A Song for Mary (18 page)
When the Mass is over, we return to the sacristy, and a man there in a powder-blue suit begins to speak to the priest in what is like French, and he is shaking his finger at him. The priest has his hands out, and his shoulders are hunched up like he is innocent and can’t figure out why he is being accused of some crime. The man is the sacristan, I guess, because no priest would wear a powder-blue suit.
The priest is explaining his story, going on, shaking his finger back at the sacristan, looking at me from time to time.
The sacristan looks at me, too.
“What is your name, son?” the sacristan asks me.
I tell him, and I squirm a little as I watch him write my name down on a pocket pad.
“You should know better,” the sacristan says. “The main altar is never used for the six o’clock, and the side altars are always for the visiting priests. You should know better.”
The sacristan leaves, and I immediately start to worry if he is going to tell Cardinal Spellman on me.
And what Cardinal Spellman will do about it.
God, I hope the sacristan isn’t a stool pigeon. How am I to know it’s a sin to do the six o’clock on the main altar?
The priest finishes up in the sacristy, putting his chalice into a big black box, and I hang my cassock in the big wooden closet. He is now talking to himself, whispering, really, and I wish I could know what he is saying. He doesn’t seem as happy as he was.
I am ready to go home. I am still tired. My eyes are beginning to close even as I walk up the sacristy stairs.
And I have to go now and deliver the papers on 57th Street, and I suppose I’ll worry all day about what Cardinal Spellman is going to do to me.
It’s too bad they don’t pay us for the six o’clocks the way they do for delivering the papers.
I
am standing in the courtyard yelling up between the corridor of the high walls. “Hey, Mom,” I am yelling, trying hard to avoid looking at the spot where I remember crazy Mario Giambetta sprawled out like a pancake. The courtyard is dirty, garbage piled up in the corners, a couple of old tomato cans and some old newspapers blowing around in the breeze. They keep the buildings on 56th Street pretty clean most of the time, but the supers don’t do such a good job in the backyards.
“Hey, Mom!”
Looking up, I try to see between the lines of sheets, pillowcases, and underwear that are in lines from window to window, and from window to the line pole shooting up like a ship’s mast in the middle of the alleyway.
“Hey, Mom!”
Where is she? I wonder. I want to see
The Greatest Show on Earth
with all the guys from 56th Street. And the girls. Marilyn Rolleri is going, and there is no one in the seventh grade that has grown to be as pretty as Marilyn Rolleri.
Finally, between the army of flying sheets, I see the fourth-floor window open, and my mother is sticking her head out, though not too far because she is afraid of the height.
“Yes,” she says, “stop yelling.”
“Mom,” I say in a slightly lowered yell, “can I have a quarter to go see
The Greatest Show on Earth
with all the guys?”
I wouldn’t tell her about Marilyn Rolleri.
“No,” she says, “not today.”
The window closes and she disappears.
I feel very sad suddenly, because I can see in my mind all the guys walking down to the Loew’s Lexington, cracking jokes under the Third Avenue El, trying to sneak up past the lobby goldfish pool to the balcony where you have to be more than sixteen, or going off to the side of the loge and grabbing a smoke on the sneak.
And I can see one of the guys putting his arm around Marilyn Rolleri’s chair, and then bringing his arm down until he feels her arm, and then maybe over more until he has a good feel of her chest until she slaps him. But maybe she won’t slap him, and if she doesn’t slap him, then I very much want to be the boy she doesn’t slap.
“Hey, Mom!”
The window opens again, and I see my mother, but she doesn’t say anything.
“Mom,” I say, “please?”
“No.”
“Mom, come on, Mom, please. I really want to go. All of my friends are going.” I am hoping here that she doesn’t mention jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge.
“No.”
“Please,” I argue. “Why can’t I go when everyone else is going?”
“Come up here,” she says, and then she closes the window again.
“Hey, Mom!”
I see her head once more.
“C’mon, Mom,” I say. “I don’t want to walk all the way up the stairs. I just want you to wrap a quarter in a piece of newspaper and throw it down to me.”
“No,” she says, “and you come up here right this minute. Don’t answer me again.”
