Isabel had worked for years to get a position teaching at the high school. Administrators tended to first move men up from elementary and middle schools. There was some misplaced notion that it was more appropriate for women to teach the younger populations. Plus an ole-boy system prevailed in Blackbrook as it did elsewhere where the desire for success in boys’ athletics required placement of talented coaches at the high school, coaches who might be more committed to their field assignments than to classroom teaching. In the spring of 1999, Isabel had submitted an innovative curriculum for a humanities program that merged 20th century American literature with both history and music. Some enlightened school board member had been interested enough to push for its implementation. For Isabel, it had been a coup.

In late August she had learned that Richard Leland had been appointed principal. 

But Isabel was a determined optimist. She told herself to keep her head down and make her new curriculum a resounding success. Leland would have to leave her to it. Or so she thought.

Isabel was at work before seven every morning. Usually, she was the first to arrive. On more than one morning she had had to wait in her car for a custodian to arrive and unlock the building. The custodians suggested she ask Leland to issue her a key but she had not. She did not want him privy to her habits.

The early arrival was part of a routine she relished. The sound of the clock radio clicking softly on usually woke her and she remained in bed listening to NPR’s Morning Edition for a few moments while collecting her thoughts. She loved the morning stillness, the smell of her own coffee brewing in her own kitchen, the clothes she’d laid out the night before, even the sight of herself in the mirror – dressed and ready – before she left. When Rafe was home, she woke him before she left. When he was younger she had been able to tease him awake with a few bars from a song but no more.  In the last year brooding adolescence had set in and there were mornings she felt she was waking a sleeping lion. These mornings she tread carefully,  turning on his music so he wouldn’t fall back to sleep, prodding gently before leaving him. He could be trusted to get himself up, to finish the coffee she’d prepared, grab himself some pop tarts or fruit and be ready for the bus when it swung by an hour later. Rafe was a dependable kid, a self-starter.  She trusted him to do what he was supposed to do; he understood that this new position was important to her and required her early tending.  He liked the independence of mornings on his own.

The roads were almost empty. Sometimes, driving to the high school she would ruminate about the odd comfort the routine gave her. Isabel had been twenty years old, a college sophomore hanging around a music studio when a member of a struggling rock band lamented aloud how they desperately needed a singer.

“Can any of you sing?” he’d asked the girls and her friends had turned to her.

“I sing. I mean, I have a pretty good voice. So I’ve sung. A bit,” she’d answered hesitantly and that had been the beginning. What followed had been a chaotic decade of late nights and sweet songs. As lead singer for The Pink Mellon Circus, she’d learned to manage the formidable egos of talented young men. She’d taken voice lessons and polished her craft. The band had made some money, gotten cocky and a tiny bit famous, then bickered and broken apart. Their singer had continued as a soloist at places like the Belmont Club, working her way through graduate school. At twenty-three she’d found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Jared had arrived and late nights in clubs had been replaced by late nights rocking a sickly child to strangled lullabies and wondering how she would get through. Then James had rescued her, had loved her, had buoyed her and Jared both.  A teaching job materialized, a second son arrived.

But the transient joy had imploded with Jared’s death and the years of grief and divorce that followed. That was all over now,  all such issues resolved, however unsatisfactorily. Tragedy was exhausting. These days she lived a quiet life and cultivated the routine of it, the absence of chaos, the simple pleasure of doing what she could in her classroom.

An enthusiastic teacher, she worked hard to prepare and correct and to be innovative and succinct with her students.  One of her strengths was the ability to take complex events and weave and connect them into a narrative that her students could relate to. She knew they would not always be paying attention and that many of them needed repetition to process and retain detail. So she covered the walls of her new classroom with an ever-expanding collage,  a visual anchor for each of the decades of the 20th century with keywords or glyphs which she returned to again and again. She loved her work in that classroom. She loved her success. And she sang to them, gave them a soundtrack to the lessons, from the Ragtime of the turn of the century to Tin Pan Alley, Irving Berlin, Billie Holiday. She got recurring laughs for Berlin’s soldier’s lament, Oh How I Hate to Get up in the Morning. There was full-throated accompaniment for Shine on Harvest Moon and almost anything from George M Cohan, a local boy. They scorned the scratchy old recordings but loved it when she sang a few bars, alerted and engaged when she led them in something they knew. or something they quickly picked up. 

