Raising the Baton
RAISING THE BATON
RAISING THE BATON
in the lives and times of...
CHRISTOPHERSTRAW, ANNA LANE, and RAJ BHAVNANI
an historical novel by
BRUCE HERSCHENSOHN
RAISING THE BATON
Copyright © 2018 by Bruce Herschensohn
Raising the Baton is a work of fiction. Places, incidents portrayed, and names are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual locales, events, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
FIRST EDITION
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Printed in the United States of America
Hardcover ISBN: 9780825308864
Ebook ISBN: 9780825307744
Book designed by Mark Karis
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Notes of the author to the readers
OVERTURE
followed by
The Curtains Open
THEME ONE
First there was Nancy Benford
THEME TWO
Then there was Miss Osborn
THEME THREE
The holiday
counterpoint
THEME FOUR
Next came Malahia Kahala
THEME FIVE
Of all things
THEME SIX
The new look
THEME SEVEN
“The far away birth and the growing up of Raj Bhavnani”
THEME EIGHT
THEME NINE
Too many tigers
duet
THEME TEN
A good night at Angelo’s
harmony
THEME ELEVEN
Common and unique destinations
striking the chord
THEME TWELVE
In Dolley Madison’s house 112 years after she lived there
THEME THIRTEEN
The forty-second floor
THEME FOURTEEN
Transitions
chorale
THEME FIFTEEN
“God speed, John Glenn”
THEME SIXTEEN
Back to the school room
maestro
THEME SEVENTEEN
The unlikely celebrity
THEME EIGHTEEN
Destinations
drums
THEME NINETEEN
Intermission
THEME TWENTY
Looking for a beautiful morning
virtuoso
THEME TWENTY-ONE
A meeting with the 14th Dalai Lama
sharps and flats
THEME TWENTY-TWO
The decision
THEME TWENTY-THREE
“The ride to Lindbergh Field”
choir
THEME TWENTY-FOUR
“On the Via Veneto”
elegy
THEME TWENTY-FIVE
Home
THEME TWENTY-SIX
Raj and the Old Post Office Building
THEME TWENTY-SEVEN
Late-night entertainment
THEME TWENTY-EIGHT
The appointment
THEME TWENTY-NINE
Conceding
variations on a theme
THEME THIRTY
As it would have been
THEME THIRTY-ONE
“Tranquility base here”
THEME THIRTY-TWO
“The invitation”
THEME THIRTY-THREE
“The way it might be”
THEME THIRTY-FOUR
The second time since Jesus Christ: A new millenium
THEME THIRTY-FIVE
“Let’s roll”
lost melodies
THEME THIRTY-SIX
On Shelter Island
THEME THIRTY-SEVEN
In Mumbai
THEME THIRTY-EIGHT
Empty stadiums
THEME THIRTY-NINE
On air
lowering the baton
THEME FORTY
Dancing in Darjeeling
NOTES OF THE AUTHOR TO THE READERS
SOME OF THIS NOV EL IS TRUE, but not all of it. There are fictional and actual characters, dialogues, places, articles and incidents. Much is written with the merger of fictional and actual. In some cases the names of the actual were kept and some have been changed. This book is an interpretive story with importance given to the appropriate sights, sounds, fragrances, tastes and feelings of times passed.
OVERTURE
followed by
THE CURTAINS OPEN
THEME ONE
FIRST THERE WAS NANCY BENFORD
YOUTH COMES TWICE; once as it is lived and again as it is remembered. Although it doesn’t seem like it at the time, youth as lived is very brief while youth as remembered can stretch into decades of glancing back at a personal museum invisible to others while it provides a secret foundation to the person’s life.
No matter that memories carry the risk of inaccuracy, Christopher Straw was destined to recall his youth with unique precision except for remembering that, at the time, the pre-teen years certainly appeared to be lasting forever.
Summer was having its annual competition with a rising autumn when school started its new semester. Autumn, as usual, would win the rivalry despite any resurgences of a battling summer to retain its presence. There was no question that when the school doors opened it would be the invitation for summer to be strong enough to say goodbye gracefully and stop fighting a losing battle even though summer was likely hiding one more heat wave to come that would have no chance of lasting victory.
Early in that first morning of school’s new semester on Monday, September the 11th of 1939, Christopher Straw who had spent seven years on earth, lived through something he had never known in those seven years. It had nothing at all to do with exiting and entering seasons. It had everything to do with Christopher Straw being hurt—over a girl.
It was worse than scraping one knee or his other knee which he seemed to be enduring as habit during his early years of life; maybe once a week or so. This hurt was something different and could not be treated by Mercurochrome or Merthiolate and a Band-Aid. There was no place for him to put those healing products to ease this pain that had no scratch, no wound, no blood, no anything that was easily traceable or treatable.
