Hummingbirds Read online

  A Novel

  Hummingbirds

  Joshua Gaylord

  for megan.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  September means pressed white shirts. New socks. School shoes. Rigidly…

  Chapter 2

  The girls move up the stairs in anxious and gaudy…

  Chapter 3

  Lonnie Abramson is the first person at the English department…

  Chapter 4

  Ted Hughes. That’s the name. Ted Hughes. As in Ted Hughes, the husband…

  Chapter 5

  Later that afternoon, when the clouds come down hard with…

  Chapter 6

  When the last bell of the day rings, there is…

  Chapter 7

  The next day, on the back stairs, Binhammer comes across…

  Chapter 8

  Two years before, in San Diego, California, a woman with…

  Chapter 9

  Two weeks later, back in New York, Binhammer sat on…

  Chapter 10

  October comes, and there are dry leaves everywhere. Like the…

  Chapter 11

  “It’s not that they shouldn’t go out together,” Liz Warren…

  Chapter 12

  For the Carmine-Casey girls, the curiously electrified interactions between Mr.Binhammer…

  Chapter 13

  For Binhammer, the arrival home has the quality of a…

  Chapter 14

  “I think I want to kiss your brother,” Dixie Doyle…

  Chapter 15

  Of all his responsibilities as a teacher of English—the report…

  Chapter 16

  When the romance between Dixie Doyle and Jeremy Notion peters…

  Chapter 17

  “Everything’s different now,” the girl says. She’s got a handful…

  Chapter 18

  Mr. Pratt, the drama teacher, doesn’t understand girls, so he likes…

  Chapter 19

  After his conversation with Dixie Doyle, Binhammer begins to suspect…

  Chapter 20

  Every time Mrs. Mayhew wants to see Binhammer in her office,…

  Chapter 21

  “You know what your problem is?” Binhammer says. “You don’t…

  Chapter 22

  During the days that Binhammer is out of town, Liz…

  Chapter 23

  During the winter, the courtyard of Carmine-Casey is barren and…

  Chapter 24

  She remembers him the way he used to be, the…

  Chapter 25

  It is a bitter cold Friday night the second week…

  Chapter 26

  Once Ted Hughes is gone, Sibyl turns to face her empty…

  Chapter 27

  It is said now among the girls of Carmine-Casey that…

  Chapter 28

  “Seventy-five years ago—” Mrs. Mayhew begins and then waits for the…

  Chapter 29

  It is the last day of school before Christmas vacation…

  Chapter 30

  When they were first married, she recalls, she had her…

  Chapter 31

  Over the two weeks of Christmas vacation, the Carmine-Casey School…

  Chapter 32

  For Dixie Doyle, death is a flavorless topic of conversation.

  Chapter 33

  Liz Warren looks askance at Mr. Binhammer’s choice of Hemingway for…

  Chapter 34

  In the works of Thomas Hart Benton, Liz Warren always sees distorted…

  Chapter 35

  It is a widely acknowledged fact that the girls who…

  Chapter 36

  The following week, on Monday, the summons that Binhammer is…

  Chapter 37

  The look on her face when she hears: a million…

  Chapter 38

  Adulthood feels like empty rooms with clocks ticking. It feels…

  Chapter 39

  At the end of the day, the school empties its…

  Chapter 40

  “Binhammer!” Ted Hughes says happily on the other end of the …

  Chapter 41

  When Binhammer leaves school at the end of the day,…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  chapter 1

  September means pressed white shirts. New socks. School shoes. Rigidly pleated skirts. “Those pleats. That’s what morality looks like,” one of the history teachers said once in class. He was young and exciting, and he was talking about the Inquisition, which seemed to give him a particular thrill. “That pleat right there,” he said with an arch smile, pointing to one of the girls’ freshly pressed skirts. “That’s morality for you.” No one knew exactly what he meant. But all of the girls laughed and shifted a little sideways in their seats.

  They had brothers and uncles and fathers of friends.

  They knew the feeling of watering, avuncular eyes getting under your clothes. Squidgy might be a word for it.

  But for the girls of the Carmine-Casey School, September, when it comes, feels like waking up to an overcast morning—that diluted and deceptive quality of light that seems to die on the windowsill. Not night nor morning nor even dawn, but rather the approximation of daylight—the best effort in bad circumstances. The weather has gotten sick. It languishes there in the corner by your unread books, circled by a cloud of dust motes. Clammy ambiguity. That’s what September is like.

  On the first day of school, everything feels old and new at the same time. The exchange of summer stories. The smell of laundered uniforms. The comparison of anklets bought either by out-of-town uncles (which is good) or by out-of-town boyfriends (which risks unbelievability). The walk to school with its familiar byways, the doormen in their tasseled coats, the wide-staired stoops of buildings where you can sit and watch the other girls go by. That girl has goose pimples on her arms—the wind this morning is chilly, but she isn’t sure if she really likes her new sweater, which is currently bunched up in the bottom of her bag.

