Nothing as Whole as a Broken Heart by Barry Rachin (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📖

watched the animal forage its way downstream before moving off down the trail.
Later that night after they had eaten their whole grain rice and vegetables followed by scalding coffee and sugar cookies, Grace mused, “I would tell you how much I love you, my darling daughter, but something essential always gets lost in the unwieldy fabric of language,... the wordiness.” She took Angie’s face in her callused hands and planted a moist kiss on either cheek. “Better that we should muck about with the likes of Mr. Anderson or watch a bull moose at dinner.”
“Or skinny-dip with rainbow trout.”
Grace’s sly smile was wasted on the darkness. “Yes, that too.”


* * * * *


“Jerome, hold up a minute.” Jerome Spellman was ready to bolt as soon as the bell range, but Grace’s no-nonsense tone brought him up short. She waited quietly for the classroom to empty out then indicated a chair next to her desk. The lanky boy slumped into the seat with his legs splayed at an odd angle.
“School year’s coming to an end,” Grace spoke casually. The boy’s jaw was slack, eyes shrouded over. A moist blob of mucous trailed down the top lip toward the corner of his mouth. “Have you thought at all about what you might want to do after high school?”
“Get a job.” His eyes drifting toward the open doorway, Jerome shifted impatiently in the seat. “Something important.” He scratched his crotch with broken nails. “Investment broker, maybe.”
“Well that’s a fine position. Where did you get such an idea?”
“That’s what my father does.” Jerome sat straighter in the chair and his face contorted in a mawkish grin. “I’m gonna need a lot of do-re-mi.”
“Yes, we all - ”
“I’m getting married after school lets out. Middle of summer,… beginning of fall.”
Grace felt her casual demeanor crack. “I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.”
Bad move! What was it Dr. Rosen had said about staying outside the circle of craziness?
Jerome smirked and mashed a wrist over his nose clearing away the glistening mess. “I met this waitress down at the diner. She’s married but gonna get a divorce so we can be together.”
“You’re seeing a married woman?”
A moment ago, he couldn’t escape from the classroom fast enough. Now Jerome's buttocks were epoxied to the chair. He glanced up at her momentarily. “Thing is, you gotta plan ahead.”
Grace felt a chill bleed through her body. The boy was carrying on an interior monologue, exclusively talking to himself. The teacher's presence in the room was unnecessary. Incidental. Jerome Spellman was a prisoner locked away in the solitary confines of his twisted imagination. He needed no one to validate his hallucinatory life view. “Most people,” she said weakly, “start at the bottom and work their way up the corporate ladder.”
Another plug of mucous was visible dangling in his left nostril. The wetness emerged as a turgid mass and began the slow trek south across the hollow above his upper lip. “Naw, that’s not my style.” Jerome rolled off the chair and grabbed his backpack. “Gotta get to my next class. Sure was swell talking with you.”

