The Crazyladies of Pearl Street Page 7

  Each afternoon as four o’clock grew near, the allure of freedom would become too great to ignore, and your soul would twist within your body with the need to be elsewhere. Over the teacher’s head in every room of P.S. 5 there was a Regulator clock whose long hand did not crawl around the dial but remained frozen for an eternal fifty-nine seconds then suddenly clunked to the next minute, giving a jab of excitement to hundreds of young bodies, stiff with accumulated boredom and yearning to run screaming out across the macadam playground and down the street. But not in Miss Cox’s third grade, where we enjoyed the inestimable privilege of ending our school work twenty minutes early, when she would say calmly and without breaking the flow of whatever she had been talking about, “...and now we have five minutes to tidy up the classroom...silently!...and then it will be storytime.” With busy—but silent!—efficiency, we lifted our hinged desktops and put away books and pens then closed them...silently!...then the assigned chair-straighteners set about their task (always girls, as boys tended to scrape the chairs across the floor), and the book-putters-away and wastepaper-basket-emptiers discharged their responsibilities, and the window-closers (the big older boys at the back of the class) manipulated long wooden poles with blunt brass hooks at the end to close the windows which Miss Cox insisted be open at least a crack during class, even in winter, because “the brain requires oxygen”, and the best student of the preceding week (me, usually) collected the blackboard erasers and took them out onto the iron fire escape, where he clapped them together vigorously until the chalk dust was dispersed into the air. When this privileged functionary was daydreaming, as often he was, he would forget to stand upwind of the erasers and would return to the classroom with white eyebrows and hair, to the scoffing amusement of the big boys. “Yeah, sure. The smart one!”

  Then, for the last quarter of an hour, Miss Cox would read to us, not dull, stuffy ‘good’ fiction, but cracking stories with plenty of action and danger, and with kids as the heroes. She would act out all the roles, letting her voice become tense with danger or breathless with excitement or hysterical with fun. Sometimes these stories came from Miss Cox’s collection of children’s books with pictures of boys and girls in outdated clothes, other times she would read from handwritten notebooks, for Miss Cox was a writer of children’s fiction, although, she admitted, “...as yet to be discovered.” She somehow always managed to be at a moment of danger or discovery when the Regulator’s minute hand lurched to straight up, and the school bell jangled. All the class would groan and beg her to read on, just to see what happens next, but she would shrug fatalistically and close the book until the next day, reminding us that “If you always leave the table a little bit hungry, you will never sit down without an appetite.” With this, she would slowly turn over one hand so that the fingers pointed to the cloak room at the back, and that was the signal that we were free to leave. That gesture was the boundary between the world of school and the world of freedom, and as Miss Cox, Queen of Chaos, sat smiling, we would rush back and grab our jackets and hats off their hooks, pushing and shoving and babbling and playing tricks, and on snowy days, those of us who had rubbers or galoshes would hop around on one foot, slipping on the still-wet floor and pinching our fingers to pull them on. Then we would dash out of the cloakroom and immediately slow to a walk and stop babbling because each student said, ‘Good-bye, Miss Cox’ as he passed her on his way to the door, and she would hold each of us in turn in her affectionate gaze and say: Good-bye, Joseph or Mary-Elizabeth or Margaret, always using the full name rather than nicknames, to the slight discomfort of a Bart who was Bartholomew or an Al who was Aloysius, and we would go out into the hall more orderly and better behaved than any other class because we had had a moment to let off steam in the cloakroom.

  Often Miss Cox would begin story time by reading a short poem, which nobody liked as much as the stories, although some girls pretended to, trying to convince somebody that they were more refined than boys. She tried to tempt the boys to taste the riches of verse by occasionally reading things like “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”, which she described as a cowboy poem, but all that stuff about the lady known as Lou seemed awfully gushy to us, although the gunfight in the dark was pretty good. Shortly after I returned to Miss Cox’s class the following September to begin the third grade in earnest, she read the class Kipling’s “Gunga Din” and told us that she would give any boy who could recite it a ‘special treat’. I checked it out from the library and memorized it, despite the funny spelling that was supposed to represent a cockney accent. After rehearsing before my admiring mother and long-suffering sister, I informed Miss Cox that I had “Gunga Din” down by heart, and she told me that the ‘special treat’ was not so much for me as for the entire class: I would be allowed to recite the poem to them! Both the class and I felt terribly let down, but I went to the front of the room and ground my way through the poem, lavishing generous measures of histrionic excess upon the last gasping words of the mortally wounded water-bearer. Later, I would learn to play to my audience under similar circumstances, sheltering myself from their mocking antipathy by making fun of the poem, or the assignment, or myself, or them; but this first time on stage I had no armor but melodramatic sincerity as I shifted roles and bitterly lamented my recent death, manfully fighting back the tears as I made what was, for a leather-hearted white soldier, a difficult confession: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.” Throughout my recitation, Miss Cox listened, her eyes closed in receptive ecstasy, while my classmates tried to distract me by rolling their eyes or pretending to strangle themselves with both hands.

