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The Pied Piper of Park Avenue

Published: Jun 05, 2014
Category: Fiction

In 2014, The New York Observer published its first serial since “Sex and the City” — my seven-part fiction about idealistic kids at New York’s elite private schools. I’m dealing here with Manhattan’s 1% and with the poor who live a few blocks away. If I were writing it now, it would be about high-school students who’d just survived a massacre. And their protests — starting with a noon walk-out from school — would spread across the country. Could that happen? Better: how soon can that happen?

EPISODE 1: “People come first!”

It looked like a flash mob.

Right after lunch on the first warm afternoon in April, seniors began streaming out of the city’s elite private schools. They came East from Spence and Nightingale and Sacred Heart, West from Chapin and Brearley. They met at 86th Street and Park Avenue. Then the Dalton crew arrived, and there were several hundred kids milling around.

They were the sons and daughters of the very rich in their final weeks of school. They’d just returned from Spring Break in St. Barts and Harbour Island and Palm Beach; in September, they’d be off to Duke and Brown and Harvard. They were tanned and buffed, glowing with good health and good fortune, and when they came together, they looked like a Ralph Lauren double-page foldout in Vogue.

The first sign that this might be something more than a flash mob was the arrival of a convoy. A Range Rover. A Suburban. A Denali. All black. These were the cars of the wives of three Wall Street titans who were, as it happened, friends having their monthly lunch at Swifty’s. Their kids knew their mothers would be drinking Sancerre until at least 2:30, plenty of time for them to borrow their chauffeurs for a grocery pickup at the D’Agostino on Madison Avenue.

They just hadn’t told the drivers that they’d be picking up $6,000 worth of canned food. Bought online. Paid by Platinum cards.

Yes, a huge purchase. But considering who the customers were, it was more like a rounding error. Real money would be more like Kate Nichols — daughter of Billy Nichols, head of equities at Morgan Stanley — being given a $2 million apartment as a pre-graduation present for getting through Spence.

The arrival of the SUVs seemed to be what Kate and her co-conspirators Tina Brandt (daughter of the CEO of Palomino Management) and Greg Lee (son of the #2 at Blackstone) were waiting for. Kate shouted something. Two drummers stepped forward and began to play a complicated, totally addictive military cadence. Kids started to clap, on and off the beat, and then Kate waved her arms, and off they went up Park Avenue.

At 98th Street, a girl produced a piccolo and played a soaring Caribbean melody that got an enthusiastic response from the women from the projects. The crowd swelled. There was some dancing. Off to the side, some kids were taking pictures and making videos and posting them on Instagram and YouTube.

The organizers had alerted the media, and a news truck was waiting for the marchers at 106th Street. Another arrived. And with that, the marchers began to chant.

“PEOPLE FIRST! PEOPLE COME FIRST!”

The cameras got it all. And moved closer when the march arrived at the food bank on 125th Street. As kids began unloading cartons from the SUVs, Kate went inside, followed by TV crews.

“We could use some help,” she said to a woman at the first desk.

The woman looked out the window at the kids stacking cartons.

“Honey,” the woman replied, “you are the help.”

Which was the money quote in the coverage about the march on the 5 o’clock news.

But there was more. The TV crews had done short interviews with the leaders. And when they identified Kate and Tina and Greg, they didn’t fail to mention who their fathers were.

That night, three Wall Street executives made it home in time for dinner. And in those homes, the same conversation played out.

“What was that?”

“Budget cuts have slashed aid to food banks. People are hungry. So we fed them.”

“That’s not how you go about it.”

“What should we have done?”

“Your mother and I write checks to charity. Large checks.”

“I had no idea. I thought your reaction would be: ‘The poor will stop going hungry when they get off their asses and find work and buy their food.’”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m only pissed about the publicity.”

“Mom’s in Social Diary all the time.”

“For her causes. And only for her causes.”

These kids prudently didn’t express their less positive view of their mothers.

“So. What’s the learning here?”

“Uh…”

“Just don’t do it again.”

“Of course not.”

Which was, Kate and Tina and Greg knew, a lie.

————-

EPISODE 2: “If you have less than $500 million, you have no hedge against inflation.”

