The children began talking all at once. Ira clapped rhythmically to ask for silence. Clap-clap, clap-clap-clap. Obediently, they echoed the cadence precisely. Often now, Ira was newly astonished by the authority he could exert without words. There was so much he no longer took for granted, and this was not entirely good.
“Now!” he said. “We are going to be taking our wood-shop skills and our safety rules up this ladder with us when we go up to decorate the inside of our tree house. We are going to split into two teams, the way we do for the sand table. Heidi’s team will go in first, then my team.”
The kids began jumping up and down, shouting that they wanted to be on Heidi’s team. Again, Ira clapped. Again, obedience; silence.
Robert and his grandfather emerged from the house. Robert waved a camera. “Yo, Ira! We have to document the inauguration!”
So as Heidi helped her five team members up the ladder through the trapdoor to the first level, Robert moved around the tree with his camera.
“Where’s your Man Friday on this important occasion?” said Percy.
Robert lowered the camera and gave Percy a scolding look. “Granddad, I did not hear you say that.”
Celestino had helped them out just twice, with encouragement from the woman whose garden he tended next door, but his strength had been crucial in lifting and bracing the largest, longest timbers, those supporting the three different levels. The levels diminished in size as they rose, each one safely walled on all sides. Celestino had also supplied a load of branches he’d been about to cart off for mulching at the dump. They gave the tree house its fabulous chameleon aspect. When the tree fell into shadow at the end of the day, the structure nearly vanished from sight.
Clover and Evelyn came running up the hill. “Wait, Ira, wait!” Clover flourished a camera of her own. She gave Ira a rough hug with her free arm. “Moment of architectural truth!”
Truth! Now there’s a concept.
It seemed there was nothing Ira could do these days to banish this sour, ironic voice from his head. It did not matter that he felt welcomed here, that he liked Evelyn, Heidi, Clover, and the rest of his colleagues as well as (if not better than) the women he’d worked with back at The Very Beginning.
As Clover posed Ira’s team in front of the tree and Heidi lined hers up along the rail of the tree house above their heads, Evelyn approached Ira.
“Maurice and I are having a cocktail party next Saturday, mostly for the school’s new neighbors. We’d love it if you could come—and please feel welcome to bring a date. Clover tells me you have a housemate? I know just how intimidating this town can seem to newcomers.”
“Oh dear. I’m afraid I already have plans,” said Ira. Instantly, that inner voice piped up. Plans? We have plans? What plans might those be? To, oh let’s see, order tandoori takeout and rent a good movie to watch with our “housemate”?
Evelyn looked honestly disappointed. “Maurice is dying to meet the mastermind behind the tree house. I think he’s feeling a tiny bit upstaged. He’s built an opera house, but never a tree house!”
“I would love that.” This was true, though Anthony would kill him if he went to that cocktail party alone.
When Clover finished taking pictures, the children ran to Ira like well-trained puppies.
“Back to the room,” he said. “Our turn comes after block time.”
“Can we please roll down the hill?” asked Marguerite.
The grassy slope leading to the barn was irresistible. Ira looked at the five faces before him, all exhilarated, all (except for Rico’s) white as Easter lilies, white as the adorable spotless Austrian jacket that Marguerite wore.
Roll to your aristocratic little heart’s content.
“Why not?” said Ira. The children squealed.
“But one at a time, okay?” He helped them line up. “And when we get to the bottom, let’s put on our walking feet.”
Ira watched Marguerite’s imported jacket as it became a blur descending the hillside.
Oh now please, sniped Inner Ira. Parents are instructed to send their children to school in clothes that are ready to play, play, play!
At last, five small faces beamed up at him. “You, too, Mr. Ira!” called Jesse.
Ira hadn’t rolled down a hill in at least twenty years. What the hell. He lay on the grass, raised his arms, and propelled himself down. As the world tumbled fiercely around him, he let the vertigo take hold. “Ban-zaaaaiiiii!” he called out.
