Bear and His Daughter (4 page)

M
ACKAY ONCE
described himself as “the last orphan.” He has a forlorn and humorous manner that makes his friends delight in the phrase. Some of them use it behind his back.

As a child of five, Mackay was sent to an institution operated by a Catholic order of teaching brothers. Though it was described as a boarding school, the male children who attended St. Michael’s were all homeless to a greater or lesser degree, and many had lost, one way or another, both parents. About half had been enrolled by surviving relatives, who paid the Pauline Brothers a tuition that, in the mid-1940s, amounted to fifty dollars a year. Others had been placed there by the family-court system through the network of Catholic charities. The children were referred to, quaintly, as “scholars.”

A significant minority of St. Michael’s scholars were statutory delinquents. Many were suffering from emotional disturbances of varying severity. All were unhappy and unloved or unwisely loved or loved ineffectively. All were mildly malnourished; in later life, Mackay would find himself unable to remember the food at St. Michael’s as food, only as the stuff of guilt or sickness. All were subject to unremitting petty violence.

To be a scholar at St. Michael’s was to live on one’s nerves. A good beating was forever at hand. Pale children were always whispering, their jaws rigid like ventriloquists’, about surprise attacks, revenge and retribution. Sometimes it would seem to Mackay that his grade school years were a single continuous process of being found out in transgression and punished. At other times he would recall them as a physical and moral chaos of all against all.

Mackay had been placed in St. Michael’s by reason of his mother’s incapacity. His virgin aunt, a schoolteacher, paid the brothers. Mackay’s mother was a single parent before her time and a paranoid schizophrenic. She was an educated, well-spoken woman, and Mackay could remember that in the years before their separate institutionalization she had often read to him. He could also remember lying with her in a dark room while music that was solemn and frightening played from an ornate wooden radio. Once in St. Michael’s he forgot, for a while, his mother’s face. He thought of her as a vague, troubled, tender presence. He was surprised, as an adult, to learn that she had been known to display a violent side.

Mackay’s own experience of violence began at St. Michael’s, where it appeared in three principal forms. The first was intramural, taking place among the scholars themselves and visited by the strong upon the weak. In obscure corners, in lavatories, showers and the swarming darkness after lights out, boys alone or in combinations fought out the laws of struggle and dominance. St. Michael was a warrior angel and St. Michael’s Institute had the social dynamic of a coral reef.

In its second variation, violence was attendant upon the scholars’ education and correction and was meted out from above by the brothers. Sometimes it was spontaneous and consisted of a clip, with or without a knuckle filling, to the head of a boy skylarking or talking in ranks. Idling in class, insufficiently complete answers to a teacher’s question, or simply wrong ones, might also bring such an expression of displeasure. On one occasion, an unhappy arithmetic teacher lined up his entire third-grade class and slapped each scholar twice, hard across the face. Someone’s slip of the tongue had provoked general unseemly laughter. The teacher; sardonically Mackay later believed, ordered his scholars to offer their humiliations to the Holy Ghost. The corporal punishment Mackay most dreaded was that administered formally, by the prefect of the primary school, with a worn razor strop. The smallest children and those in their first weeks at St. Michael’s were not subject to such rigors, lax deportment in them being seen as the fruit of natural depravity. But for scholars aged six and over, the words “You will stand by my room … tonight!” uttered theatrically in the French-Canadian inflections of Brother Francis, prefect of the grammar school, were an occasion of stark, sick-making terror.

Finally, among the forms of violence, there were the weekly “smokers,” in which a scholar found himself confronting both the authority of the institute and the mob spirit of his fellows. In the smokers, boys six and over were obliged to put on boxing gloves and flail away at each other for three two-minute rounds—time enough, Mackay discovered, to get beaten thoroughly. For years Mackay dreaded Thursday evenings and the smokers. In the middle of his second year; matched against a talented boy from West Virginia, he lost much of the hearing in one ear and years later discovered that his eardrum had been broken and his inner ear injured. Eventually he learned the requisite lessons. He learned to keep his head and to use his own anger. He learned to take blows, to take courage from someone else’s show of pain and to use another’s fear to his own advantage.