The next day, when the seniors of Manhattan’s elite private schools walked out after lunch, no one thought it was a flash mob. A Chapin senior had shared the plan with a junior she hoped to sleep with, and the junior decided to score some points by telling a teacher, and from there the news moved quickly. To the headmistress. To the lawyers.

Within hours, the heads of the elite schools and Hays Nolan, who was Henry Kravis’s lawyer and a member of the Brearley board, were on a conference call. What to do? Someone suggested making an announcement: “We know what you’re up to, and…” And what? Call their parents? And tell them what? The next bad idea: a lockdown, a prudent response to a “threat” that would never be confirmed. That was quickly rejected. Silence descended.

Over four decades Hays Nolan had seen many looming disasters, and his advice rarely varied: Don’t rush to respond. That’s what he suggested now. “The kids are putting on a show, and it’s a good one. But it has a half-life. This time, they’ll discover it doesn’t matter what they do, only who they are. TV and the Post will go after them as spoiled rich kids — and in the glare of the bright lights, they’ll fold.”

So school administrators busied themselves at their desks as their seniors streamed out after lunch and again made their way to 86th Street and Park Avenue. Again the marchers were exuberant, chanting “PEOPLE FIRST! PEOPLE COME FIRST!” and making videos for YouTube, flipping their photos onto Instagram and mugging for the TV crew.

This time the march was followed by a single SUV. A smaller food donation? Hardly. There were gasps — first from the TV crew, then from some of the marchers — when the kids started to pile their gifts in front of the Salvation Army store on Lenox Avenue.

A Birkin bag. A fur coat. Dresses that had been photographed at the Ballet Gala. Men’s suits. Shirts that would have been at home in Gatsby’s closet. Women’s shoes, several pairs flashing red Louboutin soles. Nikes that looked as if they’d never touched the pavement.

The women who worked at the Salvation Army knew what a Birkin bag was because they’d read on Page Six that Jay-Z had spent $350,000 on them for Beyoncé one Christmas, but they’d imagined that bought enough Birkins to fill a closet. They had no idea what it would cost to buy the Birkin Capucine Togo Leather model with Gold Hardware that was sitting on the sidewalk. But the TV crew had an idea, and the cameras went close-up on the bag, which they quickly discovered belonged — correction: used to belong — to Lisa Brandt, wife of the CEO of Palomino Management.

Dinner chez Brandt was a simple coq au vin that night, but the real meal was sure to be Tina’s conversation with her father. David wanted to talk about the march. Tina wanted to turn her defense into an attack. Lisa, wanting neither, jumped in first.

“So I called, and told the Salvation Army about the misunderstanding…”

“It wasn’t a misunderstanding,” Tina snapped. “The Birkin was a gift.”

“A $20,000 gift.”

“No way.”

“That’s what it cost.”

“I had no idea.”

“And did you have any idea,” David Brandt said, struggling for the calm, even tone that has been so highly praised by business media, “that we could have had you arrested for theft?”

“Why didn’t you?”

Lisa made a second attempt at peacekeeping: “Don’t you think the embarrassment is punishment enough?”

Tina shrugged. Parental disapproval was new to her, but it got old fast.

“Punishment,” she said, and her tone was drenched in contempt, “is not a concept you guys have the least clue about.”

David and Lisa took this as criticism of their parenting, which had been passive in the extreme. Tina meant something else: unpunished Wall Street criminality, not excluding Palomino Management.

“Tell me, Dad — you own Apple, don’t you?”

“A big chunk. So what?”

“You know about what Apple does in Ireland?

“Yes. So what?”

“You think it’s okay that they register in Cork but they say the company isn’t a tax resident of Ireland — or anywhere?”

“It’s legal. So what?”

“So they’ve got about $100 billion tax-free dollars parked there while the people who make their stuff in China are jumping out of windows.”

“If corporate taxes were lower, they’d bring it back.”

“Corporate taxes are low, Dad, once the accountants dive in.”

“Low? Apple paid $6 billion in 2012.”

“And what about…”

“Wait a minute, Miss Holier-Than-the-Pope. You’ve got the 5s, the super-thin MacBook with retina display and an iPad Air — if you’re so outraged by Apple, why contribute to corporate crime?”

