A Song for Mary (7 page)
And then maybe I could have a new book, and we could sit and read it together, even for just a day.
I
t is Tuesday afternoon. I know it is Tuesday because there is altar boy practice every Tuesday, and Sister Stella let us out of class fifteen minutes early.
I’m on the altar holding a tall candlestick high up, as if I’m offering it up to God. It’s not so easy to do this when you’re only eight. It is made of gold, and it’s heavy, and I am afraid of dropping it. I know that there are people in the church making visits, and Father O’Rourke is behind me giving us instructions on how to be good acolytes. I should be paying more attention, but there are big holes in my shoes. I had cardboard in them, but it rained and the cardboard went like soggy liverwurst. I forgot to put in new cardboard, and so there are holes in my socks, too, and I can picture the threads falling out of the holes and all the people in the church laughing, and Father O’Rourke, too. I know that I want to throw the back of my cassock over my shoes, but I can’t hold up the candlestick with just one hand, and I pray to God to make Father O’Rourke get it over with. I don’t even have the Latin memorized yet, and here he is giving us the instruction to serve at High Mass.
“Okay,” Father says, “we are at the Consecration now, and the priest has the Host high in the air, so you’re on, Delaney.”
Richard Delaney is in charge of the bells, brass bells that look like three round upside-down bowls, and he hammers each bell so that it sounds like NBC on the radio. Delaney is a good bell ringer, and the sound goes around the church. It makes me think of the radio, NBC, sold American, look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp, the Shadow knows, Bobby Benson and the B bar B, Henry, Henry Aldrich, coming, mother, and I am thinking of these things to get my mind off the holes in my shoes, and to forget how my arms are hurting from holding this thing so high. And then my eyes tighten, and I make the faces, and I’m glad Mommy isn’t here to see me.
Father Hamilton comes on the altar and the first thing you notice about him is his white socks. The boys in school can’t wear white socks unless we have a note from home saying we have foot scurvy or the creeping crud or something. I wonder if Father has athlete’s foot? He is a lot younger than Father O’Rourke, but he is completely bald, and has skin the color of Chinese apples, a sort of red and brown mixed together. He works with Father O’Rourke, and he grills us all the time. And if he’s not asking us about the Latin, he wants to get the inside stuff about everybody’s family.
We are all standing here, lined up like penguins.
“How is your mother, Dennis?” Father Hamilton asks me.
“Fine, Father,” I answer, and wait for him to ask something more. He is always asking us where we went last weekend if we weren’t at Mass, or where did you get that new coat, or is your grandfather still living out in Brooklyn? He once asked me if my mother was working, and I told him my mother is always working, and he asked if she had a real job, and I told him she goes from one job to another.
He turns away from me now.
“How is your father, Peter?” he asks Petey Poscullo.
“Fine, Father.”
“Did he get a new job yet?”
“I don’t know, Father.”
“You don’t know?”
“He don’t talk to me about that.”
“Doesn’t,
not
don’t,”
Father says. “And you, Timmy. Is your sister still living on the farm upstate?”
“Yes, Father,” Timmy Thompson answers.
I didn’t even know that Thompson had a sister, but I guess when sisters go to farms upstate, they are in prison or something like that.
“Okay,” Father Hamilton says to the whole group, “I am going to teach you how to pronounce the Latin of the Suscipiat.”
Father Hamilton recites the Suscipiat slowly. It is the hardest prayer for any altar boy to memorize, and we all listen carefully because Latin doesn’t always sound the same way it looks on a page.
“There are two words here,” Father says, “that you have to practice, and if you don’t get them right, you will never get on the bus for Coney Island.”
Father knows that will get our attention because the only real reason we become altar boys is to get that extra day off from school and go on that trip to Coney Island every May.
“The words are
sacrificium
and
totiusque,
okay, and you will repeat them now as I say.
Sa-cra-fee-see-umm,
okay.”
Someone is heard to say
sa-cra-fish-ium,
and Father makes us say the word ten times before we can get on to
totiusque.
“
Toe-tea-us-quay,
okay,” Father continues.
Someone says
toe-ta-as-quay,
and we have to do that word twenty times.
When Father Hamilton is finished, he looks over at me and sees that I have put my hands, cassock and all, into my back pockets, and he yells.
