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‘Hey, Mary,’ he announced, ‘maybe we’re going to get a cat I’m almost not ’lergic anymore and my mom says as soon as I’m not ’lergic we can get one.’ He turned towards Brian. ‘And I’ll bring it in here, Brian, so you can see it.’
Rufus walked comfortably around the room, commenting on everything, and I could see Brian loosening up, his fears diminishing. The children did so much for each other without realising it. Rufus’s explorations freed Brian to begin his own, and soon both boys were settled on the floor taking out the books and papers and small supplies that I’d put in their individual cubbies.
Jamie, the last of my three boys, burst through the classroom door and half rocked, half ran, across the room.
I sat down fast. Jamie was eight and I’d only had him for one year. He was still potentially explosive, and the more body contact he got during times of stress, the better. A new room plus the first day of school added up to a lot of pressure.
A huge grin stretched over Jamie’s face as he spotted me and headed straight on. I spread my legs as wide as I could to make a big lap and opened my arms. Without caution, without a pause in his breakneck run, Jamie took a flying leap and landed squarely in my lap.
‘Hey ho, Jamie,’ I said, wrapping him up in my arms. ‘What took you so long?’
Jamie didn’t say anything, but then he rarely did. He just buried his head against my neck while I rocked him back and forth. Pretty soon he came up for air and surveyed the room from his safe station. Then, seeing Brian and Rufus contentedly sorting the contents of their cubbies and realising that he could stay where he was as long as he wanted, he gradually began to disentangle himself: first an arm, then another arm, then a foot, then the other – one quick turn around my chair, back on my lap, off again, this time to a chair of his own.
By ten o’clock the room began to be ours. The boys had taken everything out of their cubbies and put it back again at least a dozen times – touching, feeling, even smelling everything before they were convinced that it really belonged to them. Jamie had tried out every chair in the classroom before he finally settled on one and thereafter carried it with him wherever he went.
I’d cleaned out Carolyn’s cubby as unobtrusively as possible and was lettering new labels for Hannah’s cubby and hook in the coat closet when the yelling began. At first it was muffled; then the noise became louder, closer. There were piercing screams followed by silence. Then the screams began again, mixed with deep, throat-catching sobs.
Was that Hannah? Had she arrived? If so, where was she? The Director had said she’d send her down when she came. It was ten-thirty. Surely she must have arrived by now.
A moment later the Director stood in our doorway. ‘Good morning, boys.’ She smiled. ‘Isn’t this a lovely room? I see you’re working hard already. Mary, may I speak to you for a minute?’
I walked over to where the Director stood by the hall door. She lowered her voice as she spoke.
‘Hannah’s down in her old classroom. I can’t seem to be able to get her to leave and join you, and I wondered if you’d step down there for a minute or two.’
I didn’t want to go. Things were just getting started in our room; tension and anxiety were gradually seeping out. Fears could return too easily if the boys were suddenly left alone. Still, the screaming and sobbing were clearer now that the door was open – and that couldn’t go on.
‘Will you cover for me till I get back?’ I asked the Director. She nodded and I went over and squatted down next to Brian. ‘Bri, I have to go down the hall. The Director’s going to stay here while I’m gone. I won’t be long, okay?’
I studied his face. He didn’t smile, but there was no sign of panic. He just nodded and turned back to his book. The Director sat down beside Jamie near the record player. Everything seemed to be all right.
I closed the door and mentally crossed my fingers; so much depended on the first day. If the children began to feel safe and relaxed in the room and with each other, a great deal of time could be saved.
The hall was no longer quiet. It was filled with the good sounds of school: chairs being pushed across the floor, record players set at various volumes, doors opening, closing, teachers speaking softly, a few children’s voices, a little laughter. Only Hannah’s screams sliced through the air, dividing time into short, painful segments.
I stopped outside the back classroom and looked through the window. The new teacher, Ellen, had bolted the door, and for a minute I wished I hadn’t come. This was the room I’d first taught in when I was hired as a substitute five years before. I stood outside, remembering how inexperienced I’d been. My first act had been to unbolt the door, my second to fall flat on my face as I held on to a runaway child. But we’d both learned, and the door had stayed unlocked. Locks and cages were never meant for children, and I felt both sorrow and frustration to see the door bolted again.