At the bottom, he faced the sky, laughing uncontrollably, the world still spinning, his ears buzzing. He pulled grass from his mouth. Five faces clustered above him. All were amused, laughing along with him, except for Rico. Perhaps Rico had X-ray vision and could see right through Ira’s laughter to the vertigo that had nothing to do with rolling down a hill.
He sat up, but he had to wait a few moments for the dizziness to pass. Then he got up and brushed himself off. “Okay then. Who’s for building a zoo?” As he followed his followers into the barn, he heard Clover’s voice behind him.
“Bravo, Mr. Ira! That was awesome. I know five sets of parents who will hear about this at the dinner table tonight!”
Ira liked Clover, but it made him nervous that she had so obviously decided, from the start, to make him her friend. They were the two newcomers here, yet in a way everyone was new because the setting was new. Ira had had an equal share in deciding just how they would make the most efficient use of the space. And from a certain perspective, Clover was the least new. She had grown up in this place—this extraordinary place. Ira’s heart had quickened at his first sight of that pond from the top of the hill; but to end up back here in your forties?
During Ira’s break period, when his kids were in movement class or having a science stroll outdoors with Miss Ruth, Clover sometimes invited him to have coffee at the edge of the pond. More than once, she’d brought along homemade scones or muffins; Ira had the feeling that she’d made them with him in mind. Early on, she’d shown him pictures of her children, who lived mostly with their dad in New York. This led to the “what we love and miss most about the city” conversation. Clover was thrilled when she found out that Ira had grown up in Forest Hills. But a week or so later, as Ira consumed a ginger-cranberry scone, savoring every bite yet trying to banish from his mind the disturbing suspicion that it was a bribe, Clover had brought up her ex-husband again and said, out of the blue, “He’s in the process of coming out of the closet. If you want to know the truth, that’s why we split up.”
Actually, Ira did not want to know this truth—not this Ira, the newly paranoid Ira—yet she’d looked right at him as if she expected some specific reaction. Did it mean that she simply assumed he was gay; that, contrary to his best efforts, he could set even a middle-aged, middle-class woman’s gaydiation detector bleeping off the end of the dial?
“Well that is a tough place to be,” he’d said to Clover, “especially with kids. And wow, I guess it’s good that you’re clearly not bothered by it.” What did he mean by that? Of course she was bothered by it!
“I’m trying to be … civilized about it, if that’s what you mean. Though maybe at this point it’s foolish for me not to be there. I kind of ran away. No. I ran away. ‘Prune the hedges,’ as my therapist likes to say. It looks terrible, I know, but I wasn’t emotionally prepared to … be a full-time mother while having my heart whacked slowly into little bits.”
Maybe the best approach was to pretend he was in a parent-teacher conference. He asked how she thought the kids were doing without her constant presence. She laughed, self-deprecating, and said that she thought they were doing remarkably well. He asked if she wanted to return to the city, children aside.
Her smile vanished. “Ira, there is no ‘children aside.’ That’s my lesson. But I know what you mean. And I can tell you this much: there’s no way I could afford a place of my own in the city.”
“Your ex wouldn’t help? Wouldn’t he rather have you there for convenience of … visitatio
n?” God how he hated that word.
Clover was silent for a time, looking at the water. “Todd was pretty mad when I left. He told me I really screwed up. So I can’t imagine how I could ask for something like that.”
“If he’s a good father, he’ll be more circumspect by now,” said Ira.
“Circumspect,” she said, sounding amused. “How can parents ever be circumspect? How often have you seen that, Ira?”
Exactly then, to Ira’s relief, Evelyn had called his name from the barn. He had not been alone with Clover since; come to think of it, he had not seen as much of her as he usually did. A few days before, when he’d greeted her outside her office, she looked as if she’d been crying. Should he ask her what was going on? Only a year ago, of course he’d have held out a hand. No question. But that was then. He no longer presumed that because you were likable and smart, you were also to be trusted.
“How are the little Trumps and Trumpettes of tomorrow?” asked Anthony. He kissed Ira on the mouth. When he stood back, he feigned a look of horror. “Good grief, could this be dirt in your ear? Don’t tell me there’s actual, real-live dirt in Matlock.”
