Roxy's Story (The Forbidden 2)

“Well, it’s as true here as it is anywhere,” he said. “What kind of a student have you been in school?”

“The kind that visits most teachers in their nightmares,” I said dryly.

The lines around his jaw deepened. He took a deep breath and blew air through his closed lips. “You won’t be giving me any nightmares,” he warned. “I can assure you of that. Let’s begin.”

He opened the New York Times and started with the lead story. I sensed that Professor Marx expected me to be a complete airhead. However, despite my sullenness at breakfast and at dinner in my family’s house, I was unable to totally ignore my father’s commentaries on current events, especially whatever affected the economy. He was always very emotional about his beliefs. Mama was his perfect audience, of course, showing her own amazement at the things that amazed him and showing her pleasure at whatever pleased him. Sometimes she looked toward me, hoping I would join her chorus and please my father. More often than not, however, just to annoy him, I took the opposing point of view by deliberately asking the simplest questions about the most obvious things that might challenge his beliefs. I never showed any real emotion or allegiance to anything that he criticized, but my merely taking that side of the argument brought the blood to his face.

In short, although I favored reading the rag newspapers and magazines more, the sort found at supermarket checkout counters, I wasn’t totally oblivious to what was happening in our country and in the world. As I replied to his questions, Professor Marx’s assumptions about me began to lose steam. He struck me as someone who didn’t like to be proven wrong about anything. To get me, he had to go deeper and deeper into an issue.

My father, because of his work, favored a more laissez-faire approach to business. I understood that, and some of our hottest arguments were sparked by my concern for the less fortunate—the grunts, as his own father, the general, might call them, the foot soldiers, the noncommissioned officers, the enlisted men, who in my opinion did the most work and bore the most pain and responsibility.

“If we lived and thought the way you do,” my father fumed at me, “we’d be out on the streets, too.”

Well, I certainly could say to him now, “You were right. Where did I end up?”

Once again, I thought it was ironic. My father would never dream that his frequent political lectures in our dining room would help prepare me to find success in this new life I was choosing for myself, a life I was certain he would despise.

My biggest weaknesses were with the arts, theater, opera, even stage musicals. Professor Marx pounced on those areas, piling up the reading material for me. I had taken an art class in my sophomore year but failed. The teacher, Mrs. Faber, was one of those teachers who found the most attentive students early on and put all of their effort into teaching them. The rest of us could stay or leave as far as she was concerned—mentally, of course. I did my best daydreaming in her class, and now I was about to pay for it. The introduction to art textbook Professor Marx gave me was the thickest. I thought it weighed five pounds.

He made it clear that I had to learn and be able to identify famous arias from great operas and be somewhat familiar with their plots. He wanted me to have a “decent knowledge of Broadway theater.”

“You’ll come in here and listen to them during your free time.”

“I have free time?” I asked.

He ignored that. “Many of the men you will escort will be much older. They won’t be into hip-hop or Lady Gaga. They’ll be pleased if you know Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. Do you know anything about any of them?”

“My father’s favorite in that group is Tony Bennett, but he listens to all of them. My mother loves Edith Piaf.”

“Oh,” he said, taken aback. “Well, that’s good exposure.”

“Do you know Patachou?” I asked.

He bristled a bit. “I’m not here for you to interrogate,” he said.

I shrugged. “I just thought you might know something about French music, since you seem to know Edith Piaf.”

“Of course I know about French music, and I know about Edith Piaf. That’s not the point. The point is what you know and what you have to learn, not what I know and what I have to learn.”

I hid my smile behind one of the books he had shoved my way.

He then leaped across topics to deliberately make me feel inferior, I thought. He was on to geography, asking me questions like Alex Trebek on Jeopardy! There was no way I was going to do well identifying world rivers and capitals of countries other than the U.K., France, Germany, Russia, Spain, and Italy. I did remember Athens, but I was lost when it came to the Middle East and the Far East.

Before what had become four times worse than any of the classes I hated at school ended, he tossed mathematical concepts at me. I was practically silent. Finally, even he had endured enough. Ten minutes before our time was up, he decided to end it with a deep sigh.

“We’ll meet tomorrow, the same time—only on time, please.”

“You don’t expect me to learn all this by then,” I said, indicating the pile of material he had shoved my way.

“Not all of it, but enough to let me know you’re serious and I’m not wasting my time and Mrs. Brittany’s money,” he replied.

“You won’t be,” I said, rising. Then I smiled at him. “You really ought to look up and listen to Patachou. My mother remembers her parents playing her records constantly when she lived in Paris. If you like Piaf, you’ll enjoy her.”

He just stared at me. I nodded and left the library, struggling to carry everything he had assigned me to read. Just as I entered the hallway, however, Randy appeared and came rushing over.

“Oh, you poor thing, turned into a beast of burden. Here, let me help you,” he said, taking the pile out of my arms. “I’ll bring this to your room. Where do

you go next?” he asked as we started toward the stairway.