A Brief History of Kate Parker

By Daniel Schorr

A Brief History Of Kate Parker follows the life of an ordinary American woman, Kate Parker, from her high-school years to her late twenties.

Originally from the unfashionable middle class in an overlooked part of the country, through effort and ambition Kate Parker is able to attend a prestigious college in the east, where she meets the person who becomes her closest lifelong friend, Katie Leung.

Kate Parker is drawn to Katie Leung, a child of immigrants, as, regardless of their academic readiness, they are both bewildered when faced with the daunting cultural advantages of their classmates.

College completes Kate Parker's transformation into a provisional member of the upper middle class, though her modest income as a public school teacher in New York forces her to the relative margins of New York City, where she has settled.

She eventually meets a man named Gardner Traxler, whose superficial attractiveness masks a lukewarm character. The birth of their son, Marlow, does nothing to cement their union.

Kate is successful in her teaching career, but is conscious all the while of her outsider status. She settles uneasily into her life as a single mother in an apartment in Midwood, Brooklyn.

Kate Parker's principal sends her to a symposium led by a semi-retired speculative financier named Hugh Worth who has taken an improbable but sincere interest in education reform. After a little hesitation, Kate succumbs to the attractions of Worth, and her life is transformed, to be sure.

A Brief History of Kate Parker is the story of a woman in search of tranquility and belonging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098363369

Book preview

XI.

I.

It was a day in February like any other. Though it was not cold for the season, the sky had been overcast for many days on end. It had probably been a week since the last patch of blue had been seen, if anyone had even given it any thought. Yet the sky had been so leaden and the weather so uneventful that most people had stopped thinking about it altogether.

Kate Parker was pushing the stroller down the sidewalk with a listless air, which was not characteristic of her. She took passive note for a second time of the condition of the sidewalk cement: grayish green and raised here and there by the tree roots—trees that themselves had no right, seemingly, to be growing there. The two-year-old in the stroller must have seemed rather dazed, as Kate Parker was well aware. She knew that this was part of the normal range of expressions that an exhausted toddler would have assumed, and so was untroubled by his almost lifeless aspect.

Kate had never been inclined to think things over any more than was necessary, though another sort of woman might easily have worked herself up into a state of agitation over the circumstances under which the little boy was being raised. First of all, he had been given the name Marlow. She had hated the name initially, before grudgingly accepting, as his personality began to emerge, that it well matched his temperament and appearance. Marlow was a contemporary name, and as such it was suspect, or so Kate Parker had once thought. No one should have to bear such a name. Yet, so many children did, including, apparently, her own. However unqualified the father may have been on any matter having to do with raising a child, it was he who had insisted on this name; he had been adamant in his refusal to consider any other. It was everything Kate Parker could do to get him to agree to drop the final e.

But if the father had insisted, she had acceded, and as she approached her apartment building, her awareness drifted away both from the dilapidated sidewalk and from questions of culpability; she reflected instead on when it is that a marriage evolves from a set of compromises to a series of acceptances. She smiled as she again admitted to herself that she was, after all this, still not really able to mark the point of transition, as hard as she had tried to note the beginning of the proverbial end. It would be so much easier if we could just throw people overboard when they become dead weight, but in practice, this is never possible. All along, she had never blamed herself; at the same time, it was impossible to avoid all regret over her dismal union with Gardner Traxler, the permanent reminder of which was Marlow, for whose care she effectively had full responsibility. Of course, she wouldn’t have dreamed of resenting poor Marlow for any of it.

Kate stopped in front of an especially prodigious break in the sidewalk, with the initial end of negotiating it as quickly as she could manage. A moment later, however, she leaned against the neighboring massive, crooked tree, allowing herself an extended moment of loathing; this too was uncharacteristic.

For if Marlow had not been the name she would have wished for their son, she now took the time to contemplate, however pointlessly, her positive hatred for the name Gardner. Naturally, everything that had transpired would only have tended to accentuate this feeling. Kate Parker may have even laughed aloud ruefully at the thought—a recurrent one—that marrying a man with a surname for a first name was a mistake she might have anticipated. At any rate Gardner was, like Marlow, also a precious name, just like the person to whom it was, no doubt idealistically, given.

