parking lot for that purpose.
It wasn’t always from afar, though, that I saw Mrs. Amory. Once upon a time I saw her up close on a regular basis—in the days when Nica and Jamie were together, and the three of us would spend whole afternoons and evenings hanging out in his house. She made it perfectly clear that she wasn’t wild about having my sister and me around. Whenever she happened to open the door and we were on the other side, she’d draw back her thin lips in an even thinner smile, say, “Welcome,” in a tone intended to convey the opposite.
Sometimes Jamie would use his mom’s ice-cold mannerliness against her, maneuver her into asking us to stay for dinner. These meals were always weird and uncomfortable and never-ending. Mr. Amory, a handsome man, pretty, in fact, prettier by far than his not-so-pretty wife though not quite as pretty as his very pretty son, would pay excessive attention to Nica. From behind a pair of round, black-rimmed glasses, which somehow emphasized his good looks rather than obscured them, he’d watch her, stare openly. Then the questions would begin, too many of them with him hanging too eagerly on her replies. He’d invite her to borrow his cue if she and Jamie and I were going to play billiards, his desk if we were planning to study, his raft if it was warm enough for us to swim. Once he even invited her on a trip he and Jamie were taking to Maine the following weekend to hunt bobwhite quail. Mrs. Amory would observe these exchanges from the other end of the table with eyes that were coolly detached or coolly amused—coolly something. Then she’d start in on Nica with questions of her own, mostly falsely sympathetic ones about our mom, asking how she was doing, saying how difficult her job as a high school teacher must be, how difficult both my parents’ jobs were, putting up with ungrateful adolescents all day, what noble work it was and yet so unappreciated, and how she could never do it herself.
Though she barely noticed me—I don’t even think she knew my name, referred to me only as “dear”—I was the one she upset with these interrogations. They’d leave me shaking with anger and hurt. Nica, on the other hand, was totally unfazed. Would always answer politely, without sarcasm or hostility, never responding to the queries’ spiky subtext, staying right on the placid surface. Actually seemed to feel sorry for Mrs. Amory more than anything else. “It can’t be fun being her, Gracie,” Nica would say to me in the car afterward as she lit a cigarette, “uptight, everybody around her wanting to be someplace else, her husband especially.” Then Nica would do an impression of Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest that was very bad but made me laugh anyway. Usually she’d talk me into stopping at the McDonald’s on Albany Ave. on the ride home. We’d split a McFlurry or a hot fudge sundae. The eggnog shake, if it was near Christmas.
I watch Mrs. Amory’s straight-backed form until it’s out of sight, disappearing inside Great House. The dull thud of the closing doors releases me from my stupor, and I continue on my way. As the concrete path turns into marble in front of Burroughs Library, I stop, dig an elastic out of my bag. When I’ve finger-combed my hair into a ponytail, I pull open the glass doors, step through them.
I step through them again two minutes later, only from the opposite direction. A crisis has arisen—burst pipe, bungling maintenance man, leak above the rare books section—and when Ms. Sedgwick, the head librarian, has dealt with it, she’ll deal with me, she said. She said, too, that in the meantime I ought to go see Mary Ellen Lefcourt in Payroll, get started on my paperwork.
So I’m going.
I’m sitting in the Business Development Office on the second floor of Perkins, my I-9 and Direct Deposit Authorization forms neatly filled out and on the coffee table in front of me. Mrs. Lefcourt is still in her office with her nine o’clock, even though it’s nearly ten now. To kill time, I’m browsing through a copy of the Staff Handbook, learning all about the proper protocol for reporting falsification of expense vouchers, when I hear voices rise up in anger—one voice, actually, male, young-sounding—rise up and die down almost immediately.
I crane my neck to see where it came from and notice a door at the end of the short, offshoot-type hallway. The sign outside it reads GLEN FLYNN, DIRECTOR OF FACILITIES. A second later, Mr. Flynn himself appears, a nervous-looking guy with fidgety hands, a red bow tie. He closes the door behind him, but not all the way, hurries over to Mrs. Waugh, the office secretary, whispers something in her ear. She shakes her head disapprovingly, either at what he just told her or at him. With an anxious backward glance, he exits. I reimmerse myself in the Handbook, wait for Mrs. Waugh’s fingers to start tapping on the computer keyboard again. When they do, I close the Handbook, stand, begin walking toward the door like I’m in search of better light. Then, casually, I prop myself against the wall opposite.
The crack in the door is narrow. I can’t see much through it, and what I can see tells me what I already know: that the room is an office, and that the angry-voiced person is indeed male and young. He’s pacing back and forth, his gait lurching, wobbly. It takes me a second to put together that he’s drunk, and I wonder if when Mr. Flynn scurried off, it was to get campus security. A slice of his body is visible, but none of his head. I’m starting to think I’ll never get a good look at him when he pauses to bend over, peel the thick fabric of his jeans from the backs of his knees. And for a brief moment, I have an unobstructed view of his face. Damon Cruz.
Damon Cruz is a day student—at least, was. He graduated in June, same as me. The term “day student” at Chandler is a tricky one to get a handle on because it doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, that is, a student who spends his days at Chandler, his nights elsewhere. Not only, anyway. It also means a student who is on scholarship. When Reverend Chandler was writing the school’s constitution, he included a clause stating that ten percent of the student body “must come from the community’s deserving poor.” At Chandler’s inception, “the community’s deserving poor” were, for the most part, the Polish immigrants or the children of the Polish immigrants who settled in droves in Sheldon/Charter Oak in the late nineteenth century to take jobs at the local factories, manufacturers of firearms and horseshoe nails principally. But demographics have shifted radically in the last couple of decades. Hartford is now a predominantly black city with the second-fastest-growing Puerto Rican population in the nation. Another thing it comes second in: poverty. The area’s gone from working class—those factories shut their doors a long time ago—to under the underclass. So what was once a gap between the day students and the boarders is a gap no longer, it’s a chasm.
There are day students, however, who manage to cross it. These students usually fit a certain profile—male, excel at a sport, come off as dangerous but not outright scary. Sex appeal doesn’t hurt either. Damon could have been a crossover if he wanted. He was a star baseball player, a little standoffish, known to have a temper. His sophomore year, he punched a rival player in the face during a game, earning himself the nickname Demon and a two-week suspension from the team. (The incident received a fair amount of coverage, not just in the school paper but in the Hartford Courant as well. The suspension was originally for the rest of the season, then got dropped down, and there were people who felt the reduction was sending a bad message, was practically condoning hooliganism, according to one editorial.) He was good at school, too, which I knew because we were in AP calculus together for a week before a scheduling conflict forced me to switch to another section.
Apparently Damon didn’t want to cross over, though. Any time I saw him on campus he was hanging out with other day students or with guys on the baseball team, a team pretty much entirely composed of day students. I remember he was going to college, UConn, the Honors Program, a popular option with smart day students since it offered a first-rate education on the comparative cheap. Was awarded an athletic scholarship, too, I think. So what’s he doing back at his old high school, wasted before noon, picking a fight with some pencil-neck administrator?
I take a step toward the door, bring my eye flush against the crack. Damon’s no longer pacing, is standing in front of the window now. He’s placed his hands on the sill so that his weight’s resting on his spread fingers. When he leans forward to look out, the muscles in his arms jump. It’s tough for me to believe this guy’s my age. He seems so much older—a cold, confident, hard-nosed man: thick, jet-black hair combed straight back, features that are handsome in a crude way, body that’s more broad than tall, bulky through the shoulders and chest, narrow at