PRIVATE FACES, PUBLIC PLACES : Heroics in the Land of the Frog Prince

This was the Hobart Boulevard School office: principal in a cubbyhole, assistant principals crammed together, naughty children sniveling in shame on footstools, pale, sickly ones hoping to go home. Copying machine in the bathroom, secretaries clambering over books with a babble of languages. The whole Hobart family lived cheek by jowl in sadness and in joy.

There has been a miracle on Hobart Boulevard: The main school building, shrouded in dust and old planks for months, suddenly emerged--a true frog prince. The office has just moved in, and elegance has been endowed on the whole rickety campus by the presence in the heart of it of wide, clean corridors and warm, peach paint. No matter that the classroom blocks are still threadbare, the playground dingy. The school has been touched by magic. Who decreed that “public” must mean gray, dour, without light or color or hope?

Not that this “new” building has done anything to improve the early mornings. Hobart looks pinched and crabby in the cold. Women with flimsy skirts and bare legs hurry across the playground, children in tow. Worn men in overalls pause by the fence to kiss their sons. Girls with straight backs walk alone to school from rooms where mothers go out to work before dawn and grandmothers wait silently.

Were there justice, they would be treated as princesses, these slender, serious girls with their perfect handwriting and gentle grace. Outsiders talk as if their accomplishments were God-given. Small, solemn children once sat over samplers as they do, as though eyes were not burning in the attaining, fingers not torn in quiet pain.

Not all at Hobart are pushed and praised. Some homes are hideous. What inspires children that one falls aside while another dreams of being an astronaut or a lawyer? Can the answer lie with those other figures hurrying across the concrete: women in jewel-colored clothes and full-dress makeup who sail into the cold early morning as if it were IBM that they were running, not some overcrowded elementary school in Koreatown. Pride and fierce commitment have no substitute.

Stories--so many of them here of women who have found a path through hard lives. What lights the candles? What illuminates the windows of some children’s souls while so many others walk through the darkness untouched?

In Room 32, Blossom Small of Jamaica, Canada and now California, waits for her Special Ed. children. Sprinkles of diamonds glitter in her black stockings, a touch of fancy at variance with her face--dear, plain, beautiful, wise, all things to troubled children. “I say: ‘You’re having a hard time--that’s life.’ I say: ‘It’s OK to be angry--it’s how you handle it that counts.’ ”

She has known loneliness and want; when she moved here five years ago, “I just brought my three children and my books.” Now there is a home, and scholarships for her two boys at a private boarding school: horses, style, excellence--and the unimaginable strain of living always in two worlds without dishonoring either.

In Room 26, Linh Do Thuy gathers papers. She is tiny, dressed handsomely in black with big golden earrings and bright lipstick. She smiles always; her flute of a voice lacks the pitch of sorrow or complaint.

And in her silvery tone, she talks of pride in being a teacher’s aide, of going to college at night. She talks of terror in Saigon, of being sent away into the country because her parents had too many children. The Viet Cong put her soldier father in prison for three years and beat him senseless. Her grandmother raised her, kept her safe until, one night, the parents she hardly knew came for her. They took her away in a small, open boat, and during the long year in camp in Thailand, she dreamed of her grandmother and the farewell they had never said.

She is 23. One day she will teach and have a real home. For now, she nurses her father and brother (“I cannot leave people who need me”) and holds inside the face of her grandmother--80 years old? 90?--a face she may never see again. What children would not be touched by such strength and courage?

And if there were justice in the world, people who drive quickly past such schools in the early morning and think them ugly would picture instead fairy tales, princesses and the magic of small children inspired by both. Peace and joy on Hobart Boulevard.