The Things We Never Say: A Novel

This was now the first week of September, a Friday, and the weather was staying warm. The leaves had not yet really started to change, and from his classroom windows on the second floor Artie could see the soccer field and the trees behind it, with only one tree turning red at its very top. It was the last class of the day, and he understood that the students were restless. He leaned back against his desk and said, "Would you folks like to know about venereal disease during the Civil War?"

The students looked up at him, they were interested.

"Whoa, Damn-dam," said one fellow who had shaggy brown hair; his name was Willoughby.

"Topic for Monday," Artie said. "Now get together in your groups." And they shuffled their chairs around until they were sitting in the four separate sections Artie had assigned earlier.

Artie taught history to eleventh graders at the local high school. For years he had also been the assistant coach to the boys' soccer team; he was not a tall man, and he was thick, and while he had always been fit, he had begun to gain weight in his stomach, so he'd had to stop running down the field a few years ago and he became the assistant coach to the baseball team instead. But Coach Clark liked him, as did the soccer and the baseball teams, as did his students and the other faculty.

"Damn-dam, the greatest man," his students would sometimes say to him, their faces shining with affection, and he would laugh, his big chest moving. "Damn-dam," they said, and he would tell them, "Go on, go on, get out of here now," waving his hand and chuckling. He was fifty-seven years old, and he did still love his students.

But the pandemic had been hard on them, he had noticed this in the more than three years since: The students had changed. They were anxious, and not argumentative—with him or with one another—as he had known them to be in the past, when there had been lively discussions. It was often difficult now to get them even to talk.

On the first day of every school year Artie would hand out sheets of white lined paper, saying to his students, "Write anything you want. But I need at least two pages. Write about who you can't stand, what you like, write anything. But write."

"Why?" a student sometimes asked, and Artie told the truth: "So I get to know you. And so I get to see how you put sentences together." He was always surprised at the students' willingness to do this. Some would sit for many minutes and then start to write quickly, others began to write immediately; over the years he had noted that their handwriting had become increasingly bad. He was often very moved at what they wrote. Many lately had written about the pandemic. Two students had started this year with the sentence "I'm scared." And yet neither of these two had been able to really articulate what it was they were scared about.

Today Artie had put the students in the groups he had assigned on the first day of the school year, only a few days earlier. Each student was to take on the role of a Civil War soldier or a nurse from Massachusetts and discuss this soldier or nurse with the group. They were talking quietly among themselves now, and he heard one of them—a young woman named Tamera, with long red hair—say, "No, he wrote his girlfriend that he enlisted because of slavery. He wrote that in his letter home to her. That he didn't think people should buy other people."

"Good for you." Artie nodded at Tamera as he walked among the groups; he stopped and rapped on a desk. "That's exactly what you should be doing, using their letters home."

He walked over to the window and saw again the soccer field and the trees behind it, the top of that one tree turning red. Something moved deep inside him, a memory perhaps of his childhood in Revere, where his father had been the super of the three-story wooden apartment building they lived in as well as the two similar buildings right next to it. Artie and his sister and their parents had lived in the basement apartment; today it would be called the garden apartment, but back then it looked like, and pretty much was, a basement apartment. Where was this memory of a red-topped tree coming from? Artie turned back to the class as a memory clicked into place: the state hospital his mother had been sent to two times in his youth, going there with his father and his sister on a weekend to visit her, seeing her slumped on a thin mattress on a metal bed. There might have been such a tree outside her window.

He went and sat down at his desk.

Every year Artie received a few notes—in the far past they had been handwritten—from students saying that he had changed their lives, he was their favorite teacher 'ever,' this sort of thing. In recent years, the notes were more apt to be emailed to him, and Artie would print them out and put them with all the other notes in his mother's big jewelry box in the attic. He never understood why the box was so big; his mother had had almost no jewelry, and the few pieces she had were not remotely expensive.