Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Events described herein are products of the Narrator’s—Speaker’s—Whatever’s—imagination. Any resemblance to factual incidents, places, or persons (real or deceased) is purely coincidental. Besides this, any relationships between consecutively narrated events is also purely coincidental. Causality, whether by natural or supernatural means, is neither expressed nor implied.
The evidence will show that the dynamics culminating famously in the “Poop-Dick Incident” of Spring 2005 had in fact manifested with the advent of Ms. Rilke’s remarked-upon liaison with a married man, the father of her own student, as early as two years previously:
Flashback to November 2003 (Freshman Autumn, Simultaneous To The Events Described In Episode 2)
That autumn, the N/S/W first became aware of Ms. Rilke’s existence as the teacher who taught all the sections of Advanced English to juniors. She also had a single section of regular track freshman, that year. He took Advanced Freshman English with Mrs. Gray, so wouldn’t expect to see Ms. Rilke in class for two more years.
One day at lunch in the cafeteria—when the round tables had unfolded and rolled into the central expanse, as the light shone down an ethereal silver-gray through the overhead skylight—he decided on a whim that he wanted an explanation of the lyrics for Simon & Garfunkel’s oldies classic, “Mrs. Robinson.” The quickest way to get that, he supposed, would be to buttonhole the nearest over-forty teacher on lunch monitor duty.
Just then, that happened to be Rachel Rafaële Rilke.
He actually had never spoken to her directly. But he knew of her because one of the other freshmen sitting at his table had her for English B. That was all it took for him to go up, introduce himself—she gave him a canny sphinx-like half-smile, without revealing any teeth, as she took his hand.
Without mincing words, he requested she explain “Mrs. Robinson.”
As a child, listening to his mother’s Simon and Garfunkel LP, the images conjured by lines like “put it in your pantry with your cupcakes” evoked to him a kindly cupcake-baking grandmotherly old woman as the Mrs. Robinson to whom the song was addressed. That was hard to square with the bitterly self-composed Mrs. Robinson he had encountered during his first viewing of The Graduate the summer before he began as a freshman at the Catholic high school.
Such was his first interaction with Rachel Rilke. Impressed by his assertiveness, unusual for a ninth grader, she bridged the gap between the grandmotherly doyenne of his childhood perceptions, and the factually jaded Mrs. Robinson of fiction and film. Helping her “learn to help [herself]” and the behests to “stroll around the grounds” to set self at ease, Ms. Rilke informed him, referred to Mrs. Robinson checking into an Alcoholics Anonymous rehab center. The cupcake-laden pantry was the hiding place for her alcohol stash. Joe DiMaggio represented the idylls and idols of childhood—as did perhaps his, the N/S/W’s own mistaken perception of the grandmotherly Robinson dame.
He thanked Ms. Rilke politely. She nodded with the same half-smile, and turned away.
Later that autumn, on an evening of growing darkness and cold, Ms. Rilke would leave school remembering a similar night, five years earlier.
She daydreamed about it as she drove.
That evening in 1997, she had left school to have, she told herself, one drink with the father of one of her juniors. It was to commiserate about the shared experience they were both having, of caring for a difficult family member plagued by cancer. A series of unexpectedly long conversations during parent-teacher conference night had revealed the parallel medical crises they were both going through that autumn.
That night in 1997, at the bar, one drink quickly became another. And another. And another. So many. She had lost count. Her drinking companion was equally sloshed. He had also lost count, when she asked if he remembered, laughing through cheeks flushed and rosy. He didn’t remember.
By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation, they passed together in a splintered second from the time when it was too soon to struggle, to the time when it was too late. The stumbling realization dawned on both of them at the same time, that they both wanted very much to be somewhere alone together, on the double. The desire they both suddenly perceived as a need, independent of conscious choice, became suddenly overwhelming.
It was fate. Everything happens for a reason.
Or maybe, more accurately, everything gets remembered for a reason.
They knew they shouldn’t—but they did—move together out to the car she had driven them to the bar in. Stumbling, and slipping slightly on the ice, and then laughing floridly at how closely either of them had evaded bodily injury or possibly death on the ice.
She put the ignition in the key. The black KIA Soul revved up and soared through the darkness.
She would later on reflect—after many other things had come to pass, that a good many others besides her own self were sorry to have had come so—that for several minutes she honestly believed driving under the influence was nowhere near as difficult as it was made out to be.
The laws were clearly misbegotten, written by fun-hating prudes.