As Kate Parker had learned in time, his parents had chosen Gardner to confer upon him a certain distinction—she had always regretted being unable to find someone else to agree with her that virtues were forever being falsely attributed to him. She had been frustrated at being the only one, seemingly, who was able to see Gardner’s numerous demerits. Then it occurred to her that everyone except her had found a way not just to tolerate but to like Gardner—it was worse than that: people liked him, in general, more than they did her. The renewed acknowledgement of this, oddly, only softened her attitude; instead of intensifying, her resentment dissipated. She was rid of him, after all.

Kate Parker was not one to submit to extended bouts of bitterness in any event. Moreover, she almost had to smile as she recalled her absolute insistence on dropping that final e. She had been able to prevail in precisely two important matters that had required negotiation with Gardner: the spelling of their son’s name and the division of child custody. In both of these instances, he had more or less acquiesced, though she should have borne in mind that in both cases he could also have come away believing that he had achieved a kind of victory.

So there she stood, astride that broken section of shabby sidewalk, and however docile Marlow was being at any given moment, reality would always tend to pull Kate out of whatever state of reverie she permitted herself. She knew through experience that any period of inattention to Marlow, however short, might have to be paid for later, and dearly, as the care of children was at all times seemingly subject to a hidden and rather heartless law—one that, one way or the other, meted out a particular brand of punishment to those who violated it, even inadvertently. The sensible thing to do now would be just to proceed as quickly as she could back to their apartment.

Her building was between ten and fifteen minutes away from the train, a walk she might have gotten used to easily enough. Though the neighborhood did offer some pleasant scenery, pushing Marlow in his stroller over this distance could be tiresome for her, as it was on this day. As many times as she had travelled back and forth to the station, she still experienced the terrain as unfamiliar—in the end it was almost always depressing, despite the lovely houses she passed. There was always some patch of barren, filthy earth between the sidewalk and the street of which she had seemingly not taken note earlier, or another tangle of black cables to mar the façade of a building—what on earth was their purpose?—or some garish piece of refuse (the rule seemed to be that she would always be forced to pass by any given discarded sofa twice at the minimum prior to its removal). Then there were the storefronts along the tawdry commercial strip by the station: the convenience stores, with their outsides displaying garish images of revolting-looking sandwiches, the nail salons, take-out restaurants, and discount stores blaring out their names, their services, and their wares, as the case was, on hideous plastic signs. If Brooklyn had in recent years become world famous, could it have been any thanks to the scenery between Kate Parker’s block of East 18th Street and Newkirk Plaza station? Or so Kate Parker snobbishly wondered.

There was no escaping the overall tawdriness of the neighborhood (its genteel patches could not altogether counteract it), not even by focusing one’s gaze downward. Kate had gotten into the habit of lifting her eyes from the sidewalk only to the degree necessary to negotiate street crossings and other obstacles. The crossing of Foster Avenue, for example, seemed to require extraordinary agility on the part of middle-class white women pushing strollers. If Kate Parker had only been an Orthodox Jewish, Mexican, or Pakistani mother in care of multiple small children, she churlishly imagined it would have been simpler, somehow, to find the right moment to go against the onslaught of traffic.

Being a creature of her times, Kate never failed to admonish herself for having such thoughts. She realized (she had long ago acquired the habit of seeking out the roots of her own prejudices relentlessly) that if she had been in the place of these women, she would in short order have been paralyzed by resentment. So, while she could never bring herself exactly to admire the mothers of her neighborhood, hectoring their offspring in Urdu, Spanish, Yiddish, or strongly accented English, Kate Parker was at least able to acknowledge what she saw as their burden.

She knew fully well what it all had to do with. Our expectations of life make up so much of who we are. We are told a striking amount of our DNA may be the same, but what we expect of the world can make us as different as a fish is from an elephant. It’s not just our culture, Kate had thought more than once (her former husband was not alone in his preciousness). It’s our lives. Kate Parker was steadfast in her refusal to look down on her sisters—she was somewhat aware, at least, of being as imprisoned by her own impossibly high expectations of life as the anonymous foreign-born mothers of Foster Avenue were by their far lower ones.

