A Wonderful Stroke of Luck Page 5

  LaVerdere might be on the rebound from as bad a night as some of them had had. It was a way of thinking that Elin, with her good intentions, had instilled in him: that he couldn’t easily understand his father because he didn’t observe his father’s off-moments. He didn’t; his father, at most, loosened his tie at dinner and wore his jacket winter or summer. The long, thick bathrobe Elin had given him as a gift hung on the hook of the bathroom door. It was used only for hand drying.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, politics. This American politician gave a now-famous televised speech in which he admitted accepting a dog from the then-Russian president.”

  “Who is Richard Nixon?”

  “When he left the White House, he got all teary and thanked everybody, but he didn’t thank his wife,” Hailey said.

  “He and Henry Kissinger should have been tried for war crimes,” Aqua said. “Even my father thinks that.”

  “Ladies? Gentlemen?” LaVerdere said. “This is not a blurt-out-anything-that-occurs-to-you occasion. If we may continue?”

  “Just go on, Mr. LaVerdere. Ignore them,” Phillip Collins said.

  “Literature. This play that premiered in the U.S. in Miami Beach was billed as a ‘laugh riot,’ and involved two characters waiting for someone or something that never appears. Ms. Sils?”

  “What is Waiting for Godot?”

  “LouLou always gets the easy ones,” Jasper said, disgustedly.

  LaVerdere scanned his eyes over the group sitting on large cushions on the floor. Earlier, he’d joked that he felt like a preschool teacher; he’d wondered aloud—in that super-wry way that still made some of the girls wonder if he was gay—if Jeopardy! should be followed by nap time. The shiny blue cushions, edged in multicolored fringe, had been a gift from the same woman who’d arranged for the donation of the Edward Hicks painting. No one had an explanation, however, for why the series of very large boxes had been shipped to the school from Bloomingdale’s. LouLou had pronounced them “cool.” When she sat on one, other girls instantly did the same. Finally, more people had joined her, though Ben sat in a chair. LaVerdere said, feigning fatigue, “Jasper, as with everything else in our universe, the cards have been randomly shuffled.”

  “The real point of his asking that question was so he could shock us by dropping in the information that Godot was considered a comedy,” Phillip Collins said.

  “I will take that as a compliment and continue,” LaVerdere said, “though you might also consider that the question contained disdain for Miami Beach as well. We move again to the category Philosophy.” LaVerdere gestured. “You’re up next, Beltz and Whistles,” he said to Darius. Ben looked quickly over his shoulder. Toward the back of the room, which Ben had passed through quickly, Darius was on the floor, weight on one hip, propped on his elbow. This, like the softball, was something LaVerdere was obviously not going to comment on. Dried mud caked the soles of Darius’s shoes. He must be sprawled there with a terrible hangover.

  “A philosopher famous for saying, ‘What needs to be said is best said twice.’”

  “Could you say that again?” LouLou asked.

  “My mother,” Hailey said, simultaneously. Several people cracked up. Ben smiled, though he was preoccupied; he was still thinking over what Phillip (a.k.a. “Tom”) Collins had said. Though nobody paid much attention to him, the guy certainly was astute.

  “Em—” Darius Beltz said under his breath. “Who is Empedocles?”

  “How would you know that?” LouLou exploded, turning toward Darius.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I read a lot.” In his room, Darius had a framed letter, handwritten, from his second-grade teacher to his parents, saying that he was reading at the sixth-grade level. None of them knew what to make of it—whether, by framing it, he was boasting or joking.

  “Kindly refrain from digressing into personal conversations, ladies and gentlemen. Aqua, might you stop looking around like someone has taken us hostage?” LaVerdere, expressionless, reshuffled the cards.

  “Science. A famous scientist said about quantum mechanics that if you thought you understood it, you did not.”

  “Who is Richard Feynman?”

  “Too obvious, Mr. LaVerdere! You’re obsessed with Feynman. He’s your default scientist, like Dostoyevsky’s always the most important writer.”

  “One more interruption, and I lecture on The Peaceable Kingdom again,” LaVerdere said.