Tina was in no way interested in pledging allegiance to Samsung. So she deflected: “Compared to yours, my crimes are minor. Giving away maybe… oh…$30,000 of your stuff…”

David, burning: “Like that’s nothing.”

“I’ve heard you at parties.” Tina puffed herself up, waved an imaginary wine glass in imitation of her father talking to friends: ‘If you have less than $700 million…well, really, you just have no hedge against inflation.’”

That was when David shot out of his chair, hands trembling. When Tina cowered. When Lisa began to hyperventilate.

David left the table and went to his study. He called the headmistress of Brearley. “This is no prank,” he told her. “She won’t apologize. She’ll do it again, and she’ll call it income redistribution or economic justice or some other cute bullshit she picked up at your school. And I have no idea what to do about it. So you’d better get on the ball, Missy, and be quick about it.”

—————

EPISODE 3: “What should we do to make change — buy a Congressman?”

The meeting of the heads of school of Spence, Chapin, Brearley, Sacred Heart, Nightingale, Dalton, Collegiate and Trinity was held at the home of Hays Nolan, lawyer to Henry Kravis, trustee of Brearley, and, unknown to his wife or her husband, lover of Annie Winsor, the head of school at Brearley. Why there? His house was on Henderson Place, an all-but-private side street lined with 19th century brick townhouses just a few blocks from Brearley and Chapin. It was the very definition of “discreet.”

The heads of schools sat in the living room, drinking just-brewed Ethiopian coffee and, as Hays knew they would, ignoring the plate of biscotti. They spoke in low voices, one to another, comparing the news of the week. It wasn’t the dirtying of their schools’ names on the front page of the Post that enraged them; tabloid readers weren’t their clientele. But all of them had been besieged by calls from graduates — rich, generous graduates — who wanted to know just what the hell was going on at their alma mater. And they had no smart answers. Let the lawyer handle it.

“People….” Hays began, and the room quieted. “Let’s be clear: We’re here to sell a truce that will last the few weeks until graduation. We want these kids to know we’re not angry. We’re not going to discipline them. We just want to … understand. Everybody on board?”

Murmurs of approval, nods of assent.

Hays went to the front door and welcomed the group waiting outside: Kate Nichols, Tina Brandt, Greg Lee and their parents. And one tall, impeccably dressed African American.

“Morning, Hays,” Theodore W. Dennison said, and smiled.

“Ted!” Hays extended a hand. “Good times.”

Mr. Dennison turned to Jason Lee. “Hays and I shared an office at the DOJ.”

“In the Pleistocene,” Hays noted. “When private equity was just a dream.”

Shrewd of Jason Lee to bring his lawyer. Hays was surprised that David Brandt and Greg Nichols hadn’t.

Folding chairs were opened. The heads of schools filled them, abandoning chintz-covered couches and ancient leather club chairs so the parents could sit in comfort. The three students sat in a row, facing the school administrators like opposing teams on a quiz show.

“First, congratulations,” Hays Nolan began. “What you’ve done this week has started a conversation about privilege and responsibility in rooms where that conversation doesn’t happen often enough.”

Kate Nichols and Tina Brandt looked surprised. Greg Lee recognized the velvet glove for what it was.

“The heads of your schools think the best thing to happen next is a day of talks and discussions about inequality in America,” Hays continued. “I mean: a day of learning and sharing in school. Private. No media. The question is: Would that work for you?”

The students had no spokesperson.

Tina, at last: “These ‘talks and discussions’ — who leads them?”

The head of Spence: “Teachers and students — we’ll do this together.”

Tina: “What if we wanted experts?”

“Like?”

“Say, Howard Zinn.”

“Love to have him,” said the head of Trinity. “But he died in 2010.”

“Maybe we should start with your goals,” the head of Sacred Heart suggested, hoping to short-circuit a bout of name-dropping and put-downs. “What are you hoping to accomplish?”

“Make change,” Tina said.

There was a hint of 19th century Boston in Annie Winsor’s dissent: “What you’re doing … this is not how you make change.”

Tina matched that disdain and raised it: “Enlighten us — how do you make change?”

“At the ballot box.”

“We should buy ourselves a Congressman?”

Her friends giggled.

“Oh, please,” the head of Dalton snapped. “This is still a democracy.”

