My Monticello(14)
Now Alex attends W. E. B. Du Bois Middle, a school situated in a flock of trees, not far from the highway. Today Mr. Attah stands in the office, still waiting to be seen. The secretary eyes him, perhaps because he’s twice refused the low chair pushed into a corner. Instead he paces, pausing to study the framed faces of former principals—men captured in stark photographs with placards underneath declaring the sequential dates of their tenures. Mr. Attah brings his hand to his chin and peers at the current principal’s closed door.
The office is a harried place, and soon yet another American mother strolls into it, one of those haughty working types, who wears her authority like a badge. The pink-faced secretary chirps a welcome, hands over a ledger without delay. The woman kisses her boy’s sand-colored hair and Mr. Attah realizes he has halted in order to stare at this mother and child, this solemn union, a frantic dry fluttering alive in his throat.
“Mr. Attah?”
The current principal must have opened the office door, silently, while his guard was down, because now she stands framed within it. All those old bordered men, but the current principal is a woman, Ms. Vasquez, whose surname breaks high in his throat, like a birdcall.
Too skinny, that’s what he always notices first: Someone ought to cook and feed her thick and hearty stews. She wears a suit—a skirted one—along with narrow-heeled shoes. Her face glows a bright tan color and her hair is suitably long. Today she wears it in a spiraled bun like a conch shell.
“Come in. Please. Sit.”
He knows she will not close her door because of what occurred the last time he was here. Last time they’d met along with some pale ponytailed teacher, a young woman who’d claimed a grand concern for his son. But when they’d finally gotten to the substance of the matter, the raw pink meat of it, there may have been raised voices. Ms. Vasquez might have accused him of behaving “irrationally”—or was it “rashly”? At one point she’d threatened to call the authorities, eyeing him that day as if he were not a man but rather a wild boar in the bush. If he’d shouted before, if by chance his fists had pummeled themselves onto a stray bit of shelving—it was only because no one understood what he’d been trying to say.
At any rate, today he will control himself, he’s given his word. Even if they’ve had him wait and wait, languishing under the row of frames, the whole office reeking of some industrial cleaner that stings his eyes.
Ms. Vasquez composes herself at her desk, crosses her naked ankles. “Have you given any thought to Alex?” she says. “About what we discussed last time?”
Mr. Attah cannot help it—his mind rushes off at this invocation of his son’s given name. He sees Alex at the shore off the Gulf of Guinea, four or five years old, the edge of the boy’s sailor shorts darkened from ocean spray. Then Alex again, on the precipice of eleven, cowering in the courtyard after being informed that his mother had been killed. She’d been down in the Delta, visiting her people, and was only by chance in the crowded market when a child detonated a crude explosive strapped to his chest.
In the months that followed his wife’s death, Mr. Attah found himself hot every morning, unable to take his tea at noon, still boiling in the evenings when the world had cooled and plunged into careless slumber. To rest his own eyes invited mangled visions: He’d catapult upright, blinking into the dark. Even the ordinary objects of his room betrayed him—the bedside table, the matching bureau, his wife’s dressing mirror. She was a regal woman; some evenings, at her mirror, she would hum to herself a tune as thick and sweet as nectar. “Calm yourself now, Papi,” she used to tell him. “Your hot anger cannot cook the yams.”
After she was gone, Mr. Attah found he could not bear it. A feeling like choppiness, like he did not know what he might do. He had to get away, but where to? When they’d first married, his wife used to say they would move to the States, that she would give him mighty sons. Mr. Attah had decided he would take their real children there now, on a pilgrimage. He had a cousin studying in a place outside the capital, called Alexandria, which might as well have been named for his own boy.
It took all his savings, family property surreptitiously leveraged, several surreal trips to the consulate, and eighteen months before Mr. Attah and his children were boarding a jumbo airliner aimed toward Europe, en route to America. Mrs. Ibeh secured their international tickets, not knowing it would be her last official act. At the outset, Mr. Attah told himself he would go and come back. In his attaché case, he carried his family’s papers, all in order—three months, the visa granted. It was only after the plane had lifted that he realized it was Alex’s first time in the air. “We fly away over the water like bitterns, Papi,” his son had said, sounding too young when he said it, pressing his forehead against the plane’s circular window.
Now Mr. Attah realizes that Ms. Vasquez is still speaking; she speaks and has been speaking and his visions of Alex fall sadly away. He only catches the slithering tail end of what she is saying. “… allowing Alex the educational services he would so clearly benefit from…”
“Yes, yes,” he cuts in, voice lifted. “My son, Alex, is special. And brave, is he not? And strong—”
“I’m sure, but if you’d just look here, at this assessment…” She extends a folder, which he promptly waves away.
“You people suggest that my son is not learning, but if he is not—if!—then perhaps you are not competently doing your job to teach him. What you don’t seem to recognize is, in conjunction with everything, this boy, this young man, might, quite possibly be brill—”