Even with the drinking companion kissing her neck and pawing at her breast, even through the layers of her late-autumn coat layers, she drove with the same confidence she brought to her best lectures for students in class each day (including his oldest daughter, to whom Lily was a younger sibling) and her chairing of meetings for other teachers and administrators, all of whom inevitably bent to her own will, at the curious institution that had been her employer, by then, for twelve years.
She shifted onto the freeway. Piece of cake.
Just then, she felt special and powerful. She was flying. They were flying. The winter wind was whistling around her car in the darkness, with her dashing and drunk companion.
Clouds were rolling across the Moon.
So confidently did she drive, that it did not even occur to her that in her drunkenness, she had shifted onto the wrong side of the freeway.
Not, that is, until she saw the first car fly straight at her headlights and swerve out of the way in just the nick of time to avoid a head-on collision.
And then—another! And another! And another! So many.
Each swerve in just the nick of time was a small miracle. It had to be.
She was so rattled, so utterly shocked by the consequences of her own poor decisionmaking, unfolding second to second, that the seconds seemed to stretch out into infinity and forever, like a rocket ascending into space.
All she knew, by the time she somehow managed to get onto an off-ramp avoiding other cars, driving on the shoulder of the road, was that the very last car that had swerved out of the way to avoid crashing into her seemed to be driven by a young-looking mother, with a child in the passenger’s seat who weirdly reminded her of the face of Lily, her own student, whose married father was now seated at Rachel’s side, drunk and pawing at her for an anticipated session of pleasures unclothed beneath a warm bedcover, on a windy night of Wisconsin autumn.
The passion of their lovemaking, when it finally happened, was amplified by the reverberating drunken thrill of having narrowly averted bodily injury or death to either themselves or to a driver or passenger of any of the several cars that had swerved to avoid them driving the wrong way on the freeway, earlier.
Afterward, having parted company, both Rachel Rilke and her companion would each utter a private, silent and reverent promise, soon to be broken, that that encounter would be a one-time thing. They had sex again. And again. And again. With, or without alcohol loosening inhibitions over the successive times. They cared for each other, understood each other. They were—dare she even think it aloud after years of cynicism—In Love. It just happened.
So she told herself.
During the consequent relationship, she would always recall that night as their first “date,” if they could be said to have one. It was an accident! Or almost one, technically. But for the entirety of the years she and her boyfriend were together, she could never summon up the courage, could never quell the shame and fear that resulted from directly trying to remember what happened, to ask him straight out, if he also saw that as their “first date.”
Because of this, during the years that their relationship ran its course—and it would indeed last years—they never celebrated an anniversary. Each participant was too ashamed to ask the other one to tell the truth.
The memory of that young mother and the child in that last car that came flying at them in the darkness and swerved out of the way in just the nick of time would haunt Rachel Rafaële Rilke during the years that followed, for more than one reason.
Her mind jolted suddenly back to the present evening of 2003.
The reason? she had nearly hit another car on the freeway, again.
Instinctively she checked to make sure she was driving the correct direction, even though she knew she had not imbibed.
The driver who swerved out of the way this time had locked eyes with her for a split second: she felt sure—had she just imagined it? was it just the memory of that mother and child years earlier??—this driver was a boy she knew from the Catholic high school, maybe named Brayden.
She had seen him in the cafeteria at lunch. She had taught his sister in class two years previously. Or was it him?
Everything gets remembered for a reason.
It was the Monday morning after All Souls’ Day, 2002.
The Narrator—Speaker— Whatever—had attended the Drama Club’s autumn play the previous Thursday, and enjoyed it enough to return to the Saturday night performance. All Souls’ Day was Saturday that year.
The second bell had just rung throughout the Catholic high school. Everybody sat in their seats in class in first period, waiting for what always came next: Morning Prayer, without fail.
But that November morning, instead a slightly worried-sounding voice resounded throughout the school instead:
“All students, please report with your classroom teachers to the auditorium. We are having a special assembly to make an announcement. Immediately, please.”
In the auditorium, Mr. Schechter the school head, stood to face the hundreds of students looking in his direction.
