Double Deuce

CHAPTER 18

Erin Macklin came to my office at about 9:30 in the evening. She had thick dark hair cut short and salted with a touch of gray. Her features were even. Her makeup was understated but careful. She wore big horn-rimmed glasses, a string of big pearls, matching pearl earrings, a black suit, and a white blouse with the collar points worn out over the lapels of the suit. Her shoes were black, with medium heels. Dress for success. She looked around my office, located the customer’s chair, and sat in it.

“I am here,” she said, “because two people I know tell me Susan Silverman is to be trusted, and Susan Silverman says you can be trusted.”

“One can’t be too careful,” I said.

“I also know a woman named Iris Milford who says she knew you nearly twenty years ago, and, at least at that time, you could leap tall buildings at a single bound.”

“Iris exaggerates a little,” I said becomingly. “When I knew her she was a student. How is she?”

“She has stayed in the community,” Erin Macklin said. “She has made a difference.”

“She seemed like she might,” I said.

“You and another man are attempting to deal with the Hobart Street Raiders,” she said.

“Actually,” I said, “we are dealing with them.”

“And Susan told me that you would like to know what I know about the gangs.”

“Yes,” I said. “But first I’d probably like to know a little about you.”

“I was about to say the same thing,” Erin Macklin said. “You first.”

“I used to be a fighter. I used to be a cop. Now I am a private detective,” I said. “I read a lot. I love Susan.”

I paused for a moment thinking about it.

“The list,” I said, “is probably in reverse order.”

“A romantic,” she said. “You don’t look it.” I nodded.

“The man you are working with?”

“My friend,” I said.

“Nothing more?”

“Lots more, but most of it I don’t know.”

“He’s black,” she said.

“Yes.”

We were quiet while she looked at me. There was no challenge in the look, and the silence seemed to embarrass neither of us.

“I used to be a nun,” she said. “Now I am a teacher at the Marcus Garvey Middle School on Cardinal Road. I teach a course titled the History of Contemporary America. When I began we had no books, no paper, no pencils, no chalk for the blackboard, no maps. This made for innovation. I started by telling them stories, and then by getting them to talk about the things that they had to talk about. And when what they said didn’t shock me, and I didn’t dash for the dean of discipline, they told me more about the things they knew. The course is now a kind of seminar on life for fourteen-year-old black children in the ghetto.”

“Any books yet?”

“Yes. I bought them books,” she said. “But they won’t read them much. Hard to find books that have anything to do with them.”

“The March of Democracy is not persuasive,” I said.

She almost smiled.

“No,” she said. “It is not persuasive.”

She paused again, without discomfort, and looked at me some more. Her eyes were very calm and her gaze was steady.

“I used to work in day care, and we’d try to test some of the kids when they came in. The test required them, among other things, to draw with crayons. When we gave them to the kids they didn’t know what the crayons were. Several tried to eat them.”

“The test was constructed for white kids,” I said.

“The test was constructed for middle-class kids,” she said. “The basal reader family.”

“Mom, Dad, Dick, and Jane,” I said.

“And Spot,” she said. “And the green tree.”

“You and God have a lovers’ quarrel?” I said. Again she almost smiled.

“Gracious,” she said. “A literate private eye.”

“Anything’s possible,” I said.

“No. I had no quarrel with God. He just began to seem irrelevant. I could find no sign of Him in these kids’ lives. And the kids’ lives became more important to me than He did.”

“The ways of the Lord,” I said, “are often dark, but never pleasant.”

“Adler?”

“Theodor Reik, I think.”

She nodded.

“It also became apparent to me that they needed more than I could give them in class. So I stayed after school for them and then I began going out into the streets for them. Now I’m there after school until I get too sleepy, four or five days a week. I came from there now.”

“Dangerous?” I said.

“Yes.”

“But you get along.”

“Yes.”

“Is being white a handicap?”

She did smile. “Kids say I’m beige. Getting beiger.”

“Save many?” I said.

“No.”

“Worth the try,” I said.

“One is worth the try,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You understand that, don’t you?” she said.

“Yes.”

She nodded several times, sort of encouragingly. She leaned back a little in her chair, and crossed her legs, and automatically smoothed her skirt over her knees. I liked her legs. I wondered for a moment if there would ever be an occasion, no matter how serious, no matter who the woman, when I would not make a quick evaluation when a woman crossed her legs. I concluded that there would never be such an occasion, and also that it was a fact best kept to myself.

“A while back the state decided to train some women to work with the kids in the ghetto. The training was mainly in self-effacement. Don’t wear jewelry, don’t bring a purse, don’t wear makeup; move gingerly on the street, don’t make eye contact. Be as peripheral as possible.”

She shook her head sadly.

“If I behaved that way I’d get nowhere. I make eye contact. I say hi. Not to do that is to dis them. If you dis them they retaliate.”

“Dis as in disrespect,” I said.

“Yes. The thing is that, to the people training the women, these kids were a hypothesis. They didn’t know them. Everything is like that. It’s theory imposed on a situation, rather than facts derived from it. You understand?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s deductive, and life is essentially inductive. Happens everywhere.”

“But here, with these kids, when it happens it’s lethal. They are almost lost anyway. You can’t afford the luxury of theory. You have to know.”

“And you know,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “I know. I’m out there every day, alone, on my own, without a theory. I listen, I watch. I work at it. I don’t have an agenda. I don’t have some vision of what the truth ought to be.”

She was alive with the intensity of her commitment.

“Nobody knows,” she said. “Nobody knows what those kids know, and until you do, and you’re there with them, you can’t do anything but try to contain them.” She paused and stared past me out the dark window.

“Had one of my kids on probation,” she said. “Juvie judge gave him a nine P.M. curfew and he kept missing it. There was a drug dealer, used to work the corner by the kid’s house every night. So I got him to keep an eye on the kid, and every night he’d make sure the kid was in by nine.”

She smiled. “You got to know,” she said.

“And if you do know,” I said, “and you are there, how many can you save?”

She took in a long slow breath and let it through her nose.

“A few,” she said.

The overhead light was on, as well as my desk lamp, and the room was quite harsh in the flat light of it. I had the window cracked open behind me, and there was enough traffic on Berkeley and Boylston streets to make a sporadic background noise. But my building was empty except for me, and Erin Macklin, and its silence seemed to overwhelm the occasional traffic.