The necessity of accommodating the realities of conflict caused Mackay much inward confusion. He recalled and idealized his mother’s gentleness like a lost kingdom, but pining about it would not do. Homesick brooding made him teary and vulnerable, which was a dangerous way to be. Struggle was the law. During his first years at St. Michael’s, World War II was in progress. The war and the patriotic effort to fight it were presented at St. Michael’s as having a sacred character. The war was an occasion of suffering and death, states that were well regarded there. Death was particularly sublime, the highest form of existence and a condition to be acquired as soon as responsibility permitted. The virtuous dead were the Church triumphant.

Mackay understood the weakness of his position. He felt that he required help from higher powers, but the higher powers seemed firmly on the side of Brother Francis, their earthly representative. Mackay’s religious allegiances shifted with his daily fortunes. One day he would find himself in transports of love for his Father in Heaven, who was after all the only one he knew, and he would pray that God’s will be done on earth. At other times he would desire nothing so much as the defeat and ruin of the United States, on the theory that even the conquering Japanese were bound to be an improvement on the Pauline Brothers. On such days he would address his prayers to Satan, Hitler and Stalin. It would seem at these times that the right side was not for him. Even today he seems to carry a strain of destructive skepticism in his nature, together with a strange credulity.

In the course of his time at St. Michael’s, Mackay was able to laugh off much of the brothers’ absent-minded battery. He joined a school gang, fought for and held a middling status in the primate democracy. He became a friend of one of the gang’s principals, a red-headed boy named Christopher Kiernan, who excelled at the smokers. Mackay himself came to enjoy the smokers and even won a few. The statutory evening punishments he would never forgive or forget.

In the hours before lights out, there were always a few boys aged between six and nine standing in a line outside the cubicle in which the brother prefect slept. Besides serving as the House of Pain, the brother prefect’s room was a place of great mystery, the only adult residence with which many of the scholars were familiar. Those who visited it most frequently would have been hard put to describe it, distracted as they were by their own fear and shame. Mackay remembers the white curtain, like a hospital screen, across the door and the smell of the brother prefect’s pipe tobacco.

After the evening prayer and the bustle of innocent scholars retiring, the standers-by were left in semidarkness with the beating of their own hearts. Very occasionally, on the eve of holidays or simply at a whim, Brother Francis would commute the sentences of the condemned and send them scattering joyfully to bed. This remote possibility added a dimension of suspense to the nightly drama and enabled the children to experience the edifying sensation of vain hopes disappointed.

Ten minutes to a quarter of an hour after the lights had gone out, the prefect would emerge from behind his curtain and eye the quivering scholars like a high priest inspecting the offerings. He would then make a withering remark at their expense; one of his favorites was to address them as “mother’s little darlings,” a characterization hardly appropriate, since they were in fact orphans about to be beaten. Mackay always felt it directed at him in particular.

Then Brother Francis would return inside and consult his dreaded little black book and call the scholars in one by one. Punishment was administered in silence. It was expected to be endured with patience and to be, as the phrase went, “offered up.” It was often pointed out at St. Michael’s that Our Lord himself had cooperated with the authorities who put him to death, meekly obeying their commands in order that the sacrifice be accomplished. And the ceremonial nature of these punishments, the waiting in reverent silence and order; as though for a sacrament, the intensity of feeling undergone by the punished, all conspired to give an atmosphere of perverse religiosity to the business.

Pushing the curtain aside, a guilty scholar would enter the tiny room. Looming hugely overhead was the black-clad figure of Brother Francis. The razor strop was behind his back and he would hold it there until the victim extended a small left hand, palm upward. Three times the strop would descend, and after each blow the scholar; if he wanted to get it all over with, was required to offer his hand for the next. Mackay says he can remember the pain even today. After the left hand, it was time for three on the right.

