Page 27 of 28 Summers
Mallory tries not to play favorites with her students but she has become very close with Maggie Sohn, who is struggling with her parents’ divorce, and she has a soft spot for one other student, Jeremiah Freehold. Jeremiah is a sweet, bright kid. His father is a scalloper, his mother a seamstress. They live in an antique home on lower Orange Street. Jeremiah is the oldest of five children. None of this is particularly remarkable. What is remarkable is that, at eighteen years old, Jeremiah has never been to the mainland. Mallory thinks of the Freehold family as a throwback to Nantucket in the 1800s. They’re Quaker; they live a quiet, sustainable island life. In his journal for class, Jeremiah keeps a list of things he’s never actually seen: a traffic light, a McDonald’s, an escalator, a shopping mall, a cineplex, an arcade, a river, a skyscraper, an amusement park.
Talk about sheltered,Mallory thinks. But his life has a purity that she can’t help admiring.
Back in the fall, Mallory asked Jeremiah what his plans were for college. He told her he wasn’t going to college; he would become a scalloper like his father. Mallory asked how he felt about this. He was bright, an enthusiastic reader; it seemed a shame for him not to continue his education.
“I’ll be continuing my education on the water,” he said. “And when I want books, I’ll borrow them from the Atheneum.”
Right after spring break, Jeremiah starts stopping by Mallory’s classroom after school. He asks her to read his poetry. He asks her to recommend books. Mallory is enthralled with Michael Ondaatje’s novelThe English Patient,which Jake had sent her at Christmas. The inscription:Again, by a man. Again, good. XO, Jake. Mallory isn’t willing to lend Jeremiah her own personal copy—it’s too precious with Jake’s handwriting inside—but she makes a special trip to Mitchell’s Book Corner and buys a copy for Jeremiah.
He reads it in two days, then comes by to discuss it with Mallory. Jeremiah is a tall, lanky kid with a high forehead and a pronounced Adam’s apple; Mallory thinks he looks like a young Abe Lincoln. Most days, he wears a flannel shirt, jeans, and sturdy boots. However, today he’s wearing a new shirt, white linen, and there’s a brightness to his eyes, a flush to his cheeks. He speaks so quickly about how much he loved the book that he trips over his words:Hana, Caravaggio,the Bedouinwith their tinkling bottles of ointment, Kip the sapper, the North African desert, the Italian villa with holes blown through the walls.
Jeremiah has a crush on her, she thinks. Or maybe she’s just flattering herself.
The next few days, she shoos Jeremiah away after school, claiming she has meetings, a dentist appointment, she’s taking the Blazer in for a tune-up—and this works. Jeremiah stops coming by.
A couple of weeks later, however, he reappears. He’s visibly upset, hot-cheeked, perspiring. All the seniors are going on the annual three-day senior-class trip to Boston (Apple is a chaperone every year, and she hates it—a Best Western in Braintree with forty horny teenagers who think it’s party time—but the honorarium is too attractive to turn down), and Jeremiah’s parents aren’t letting him go.
“We had a family meeting and discussed it,” Jeremiah says. “I made my points and they made theirs but it came down to this: I live under their roof so they are in charge of me until I move out. And they don’t want me to go.”
“Oh,” Mallory says. “Wow.” She’s at a loss. She, like just about everyone else she knows, had wished for different parents growing up. Kitty would cook elaborate family dinners every single weeknight, and it was Mallory’s responsibility to do the dishes. Mallory’s tendency—every teenager’s tendency?—was to try to find shortcuts, but it was as if Kitty had second sight.
“Properly,” Kitty would call from the other room if she heard the plates landing in the dishwasher at too brisk a pace for them to have been thoroughly rinsed. “Do them properly.”
Mallory had learned to tune out her mother; the endless stream of whatever was coming from Kitty’s mouth became an unintelligibleWah-wah-wah,like the teachers in thePeanutsTV specials.
Senior was a man of few words unless the topic was traffic on 83 or the Orioles. He was frugal—the heat in their house on Deepdene Road was turned on and set to sixty-seven degrees on December 15 and not a day before; it was turned off on March 15 and not a day later. “If you’re cold, put on a sweater,” he would say. And Senior’s political views were pulled right out of the Eisenhower administration—for starters, his attitude about his very own sister, Greta.
