signature. McKinley was just a halfway place where I learned to throw the fish-eye, and slip by, but Tech is the place where they don’t care how cold you can look they’re going to give you a name anyway.

[On a very hot day in Manhattan I’m walking from the Donnell Library to the subway and I imagine unexpectedly that I’ve written my name in hot brass across the face of the next building down. It’s a good feeling, I can see the brass. It’s a bad feeling, I’m embarrassed, and I stand in front of the Metropole for a while to get my head into another place but it’s Charlie Shavers in high register and it grates, so I walk on disconsolately.]

The American Tradition in Literature. I don’t even know what that means — still don’t. The Human Tradition in Literature might mean something (not much, redundant), but I’m barely American, barely a citizen, all my attitudes and spellings from Ireland and Scotland. Even what I picked up at 185 was largely from Europe. There couldn’t have been more than ten kids or so in my classes whose parents weren’t born on the other side. Stevenson and Dickens are my writers.

The music makes me pretty much American . . .

[my father used to listen with me to Gene Autry because he liked him but after the record Don’t Bite the Hand that Feeds You was released he rethought it. He has a lot of trouble that way — he takes me to see The Quiet Man, and we both love it, but he knows about Wayne and McLaughlin and right wind politics and it leaves a slight bad taste in his mouth. The Irish do that a lot to him.]

. . . and the movies, but even in those I’ve been steeped in my mother’s music — Gracie Fields and Vera Lynn — and by my father in the J. Arthur Rank stuff, the movies with the big gong in the shadows and the soft voices. Black Narcissus, Mine Own Executioner, Tales of Hoffmann, A Matter of Life and Death, Quartet, The Red Shoes, The Rocking Horse Winner, The Lavender Hill Mob, Jamaica Inn, The Small Back Room, The River.

The River where the little boy disappears early on. It’s a mystery to me — I know he’s dead because I watch them carry the little coffin down the grassy hill – but how could the boy die before the end of the movie? There was nothing to let me know ahead of time. Usually at the Dyker on Saturday nights there are hints, and you can tell when someone’s going to die. But here the snake just bites him and he’s gone — he’s bringing the snake his food because he’s fascinated, and sort of loves it, and it bites him and he’s dead. Doesn’t seem right. It haunts. I’ve seen it alone with my father, seven or so, uneasy that we’re sitting there watching the funeral of a little boy who worshipped a cobra.

But he wasn’t like me at all, was he? He was willful out in the open.

I fold the kid up in my head with the blue dancer in the twilight gleam of gold and the beautiful woman.

Pretty much American is the best I can do. My loyalties are largely, generally British. I don’t know yet about the English in Ireland, just bits and pieces. The Black and Tans come up sometimes, the Troubles, my father’s odd passports that I look at when I open the desk, ritually, every six months or so.

I have a reasonable political education for a thirteen year old. My father can spot an ex-Nazi at a hundred yards, and he’s usually right. I watched the Army-McCarthy Hearings and I suffered in the night as Eisenhower beat Stevenson and I hate John Foster Dulles and anytime I hear “The Amurrican People,” I know just what’s going on.

In this sense, Tech is just the place for me. There may be fewer kids with foreign-born parents, but there are a lot more with left wing parents — a lot more.

Bay Ridge was the only district in Brooklyn that never went for Roosevelt.

I think power is the answer, of course. So do we all. If we had power, we’d be happy. My view is slightly off kilter because I don’t really think I’ll ever have any. Or maybe I think I will but feel I won’t, something, so I’m already looking with a slightly cold eye. Not cold enough to keep me from dreaming of top-of-the-world, but there, and dreaming its own dreams.

Mr. Feeney has power but he doesn’t know what to do with it. He believes in it, and he tries to use it, but nothing ever comes out right for him and somehow we all know he’s weak in that way a classroom of thirteen year olds can just know things about a teacher, and use them to push him, brutally.

All the power in 7S2 is really ours, and we use it just like the world does.

Feeney is a big, flat-faced Irishman with a rough voice. He teaches mechanical drawing and tries to look strong and intimidating, but there’s just something there, and nobody buys it. Worse than that. They mock it ingeniously, hilariously, till the man is virtually insane.

Dallio is his nemesis, malignly inspired and suave, handsome, swept-back dark hair and chosen clothes and thin silver flex-belt with buckle at the side. I have one of those too, but it doesn’t look the same and never will.

Dallio and Feeney meet somewhere in the air and the play begins and we’re all along for the ride, knowingly, knowing exactly what’s going on and choosing to join in.

