The Good Samaritan

I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned the fact that C’s new school, Hogwarts, is in the city.

It’s in a part of the city folks around here don’t frequent, a neighborhood familiar to me almost entirely from movies starring people like Robert De Niro or Al Pacino or Johnny Depp playing policemen and/or members of the Mafia and/or policemen impersonating members of the Mafia and what have you.

So C. commutes to school. Because the city has no direct train lines from here to there, his commute involves changing trains in another part of the city that is also familiar to me entirely from movies featuring policemen, crime, drugs, “the projects,” and extended sequences of running, chasing, punching, shooting, bleeding (copious bleeding), and dying. Such is my image of the place.

Strangely enough, this particular change of venue seemed, and seems, like an excellent idea. I’m not sure why. Christian and his mom agreed: the two of them were adamant C. needed to exit his school district here in the “leafy suburbs”^* and decamp to a part of the city white people invariably describe as “gritty.” I'm sure Christian and his mom are right, but I'm not sure why.

The one thing that did make an impression on me, when we spoke to the Director of Admissions last winter, was his observation that “the kind of parent who will send his kid to school in this part of the city is a particular sort of person.” He meant that in a good way, and I thought, instantly: I bet I would like those parents.

So the whole undertaking seems to suit us. It suits us, but we’ve been nervous. The lady who washes my hair at the hairdresser’s told me, “Great school, but drive him to the door. The local boys know kids are coming in from the suburbs, so they wait in groups to mug them, and the school won’t tell you that it happens.” That sounded like an urban legend to me, but, at the same time, it also did not sound crazy, not to a person who’s watched as many police movies as I have.

So I began the new school year driving C to school. Drive him to the door because the local boys might or might not be lying in wait: that was the plan. But, finding the commute by car to be both harrowing (thank you, Robert Moses) and long, I made it through only 3 days before I found myself thinking that, really, the surrounding neighborhood seemed fine to me. (Along with: Wow. Fantastic prices on back-to-school clothes at the local back-to-school clothes emporium.)

Thus before the end of his first week in school, C. had joined the small army of businessmen and women headed into the city on Metro North each day, broadening his horizons and ours.

e.g.: In Week 2, C came home and reported that he had seen his first "crackhead" at the train station. He knew she was a crackhead, he said, because she was extremely thin and she was asking people for money.

Then, a couple of days ago, C. was between trains when two policemen came into the station with a dog and began to patrol the waiting room. The dog pulled up short at the entrance to the men’s restroom and began to bark ferociously at the door. The policemen knocked loudly, calling for whoever was inside to come out. But the door did not open.

Now C. is a cautious boy who looks young. All the new boys look young, of course. The principal told us: They’re still children when they come here, and when they leave, they’re men.

And this: “In the next four years there will be some long days and long nights, but the years will fly by in a blink.”

We are still in the beginning of the years that will fly by in a blink, and C. still looks young, and I can imagine the expression on his face, watching the dog and the policemen. In my mind’s eye, he is trying not to look scared.

At some point, as the scene unfolded, the lady sitting beside him, a middle-aged black woman from Connecticut, struck up a conversation. Where was he from? she wanted to know. And where was he headed? Hogwarts! Oh yes, a nice school.

About the dog barking ferociously at the bathroom door, she said mildly, “Oh, that’s not good.” But she made no move to get up from her seat. She would be standing her ground.

What came next, I gather, was that the dog carried on barking, and the policemen carried on knocking and calling on the man inside the restroom to come out, and the man inside the restroom carried on doing whatever he was doing behind the closed door: a stand-off. Finally, after some minutes of this, the woman said to C.: “If things get hairy, go upstairs and wait.”

On the day these events took place, C. told us the story of the lady from Connecticut and the policemen with their dog at least 3 times. He has told it again several times since. And always, the ending of the story is: “She told me, if things get hairy, go upstairs and wait.”

I didn’t think until yesterday to ask what became of the man inside the restroom. When finally I did ask, and C. told me, I realized I had already known the answer. The man came out of the restroom, C. said, and the policemen talked to him, "and then they let him go."

The reason I knew the answer was that in his telling of the story, C. had stopped at the end; he had stopped at the part where you know everything is going to turn out OK.

The lady from Connecticut, the policemen and their dog, the man inside the restroom, and C.: each will emerge from this episode unharmed. The adults will do their jobs, and the objects of their concern — the man inside the restroom and the boy inside the station waiting for his train — will be talked to and sent on their way.

A happy ending, and gritty in its way.

^* channelling Mike Petrilli