  Each grade of elementary school has its own ethos, its own shibboleths, its own taboos, even its own jokes that linger through the summer in the chalk-dusty air to be rediscovered, dusted off and found hilarious by each succeeding wave of children. Each generation of third-grade kids at P.S. 5 was intensely loyal to Miss Cox while under her thrall, but the moment they became sophisticated fourth-graders they felt obliged to ridicule her and to disdain the next batch of adoring third-graders. Boys would mock her by speaking in a snooty, fluting voice, and even the best-behaved girls sometimes put their heads together and giggled at her bizarre clothes. It was universally accepted that she was ‘crazy’.

  Miss Cox was a teacher for all students. Her inexhaustible flow of information, ideas, images and inspiration was sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of the brighter minds and send them into books to learn more, while average students learned enough to do well in the fourth grade, and the bumptious tendencies of the dimmer kids were allayed by the unaccustomed attention and individual recognition she gave them. She embraced all her students with her absorbed, responsive gaze as she reached out for them with her rich, many-layered voice; and she was in almost constant physical contact with us, placing her hand on the shoulder or head of one while she answered another and looked into the eyes of a third, somehow giving every one of us the feeling that she was aware of your particular needs and interests or, sometimes, of what mischief you’d been up to.

  Miss Cox was a uniquely colorful example of those generations of splendid, often lonely, women who devoted their lives to teaching in urban slums, small towns, and one-room rural schoolhouses from the last third of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War, women whose personal sacrifice made American public education effective despite its innate weaknesses of structure, organization and resources. Most of these martyrs to learning never married; in many school districts they weren’t allowed to. They lavished upon succeeding generations of children the energies and talents that other women put into marriage and motherhood, energies and talents that a modern woman might devote to a career in commerce, government or industry, the doors to which professions were either closed to women at that time, or just barely ajar. Grand and noble though the achievements of these lay saints were, no compassionate or just-minded person would want to see a return to such exploitation of talent as was necessary to make a jur
y-rigged and neglected educational system work.5

  One afternoon in late fall Miss Cox said she wanted to speak to me after school. Apprehensive, I lingered as long as I could in the cloakroom. The only reprehensible things I’d done that day had been the vivid daydreams I slipped into while waiting for the rest of the class to finish a word problem. I let my fertile, furtive imagination settle on the girl who sat in front of me...what would the nape of her neck feel like if I stroked it?...and the golden hairs on her arms—I glanced up and saw Miss Cox looking down on me, smiling. Oh-oh! I had often had the uneasy suspicion that Miss Cox could read minds!

  Perched on the edge of her desk, she whipped the corner of her shawl over her shoulder and looked down at me, hot and cramped in my jacket and feeling vulnerable without the insulation of my fellow students around me. “Have you ever been tested, Luke?” Right from the first day, she had had the sensitivity to use the American version of my name that I preferred. I was ‘different’ enough as it was without having a different kind of name.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Have you ever taken an IQ test?”6

  I said no, I didn’t think so.

  “H’m. But surely you know that you’re quicker than other children...and that you learn more easily, yes?”

  I didn’t answer. It sounded like one of those trick questions adults are always decoying their quarry with.

  “I think you ought to be tested, Luke, and I intend to arrange for it. Unfortunately, our Board of Education is behind the times and still uses the adult tests for children, and that can produce wild measurements, especially at the higher ranges of ability. I’m sure you’ll turn out to have a high IQ, perhaps very high. And that’s a good thing. But it’s not everything. Do you know what IQ means?”

  I admitted that I didn’t.

  “A person’s Intelligence Quotient is an expression of the difference between his mental age and his physical age. If a child of, say, ten years old, did as well on an IQ test as most other ten-year-olds, he’d have an IQ of 100, which is what they call average intelligence. If he did as well as a child of thirteen, he’d have a 133 IQ. Above average.”

  I nodded tentatively, still not sure where all this was leading.

  She went on to tell me that no one had ever defined ‘intelligence’ in any useful way. Indeed, the man who invented intelligence testing, a Frenchman named Binet, ended up by admitting that: “The most accurate definition of ‘intelligence’ is: the quality my test measures.” And what Binet measured was a cluster of aptitudes and skills that made certain kinds of learning relatively easy, particularly the kinds one needs in a technological culture. “It’s what I call round-peg/round-hole intelligence,” Miss Cox said dismissively, adding that she personally found such human qualities as kindness, fairness, gumption, honesty and compassion more valuable than the ability to figure out quickly which direction the sixth cogwheel of a system was turning.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Luke?”

  “That it’s good to be intelligent, but it isn’t the most important thing in the world and I mustn’t get a big head.”

