A New York City Schoolteacher

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Marilyn Horan

                                                In the Classroom           

            In 1977, when the citywide financial crisis was easing, I was finally offered a job teaching English in a New York City school, Bushwick High School, a place with a bad reputation in a dangerous neighborhood.  I had been on the eligible list for five years waiting for an appointment by the Board of Education, and spent that time teaching in an all girls Catholic secondary school.  Except for the first year, which was brutal—teaching Afro-American Literature to a fiercely resistant all-white class of seniors who ridiculed me daily—I loved teaching.  The nuns who ran the school treated me with respect and care.  They provided me with excellent gourmet lunches each day served on white tablecloths, bought me presents for my birthday, and, in general, valued me as a member of their congregation.   However, the pay was low and taking the public school job would double my salary almost to the dollar.  Having recently broken up with a long time boyfriend and needing to pay the rent on my own, I called my Uncle Alfie for advice.  He didn’t hesitate for a moment and told me to accept the offer because it provided health benefits, a much improved salary, a retirement plan, in a word: security.  So, terrified, I reported to my new employment, shaking all over.

            The atmosphere at the public school could not have been more different from that of my previous job.  Upon meeting my chairperson, an unsmiling and unhappy man, I was given five remedial English classes, and a professional assignment which consisted of sharpening three thousand pencils, filing papers, addressing labels, and so forth.  There was a cold, almost military atmosphere about the place, and although my colleagues were mostly friendly, my supervisors, including the principal, were impersonal.  It was as if they were all in the same miserable boat, and I, as the newcomer, was not allowed on board but had to tread water while hanging on with one hand. The first time I handed in my grades I had labeled a set “English 3.”  My department chairman practically threw the sheets back in my face and told me to identify them correctly, “English 3F,” with the admonition to, “Get it straight.” He insisted also that his name, Mr. Kass, and the title “Assistant Principal” be typed on every sheet or test I distributed to my classes.  I got my revenge by occasionally leaving off the K from his name, or abbreviating his title “Ass. Principal.” 

            The students were, for the most part, sweet and responsive, but only after they put me through a crucible.  More than anything else, the kids wanted to know if I was their “real” teacher; if I was going to stay.  Turnover in more difficult schools was great, and the teenagers wanted consistency and a guarantee that going I was going to be loyal to them, by persisting despite their sometimes disturbing antics.  For example, one skinny, homely young man with what appeared to be only one or two teeth, Jerome, in my homeroom class insisted on calling me “ugly” every chance he got.  Sometimes he would do so while polishing a knife with a rag or rolling what looked like a joint from his seat in the back of the room.  “You ugly, Miss,” was his daily greeting.  “Where you come from, Miss?” and “You ever teach before, Miss?” were some of his other comments.  I was afraid of him and had to call upon every nerve in my body to not tremble or show fear in front of him.  One day I had an epiphany.  I realized that, more than anything, Jerome wanted my attention.  I had nothing to lose and in a moment of rash bravery I said to Jerome, “You keep telling me I’m ugly, Jerome.  When is the last time you looked in the mirror?”  The whole homeroom responded with a roar of appreciative laughter, hands clapping and feet stomping, and Jerome burst into a big, mostly toothless, smile.  I felt triumphant.  I had broken down the barrier of fear and created a path of communication with Jerome and the rest of the class that lasted all year.  Jerome never tired of kidding around with me and I answered his questions with crazy answers such as:

             “I came from Riker’s Island.” 

            “Why you was there, Miss?” 

             “Because I killed someone.” 

             “How you killed him?” 

             “How do you think I did it?”

             “You chopped off his head?”

             “How did you know?”

            “Why you did it, Miss?”

             “Well, he was in my homeroom and kept asking me annoying questions.”

            To those who never taught in a school, these exchanges might seem cruel or unprofessional, but learning to disarm students with a sense of humor was the most important skill I developed during teaching.  I could not have survived the two and a half years there without getting into the students’ give and take, playing the dozens, trying to relate to young people who needed a connection.  I looked forward to homeroom every day as a safe haven.  The kids became mine and I became theirs.

            This is not to say that everything was rosy at Bushwick.  Crime was a constant threat to my possessions and to my well-being.  One day as I was standing at my desk, explaining an answer to a student in my English class during the three-minute break, I noticed an unfamiliar young man standing there. I told him I would be with him in a minute.  He then grabbed my hair with one hand and ripped a gold chain off my neck with the other and ran out the classroom door.  The students were shocked and nobody moved for a few seconds, when a large, burly girl, jumped up, cursing, “Don’t worry, Miss.  I’ll get that mother fucker,” and ran after the thief.  She returned a few minutes later, out of breath and unsuccessful in her attempt.  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll see him around the neighborhood.  I’ll fuck him up.”  “Thank you,” I said, still in shock from the assault. 

            When I reported this to the principal, he said, “This is your fault.  You shouldn’t wear jewelry to school because you make yourself a target.”  Lesson learned.  “the princple he sit on he fat ass all day smoking herd,” was the beginning sentence of a student’s letter--a response to a prompt on a NY State literacy test.  When one of the English teachers read the essay aloud during a group marking session, the entire department cheered, agreeing with everything the unfortunately dyslexic student said.  Intense dislike for the administration created a strong sense of camaraderie among the teachers and was fodder for many a raucous and hilarious lunch period.           

            Another time in the middle of the lesson, I reached down to get a book from the desk drawer.  There between my feet was a hand.  I jumped. I looked over the desk and all I saw was gigantic tumbleweed of black curly hair.  What the heck was it?  I couldn’t imagine.  “Class,” I said pointing to the hair, “what is that?”  Suddenly the mass of hair, a huge Afro, jumped up and revealed a skinny little kid, about thirteen, under it.  He looked at me long enough for me to see his severely crossed eyes.  He sprinted out of the classroom in a flash, leaving my students and me stunned, mouths open.  What the heck just happened?  We later found out that this kid had already stolen another teacher’s purse using the same technique of sliding down the aisle on his belly, slowly and stealthily, reaching under a desk to grab the purse, all the while unnoticed by anyone.  I later had to identify him and testify against him, frail and cross-eyed and scared, in court.