_____East 18th Street was a post-war white-brick apartment house. Kate Parker could not imagine the worldview that brought such an ambitious dwelling into being on a side street in Midwood; she would have been surprised to learn that her building was considered contemporary when it opened—it had even been something of a smart address, for a few years at least. But all she could see was what it looked like now, and no one could hold that against her.

Kate’s temperament (the constraints of her present life only compounded the tendency) was such that she did not give much thought to things that did not directly concern her; nothing could have interested her less than the history of New York City, and of Brooklyn in particular. Shame on her, on the one hand, but in fairness, few people nowadays would have taken the trouble to imagine that expansive spirit so particular to post-war New York. After all, New York seemed so expansive now, as it was.

One of the many lasting legacies of this era was the countless massive apartment buildings that were ruthlessly erected in place of tenements, brownstones and, in the case of her own building, so-called Victorian homes, many of which, in the years before their demolition, had been converted into rooming houses and had become shabby relics. Each time Kate entered her building and semi-consciously took note of its name (The Normandie—etched onto an aluminum plate to the right of the entrance, with tarnish forming a shadow under the letters), the assumption in the far back of her mind was that it was meant to evoke the French region, though by this time she should have known better. It had been named rather after the ocean liner, and though the architect had not thought things out altogether precisely, without question there had been an attempt to associate the featureless modernity of this structure with the sleekness of the passenger vessel, both in the smaller as well as the larger strokes of the building design (though one would think that even the first tenants were not supposed to have remembered the ship’s unfortunate end). The idea had originally been to mark this as a place where those with aspirations would feel at home, though its location, at that time as well as now, made such a notion seem odd.

It was hard to imagine that at one time the plate glass looking into the lobby had been unblemished; it had been installed at a 100-degree angle so as to suggest a ship’s cockpit. The lobby furniture had originally been sleek (if inexpensive) copies of Scandinavian designs. A competent mural depicting the Normandie arriving in New York harbor had been painted on the rear wall—another suggestion of the possibilities offered by ocean travel (Kate Parker had, amazingly, scarcely connected what was left of the painting to the building’s name during her short tenancy; either she lacked curiosity about life’s insignificant details, or she was simply preoccupied). The wide glass doors of the entranceway were in imitation of a midtown office building that the architects of The Normandie had also been commissioned to design; their handles were the original aluminum irregular quadrilaterals installed when the building opened.

The paint had flaked off the mural in places, and water stains marred much of the rest. The outer glass of the lobby was scratched and clouded, one of the sections having been replaced altogether with plexiglass, which at this point had gone completely opaque. The furniture was all gone except for a leatherette couch of faded lime-green, on which no one was ever seen sitting. The front-door handles were worn and scratched.

Congregation in the lobby was de facto discouraged by its inhospitality and de jure by the management company’s injunction against loitering. Then again, the tenants of ______ East 18th Street, however gruff (with the exception of Kate) they may have seemed, were oddly undemanding regarding amenities that many people reading this might regard as absolutely essential. As for Kate Parker, with her view that living here was the result of a setback and therefore temporary, she was, like her neighbors, also more or less accepting of the worn appearance and indifferent maintenance of her address.

There is only so much that most people can bear in mind at once, which is why when Kate Parker and Marlow Traxler entered the darkened lobby of their building this winter’s day, she mentally registered so little worth mentioning (this also may have had to do with the inadequate lighting: the three recessed lights which had originally illuminated the mural had long been in disuse but had not been removed; the fluorescent ceiling light did not go on until after sundown—there was another light, a very dim candelabra suspended from the middle of the lobby ceiling, but it was almost worse than nothing at all).

The shapeless woman who lumbered past her on her way out without smiling or otherwise greeting Kate was a normal enough sight. The ground-floor corridor was frequently filled (as it was that afternoon) by the rich, slightly nauseating smell of heavy food—Kate always imagined giant cauldrons simmering for endless hours.

The elevator door of faded, mottled aqua opened reluctantly and they entered the car, whose walls of sheet metal had been covered with successive layers of off-white paint and whose linoleum floor had been worn through in one spot down to the plywood base. Dried paint drops partly covered the ventilation holes. A dirty ceiling fan spun furiously, but to little effect. With a reassuring electric crescendo, the car lurched upward; with an equally unnerving decrescendo the car slowed and stopped, though with very workable accuracy, at the fifth floor of The Normandie.