But as exasperating as Kitty and Senior could be, they fell within the parameters of “normal parents” for twentieth-century America. They would never have kept Mallory or Cooper from an experience that could expand their horizons. Mallory tries to understand why the elder Freeholds would not want Jeremiah to go to Boston on a supervised trip with his peers, children he has known his entire life.
“Is it a matter of money?” Mallory asks. The trip fee, she knows, is a hundred and ten dollars per student, but the kids have been selling candy bars all winter to fund-raise, and some of that money is earmarked for families in need. Mallory could put in a word with Dr. Major.
“No,” Jeremiah says. “It’s a matter of principle. They see the mainland as needlessly complicated.” He shakes his head. “I love this island. But as soon as I have enough money saved, I’m leaving. I’m going to North Africa.”
Mallory brings up Jeremiah the next day at the faculty meeting. She’s hoping someone—Apple or even Dr. Major—will offer to call the Freeholds and persuade them to let Jeremiah go on the trip. But Dr. Major, who is normally very progressive and involved, shuts Mallory down. “There is no persuasion powerful enough when it comes to that family,” he says. “Let it be.”
Apple follows up with her later, in the hallway. “And don’t you go knocking on their door, Mal, please. I know you—you feel for the kid, he’s a little different, he doesn’t have many friends, you want to save him, but do not get involved. He’ll be fine. You want to feel sympathy for someone, feel sympathy for me—I’ll be confiscating cigarettes and trying to prevent teenage pregnancy for seventy-two hours.”
The seniors leave early Monday morning and are due back on the late ferry Wednesday night. The school is eerily quiet without them. Mallory teaches two seniors-only classes, so her days are baggy with time. On Monday, she catches up on her end-of-the-year progress reports. Tuesday, it rains and she holes up in her room and reads the new Anne Tyler novel. Wednesday dawns sunny and warm. It’s a terrific day to play hooky. What’s to stop Mallory from calling in sick or taking a personal day and getting some sun on her front porch? A sense of responsibility, that’s what. When she gets to school, she realizes her sophomores have a field trip to Jetties Beach, leaving Mallory with even more free time.
Mallory walks past the library and sees Jeremiah sitting at a table alone, his journal open in front of him. Her heart lurches. She can’t let him just sit there.
“Want to go get some lunch?” she asks him. “My treat?”
“In the cafeteria?” he asks. Mallory notices his steel lunchbox with the domed lid, the kind construction workers used to carry. She knows that Mrs. Freehold packs Jeremiah a lunch each and every day; he doesn’t even buy milk.
“No, let’s go on an adventure,” Mallory says impulsively. Jeremiah is a senior and therefore has off-property lunch privileges, though she doubts he’s exercised them even once this year. Which is all the more reason for him to go today. The rest of his class is watching street theater outside Faneuil Hall or farting in the elevators on their way to the Top of the Hub in the Prudential Center, so what harm will it do if Jeremiah goes to the beach? Or…“Maybe you can show me someplace I’ve never been?” Mallory has lived on Nantucket just shy of two years and there are still whole swaths of the island she hasn’t explored.
Jeremiah cocks his head. She can tell he’s wondering if she’s serious.
“Come on,” she says. “My car is out front.”
Jeremiah says he wants to show her Gibbs Pond, which is in the middle of the island, because that’s where his father first taught him to fish. Mallory’s interest is piqued because she knows from reading the kids’ journals that Gibbs Pond is where most of the high-school parties are held.
“We have fifty minutes,” Mallory says. “Can we get there and back in fifty minutes?”
“Yes,” Jeremiah says. He grabs his journal, his books, and his lunch with purpose, and for a moment, Mallory feels likethatteacher—the one who thinks outside the box, the one who goes the extra mile, the one who saves a kid’s life, at least figuratively.
They head out the Milestone Road in the Blazer. The top is on but it’s warm enough for them to open the windows and let the sweet spring air rush in. Mallory turns up the radio. It’s “Crazy” by Aerosmith, and Jeremiah throws his head back and campily sings along.