I can see the window shutting, but this time it is slamming down. I know she is mad about something. I don’t want to climb the stairs, but I know now that she is mad, and she’ll only be madder if I don’t go up. I know, too, that she is going to say no again, and I am wondering as I count the gum stains on the stairs what I will do then. It is Sunday. Kips Bay Boys Club is closed, and there is nowhere to go, and nobody to hang around with. At least at Kips there are a hundred things to do, but a Sunday in New York is like being in a ballpark when the game is called for rain.
In my living room I am sitting on the hard spring that is popping up almost through the cushion of the couch. Mom comes in from the kitchen and sits in the small chair across from me. There is just room for the couch and the small chair and the radio. I wish as I always wish when I look around my living room that we had a television set like everyone else, so I could watch Milton Berle on my own television set, and not on somebody else’s, like on Dante Vescovi’s television set that was sent to them by his uncle who is a bishop in Italy, where you can’t say a peep because Dante’s father will throw you out on your ear if you say a peep when they are watching television.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” my mother says.
“Do what, Mom?”
I am in for it, because she always begins complaining when she says “I wish.”
“Yell up in the yard like that,” she says, wringing a dish towel in her hands, “asking me for money, so that all the neighbors on 56th Street will know that I am a woman that does not have a quarter to give her own son when he wants to go to the movies. You have to learn better manners than that.”
Here we go again with the better manners, I am thinking. My mother is always saying that I should get better manners, and my brother Billy, too. It’s like an excuse to not talk about something. Don’t talk about that or you’ll hurt someone’s feelings, and all that. But it’s my feelings, too.
I don’t know how much good manners you have to have, anyway. We are always saying thank you like a broken record, and we always have the clean shirts, and if there’s meat, we don’t pick it up with our fingers, except if there are pork chops. I like to hold the pork chop in my hand like a hatchet, and she lets me get away with it.
My mother is looking at me now in a kind of hard way. Not in an angry way, but, still, I can tell she is unhappy.
“It is not right,” she says, “that I don’t have the quarter to give you to go with your friends, but I don’t. Can’t you see that I would give it to you if I had it in my bag, or even saved up somewhere? But there are no quarters, Dennis, not even any of your money from the newspapers, or Billy’s, and you shouldn’t make me say that out the window to the whole world. Can’t you understand that?”
Well, I do understand her. But I also want to go see
The Greatest Show on Earth
and try to get my arm around Marilyn Rolleri’s chair. I can’t say it, though. Even if she did understand, I couldn’t say that to her. It’s just a quarter. Some of my friends get a quarter whenever they ask for it. Some of them don’t even have to ask, like Dante. His mother is always giving him quarters, an unending supply of quarters, like she just got them from the bishop’s collection basket.
In the street again, I tell Bobby Walsh that I can’t go with them to the Loew’s Lexington. I don’t say anything except that I don’t have the quarter.
“Let’s go steal some bottles from Rossi’s,” Bobby says.
“What happens if we get caught?” I ask, knowing that my mother won’t be able to get the milk there anymore if someone saw us.
“Are you yellow or what?” Bobby says. “Rossi keeps the bottles in the cellar, and we just have to open the outside grating and climb down there. Then we can give the bottles right back to him for the deposit, thirteen for the quarter. C’mon.”
Bobby has his own quarter, and he’s being a good friend trying to help me get the money up, but I know I don’t want to do this. If we got caught, Rossi would never again give me a roast pork hero, and my mother wouldn’t be able to have a bill there anymore, and I don’t know what. She would disown me like I was an orphan.
“Naw,” I say, shrugging my shoulders, “forget it. You go, Bobby. Catch up with the gang and those girls, but don’t try to cop a feel of Marilyn Rolleri’s anything.”
“What’s an anything?” he says.
“You know,” I answer, “anything what’s soft and round.”
“Hey, c’mon,” Bobby says, “come with us, anyway. You can do your own copping, ‘cause I’ll sneak up to the balcony and open the emergency exit there. I know how to do it, and you can get in through the back door.”
