Free Saying Grace by Beth Gutcheon Page B

could have handled the eighth grade, if it hadn’t been for Kenny Lowen,” Emily said at last.
    Rue did not seem surprised. Instead she offered, “I once heard a psychologist say that when he studied groups of children, he couldn’t necessarily pick out the ones from what we used to call broken homes, but he could always spot the ones who were adopted.”
    “Not that you’d have much trouble with Kenny; he looks about as Jewish as Reverend Sun Yung Moon.”
    “Which makes it worse for him. He does seem to have an empathy problem.”
    “I’d say he’s an evil little shit.”
    “I was using the technical language. It’s too bad he’s so bright; it makes it so easy for him to manipulate the other kids. Do you want to think about this job for a day or two?”
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    “Either way, I can’t have the teaching job?”
    “No. I’m sorry.”
    “Then I want it.”
    “Good.”
    Emily found that her position on campus changed dramatically with her new job. She was no longer a gear in a machine, she was the closest thing to the main axle. If she had foreseen what the ad-vantages were, she’d have begged for the job in the first place. In many ways, she soon knew more of what was going on than anyone else on campus, including Rue. Not necessarily all of it was useful, but nearly all of it was interesting, in the way that family gossip is interesting to members of the family. There were many things that people wanted Rue to know but did not want to be seen to have told her. The faculty made publicly a unified front but among themselves were full of feuds and annoyances. Teachers who wanted Rue to know that Charla Percy had spent three times her budget on new classroom furniture, told Emily. Teachers who wanted Rue to know that Marilyn Schramm was not doing her share of cleaning up the mess in the art room, told Emily. Teachers who wanted Rue to know that they all felt threatened when she let the Lowens terrorize Catherine Trainer, told Emily.
    And parents who wanted Rue to know that they might withdraw their children if their children got Catherine Trainer next year, told Emily. Parents who thought Sylvia French was siphoning money from the hot lunch fund, told Emily. Sometimes parents told Emily other parents’ secrets for the hell of it, so she’d owe them one if they wanted her to tell a secret to them.
    T he first week in October got off to a great start. Lynn Ketchum had planned an eighth-grade class outing for Wednesday, to see an exhibition of memorabilia honoring Anne Frank, the famous teenage martyr and diarist. Unfortunately, the Jewish parents of the class were incensed.
    “Why on earth?” Mike Dianda asked.
    “It’s Yom Kippur,” said Rue. It was so terrible they both began to laugh.
    “We’ll have to reschedule.”
    “Can’t,” said Rue. “It closes Friday. It was the only day she could get the reservation.”
    “I can see why,” said Mike, and howled. There seemed nothing for it but for Rue to turn her bow into the wind and accept the storm, and they knew it would blow. It was true that the nonobservant Jewish families would rather have their children see the exhibit on Yom Kippur than not see it at all. It was also true that the observant ones were deeply offended, and right to be. Rue felt that maturity, or civility, or perhaps she meant sanity, consisted of the ability to hold in the mind as many points of view as a situation required and retain the ability to function. It appalled her how often she herself failed to meet her own standard, considering that she knew that she at least was trying.
    And at this moment she only laughed because it wasn’t funny.
    There was no doubt at all that anti-Semitism was alive and well, or alive and ill, on their little stretch of America’s Gold Coast. Last Rosh Hashanah, she’d had an angry visit from a Fundamentalist faculty member, who complained bitterly because the second and third graders had been taught to sing a round in Hebrew for