  Still, as familiar as these things are, they also seem to imply possibility and promise. Each girl thinks, in terms large or small, Perhaps this will finally be the year that I have been waiting for. Maybe this is the year for me.

  So when September comes, the girls of Carmine-Casey—CC girls, as they are sometimes known among the community of Manhattan prep schools—are already flush with minor-key dramas of hope and apprehension.

  The building itself—whose side windows overlook Fifth Avenue and Central Park—houses a venerable institution dating back to 1895, since which time its marble staircases have been worn into arcs so subtle and soft that new adhesive traction strips have to be added at the beginning of each year. In fact, the girls are no longer allowed to wear open-backed shoes ever since, two years ago, a freshman girl tripped on the stairs and sprained her knee. It could have been worse, said the administration, evoking images of skulls cracking against the yellowing marble. It could have been much worse.

  The facade of the building is stark white, and the only thing that identifies it as a school is a small brass plaque, the size of a sheet of notebook paper, mounted to the left of the main entrance. There are four stories above the ground and two below, and the building is shaped like a U, with the bottom of the U facing the street and the center containing a private courtyard where the girls can take their lunch trays when the weather permits. There is also an old sugar maple, which at this time of year still has bright green leaves, and from a branch of which, it is rumored, a girl once hanged herself to death after a particularly difficult calculus final.

  It is near the base of this same tree that two girls can now b
e seen malingering in poses of boredom or irritation on one of the picnic tables set up around the yard. They are seniors, and they take it as an obligation to be constantly gazing with disinterest in directions that nobody else is gazing.

  One of them, Dixie Doyle, a pretty girl with ironic pigtails, takes a lollipop from her mouth and says, “So I think my formative years are over.”

  “Really?” says the other. This is Andie. She is tall and never quite knows what to do with her shoulders.

  “Over the summer I marked on the calendar every day that something formative happened. I looked back at it yesterday—four formatives and seventy-two blank squares.”

  “Well, maybe something formative will happen today.”

  “It seems unlikely,” Dixie sighs. “It’s September. Formative things happen in June and July mostly. August at the latest.”

  Andie nods at the irrefutability of Dixie’s logic. Andie is the daughter of Mrs. Abramson, one of the English teachers at Carmine-Casey, and everyone suspects her of having an intellect that towers over that of her friends.

  Dixie takes the lollipop out of her mouth and looks at it with one eye squeezed closed—as if measuring it against something in the distance. “Did I tell you,” she says, “that I slept in the hall for two weeks?”

  “The hall?” Andie says. “What hall?”

  “In the hall, while my folks were gone. They went to Rome for two weeks.”

  “What for?”

  “They wanted to see a pita.”

  “The round bread?”

  “No,” Dixie says. “Not the bread, don’t be silly.”

  “Pisa? You mean Pisa, Dix? The Leaning Tower of Pisa?”

  “No,” Dixie says again, shaking her head. “A pita. It’s a sculpture. It’s a marble sculpture of Mary Magdalene or something.”

  “Oh. The Pietà,” Andie says. “Michelangelo.”

  “Right.”

  Of Dixie Doyle it is said that she could convince grown men of anything. While she is only a mediocre student and a wholly untalented tennis player, she possesses a quality of performed girlishness that turns sex into a ragged paradox for men beyond the age of thirty. She speaks with the hint of a babyish lisp, the pink end of her tongue frequently peeking out from between her teeth, but her eyes are implacable fields of gray that at any moment could conceal everything you imagine—or nothing at all. She might be an X-ray registering the skeleton of your soul, or, like Oscar Wilde’s women, she might be a sphinx without a secret.

  But when her friends look at her, especially Andie, who now rubs her eyes open as though her mother were waking her up from bed, what they see is a violence of feminine spirit—their own desire for which they can only begin to articulate.

  “So anyway,” Dixie continues, “after they left I realized I couldn’t stand my room anymore. You know—I was just done with everything in it. I wanted a new perspective. I wanted a non-bedroom perspective. And I saw this thing on TV where in old mansions in England some of the servants used to sleep in the hall. So I got Brady to come upstairs one day, and he moved my bed into the hall. All I know is that hallways in England must be bigger, because it just barely fit.”

  “Brady moved your bed?” Andie asks with a half smile. Brady is a boy from the Bardolph Boys’ Academy. He lives in Dixie’s building on Park Avenue.

  “He just moved it. And it’s just Brady. Anyway, when the folks came home, they made me put it back. My mom kept asking why I was sleeping in the hall. ‘How come you weren’t sleeping in your room? Why do you want to scratch up the wainscoting?’ She just about went crazy over it. I think she wants to send me back to the therapist now.”

  “God,” Andie says.

  “Oh, Donald’s okay. That’s the therapist. He knows a lot about TV. For a therapist.”