The hurt came in the voice of a high pitch about the same age as Christopher Straw but not his disposition. She was a girl devoid of hesitancy or subtlety or nuance: “Christopher Straw, you make me sick!”
While most of the world’s attention was riveted on events in Europe since Hitler had invaded Poland ten days earlier, Christopher Straw was oblivious to events beyond his own world and Nancy Benford made it a terrible way for him to
begin the semester. Not one person before Nancy Benford had ever said that he made some one sick. In fact from kindergarten all the way through the first grade he had gotten along well with his classmates and this was a girl to whom he had never said one word. He had hardly noticed her.
“Why do I make you sick?” he asked her with genuine curiosity. “I mean I don’t know why. I mean I never bothered you or anything. I mean like that. I mean you know.”
“That doesn’t make any difference! It doesn’t make any difference that you don’t know why! Oh, you make me so sick!” Then she said a word he had never heard before: “Eewwwch!” The last part of the word was said with a growling in the back of her throat. She twirled around, her petticoats making a snapping crinkly noise beneath her white skirt attached by a thin black belt to her white blouse that had little sewn replicas of blue flying birds on it. Then she withdrew her hands from her hips and with arms swinging in soldier-like exactness under a dictatorship, she walked away from him with head-up determination. As she walked in such triumph and authority he thought he heard her say to no one at all, “Oh, he makes me so sick!”
His hearing was fine. There was no ear error; this was not a hearing problem but a saying problem. But why should such a thing be said or even thought of being said about him of all people?
Christopher Straw was convinced that God was late leaving from His summer vacation or He would have been back to His prime job of fixing things, among them stopping Nancy Benford from being such a jerk.
Although Christopher Straw didn’t know the reason for her anger; what he did know was that whether or not he made her sick, she was, for sure, beginning to make him sick.
It was going to get worse.
Since this day ushered in the new semester, his entire class was assigned a different classroom than it had last semester. Christopher Straw came into Mrs. Zambroski’s second-story classroom a little ahead of most of the others so he could take a seat which would be kept as “his seat” throughout the coming four and one-half months. The seat he selected was not in the front of the room where the smarty-pants sat with their hands signaling in the air so as to be seen and called on by the teacher, and not in the back of the room where the dummies chose those seats to launch spit-balls at whoever may be their target.
The classroom had wooden seats that were each attached to their desks in single-file rows with desks providing the back of the seat of the student in front of that desk, with each row having eight desk-seats from the front of the classroom to the back of the classroom. That meant that students had to slide into and out of their seats because there was no way to move the seats backward or forward for rising and sitting without affecting the entire connected row. Christopher Straw was delighted with his chosen seat in the middle of the class, sitting in a place where he could remain nearly unnoticed. Perfect. Almost.
It was perfect until the emergence into the classroom with a group of others came Nancy Benford and without looking around—or at least Christopher Straw didn’t see her looking around—she selected the seat right in front of his desk meaning the back of her head would be in his constant straight line of sight, like it or not, and how could any sane boy like it for a moment to say nothing of a full semester?
Christopher Straw was a well groomed blond-haired boy and on this day he was wearing knickers and a blue and white horizontally striped polo-shirt. He was the only child of Lewis and Millie Straw in Fort Littleton, Pennsylvania some nine miles north of school. When the United States became a nation, Fort Littleton was a real fort, and now it was a community with little more than one street of residences, with that street surrounded by farms and vacant lots. Fort Littleton was truly a community where everyone knew everyone. That was because no matter where they were in Fort Littleton everyone could see everyone else in a single sweep of eyesight while standing still.
With arrogance, Nancy Benford did not live in Fort Littleton, but right in the cosmopolitan life of McConnellsburg. Why that gave her arrogance was a mystery but probably because she thought McConnellsburg was better than anywhere else her classmates could be living and laughingly better than Fort Littleton.
The bell rang for the class to begin and Mrs. Zambroski called the class to order and then she led them in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of the United States and on the word “flag” they extended their right arms with their right hands facing upwards. After the pledge, everyone slid back into their seats and as soon as Nancy Benford was seated she used both hands to adjust her pig-tailed braids to assure they would land right on the desk behind her, and they did exactly that, antagonizing its targeted occupant: Christopher Straw.
Mrs. Zambroski wrote the name “Mrs. Zambroski” in perfect penmanship on the blackboard, pressing unnaturally hard which sent white dust from the chalk all over the place. She then faced the class and said, “My name is Mrs. Zambroski.” That made sense since that was what she wrote. What she didn’t write was that she was very fat and that she was also built abnormally like an upside down pyramid getting wider as her body progressed upward with her shoulders taking a tremendous amount of width providing a pedestal for an out of proportion amazingly small head.
