But that change hadn’t come yet when Jesse told his teacher about his father getting mad over dinner. The teacher, Mrs. Benson, was fond of Jesse, who seemed to love being in school most days: he and a pod of other boys roved the schoolyard at recess, laughing and yelling at high volume; Jesse wasn’t a leader among this group, but a very faithful follower. The boys played rough: they pushed each other into a ditch at the edge of the playground over and over, and they played contact football. On most days, Jesse couldn’t get enough.
But lately he had started sitting out of recess entirely; he volunteered to stay in the classroom with his teacher, cleaning erasers and sharpening pencils. Mrs. Benson had taken a careful approach in trying to find out what was going on; she could see that he was bothered about something, and wanted to let him tell her about it at his own pace. So she waited a couple of days, and then a third, and then, on the fourth, when the day outside was too nice for a child to be cleaning erasers, she thought she’d prod as gently as she could, just to try to let him know she was there to listen if he needed.
Back in your day, you wrote, a teacher would have just minded her own business, because a teacher’s job was to get the kids to behave, and to get them ready for a world where they’d better behave. It wasn’t like that anymore, you said. Teachers take all kinds of interest in their kids. And that was mainly good, you said, but could also cause trouble. You didn’t want to sound like somebody always complaining about people who are just trying to make the world better. You weren’t like that. You were glad Jesse had somebody, one person, at least, trying to watch out for him when he was nine years old, someone who could see that something was wrong, and who cared enough to ask him why he didn’t want to go outside and play with his friends. Maybe one of the kids was being a bully, Mrs. Benson had wondered aloud, trying to leave a door open in case that was the one he needed.
“The only bully is my dad,” your son told his teacher, and then, she said, he began to cry, quietly but very bitterly, trying to hold his tears back, gritting his teeth until his face shook.
He stared off into space for a whole minute, Mrs. Benson said.
These days, a teacher would probably hug him, and maybe that would help, you thought, and maybe she did hug him, and left that part out of her story; you didn’t know.
But she did call you at your apartment and ask to arrange a meeting; and Michael was home when you took the call, and although you’d been careful, in answering her questions, to speak in a neutral voice and to be as vague as you could, he got suspicious, and the rest of the night was pretty bad.
You sent a note to school with Jesse the next day, saying that you could meet after school any day this week, and that would probably be the best way.
* * *
WHEN MRS. BENSON HAD COME AND GONE, you gathered your thoughts, you wrote to me in your letter, your letter which filled a nine-by-twelve manila envelope until its fold strained against the clasp and which reached me at my house in Milpitas, the house where my renovations were already under way. It had been a bad visit, for you, though you had tried to conceal your worry as best you could. You understood well enough that Jesse’s teacher wasn’t trying to be a busybody; that she cared for him, that she wanted to help if she could. But you resented her, too, for forcing you to see the situation through the eyes of the outside world—eyes through which you could only permit yourself to gaze as an occasional luxury, a sad indulgence, a hopeless sort of daydreaming that left you feeling worse than ever.
You tried to explain your position: that Jesse and his father got along very well most of the time, and that Jesse truly loved his daddy, even if, sometimes, Daddy was mean. But Michael was trying to get better, you’d said; it had been worse before; but this was a lie, and you suspected she could see it. You could call her to talk anytime you needed, she said as she rose from her chair, by which you took her to mean that she understood the full extent of how bad it was, and would help you if you ever decided that help was what you wanted.
When you got a moment alone with Jesse in his room, you tried, as gently as you could, to ask him about Mrs. Benson, and what their conversation at school had been like.
“She was asking why I didn’t want to play outside,” he offered, his head hung.
“And you told her about your dad?”
“She asked me did I have a bully,” he answered, and then he looked up, and seemed to search your eyes: For what? you wondered, then, and, when you remember it, now.
“Your daddy is trying the best he can,” you said.