The Quincy School in Dedham, Massachusetts

Living Madly: Nothing Gold Can Stay

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

The elementary school I went to was built in 1909. The brick building was a replacement for an older wooden school that had been built sometime in the mid-19th century. My grandfather and his three brothers had also gone to the school. It’s where they learned English.

Named for Josiah Quincy III—a lawyer who served as mayor of Boston, in the U.S. House of Representatives, and as president of Harvard University— Quincy School was located in my town’s working class neighborhood. It was founded to educate the children of the French-Canadian, Irish, Italian, and Polish workers who labored in the mills on Mother Brook or worked for the wealthy families on the town’s west side.

Most of the students at Quincy School were the children or grandchildren of immigrants. Some were immigrants themselves. Everyone was Catholic. I didn’t realize it at the time, but many of the students were also poor. There were kids in my grade who wore the same clothes to school every day, who never had anything to eat at snack time. Some of them didn’t have warm clothes or coats to wear in the winter.

A lot of the time, it was these kids who got into trouble for acting up in class or talking back to the teacher. They would have their desks moved to the sides of the classroom, facing the wall, so they could “concentrate” better. Looking back, I think these kids were probably hungry. Or maybe they were just trying to get some adult to notice them, to see that they needed help.

Bullying was a problem, especially for kids who were new to the school. In the second grade, a new girl came to our class in the middle of the year. She was French-Canadian and tiny for her age. The moment she arrived, the popular girls decided they didn’t like her. Their treatment of this small girl was brutal. I regret not telling our teacher about it. But I was seven years old and deathly afraid that, if I did, they would turn on me, too.

Because of its age, Quincy School lacked things that were common in newer school buildings. We didn’t have a gym, for example. When the weather allowed it, we would have phys ed class outside. Our gym teacher was a husky Polish guy who called us by our last names. He used to mark out spaces in the schoolyard for us to run relays or jump rope with orange traffic cones, which he called “pylons.” I thought everyone called them that until I was in my mid-twenties.

There was no cafeteria, either. Kids who ate lunch at school had to eat in their classrooms. If you had to buy lunch, it would come in a pre-packed paper bag. Usually, it was something non-perishable. But sometimes, and I will never know why anyone thought this was a good idea, it was cold fried chicken.

You knew ahead of time that it was going to be a chicken day because all the paper bags would be soaked through with grease by nine a.m. Also, there was the smell. Perhaps the worst thing, though, was the mess.

After lunch, all the desks would be covered in chicken grease. The teachers would hand out rolls of brown paper towels and some kind of industrial-grade purple spray. We did our best to clean our desks with this stuff, but it was almost impossible to get all the grease off.

Some kids went home for lunch. For a few years, I was one of them. Every day at noon, they’d let us out the door without a second thought, even students as young as six. I liked eating lunch at home because it was a nice a break. There were no teachers to tell you to stop talking or hassle you about finishing your milk. I liked the quiet, and that there were no other kids around to make trouble. I don’t remember ever being reminded about what time I had to be back at school, but somehow I always made it.

Quincy School was loaded with asbestos. The floor tiles were made of it. Every heat and hot water pipe in the place was wrapped in layers of the stuff. We used to pick at this insulation while we were waiting in line to go to recess. I liked the way it came apart in sheets. I think about this every time I see one of those home improvement shows where workers are removing asbestos from a house wearing respirators and hazmat suits, a giant vacuum tube sucking out the ambient dust. Their precautions always feel like overkill.

The blackboards at Quincy School were made of natural slate, and they were actually black. Chalk glided across them like silk. They had fancy woodwork boarders that had been varnished so many times that they had taken on a high gloss. Anything written on these chalkboards was easily erased without a trace. They were magnificent.

First grade was my favorite year. My teacher was a no-nonsense Yankee with a heavy Boston accent. She wore wrap skirts and Kelly green chinos and taught every last one of us how to read and write. Sometimes we took turns reading poems aloud. The poem I loved most was Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost. I always volunteered to read it, and can still recite most of it from memory.

When I was in the fifth grade, our principal, an elegant French-Canadian man who was a veteran of the Second World War, came into our classroom to tell us that the school was closing at the end of the year. There weren’t as many kids as there used to be, he told us, so the town no longer needed all of its elementary schools. Quincy School’s students would be going to another school, about a mile away, in the fall.

After hearing this news, I felt sad and lost. I was worried about what was going to happen to me. Quincy was the only school I had ever known. I dreaded the idea of having to go to a new school with kids I didn’t know. Even worse, we found out later that the town had sold the school building to a contractor who planned to tear it down and build houses on the land.

The morning they demolished the building, most of the neighborhood came out to watch. An enormous wrecking ball tore through its brick walls. Broken pieces of varnished woodwork and shards of slate were mixed with the smashed bricks. A bulldozer pushed the rubble into piles. I remember my mother being horrified that no one had tried to save anything before the building was destroyed. They hadn’t even bothered to take the clocks down or the light fixtures. Everything was gone.

Many years later, someone who had worked for the town told me that Quincy School had been torn down because it was in “disrepair.” It was, of course. But I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that the real reason the school was sold for scrap was because the kids who went there were from working class, immigrant families. The town knew none of us would fight back.

Along with the other kids in our neighborhood, my sister and I each took a brick from the school home as a keepsake. With a piece of chalk, I wrote the lines to Nothing Gold Can Stay on the back of mine. It seemed appropriate at the time, and I suppose it was.

For most of my life, I’ve used that brick as a paperweight. It’s a reminder of the place I came from. It’s also reminds me that anything, even the most solid of buildings, can be transitory unless people are invested in its survival. We only get to keep the things for which we fight, all the rest becomes history.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her) is the author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Her website is  emilienoelleprovost.com.