As I looked through the window I could see that Hannah had barricaded herself inside the wooden jungle gym that was wedged into a far corner. She clung to the bars, alternately screaming and sobbing, her face contorted with pain or rage or perhaps fear. The other children stood gaping at her, but if they ventured near she reached through the wooden rungs and swiped at them with her hand.
I tapped on the window. Ellen looked up and her round, sweet face flooded with relief as she hurried to the door, unlocked it, and drew me inside.
‘Am I ever glad to see you,’ she said. ‘This has been going on for over an hour. Nothing helps. Somehow Hannah got away from the Director this morning and ran in here. I guess she was expecting to see her teacher from last year, because when she saw me she went crazy, yelling and tearing at my clothes as if she thought she’d find her old teacher somewhere underneath. Finally she gave up and climbed into the jungle gym, and now she won’t let anybody near her.’ Ellen lowered her voice. ‘Listen, Mary, you’ve got to get her out of here. She’s scaring the other kids half to death. I’ve tried everything I can think of and she just gets worse.’
I looked over towards Hannah. She seemed smaller than I’d remembered, but what Ellen said was true – she was getting worse. Her sobs and screams were louder, deeper than ever. How could she keep it up for so long? In spite of everything, I felt a surge of admiration. Somewhere inside this child there must be tremendous strength.
I walked towards the jungle gym, not sure what to do, only trying to get a feel, a sense, of Hannah. I had been anxious to have her in my classroom – Carolyn would have made things much easier. Still, if she was going to be with us, I had to get to know her. What must it be like to come back and find your teacher gone when you thought she’d be there? What was it like to be eight years old and hurt and angry and confused? If I were Hannah, what would I want, what would I need?
As I approached, Hannah began stamping her feet. It was as if her vocal cords were already making all the noise they could and now, with a new danger, she needed another source of sound.
Two sides of the jungle gym were against the walls. Hannah clung to the third side, shaking it and stamping her feet. With no plan at all, I climbed up the fourth side.
Hannah’s screaming stopped and I took advantage of her surprise to reach the top, away from her clawing fingers. I lay flat on the top platform, trying to listen with my whole being, not just my ears. Nothing. There was absolutely no sound from below. I leaned over the platform and there was Hannah, bent over, her head pressed against the bars, great pink wads of gum stuck in the red-gold of her hair, I talked to the back of her small, grimy neck.
‘Hiya, Hannah.’
There wasn’t any answer, not a twitch of response, but somehow I had the feeling that she’d heard me.
‘Listen,’ I continued, ‘this isn’t your class. You’re supposed to be with us, in the room down the hall on the other side. We’ve been waiting for you down there.’
Hannah didn’t make a sound, but she turned her head just a fraction of an inch. I went on.
‘Shirley, your teacher last year, didn’t want to leave. She liked our school and she liked teaching you. But her husband was studying to be a doctor and he was sent to a hospital a long way away – and so she had to stop teaching here to go with him.’
The muscles in my neck were getting tired from dangling my head over the edge of the platform, and I longed to get down and stand beside her, get a closer look, maybe even hold onto her square, solid body and let some of her anger drain out. But Hannah seemed nowhere near ready. I was going to have to wait.
Suddenly she turned and twisted her neck and body to peer up at me. For an instant she hung outside the wooden bars with her face turned up towards me and then she was gone, out of the jungle gym, out of the door that Ellen had left unlocked when she let me in, and down the hall. I climbed down quickly and followed, Ellen’s door clicked behind me and the bolt slid back in place.
Hannah ran up and down, back and forth in the hall, like a fat mouse in a maze. She was dressed in a woman’s cotton housedress that was tied at the waist with a string. The dress reached to the tops of her heavy brown shoes and she stumbled around, banging against the walls, letting out periodic snarling howls. Once she turned back towards me and I could see that both her face and the front of her dress were wet – stained with tears, or sweat, or maybe both. She opened the door to our room, more by accident than design. The boys and the Director stood up simultaneously as Hannah crashed in. I was only a step behind and closed the door behind me. We needed a little space, a little time to ourselves.
