“Today we’ll jump ahead and study deviance and crime,” Professor Gardiner announced.
While her Jake was no shrimp—he almost touched six feet—Gardiner topped him. Sun-colored hair hung in his eyes. When he spoke about pioneer social worker and suffrage activist Jane Addams and the settlement house she helped found, he sounded as reverent and impressed as Jake did when talking about Mickey Mantle and the Yankees.
Each quiet word Professor Gardiner uttered provided depth and clarity. Like Phoebe’s father, her professor understood the worth of being good. Unlike her mother, who shook her head in frustration and muttered “Enough!” when Phoebe’s father dropped a coin into the cup of every beggar they passed. (Though she knew her mother secretly admired Daddy for his generosity—as she did everything. To her mother, Daddy was a minor god.) Phoebe stared trancelike as Professor Gardiner lectured. His strong, straight white teeth impressed Phoebe the dentist’s daughter, and his blinding smile screamed fourth-generation American—he looked like a sexy portrait of Jesus.
She scribbled down the golden nuggets of information that Gardiner provided, resentful of others—mainly girls—who were similarly engaged in doing so. She wanted him to be only her discovery.
As he turned to the board to write down the key events tying the Industrial Revolution to changes in social conditions and crime, the door opened. A panting woman wearing a too-long skirt clutched a clipboard to her sizeable chest.
“Professor Gardiner.” She huffed out a teary breath before continuing. “I need you in the hall, please.”
Without a word of apology for the interruption, she left. Gardiner held up his hands, signifying “I don’t know,” followed her out, and the whispering began.
The girl next to Phoebe put a hand to her chest. “Maybe someone in his family died. Or it could be an emergency for one of us.”
Chills shot through Phoebe. What if her mother had suffered the heart attack that Mom always worried about? Or Daddy? Hadn’t her mother mentioned that his color seemed off yesterday? Work would drive him to an early grave, her mother always said. As Phoebe imagined her father in a hospital bed, or worse, Professor Gardiner returned, frowning and colorless.
“We have some bad news.”
A waiting silence came over the room.
“I . . .” He stopped and closed his eyes, pressing his fingers to his brow. “President Kennedy has been shot.”
A collective gasp sounded.
“He’s dead?” asked a rumpled young man from the back of the classroom.
“I’m afraid so.” Professor Gardiner walked to the front of his desk and sat on the worn oak. After a moment of quiet, he crossed his arms and spoke. “Mrs. Treisman—she’s our department secretary; such a kind woman—suggested I dismiss everyone. So you can be with your families. But—”
Competing thoughts swirled. Where were her parents? Deb? Was Jake at the fraternity house? Who had shot the president? Their handsome, brave President Kennedy. Had a war begun in America?
“—I don’t think you should go, though. Not immediately. Of course you want to be with your loved ones, but rushing to the subway might not be the best idea. Not right away. Certainly, if you need to go, do so. Only you know your family circumstances. But if you can, let’s take a few minutes together. Let this settle in.”
A few students stood, nodded at the class, and then left, books held tight.
“Anyone have a transistor radio?” Professor Gardiner asked after the door closed.
Two students raised their hands.
“Bring them up front. Let’s tune them to the same station, shall we?”
One guy, wide and hefty, the other built low to the ground, like a wrestler, carried their small radios to the professor. Phoebe’s nerves buzzed as the group set up the radios on the professor’s desk. Static-filled voices vied for primacy until they both hit the sound of Roger Mudd reporting from Washington.
With his voice came reality.
They wept as they listened. Professor Gardiner radiated calm. When Mary Alice Haverstraw actually started sobbing, gulping between ragged breaths, he patted her back, leaning down and whispering secret words.
She hated Mary Alice. In Phoebe’s family, her nickname would have been Sarah Bernhardt—the name her mother coined for whenever she thought Phoebe became too dramatic. After the hundredth time of being compared with some old actress, Phoebe had learned to hold her tongue. Hey, she’d love to weep like Mary Alice, but being a spectacle was a sin in the Beckett home. Any time that she or Deb whined, their mother reminded them that Daddy listened to people in awful pain all day, and he didn’t need more agony when he got home—as though their father treated leprosy, when, in fact, he injected Novocain the minute a patient opened his or her mouth.
After wiping away a few escaped tears, Phoebe caught Mr. Gardiner’s eye. Without a hint of her usual reserve, she blurted out her thoughts. “Losing President Kennedy feels like a lifeline slipped away,” she said. “Everything seems dark. Frightening. Who’s Lyndon Johnson, anyway?”
No one paid the vice president attention—at least no one who grew up in her Brooklyn neighborhood. A Catholic president was as close to a Jewish one as they’d get in their lifetime.
“President Kennedy represented a bridge to a world where you couldn’t imagine how your relatives might end up in an oven,” Phoebe continued, before realizing she sounded like a Sarah Bernhardt minus tears.
Professor Gardiner didn’t seem disgusted by Phoebe’s sentiments. He walked over and sat in a blessedly empty seat across from hers, squeezing her shoulder—not as good as getting the slow sympathetic pats Mary Alice got, but welcome. His cool hand comforted Phoebe. His long fingers could have conducted a symphony.
“You’re right,” he said. “John Fitzgerald Kennedy represents . . . represented a new generation. We will mourn, but the world won’t go backward. The changes the president brought will remain.”
A calm and measured cadence—with none of the staccato wise-guy sounds so endemic to Brooklyn boys—colored his words. His voice carried the sound of Manhattan private schools; a man who illuminated the workings of the world. “Your observation captures all our feelings, Phoebe. Thank you.”
Fear of the future mixed with a shameful shiver of delight at Professor Gardiner’s admiration. The possibility that he might think her wise brought a never-before-experienced satisfaction. By the time Professor Gardiner dismissed them, he and the sainted dead president had merged into one beacon of light.
? ? ?
Three weeks later, Phoebe handed in her last Introduction to Sociology paper before Christmas break, this one on “Corporate Responses to Poverty.”