It had begun in early  September when she’d tangled with a class of upperclassmen dominated by a cadre of football players. They had wanted to crush her.  Having practiced together through August, they had arrived in her classroom an indomitable force, intimidating and rawly masculine,  rowdy, aggressive mammal cubs with sharp teeth.   They sought to dominate and were initially dismissive of this newcomer to their world, this small woman who thought she should command their attention. About to lose control of the class one afternoon,  she’d been momentarily terrified, in confrontation with one ornery player who snarled disrespectfully that she was “bothering” him with all her assignments and expectations. Without thinking, she’d responded by singing, pitch-perfect, the first lines of Taj Mahal’s Cakewalk into Town: I had the blues so bad one time, it put my face in a permanent frown….” It had been perfect. They’d listen, captured by the sweetness of the sound, then laughed, delighted with the novelty and humor of the lyric.  Even the boy who might have seen it as humiliation had been swept up.   And so had begun her quirky exchange. She sang to them. Some perfectly appropriate lyric would pop into her head and take on a cappella life of its own, briefly, sweetly, disarming conflict, recapturing attention, refocusing the class. The magic of it still made her laugh.

Principal Leland had discovered her early arrival by accident. While it was not his habit to arrive early for anything,  a January storm had brought him into the building early to coordinate the delayed opening. He’d parked his car next to Isabel’s. Discovering its proximity when she left at day’s end had filled her with uneasiness. Nothing was said.

Several weeks later, on this frigid February morning, she was working to incorporate a broadside of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire onto her collage of the early 20th century.  It had put her deep in an empathetic preoccupation with the young women who had died there, the fourteen-year-olds who had jumped to their deaths or died because locked doors pinned them in the inferno. Standing at her desk, bent over her work, she had not realized anyone was behind her until a figure loomed and his groin made contact with her ass; he’d grab the desk and pressed aggressively into her glute.  She’d jumped and whirled, infuriated.  Then she’d realized who it was –  the principal. His erection, hard and unwelcome against her flesh, now lingered as an angry protuberance in his pants.  His smile was humorless, a grimace, yet with an odd touch of hurt in it.

“Too early for you, McNally?” he asked by way of explanation. She stared at him in silence, wrestling unsuccessfully to control her outrage. Breathing. in and then out.

“Oh, come on. We’re both adults here,” he’d continued, moving backward to study her wall. “You finding this kind of collage stuff works?” he asked in an altered tone. He was, after all, her supervisor.

Backed up against the desk, she inhaled, counting out the beats with her breath, unsure what to do. But she knew her face showed her fury. Just then Rafe appeared in the door.

“Mom?” Rafe’s voice captured his confusion but also conveyed some basic sense that what was happening here was alien.

“Hi, honey,” she forced her voice to a near-normal range, tore her gaze from Leland. “What do you need?”

Rafe was shifting his own gaze from Leland to his mother and back again. He hesitated before answering.

“I just wanted to tell you I was going to Dad’s office after school. He thinks he can get out early to give me a driving lesson. Okay ?”

“Of course. Never too early to start learning…..”

“McNally, I came up here to tell you something,” Leland interrupted sourly. Both Isabel and Rafe turned to him with apprehension.

“I want you to sing today. At the rally. National Anthem,” he announced gruffly, heading toward the door of the classroom. Rafe scrambled to get out of his way.

For a few seconds, Isabel was frozen by discomfort and disbelief. It was Rafe who spoke first.

“Without accompaniment?” he asked.

“I don’t care how she does it,” Leland snapped. “I just want it done.” He stared confrontationally at Rafe.

Rafe turned toward his mother who was swimming slowly through the sludge of her conflicting emotions, focused on her desire to spare Rafe. He read the pain and confusion in her face.

“We got this,” he told her as Leland shoved roughly past him and out the door.

“Mom? You ok?” He asked.

She exhaled and then smiled at him.

“Yeah.  Yeah. OK… just unprepared. Star-Spangled Banner, without accompaniment, without practice….” she muttered, shaking her head.

“We got this, Mom. Look for me in the gym. Sunglasses!” He shouted and was gone.

Isabel lowered her head and remained leaning against her desk as she felt hot tears of powerlessness rising. Outside the classroom, she could hear the kids beginning to gather.  Her hands were shaking, her heart pounding. She inhaled as the first wave of her students entered her classroom.

It took half an hour to regain her composure. A few of the kids eyed her curiously, but she pushed ahead, beginning her lesson, focusing on something other than the encounter with her boss. That was the thing about teaching. There was seldom a moment to regroup emotionally. Another class was always pouring in. In every class, she was center stage and fully on. 