Their hallway was lined with more fluorescent lights (the fluorescent light must be one of our most pernicious non-lethal inventions). There were fully eight of them across the length of the hallway ceiling, yet they gave off only just enough pale light for Kate and Marlow to see their way and not much more.

So much for the original vision that had brought The Normandie into being! The optimism inspiring those countless New York apartment buildings in the vein of The Normandie is no longer with us; the loss to American civilization is incalculable. All that did remain were places for people who simply needed a place to live.

Kate Parker was not overwhelmed or alienated by _____ East 18th Street. She had decorated her apartment of one spacious bedroom in a manner wholly unbefitting the rest of the building. That is, it was sparsely but tastefully appointed; she had refused, in spite of her difficulties, to make use of any recovered furniture, even managing, with her parents’ help, to acquire some rather nice pieces. The light pastel paint scheme she had chosen was also pleasing, and the lighting was a defiant antidote to the fluorescent gauntlet she had to pass through on entering the building.

All the same, whenever Kate Parker shut her apartment door behind her, it was always a moment of pointed vulnerability, because once inside, Marlow notwithstanding, her solitude was complete. While the two of them were out of doors, she could harbor the pleasant illusion that the whole world accompanied them on their outings. Kate Parker could fancy that her former husband was, in theory, not necessarily more feckless than any other man past whom they made their way. However, once they were back inside apartment 5F, there was no longer any denying the burden that had been placed solely upon her. However much the circumstances had made it necessary, even desirable, for Marlow’s father to be absent from their lives, Kate could still feel, just as keenly as she pleased, the absence of a partner in raising the child.

To Kate Parker’s credit, thanks to a particular kind of fortitude that was almost uniquely her own, she did not fall prey at such moments to the spiraling resentment to which, one supposes, she had every right. Kate’s spirit had come out of her ordeal more or less undamaged, and she could only wish to keep it that way. She was vigilant about any line of embittered thinking that might have seeped in and tainted her relationship with her child, although at this point she was quite a bit more sympathetic to less-advantaged women who, upon their abandonment, had to raise their children utterly on their own, and because of this terrible circumstance, underwent a personal, or even moral deterioration. Kate had limitless reserves of awareness, whether she was able consistently to draw upon them or not, and it was fortunate for her and Marlow that no matter what befell her, this preternatural sense that she could eventually get the better of any adversity would always lift her up.

She was able to work at her desk while Marlow played contentedly in the portion of the living room Kate had set aside for him (she had installed an extendable gate that could reliably seal Marlow off). Marlow, who, for his age and circumstances, was quite as even-tempered as one could have hoped, thankfully remained cooperative just long enough for his mother to get through nearly all her students’ essays. Although, it must be said, even had there been no child, no amount of concentration could have gotten her though every single one of them in one sitting.

Many of the outside tasks required of a middle-school English teacher were made bearable by Kate’s instinctive avoidance of all literary judgment; in fact, her avoidance of any judgment—literary, moral, or otherwise—is what most contributed to making her a standout teacher. Heaven knew she had plenty of provocation, but Kate Parker was impervious to all of it. At the same time, she maintained an internal standard for both work and conduct, which while being in truth impossible for any student in her class actually to attain, one was incessantly encouraged to approach through a fairly precise doling out of humor, cajolery, and even toughness that was uniquely Kate Parker’s own. The last thing anyone would have expected of her would have been the ability to control a classroom of almost thirty seventh graders, but there it was.

There was no good reason Kate Parker’s Sunday evenings should not in fact have been despairing. Still, she never lost heart as she made her way through the featureless terrain of outlandishly formed sentences (to say nothing of the bizarrely shaped individual letters), the mystery of whose grammar could never have been unwound; of paragraphs which bore little resemblance to the normal conception of that rhetorical structure; and of essays with arguments that were anemic seemingly in inverse proportion to the strength of the writer’s in-class personality.

Kate doggedly marked her papers, never doubting, in spite of her five years of experience, that her ministrations were in some way altering the thinking of her students for the better; scarcely less did she doubt that they benefitted at least as much from her personal, emotional connection with them. In spite of the exhausting nature of her work, Kate Parker was able to maintain a both a rigor and a personal authenticity that was evident to everyone, colleagues, superiors, and students alike; all the while, she maintained strict boundaries with her students. The committed teacher must summon more dignity and conscientious authority than is called for in almost any other profession. The very best teachers will come out of their experience broadened and ennobled; this was certainly the case with Kate Parker. All the same, Kate had to struggle against innumerable obstacles, both visible and not so, permanent as well as incidental.