It was hard to tell who was more frightened, Hannah or the boys. They stared at each other silently until the Director called out cheerily, ‘Well, Hannah, I see you’ve found your room. Good enough. Now that we’re all set, I’ll get back to work. Phone never stops ringing, a thousand things to do. Have a good day.’
The Director was out the hall door and gone before any of us moved, but just as the door clicked shut Hannah ran towards it. Brian and Rufus had huddled together in front of the outside door. Jamie whimpered and ran to where I stood by the hall door and buried his head against my legs. Without previous planning, we had formed a barricade to the exits. There was no way out for Hannah. Like it or not, she was with us.
Hannah backtracked and then made one dash for the hall door, and I captured her as she came by. ‘Gotcha. Enough now, okay?’
I said it as much to reassure the boys as to steady Hannah, but while it may have helped them to hear a familiar tone in the room it did nothing for her. She slid out of my arms to the floor, propped herself on her hands and knees inside her long housedress, and with a moaning, keening noise began rocking back and forth, back and forth, like a tormented infant in a crib.
The safety we had begun to build was gone. Trouble, trauma, violence and fear had invaded our room. I muttered a silent expletive in the direction of the departed Director, but it wasn’t of any use. She was gone; Hannah was here. We’d just have to get through somehow.
I turned to the boys. ‘Hannah’s going to be in our class this year. She feels badly about missing her old teacher and some other things. It’s going to take a while for us to get used to each other, but it’s going to be okay. We just need a little time. Now let’s get busy. Rufus, Brian, bring your books on over here and let’s see what we’re going to be working on.’
As I spoke there was a dull, heavy thud and I turned back towards Hannah. She was not only rocking, she was banging her head, bringing it down hard against the black tile floor at the end of each forward thrust. I knew that part of this head hanging was to test us, but part of it was also an attempt to destroy the torments inside her.
I sat down on the floor next to Hannah and pushed my leg beneath her head to cushion the blow. ‘No. In this room you don’t hurt yourself or anyone else. And no one hurts you. You can rock if you have to, but no banging.’
She brought her head down again, drove it hard into my thigh – and then, as the noon whistle wailed, suddenly she was still. We sat without speaking. I leaned against the wall with Hannah spread out, drenched in sweat, inert against my leg, while the three boys watched us silently from the other side of our room.
Chapter 2 (#u82169d21-2612-57d6-bea3-c88eb9c7f6f5)
Jamie was the last to leave our room that first day. We were both limp from emotion and heat, and we sat in a chair by the windows watching for his bus. But as soon as his driver arrived and he was safely aboard, I went down to the office, unlocked the file cabinet, and took out Hannah’s folder.
The Director was in the office, a calm oasis in the midst of confused bus drivers, anxious mothers and tired teachers. She was at her best here, soothing and at the same time encouraging. She had founded the school fifteen years before and had worked harder and harder each year, raising money to keep the doors open, raising standards, coping with the ever-increasing publicity, the long waiting lists of children. Finally, with the death of her husband, the school had become her life. For years it had existed in rented and borrowed buildings, but now the dream was almost reality: within a few months ground would be broken for a spacious new school building, built to the Director’s specifications. Nothing escaped her, and she nodded to me as I took Hannah’s file back to the quiet of my own room.
I spread the folder out on one of the tables before the open windows. Small air currents stirred through the room and riffled the edges of the papers. I was eager to read the reports, hoping to discover what had happened to make Hannah so angry, so frightened. She was more like a young animal than a little girl. Why wouldn’t she let anyone near her? Where had the rage and self-destruction come from?
The folder contained a school form filled out by Mrs Rosnic, a health form from the paediatrician, a report from the principal of the public school Hannah had attended; there were also a joint report by a psychologist and a social worker at a mental health clinic, a final report by another psychologist from the public school, and a half-page year-end report written by Hannah’s teacher from last year. From these I gradually pieced together Hannah’s history.
