The World of Cornelius Magee

By Elaine Todd Koren

These unforgettable short stories of a ghetto school in NYC interspersed with the sadness of the characters such as little Rachel caught in her mother's divorce and ludicrous romance with fellow teacher, idiotic Mel. It's about the absurdities of the school life, of the young psychiatrist, Dr. Fallek, terribly shocked and astounded at the goings on his arrival at the school. About the handsome black student, Donald, a self-styled Picasso, always incorrigible, taking bets with his buddy, Carlos on Rodney's survival from Sickle cell anemia. The general tone of the School and its madness was always seen as sane. The absurdities of the school described in the book live alongside the magical qualities of Cornelius and his fantastic world. Cornelius was a magnet who attracted all the children around him.
Read the hilarious chapter, "Sex on the Staircase." About Mr. Stone, an Assistant Principal, the nemesis of Donald and Carlos. He is terribly distressed by their antics, and by the immoral action called, "Unsupervised Sex Activity" defaming the school. He observed sex in the wardrobe as truly a most horrible act and quite unbelievable. But unfortunately for Mr. Stone it was true. We experienced its madness, the wild fornication took place in Mel's classroom wardrobe and he was threatened with the loss of his job. Poor Mel.
And above all Cornelius was real and he returned with his world and left when the school finally closed. He is a character you will never forget and his magic will rub off on you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elaine Todd Koren
• Release date: Oct 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310439780

Elaine Todd Koren

As a “woman of a certain age” like her heroine, Suzanne, Elaine Todd Koren has defied time by consistently bucking the tide. A renaissance woman who modeled, acted and studied art with Moses Soyer, she is both an accomplished painter and a writer. A divorced single mother of two, she worked in the New York inner- city school system both as a teacher and guidance counselor, and at night she wrote. Her mystical short stories of the children she met won first prize in both the Educational Press and International Labor Press Association awards. Her guidance book for the elementary school teacher (Prentice-Hall) was successful, well reviewed and widely used in colleges. She left the educational field to write full time and has published articles, contributed to anthologies and then worked on the biographical novel, Suzanne. For many years she researched, in the United States and in France, the life of Suzanne Valadon, the French painter and the people she touched. Ms. Koren presently resides in New York City with her husband where she is working on a memoir.

Book preview

the world of Cornelius Magee

Tales from the School

By Elaine Todd Koren

Published by Maverick Books

Woodstock, New York 12498

Copyright © 2001 by Elaine Todd Koren

Library of Congress Catalog Number pending

ISBN 0-9672355-4-5

Front-page graphics, Dr. Lori Todd

This is a work of fiction. Many of the incidents are based on the author’s experience in the classroom and as a counselor. The characters and incidents are written as fictional interpretations of actual events.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Ebook, June 2013

to my husband, always

TABLE OF CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PREFACE

PART ONE: Fall Rumblings

Morning in Brownsville

The Divorced Ones

Leroy's Lament

Don't Go Near the Window, Dr. Fallek!

In Pursuit of Donald

M. Harold Stone

Fall Rumblings

PART TWO: A Winter Madness

The Invitation

Louise Fulton

A Budding Picasso

The Trial of Peter Zenger

A Winter Madness

PART THREE: Rites of Spring

Sex on the Staircase

America the Beautiful

Unsupervised Sex Activity

Requiem for a Slum Child

James is Gone, Thank Heaven

PART FOUR: Sounds of Summer

Answer by Noontime

Rodney and Cornelius

A Night at the Opera

Farewell Louise

The Loser

The Graduate

The World of Cornelius Magee

Sounds of Summer

Epilogue

Meet The Author

Preface

The School stood as a bleak fortress that September 1968 still withstanding the onslaughts from within and without. And the onslaughts were substantial. From across the seas, the Vietnam battle still raged. This turmoil was enhanced on April 4th by the shooting of the civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, and compounded by the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy on June 5 in Los Angeles.

But if the School was resilient, the population was changing. By 1968, the ethnic population of the School changed from the Jewish lower middle class children of immigrant parents to the poor black and Spanish families, many on welfare assistance. There was a growing poverty and ensuing violence, which spilled into this School through its children.