  “Hmm.” Andie looks up at the sky again, and then at her watch. “I guess we better get inside. Everybody’s going to want to be on time today.”

  Dixie and Andie rise from the picnic table and straighten the skirts of their blue and gray uniforms. Then the two girls march side by side toward the rear doors of the building.

  “I once slept in the garage, in the back seat of our car,” Andie says, almost wistful. The Abramsons live in an upscale New Jersey suburb. “But I never slept in the hall.”

  Through the windows, Dixie spots a figure she recognizes—a tall shadow of movement whose pale face and racing eyes are visible only briefly behind the panes of glass. Feeling suddenly agitated, she takes the lollipop and looks for a trash can to toss it into, then reconsiders and puts it back in her mouth, wondering with deep concern if it has made her lips purple. She removes the lollipop again and runs her pinky fingernail along the corners of her mouth; she hates it when she sees girls who have sticky stuff in the corners of their mouths.

  She thinks about her father—how he didn’t say anything when he took her bed apart and moved it back into her room. There was a gaunt stoicism in his movements, as though it were the prerogative of every daughter to move her bed into the hall and the obligation of every father to move it back.

  “Was that Binhammer who just went by?” Andie asks. She must have seen the same figure.

  Dixie doesn’t say anything.

  “I think that was Binhammer,” Andie says again. “Did you see him?” No answer. “At least I have Binhammer again this year for English. That’s something. You got Binhammer again too, didn’t you, Dix?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Thank god. I don’t know what I would have done…. At least there’s Binhammer.”

  Yes, Dixie thinks, at least there’s Binhammer.

  chapter 2

  The girls move up the stairs in anxious and gaudy pageants, each one of them a carnival pier at midnight, brightly lit, intricately mechanistic, with an electrical heartbeat that turns the dark air around them a color of white that is like the negative of dark—but not light, not quite light, never just light. Each one of them is a flash along a black shoreline, and there is something laughingly obscene in the display, something decadent in the strings of teardrop bulbs that resist encroachment by the landscape around them. This one has Ferris wheels dangling from her ears. That one has a carousel in her eyes.

  They brush by him with their awkward broad gestures and their attitudes of coy instability, saying Good morning to him and How was your summer? and Guess what, Mr. Binhammer, I’m in your class this year. Aren’t you excited?

  He smiles and gives a distant, all-encompassing nod that serves as a response to all of them at once. He learned a long time ago that they do not expect much—that they are insectlike in their ability to pollinate an entire building with their gushing affections by alighting on each individual for only a second or two at a time. All that is required of him is a nod. To do more is to risk the embarrassment of a sudden and baseless intimacy. So he does not meet their eyes, keeping focused on the backs of the knees of the girls in front of him on the stairs, trying to wedge himself between the clots of bodies pushing their way up on the right and the steady trickle of the ones tiptoeing down on the left.

  And he thinks, What is that smell? Is that lilac? It must be shampoo. I smelled something else like that once…. Or some girl has lilacs in her hair. I wonder what boy might be burrowing his face into her neck later…. I don’t like to look at the backs of their knees. Sometimes there are little accumulations of dirt in the creases. They look unclean….

  But now one of the girls coming down on his left, a sophomore with an armful of books, trips on her own shoes and begins a slow-motion tumbling dance down the stairs, twisting her body this way and that, beginning to run despite herself in order to keep her legs underneath her as the gravity of the fall presses her downward, the panic evident in her eyes and in her hands that clasp tightly to the books. She shrieks quietly.

  Fortunately, Binhammer sees it coming and sticks his left arm out to stop her fall, bracing himself for the weight of her small body. When they collide, his arm cuts across the up
per part of her stomach, pulling the shirt out of her skirt and exposing a little white strip of belly. Not only that, but, as one of her books goes flying forward to strike another girl in the back of the head, he finds that his forearm is wedged up underneath her breasts—

  Oh god.

  —and that her whole weight is on him now, so he can’t let go. The only thing he can do is lift his arm even more and push her back upright where she can regain her balance.

  “Sorry, Mr. Binhammer,” she says as she sets down her books on one of the steps while the other girls maneuver around them. She seems unbothered by the recent commerce between her breasts and his arm. Her hands fly up to fix her hair, clicking and unclicking barrettes.

  So many fasteners they have! So many little metallic snaps and zippers. These girls are held together with clips and buttons.

  “It’s okay,” he says. “Just be careful.”

  He continues up the stairs to the third floor, where the teachers’ lounge is. When the door closes behind him, the noise of the hallway grows distant and muffled. The only other person in the lounge is Walter, who has been a history teacher at the school for twenty years. He’s knocking straight a stack of copies on the table in the middle of the room.

  “I just saved somebody’s life,” Binhammer says.

  “Good for you.”

  “Good for me.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  “One of the girls.”

  “Hm.” Walter doesn’t like him. He thinks Binhammer isn’t a serious teacher, that teachers don’t reach their prime until at least age fifty.