“No!” Tina’s voice crackled like a Taser. “No! Democracy is what you teach us. It’s not what we have.”

Everyone over 18 knew the dirty words ahead: oligarchy, plutocracy, kleptocracy. And what came after them: raised voices, the kids stalking out, an escalation of protest.

Kate played the peacemaker: “I think we’d prefer — well, I would, anyway — a day of conversation about Economics. How corporate America operates. So more kids could get educated about how the world works.”

“For example…”

“For example: Nestlé. They own Pellegrino, Perrier, Deer Park, Arrowhead, Poland Spring — 15 water companies. There’s a global water crisis coming. I’d like someone from Nestlé to come and explain how they’ll respond to that. Like: will they use their monopoly power to raise prices?”

This wasn’t what any head of school had in mind. But they could deal with the day’s focus later; for now, they feigned agreement.

“I see a larger conversation,” Greg said. “If God was looking down at our parents — and you too, because you serve them — do you think He’d let any of you pass through the eye of a needle on the way to Heaven?”

When the head of Trinity spoke, his sadness was almost visible.

“Son, you need to go to the clue store,” he said. “The elite — you think that’s just your parents and their crowd? It’s you too. You’ve all got trust funds, you’re all off to great colleges. You’re the elite. Whether you want to be or not.”

A new idea for the students. And not a pleasing one.

A whispered conference, Tina and Kate clearly pushing for a compromise, Greg Lee having none of it.

“We’re done here,” Greg said.

He stood, his exit forcing the girls to follow. Their parents and Jason Lee’s lawyer trailed in their wake, murmuring apologies all the way to the door.

“What next?” Hays Nolan asked.

Silence. A trip to the clue store also seemed to be in order for the school administrators. Then Annie Winsor spoke.

“What are we going to do about these liberal teachers?“

—————–

EPISODE 4: “Children, wake up. Hold your mistake up.”

It was now May, just a month of school to go, and no date had been set for the “day of learning and sharing” that the heads of school had invented to head off more student protests. Why the delay? Apparently this event required considerable planning and coordination. That required a committee. And as a knowing scientist once observed, “A committee is a cul de sac down which ideas are lured and quietly strangled.”

The committee compared the academic calendars for eight schools. AP exams for juniors. Awards assemblies. School trips. Teacher appreciation days. Preparing the gyms for the spring dances. And more.

Graduation would be upon them before the promised multi-school conversation about a system that had the Kochs doubling their fortune in three years while 100 million Americans were living in or near poverty. How delightful!

Over iced coffee at Yura, Greg put the question directly: “If we stage anything outside of school on a school day, will they punish us?”

Kate: “Yes.”

Tina: “Yes.”

Greg disagreed: “They don’t want publicity even more than they want to punish us.”

“Majority rules,” Tina said.

Greg couldn’t argue against the democratic process. But he saw a workaround: “What if we do something over a weekend?”

Not a good idea. The brutal winter had been followed by a spring so warm it was scary to think how high the temperature might go by August. Many families had opened their beach houses early. On weekend nights now, if you looked at the great limestone buildings on Fifth and Park Avenues, only the maid’s rooms had lights on.

“So we’re screwed,” Tina said. “They’re going to grin us to death.”

“Maybe not,” Kate said, thinking of a Trinity student who’d gone to computer camp with her a few summers back. They’d played Minecraft together, traded back rubs and more. If she believed all nerds kissed as well as he did, she’d be bound for MIT.

“What?”

“Better you don’t know.”

They knew two days later. Everybody did. At noon, just before lunch, a digitally distorted voice made an announcement over the classroom loudspeakers at Nightingale, Dalton, Sacred Heart, Trinity, Dalton, Spence, Brearley and Chapin.

“Go…to….the…portal.”

In these schools, every student has a laptop, usually open. Curious, many students clicked to the main screen of their school’s website. They were not there long. The screen faded, and up came two words — CRANK IT! — and a YouTube video.

The scene was an English music festival. Drumming started, a low undercurrent, then insistent, the signature introduction of “Wake Up.” Arcade Fire started singing. 87,000 Brits, hands raised, knew the song and shouted the lyrics.

Somethin’
filled up
my heart
with nothin’,
someone
told me not to cry
.