“Stand up straight, Smith,” Father barks, “and put your hands at your side.”
I jump as he yells. At first I am a little frightened, and then I get angry that he singled me out this way, embarrassing me. You would think that I was walking off with the tabernacle itself, the way he yelled. But I just stand straight and say nothing.
Father Hamilton goes on some more about the different Latin words, but I am not listening anymore. I am just standing with my hands at my side. I feel like telling Father Ford about him. Father Ford is the nicest priest I know, and he is the boss next to Monsignor O’Connor. He would tell Father Hamilton to let a kid put his hands in his back pockets if that’s where he wants them.
Finally, it is over, and Father O’Rourke says we can go home. The next time, he says, we will get to the
mea culpa,
and we should read in our missals about the Offertory.
I love being in this church. It’s such a big place, and the lighting is always perfect here, little candles throwing these big shadows that change whenever anyone walks around. I am always studying these gigantic paintings on the ceilings, and the ones on the walls that seem to move in the light, with the gold around the halos that flashes like it is part of a huge neon sign. And what I like, too, is that there is only one reason to be here, to be in this light and the quiet, and that is to talk more directly to God. I mean, you can talk to God anywhere—in your bathtub, at second base, anywhere—but it is better here somehow. And, here, you can see how many of the statues you can make smile. I think it’s an honor, too, being an altar boy, because it makes you different from all the other boys in class, even if you didn’t get an extra day off and got to get on the bus for the annual outing to Steeplechase Park in Coney Island.
Father Hamilton is just being a pain, I am thinking as I walk up First Avenue, and it’s not so bad. I shouldn’t let him rile me up. Mommy says that we should be careful about what people we let rile us up, because most of the time it is just a waste of a good rile. I have a lot to feel good about. I am the youngest in the altar boy class. I got in the class even though I’m only in the third grade, because of the high marks I got in vocabulary. So they made an exception. Usually, you have to be nine.
I see Mr. Dempsey standing outside of his delicatessen when I get to the corner of 56th Street. He waves to me and calls out.
“Hey, kiddo,” he says, “do you want to earn fifty cents and sweep the store out?”
It would take me just a little while, I am thinking, and I would be a little late for dinner, but he said fifty cents this time. At least it wouldn’t be a dime. I wouldn’t risk being late again for a dime and spend the whole time after school tomorrow with Mommy at Mrs. Grayson’s apartment on Sutton Place.
Mr. Dempsey gives me a broom and asks me to start in the back of the store, where there are a million boxes waiting to be unpacked. There is a customer in the store, and I start to move the boxes around and sweep behind them. The boxes are like mountains, stacked very high, and I feel very little in front of them. As I sweep, I am thinking about the eraser job that Sister Maureen took away from me. She should have known just how careful I was to get every last speck of chalk dust out of those erasers, so that she would be glad that she asked me of all the boys in the class to do the job. And here I am, being as careful as I can to get to all the corners and sweep them clean.
Mr. Dempsey is saying goodbye to the customer at the front door. I am thinking that I never saw him walk a customer to the front door before, and I wonder why he is doing it. I see him from way back in the storeroom corner. He turns the lock and turns the OPEN sign over. It is so early to be closing the store, I am thinking, and I begin to sweep a little faster so that I can be through before he closes the store. And Mr. Dempsey comes to the back of the store and says he wants to show me something, and he picks me up and puts me on one of the small boxes, and he is holding my wrist, and I don’t like that he is doing that, and he is unbuttoning his pants, and then he takes himself out of his pants and I begin to get very frightened, and I don’t know why he is doing this, and I wish Mommy was here to see me make a face, and to tell me to stop, and to tell him to stop. He pulls my wrist over so that my little hand is near to himself, and I pull away, but his grip on my wrist is so strong, and I want to run, anywhere, and to tell somebody that I am only eight years old, and Mr. Dempsey has me a prisoner in the storeroom of his delicatessen, and he pulls my little hand a little harder until it is nearly on top of himself, and I want to get away, but he is pulling, and I think of my brother Billy and of how quick he is in everything, and so I begin to yell at the top of my lungs and wriggle as quickly as I can, jumping down from the box, screaming, trying to free myself from his strong grip, jumping fast from foot to foot, pulling away on one side and then on the other, beginning to punch at Mr. Dempsey with my free hand, saving all my strength for one big tug away from him, and then he looses his grip, finally, as I charge away and I run to the front of the store, but the front door is locked, and I am screaming now as loud as I have ever screamed, and Mr. Dempsey looks afraid, and he is yelling for me to shut up, shut up, and he opens the lock, and I never look at him, but run out of the store as fast as I’ve ever done anything, and I run to my stoop where there are some women sitting on newspapers, and I thank God that Sue Flanagan is not there because I can feel the red in my face and the tears in my eyes, and I feel so embarrassed, like I did something very bad and people were pointing at me and saying there is Dennis, the little kid who will do anything for fifty cents, and so I jump up the steps of the stoop and run right past them, into the hall and up the stairs, not a word or a squeak out of me.
