son… Todd’s father…’
‘He is not without blame,’ Bowden said harshly. The hours he works, the meals he has missed, the nights when he must leave suddenly… I tell you, Mr French, he is more married to his job than he is to Monica. I was raised to believe that a man’s family came before everything. Was it not the same for you?’
‘It sure was,’ Rubber Ed responded heartily. His father had been a night watchman for a large Los Angeles department store and he had really only seen his pop on weekends and vacations.
That is another side of the problem,’ Bowden said.
Rubber Ed nodded and thought for a moment. ‘What about your other son, Mr Bowden? Uh…’ He looked down at the folder. ‘Harold. Todd’s uncle.’
‘Harry and Deborah are in Minnesota now,’ Bowden said, quite truthfully. ‘He has a position there at the University medical school. It would be quite difficult for him to leave, and very unfair to ask him.’ His face took on a righteous cast. ‘Harry and his wife are quite happily married.’
‘I see.’ Rubber Ed looked at the file again for a moment and then closed it. ‘Mr Bowden, I appreciate your frankness. I’ll be just as frank with you.’
Thank you,’ Bowden said stiffly.
‘We can’t do as much for our students in the counselling area as we would like. There are six counsellors here, and we’re each carrying a load of over a hundred students. My newest colleague, Hepburn, has a hundred and fifteen. At this age, in our society, all children need help.’
‘Of course.’ Bowden mashed his cigarette brutally into the ashtray and folded his hands once more.
‘Sometimes bad problems get by us. Home environment and drugs are the two most common. At least Todd isn’t mixed up with speed or mescaline or PCP.’
‘God forbid.’
‘Sometimes,’ Rubber Ed went on, ‘there’s simply nothing we can do. It’s depressing, but it’s a fact of life. Usually the ones that are first to get spit out of the machine we’re running here are the class troublemakers, the sullen, uncommunicative kids, the ones who refuse to even try. They are simply warm bodies waiting for the system to buck them up through the grades or waiting to get old enough so they can quit without their parents’ permission and join the army or get a job at the Speedy-Boy Carwash or marry their boyfriends. You understand? I’m being blunt. Our system is, as they say, not all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘I appreciate your frankness.’
‘But it hurts when you see the machine starting to mash up someone like Todd. He ran out a 92 average for last year’s work, and that puts him in the ninety-fifth percentile. His English averages are even better. He shows a flair for writing, and that’s something special in a generation of kids that thinks culture begins in front of the TV and ends in the neighbourhood movie theatre. I was talking to the woman who had Todd in Comp last year. She said Todd passed in the finest term-paper she’d seen in twenty years of teaching. It was on the German death-camps during World War II. She gave him the only A-plus she’s ever given a composition student.’
‘I have read it,’ Bowden said. ‘It is very fine.’
‘He has also demonstrated above-average ability in the life sciences and social sciences, and while he’s not going to be one of the great math whizzes of the century, all the notes I have indicate that he’s given it the good old college try… until this year. Until this year. That’s the whole story, in a nutshell.’
‘Yes.’
‘I hate like hell to see Todd go down the tubes this way, Mr Bowden. And summer school… well, I said I’d be frank. Summer school often does a boy like Todd more harm than good. Your usual junior high school summer session is a zoo. AH the monkeys and the laughing hyenas are in attendance, plus a full complement of dodo birds. Bad company for a boy like Todd.’
‘Certainly.’
‘So let’s get to the bottom line, shall we? I suggest a series of appointments for Mr and Mrs Bowden at the Counselling Centre downtown. Everything in confidence, of course. The man in charge down there, Harry Ackerman, is a good friend of mine. And I don’t think Todd should go to them with the idea; I think you should.’ Rubber Ed smiled widely. ‘Maybe we can get everybody back on track by June. It’s not impossible.’
But Bowden looked positively alarmed by this idea.
‘I believe they might resent the boy if I took that proposal to them now,’ he said. ‘Things are very delicate. They could go either way. The boy has promised me he will work harder in his studies. He is very alarmed at this drop in his marks.’ He smiled thinly, a smile Ed French could not quite interpret. ‘More alarmed than you know.’
‘But—’
‘And they would resent me’ Bowden pressed on quickly. ‘God knows they would. Monica already regards me as something of a meddler. I try not to be, but you see the situation. I feel that things are best left alone… for now.’
‘I’ve had a great deal of experience in these matters,’ Rubber Ed told Bowden. He folded his hands on Todd’s file and looked at the old man earnestly. ‘I really think counselling is in order here. You’ll understand that my interest in the marital problems your son and daughter-in-law are having begins and ends with the effect they’re having on Todd… and right now, they’re having quite an effect.’
‘Let me make a counter-proposal,’ Bowden said. ‘You have, I believe, a system of marking halfway through each quarter?’
‘Yes,’ Rubber Ed agreed cautiously. ‘Interpretation of Progress cards — IOP Cards. The kids, of course, call them Flunk Cards. They only get them if their grade in a given course is below 78 halfway through the quarter. In other words, we give out IOP cards to kids who are pulling a D or an F in a given course.’
‘Very good,’ Bowden said. 'Then what I suggest is this: If the boy gets one of those cards… even one — He held up one gnarled finger ‘-I will approach my son and his wife about your counselling. I will go further.’ He pronounced it furdah.
‘If the boy receives one of your Flunk Cards in April—’
‘We give them out the first week in May, actually.’
‘Yes? If he receives one then, I guarantee that they will accept the counselling proposal. They are worried about their son, Mr French. But now they are so wrapped up in their own problem that…’ He shrugged.
‘I understand.’
‘So let us give them that long to solve their own problems. Pulling one’s self up by one’s own shoelaces… that is the American way, is it not?’
‘Yes, I guess it is,’ Rubber Ed told him after a moment’s thought… and after a quick glance at the clock, which told him he had another appointment in five minutes. ‘Ill accept that.’
He stood, and Bowden stood with him. They shook hands again, Rubber Ed being carefully mindful of the old party’s arthritis.
‘But in all fairness, I ought to tell you that very few students can pull out of an eighteen-week tailspin in just five weeks of classes. There’s a huge amount of ground to be made up — a huge amount. I suspect you’ll have to come through on your guarantee, Mr Bowden.’
Bowden offered his thin, disconcerting smile again. ‘Do you?’ was all he said.
Something had troubled Rubber Ed through the entire interview, and he put his finger on it during lunch in the cafeteria, more than an hour after ‘Lord Peter’ had left, umbrella once again neatly tucked under his arm.
He and Todd’s grandfather had talked for fifteen minutes at least, probably closer to twenty, and Ed didn’t think the old man had once referred to his grandson by name.
Todd pedalled breathlessly up Dussander’s walk and parked his bike on its kickstand. School had let out only fifteen minutes before. He took the front steps at one jump, used his doorkey, and hurried down the hall to the sunlit kitchen. His face was a hopeful landscape of hopeful sunshine and gloomy clouds. He stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment, his stomach and his vocal cords knotted, watching Dussander as he rocked with his cupful of bourbon in his lap. He was still dressed in his best, although he had pulled his tie down two inches and loosened the top button of his shirt He looked at Todd expressionlessly, his lizard-like eyes at halfmast.
‘Well,’ Todd finally managed.
Dussander left him hanging a moment longer, a moment that seemed at least ten years long to Todd. Then, deliberately, Dussander set his cup on the table next to his bottle of Ancient Age and said:
‘The fool believed everything.’