The irony of the upheaval which took place in the classrooms was that the insanity was regarded as sane.

There was nothing unique in the structure of this School which resembled a hundred other schools in the city, and had been constructed in the year 1918 of concrete, brick, mortar, wood and steel. It now was a silent sepulcher shorn of the mystique that children endow even the oldest and most dismal of school structures; it now was a mute specter resisting the onslaughts of decay in the slum of Brownsville, and waited until it was either demolished or its doors miraculously opened through a reprieve. And it appeared that it would wait there forever.

This group of vignettes, stories and anecdotes span the fall, winter and spring terms of that final year in 1968. It settled into the welcome respite and mellowness of the summer recess, expecting to be renewed again in familiar unsettling patterns for the fall. Only it was the end of an era. The doors never opened again.

I was once a part of that school.

* * *

One night I had a dream that I was running down the steps of the School, slowly at first but then very swiftly. I didn't know why I was there but I knew I was looking for something or someone. But when I reached the exit, the passageway didn't end, but extended on into infinity and it was lined with children. And as I ran, the children stood as statues. Slowly the statues came to life and passed through the doorways, and when I reached each door there were empty classrooms. I saw a huge window whose broken sill almost touched the littered floor and when I looked through it I saw the world of its children and it all came to life and I was one of its teachers. And one of its children was Cornelius with the magic quality about him, a magnet to which children were drawn like moths to a flame, suspended always in limbo some where between fantasy and reality.

* * *

PART ONE: Fall Rumblings

The calm would not last

Morning in Brownsville

The ambulance wails plaintively down the Brownsville streets. It passes a fairly large medical center guarding the outskirts of the ghetto area, the complex of the structures’ clean lines making inroads into a neighborhood holding frantically to some respectability; inside its clinics are chocked full of blacks and Hispanics from the encroaching ghetto community. The Medicaid card is the common denominator. The ambulance passes wide tree lined streets and the congestion of other vehicles going to and fro before the Hospital’s Emergency entrance and then turns a corner, and the scene changes alarmingly. Discordant notes of decay and despair dance crazily on every side as the blitzed streets of Brownsville come into full view.

Past streets of bleak, boarded up business establishments, the ambulance swallows up the din of Spanish music blaring from a thousand store fronts set up to sell a thousand dance records, impromptu operations that will disappear the following week. The ambulance passes several small bodegas, barely eking out an existence, some vandalized, some vacated. Nearby, a Jewish luncheonette had changed to black ownership, the name of Schwartz still printed in neat yellow letters some time before, its windows smashed and the glass still lays in the street, glittering bravely in the morning sun, forever escaping the sanitation pickups. It is a store in which orthodox Jewish women once sat, their hair bound up in kerchiefs, while chickens were selected and plucked. They once gossiped here about their children and grandchildren, making tracks with old shoes in the sawdust and feathers on the floor. On the next block, on a borderline street of Brownsville, old Jewish women huddle together on small wooden chairs before a prewar apartment building during warm daylight hours; they defy the neighborhood perils while they sun themselves and seek each other for solace. They talk of sons and daughters all having moved away to the greener pastures of the suburbs and other parts of the city. They are old wives waiting for death to terminate their endless vigil of decay. They are the relics of a culture that had come and gone.

As the ambulance draws nearer to the School it passes a Jewish synagogue which is converted to a Baptist church. The Star of David remains stubbornly intact on the front of the building but inside a makeshift cross of red lights is erected above the altar. Ahead are the fire charred ruins of another church whose gaping windows reveal a battered organ, until finally the ambulance reaches the School. And it could be a block in the London blitz, a disaster area that never seems to be rebuilt.

A small crowd of children gathers about the ambulance whistling and hooting. There is a new excitement now. The children quiet down waiting for the two attendants who swing open the heavy rust red doors of the School to ensnare their prey. It is Rodney, a nine year old; poor Rodney who has a certain fame with the children as he cringes on a worn leather couch in the medical suite, battered by a new sickle cell anemia attack as intruding young eyes morbidly peer inside. And now the same wide-eyed children are fascinated by this delicious horror show as he is taken out, and they greedily ogle his distended abdomen.