I am alone now, and a little scared. I wish there was someone with me. But everyone had a quarter, and I didn’t. That’s the breaks, and why I’m here in the backyard of the Loews Lexington, trying to get up the fire escape stairs to the balcony door.
It’s a wide fire escape, and it has outside bars that go completely from bottom to top, so there is no way I can get into the stairway. But, looking up, about four flights up, I can see that there is an opening at the top of a door that connects the landing and the stairs. If I could just get to that door, I could squeeze through the opening. Maybe. It looks like more than a foot high and two feet wide. I know I can fit.
It is like a mathematical problem, and I can see my seventh grade class now, and I can hear Sister Regina’s squeaky voice as she is teaching. Just Greta Schmidt and Ronnie Santina say they like mathematics, but the rest of us have these blank and ignorant faces, and our heads going up and down as if we understand it all.
“Always study the problem a few minutes first,” Sister says. “First you see it straight, then sideways, then upside down, whatever helps you get to the middle, because that is where you want to be, right smack in the middle of the problem. When you are there, you can always figure a way out.”
Maybe she’s right, I’m thinking, for I want to be in the middle of the stairs, and the only way I can get there is to climb up the outside of the fire escape until I get to that fourth-floor opening. Only, I wish that somebody else was here to help me, because I know that if I fall, it might be days before someone comes back here to find me.
God. This wave of questioning suddenly comes over me. What is it about us, about Billy and my mother and the way we live, that I can’t even get a quarter together? Maybe I should have thought more about Rossi’s bottles.
Goddammit, I want to be in that balcony. So whatever I have to do to be there I want to do it.
I am thinking now as I climb carefully up the outside of the stairs about nothing more than how far it is to the concrete of the backyard below. My foot is wedged between the iron steps and the thin metal bars of the fence. Just for a moment, I think about Harry Shalleski, but I know I shouldn’t think about him. Not now. One by one I climb up the outside of the steps, carefully, the breeze sweeping stronger across my face the higher I get. My hair is blowing all around. I am being careful to grab firmly onto the fencing before I move my feet. I do this for three flights, slowly, like I am on a very high monkey bar, until I am up on the fourth floor on the outside of this fire escape, and the opening I want is just up a little higher. But, suddenly, my foot slips out of the wedge because there is not enough room where this one step is, and I fall down, and I’m falling fast, but my hand is still firmly around the fencing rod, and it slips down as I fall into the midair, and now I am swinging in the midair, my hand caught at the bottom of the fencing because I have slid all the way down, Holy God, and I can feel a sharp pain in my hand and in my shoulder because my body is swinging with nothing to grab onto.
Oh, God, this is just what I was afraid of, something like this, and without somebody here to help me. And now I think of Harry Shalleski again, falling from the RKO fire escape, and Mikie Harris sliding down the rope, and Harry dead and splattered below. God.
Why couldn’t I just buy my ticket like everybody else, and walk in past the big marble goldfish fountain, past the candy stand, and into the dark of the movie house, feeling my way around until my eyes adjusted and I could see the lovely form of Marilyn Rolleri? Here I am swinging by one hand above the end of my life. Like that guy in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” a story Sister Regina made us read, I have to do anything I can from falling into the black hole.
I know I have to use all my strength now to pull myself up, and so I try to rest for a minute, but the shoulder is hurting too much to rest. So I swing as hard as I can, to get a foot up and catch it between the fencing rods, and so I begin to say a prayer, and shift my weight with as much force as I can. Oh, yes, I have it, I have my foot between the upright rods, and now what? I have to inch my hands up, little by little, and I do, sliding my hands upward.-each inch giving me a little more room to get a better balance, until, finally, I am again standing upright, my foot firmly wedged again between the stair and the fence. God.
My heart is beating so loudly I can hear it through the breeze, but I climb up to the opening and slide my body through, like a snake, headfirst, and I climb down the fencing on the other side with my hands down below me. When I get down on the landing, I am sprawled out flat, breathing hard, trying to get over the shock of almost being flat like a pancake like crazy Mario Giambetta, down on the backyard concrete when he took a flier out the window, or like Harry Shalleski, probably wrapped in silk that looks like cellophane in his small coffin.