She had been born eight years earlier in a hospital in New York City. Her life had been filled with violence from the beginning. She had cried constantly through her first days and nights, eating little at first, finally refusing to eat at all. In desperation, Mrs Rosnic took her back to the hospital where she had been born. They discovered an abdominal obstruction which had caused food blockage and dehydration. Hannah was operated on and hospitalised for several weeks.
When she returned home she was able to eat and some of the screaming stopped, but she rocked back and forth in her crib, banging her head against the end panel.
Her brother, Carl, three years older, was resentful of the new baby. One day soon after Hannah came home from the hospital, Mrs Rosnic found Carl by Hannah’s crib, hitting her on the head again and again. In spite of everything, she grew; she walked at thirteen months and completed toilet training at age two. However, Mrs Rosnic continued to bottle-feed her until she was three years old, and although no connection was made, it seemed pertinent to me that Hannah didn’t try to talk until then. Her speech consisted primarily of grunts and monosyllables that only Mrs Rosnic could understand.
When Hannah was four, her family moved to the run-down industrial city where she still lived. They occupied a two-family house in a derelict section of town. Mrs Rosnic’s father lived downstairs; the Rosnics themselves occupied the second floor.
Hannah’s father had been a strange, brutal man. He must have been tortured by both emotional and physical ailments. The records showed that he had been in and out of mental institutions over the years, yelling, shouting, beating his children when he was home. Later he was confined to a wheelchair, from which he berated the world and everyone in it. He died in the same bizarre manner in which he had lived. Rising suddenly up out of his wheelchair at his mother’s funeral, he was stricken with a heart attack and died the next day, two years before Hannah came to our school.
At the time of her husband’s death, Mrs Rosnic was pregnant with a third child. Still in her early thirties, a widow with little money and no training, with an ailing, demanding father, two young children, and another child soon to be born, she became ill herself, overcome by a deep depression.
She turned to her church for help; they put her in touch with a community mental health centre. Here she was interviewed jointly by a psychiatric social worker and a psychologist, who judged her to be of ‘bright normal intellect with a fair insight and judgement, but with a feeling of being unable to cope’.
I got up from the table and began to pace as I read. Who wouldn’t feel ‘unable to cope’ under similar conditions? The report ambled on, bleak and without compassion. Carl, Hannah’s brother, was summarised and dismissed in two brief sentences as having ‘a childhood adjustment problem with the unusual phobia of fearing the key to an old clock’. Hannah was described as ‘a seven-year-old Caucasian female –’
I put the report down, hating the stilted language. Who could write that? And why? Was it to impress some invisible audience or was it simply the way psychologists had been taught to write reports? Hannah was a sad, solid, gutsy little girl with blue eyes and red-gold hair. How could they write ‘seven-year-old Caucasian female’? Why did people deal out labels instead of looking at a child? Never mind. Forget the anger. It didn’t help now.
‘– Caucasian female exhibiting restless behaviour, with unintelligible speech consisting primarily of grunting noises. Judgement and insight extremely poor. Diagnosis: Psychosis. Organic brain disease versus schizophrenia.’
It seemed to me a dangerous, presumptuous diagnosis after one brief interview. I searched the remaining pages for more concrete information. An electroencephalogram had been made, and since it was within normal limits Hannah was put in a kindergarten class on a trial basis – but this lasted only a short time. Soon she was put on home instruction because of her ‘disruptive behaviour’. The dates in the reports were confusing, but it must have been a hard, bleak period for Mrs Rosnic, for the whole family.
I shook my head. No wonder the teachers in our school rarely complained. Our troubles, whatever they were, were small compared to the lives of our children and their families.
The late-afternoon sky was dark and the air was filled with the musty smell of rain. At least it would be cooler tomorrow. Tomorrow? Tomorrow would be here very soon and I still had a great deal to do before morning. I turned on the overhead light and skimmed the remaining pages.