            While I was tutoring remedial reading students for an important upcoming state test, someone slashed all four of my car tires.  I was distraught and questioned deeply my decision to be a teacher.  All of my dedication and this is what I get?  The next day, as I walked down the hallway, I heard, “Psst…Ms. Horan,” and a student told me the name of the tire cutter.  I walked another few steps and again, “Psst…Ms. Horan,” and again I was told the name of the guilty one.  This happened about six times before I got to my classroom at the end of the hall.  I felt that I had allies in the school; I had students who cared about me.  The slasher was brought down to the dean’s office, handcuffed, and taken to the local precinct.  The police officer who remained to take my statement, kept shaking his head saying, “I don’t know how you manage to come back day after day to this job.  I wouldn’t do it for a million dollars.”  This same sentiment was expressed to me by a Vietnam vet and by a Navy jet fighter pilot.  By the way, all of the sixteen students who attended the tutoring class passed the state examination and I felt great satisfaction.  The students did, too.

            Throughout the years all my stories of work were much more interesting than the stories other had to tell about their jobs.  People always asked me to tell them what crazy/fun/scary things happened in school since they last saw me. They still ask me to repeat my "stories," and the fascination others have for what I did on the job suggests to me that other people's jobs are really boring.  In addition, I took pride in the fact that I persevered in a profession most people wouldn't even consider or without a SWAT team on hand.   I felt especially proud and maybe even a little bit swaggering with "toughness" that I had a job that would make others quake in their boots.

            Additional reasons that being an English teacher was satisfying are:

1.  People, especially teachers in the lounge, always ask for your help when they are stumped on a crossword puzzle. 

2.  Secretaries and other school personnel seek your advice about grammar, word usage, and spelling.  “Affect/Effect” is the number one stumper followed by “use to/used to,” “than/then,” “a lot/a lot.”

3.  Whenever acquaintances or friends write to you, at the end of the letter they apologize for their spelling and grammar, knowing you are always on the lookout for mistakes. 

4.  When people speak to you, they often ask you to excuse their accent, Brooklyn or otherwise.  Sometimes they blush and stammer and self-correct their pronunciation.

Being an English teacher can sometimes be a heady experience.

            It never failed that throughout my 36 years in the classroom when I asked my students how many of them were considering teaching as a career, the class would laugh and hoot derisively.  “Yeah, we want to work for crappy salaries and get insulted by snotty teenagers,” they said.  So I liked to ask them what they wanted to be when they grew up.  It’s amazing how many future brain surgeons, lawyers, professional ball players, actors, and rocket scientists were sitting right there in front of me just biding their time, chewing gum, applying more lip gloss, and playing video games until their fabulous, glamorous, wealthy, and exciting new lives started. They didn’t realize what I knew: teaching is a great job.  I made a decent salary, had and still have great benefits, and am currently enjoying the pension for which I worked decades.   I helped many students both in and outside of the classroom, spent countless hours discussing literature and its lessons with young people, enjoyed the adolescent sense of humor, made lifelong friends, and, as a bonus, even met my husband. Uncle Alfie didn’t steer me wrong.

Bed Jacket

 

Marilyn Horan

Bed Jacket

            I have never personally known anyone who owned a bed jacket. They are anachronisms.  Years ago, at least in the movies, wealthy, glamorous women of leisure wore them during long periods of convalescence.  New, young mothers wore them in real life during their extended stays in the hospital after giving birth. Besides making breast-feeding easier, they created an aura of prettiness and daintiness, making visiting hours more cheerful.

            I bought my mother one of these bed jackets.  It was a feminine item:  pale mint green of a fuzzy-lamb-like fabric, with appliquéd flowers on each flared sleeve, edged all around in satin and fastened with one smooth white pearlized button.  Mom had been in Lutheran Hospital for the second time in two months.  The cause was a stroke that paralyzed her right side.  Her frailty was touchingly obvious.  Her shoulders, always rather small, seemed tiny, bony, curved and vulnerable.  Her broken and poorly mended collar bone, the result of a car accident four years earlier, stuck out jaggedly under the freckled and thin skin.  The flimsy hospital gowns that were put on her looked institutional and depressing.

            Some housecoats, really lightweight cotton dress robes that my mother had brought from home, were dilapidated, although a couple were those she retrieved from a bag of my recently deceased aunt’s clothing meant for the Salvation Army.  One of these wrappers was faded orange color and the other was a harshly stiff, unrelentingly cheerful red and white check fabric with a large clown-like collar and big patch pockets that even my aunt thought better of wearing, as the still attached price tag proved.  My mother’s keeping them attested to her self-effacing, infuriatingly modest attitude.  She rarely bought anything for herself and when she did, it was always the price rather than the quality that determined her purchase.  Her frugality and thrift, also characterized by me as miserliness and cheapness in my less charitable moods, colored everything she did. A victim of the Great Depression and penniless immigrant parents with six children, all of who were out of school and working by the time they were twelve, my mother’s attitude toward money was intense and unchangeable.  Unfortunately, those same circumstances that made her acutely aware of the value of a dollar also made her feel unworthy of anything but the barest minimum, an attitude that angered me and made me feel responsible.  I tried to counter her self-abnegation, and maybe my own, with no success.

                 The hospital robes and the inherited ones she wore in the hospital made me, above all, feel guilty.  How could I let my mother, sick and pathetic, shocked by her own limited ability to move or talk lie in a hospital bed in castoffs?  So, I went to the lingerie department at Macy’s to get her a presentable, new robe.  There in a corner of the department hung bed jackets.  At first glance they looked ridiculous—short and girly.  But the idea began to grow on me.  They were practical; they did not bunch up in bed the way a longer robe would have.  They were light and unemcumbering, yet warm and cute.  I bought one.