“It is my sad duty to inform all of you,” he began, “that this last weekend, your classmate Brayden Perzik was killed in a car accident, just past midnight on Friday night. I’ve known Brayden for a long time. He was a wonderful young man, who showed great promise. But there were some things he could certainly have done differently. Could have done better. He drank,”—here, Mr. Schechter paused to let the silence ring out for a second. “The first responders at the scene of the collision discovered he had been driving 65 miles per hour on the wrong side of the freeway when he hit the other car driving exactly that same speed in the right direction. Please students,” he concluded earnestly, “let this death which never should have happened be a lesson to all of you. Innocent people are currently in body casts, in critical conditions, because of a poorly made choice about alcohol. Make Good Choices.”
Sitting among the other freshmen, the N/S/W had no recollection of Brayden, except that he had seen the senior boy parody Mickey Mouse’s turn from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to the 80s dance tune “Hey Mickey,” in a public performance directed by Mrs. Gray, during a lunch period just the previous week.
Like the autumn play he had just watched the previous Thursday, that performance— Brayden’s unwitting final turn onstage—had been part of the run-up to the Catholic Feasts of All Saints and All Souls’.
Flashback to September 2003 (Sophomore Autumn, Occurring Shortly Before The Events Described In Episode 4, And Seven Months Prior To Episode 3)
Disappointment haunted the school, that year.
It visited him the week after 9/11, because Mrs. Worden and Mrs. Wright rejected his second year audition for show choir, the training ensemble for leads in their musical productions. Despite having had small soloes in Les Miz the previous year, his dancing skills did not meet Worden’s exacting standards. He was crushed.
Crushed did not begin to describe the feeling of the student body, the second of the three times during his four years when Morning Prayer over the intercom got postponed at the start of the day, one morning late in September.
“All students, please report with your classroom teachers to the auditorium. We are having a special assembly to make an announcement. Immediately, please.”
This time, Mr. Schechter was nowhere in sight.
Instead, the president of the school board told the students that Mr. Schechter had fled the school because male alumni from thirty years earlier had made allegations through private attorneys, that he had “had inappropriate sexual contact with” them as underage students, when he coached track at one of the school’s three precursors, an all-boys’ institution. He did not want to drag that curious institution through the messy public spectacle that answering the charges in court would have entailed.
“Mr. Schechter asked me to convey to all of you that he wishes all of you the best, and that although this is a setback, to please not let it interfere with all your abilities to have the best academic year you’ve yet had, because he knows you’re all more than capable.”
The shock, indignation, and rippling fear that rolled through the auditorium at that moment was palpable. It reverberated off the walls, hovered over heads of students and grownups alike, and rose higher to curl around the catwalks traversing the ceiling, and thence to shake loose dust that previously only Mrs. Worden’s screams had vexed to nightmarish awakening.
The now-ex-head had been a blood relative of at least a quarter of the student body. Thus the initial reaction of many was to disbelieve the charges, insist they must have been concocted by ruthless attention-seekers.
Michael Schechter, if you are wondering, was one of those rare individuals who gave the impression of total attention and pure compassion whenever he spoke to people. That was his default setting. You could hate the man before you met him, hate him just the same afterward, but while you spoke to him—you loved the guy despite yourself, because inevitably he made you feel like the only person in the room. On any given year, he knew the name and class schedule of every single student out of the 815 populating his school, and could greet any of them by name passing in the hall, and have a thoughtful conversation with any of them on the spot, about their classes and activities.
The last conversation the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—had with Mr. Schechter before the alums surfaced with their attorneys, the head had asked him to write a thank you note describing his freshman year highlights for one of the anonymous donors whose generosity had made his subsidies at the Catholic high school possible.
He never turned that thank you note in, because Mr. Schechter summarily departed before there was a chance to follow up.
Perhaps it was just as well that the thank you note never materialized.
And the way that we know this is true is because it was whispered behind many hands of previous generations of alums, that in the past, subsidized male students had been asked to furnish considerably more than thank you notes to earn their keep. Previous heads of the school—now disgraced in the eyes of many, though still raised on high by the Diocese, to shine in pride and robes of honor—had personally transported those boys on weekends and even school holidays, to the Abbey of Saint Frideswide’s, on the other side of that faraway and mysterious city by the bay, somewhere in Northeastern Wisconsin.
It was there that those boys reputedly earned their keep at the most curious institution that was the Catholic high school, by performing—physical labor—of one type or another—for the priestly vestures of that holy Abbey.
Liberties in this regard might or might not have been taken by priests who preceded the unmarried Michael Schechter in wielding authority and influence over the region’s Catholic schools, through the shadowy reaches of the Friswithian Order, and more distantly, the Diocese.