Then I am on the fourth floor, and I am out of breath. I remember now that I never started to cry, and that makes me feel a little better, and I think it is because there is nothing that I did wrong and I wish I could make everything go away and just go back to church and Father O’Rourke and the bells. And I would even listen to Father Hamilton. I am not in the mood to cry. Instead, I am in the mood to get a zip gun and shoot Mr. Dempsey. And I think, too, that I am too mad to go into the house, and I don’t want Mommy to see me like this because she will ask a hundred questions like Sam Spade. I try to calm down by counting to one hundred in sevens, and I get to ninety-eight, and I try to think of something else to think of. I am having a hard time breathing, I guess from running so fast up the stairs, and I am making the faces.
Calm down, I tell myself, calm down or you’ll never be able to go home. What am I going to say to Mommy? I can’t say anything. I can’t even tell Billy because I know Billy will go around and throw bricks through all of Mr. Dempsey ‘s windows, and the police will come, and Billy will tell them everything, and then I’ll go to jail, too, because I told Billy and so I started it all.
Elephants, I think. I’ll count the elephants clumping through the jungle, stepping on trees and making them fall over so that the other elephants have a path, and in my mind I can see these animals in slow motion, one by one, each holding the other’s tail, each helping to keep the line straight so that they will all get to where they are going in one piece. One, two, three, four, and they are moving so slowly I wish I could make them gallop, but they just plod ahead like turtles.
I notice now that I am breathing better, and I begin to walk down the long, dark hall to apartment 26. At the apartment door I pick up a corner of the linoleum at my feet, grab the key, and open the door.
Billy and Mommy are at the kitchen table.
“Boy oh boy,” Mommy says, “are you lucky. One more minute and you would be in your bed without your dinner.”
I bless myself as I sit, and look at the plate that Mommy has put before me. It is ravioli, soft ravioli, the kind from the can. They are like marshmallows. I once had real ravioli at Dante Vescovi’s house, and it didn’t taste anything like this. It was scrunchy. I can’t talk, and so I just yes and no everything to death, and try to be anything but suspicious. I can’t eat, either, but I force myself. The raviolis don’t taste so bad, but they are as hard to eat as the tripe because my stomach is beating time with my heart, and I keep thinking that all I want to do is lie down and go to sleep.
God, I don’t want Mommy to find out about this.
E
veryone in the third grade except for Greta Schmidt is lined up for the bus that will take us to the Guggenheim Dental Clinic on 72nd Street. Greta’s father is Dr. Schmidt, and we go to him for school examinations. The welfare doctor does not do regular exams, just the emergency ones. The Schmidts have their own house on 53rd Street, and so they are rich. Dr. Schmidt would not sign the release form to send Greta to the dentist with us, and Greta does not know why. And so I feel a little sorry for Greta because she has to sit in Sister Urban’s class all day, and nobody likes Sister Urban. Not even the priests, and they like everyone. Father O’Rourke and Father Hamilton never seem to talk to her at our assemblies, but they talk to all the other nuns. I’ll have to go to Sister Urban in the fifth grade, and Billy told me it is like going to reform school, only she beats you worse than the prison guards. Maybe she’ll get diphtheria or something before I get there, and she’ll have to recuperate for ten years. Billy had diphtheria last year and almost died. He had to stay in the hospital for a month, down in Bellevue, and Mommy cried a lot every night. I made her tea. It always cheered her up when I made her tea.