            Consciously or not, I knew from the minute I bought it that my mom would not want it and that I would wind up with it.  That’s why I got the large rather that the medium.  I knew her policy of self-denial, her refusal to have or wear anything not essential or too expensive.  Once before I had bought her a lovely nightgown and matching outer garment and she had kept it in her drawer wrapped in tissue paper for years, telling me that she was saving it for a special occasion.  It was only when I became exasperated and told her to renounce her crown of thorns that she relented, to please me, and wore it the next time she stayed at my house.  She looked uncomfortable in it, stilted, afraid to ruin it with coffee or wrinkles.  She kept looking at me for reaction and complimented me several times on my good taste.  I felt regretful, not only that I had bought such a “nice” thing for her, but that I had used accusations of martyr to shame her into wearing it.  Guilt works, though.  When she discovered that she had a recurrence of cancer a few months later, she took out a set of earrings and a bracelet that I had bought her about twenty-five years earlier and about which I had forgotten.  When she did put the bracelet on, the clasp broke—brittle from age—and the jewelry fell and shattered across her linoleum floor.

      This time though, I thought, she, weakened by illness and worn down from weeks in the hospital, would give in and wear the charming item.  She would not.  Her roommate, whose shaved and stitched and lumpy skull, the result of brain surgery, remarked to my mother that maybe she was pregnant and should go to the maternity ward where bed jackets are, or were, the accepted costume, certainly not here in the ward of dying old men and women. They both laughed heartily and I felt ridiculed.  My mother said nothing about the garment and I mentioned it when I visited her, but it just hung, tags attached, in the narrow hospital closet. Perhaps it was too fancy for her, an object whose main purpose was decorative and therefore frivolous.  Maybe she wanted to maintain her humble look and the accompanying pity it aroused in visitors. It could have been she just thought the jacket was stupid or inappropriate, although she kept telling me how beautiful it was when I referred to it, and how I should take it home and wear it myself.

     So I took the jacket, stagnant after weeks of absorbing food odors and the stench of bodily functions in the sealed-window hospital, and made it my own.  I wore it to bed for a few nights, thinking I could read in comfort, not having to tuck the blankets under my chin to ward off the cool drafts that arise after the heat goes off.

     But the bed jacket was less than satisfying to me.  The first time I wore it, it felt dirty and reeking of hospital smells despite the washing I had given it.  I felt sullied.  My husband looked at it askance, but said nothing the first time I had it on.  By the third wearing, he laughed at it, at me, and said I looked silly.  Besides, he went to bed much earlier than I did, so I could not read in bed at night anyway.  All of this made the bed jacket superfluous, frivolous, and foolish.  My mother did not want it, my husband did not like it, and even though I thought it would make my mother, and then me, feel pampered and elegant, it just made me sad.

10 Reasons to be an English Teacher

 

Marilyn Horan

Rosie the underappreciated secretary in Bye, Bye Birdie laments to her boss and long time love interest, Albert, a “music business bum,”: “An English teacher is really someone/ How proud I'd be if you had become one/ It could have been such a wonderful life.” Other benefits of being an English teacher according to Rosie are having a little apartment in Queens and a summer vacation. “We would know what life means/A man who’s got his Master’s/Is really someone” she continues in her fruitless attempt to get Albert to change professions.  While the song is tongue-in-cheek, listening to it in the theater made me feel proud of having been an English teacher for more than thirty-five years.   Here are the top ten reasons why.

1. You are the font of knowledge. Teachers in the lounge, always ask for your help when they are puzzled by a crossword clue.

2. You are the word wizard.  Secretaries and other school personnel seek your advice about grammar, word usage, and spelling.  “Affect/Effect” is the number one followed by “use to/used to,” “than/then,” “a lot/alot.”  

3.  No matter how old a person is, to him you are the strict authority on language.  Whenever acquaintances or friends write to you, at the end of the letter they apologize for their spelling and grammar, knowing you are always on the lookout for mistakes. 

4.  People apologize to you often.  When people speak to you, they often ask you to excuse their accent, Brooklyn, Long Island, foreign or otherwise.  Sometimes they blush and stammer and self-correct their pronunciation. 

5.  The pen truly is mightier than the sword.  The red pen is even mightier. You can wound with a red pen.  The size, severity, and bloodiness of the wounds inflicted depend upon how many essays you have to grade by Monday morning and how many times the students ignore the rules for writing you have established, day after day after day.

6. English teachers are the Renaissance men and women of the school.  Having read voraciously throughout your life, plus completing all those English, American, and Comparative Literature classes, you are well versed in many areas of knowledge.  Wear your crowns proudly.

7.  What other job can provide you with the opportunity to discuss poetry for fifty minutes every day for a week with students who start out hating it and end up writing it, sometimes even producing poems that do not have the words “blue/you,” “love/dove/glove”?

8.  English teachers are unflappable.  Teaching the forms of the verb “lie” and “lay” and hearing the class snicker is so much fun. Peals of laughter follow as various students use the past tense of “lay” in suggestive ways, and the class is super charged to witness your shock.  This is your turn to prove that you are not thrown off by any question about grammar, and, in fact, despite your age, lack of coolness, and the strand of pearls you occasionally wear, you can still get excited about something and that something, young men and women, is proper usage.

9.  Students always remember their English teachers, even if it is in direct proportion to the perceived difficulty and boredom factor of the books she made them read.  Former students on Facebook will sometimes ask, “How’s the old Scarlet Letter?” or “Anytime I hear about The Scarlet Letter, I think about you.”  In a diner, at the movie theater, at a school reunion, the first response to seeing me is: “Ms. Horan!  The Scarlet Letter!  I hated that book.”  Even though these reluctant readers insult my beloved Hawthorne work, at least they remember me.

10. Begetting more English teachers is the greatest reward.  These days most college students go for a degree in teaching history. When I hear that a former student is going to teach English, as I did just the other day, I feel great. Creating writers is even better, and I still beam with happiness about a book written by a former student who thanked me for spurring her on to a writing career.  All right, I admit that the best accomplishment for me as an English teacher would be that I get to use my skills to become a great writer myself, now that my work with students is over.

So, if there is anybody out there thinking about a career, remember that an English teacher is really someone.

Subway Series

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Subway Series

Lesson One:  The Meaning of Charity

            Having attended Catholic schools for thirteen years, I was taught repeatedly the importance of faith, hope, and charity, charity being the greatest virtue of all.  I lost my faith at about age 14.  Hope consisted of wishing for material things and cute boyfriends.  But I did believe in charity whole-heartedly.  An incident that happened while in my senior year of high school, changed my understanding of the term and revealing it to be facile and shallow. In 1968, my senior year in high school, I was returning home to Brooklyn from a part time job in Manhattan  While standing on the subway platform one evening, I noticed a long-haired blond guy, filthy and homeless, rummaging through the garbage and eating things he had picked out of the trash.  I pitied him.  Here was a chance for me to practice what I had been taught and what I considered an essential part of my moral code.