“Oh stop,” said Ira, though he leaned in to second the kiss. “Your jokes are growing tiresome, you know that?”
Anthony was browsing through the cupboards and fridge. He still wore his tie but had abandoned his jacket in the living room. “How’s perciatelli with feta, mint, and olives? I bought rosemary bread at Ooh La La.”
“Skip the feta; I could eat the goat.” Ira held up his paint-stained hands. “We’ve entered the decorating phase. It’s looking practically palatial.”
“No more slumming it for you,” said Anthony. “Like, do these kids know what a tire swing is?”
“You have got to stop. Really.” He had been looking forward all day to telling Anthony about taking the children up into the tree house for the very first time. Anthony had been impressed when Ira told him about Robert Barnes, how he’d helped build an actual hotel in a tree, and about Arturo, who had grown up in three different countries and spoke all three languages well. But when Ira had mentioned Celestino, how he’d briefly joined their team and had made such a difference, Anthony had interrupted with “Noblesse oblige, Matlock style. Migrant workers as flesh-and-blood people!”
“Anthony.”
Since starting at Elves & Fairies, Ira felt he had to censor himself whenever he talked to Anthony about his work. Anthony was a high-end divorce attorney in Boston, and it was certainly easy to make fun of the capitalist pigs with whom he schmoozed on a daily basis, but he also did pro bono work in Lothian’s family court, representing mothers who’d once been prostitutes and crackheads, children who’d been beaten and maliciously starved. Anthony despised the citizens of the much wealthier nearby towns who, as he put it, wouldn’t know juvy from the juice-box aisle at Whole Foods.
“Did you catch this?” Anthony pushed a copy of the Globe across the counter. It was folded open to the West Suburban section. The largest headline read, ECO-VANDALS STRIKE AGAIN: Four Towns Coordinating Search.
The dateline was Matlock. Ira sighed and picked up the paper.
It looked at first like a series of elaborate practical jokes, but apparently it’s war. “Today’s incident is the third to hit Matlock, and it is downright weird,” commented Capt. “Cap” McCord, the bucolic town’s police chief, as he described the latest act of sabotage. Early this morning, a 46-year-old female citizen of Matlock who wishes to remain anonymous walked out of her house to discover that seven bicycles had been locked tightly together around the body of her car. According to Capt. McCord, “The vehicle’s windshield had a big sign glued onto it. The sign said, PEDALS, NOT PETROL. The bikes were junk—rusty, some without tires. We are investigating whether they were taken from the local transfer station. That might give us a lead.”
Almost simultaneously, in neighboring towns Ledgely and Weston, citizens awoke to similar displays of blatantly “green” bravura. In Ledgely, a homeowner who had not locked his residence returned from work to find every lightbulb within the premises replaced with a compact fluorescent. LET THERE BE FUTURE, read the sign affixed to his front door.…
“Can you believe it?” said Anthony. “I thought my lunch would come out my nose.”
“It’s not so uproarious if you’re in Matlock,” said Ira. “Some of the parents want to hire independent detectives. People are pretty pissed off.”
“Did you get to the part about the letter? They may be lunatics, but these guys have got balls.”
Ira skimmed a few paragraphs till he read, The police departments of all four towns in which these pranks have been perpetrated received the same letter. Reporters have not been shown the full text, but Capt. McCord revealed a key message: “The DOGS have been unleashed.” The acronym of this previously unknown organization stands for Denounce Our Greedy Society. Some are claiming it’s terrorism; others are saying, “It’s about time!”
Unable to help himself, Ira burst out laughing. “The DOGS? Oh my God.”
“Isn’t this just too fabulously in their face? And I’ll bet the bozo cops who get paid top salaries to work in these towns are bumbling around like a bunch of Inspector Clouseaus. Can you honestly feel sorry for any of those people?”
Ira said, “I do admit it’s a challenge,” but he knew how prim he sounded.