It was known, through many whispered conversations, behind many hands, that up to and including the local Sheriff’s Department, circuit courts of justice, and local press outlets, had proven complicit, in maintaining local Catholic institutions’ good name with the community they claimed to serve in good faith.
This might or might not have included the execution of measures so extraordinary as to be diabolical—the better to silence those who might have raised a justified objection to the precise nature of physical labor that subsidized students were sometimes called upon to perform, to show proper gratitude and deference for their endowed tuition rates at the Catholic high school.
Why couldn’t they just be grateful, and leave it at that?
That was what some voices, near the highest reaches of the Diocesan chain of command, seemed to believe.
And the way that we know this is true is because it may or may not be a coincidence that the topmost point of that mysterious city’s skyline is in fact the twin towers of the Cathedral. Maybe even the heads of the courts and law enforcement and local press who also occupy that skyline know where the fuck the seat of power truly still lies, somewhere by a bay, in Northeastern Wisconsin.
Nearly all the days were still.
Maybe.
But somewhere higher still—nobody knows where—Our Lady Queen of Angels sees these things done in her own holy name, and weeps silently.
But none of this occurred to the Narrator—Speaker—Whatever—when he passively omitted to turn in the thank you note Mr. Schechter has asked him for, before suddenly fleeing the school because of alleged misconduct.
Except for that moment, in the auditorium, in September 2003.
Until that moment, he had never even had reason to think of Mr. Schechter in sexual terms, let alone gay terms—although on reflection, there must have been whispers long before those allegations removed all doubt from the minds of many: he was, after all, a single man in his 50s, and lacking the shadowy protection that a priestly vesture would have afforded him in such a circumstance, as the percipient reader has learned.
Well, perhaps only almost never. Once, the previous year, at special study hall the night before finals, he had walked down the hall side by side with Mr. Schechter, musing on the outcomes of his first semester courses. They both spoke while looking ahead, but for a fleeting instant, he glanced subtly to Mr. Schechter’s face in profile. So blandly authoritative and devoid of innuendo, it was only at that moment that it suddenly dawned on the boy that his head was very handsome for a man in his mid50s. Why hadn’t he ever married? The N/S/W was still naïve enough to consider every explanation except for the most obvious, and incidentally correct, one.
It was then of a sudden that Michael Schechter became mysterious and lovely. In moments like those, the Catholic high school seemed most curious, haunted from within, it always seemed, by a contrast of creeping shadows and dazzling sunlight, or during the long and fearsome Wisconsin winters, an ethereal gray northern light.
Now, with Mr. Schechter in the flesh gone, that flesh, that man, the ghost of his memory walking the halls, seemed lovelier than ever.
In the middle of November, that same autumn, Morning Prayer was given over the intercom by Miss Lotti the religion teacher, in a quavering unnerving voice, because Ms. Rilke’s mother had died the previous day. Lotti read the condolence prayer for Ms. Rilke, who was absent that day to attend the funeral at a church across town called Our Lady Queen of Angels.
When Ms. Rilke was back in school a day or two later, Harriet Elizabeth Johnson Gray went to see if she was in her classroom. Their conversations in the teachers’ lounge had grown more frequent over the last year or two.
Mrs. Gray knew, for example, that Rachel Rilke had gone on the official record in the lounge, as loving Jack Fredricksen deeply, but resolute in her unwillingness to marry him, even after the destruction of his marriage to a woman, the mother of his own four children, dying of brain cancer, even if Rachel’s perhaps untoward advent as the proverbial “other woman” had expedited the decay of that colossal wreck.
Boundless and bare must be Rachel’s feelings in this regard: to have to deal with the death of her own mother, also from cancer, the very same autumn!
Poor dear Rachel.
So mused Mrs. Gray to herself, with perhaps unconsciously sublimated purpose.
Personal condolences were clearly in order.
She found Ms. Rilke’s large dull box-like room unlocked.
The door was open.
Its mistress was present, answering emails at her desk. Her keys were in her pocket. Curiously exacting about the symbols and rituals that governed the spaces encompassed by her classroom door, she carried them on her person at all times.
“Rachel I was so sorry to hear about your mother. If there’s anything you need, just give me a holler. I’m right around the corner, you know.”
Somewhere in the background, a heating vent whirred.
An eerie stillness descended.
Nearly all the days were still.
“You know, Harriet, you don’t need to talk to me at all for the rest of the year. You don’t even need to say hi if we pass in the halls. If it’s all the same to you. Thank you.”