            After considering his situation and checking my cash situation, I decided to buy the blond a hot dog and an orange soda from the Nedick’s on the platform.  Not wanting to embarrass him by handing him the meal, I put it down on the unoccupied bench, and began to walk past him.  As I did so, I said, pointing to the food and drink, “Those are for you.”

            “What?” he shouted.  “Who the fuck told you to do anything?  I didn’t ask you for shit.  Who the fuck do you think you are?

            He then proceeded to take the hot dog and soda and, cursing, flung them across the tracks so they splattered and slid down the filthy tiled wall at 42 Street.

            “Fuck you.  Who needs your charity?  Fucking asshole,” he said.

            Mortified, shocked, and crying, I walked up the stairs to get away from him fearing his violence would get physical. I returned to the platform down another stairway where he couldn’t see me.  When the train pulled in I got on it and went home.

            I will never forget this incident because it taught me about charity.  Even though I had tried to avoid looking like a do-gooder and had kept my gift secret from anyone else, not desiring admiration from on-lookers, the blond homeless man didn’t want charity.  Maybe he didn’t want to feel minimized, emasculated, or pitied.  Perhaps he was just crazy. I got a powerful lesson in the delicate and complicated quality of charity and in the nature of humans. But I have been told that charity rewards the giver, even if the gift given turns into an orange and mustard-colored mess dripping down a subway wall. I still am proud of having tried to help a hungry person.  But the wisdom I got from this incident was best stated by Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson:  “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”

Subway Series

Lesson Two: Death Commute

            It was 1976, during rush hour and I was on the subway going to graduate night classes at Brooklyn College.  The #4 train was crowded, but not stifling so.  I heard someone yelling, “Ouch!” and “Stop!” and “Hey, why are you stomping on my foot?”  I looked down the train and saw a young white man, the only other white in the car besides me.  He was trying to hold onto the pole in the middle of the jostling car.  As he strained to maintain his grip a large African-American teenage girl was hitting his hands with what looked like an umbrella.  She was laughing and taunting him by saying, “You a punk.  What’s the matter? You afraid?  That hurt?  Ha ha!  Look at this cracker jump!  Look at the white boy shit his pants.” From the other end I could see him flinch as the girl stepped on his feet, one at a time, or stabbed at them with her umbrella,  His face was flustered--red and panicky.  No one but me even looked at the scene.  When the train doors opened he flew out. 

            The doors closed and I was frightened, chastising myself for not dashing out of the train when I had the chance.  I knew she was going to come after me, and she did.  From the corner of my eye I saw, almost in slow motion, her head turn, her eyes scanning the car for someone else to hound.  Her gaze was robotic as were her movements. I thought I could hear the clicking of her neck as she turned to pinpoint her next victim.  I know that laser beams did not, in reality, shoot out of her eyes, but she homed in on me and I froze in place.  When she made eye contact with me, she smiled--a demented leer, and raising her umbrella, screamed out, “I’ll get you now, you fuckin’ white bitch.  I’ll fuckin’ kill you, motherfucker.”  She pursed her lips together and shook her head, determined to do what to her was necessary.  I could not stop staring at her as she progressed through the train, scaring people out of her way, her umbrella raised like a spear, cursing about “killing that white bitch.”  Even though not one person on the train looked up, avoiding eye contact with the madwoman, there was a sense of danger, of insanity.  I could feel the tension in the car.  She finally came face to face with me. I considered fighting her, shoving my book bag into her or raising it to protect myself, but my arms were limp with terror and my body was petrified.  I noticed that the umbrella was not an umbrella at all, but was a walking stick about three feet long, with black carvings, its metal end sharpened to a spike.  She had the stick poised and aimed exactly at my forehead. I stared at the point and immobilized, pictured what the wound would look like in my head—a clean, round hole gushing blood.  She pulled her arm back to propel the stick with force when four men jumped up simultaneously, forming a wall of defense between me and my attacker.  One man said to her, “You gotta calm down, Sister.  Go sit down.  This lady here didn’t do anything to you.  Now go sit down.  Relax.”  She looked deflated and confused, yet still coming at me, so intent was she on her goal.  The men had to use considerable force to keep her from me.  The train was pulling into a station and I felt hands on my shoulders turn me and gently push me out the doors onto the station.  “Go ahead,” I heard someone say.  “Best you get off here.”

                 I stood on the platform as the train with my would-be killer pulled out.  I stood,  surrounded by people, but unable to move, to speak, to do anything.  Colors swirled around me that came from people’s coats and bags and hats as they entered and exited subway cars or walked past me on their way in or out of the station.  It was several minutes before I could walk again. I, legs shaking and unable to speak, got on the next #4 and went to class as planned.  As harrowing as my encounter was with that girl, I was grateful to the men who came to my defense and saved my life:  gallant knights who stopped a monster in her tracks.

Subway Series:

Lesson Three:  If You See Something, Say Something

            While reading the NY Times today, I came across an article, “A Brooklyn Mystery Solved: Vandals Did It, in 1959” By James Barron about a missing statue, “Angel of Music” that had once stood in Green-Wood cemetery. Richard J. Moylan, Green-Wood’s president recently found out that the statue, which he thought had been destroyed by a tree falling on it, was actually damaged by vandals in 1959.  The interesting thing to me was Mr. Moylan’s response:  “Vandalism, that shocked me.  I guess I thought that was a different time and people were better then.  If I had heard it happened in the “70s, that I could have understood.  New York City was really in the dumps.  But the ‘50s?” I have to agree.  The ’70s were dangerous years:  Son of Sam, the Blackout, car and house robberies, muggings, killings, graffiti, unemployment, flight to the suburbs. 

            Around 1975 or 1976 a French teacher from Brooklyn College was murdered on the #4 train on her way home from teaching.  She was set upon by two men who knifed her so many times that she bled to death there in the subway car.  I don’t remember if they raped her first.  I  remember that people left the car once the men began attacking the teacher and people on the platforms saw what was going on and avoided that car, getting on another one instead. Not wanting to get involved in a crime in progress, the “Kitty Genovese Syndrome,” seemed to be more prevalent in the ‘70s then it is today, especially since we all have cell phones and, even if we don’t want to risk getting involved in a murderous situation, can at least notify the police.

