The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (281 page)

“Aren’t you going to hang it up?” Rosalie wanted to know.

“At some later date,
peut-être
,” Madame told her.

“Well, I hope so. Because I worked really, really,
really
hard on it.”

“
Oui, mademoiselle
. So noted. Now please take your seat.”

Rosalie heaved a disgusted sigh and walked to her desk, rolling her eyes and mumbling about the number of hours she’d spent on her stupid poster.

O
n the Monday morning before Thanksgiving vacation, during Current Events, kids’ reports included the news that President Kennedy’s perpetual flame had drawn thousands of people to his grave at Arlington National Cemetery on the first anniversary of him getting assassinated. And that Mariner 4 had been launched successfully toward Mars. And that South Vietnam had destroyed a bunch of secret underground Viet Cong tunnels. Kitty Callahan, who was our class’s biggest Beatlemaniac, said that, according to something called
Variety
, the Beatles were the Entertainers of the Year on account of their 45s had hit #1 for seventeen different weeks and
A Hard Day’s Night
was the second most popular movie of the year after
Mary Poppins
.

During the part where you got to ask the speaker
a question about their Current Event, Marion Pemberton raised his hand and Kitty nodded. “Are you sure it’s the Beatles and not the Four Tops or the Supremes?”

“Uh uh,” Kitty said, shaking her head. “It’s definitely the Beatles.”

“Oh, man,” Marion exclaimed. And three or four of us boys said it along with him. “Wait’ll the NAACP hears about
this
!”

Geraldine Balchunas was the last Current Events person. Her report was about some experiment up in Hartford called “subscription television” where you had to pay for TV instead of getting it for free. During the part where you got to ask the speaker a question about their Current Event, I raised my hand. Geraldine pulled her mouth to the side of her face, none too pleased. “Felix?”

“That would be like going to a store and
buying
water instead of just getting it out of the sink,” I said.

“Yeah? So?”

“So why would anyone pay for something they were already getting for free?” Geraldine shrugged and said how should
she
know? When no one else had questions, she returned to her seat.

Instead of having us move on from Current Events to religion the way we usually did on Monday mornings, Madame Frechette rose, caressed her front, and told us to
écoutez, s’il vous plaît
, because she had two important Current Event items of her own. Turning to the blackboard, she picked up a stick of chalk and wrote the words
remplaçante and tableaux vivants
.

“Remplaçante,”
she said, turning back to face us. “Any guesses?”

“Replacement?” someone said.

“
Oui. Très bien
. Replacement, or substitute.” Madame explained that she would be taking the train home to Québec over the Thanksgiving holiday and so would not be in class on Wednesday for our half-day session. We would therefore have a
remplaçante
. Jackie Burnham reminded her that
she
was the
remplaçante
.

“D’accord,”
Madame agreed. “And so, on Wednesday, you shall have a
remplaçante
for your
remplaçante
, heh heh heh. And,
mes élèves
, the Good Lord willing, I shall rejoin you all next Monday, one week from
aujourd’hui
.” Her saying it that way—“the Good Lord willing”—made me think of that movie we’d been watching when Sister Dymphna went cuckoo,
The Miracle of Marcelino
. One day you could be walking around like normal, and the next day your bed would be empty and God the Father’s voice would be telling your family or whoever, “Sorry. I needed him in Heaven.” Still, I wasn’t too worried. Unless Madame’s train got derailed near a cliff or something on her way back from Canada, I figured she’d be back after Thanksgiving like she said.

MaryAnn H. (not MaryAnn S. or MaryAnn V., the other two MaryAnns in our class) asked Madame who our sub was going to be, and Madame said she was quite sure it would be Sister Mary Agrippina. The entire class, minus Zhenya, who had yet to be ruler-slapped or skin-twistered, groaned. Madame
shook a scolding finger at us, but she was smiling as she did so. “And now,” she said, pointing to the other thing she’d written on the board. “Who can tell me what
tableau vivant
might mean?”

I recognized the term from Madame’s report card and raised my hand. “Is it a tablecloth?” I asked.

“A tablecloth?” Madame Frechette looked puzzled.
“Non, non.”

When nobody else said anything, Madame explained that
tableau vivant
meant a “living picture,” and that our fifth grade class had been given a very special role in the upcoming Christmas program. Our class would present a series of four
tableaux vivants
, which would complement the musical interludes of St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s eighth grade orchestra, seventh grade choir, sixth grade chorus, and fourth grade glee club. “But you,
mes amis
, will be the stars of the show!”

