Bread Upon the Waters by Irwin Shaw Read Free Book Online

deprecatingly. “The arguments were short in my father’s house.”
    “They’re not short here,” Strand said. “I’ll say that for them.”
    “Refreshing.” Hazen turned to Caroline. “And you, young lady? Are you in college?”
    Caroline, who had been eating as though she were starving, laughed. “If I’m lucky, in the fall. I graduate from prep school next month. With my marks…” She shook her head sorrowfully.
    “You don’t go to River?” Hazen asked.
    “It’s across town,” Leslie said hastily.
    “Daddy says it’s too dangerous. I told him if it wasn’t too dangerous for him it wasn’t too dangerous for me.” She giggled. She was not a girl who was ordinarily given to giggling, but Strand forgave her this evening. “That was one short argument. I lost. I go to school ten blocks from here.”
    “I read about it, of course,” Hazen said, “about the violence in the public schools, muggings, children stealing from other children, weapons. I’ve always taken it with a grain of salt. Mr. Strand, have you found…?” He stopped.
    “Well,” Strand said, “it’s not like Sunday school in Vermont, say. There are incidents. Yes, there certainly are incidents.”
    “Have you been involved?” Hazen leaned forward, interested.
    “Once or twice,” Strand said. “Last term a boy threatened me with a knife if I didn’t pass him. He had cut one-half the classes and on the final examination he got a grade of 32 out of a possible hundred.”
    “Did you pass him?”
    Strand laughed. “Of course. If he wanted a passing grade badly enough to threaten to kill me, I thought he deserved it. At least he didn’t try to take my bicycle.”
    Hazen touched the bandage on his head ruefully. “Perhaps you’re more intelligent than I,” he said. “Among the ruffians, do you see any gleams of hope?”
    Strand shrugged. “Of course. Though most of them are doomed to be snuffed out, I’m afraid, in very quick order. In my senior class, for example—there’s an undersized Puerto Rican boy who seems to have been reading history since he was a child. I just read a paper of his this afternoon. About the Civil War. He has some ideas of his own on the subject.”
    “For example…?” Hazen said. He seemed genuinely interested.
    “For example, he wrote that the Civil War was a great mistake.” As he spoke about the boy, Strand remembered the round dark face with white teeth bared in what could be a sneer or an insolent smile. “He wrote that the South should have been allowed to go its own way, that in a short time they’d have had to free the slaves anyway, and a million lives would have been saved. By now, he wrote, the South and the North would have been united in some way, even in a loose confederation, and all of us, black and white, would have been spared a century of misery. That, of course, is not what he’s been taught and I must warn him that if he answers questions in that way on his Regents, he’ll fail.”
    “How do you think he’ll react to that? ”
    “He’ll laugh. Passing the Regents doesn’t mean much to him. He can’t go to college, he’ll have to be looking for a job as a dishwasher or hustling on the streets from this summer on, what does he care about the Regents?”
    “It’s a pity, isn’t it?” Hazen said thoughtfully.
    “It’s today,” Strand said.
    “What mark did you give him for his essay?”
    “A,” Strand said.
    “You must be an unusual teacher.”
    “He’s an unusual boy. In another paper he argued that the way he was taught history was bunk. His word. Bunk. He wrote that cause and effect in historical movements are just designed to make it easy for historians to package our past into neat little phony parcels. He’s done some reading in science—physics—and he’s latched on to the theory of randomness—you’ve read something about that, I suppose?”
    “A little.” Hazen nodded.
    “He takes it to mean that nothing is or was