Mrs Rosnic’s pregnancy had gone full term and Hannah had been born, a healthy eight-pound girl. Hannah had remained on home instruction until a place was found for her here; then one last psychological work-up was done in the public school. It said that Hannah – an aggressive child with a deep underlying pathology – seemed to be living completely in a world of her own. ‘This child must be regarded as a threat to other children.’
Lightning streaked across the sky. No one else was left at school and I knew I should hurry.
How could a child ever grow in a place where she was looked upon as a threat? There was only one positive note in the report: The psychologist noted that Hannah’s drawings showed ‘an above-average mentality’.
Well, maybe this was how I’d have to reach her, through her mind, her intelligence. But how could I get through? She’d fought so many enemies already in her eight years, seen more pain and cruelty than most of us do in a lifetime. Her mind must be sealed behind many layers – she would have needed to build thick walls in order to survive as long as she had.
Outside, the rain pelted hard against the black macadam. I closed my windows and read the last remaining page. The report from Hannah’s teacher of last year described Hannah as a troubled, sad little girl, unable or unwilling to use eating utensils, given to long crying spells and temper tantrums, her speech a garble of unintelligible slurred consonants – and yet her actions showed an acute awareness of her environment. She had remained difficult and disruptive throughout the year, but there had been some improvement and rapport gradually developed between teacher and child.
It must have been a cruel blow for Hannah to come back this morning and find her teacher gone, the first semblance of security disrupted. Whatever tiny hope had stayed alive inside her must have crashed into despair.
I put the report on the top shelf of my closet and left by my own door. I stood on the step just outside and watched the small rivers of rain swirl past; then I took off my shoes and raced up the driveway to the car park in my bare feet. But when I reached my car, I stood still for a minute before getting in. My dress and hair were already soaked and the rain felt cool and clean against my face and arms. I wished that it would cool my head and heart as well. Hannah would bring enough passion into our room. She would need a teacher who was clear and steady and strong.
What I needed to do, had to do as soon as possible, was set up an appointment with Mrs Rosnic so that we could talk. There were so many complicated factors in Hannah’s history: the operation, the isolation of the hospital, the head blows, the brutal father, the prolonged bottle feeding. I was as confused as when I started.
Chapter 3 (#u82169d21-2612-57d6-bea3-c88eb9c7f6f5)
‘Good morning, Rufus,’ I said as we arrived together the next day. ‘How’s it going?’
But his ebullience of yesterday morning was gone. He sat down glumly and peered at me through his horn-rimmed glasses without answering my question. Instead he asked, ‘Is that girl going back to her other class?’
‘Hannah? Hannah doesn’t have another class. She was only in the other room yesterday by mistake. This is her regular room.’
Rufus looked down at his feet. ‘I don’t like her. I don’t like her in here. She ruins everything.’
I sat down beside Rufus. I knew how he felt. I’d said almost the same thing to the Director. ‘Hannah’s had a really rough time …’ I began.
Rufus got up from the table. ‘I don’t want to talk about her!’ he shouted at me. ‘I hate her! Don’t you understand that? I hate her and I don’t want to talk about her!’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay. What do you want to talk about?’
‘Nothing.’ Rufus kicked the table leg with the toe of his shoe. ‘I just want it to be the way it was last year, without that dummy girl.’
It wasn’t just Hannah. It was always hard for the kids when a new child came. With only four children in a class, we were so much a part of each other that what one did profoundly affected the others. The children’s usual stay at the school was for three years, although if they were making good progress and had not yet reached their thirteenth birthday they were sometimes allowed to stay for a longer period. This was Rufus’s fourth year, and he had been in my class from the start.
When he had come to our school three years before, he had looked more like a middle-aged businessman man than an eight-year-old boy. He wore a dark suit and heavy horn-rimmed glasses, and his hair was combed flat against his head. He carried a large brown briefcase and he’d talked to his briefcase most of the first weeks, crouching nervously behind a bookcase.
