The Tiger’s Child: The story of a gifted, troubled child and the teacher who refused to give up on her. Torey Hayden
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I could cope with this disparity most of the time, as the general ethos of the clinic did not demand I practice as my colleagues did, and given that I was not qualified in psychiatry, they didn’t expect me to. Indeed, it was my varied point of view, I suspect, that had attracted Dr. Rosenthal. Nonetheless, I found myself having to do a lot of tongue-biting.
Not being a full-fledged psychiatrist, I didn’t merit one of the offices up front. Instead, I shared an oversized closet in the back of the building with Jeff Tomlinson.
Jeff, already a doctor, was in his last year of training as a child psychologist. He was one of those individuals so intellectually gifted that it is taken for granted. No modesty with him. He was brilliant and he knew he was brilliant, and he knew everyone else knew. “Does Superman fly?” he would say casually whenever I evidenced amazement at some mental feat, but he was so ingenuous when he said it that one never minded. Too much.
Unfortunately, Jeff might as well have been Freud’s grandson. Indeed, he might as well have been Freud himself, for all his ability to quote what the old master said. With a near photographic memory, Jeff could bludgeon me into silence with word-for-word regurgitation of endless cases the old boy had worked on. It became a game with us after a while, to see who could outdebate the other.
Truth was, I loved Jeff. We were the youngest members of staff by quite some years, if not decades, and ours was like a sibling relationship there among the grown-ups. The other psychiatrists all had magnificent offices up front with cornices and fireplaces, carpets and leather couches. In the back of the building Jeff and I shared a windowless closet of an office, which had once housed another psychologist’s research animals and still smelled. Here we had festooned the walls with posters, cartoons and matching Pink Panther nameplates. And here we worked, fought and shared our problems.
What saved Jeff from certain annihilation for his Freudian idiocy was an extraordinary sense of humor. He had a particular gift for funny voices and mimicry, which he displayed with the aplomb of a stand-up comic. As a consequence, the inanimate objects in our office—the filing cabinet, the desks, the radiator—were all inclined to join unexpectedly into conversations, each with its own weird little Robin Williams-type voice. The kids, of course, adored this when they heard it, but it even worked on me. It was difficult to get angry with a guy who had the furniture on his side.
All in all, I was pleased with this career move away from special education. It still felt funny to dress for work in wool skirts and dangly jewelry, to know that I could leave my long hair unbound because no one was likely to try and pull it out of my head; and, indeed, I found I missed my jeans and track shoes too much and was back in them after the first few months. But I fully enjoyed the ample resources and stimulating colleagues and felt that for the moment, at least, this had been the right move.
Sheila was three months short of her fourteenth birthday when I finally located her. I hadn’t seen her in seven years—half her lifetime past—and other than the poem I’d received through the mail two years earlier, I hadn’t heard from her in five. I found her back with her father, living in an outlying suburb of Broadview. After a telephone conversation with her father, I asked if I could visit.
They were living in a duplex, a brown-colored building with peeling paint, in a run-down area where the yards were littered with car bodies and rusting appliances; however, compared to Sheila’s home in the migrant camp, this was luxurious.
I knocked at the door. A long moment passed with no sound beyond the door and I found to my surprise that my knees were shaky. All the ghosts of long ago came crowding in around me as I waited on the doorstep and I could hear them so clearly. A child’s laughter echoed, shouting, squealing, the sounds of a classroom, and then the dark, blowy silence I remembered experiencing as I had stood on the doorstep of Sheila’s tar-paper shack in the migrant camp. Then, back to the present. Footsteps came toward the door and it opened.
I don’t think I would have recognized Sheila’s father if I hadn’t assumed it would be he opening the door. He had changed dramatically in seven years. The dumpy, overweight boozer I recollected was not there. Instead, the man opening the door was slim and athletic-looking and, most startling to me, young. I had been in my early twenties when I had last seen him and I had always regarded him as being in my parents’ generation. Now, with shock, I realized he was, in fact, not much older than I was.
“Mr. Renstad?” I asked tentatively.
He nodded.
“I’m Torey Hayden.”
He smiled in a genuinely welcoming fashion and held the door open. “Come in. Sheila’s not here at the moment. She’s just run over to the store for some milk, but she’ll be back in a few minutes.” He opened the door to let me into the living room. It was small, with a television, a well-worn brown sofa and two old-fashioned armchairs. Indeed, the whole room had a sort of brownish quality to it, but it was comfortable.
Sudden shyness struck us both. All these years I had pondered this moment and now that it was here, I didn’t know quite what to say. He obviously felt just as uncertain.
After a moment, he snatched a photograph from the top of the television. “Here, you want to see this? These are my boys.”
It was the photo of a baseball team, the boys appearing to be about ten or eleven. They were posed in two rows, the first kneeling, the others behind. Mr. Renstad was on the left of the back row.
“I been coaching a year now,” he said, moving beside me to look at the picture. “See that kid? His name is Juma Washington and you listen out for that name, because he’s going to be great someday. Like Hank Aaron, that kid. And it was me that taught him to hit. Wouldn’t do nothing for us when he first came. Was a wild, jazzy kid. And now he’s gonna make the major leagues. You watch and see. I know he’s gonna make it big.”
“That’s super.”
He looked at me. “I’m clean now, you know. Sheila tell you that? No more booze or stuff. I been clean eighteen months now and now it’s me helping them.”
“I’m pleased,” I said.
“I mean it. I’m not having no trouble at all anymore, and now I got these boys. We won four games already this season. Didn’t win no games at all before I took ’em over. Were wild kids, crazy as monkeys. But we’re making it big now. Got Juma. Got a couple of other good ones too. Here, let me show you.” He took the photograph. “Him, that’s Salim. And him, Luis. You ought to see ’em play. Can you come down some Saturday?”
Just then the door banged and there stood Sheila.
Sheila?
Who stood there was a gangly adolescent with—honest to God—orange hair. Not strawberry blond, not red. Orange, like a road cone. It was longish, and permed into frizzy ringlets, a Cubs baseball cap pulled down over the top of it.
Would I have known this was Sheila if I had encountered her on the street? She’d grown taller than I’d СКАЧАТЬ