  Silence in the room. Again, the cards were shuffled. Ben noticed that LaVerdere’s ears had turned bright pink. He seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. It had been Dr. Ha’s turn to preside over Jeopardy!—that is, if he didn’t come up with an alternate idea—but he’d canceled late the night before because of a sore throat. Ha had been lying, Ben thought, when LaVerdere announced the change of plans, with his characteristic straight face.

  LaVerdere nodded in the direction of one of the two math majors who were sitting in today, for no reason anyone could understand. Later, Jasper would nickname them “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” The next question was directed at Tweedledum.

  “Shakespeare. Identify the play that contains the line ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth.’”

  “What is Macbeth?”

  “That is incorrect. It’s Hamlet. Let’s try again, Mr. Amasett.

  “Our next category is Famous Americans. Mr. Amasett, ready? For those of you who don’t know Grover Amasett, whose studies include an emphasis on math, he has decided to join us today. Let’s see if we’ve turned up a question about Einstein for him.” LaVerdere cleared his throat.

  “Famous Americans. He said, ‘I’m the most cold-hearted son-of-a-bitch you’ll ever meet.’”

  “Who is Ted Bundy?” his friend Tweedledee shouted.

  “Who is Ted Bundy?” Akemi Hayashi-Myers asked.

  Tweedledee turned to look at her. “A sociopath,” he said. “He murdered at least thirty women. Nobody knows the real number. He was born in Vermont. He went to the electric chair.”

  “Very good, Mr. Duquell. Please excuse me for neglecting to introduce our other math student, Mr. Duquell. Since we’re going off-script today, I recommend to you, if it might have escaped your attention previously, an amazing painting—a painting by Andy Warhol, a.k.a. Warhola, of Campbell’s soup can fame; numerous paintings, I should say—of the electric chair. But let us continue, as I’m sure we’re all eager to enjoy our”—he looked quickly around the room—“unhealthy snacks, which will affect our glycemic index at the conclusion of Jeopardy!”

  “That was really in the category ‘Famous Americans’? Darius Beltz asked. “Don’t we want to have a debate as to whether, morally, murderers should be considered ‘famous’?”

  “In spite of what you imply, Beltz and Whistles, I am not a pedant,” LaVerdere said. “So the answer is no. Though perhaps in our next debate we can take sides about whether interruptions are helpful or unhelpful.

  “Literature. In this twentieth-century novel, a character attends a sparsely populated funeral after the protagonist is found dead in his pool.”

  “Who is John Cheever?”

  A groan went up. “The Great Gatsby,” LouLou said, then clamped her hand over her mouth. Heads nodded in agreement. “Gatsby!” also escaped someone else’s lips. Aqua had bumped over and put her arm around Akemi’s shoulder, continuing to explain who the serial killer Ted Bundy was. There were no teams—the worst you could suffer was personal embarrassment—though for Akemi, a mistake was always devastating.

  “Entertainment. This movie by Robert Altman had a haunting musical score that only occurred to the director after filming concluded.”

  “What is McCabe & Mrs. Miller?”

  “That’s his Holy Trinity: Dostoyevsky; Richard Feynman; Robert Altman,” Darius Beltz said.

  “I will ignore that remark—though it does express my own exc
ellent taste, as well as my ability to understand the underpinnings of our culture. Tom Collins, I feel sure you were thinking the same, even though you are surreptitiously consulting your phone, which is against the rules of Bailey Academy. But now, following Big Ben’s triumphant answer about Mr. Altman’s film, let us conclude by wishing Dr. Ha a speedy recovery—though we need commit these thoughts only in our hearts, as former President Jimmy Carter informed us he did, when considering adultery.”

  It was too convoluted, Ben thought; LaVerdere could easily be a one-man band, but when he played the synthesizer, the audience quickly lost all sense of what was going on. He agreed with LaVerdere about the brilliance of Altman’s revisionist Western, though. He also knew another interesting fact about it: When filming, they’d decided to continue when it began snowing, and the snow went on and on and on. He’d never seen such real-looking snow as in that movie and later he found out why. He conjured up Julie Christie, her face on a pillow, stoned.

  “Dr. Ha,” LouLou said solemnly, standing, touching her palms together, her fingers pointing up, “our condolences go out to you today, though we understand that, really, you’re somewhere in your sports car.”

