The Question Authority. Rachel Cline
system. The attorney’s name is Elizabeth Cohen—the number of Beth Cohens in the world approaches the infinite, I sometimes think. My Beth married a Silicon Valley guy in 1980-something, and certainly showed no signs of becoming a lawyer. Au contraire, Pierre, as we used to say.
As Jocelyn mentioned, Harold Singer has been caught before but—like everything else at the ED—it’s not really that simple. Sorting through the contents of the accordion file, I find the earlier case: Singer was charged with sexual impropriety but the hearing officer found in his favor. The full decision is too boring to bother reading but I scan it and am struck by the name of the girl in question, Elodie Cascarelli, who is represented by a few choice quotes:
I guess you could say he was “personal” with me.
Yes, I saw him outside of school a few times. So what?
He has a way of talking that lets you know you’re important to him.
In the current case, my case, the victim isn’t even named. The only people who seem certain Singer’s done something wrong are one of his colleagues and another girl in the same classroom. There’s a letter of reference from one of his professors from Teachers College, who calls him “gifted” and “dedicated.” There’s also a Letter to File from a former colleague, who calls him “one of the most inspiring and inventive young teachers I have ever met.” His girlfriend? No, she says “in all my years of teaching”—so Singer is a charmer of middle-aged ladies, as well. Great.
The summary report of the city’s special investigator is in all caps and exhausting to read—does he realize he’s screaming? The upshot is that the principal told Singer, in writing, that he was not to spend time alone with female students in any capacity, and he was subsequently written up three times for disobeying: He offered homework help (“I didn’t realize I was barred from helping my students”) and he walked a girl to the subway after dark (“It was on my way, and we were in the middle of a conversation about the book she was reading; it didn’t occur to me to cut her off mid-sentence”). The third incident involves such a grammatically tortured explanation of the configuration of the cafeteria entrance (somehow Singer and a student had been “alone” there) that I can’t even follow it, despite reading it twice. I wonder if its all-caps author gets paid the same shit salary as me.
Anyway, Harold Singer is officially accused of insubordination—disobeying his principal—because there was no proof of sexual misconduct and the girl herself has not come forward. Nevertheless, if the hearing officer finds him guilty, he could lose not only his job but his pension—and for a teacher well into the third decade of his career, that’s serious money, not to mention health insurance, for life.
In the absence of a photo of the guy, I find that I am picturing Bob Rasmussen whenever I read “Harold Singer.” Rasmussen also never failed to have an answer to every question—a logical (though sometimes invented) explanation— and he, too, was free with his righteous indignation. Not that I ever saw him accused of doing anything wrong by a grownup. Of course, in 1971 there was a lot more leeway for a guy like him, and at a school like the suffragette-founded Young Ladies’ Academy of Brooklyn (where we didn’t even have a dress code and sang “This Land is Your Land” instead of the national anthem every day) his colleagues seemed to view him as occasionally arrogant and irritating but nothing worse. I once heard our headmistress refer to him as “a lovable rake.”
I hunt up the spreadsheet of comparable cases on our shared drive to find out exactly what facts I’ll need to feed it in order to generate a settlement offer. The column headings are: Respondent’s Age, Hire Date, Current Salary, Strength (which means “of our case”), and Severity (which must mean “of the offense”). How do I measure that? It’s not a legal matter; no one saw anything. Technically his offense was disobeying his principal. Big deal.
This is typical of my job. There’s no real training; they just give you the regs to read and a bunch of cases that have been written up for law journals or whatever and because you’re smart and well-meaning—or were trained as an attorney in Kenya, or dropped out of law school—it is assumed that you will figure it out. And I do, but often the hard way.
The basic facts should be in the paperwork—sometimes they are: there’s a cover sheet that someone is supposed to fill in before the case gets to the Settlement unit—but I can’t find one in the Singer accordion file. I should just be able to look up the guy’s personnel file somewhere on the computer network and get, for example, his hire date, but no, this requires a records request, a paper trail. I have to write a polite and correctly formatted email to a lady named Shonda Deville in the Manifest Records Unit, who replies with a polite, five-sentence email, the gist of which is: “Your request has been received.” She has a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King underneath her cursive-font signature. After a week (but not sooner) I can follow up with another email and, five days later, an apologetic phone call, but even then I never find out whether there are a hundred requests ahead of mine, or ten, or a thousand. When something is “on for hearing” in a few days like this case, I can add a boilerplate first paragraph requesting expedited handling but even then—what if Shonda is sick or on vacation? What if she has trouble finding the records—sometimes she has to resort to looking up paper files and must, herself, send a records request to the storage facility in Staten Island, and on and on. I write my request and set myself a reminder to follow up first thing in the morning. And although it is probably the least efficient way to find anything, I return to the accordion file and start to read.
It surprises me that Singer went to Teachers College—in other words, he must have been smart and enthusiastic and all that once upon a time. TC is hard to get into, not to mention expensive. He could have gotten a job in a private school or out in the suburbs—so he is also an idealist of some sort. I guess he is the kind of pervert who thinks he is rescuing his victims from ignorance and poverty—but then how’d he end up at the Children’s City School in Murray Hill? It’s one of those school-within-a-schools that the ED started doing a few years ago—along with magnet schools, and outdoor schools, and charter schools, and anything else that might counter the overall impression of failure and despair. Anyway, Singer must be good at his job or they wouldn’t have hired him in the first place. Of course, there’s no reason a pedophile can’t also be a good teacher. I learned that from Rasmussen.
9
Nora
Lunch is a confusing time of day for me. The apartment is a fifteen-minute walk, so clearly I should go home. No one here expects me to work through lunch, and even if I did, it wouldn’t count—I wouldn’t get paid for the time—but if I come back more than two minutes late, they dock my check and, after three lates, there’s some kind of probation or warning, so mostly I stay close. But all I can really get to eat in the immediate neighborhood is a burger, pizza, or “street meat.” Obviously, I should bring a sandwich and I have resolved to do this numerous times, but making myself lunch at eight in the morning is apparently beyond my capabilities as a human being. I’m sure that’s related to the fact that my mother never mastered that skill, either, and used to send me to grade school with atrocities like a jar of olives or a can of sardines—this was before the invention of the Lunchable. Maybe that’s part of why I wound up at the Academy. They served a hot lunch every day and every girl was expected to sit down and eat it.
Anyway, it’s twelve thirty, I’m so hungry I could plotz, and I’m sitting immobile at my desk when my cell phone starts ringing in my bag, in the desk drawer. I don’t even keep it on my desk, because since moving back to Brooklyn and starting this job I have been as bad at keeping up my friendships as I have at making myself lunch. It’s an unfamiliar 718 number, but I’ve gone to the trouble of getting the thing out so I answer it.
“Is this Eleanor?” says a male voice. No one has ever called me Eleanor. I can’t even imagine who would know that it’s my real name.
“Yes,” I say, with some discomfort.
“I think I have your cat,” he says. “I got your number from Sammy.”
It takes me a second but I realize he means Sami, the man