Day 180 - A Secret in the Heartland

Sharon put down the book, recognizing that emotions were choking her up. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Laughter would be aimed at herself for being so naive. Crying would be for any of her classmates or students of other classes who had gone through the same experiences as the author of the book she had just finished reading. But maybe he was the only one, she thought, almost hopefully, even though her real hope was that no child would ever have to experience predatory actions from adults, especially from a teacher.

The book was a novel, but the author indicated it was based on events from his childhood. In the epilogue, he spelled out what happened, without naming real people, of course. But Sharon knew the teacher was Mr. C, her favorite elementary school teacher.

Sharon had felt she was special to Mr. C, but not in any shameful way. She thought Mr. C considered every student in his class special. She knew that she had considered Mr. C special, because he had taken the time to verify that Sharon's inconsistent grades were not the result of not knowing the material. It was because Sharon needed glasses. Whenever Mr C handed out problems to solve or tests on paper, Sharon got most of the answers right. She tried so hard to make no mistakes and Mr C had already tried to console her when tears filled her eyes whenever her grades weren't what she expected. It had always been that way. Tears came all too easily for Sharon, the source for the nickname she had had throughout elementary school and that followed her, behind her back, of course, into junior high school: Cry Baby. Mr C told her that her ability to bring tears to her eyes so easily might be a talent she could develop later in life if she decided to try acting. Actors need to be able to display all emotions at any time. Mr. C was the first teacher to give her encouragement, not to cry, but to see her ability to bring up emotions so easily, or more precisely her need to develop the ability to control her emotions for the right moment, instead of just telling her to stop it, to grow up and quit behaving like a baby. It was no wonder her classmates picked out the nickname Cry Baby for her. Most of her teachers thought she was acting like a baby, too.

One reason Sharon's grades disappointed her was that when Mr. C wrote the problems or questions on the board, Sharon couldn't always see them clearly enough. If the problem involved words, she could figure out what she couldn't see by what she could see, but when the problems involved numbers, she couldn't always figure out what the shapes were by what was around them. So she made mistakes, lots of mistakes. Fourth grade was when multiplication and division were introduced, so there were lots of number problems to solve.

One day as class was about to be dismissed, Mr. C asked Sharon to stay after class. Once the rest of the students had left, Mr. C told Sharon to stay in the back of the room while he walked to the front and raised one of the maps that covered a section of the blackboard. On the board were several arithmetic problems. These were all completed, so it wasn't like a test. But the problems were a mixture of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Multiplication and division had been difficult for Sharon and the plus sign for addition looked so much like the times and division signs to her from the back of the room. Mr. C asked her to read the problems. She had to guess a lot and she admitted that as she read, telling Mr. C that because she could see one of the top numbers and the bottom number, she could figure out the other number and whether the problem was addition or multiplication because she could figure it out by either subtracting or dividing.

After Sharon completed reading the problems to Mr. C, he gave her a note to take home to her parents. He told her the note said he thought she needed glasses and suggested that her parents have her eyes tested.

Sharon's mother was surprised when she read the note because she knew the school gave eye tests each year and none of those who tested children's eyes had indicated Sharon's vision needed correcting. But no one had ever asked Sharon if she understood what the eye test was for. She knew it was a test, so it was just one more time when she wanted to give all the right answers. Sharon didn't remember if she did anything to make sure she answered correctly, but as an adult, she believes she just might have done so. The eye chart in elementary school wasn't like the one in optometrists' offices. The eye chart in the school only had the letter E on it. Sometimes the E was correct, sometimes it was backward, sometimes it was lying on it's back, and sometimes it was standing on its three arms. Students were supposed to point in the direction the arms were pointing.

When Sharon had her eyes tested in a doctor's office, it was clear that she needed glasses. The day after her exam, she told Mr. C that she was getting glasses and asked him not to tell anyone in the class. She wanted it to be a surprise when she arrived in school the next week wearing her glasses.

In addition to being able to see everything written on the board with her glasses, Sharon noticed that people's faces no longer looked fuzzy. She realized that for at least the past year she had been seeing everyone with two noses until they were close enough for her to recognize. This inability to recognize faces at a distance may have contributed to her feeling that people were ignoring her. Her classmates probably had thought she was ignoring them since she didn't say "Hi" to anyone unless they were right next to her.

Years later, when Sharon was in high school, Mr. C had been her Sunday School teacher. Some of the shine of her admiration of him was tarnished that year as she discovered Mr. C opposed the integration of schools all at once. He proposed that the schools should be integrated one grade at a time, beginning with first grade and then adding a grade each year, giving everyone time to adjust gradually. The need for integration and bussing children across town was not an issue in Sharon's home town so there didn't appear to be any immediate impact of the desegregation of schools and no children in her town were going to have to be bussed to a school any further from their homes than was necessary already. But Sharon and her classmates all felt that it was important for all children to get a good education and if that meant children needed to ride a bus to school so that all the schools would provide equal education to all children, they agreed it was the right thing to do. But Mr. C objected.

Sharon began at that point to see Mr. C as more like all other adults than as the special teacher he had been to her in the fourth grade. But he remained one of her favorite teachers because of what he had done for her so many years before.

But now, five years after Mr. C's death at 82 years old, she learned that at least one of Mr. C's students saw a side of Mr. C that Sharon couldn't have imagined all those years ago, even when Sharon's mother told her after Mr. C had left the school district and moved out of town with his new wife that there were some ugly rumors about the reason for his departure. In fact, Sharon thought the reason for his departure was that the marriage was troubled and any talk of divorce among the teaching staff at that time was scandalous. It was only now, after reading the work of fiction that developed characters along paths that the author might have taken himself as a result of Mr. C's inappropriate attention, that Sharon learned the real reason for his departure from her home town. Mr. C remained married for the 44 years until his death.

Sharon knew that her friends and family considered her to be a bleeding heart liberal - too ready to give someone the benefit of the doubt. Those whose political alignment differed significantly from hers saw the world in more sharply delineated black and white tones. Sharon saw shades of gray. But she couldn't stop remembering the good he did just because he also stepped astray. She thought about all the crime shows on TV about child predators and recalled the message of them that was repeated again and again that such people could never be cured. Once a predator, always a predator. Sharon wanted desperately to believe that was wrong, that at least one man who acted inappropriately with at least one 9-year-old child did find redemption though counseling and a 44-year-long marriage.

Sharon worried about what Mr. C's widow would feel when someone told her about the novel. Someone would eventually mention it to her. She must also be in her 80's by now. What would it feel like to have to confront an event from nearly half a decade ago at such an age?

Yet the author had lived the consequences of keeping a horrible secret for that same length of time. Would it have been better had he written the novel six years earlier, while Mr. C was still alive to respond? Or would that have just raised dust unnecessarily in a new town?

Did Sharon's mother act correctly in telling Sharon that her beloved teacher had left town under a cloud without telling her the details? Was it kinder to Sharon, to Mr. C, to Mr. C's wife, to leave the details out? Surely it seemed so at the time, but perhaps an open airing of the details would have encouraged the author and possibly other children who experienced the same inappropriate attention to confront the facts instead of surpressing them and turning them into ghosts to haunt them in the future.

What do you think?