“I used to spar with Philadelphia Jack O’Brien,” Feeney tells us pointlessly, comically, floundering. And later he’ll open the 7th floor window and say “Come on, I’ll take you on one at a time. You’ll get me sooner or later but some of you are going out the window.”

It’s the only time, I think, I’ve ever been involved in mob violence. I can’t think of any other. It’s not like me, and I hate it, but the class breaks the monotony of the day and it’s all so bloody funny, so anarchic, and Feeney is such a failed bully (every bully you’ve ever seen made vulnerable).

[I compulsively and unwillingly think about where people came from and see them in other times, other places. I feel a sharp pain when Feeney comes up in my mind as a little boy faking it, trying to be someone he thinks he has to be. There’s no volition or conscious virtue in how I think or see — it’s just there, and it hurts — I hurt for Feeney. What a life. I need to get less fragile. I look around the room for the others who feel like me, but I’m not sure anymore, not sure I can recognize them. None of us have pasts. None of us have parents. All of us work the rhythms and the catch-phrases. All of us go along as best we can. The ones who can’t get brutalized — Lederman, the hapless Boylecky, the fat and squirmy Hillman. I’m hiding in plain sight. I can do that. I have the distant eyes and the fake self-absorption.]

“Bloom’s got the plague!” Dallio screams and half of the class runs screaming to the back of the room to claw at the wall and try to climb over each other, screaming, “Bloom’s got the plague, the plague!” I don’t. It isn’t my kind of scene. It isn’t self-contained at all, and I’d be scared to.

Feeney has turned from the blackboard and he’s watching silently and doesn’t even try to make himself heard just waits. I think maybe he’s learning but he isn’t really, he’s just getting tired.

He comes in the door and goes to his desk and there are jigsawed pieces of a photograph on his desk and he stands there, putting the pieces together with one finger till it’s clear, an eight-by-ten, hard-core, black and white print. He opens his desk drawer and sweeps it in.

[I would have liked to see it, the photograph, but never had the chance.]

Dallio, I hear, has called him at home in the middle of the night. I don’t like that. Feeney has a family and he probably feels like anyone else.

Dallio makes a fake bomb out of red-painted toilet paper tubes and copper wire and leaves it in the waste paper basket next to Feeney’s desk. When Bloom walks by he kicks it over and the bomb rolls out and “Bomb!” he screams, “it’s a bomb!” and the class goes scrambling again to the back of the room as Dallio crawls down an aisle, grabs the bomb and pulls the wires off and everyone cheers from the back. “Dallio saved us! Feeney was chickenshit but Dallio saved us!”

Why doesn’t he kick Dallio out of his class? Tech isn’t a liberal school, if they don’t like the way you are, they bounce you out (“Look to your left and your right. Only one of you is going to make it through,” they say first day).

God knows There are plenty of kids want to get in. But Feeney doesn’t kick him out and there’s a sense in the room that something old and terrifying is going on, a dance of death.

Days go by that are just days in a classroom, and Feeney makes his plodding rounds with his indelible red wax pencil, marking drawings he doesn’t like so that they’ll have to be done over. He just doesn’t know. He’s locked in.

The humming begins one winter morning. Every time he turns to the blackboard, the room becomes a solid hum. Everyone’s in on this one. It stops dead when he turns back to us. My seat is right by the blackboard and the third time he turns around he looks quickly at the row and picks the most harmless looking, me, comes to me in two big strides and pulls me from my seat to throw me against the blackboard. I’m pretty good. I just straighten up and look at him and he says “Stay there till after class.”

So I stand there and I’m getting smirks and support and when Feeney turns to the blackboard again the humming goes off and now he’s stuck, he’s already made his move, and has to just ignore it.

After class he keeps me there and wants to know why I was humming. He’s had me spotted as someone whose heart isn’t in it, and now he wants to make me his. In the open classroom doorway, Larry Klein is leaning against the frame and snapping a Garrison belt. Feeney can see him over my shoulder.

“I don’t know,” I say, and he says “Well don’t let it happen again,” then, “You seem a decent sort. Maybe you could help me out here.”

“Uh . . .”

And he’s failed again, so miserably that I’m embarrassed to be in the room and when I leave Klein is smirking at Feeney and I smile a little at Klein, back to Feeney, and off we go down the hall.

“What a fucking schmuck,” Klein says and I have to agree though I feel like I’m faking it and wish I had the power not to. Feeney is a schmuck.

[So am I, so am I.]

And what has this to do with the light and deepness of Mary Heslin’s room?

Not much, except in the contrast. She doesn’t ask for anything and uses her power with little effort, mostly to plant things to mark out the edges of the road.