Rufus was scared of the world, the school, and himself. He was intelligent and he used his intelligence to manipulate the world, which only made it more frightening. Illness was his control. Anything that Rufus thought might prove unpleasant or difficult was met with a stomach ache. Usually this meant that he stayed home or got special attention, which was what he’d wanted in the first place.
But gradually Rufus had grown stronger and more independent. Occasionally, under stress, he still talked to an imaginary companion, and sometimes when things went badly at home he wet the bed. But Rufus was growing all the time. If there was a leader in our classroom, it was Rufus.
Now that Rufus had started talking, he kept on. ‘She’s a dummy girl. She can’t even talk and she’s fat and she’s dirty.’
Any new child is difficult, but a child like Hannah is a triple threat. She not only claimed my attention and destroyed the safety of our classroom, she also reminded the boys of how fragile they were themselves. If one child in the room could shatter, so could they all.
Rufus gave the chair another kick. ‘Why does she yell like that? Why don’t you make her stop?’
‘I’m trying, Ruf. Believe me, I’m trying. Just give her a little time; give us all a little time. First days are hard. Remember Jamie last year? He yelled and kicked and ran away whenever he could. I know Hannah’s hard, but it’s only the second day and maybe today will be better.’
By nine-thirty my attempt at optimism was fading. The boys were there but they were tense, and there was no sign of Hannah at all. Rufus was rubbing his stomach as if recalling the pains he used to have. Jamie had the record player turned too high, his thin, taut little body rocking from one foot to the other while he kept his hands pressed over his ears. Brian drew stick fingers representing the stars he’d watched on television panel shows the night before, keeping up a low barrage of commercials all the while. He carefully drew a box around each figure, as though to keep it isolated, separate from the rest. Television was Brian’s link with people. Encased in the glass box of the TV screen, they were far enough away so that they weren’t frightening.
When Brian had come to the school four years before, his speech was incoherent and he refused all food – both at home and at school – except for milk and saltines. But there had always been a sweetness about him as well as curiosity and intelligence, and these qualities had brought him a long way. He too had been in my class from the beginning. I knew how threatening Hannah’s anger must be.
All this tension and no Hannah. Where was she? It was almost ten o’clock. Had she gone back to Ellen’s room? Climbed back inside the jungle gym? Had she or her mother given up after yesterday? Would that one day be her only day with us?
Come on, Hannah, I thought. Don’t give up before we’ve even started. It was going to be hard, but she had so much potential. It was all there – in her records, in her eyes – it just had to be tapped. Yesterday I’d almost resented her; now I was impatient for her.
Just then something caught my eye outside the window. Hannah? I couldn’t believe it. She stood absolutely still about an inch away from the glass. Her face was turned sidewise, obscured by her long, matted, gum-filled hair. I tried to watch her without moving my own head. I had the feeling she would bolt if she knew she had been seen. But she was there, that was what counted. She had come back, she remembered where our room was, and she cared enough to watch us through the window.
Then Brian saw her too and one hand fluttered against his side while he pointed with the other. ‘Look. There’s the girl. She’s looking in the window.’
Rufus and Jamie turned and Hannah vanished. I ran across the room to our door, opened it, and stepped out, but there was no sign of her. Not in the bushes, not on the driveway. I came back and called to the boys, ‘Maybe Hannah’s in the office. I’ll –’
But before I could finish my sentence the hall door opened and there stood Hannah.
Fat face and hands dirtier than ever, but balancing lightly, almost airily, she stood on her toes in our doorway, clutching a crumpled paper bag.
‘Good morning, Hannah,’ I said. ‘Come in.’
She stood for one moment more and then, half turning, half dancing across the few feet to the back of the classroom, she pulled open the closet doors. She stood once more, absolutely still, and then sank slowly to the floor. We were all staring at her. She was an absurd figure with her long dress and matted hair and yet she had an indefinable grace that contrasted with her heavy body and bruised eyes.
I spoke a little louder than usual to break whatever spell was in the room. ‘I’m glad you’re here, Hannah.’
Hannah sat without speaking, half in, half out of the closet. I suddenly realised that it was she who was in total command of the class. This was no way to begin.