Later, lessons over, she faced her further humiliation downstairs in the gym. It made her want to cry, the idea that he could mistreat her so badly and yet demand she perform at the rally in front of the entire student body. But what choice did she have? Remembering Rafe’s instruction, she grabbed her sunglasses and entered the swarm of teenagers and teachers, all in high spirits, heading to the rally. Her head was pounding; she feared her voice would fail her, feared she might just weep into the microphone 

But once there, she spotted her son, an odd and misplaced figure in the doorway to a locker room, standing at a portable keyboard, dressed completely in black, his sunglasses hiding his face but not his intent. It thrilled her; it washed her with relief. She knew exactly what he intended.

Principal Leland quieted the boisterous crowd by telling them that the rally would begin with Ms. McNally singing the National Anthem. He carefully exaggerated the “Ms,” his scorn for the honorific inherent and conveyed. Isabel did not flinch. She took the microphone from him without making eye contact and turned to Rafe who signaled with the first notes from his keyboard. Then she delivered a worthy imitation of Ray Charles’s throaty version of America the Beautiful.

Oh, beautiful for heroes proved

in liberating strife

who more than self

our country loved

and mercy more than life….

Her recollection of the lyrics did not fail her, nor did her precision with the notes. It was her gift; she didn’t know where it came from but it was there and she could almost always count on it. For a moment the line about mercy brought up emotion so strong it threatened to  swamp her, but she shifted it with full force into the chorus:

America, America

may god thy gold refine

till all success be nobleness

and every gain devined…

She shifted to a speaking voice and continued:

You know when I was in school

we’d sing it

something like this

sing it with me now……

And with that they were all singing, stomping to their feet, a few pulling sunglasses from their bags and packs, exhilarated because this was novel, because they knew this song and liked this teacher and her goofy son, but mostly because it was Valentine’s Day and with this rally they’d be freed for winter break, a week’s vacation that could feel like the promise of  everlasting freedom when one is seventeen.

Later she couldn’t locate Rafe. He’d disappeared to return the keyboard and because he had very little interest in hearing the wonders of the basketball stars lauded at this rally. She wanted to thank him, of course, wanted to thank Ray Charles and all the stars in heaven that had delivered her voice but she was wasted with exhaustion so she headed quickly to her classroom to gather up her things and bolt to the reprieve of her car, to the onset of her vacation.  But Richard Leland materialized,  as he was wont to do. He appeared at the bottom of the back stairs by the exit, smiling but with his lip slightly curled.

“Quite the performance, McNally,” he quipped, damning with faint praise. “Quite a performance……yeah, and I want you in my office on Monday when we get back. I’ve got another job for you. Tutoring at Bradley. But we’ll talk about it then. I’m sure you’ll be as impressive as you were with this….”

He’d turned away from her, dismissively, then wheeled back.

“And I do know that was not the National Anthem,” he added, as though she had not known.

She pushed open the door and sucked in the icy air. Through blurred vision she dragged herself to the old Honda.

Claire Howard had gone into the city that afternoon. She’d been having trouble with her hands. They trembled all the time. Her primary care physician had spoken of the possibility of a central tremor or something worse. Claire had dismissed her. She was thinking instead that it was stress, that it was time to retire. So she had made an appointment with an investor at Profitline to ask about her investments, the ones that Herbert had left her when he’d left her a widow. She resented them then, wishing he had instead survived to grow old with her and fuss with the damn things himself.  But now thinking of retirement, she needed to pin down the exact amount she could cull from them to supplement her pension. Exiting that interview to the sidewalk, thoroughly preoccupied, she spotted a car with a driver who seemed familiar.  Claire was not a car person, so she could not have identified the make or model but the sole occupant, the driver,  looked a lot like Rafe.

Is that Rafe? Is Rafe old enough to drive already? She wondered momentarily and then the thought disappeared into the ether. Later, she rendezvoused with Isabel and other colleagues for pre-vacation libations. From them, she heard the story of Ray Charles’s 1972 rendition of America the Beautiful on the Dick Cavett Show, an old show she remembered with pleasure. They told her how that same song had been Isabel’s small rebellion and had considerably enhanced the rally. There was laughter,  and a slapstick glee as the sweep of the vacation stretched out before them. Isabel did not mention the awful episode with Leland in her classroom. While she applauded Rafe’s costume and his keyboard, Claire did not mention sighting him on the road.

copyright ©Meredith Powers 2015-2025

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