Outside, the small crowd about the outgoing stretcher grows larger. There are in all five boys and three mothers, a mixture of Hispanic and black women begin to peer from behind the grimy windows of the tenements facing the school; some hang out of windows in house dresses of blazing color and stare with curiosity at the tableau. A mother turns her face from side to side muttering, Ay Dios mio, es terrible! as she gazes at Rodney on the stretcher.

Two figures creep from the shrubbery with eager inquisitive faces. One, a handsome black boy, Donald Brooks flashes a dimpled smile flooded with charisma. He radiates a questionable charm. In his hand he holds the ubiquitous wooden pass, a calling card to adventure.

An anbillance, he says as he stands squarely before the teacher, Ellen Harris, blocking her entrance to the School building as though it’s his prerogative to do so.

An anbillance, echoes Carlos Rodriguez, Donald’s eternal compatriot, a short chubby light skinned Puerto Rican youth, who jumps up and down punctuating his words.

Shut up, Carlos, says Donald.

I could talk if I want . . . it’s no law I can't talk, man.

It’s a law . . . only I could talk, man . . . I tole you that before, says Donald emphatically.

Why are you here, boys? reproves Mrs. Harris.

Hello, nice pretty lady, and Donald bows low. Ain’t Rodney in your class? Well, he ain’t feelin’ so good and if you wanna know my expert opinion, I think he gonna be dead so he ain’t comin’ back, he says cooly.

That depends. asserts Carlos.

What do ya mean that depends? says Donald.

‘Cause if he be alive, man, it mean he ain’t dead and he comin’ back, spouts Carlos with great wisdom.

Come on now, step aside and let me through before I call Mr. Stone. Go where you belong.

You see, Carlos, what you done. Now she be callin’ ole stone face. You always sayin’ the wrong thing. I tole you to shut up your stupid brain, man, ‘cause you gonna get it tired out, 'specially with all them reefers you smokin’ . . . that’s why you a retard, and move and hole open the door like a gentleman for a pretty lady, and Donald bows again.

You crazy. I don’t see no door out here. Boy, look at her run. She’s sure late, says Carlos as Ellen Harris runs into the building. I like her ass.

You got no respeck for a teacher, man. Hey! There’s Rodney on a stretcher, poor little kid. He lookin’ at us.

He ain’t lookin’ at nobody with them sickle cells in him.

Maybe we should hole his hand . . . he won’t be so scared. Donald approaches the stretcher. He is pushed away by one of the attendants.

Go to your class, little boy.

Who you callin’ little boy, shouts Donald. Can’t you see the little kid is scared. Ain’t you scared, Rodney you gonna die?

Rodney looks out with glazed feverish eyes.

Only kiddin,’ says Donald. Lemme touch your hand, Rodney, before they lock you up in that awful thing and you don’t never come back.

Rodney extends his hand in a feeble gesture.

Beat it, kid or I’ll call the principal over there, says the attendant.

Where? Oh . . . fuckin’ ole stoneface.

I knowed it was him ‘cause I heard his creepy cough. Let’s get outa here. Carlos darts into the bushes.

He don’t scare me, man. I’ll kick him in the ass if he bothers me, asserts Donald. He fullashit, anyhow, and he darts after Carlos and both crouch down behind the bushes.

Boy, I sure gonna be glad when I’m outa this here cheap school, swaggers Carlos. No wonder kids like Rodney be so sick.

You ain’t never gonna be outa here ‘cause you never gonna graduate like me. I might become an astronaut and go up on the moon but you be too retarded, and you’ll wind up bein’ a wino on the streets and smokin’ joints and stuff and your wife be cryin' in the house ‘cause you be drinkin’ up your welfare check. I can hear her now, man, and Donald cups his ear. Hey, ole stoneface left . . . let’s get outa here.

I wanna see the anbillance leave.

What’s so great about that? That little kid ain’t comin’ back anyhow. You wanna bet he ain’t comin' back?

Okay, what doya bet? I say he be comin’ back.

"I’ll turn you in to ole stoneface if you lose,