* * * * *

In late April, Principal Skinner approached Grace in the parking lot. At six foot five, two hundred and fifty pounds, even some male staff were intimidated by the hulking bear of a man. “Last month Dr. Rosen petitioned the school committee for two hundred dollars to have a psychiatrist, at Beth Israel Hospital evaluate Jerome Spellman.”
“Does the psychiatrist come here or Jerome travel to Boston?”
“Neither,” the principal was staring at the front of the school where a caravan of yellow buses was pulling up at the front of the building. A group of walkers dragging rolling backpacks emerged from the building heading for home. “Tuesday Dr. Rosen brought his test results to the psychiatrist’s office in Boston and they discussed options.”
Options - like whether or not to keep a sixteen year-old in public school or cart him off to the funny farm.
“Excuse me just a moment,” Principal Skinner said. A parent, who was walking a large German shepherd on a leash with a choke collar, arrived to collect her child. The dog waited until they reached the bus loading area and, as if on cue, moved his bowels. The principal instructed one of the teacher’s aides to get a janitor to dispose of the unsightly mess. “Children! Children!” Two girls were chasing each other near the crosswalk as the busses were loading and the principal rushed off to settle the girls back down.
“Where was I?” the man asked when he finally returned.
“Options,” Grace said. In a moment all the buses would pull away with their precious cargo and the bedlam would fade away to nothing.
“The assessment from Boston was bleak,” he muttered. “The psychiatrist said, ‘Think positive but prepare for the worse’.”
The school spent two hundred dollars for seven words of advice. That matriculated out to twenty-eight dollars a word. “Which is exactly what Dr. Rosen told me at the beginning of the school year,” Grace replied.
Principal Skinner watched the last bus pull away from the school. Just moments earlier a custodian shuffled out of the building with a flat shovel. He scooped up the dog feces with a deft motion, dumped it in a plastic shopping bag, and then hurried off to dispose of the mess. The principal rubbed his hands together and rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet. “This is a public school. We have an obligation to serve the community as a whole.”
“Jerome isn’t a monster,” Grace ventured. “He just lives inside his head. Maybe if - ”
“The Spellmans belong to my church,” he cut her short. “I golf with his father. They’re decent, down-to-earth people.” He raised his arms in a gesture of futility. “How the hell do I tell them to think positive but prepare for the worse?” The man was hinting at a deeper truth. Brandenberg Middle School made every effort to accommodate students who didn’t fit the mold, but Jerome Spellman was too far gone, his behavior absurdly dangerous. The principal went back to his office.
Everyone was gone. The natural order was beginning to reassert itself. Frogs croaked in the culvert near the track field. In a cluster of white-barked birches, a chorus of raucous birds was chortling like crazy. The deciduous trees, stripped bare in the late fall, were only just beginning to bare their delicate buds. The air reeked richly of percolating promise and rebirth. A warm breeze caressed Graces neck before skittering off into a stand of Eastern white pines.
What was it she had read just the other day in a collection of spiritual verse? A quote from the 17th Century Rabbi Nachman from Bratzlav: There is nothing as whole as a broken heart.

* * * * *
Friday morning before class, the school receptionist stuck her head in the doorway. “Principal’s looking for you.”
When Grace reached the administrative office, Principal Skinner and Dr. Rosen were chatting in hushed tones. A Maalox bottle was sitting uncapped next to a plastic container of extra-strength Tylenol. “Jerome Spellman’s over at Butler Hospital,” the principal said soberly. “Police took him last night in a paddy wagon.”
“The boy barricaded himself in his bedroom,” Dr. Rosen continued, “wouldn’t undo the lock. When the cops finally broke down the door, they found Jerome huddled under the bedcovers mumbling incoherently. He went quietly, though… made no fuss. The admitting psychiatrist at Butler put him on a locked ward. There was no need to medicate or restrain him. The boy just wanted to be left alone.”
“Orderlies gave him a bath,” Principal Skinner added. “First in months, from what I gather.” He poured some Maalox into a small plastic cup and tossed the pink liquid down. “We don’t anticipate Jerome returning to Brandenberg High School.”
“Well, at least it’s not the MIMH,” Grace muttered.
The boy’s classmates would catch on in a hurry that something was up. The kid was never physically sick and hadn’t missed a single day of school since September. Gossip and wild rumors would blossom like late summer weeds and then just as quicky wither away. The queer boy had no friends. The Spring Fling dance was coming up plus the junior class trip to New York to see the Rockets at Radio City Music Hall. Jerome Spellman would be old news long before then. Like the psychologist said, it wasn’t anyone’s fault. And yet, if the tortured expression on Principal Skinner’s face was any indication, grownups didn’t handle mental illness any better than their adolescent counterparts.
There is nothing as whole as a broken heart. "Jerome was partial to those cinnamon raisin buns they sell over at Ryan's diner,” Grace’s voice faltered slightly. “You know, the ones with the sugary glaze. You nibble at them with sticky fingers or unfurl the pastry by pulling the dough apart from the outside edge toward the center. They tasted just as good either way.” The Principal smiled bleakly. Dr. Rosen, the man who wrote his doctoral thesis on Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist, wagged his shaggy head. As Grace explained it, she would stop by the diner after school let out and pick up a couple of pastries. Of course, she would call to determine visiting hours before heading over to the hospital.

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Publication Date: 08-23-2010

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