            But the detail I remember clearly from that incident was that the police said that when they found the French instructor’s body, they had to literally pour blood out of her boots in order to transport her body on the stretcher.  It was a shocking crime and perhaps emblematic of the bad old days of New York City when crime was rampant because the city was on the verge of bankruptcy and the mayor, Abe Beame, instituted major cuts in the city’s budget, reducing municipal payroll by 65,000, police included.  

            Two nights after the murder, I was on the same subway line again going to graduate classes at Brooklyn College.  As I had done throughout high school, college, and then graduate school, I studied on the subway--a procrastinator’s last minute attempt to squeeze a week’s worth of work into forty-five minutes.  I was intently reading something that was due for class that night and was unaware of my surroundings, especially that the subway car was empty except for me. Without warning, a shadow blocked my light and, at first, I didn’t have the courage to look all the way up.  I was petrified.  There, right in front of me, holding onto the passenger strap, was a six-foot-four black man, in black jeans, a casual brown winter jacket, gloves, and a woolen cap on his head, covering his ears and most of his forehead.  His crotch was on the level of my eyes and his legs swayed with the motion of the train.  He stood so close to me that his pants occasionally brushed my own.  Would the coroner be pouring my blood out of boots later that night?

            I kept my eyes on my book, although I couldn’t read a word.  My body and mind went into survival mode, and came up short.  There was no way that I could escape from this man.  After about five minutes, he said in a low tone,

 “You’re all alone with me on this train.  Do you know that?” 

I nodded without looking up.

 “You’re a college girl?” he asked.

I again bobbed my head up and down. 

“You read the newspapers, College Girl?” he said. 

I said I did. 

“Then you know that two night ago, on this very train here, a professor was killed?  On this very train you’re on all alone?”

 “Yes, it was terrible,” I said. 

“How would you like to wind up like she did?”

 “No,” my voice managed to say.  “No.  It was horrible.  I feel sorry for her.” 

“Then get the hell up and go into a car with other passengers in it.  Preferably one with a conductor,” he growled.  “For a college girl you sure are stupid.” 

I looked up and from under his coat he took out a police badge.  I could have wept with relief and gratitude that he took the time to teach me self-protection and awareness. but more importantly that he wasn’t going to kill me.  I was embarrassed and tearful.  When the train stopped he escorted me into another car and he went to sit at the far end.  A few minutes later, he got up and went into another car, leaving me rebuked and humbled, but wiser.

           

Farewell Kathryn

 

 Marilyn Horan

1654 Glenwood Road

Brooklyn, NY  11230

marilbone@aol.com

718-859-6145

                                                            Farewell

The horseman of the apocalypse came prancing,

High-stepping to the side.

Splay-footed

Pigeon-toed

Bumbling in

With a hop and a skip.

Annihilation

Disguised as a pot bellied fellow.

Devastation

Displaying an amused sideways jollity.

The Red Death in a ski cap and green coat

Sneakers and tube socks and

Ordinary objects--knives

As carnal messengers.

Coffin closed,

Damage done

No autopsy so awful

As death strikes on

The landscape of white flesh

Tearing and shredding

And giving birth to grief

The more dreadful

For ruined dreams.

Protection and shield gone.

Only torn skin remains.

Weeping for what might have been

And what will never be

Except in restorative sleep

Protecting the dreamer and the dreamed of

From what was.

Waking moments

When sense is just dawning

Is the precious time.

The lull before the storm of memories

First sweet, then filled,

With unfathomable horror,

Horan

Of rage spent on an undeserving one.

(Outside of hell and bedlam

Is there any one rating such an end?)

Scream goodbye cruel world--

No irony in the phrase.

Well, it’s over, my friend,

That’s the best I can say about that—

The lingering loss of

of life’s goodness

Is all that remains.

Farewell

 

Marilyn Horan

Word count:  4500

Farewell

            On Monday, October 12, David Tarloff, a 41 year-old former mental patient, will stand trial for the brutal murder of Dr. Kathryn Faughey, my therapist of seventeen years.  Over the last thirty months, his trial has been scheduled, postponed, rescheduled, and then postponed again while psychiatrists evaluated Mr. Tarloff’s mental competence.  The latest diagnosis is that he is competent to stand trial—a judgment I have trouble squaring with the terrible chain of events that began two and a half years ago when I received the shocking news of Kathryn’s murder.                       

            I was in my office at the Brooklyn high school where I worked as assistant principal when the phone rang.

            “Marilyn,” my husband Frank said, “Honey, please stay calm.  I think the psychotherapist who was murdered last night is Kathryn.”

            “What are you talking about?” 

            “The therapist on the Upper East Side.  I’m sorry, but I’m almost sure it’s Kathryn.”

            “What do you mean?” I said in a voice that bordered on a shriek.

Frank said, “Kathryn.  Kathryn Faughey. I think she is the one who they’re talking about on the television. It’s her building—York and 79th.  There are cops and detectives all over the place. They say it’s a female psychotherapist and, Marilyn, she’s been stabbed to death.  It’s horrible.  I wanted to tell you before you saw it on television.  I didn’t want you to be shocked.” 

            “I’m supposed to see her tonight,” I said.  A reflex thought flashed through my mind:  During my session with Kathryn that night I would tell her all about the murder, since I always told her everything that happened during my day.

            I shuddered as if an Arctic blast had passed over me. “Please help me, Frank.  Help me,” I said crying.  “Please come here and take me home.”

            “I can’t right now.  We’re in the middle of a seminar way out in Queens College,” he said.  “Why don’t you go home and when I finish my presentation to the teachers, I’ll meet you there.”

            I ran into the Social Studies office. Eight teachers, all friends and colleagues, were sitting and standing around, during their lunch break.  Through my sobs I asked them to turn on the TV, and there it was on the news. “My friend,” I said.  “My friend has been murdered.  That’s my friend they’re talking about on the news reports.  She’s been murdered.  She’s been knifed to death.” 

