I failed kindergarten, Mom.’” A collective gasp ripples through the crowd. “Then he asked if they didn’t want him at Victory Academy because he had some disease or if it was because he was bad. I’ll never forget that.” She digs in her pocket for a tissue and blows her nose.
“But.” She holds up her hands. “My son’s story doesn’t end there. He did well in the public school. They understood him. They worked with him. He’s still rambunctious, but he’s happy and creative.”
Gillian Sparks walks off the stage to raucous applause and whistles. “How do we protect our children?” someone in the crowd shouts.
“Just say no,” someone responds.
The sign-waving crowd goes wild, with people chanting, “Just Say No! Just Say No! Just Say No!” My adrenaline is pumping and I’m about ready to join in when J. B. taps me on the shoulder.
“Want to go for coffee?” He slips the notepad into his pocket.
I nod, satisfied that the rally has been successful and that I’ve done my part for the day. I hand my sign to someone else as we jostle our way through the throng of people standing shoulder to shoulder and arm in arm, swaying from side to side.
“So, do you miss it?” J.B says, when we emerge from the park and wait for the red light to turn green before crossing the street. He nods to the Health Services Building across from City Hall, where I worked as a foster care supervisor until six months ago. “Do you like being retired?”
“I’m not retired. I resigned, remember?” I pause, give myself a minute to think about his question. “I miss it when I think about the kids, you know, and the workers. But I’m still trying to reform that system, and to save our public school system, too.”
“Why am I not surprised,” he says with a grin and a shake of his head.
Inside the coffee shop, we find a small round table for two by the door. J. B. hangs his coat over the back of the chair. He stands and watches me sit down and tuck my short, jean-clad legs and knee-high boots under the chair, then unzip my jacket and adjust the cowl neck of my gray cashmere sweater—another consignment-store find.
“So, you want the usual?” he asks. I nod, and he heads for the counter.
I tuck in a couple loose strands of hair that have escaped from the soft gray bun at the back of my head. Then I start to sort through sections of today’s edition of the New York Times on the table. I push the business and sports sections off to the side and leaf through the arts and entertainment section, make a mental note of some Broadway shows I’d like to see, even though I haven’t been to New York in years. Then I pick up the front section and turn the pages until a headline on page five jumps out at me.
“Dead Body Found in Rubble of Demolished Bronx Elementary School.”
I fold the page back and read the first sentence of the article. “Last month P.S. 457 in the Bronx was demolished to make way for a new school.”
I blink, read the sentence again. P.S. 457. That’s where I taught third grade in the mid-1960s. I hold my breath and keep reading.
The mountain of rubble had been cleared away and the excavation crew was pulverizing the last of the concrete base when they discovered a child’s body, likely a boy, estimated to have been of elementary school age.
A wave of nausea comes over me. I grab onto my elbows and squeeze my arms against my chest.
The body may have been buried under the basement floor, and later cemented over, three or four decades ago.
The words blur, move deeper and deeper into the page as if disappearing down a cave. The voices, other sounds in the coffee shop, are a distant hum to the shouting in my head. A dead child. Likely a boy. My school. When I was there. I tighten my hold on the edge of the paper and stare at my hands, my wrinkles and age spots, my misshapen, arthritic fingers.
“Are you all right?”
J. B.’s voice startles me. The bright lights in the coffee shop burn my eyes. A gust of freezing air from the open door leaves me shivering and rubbing my hands together. Cold irritates my arthritis.
“What is it, Sylvia? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
I stare down at the squiggles and other illegible marks in the New York Times, my hands gripping the newspaper like a vise.
J. B. sits down across from me. He leans forward, reaches for the paper, pries my fingers off one by one.
“What were you reading?”
“The school... in the Bronx,” I whisper.
“Hmm, it’s written by Daniel Leacham,” he says. “Must be important.” He tips his head and starts to read—some of the words to himself, some of them out loud. “‘Dead body found... P.S. 457... demolished... likely male... between seven and nine years of age... buried... identity has not yet been established. The New York Police Department’s Forensic Investigations Division is conducting an investigation.’”
He places the paper on the table and takes a sip of his coffee. He leans back in his chair, stretches his long legs out under the table, and waits, his unasked questions dangling in the air.
“I was there.” My voice sounds like it’s coming from a distance, like it’s not mine. “I... ” I swipe at the tears on my cheeks, close my eyes. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” I cover my mouth with my hands. I’m rocking back and forth.
J. B.’s voice is soft, hushed. “Sylvia, you know who the dead boy is, don’t you?”
TWO
Summer 1967
“Do you need help, Sylvia?” Frank’s offer was less than enthusiastic. “Otherwise, I’ll go and finish organizing my office.”
I looked up from the boxes scattered around me on the kitchen floor of our new apartment to see him standing with one foot pointed away from me like he was ready to bolt. “Go on,” I said with a flick of my hand.
His lips brushed my cheek in passing as he headed for the door. There was a smell of stale beer on his breath. I listened to him turning the three locks on the metal door, lifting up the steel pole that dropped into a hole in the floor, then opening the door and letting it slam shut on its own without being locked.
On the same day Frank and I were married, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—were murdered in Mississippi. I sometimes wondered if that was why I was angry at Frank so much of the time. As if I held him accountable.
Now it was three years later, the summer of 1967 and hot. I was twenty-four years old, a passionate crusader for equal rights, civil rights, peace, and everything that small-town middle America had taught me, in subtle and not so subtle ways, not to be for, not to even think about. President Johnson’s signing of the Voting Rights Act two years ago had encouraged me, Martin Luther King Jr. inspired me, and the Black Power and anti-Vietnam War movements called to me. In such a tumultuous and hope-filled time, I could think of no better place to be than the Bronx.
I was, in fact, the reason we were here. Frank was in the seminary, and when it came time for him to make a decision about where to serve his yearlong internship, I dug in my heels and declared I would not go to any small town or to any church where the minister and his wife were hired as a team or seen as a unit. We decided that an urban church would be our best bet, which left him, in our particular denomination, with one choice: a small church in the Bronx consisting of one-third white old-timers who had remained members even after the neighborhood changed and they moved to the suburbs, and two-thirds black and Latino members who lived nearby.
Our apartment across the street from the church faced its round stained glass window riddled with holes. There was a difference of opinion among the members as to whether these holes came from stray bullets or baseballs or both. I looked out the kitchen window and saw Frank lumbering along the sidewalk by the church, then disappearing through the side door