Practically everything about the physical condition, social makeup, and at times muddled purpose of the Adlai Stevenson Middle School for Government and International Studies might have been difficult for the school’s namesake to recognize, should he have been brought back to life for a visit. Moreover, the record of Government in providing for the material educational needs of its students was such that it might have been less needlessly provocative simply to have left it out of the school’s name altogether (though in recent years Government, to its credit, had become more aware of its dereliction and had begun to make some amends). And even the most exhaustive tour of the school would have left most visitors perplexed as to the connection of International Studies with the institution.

Nonetheless, in the conviction that the mere renaming of a thing could in some way alter its fundamental nature, the idealistic mouthful was added to the school’s original name a few years before Kate Parker’s arrival. Things did not end there. There were mission statements, the adoption of multiple curricula and methods in succession, each new one usually contradicting in some fundamental way the approach of the one preceding, and discipline codes rarely consulted once promulgated, and enforced if not inconsistently, not always enthusiastically. Yet the school had that indefinable quality, heart, in abundance. And the staff and administration were generally kind and very hard working. Adlai Stevenson was not a bad place to be.

If Kate Parker was still thriving after five years of teaching, it would have had little to do with the cosmetic changes made to her current school; in addition to the intangibles just alluded to, her success owed itself in large part to her students, who, in spite of any appearances, were anything but resistant to her efforts. One of the great taboos in education is seemingly to comment on the willingness of students actually to be educated. Countless solutions have been introduced over the decades to force the unwilling to accept the offerings of those seeking to teach them; however, these have done no better than to hoodwink a society not greatly invested to begin with in the success of any but its most ambitious or advantaged students.

At the end of the day, Adlai Stevenson managed, however, in spite of any obstacles placed before it (as well as some it placed before itself), to educate most of its students adequately. Thus, it was spared the radical interventions of the educational reformers who had been recently embraced by the leadership of the city. In spite of being anything but an exceptionally highly performing school, it was not being threatened with closure, nor was it being forced to share its space with a charter school, which would have effectively had the same result. Even a preliminary discussion of reorganization (the preferred euphemism for closure), or of what was (also euphemistically) termed the co-location of a charter school in a public-school building could be disruptive. If a school was actually closed down, regardless of the reason, it would not just be the end of the particular school in question—it could have been fatally damaging for the careers of the teachers affected, as they are the ones who are ultimately judged responsible for the school’s demise, as a practical matter. Serving in a school that has been closed down by the authorities tarnishes one’s reputation irremediably, and principals of other schools generally will not hire them except out of desperation or under constraint.

Reorganization, co-location, and outright closure were then but variations on the managed death of a school, the last of these only being the quickest and most honest method of execution (though always preceded by theatrical public deliberations that inevitably failed to change the outcome), the second being simply more gradual, rather in the manner of a terminal illness, as the better-funded and more enthusiastically supported charter school slowly crowds out its host. As for reorganization, this simply meant making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Kate Parker’s students were primarily first-generation immigrants. Though they lacked the material advantages of the better-off youngsters from the neighborhoods a couple of miles north of them, they possessed what commentators were fond of calling cultural capital (it was no accident that here, as in so many other instances, opinion makers used an analogy with economics to describe a domain that was anything but quantifiable). A pernicious myth that had the status of gospel, both within as well as outside the occasionally insular world of American education, was that students’ family situations should have no bearing on what teachers should be able to accomplish. Some of Kate Parker’s teacher acquaintances were, because of simple fate, left to founder in schools in the city’s most troubled areas. The very same earnestness, the same dedication, and the same ability to project authority over thirteen-year-olds yielded tragically different results, all depending on where a teacher happened to be assigned. In New York City, teaching careers are made and broken by luck.

So, if you were a young teacher full of idealism assigned to one of the city’s many schools with intractable discipline problems, you might last a year or two (though frequently far less time even than this) before leaving the field in ignominious defeat, with all the disruption that