  “Exactly. I’ll let you know when it’s time to take the test.” She turned her attention to some desk work she was doing.

  I rose and began buttoning up my jacket. “Miss Cox?”

  “H’m?” she hummed without looking up.

  “I sometimes have the feeling that you can look right into my mind. I know you can’t, of course, but...”

  She continued scanning her page.

  “I mean, you can’t really see what I’m thinking, can you?”

  She looked at me owlishly. “Can’t I?”

  I left.

  When I got home that afternoon I was careful to mention the forthcoming IQ test in an offhand way, adding untruthfully that all new kids had to take them to keep my mother from making something big out of this. She was quick to build castles of expectation on the shifting sands of hope and longing.

  Shortly thereafter, Miss Cox excused me from class to go to the principal’s office, where I found a large woman with thick glasses, a red face, and a molten head cold that made her sniff constantly. She was a psychologist from the State Department of Education, and she gave me a long test to do against the wall clock that chopped off a minute with each click. It was a game, and I enjoyed it. I knew most of the answers even before looking at the multiple choices, and so I finished each section in less than half the time allotted, which the sniffing psychologist seemed to take as a professional affront...as though I were making light of her test and, by extension, of her expertise.

  By the next morning it had got around the school that I had been sent down to the principal’s office to meet a psychologist, and kids began to tease me about being a nutter. This gave birth to a new, happily transient, playground chant that followed me around during recess for a few days. Little girls would make the shame sign at me, scraping one forefinger on another as they chanted:

  Mickey Rooney is a loony.

  Like his ma, he’s really goony.

  I rankled at being called Mickey Rooney, a reference to my overacting the role of Gunga Din. This stung because Mickey Rooney was my least favorite actor after Rin-Tin-Tin (whom, come to think of it, Mickey Rooney resembled in his moist-eyed, canine need to be loved). I didn’t even mind their calling me a loony, but I was sorry to have my suspicion confirmed that the block included my mother among its crazyladies. Fortunately, street gossip never grouped my mother with the block’s full-blown nutters like Mrs Meehan across the street, or the old woman from around the corner who used to get away from her grandchildren a couple of times a year and run down the street screaming that she was the queen of heaven and the common-law wife of Jesus Christ. My mother’s craziness was understood to be only a mild case that manifested itself in her ‘funny’ clothes, her ‘tomboy’ behavior and her repeated attempts to get part-time work, despite the danger that if she were caught working we would lose our welfare allowance.

  Just before the Christmas vacation, I was given a note to carry home to my mother, asking her to come to school, where the principal and Miss Cox revealed my IQ score, which they told her in confidence because the then-prevalent theory was that a child shouldn’t know his IQ because if it were low he would be discouraged and give up trying, and if it were high he might stop working and rest on his laurels. Naturally, my mother ignored this injunction and told me everything she had learned. On the adult test they had given me, I had scored a little better than the average fifteen-year-old, which, considering that I was only seven, gave me an IQ of something over 200, which Miss Cox had said was patently ridiculous and served only to point out the foolishness in using adult IQ tests for evaluating children as young as I. But my mother was delighted. More than 200! Well now!

  I wasn’t nearly as impressed. In fact, I was a little annoyed to learn that I was only as smart as an average fifteen-year-old. Vic Ravelli, a swaggering dolt from down the block, was fifteen years old, and to be told that I was only as smart as Vic Ravelli...Jeez! Hoping to deflate her optimistic dreams lest she get carried away, I said that I was probably already as smart as I was ever going to get, and that if I took the same test in, say, five years and did exactly as well, my score would fall from over 200 to 125. But that wouldn’t mean I was getting any dumber. It was just a number thing. And if I went on in the same way, by the time I was fifteen I’d have an IQ of 100, and by the time I was thirty my IQ would be 50.7

  But Mother dismissed my self-abnegating manipulation of the IQ scores. The principal had told her that my performance put me in the top fifth of the top one percent of the population. “The top fifth of the top one percent of the population,” my mother repeated, as though to cement it in her memory. “...the top fifth of the top one percent!” She was in awe of this brainy phenomenon she had produced (after such a long and difficult labor) and not a little proud of the
woman who had produced it.

  I had been afraid from the first that my mother would convert any good IQ score into yet greater confidence in, and reliance on, my ability to cause her ship to come in and transport us from North Pearl Street to Easy Street, so I explained to her that being in the top fifth of the top one percent of the population meant that one kid in every five hundred was like me, and this meant that Albany, with its one hundred thirty thousand residents, had two hundred and sixty people every bit as smart as I was; and among New York City’s seven million, there were fourteen thousand of us! But this failed to puncture my mother’s balloon of hope; indeed, it reinforced her faith in my genius. “How many boys could have worked all that out so fast in their heads? You’ve got a gift for figuring out the percentages, Jean-Luc, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that being a success in business is mostly a matter of figuring out the percentages.”