            Three female teachers rushed to hug me, while others offered me a seat or a glass of water.  I gulped down air, praying that I didn’t have a panic attack or a complete breakdown in front of the teachers.  As their supervisor, I was supposed to be cool in the face of an emergency.           

            With the help of my best friend at the school, who was working toward a PhD in psychology, I managed to calm down.  Keeping a tight rein on my feelings, I got my car from the school parking lot and drove home, through streets turned hazardous with ice from the blizzard the day before.

                        But when I got to my house, I was too terrified to go inside.  All I could do was wait in my car until Frank came home.  I couldn’t stop thinking about who could have killed Kathryn.  There was the former English teacher I had referred to her after he’d threatened suicide—a prelude to a complete psychotic break.  After seeing him once or twice, Kathryn warned me not to let him come back to the school, because he had called her one night, using filthy language and threatening to kill her.  Now I feared that the teacher, having butchered Kathryn, was lying in wait to kill me.  He could be in my backyard, my garage, my house.  I sat in the car for more than an hour, phoning Frank every ten minutes to find out how close he was to home.  The relief I felt when Frank finally got to our place was incredible.  He escorted me into the house, his arm around my shoulder.  The moment we got inside we turned on the television and for hours we watched the news bulletins about Kathryn, my intimate for almost two decades. I still couldn’t believe she was dead.

                         I watched as the police carried out the leather chair I had sat in for all those years, now wrapped in plastic to preserve the evidence.  I listened as the news reporters on the scene and in the studio repeated over and over that Kathryn was “hacked” to death, that the murderer had used and bent several knives on her body, that even the cleaver he used to kill her was warped from the sheer force of his assault on her skull and bones.  I saw the Venetian blinds of her office, as familiar to me as my own, now bent and broken.  I heard about the blood splattered on every surface, about the “fierce battle” that had been fought, about Kathryn’s screams, about her office-partner in the room next to hers, a psychiatrist, named Dr. Shinbach, who had rushed in to help her and who was himself gravely injured by the killer.  I watched the security tape of the suspect being admitted by the doorman, wheeling behind him a suitcase that was filled with the murder weapons, women’s clothing, and adult diapers.  I saw the body bag being carried out and put into the coroner’s van. An image arose in my mind of Kathryn’s savaged corpse under that black plastic and I tried to replace it with an image of the Kathryn I knew, smiling and beautiful.  I took a Valium, and then an Ambien, then another of each, and fell into a deep sleep.

            The next morning, I woke groggy and disoriented.  I called my brother to tell him and his response was, “Holy God!” followed by, “You were seeing a therapist for seventeen years?”  My sister in North Carolina was sympathetic and her instinct to “help” went into overdrive.  Without asking my permission she called the police precinct where the murder occurred, gave them my name, address, and phone number, and reported my suspicions about the English teacher. As a result, for the next two days, I got phone calls from detectives asking me about Kathryn and about the teacher who had threatened her.  Ultimately, the teacher was cleared.  Though I was not happy about my sister’s breaching my confidentiality, I was excited about the chance to help the police find the madman.  I found several pictures of Kathryn on the Internet, mostly at guitar camp, and scrutinized the faces around hers to see if I could match one with the grainy image of the murderer in the security tape.

             I stayed home from work the next day, and immersed myself in the coverage of the crime on television and in the newspapers.  The news reports were focused on a man in Pennsylvania with whom Kathryn had exchanged emails on the night of her death.  But aware that the police usually investigate family members first, I began to suspect Kathryn’s husband.  I had never met him.  I hadn’t even known if she was married, but The New York Daily News reported that in 2003 Kathryn had filed for divorce from her husband, although she later withdrew her suit.

            After my husband went to work, I was a nervous wreck.  I jumped at every sound, at times afraid even to walk downstairs if I was upstairs and walk upstairs if I was downstairs, or open the bathroom door once I’d closed it.  I regretted not having drapes or shutters on every window or door of my multi-windowed Victorian house, fearful that people could look in and see me at all times. I encouraged my dogs to bark at any sound, by whispering in an excited voice, “Who’s that?  Who’s there”?  Reacting to my tenseness they became hyper-vigilant, pricking up their ears and barking at the slightest sound.

            Feeling overwhelmed and terrified, unable to calm myself, I called a psychiatric nurse practitioner I knew, to get the name of a therapist I could see immediately.  She offered me her tearful condolences and recommended a person in Brooklyn Heights.  I went to see the new therapist that night, parked my car, and had difficulty walking the half block toward her office.  Terrified of every pedestrian I passed, I stayed as close as possible to the buildings, limiting my vulnerability.

            As I entered the psychologist’s apartment, her Shih Tzu jumped on me, and the therapist’s husband, who was cooking dinner, greeted me. The therapist herself, with her braided and mussed gray hair, striped socks, Birkenstock slippers, oversized blouse and pants, led me to a small room, presumably her at-home office, where she proceeded to sit in a chair, put her feet up on an ottoman, drink her tea, and allow her dog to pester me.  She reprimanded the animal half-heartedly, and I wanted to scream that I really couldn’t handle the annoyance at this time.  I was crying and jumpy, and was put off, angered even, by her casual attitude.  I was accustomed to Kathryn’s extremely formal manner, professional office, and polished appearance.  This new analyst offered to use a technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) that would help me resolve symptoms resulting from the traumatic experience of the murder.  This seemed “new agey” and foolish, and I refused.  She might as well have pulled out a pocket watch and said, “You are now getting sleepy.”  I sobbed through the session, as she sipped from her cup, and I left convinced that I had truly lost the best psychotherapist in the world.

            My first session with Kathryn had taken place on February 4, 1991, a week before my fortieth birthday and two weeks after my second ectopic pregnancy.  I had gotten her name from Resolve, an infertility organization.  My grief must have been obvious in my posture—I would have curled up on her couch if she’d had one.  My clothes were crumpled and my face was bloated from crying.  Kathryn was gentle and listened as I poured out my anguish at losing a child.  I told her of sitting in the gynecologist’s office a week before while he’d shown my husband and me a video of the laparoscopic surgery in which a miniature motorized scalpel chopped up the tiny embryo, which formed a small bump in my fallopian tube.  I told her how proud the doctor had been of his surgical skill and how puzzled he seemed when I had burst into tears.  Even when I explained that I couldn’t stand to see what could have been my child being scissored to death, the doctor cheerily replied, “At least we know you can get pregnant.” 