In these New York schools, there were also kids who knew “Wake Up” and cherished it. It reminded them that the lives they were living were the lives they endured, not the lives they wanted, and so they played this song for courage, often and loud, in the morning before they went off to school. Now, at their desks, they mouthed the words, looking around the room, catching one another’s eyes, smiling in recognition of their bond.

Now that
I’m older,
my heart’s
colder,
and I can see
that it’s a lie
.

Some kids stood and sang along with their English brothers and sisters.

Children wake up,
hold your mistake up,
before they turn the summer into dust.

Some of the kids who knew the words pounded their desks. Their enthusiasm killed the dead air of their classrooms, and more kids began to stand and raise their fists.

If children
don’t grow up,
our bodies get bigger
but our hearts get
torn up.
We’re just a million little gods
causin’ rain storms
Turnin’ every good thing
to rust.

There was screaming at that last line, screaming that filled the classrooms and echoed in the halls: youth wanting its freedom, not caring about tomorrow. Take their parents lives, their parents’ concerns, and flip them — this is what the Arcade Fire anthem pointed to. And you could say, well, easy for them, they’re rich, but this was bigger than that, and the Trinity music teacher, who lived in Brooklyn and played in a slacker band on weekends, got the analogy right away: Bruce Springsteen playing for 200,000 East Berliners in 1988.

“It’s nice to be in East Berlin,” Springsteen began, reading from a card in halting German. “I want to tell you that I’m not here for or against any government, I have come to play rock ‘n ‘roll for the East Berliners… in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down…”

Then Springsteen began to sing Bob Dylan’s “Chimes of Freedom.” But the song didn’t matter. It was the feeling: hope long suppressed, hope finally rising. There are those who say that President Reagan took the Wall down and those who credit Gorbachev. Watch the YouTube video. Looking at those East Berlin kids, you could make a better case for blue jeans and rock music, and you might think that what happened in East Berlin that day was a promise 200,000 people made to one another: That Wall is coming down.

And so it was at eight elite New York schools. The kids got it, even the scholarship kids who didn’t know the words and didn’t quite get the feeling behind them and the kids in the lower grades who were completely clueless about the price of privilege — a wall was coming down.

——————

EPISODE 5: “Do any of these schools teach a class about terrorism?”

Who hacked the portals?

After the all-school rockathon, there was no more pretense of planning for a day of conversation and reconciliation. Now, behind closed doors, the heads of schools met with their IT staffs. Their obsession: the security of their personal computers. If their portals could be hacked, how safe was their email?

Their investigation centered on the three students they’d identified as ringleaders. They didn’t need permission to open Kate, Tina and Greg’s school email. That was a waste of time — nothing there but the usual teen stupidity — so they asked the students for the passwords to their personal email and social media accounts. They refused. Kate, Tina and Greg were all 17, property of their parents; their parents were more accommodating. But once again the schools learned nothing.

The next time they found themselves under a Frette duvet, Annie Winsor, the head of school at Brearley, told Hays Nolan, the Brearley trustee who was her lover, about the thwarted investigation.

Hays explained why they’d never find electronic proof.

“The kids sign up for an email account, say, PiedPiperPark@gmail.com,” he said. “They all have the password. One of them opens an email form, writes a message and saves it as a draft. The others log in, type their ideas in the same mail and save it as a draft. When the conversation ends, they delete it. There’s no record.”

“How do you know this trick?”

“I read a book about Al-Qaeda.”

Hays expected her to praise the unbounded range of his knowledge. But Annie was thinking. Hard.

“Of the schools that got hacked, who teaches anything about terrorism?” she asked. And then answered her own question. “We do.”

In every school, there is a legendary teacher. Students thrill to see her checks of approval in the margins of their papers. After graduation, they come back to visit. Some name children after her.

At Brearley, Rebecca Sykes Jackson was that teacher. She had a dream pedigree: Milton, Wellesley, Oxford. Her husband ran the trusts and estates department at White & Case, her daughter did something at the Fed. In a dress from J. McLaughlin, with a sweater over her shoulders, she looked like a Hollywood version of a girls’ school headmistress — a job, some said, that should have gone to her at Brearley.

Why, Becky Jackson wondered, was Annie summoning her? Graduation was just weeks away. Was she being honored?

Not close.