The worst of it, Mackay says, was the absence of mercy. Once the punishment began, no amount of crying or pleading would stay the prefect’s hand. Each blow followed upon the last, inexorably, like the will of God. It was the will of God. Brother Francis, implacable as a shark or a hurricane, carried out what was ordained on high. If a scholar withheld a trespassing hand, Brother Francis would wait until it was extended. He seemed to have nothing but time, like things themselves. Only in refusing to cry could a boy preserve a remnant of personal dignity. Mackay always tried to hold out. Once he made it through the second blow on the right hand before dissolving. It did not escape Mackay’s notice that, in the end, everyone cried.

Duly punished, St. Michael’s children would fly weeping toward their pillows, their burning hands tucked under their armpits, scuttling barefoot over the wooden floor like skinny little wingless birds. In bed, in the darkness, they would moan with pain and rage against the state of things, against Brother Francis and God’s will, against their alcoholic fathers, feckless mothers or stepparents. Children can never imagine a suffering greater than their own.

Mackay was an intelligent child who liked books and so was able to mythologize his experience. One of the favorite myths informing his early childhood was the Dickensian one of the highborn orphan, fallen among brutish commoners. Sometimes he would try to identify and encourage in himself those traits of character that gave evidence of his lost eminence. The question of his own courage in the face of danger and enmity often occupied his thoughts. Years later, in navy boot camp, Mackay would discover that in the course of his years at St. Michael’s he had acquired an instinctive cringe. This would be the first indication in adult life that he had not passed altogether unmarked through his early education.

When Mackay’s mother was released from the hospital, Mackay left St. Michael’s and went to live with her in a single bathless room at a welfare hotel on the West Side. He spent as much time as possible out of the room, on the street. In his second year of high school, he began to cut classes. He had become a “junior” of a West Side gang and spent much time drinking beer in Central Park at night and smoking, with a sense of abandon, the occasional reefer.

Once, in the dead hours of a summer night, he was drinking Scotch and Pepsi-Cola with four other youths around the Egyptian obelisk in Central Park called Cleopatra’s Needle when a hostile band happened by. One of Mackay’s friends had a knife, and in the fight that ensued a boy of the other party was stabbed. It was impossible to see everything in the darkness. The fight was almost silent. Mackay found that adrenaline worked against the sense of time; time advanced with his pulse beats, moment by moment. There was a cry of “Shank!” The stabbed boy cursed and groaned. At the height of the battle two mounted policemen from the Central Park precinct came galloping across the Great Lawn, bearing down on the combatants. Everyone scattered for cover.

Mackay and Chris Kiernan escaped over a wall and onto the transverse road across the park at Seventy-ninth Street. There they found the teenager who had been stabbed, standing by the curb watching glassy-eyed as cars sped past him. He had been stabbed twice in the arm, warding off thrusts at his body. The wounds seemed deep and, Mackay thought, might well have killed had they been placed as intended.

The stabbed youth cursed them. Mackay and Kiernan felt compromised. Custom discouraged the promiscuous use of knives against white enemies. It seemed impossible to just leave him there, so they decided to help. Mackay and Kiernan made a tourniquet of his bloody white shirt. They walked him, talking encouragement, to the door of the nearest hospital, a luxurious private establishment off Madison Avenue. His shirt had become suffused with blood. Blood ran off his sneakers onto the pavement. As they approached the inner glass door of the hospital a man in white came forward from behind a reception desk and locked the door. When they protested, the man in white simply shook his head. Mackay and Kiernan somehow got the youth to Bellevue, left him outside Emergency and fled.

The following March, on St. Patrick’s Day, Mackay was one of the drunken youths who, then as now, made the Upper East Side horrible with their carousing after the parade. His mother was back in the hospital and he was staying in an apartment in East Harlem with half a dozen other dropouts. Parents, not unwisely, cautioned their teenage children against association with him.