            Kathryn agreed that the physician was insensitive, at best, cruel at worst.  Immediately, I felt I had an ally, a caretaker, a wise counselor. She said that I had returned to work too soon, that I needed time to heal, to take care of myself. She wrote a letter to the gynecologist convincing him to sign my leave of absence application.  The two months I stayed were crucial to my recovery.  This was the first of many painful episodes that Kathryn guided me through by encouraging me to pay closer attention to my emotional needs.           

            In retrospect, seventeen years with a psychotherapist does seem like a long time, a Woody Allen joke.  Yet, there were breaks in my therapy, sometimes for as long as six months. Once when I came back after a few months, Kathryn suggested that I see her every other week, and that I view our sessions like going to the gym—a regular exercise that would keep me on an even keel. And so, Kathryn became closer to me than anyone else in my life, except my husband.  My sister lives far away and we are somewhat estranged, and the same is true for my brother.  According to medical literature a successful therapist can play the role of “the good mother” and Kathryn was certainly that, in sharp contrast to my own mother whose credo seemed to be:  “Enough about you.  Let’s talk about me.” 

            As the youngest of three children I am gregarious, but I’m not really that close to my friends because most of them are involved with their children and grandchildren and I often feel left out, especially on holidays. Kathryn had no children either and that deepened my bond with her.  She knew how I felt.  She suggested alternate activities for the holidays and helped me develop the confidence to host holiday parties myself, instead of feeling isolated and sorry for myself amid the seasonal festivities.

              Kathryn helped Frank and me deal with our very different approaches to emotional communication.  I come from a family whose every feeling was not only freely expressed, but always accompanied by crying, screaming, cursing, pounding the table, punching a wall, overturning the dinner table a couple of times, and once, even swinging a gallon of paint, splattering the walls and ceiling of the room with the indelible marks, in bubble-gum pink, of a temper tantrum.  Frank and his family were refugees to the U.S. from a Displaced Person’s Camp in Austria.  They lost everything they owned during World War II.  Leaving behind close family members, they spent ten days in March 1952 on a troop ship to get here. In America they had to learn a new language while finding places to live and work.  They never raised their voices or displayed anger.  Frank’s easy-going manner and imperturbability attracted me to him.  His attitude toward life was the opposite of my family’s. As our relationship went on, however, I sometimes felt he was too laid back and I wanted more responsiveness.  Kathryn acknowledged my frustration, and led me to recognize that no one person could fulfill my every need. I had to admit that Frank’s equanimity countered my anxiety.

             Kathryn also helped me navigate through my professional life. She taught me methods to calm myself, such as deep breathing, reading with intention, meditation, and exercise. She suggested ways to stop difficult colleagues from corroding my ego and peace of mind.  Eventually she helped me decide to retire after 31 exhausting and frustrating years in the New York City Department of Education.  And with great skill and tact she helped me let go of a beloved, but manipulative drug-addicted nephew whose bail and rehab bills I had paid on and off for ten years.

            When my mother was dying, Kathryn introduced me to “Choice in Dying” and it helped me to take her off life support and convince my brother and sister to agree. She suffered with me through a promising adoption that turned ugly at the last moment.  A young woman in Kentucky with whom I had a daily conversation for seven months during her pregnancy agreed to let us adopt her unborn child. Frank and I had visited her and accompanied to the doctor where we watched our son-to-be on the sonogram.  We had already named the child Nathaniel, had bought him clothes and baby essentials, and informed all our families and friends that we would soon be parents.  We kept a copy of his sonogram on the refrigerator, gazing at it with wonder and joy.  Two days before the birth, a lawyer called and told us that the birth mother had decided to give the child to another couple--his clients.  We found out later that this other couple, with the aid of this unethical attorney, had offered the mother $20,000 for the child and she accepted.  Kathryn was visibly shaken by this devastating turn of events.  She encouraged Frank and me to have a ceremony in our yard during which we set fire to the sonogram and said good-bye to Nathaniel.  The act of burning the picture, during which we wept and hugged, provided a sense of finality--a primitive and palpable ritual of exorcising our dream child.           

            Kathryn even took thought for my future, encouraging me to plan for my life alone should Frank die.  I had no doubt that, aside from our professional relationship, she loved me—dare I say it?—like a mother.  Two nights after her murder I composed a seven-page list of advice she had given me over the years, in hopes of keeping her alive in spirit:  Keep the end goal in sight and don’t be thrown off by small obstacles; avoid people who were negative or who demanded too much of me emotionally; plan social activities well ahead of the weekend so that I could keep a forward momentum going and not get bored; accept that people, including myself, were fallible, but still worthy of love, explore the artistic side of life to counter the tedium of my middle-management position in civil service.

            As much as I loved her in return, I was fully aware that she was not perfect. She was especially touchy about any personal questions.  When I asked if she had children, she said, “No, I have no living children.”  Her reaction to this probing question made it clear we weren’t going to be buddies, although I fantasized about that possibility—lunch, a movie, a museum visit—with more excitement than I would have about a possible lover.  Several times, especially during my last year with her, a year during which I stopped drinking entirely, lost fifty pounds, and decided to retire, she would almost fall asleep while I was talking.  I told my husband that I was going to say to her, “Maybe I’ll come back another time after you’ve had a nap.”  In truth, I felt “cured” since my problems were so boring that they lulled my own shrink into a semi-conscious state.

            As anxious as I was about attending Kathryn’s wake and funeral two days after the murder, I actually looked forward to learning more about the woman who had known my deepest secrets, but about whom I knew practically nothing.  I met Kathryn’s sisters and brothers and husband. One of her sisters held my extended hand in both of hers, and her resemblance to Kathryn made my eyes well up. Pictures were displayed of Kathryn as a child and young woman, and as a bride. Still reeling from the horror of her death, I was somewhat comforted to see her as a joyous young newlywed. Her husband was tall and well groomed, intellectual-looking with a slight tremor in his hands.  He welcomed all visitors with a smile, a hearty handshake, and an eagerness to talk.  He bantered with a group of people from Kathryn’s guitar group. When I introduced myself to him, he said, “Wow.  You’re one of the old ones.  I know from doing the banking and seeing your name on the checks.  Not that Kathryn ever told me about you,” he reassured me.  He told me that now that Kathryn was gone he didn’t know how he would remember to take his medication since she set up his pills each day and reminded him to take them.  I felt ashamed of ever having suspected him of murdering her.