The emotional temperature in Annie’s office was Ice Age. No greeting. Barely a glance.

“Tell me about…” Annie looked down at a piece of paper. “…your ‘Modern Conflict’ course.”

“It’s for seniors who have completed their History requirements. We look at documents, media, films and music to try to understand the causes of various uprisings and judge their success.”

Annie raised an eyebrow. “Success?”

“Most revolutionary movements fail, but some succeed.”

“By what metric?”

“They overthrow a colonial power.”

“By violent means?”

Becky couldn’t believe where this was going. After all these years, an Inquisition. But she remembered the immortal words of James Carville — “No man stands so tall as when he stoops to kiss an ass” — and excised all tone from her responses.

“Yes. Often. Though I spend as much time as I can on Mahatma Gandhi.”

“Do you take them inside these liberation movements? Do you teach them, for example, how revolutionaries communicate with one another without detection?”

“No, not really.” Then she remembered. “Well, yes. We watched ‘Battle of Algiers’ and discussed the organizational structure of the FLN.”

Annie didn’t want to ask what FLN stood for.

“’Battle of Algiers’ is probably the best political movie ever made,” Becky said.

“What’s it about?”

“A lot of things. But mostly, in class, I pointed out the difference between a traditional army, which is highly organized, and a revolutionary one, which decentralizes power.” Ah, teaching. She loved it. “The story is a textbook demonstration of that kind of confrontation — in the 1950s, when Algeria was a colony of France, the guerilla fighters started escalating their attacks on French civilians, so the French sent troops to put down the revolt.”

“And?”

“The revolt was crushed.”

Annie looked only mildly reassured. She turned to her desktop, typed a few words. The preview for “Battle of Algiers” appeared on her 21” monitor.

“Who are the guerilla leaders?” Annie asked when the preview ended.

“That’s the point. You can’t tell. Why do you care?”

“We need to identify who’s behind these… protests.”

“Three kids, I thought. At other schools.”

“So we thought. But no. It’s someone… smarter,” Annie said. “And yours is the only class in all the schools that studies revolution. We believe it’s someone you’re teaching. Anyone come to mind?”

“There are 16 girls in that class.”

Annie understood: Becky wasn’t going to be helpful.

“We’ll find her.” Annie stood. “Thank you, Becky. That’s all.”

At the door, Becky turned. “In the film, the French have some success with water-boarding,” she said, and this time, there was no mistaking her sarcasm.

“Yes, they did. And they lost Algeria. And if you want a gold watch, Becky, you need to lose that tone.”

————-

EPISODE 6: “We’re done now. Safe travel. One love.”

At Trinity, it was a week of upper-class graffiti. It started when someone — Harvard-bound seniors, no doubt — painted “H 4” in crimson on the Astroturf playing field that covered the school’s roof. The next day, seniors off to Yale painted “Y 6” in blue. On the third day, the Stanford crew painted an “S” and the number 10, and because no first tier college had accepted more Trinity kids than that, the oneupmanship ended. Boom, what! Stanford was the new Harvard.

Disciplinary action? Take the long view. Where do Stanford graduates work these days? Your first answer would be Google or Goldman Sachs. They’re still major employers of Stanford grads, but more and more Stanford students now seek “fulfillment” — they want to be entrepreneurs, they head to start-ups. Which often go public. Which make their employees mega-rich. Which make the development officers of their old schools very, very pleased. So, yeah, Stanford as the new Harvard put a nice punctuation mark on the spring.

Over at Dalton, hijinks took a different form. Ten days before graduation, Billy Passidomo threw a party at his parents’ duplex penthouse. His parents were such legendary travelers — more than once, a nanny represented them at parent-teacher conferences — that their apartment was the default location for the wildest Dalton blasts. For this one, Billy had bought his friends Pax vaporizers and had their initials engraved. And he’d had his connection deliver a quart jar filled with buds of Jack Herer, a strain of herb so prized it was sold out in San Francisco. The school knew about the smoke-off at “The Passidome.” But Billy’s crowd was halfway out the door. Turn a blind eye.

And why not? The axis of the Upper East Side was about to tilt to the Hamptons. The weather was good, the city was quiet, the days counted themselves down.

Was anyone working?