Before his new job in Matlock, Ira’s contempt would have been no less vehement than Anthony’s, but now he clammed up at dinner parties where their friends threw stones at the wealthy—the landed liberals, Anthony called them. After all, they were wealthy liberals, too. Ira and Anthony might live in a frontier neighborhood in Lothian, where the closest thing to a grocery store was a deli with stale sandwiches, canned beans, and a pit bull in the back room, but they had two cars and could shop with abandon at the Fresh Pond Whole Foods and the uppity food boutiques of Faneuil Hall. Unlike many of the rich suburbanites Anthony scoffed at, they would never face the cost of putting kids through college. As Ira had recently learned, making smug, class-based assumptions was more than foolish; it was hypocritical.
Back at The Very Beginning, a signature end-of-year tradition had been the teachers’ assembly of a keepsake book for each of their little students. In mid-May, teachers from all four classrooms spent a week of late nights together, sorting through snapshots, photocopying Raffi song lyrics, three-hole-punching sheafs of construction paper and binding them together with yarn, to produce Our Amelia and Our Zach and Our Keesha—each one a story, in pictures, poems, ballads, and handprints, of that child’s year in the Red, Blue, Yellow, or Green Room. Ira had been through three years of this tradition; in retrospect, he was amazed by how respectfully, even lovingly, the teachers went about this laborious task. Even if Amelia or Keesha or Zach had been a whiner, an instigator, or a know-it-all, Ira and his colleagues regarded each child as just that: a child, still very much in the making, faults eminently forgivable, character embryonic at best.
That’s why Ira had embraced early education in the first place, despite the lousy pay. Small children made mistakes. They bragged and bullied. They were sloppy. They cried and yelled at the least provocation. They were exhausting and often stunningly rude (on purpose or not). But there was still a decent chance that you could help guide them toward a future free of the xenophobia, self-righteousness, and cowardly inhibitions that afflicted many of their parents.
Yet it was this sweet tradition—it was, to be precise, the celebration of Our Ramsey—that ultimately drove Ira from a job he loved and at which he was damn good. From this unjustified disgrace, Ira had learned a grave and bitter lesson about what you should and should not share about your personal life.
Lothian was a town with a surprisingly broad social spectrum—something else that Ira had treasured about The Very Beginning. After he’d landed the job, he and Anthony had decided that they should leave the city and fully embrace a community that could use their skills. Over three years, Ira’s classroom incl
uded the four-year-old children of cops and cashiers, university professors and aspiring sculptors, accountants and bankers, waitresses and sanitation workers. There were children to match every color in the Crayola Multicultural Markers box, children whose parents owned two houses trading Legos with children who shared a bedroom with two siblings and whose parents’ preferred language was definitely not English. Since the abolition of rent control in Boston, Lothian was a town where Ph.D.’s lived beside auto mechanics. Ira used to call it a “true cultural crossroads.” Now he tried not to talk about it at all.
Ira had believed that most of the parents who sent their preschoolers to The Very Beginning shared his pride in its diversity (a word that now left a bitter taste in his mouth). When Betty, the director, had hired him fresh out of his master’s program, Ira had been secretly certain that being not just a man but a gay man gave him a double edge over all the eager single white women, even those who’d put in a few years of teaching already.
Anthony had joined him for the staff party at the start of his first year, had even helped him give the Green Room a fresh coat of paint in a new, more stylish shade, a bright urbane kiwi to replace the tired old kelly green of poster paint and Playskool toys. The two of them socialized with some of Ira’s fellow teachers (all straight) and even, by the third year, with a few couples whose children he’d taught in the Green Room. It was typical for the little girls to have their first crush on Ira, and the mothers with whom he was most familiar (those who came in to read stories or serve snacks) would make jokes to Ira like “Now please let her down easy!” and “Oh if poor Alexa only knew.” One mom, standing next to Ira on the playground at recess, had actually told him, “I know this sounds perverse, but sometimes I wish Chloe could grow up and marry a gay man. You understand women so much better than the guys we get to choose from!” Ira had forced a congenial laugh.