She’s so young and intense. It’s a breathless room and sometimes she comes close to places she’s afraid to be because she knows they can come back on her, from parents, from the structure, and I see her backing off, backing down. We’re complicit, she lets us know. I watch her open-mouthed and when she looks at me I’m stricken and absolutely amazed because I can see her seeing me. She sees me and she doesn’t seem to care that I’m just this scared kid with a smattering of information and a head full of words to no purpose, the fake kid who copied the poem, the traitor kid who leaves his father in the dark, the terrified kid whose mother’s going to take him to some fucking goddamn miserable cocksucking piece of shit Jersey apartment where he’ll curl up and die in a pot of Campbell’s vegetable soup on a rotten fucking broken dirty stove.

She sees me, I think, and takes me in as I am and the sweetness is frightening.

I’m not sure about the others, how they feel. I know they’re all on edge and jumpy and expectant. Some can’t handle it – “Heslin’s a carpenter’s dream. Flat, smooth and square.” — but the bravado goes nowhere at all. Because above all we’re in a special place, and they know it. And she is too, young and intense and finding her way and making a fool of herself, sometimes, and touching us oddly.

We’re involved with her in a venture.

We’re part of something interesting, and occasionally lovely. It would take a rare dead heart to actually resent her as a teacher, and I can’t remember anyone who did.

Then there’s Mr. Starfield who teaches Industrial Processes (argh) and is reasonably funny in the same ways with the same words, probably, that he’s been funny for years.

And Mr. Wolfson who teaches history and seems genuinely involved, genuinely worked-up.

And Mr. Sachs who teaches Physics and who left a job at Westinghouse Research to teach because he thought it was the good thing to do and now comes in to class to tell us about who he was, and how they’ve got him on bathroom patrol, looking for smokers.

And Miss Greenfield who teaches chemistry and has no identifying marks, I can’t remember; and Mr. Kobel in machine shop who phrases interestingly so that a six-inch, one inch square of cold rolled isn’t just going to be turned to a three quarter cylinder but ‘wants to be’ three quarters; and Mr. Sklar who teaches Math and treats me quite well considering how hopeless I am, what a hopeless, lazy fuck-up I am, without even the decency to pretend to be interested.

There’s Somebody in gym, who knows? Some of us learn early that if you go upstairs to the track that runs around the wall, you can run it a couple of times them disappear back into one of the corners and read, or talk. Every once in a while one of us will get up and run a lap, just for the hell of it. Every once in a while they have tests on the various physical skills and I do wretchedly. What else is new?

When Boylecky goes up the rope, Horton tries to set fire to the end. It doesn’t work, but the smoke goes up and Boylecky comes down fast.

In the flat recessed corner of the track, Horton reads The Naked and the Dead. Luba is reading The Amboy Dukes. We’re all poised and waiting.

We’re going to get stamped, Lost or Found. There’ll be a little hiss, a little smoke, and off we’ll go.

I’m working the angles as well as a scared impostor can and when I get off the subway in the afternoon, I turn back to look at the woman half under the water on the billboard.

When I go up into the sunlight, there’s the Fleetwood. When there is no sunlight, just the metallic air, my heart sinks in front of its massiveness. Carol’s inside and she could be mine if I could bring myself to touch her.

‘God’, I think, ‘I’ve been in here for thirteen years. I’ve got to get out of here.’

I have read Moby Dick. I have done that. Oddly enough, talking about books up on the track, I never mention it. It’s the wrong kind of book — no fucking, no clues.

My ideal, I guess, would be to find a Moby Dick with sex in it. Melville describing the woman on the bed and how her legs might be — outlined whiteness and substance, whiteness and half-conscious opening, sweetness and restlessness. What would that be like?

But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time,; and while yet drawing mortal nourishment , be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; — even so did the young of these whales seem looking up toward us, but not at us . . .

[This, of course, is not what I remember, or ever did. This is what was there, and what I remembered (remember) is an endless space of pale, blue-green vaulting below and the huge shapes moving through it, real and unreal at the same time, true, beating hearts in suspended shapes and their flowing in the emptiness and distance — this is what rose up, where the words made a space.]

What would anything be like? I don’t know, though I feel like I’m involved in a motionless struggle, and that something will come, sooner or later.

I’m not really a child anymore though I am ridiculously young.

And the real strength and beauty of my child’s attention is disappearing slowly into a soup of imagined sex and imagined power and real disguise.

I want, and I can’t see, and the soup is bubbling and churning around me.

The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Six Fits.

For sure.

I engage with the Snark, every night after dark
in a dreamy delirious fight ,
I serve it with greens in those shadowy scenes,
And I use it for striking a light.