This story must be 25 years old or so, and when I now go through again what some call this denouement, I can't help but think that even when I wrote it, I didn't know what to do with the experience, how to understand the events nor my role in what had happened to a young lady with all those brains and talent. The import of Mr. Crotty's emotional breakdown still isn't clear. I was 22 years old, a first-year teacher. I was as blown away as the 6th hour class who wandered into my room that day, stupefied at what they'd just seen and heard.
The line between fiction and memoir almost disappears here at the end. The person you're listening to is no longer a fictional teacher in a fictional high school. The narrator is nakedly me.
______________________
That was years ago. Today, Wilson Crotty might have gone to jail if the whole truth were ever told. Certainly, he would have lost his job. Instead, he may still be there behind his old desk.
I could have told Templeton everything Mel told me—if I would have spoken to him, he would have pressed her for every last detail. She could have told him too, but she didn't. She was powerless, really, and maybe it's taken me all this time to understand that. That may be why she never told the principal anything more than that this: "just now, in class, Mr. Crotty had a nervous breakdown."
Maybe I didn't tell Templeton because I was already starting to know Crotty's loneliness. Maybe I didn't tell because I was a teacher, or because I'm male.
Maybe I didn't tell because I wanted to protect her from the public slime of being seen as Friedli's victim, to keep a young woman already short in self-esteem, from the ignominy of a kinky association with a tall, gangly psycho, old enough to be her father, a man who was, by and large, a decent teacher, but like so many of us, starved, I suppose, for love.
Maybe I still can't see the whole thing clearly, objectively.
I got a card from her today. She sends something at Christmas every five years or so. This one came more than a month before the holiday season, along with a letter she sent out to dozens of friends.
It says she changed jobs now--and addresses--and that she loves the new job, writing software for banks, because it allows her to stay home more often and brings in even more money than the high-pressure marketing position she had with some Fortune 500 company.
The card's corners are decorated by little holly wreaths she drew in by hand, and she slipped in a snapshot of her kids, three of them, the oldest getting to high school age himself now. She knows it's early for Christmas, she says, but she knocked off two birds with one stone by announcing her address change and giving holiday wishes all in the same envelope, all with the same stamp.
"That's just like me, I know you're saying," she writes in the letter. "I don't know where in my life I've picked up all the frugality, but it seems to get worse with age."
It's hard to imagine the Mel I knew thinks about aging.
She signed the card with a fountain pen, but what is conspicuous by its absence is her husband's name. "Love," it says, "Mel, Brittany, Stephen, and Zack." No Burt this year. No husband.
There has been a divorce, it seems. It's obvious that she's suffered again, and I can't help but think I may be at least partially responsible for whatever travail she's not documented here. I'm the one who kept quiet as to what really happened between her and Wilson Crotty--protecting her, I thought, and him, and maybe even me, I suppose, when what she likely needed back then, more than anything, was her own innocence. I know that now.
She came back to me a week after Wilson Friedli lost it, came back to my room, and told me, without a tear, that it would be best if I not tell a soul what she'd told me in the cemetery. I never did.
On the picture, her auburn hair is cut short and neat, like an executive's. Zack's in a surf shirt, like every other kid in junior high. Stephen is leaning just far enough for you to see three little stripes shaved in above his ear. A long-haired cat flops uncomfortably over little Brittany's arm. The picture was taken on a redwood deck, and there's a lake somewhere beyond the pines. She's got a better job now, she says, and from the looks on the faces of her kids, they're not as starved for love as she was—or Friedli, for that matter.
I know this: to me, the joy on those children's faces says that we all have to get up and move—Melinda, Wilson Crotty, and me too, I guess. I ask myself this, as a Christian: isn't the great lesson of the gospel simply this, that there is hope?
I'm sorry, Melinda. I can't help but think I let you down.
Maybe it's not necessary for you anymore, but it is for me—it’s time I tell the story.
___________________
The last line isolates a theme present throughout the narrative but now rising as central to a story drawn from my memory of an incident that seems more than just sad.
Flannery O'Connor once said that she didn't know what she thought about some idea or another until she wrote about it. Writing, some say, is itself a way of knowing, although in this case it was, at least for me, a way of knowing that I didn't know, couldn't know, would never know.
The Christmas card story is real. Some students remembered me for several years and sent cards; some are still my Facebook friends. One year, one of those holiday missives bore no record of the man who had been her husband. I assumed he was gone, out of her life.
That card prompted me to write "The Whiz." Could what happened to her those years before have anything to do with the failure of her marriage? And if it did, what role might I have played in that sadness? After all, Mel had trusted me enough to tell me at least a fragment of her horror.
The card triggered the story. I used to believe that, at least for me, every story required two foci before it could be attempted. Here, one focus is the day fifth-period math went off the rails; the other is my discovering no husband's name on the Christmas card. The tension created by those realities made me want to try to tell a story that remains, half a century later, a mystery, especially my part or role in it.
Museum people call the story of an artifact its provenance, the story of the item. Sometimes the provenance of a hammer or a dress made from a flour sack adds immense value to the artifact itself.
It's been a long haul. Thanks for listening.
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