  LaVerdere cocked his head. He said, “Perhaps you could let us in on the secret of how you’re sure Dr. Ha is not at home, ill? Would that be because you looked out your window and saw him driving away?”

  “Okay, I didn’t see it,” LouLou said after a long pause.

  “I did,” LaVerdere said. “Though I do admire the man’s chutzpah.”

  Six

  On 9/11 LouLou was the town crier, banging on her classmates’ doors. It took Ben some time to realize that he hadn’t been awakened from a nightmare. Mrs. Somersworth, the school nurse (rumored to have had a drug problem herself, when she was their age), handed out tissues and herded them into the TV room to look at the shaky footage, the incomprehensible smoke in New York.

  Oh, Ben thought stupidly. They’ve wheeled a TV into the solarium. The solarium had no plants in it because the baseboard heating had killed all of those that Binnie and Tessie hadn’t rescued and put elsewhere. The corner room, hung with portraits of the school’s founders, was used for faculty meetings, with extensions fitted into the big oval table. Someone had pushed the table against one wall. The TV had been brought in from somewhere else, its back trailing extension cords. It sat angled toward the two sofas. Some people sat on the rug, or on the few folding chairs Tessie had dragged out before she stopped and sat down, drawing her daughter in close to her side.

  Everyone’s real affiliations immediately became clear: LouLou did her best to comfort Hailey, using some patois of baby talk, holding her face so Hailey had to look into her eyes and focus her attention. Eleanor (Ms. Rigby, to LaVerdere) refused to sit and backed up against the wall near Darius Beltz. Darius’s eyes kept darting toward her. No one touched Darius. He’d ask you not to, if you did. Mrs. Vale, the history teacher (who always corrected you if you called her “Dr.” Vale; only LaVerdere did not stand corrected), walked over to be with her star pupil, Eleanor, trying to sniff back tears. “I can’t explain, it’s a horrible accident, a plane went off-course and flew into the tower, that has to be what happened,” Mrs. Vale said dully, drowning out the more interesting speculation on the TV, as she went to sit down.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” Ben said.

  Tessie, Binnie’s mother, sat beside Mrs. Vale on the low, red leather couch, fingering colorless rosary beads, her lips moving silently as her big-knuckled fingers—worse even than Benson Whitacre’s—worked themselves over the glass. Tessie’s slip showed—it often did—but today none of the girls pointed it out.

  Darius Beltz had left the room. He stood in the corridor, fumbling in his attempts to button his shirt. He looked like a crazy man exploring his body for imaginary insects.

  “What are you doing?” Aqua said. “Go bang your fist against the wall or something, Darius, but don’t do that.”

  “Aqua, come sit with me,” Mrs. Vale called.

  “Where is every other person in the whole school, like every teacher?” Aqua said, her shoulders heaving with exasperation.

  “I’m a teacher,” Mrs. Vale said quietly.

  “She’s the history teacher,” Ben echoed. Hearing his own voice, he wondered why it sounded so high. The minute he spoke, he felt like everyone had caught him in an enormous lie. Worse, that he was falling back into his pattern of echoing his father. Elin had discussed that with him privately. “You don’t have to repeat what your father says, if you disagree,” she’d said. “You shouldn’t just echo his words.” What she didn’t know was that by echoing, he was simultaneously erasing, in his own mind, what his father said.

  He rubbed his hand over his forehead and his uncombed hair. He was standing there in his socks—socks! Stiff and dirty, worn since basketball practice the day before—but he’d forgotten to put on shoes, LouLou’s cries had been so disturbing. Who knew there was anything between Aqua and Darius—or possibly he was imagining it. Right now, she was clasping Darius’s hands (amazing!), their arms swaying the way someone would show a child how a metronome worked. Darius’s shirt remained unbuttoned. Ben was stunned at what white skin he had. He’d been in the locker room with Darius . . . why, suddenly, did his ribs protrude? Was it the angle from which he saw Darius’s body?

  Adults floated into the room. They came from nowhere, like ghosts blowing through empty castles. Even if they were crying—or maybe because they were—they said little. No ghost greeted another. They hadn’t been there when LouLou started screaming, or when blank-faced Binnie—Binnie, who’d rushed out to rescue LouLou; Ben had been entirely incidental—turned on the TV. No matter how hard Ben tried, Binnie wouldn’t make eye contact with him.