The valedictorians. As if they were being graded, they submitted draft after draft of their speeches, accepting, as they had for years, the lash of comments in the margin.

“’9/11: a day that changed us forever?’ Really, Ms. Steinberg, is there a change that can be completely erased? Or do you get do-overs I don’t?”

“‘A brutal murder?’ Jerry, tell me about the other kind.”

And back the valedictorians went, the better to make their schools and families proud.

There was one other bit of writing done that week, and it arrived in the email of every private school student in the 7th grade or higher one evening. Why after school? Because the authors didn’t want a repeat of the all-school musical interlude.

This is the email:

Dear Friends of ’14,

We graduate in a week. It seemed like the right time to give you a report — a first report and a final report — about our Spring Project.

Who are we?

Call us the Pied Pipers of Park Avenue.

Why that name?

If you remember your fairy tales, you’ll recall the 13th century story about the rat catcher hired by the civic leaders of Hamelin, Germany. He played his magic flute and the rats followed him to the river and drowned. The civic leaders stiffed him, so he played his magic flute again and 130 of Hamelin’s children followed him out of town, never to be seen again.

No one’s burned us. We’re not vengeful. We love New York — we don’t want you to follow us out of town.

What inspired us was a video. You know the song: “Ho Hey.” But you may not have seen the Lumineers play it live in London. Watch it closely, especially starting at 2:06. Behind a bass drum, they’re singing in the streets.

That image says it all for us. Kids. Having fun. Together. Kinda marching, kinda dancing. The way it’s supposed to be. The way it rarely is.

What we wanted in our demonstrations this spring was to help people who needed help, but if we’re totally honest, this was mostly about us, for us. We wanted to give you something like that Lumineers moment — an experience of joy and community that might mean more to you than a graduation party or a summer trip or the car you’ll be driving to whatever college. We hope we did that.

We’re done now. Safe travel. One love.

— PP

So creating an “experience” was the primary motive, not some Thomas Pinketty wealth redistribution scheme. College admissions settled, summer plans made, the school year done and dusted. These incoherent spasms of philanthropy were just a form of senior hijinks, a noble tradition with a contemporary twist. For the school administrators and their boards, that email was a warm bath. Or as Annie Winsor, whose school had a $135 million endowment, put it, “Nothing happened this spring to make a graduate hesitate before writing a check.”

Only Hays Nolan saw the Pied Piper letter as a head fake. He said nothing to Annie, but he had a bad feeling. There was, he sensed, another event ahead.

————

EPISODE 7: “You were how we pierced your parents’ bubble.”

A week before graduation, the valedictorians of the elite private schools got an email from the Pied Piper.

Congratulations. You get the last word.

For weeks now, you have been slaving over your speeches. Before you sign off on them, I ask you to look at a video. It shows Jean Sara Rohe speaking at her New School graduation in 2006. Like you, she’d worked hard on her speech. But also speaking that day was Senator John McCain, who never saw a war he didn’t like. So she threw away her speech and said this:

Should you rethink your remarks? It’s your call. We just want to remind you: This is the last time your parents will have to listen to you in public. And your parents are Very Important People. They run things. What they do affects million of people. But because of where they live and how they live, your parents don’t know any of the people they affect. Their circle of caring is small — it’s limited to their families and friends and a few business associates. That makes their bubble almost impossible to pierce.

You were how we pierced their bubble.

We lied in last week’s email. We didn’t launch the Pied Piper initiative as a spring goof. We did it to steal the kids of the rich. To inspire them. To turn them into activists. And then to return them to their circle of caring. Did we want to get you in trouble? Totally. Because when your parents yelled at you, we hoped you’d tell them you were making good trouble — and that they also needed to act on behalf of the people.

In your five minutes of fame, you can get your families to act. Write back, and we’ll suggest how.

People first! One love!

— PP

The graduation ceremonies of Manhattan’s private schools are monuments to tradition. Remarks, awards, a student speaker, a distinguished alumnus or board member, and then, tradition affirmed, it’s off to lunch.

Some of the valedictorians liked that tradition; they deleted the Pied Piper mail. Some valedictorians just wanted school to be over; they deleted that mail. But at five schools, graduation exercises were treated to speeches very much like this one from Helen Greenwood, Brearley’s Yale-bound valedictorian:

“Parents, teachers, trustees, classmates… good afternoon. What a glorious day! I know school’s out, but I’d like to start by giving you a quiz.