             He asked if there were any questions I had about Kathryn that he could answer and I said I wanted to know her birthday.  He told me.  I realized much later that there was an element of jealousy in my feeling toward him, her siblings, her nieces and nephews, and her other patients. I was a small part of her existence while she was a huge part of mine. The reality was that the snow-globe world Kathryn and I lived in for fifty minutes every other week was gone. I would never again inhabit that safe and comforting microcosm in which I was special—the only person she was interested in.

            At the Mass the next day Kathryn’s best friend, a nun, walked arm in arm with Kathryn’s husband up to the front of the church.  The nun, smiling throughout, gave a speech about Kathryn’s contributions to the world culminating in, “Well done, Kathryn!” Everyone applauded. The nun’s unquestioning faith that Kathryn wasn’t dead, but in another place, comforted me.  For the first time in years, I experienced a scintilla of belief in an afterlife.

            But after the funeral I found myself growing angry with Kathryn.  I had once seen her crossing the street from her apartment to her office and I had been surprised as I watched her wrap her trench coat around her and gingerly step into the street, looking hesitant and wary.   As a former high school basketball player who openly disdained the “girly-girls” who screamed and covered their faces when a ball came at them, I was disappointed to see Kathryn seem so tentative and unassertive.  I wanted her to be as fit physically as I felt her to be emotionally.           

            This feeling of disappointment came back strongly when I imagined over and over what had happened to her that terrible night.  And the more I thought about it, the angrier I became. I kept asking myself why she didn’t throw her laptop at him, why she didn’t pick up the damned table or lamp and smash him with it, why she didn’t kick him in the crotch, break his nose, throw every book on her shelves at him, her murderer.  Why didn’t she have a panic button, a guard dog, a gun, a taser?  Why did she let him in?  Why was she working so late?  Why was she so naïve, so unguarded, so stupid? Why couldn’t she have been as tough and resourceful when physically threatened as I imagined I would have been?

            And how could someone so perceptive about people not immediately recognize the madman for what he was?  Why would she let a stranger, especially one dragging a heavy suitcase, into her office? The newspapers reported that she spent twenty minutes with David Tarloff before she was attacked. I wanted to know what they talked about.  What was she thinking?

            Her violent end begat violence in me.  I played and replayed images of me barging into the room in time to save Kathryn from the murderer and busting him over the head with a typewriter, or swinging a crowbar at his legs, or smashing his head with a brick.  If I had been there I would have killed this bastard, I thought, and then I started feeling guilty that I hadn’t been able to help Kathryn.  At the same time the thought that I could have been in that waiting room with the murderer froze me with fear.  And so, I skidded back and forth, back and forth between heroic revenge fantasies and abject terror.

            Once David Tarloff was arrested in Queens, my feelings began to change yet again.  I, along with many others, had assumed that a disgruntled patient had killed Kathryn.  When it was revealed that the murderer was a psychotic off his medication, who didn’t even know Kathryn, I felt strangely relieved.  I’m not sure whey it was comforting to learn that Mr. Tarloff had come to Kathryn’s office building that night to rob her office neighbor Dr. Shinbach, the shrink who had had him institutionalized years before.  He had been arrested just three weeks earlier for assaulting a security officer in his mother’s nursing home when the guard refused to let him sleep in the same bed as his mother.  With the money he stole from Dr. Shinbach, Mr. Tarloff planned to free his mother from the nursing home and take her to Hawaii.  That explained the women’s clothes and the adult diapers in his suitcase. Harming Kathryn was not part of his plan.

            I found it hard to be angry at a man who was so delusional, a man whose heartbroken and sorrowful father and brother, apologized to the Faughey family, saying that they had spent decades trying to get Mr. Tarloff permanently institutionalized, only to see him released time and again from psychiatric hospitals.  This left me to ponder what was worse—having a beloved friend murdered in such a grisly manner, or having a son who was capable of doing such an appalling thing.  Their agony was even greater than mine.

                        Besides the grief that I am still experiencing, my fear of being attacked has grown even stronger.  Before I answer the door at home I reach for a weapon—a screwdriver, a wrench, a knife—anything dangerous-looking to hold in my hand.  I am easily startled by waiters who come up behind me to pour coffee, or people who open a door quickly, or strangers who seem to be walking straight at me on the street.  My husband calls ahead to warn me that he is coming up the stairs, because if he doesn’t, I jump and scream at the sight of him.  Whenever I take a shower I lock the bathroom door even if I know Frank is the only other person in the house. I find it hard to fall asleep at night, and often feel depressed about living in a world in which such random violence can occur.

            I have a new therapist. When I walk down the hallway to her office, I am always wary of the possibility that someone is coming up from the basement to murder me.  If, when sitting in her office, I hear a noise outside the door, I jump. The therapist once assured me that the door was locked, only to discover that it had been open all the time.  My new therapist, Catherine, and I have spent hours talking about Kathryn.   She is kind, empathetic, and supportive. Her own sorrow concerning Kathryn, whom she did not know personally, touched me.  Catherine told me the entire psychotherapeutic community was frightened and saddened by the murder of one of their own. We have picked up therapy from where I left off with Kathryn to my satisfaction and relief.            

            Kathryn will never be far from my mind.  When I see a tall redheaded woman, for an exciting split second I imagine it’s Kathryn, and then I am brought back to the truth.  What makes all this even harder is that I feel on some level unentitled to my grief.  People expect you to mourn a life partner or a close relative or an old friend.  But, except for my husband and my current therapist, there is no one who knows the depth of my mourning for the loss of my dear counselor. This is my own private bereavement, and it seems to go on and on without end.

            I will be attending the trial of David Tarloff because I hope to gain closure on Kathryn’s death by witnessing the testimony of the man who killed her. I want to look into his face and listen to his voice and try, for the hundredth time, to understand what happened that terrible night and why.