“And who would like to be blackboard-eraser monitor?” she asked in reference to the person who would beat the erasers out the second story window against the exterior brick wall of the building when class was done. Immediately almost every boy sitting in the front rows raised their right arms with their hands extended, some of them even waving to her to catch her attention. There were repeated quick grunts of one boy who could not hide his enthusiasm for such a prospective prestigious position as blackboard-eraser monitor. And from another boy came a soft “Here!” and then another “Here!” Mrs. Zambroski pointed to one boy who was excitingly waving his hand but hadn’t made any noise. She smiled at him and asked him, “And what’s your name?”
“Ralph Dorgan, Mrs. Zambroski.”
She nodded and then she scanned the class as she said, “Ralph Dorgan is our blackboard-eraser monitor” as though she was announcing the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. A few of the losers groaned in their defeat.
She nodded and said, “We only need one.” It was a justification for making her choice. “And now I would like to know all of your names. Let’s start at this row, working up and then down the next row, up the next one, and so on and so on. And one other thing I want to know is what you want to be when you grow up.” There were a few “Wwww’s!”
Some girls wanted to be a dancer or a singer or a movie actress or a nurse and some boys wanted to be a fireman or a baseball player or a cowboy and one wanted to be an Indian; an ambition which was not too likely for him to achieve.
The row in which Christopher Straw sat was now being called by Mrs. Zambroski at the front of the room pointing at the rear of that row for its start and working its way toward him. When it came to be his turn he said nothing. Mrs. Zambroski squinted her eyes at him. “Young man?”
He nodded. “My name is Christopher Straw and when I grow up I want to be the first man on the moon.”
Nancy Benford didn’t turn around to watch him give that answer, but she did spurt out a short ridiculing laugh as though that eruption of hers was involuntary and could not have been prevented.
“No, no,” Mrs. Zambroski responded to Nancy Benford’s laugh and then Mrs. Zambroski looked at Christopher Straw. “That’s very admirable, Christopher. Doing what no one has ever done is admirable. But just how do you plan on getting to the moon?”
He answered quickly, proving he had given his ambition serious thought. “With a Chevrolet. A green one.”
Nancy blurted out another laugh despite Mrs. Zambroski’s having called her down on her previous laugh. This time Mrs. Zambroski gave a smile herself. “A green Chevrolet?”
“Yes.” There was a period of silence, and so Christopher Straw nodded and repeated, “A Chevrolet. A green one.”
“Why green?”
“Because that’s what
it should be.”
“Is that your common sense at work or your rich imagination?”
“Which one’s better, Mrs. Zambroski?”
“In your case, Christopher, I would say your imagination.”
“Then I would be on my way to the moon!”
“But, Christopher, you know that the world is round, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Christopher Columbus discovered that. He told everyone that.”
“But that was Christopher Columbus and Christopher Straw might have missed the importance of that discovery and what it would mean to any attempt to drive to the moon even if it was his car and was any color and there was a road to the moon,” Mrs. Zambroski said and she looked very proud of herself. Too bad her quick response was wasted on a bunch of kids who couldn’t know how clever she was by comparing the two Christophers. It was such a glorious extemporaneous statement. And then, in a revelation of her magnanimous dismissal of her skillful previous response, she added, “A Chevrolet goes on the surface of the earth—straight ahead. Won’t it just go on and over the land until it reaches the sea? How can you take it up to the moon while going around the world and hitting the sea?”
“No. I mean you have to aim at the moon, maybe from the Chevrolet tilted up on a hill and then aimed right at the moon and go real fast.”
“Well then,” and she couldn’t contain herself any longer from dwelling back on her earlier moment of quick-thinking accomplishment. “Christopher Columbus and Christopher Straw! Well, who knows? Two Christophers!” Then she finally felt obligated to disregard her magnificent cleverness as though she was used to being an ingenious quick-thinker. “But is there anything you want to do here on earth, Christopher?”
“No.”
“Alright. Alright. And you, young lady?” She gave a slight nod to Nancy Benford.
In a move that was unprecedented in these testimonies, rather than talking from her seat, Nancy Benford slid out of it and stood up, facing some of her classmates sitting behind her. “I’m Nancy Benford.” Then she turned herself to face Mrs. Zambroski. “And I want to be a great teacher like you, Mrs. Zambroski.” Then she smiled and sat back down.
Christopher Straw murmured under his breath, only loud enough for Nancy Benford to hear, “What a kiss-up!”