The quote is: ‘The promise was that when the glass was full, it would overflow, benefitting the poor. But what happens instead, is that when the glass is full, it magically gets bigger — nothing ever comes out for the poor.’

Who said this? Michael Moore? Elizabeth Warren? Kanye West? Pope Francis?

Okay. Please raise a hand if you think it’s Michael Moore.

I see Head of School Winsor’s hand up. Mrs. Winsor, are you voting for Moore — or are you waving at me because this isn’t the speech you approved? Right. The speech. Forgive me. I wrote a better one.

The correct answer is The Pope. Francis the Great. And he’s not the only one to notice that the game is rigged. Decades ago, Hunter Thompson figured it out. ‘A job?’ he asked. ‘But how would I make any money?’

My parents have jobs. They work hard. But if my dad is a typical CEO, he’s paid 331 times better than his employees. Even my mom couldn’t spend it all! So his money makes money. And making money while you sleep — that’s the winning ticket.

Economic inequality never ends well. Usually the peasants storm the castle, kill the nobles and divvy the spoils. But this time it looks as if the mega-rich will get away with it — you don’t see people buying pitchforks. ‘Bread and circuses’ was the old way to put the masses to sleep. Now it’s just cheap toys. There may not be a chicken in every pot, but there’s a flat screen on every wall.

Not everyone’s asleep. There are people close to us — people who work at this school — who spend five days a week seeing how we’re being groomed for success. That looks good to them. They’d like their kids to make it. They’re like our parents — just without money. I’d like you to meet one of those people. She works in the kitchen here. The kids know her — she tends the salad bar. Would you welcome Lorraine DeJesus?”

Lorraine DeJesus had been standing off to the side, unnoticed in the sea of chic. Short, not thin, unremarkable in every way — she was a woman you see without seeing.

Light applause as Lorraine DeJesus came to the stage, nervous, almost shaking. Helen hugged her, held her hand, whispered encouragement.

“Miss Helen asked me to speak to you about opportunity, but she no tell me what to say,” she said, in a heavy accent. “Now, standing here, I see you all, and I know: You are all very beautiful. I see now the beauty of your children… where it comes from. They shine. And you shine. This whole world — your world — it shines. It is too bright for me, but my children… I want them to shine like this.”

She paused, and in the sudden silence, you could feel a surge of unaccustomed empathy. Helen read the moment and nodded to Lorraine, who left the stage.

“You all know Jamie Niven,” Helen said, and there were many who smiled, because Niven is an affable fixture on the social circuit. “At charity events, he stands up and says, ‘You are now going to give money to this cause. For that gift, you get nothing but satisfaction. Now, do I hear $25,000?’ Well, that’s what we’re going to do here — we’re going to start a fund for the workers at this school, so they can feed and clothe and educate their children. This fund will be administered by…” She paused, as if thinking, and then brightened, as if she’d just had a brainstorm. “… Hays Nolan, a trustee of Brearley. Would you, Mr. Nolan? And you’ll set it so contributions are tax-deductible? Good. Thanks. Ok, let’s do this…. Who wants to help the Brearley workers? Someone say $25,000.”

Someone did. And another. $50,000 in 30 seconds. How high could this go? In the back there was a disturbance — a man and woman arguing — and then the woman pushed the man away and gave $50,000. In a few minutes, the fund for the Brearley workers was $175,000. And at four other schools valedictorians also produced six figure donations.

Lorraine DeJesus got her picture in the Times.

Annie Winsor figured out that Helen Greenwood had taken Becky Jackson’s class, and she forced Becky into early retirement. She wanted to use some of the money donated to the workers to pay Becky off, but Hays, appalled, wouldn’t go along; their affair ended, badly.

And the kids? Graduation is a break shot; they head off in all directions. In a few months, they’d be at college, their parents far away and receding fast. Impossible to contemplate who they’d become. So let the camera stay at graduation, on the family constellations and the faculty accepting praise and, huddled together, the trustees asking if what just happened was a good thing, and would it ever happen again, and, most of all, what might be done about those liberal teachers.

— THE END —