  Where, though, was LaVerdere? He was the person you’d expect front and center, he was the one who could be counted on to provide some perspective, to involve everyone in a discussion.

  Dr. Ha stood in the doorway in black Lycra shorts and an oversize Nike T-shirt. Had he fallen? Quite possibly, since he was holding a pair of broken glasses. “What’s happened? They told me at the post office,” he said. He glanced at Mrs. Vale, though he quickly looked away. She shook her head in disbelief, but the baffled silence continued, all attention riveted to the frightening image on the television, which Mrs. Vale abruptly muted. Confused, she continued to stare at the screen; eventually, she held out the remote to Dr. Ha, who said, “Do you mind?” and turned the volume back on, watching her out of the corner of his eye as the sound came up.

  The second plane hit. The new picture provoked a moan from Tessie, whose slip had a thick strip of lace at the hem, though you could see where the lace ended and the dingily colored nylon began. Satin, nylon, polyester. Polyester. Elin had once gone on a rant against polyester, and his father had made a joke, trying to be cool, asking if that wasn’t the name of someone who’d hung around Warhol’s Factory. Elin was attractive, though her startled eyes didn’t reassure anyone. Her eyes would certainly be huge today. He could understand why his father had married her, though she spent almost as much time instructing him as she did Ben. Her own daughter, from her brief first marriage, had died in infancy, long before she married his father.

  In the hallway, Darius held his shirt against his chest like a flimsy shield. He and Aqua had stood apart from the TV watchers so long, whispering, that it wasn’t clear they’d ever join the group. With ribs protruding that sharply, better that Darius cover up, since adults were flipped out by seeing ribs. There were worse things to worry about now, though. It truly, really, completely, totally did not matter that Darius, pitted by acne, was also anorexic.

  “I do not believe even one plane has flown into the World Trade Center by accident,” Dr. Ha said.

  “Pray for the people,” Tessie said, tugging her hem.

  “What’s happening?” LouLou said, her voice more desperate than when she’d been running d
own the hallways.

  Dr. Ha continued to cast sideways looks at Mrs. Vale. She paid no attention to him, even when a piece of cracked lens fell out of his glass frames. Ben picked it up and handed it silently to Dr. Ha. Dr. Ha looked at the lens as if it were the most unfortunate thing he’d ever seen.

  Ms. Alwyn-Black appeared, frowning. “My god,” she said, not realizing that no one was talking. “A plane? It went out of control? With all those people aboard?”

  “Two planes!” Darius Beltz said, then went back to biting his thumbnail.

  Ms. Alwyn-Black was joined by Ms. Delacroix, who was obtuse, absolutely unlike anyone else at the school. Ms. Delacroix had majored in women’s studies and volunteered several nights a week at a shelter for abused women. Recently, a man had shown up at the shelter—Ben knew this from a discussion with LaVerdere, who, in bringing it up, had seemed genuinely interested in what Ben really thought—wearing a curly wig and lipstick and begging for a place to stay to escape domestic violence. That had really gotten LaVerdere’s wheels turning. Ms. Delacroix had been Eleanor’s first confidante after what did or didn’t happen with Phillip Collins in the potting shed. Ms. Delacroix was married to a judge in Albany whom she saw only on weekends. She was nice enough, though sanctimonious. “I serve as I can,” she often said. The day was lovely, warm compared to the previous night. The world might be ending (Hailey’s bluntly stated opinion: Her eye patch was askew; Ben had once seen that the place where her left eye had been was a shallow indentation).

  “Madmen hijackers,” Ms. Delacroix said, her big butt collapsing onto the couch so that Mrs. Vale rose up as if they were on a seesaw. Tessie—who’d been clutching her daughter’s hand all the time they were riveted to the TV—walked away, shaking her head, her back mercifully blocking Ben’s view of the burning buildings. Tessie and Binnie had a dog that they sometimes brought to work. Otherwise, their neighbor, who lived above them in the town at the crossroads, looked after it. The dog was old. Dilly, it was called. On the ride back to Bailey, Binnie had told them that the dog was fourteen years old and sick, but that putting it to sleep would be a mortal sin.