Madame assured us that she had had considerable experience as a director of theatricals back in her native province and even
un petit peu
of experience in the big city of Montreal, and that now she had
been called upon to direct St. Aloysius Gonzaga’s first-ever Christmas
tableaux
. Recalling Mother Filomina’s “additional remarks” on Madame’s report card, I thought I remembered not that she’d been “called upon” but that Madame had asked for this assignment and Mother Fil was
thinking
about it. “It will be very exciting,” she promised now. “When the curtains part to reveal you all,
en costume
and as still as statues, depicting the various scenes of
l’histoire de la Nativité
, you will hear gasps of wonder from the audience!” There would be much to talk about, and much to do, upon our return from Thanksgiving break, but for now she could tell us that the four “living pictures” in which we would star would be the Annunciation, the shepherds’ spotting of the Star of Bethlehem, the Wise Men’s journey to see Baby Jesus, and the grand finale: a nativity which would include shepherds, angels, Magi, the Holy Family, of course, and last but not least, the little drummer boy, heh heh heh. (Here, Madame looked right at me.)

Hands flew up even before Madame stopped talking. “
Oui, monsieur
?”

“What about Santa Claus?” Monte Montoya asked.

“
Non, non
. Father Christmas was not in Bethlehem that night, heh heh heh, and so he will not be a part of our
tableaux
.” Madame acknowledged Susan Ekizian. “
Oui, mademoiselle
?”

“Will there be animals?”

“Well, we shall have to see about that. Live animals? Most likely not. But put on your thinking caps,
mes amis
. How might we represent cows, sheep, donkeys, and camels?” Ernie Overturf said his father could maybe cut out some plywood animals with his table saw and Ernie could paint them. Madame clapped her hands and said that would be
magnifique
.

When Rosalie Twerski’s hand went up, I knew what was coming “Can I be Mary?” she asked. Madame said she had made no decisions about casting yet, but that she would think about this over vacation and get back to us.

“What are we going to do for Baby Jesus?” Margaret Elizabeth McCormick wanted to know. She volunteered her three-month-old nephew.

Madame said she thought using an actual infant might present complications and that we would probably use a prop—a baby doll. Margaret Elizabeth said she had one of those, too. “
Et bien
. But more about our
tableaux vivants
later,” Madame said. “For now, please take out your
livres mathématiques
so that we can see how successfully you have borrowed your fractions, heh heh.”

J
ust as Madame had said, on the Wednesday half-day before Thanksgiving vacation, she was gone and there in her place sat the Enforcer, Sister Mary Agrippina, her hands folded in front of her, her scowl saying,
Just try something, anything and the pain I will inflict in return will make you wish you hadn’t
.

Of course, none of this was obvious to Zhenya Kabakova who, midway through that morning, rose
from behind her desk and, pencil in hand, walked toward the pencil sharpener on the other side of the room—a perfectly legal act in the classroom that Madame Frechette superintended, which, of course, was neither apparent nor acceptable to Sister Mary Agrippina. “Young lady!” she called out. “Just where do you think you’re going?” In response, Zhenya held up her pencil.

Sister Mary Agrippina informed Zhenya that she did not read sign language and invited her to
say
what she thought she was doing.

Zhenya shrugged, looked around at the rest of us, and then turned back to Madame’s substitute. “Pincil sharpenter,” she said. “My pincil point ees dull.” Sister Mary Ag rose from behind her desk and walked toward Zhenya. The rest of us geared up for the showdown.

Height-wise, Zhenya had Sister Mary Agrippina by at least three inches, and whereas our classmate was robust and muscular, her opponent had jowls and a considerable paunch. But if this was a match
between David and Goliath, it was difficult to decide who was who.

“I guess I must have developed temporary amnesia,” Sister said with a sarcastic smirk. “Because I can’t recall having given you permission to get up and use the pencil sharpener.”

“Don’t need peermission,” Zhenya countered. “What ees beeg deal you are making h’about thees?”

“The big deal?” said Sister. “The big deal is that you are being openly defiant, and
that
, young lady, is entirely unacceptable.” She moved a step closer so that the two were face to face, separated by a scant few inches.

At which point Zhenya called upon one of the expressions that Lonny Flood had taught her. “Why not you go sheet een you het?” she said.

The rest of sat there frozen—a wide-eyed, horrified
tableau vivant
. All of us, that is, except Rosalie. “She just told you you should go to the bathroom in your hat, Sister,” she said.

“Oh she did, did she?” Sister Mary Agrippina
said. Then she reared back and slapped Zhenya, hard as she could, across the face.

Zhenya looked stunned. She reached up and, with her right hand, rubbed her stinging cheek. Then she, too, reared back, formed a fist, and clocked Sister Mary Agrippina in the jaw, hard enough so that the old coot lost her balance and fell back against Eugene Bowen’s desk. Attempting to get up, she fell back again, this time landing in Eugene’s lap. Rosalie stood, ran toward the back door, and down to the office to tattle.

You’d have thought Zhenya’s actions would have gotten her expelled, wouldn’t you? Or, at least, suspended indefinitely? But that was not the case. The language barrier and cultural misunderstanding, not Zhenya, were blamed for the assault on Sister Mary Agrippina who, over the Thanksgiving interlude, got transferred from St. Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School to some retirement home for Catholic sisters in Galilee, Rhode Island. I felt sorry for those old nuns if Sister Mary Ag was going to
be taking care of them the way she took care of us, but I felt glad for my class and me. Zhenya had brought Sister Mary Gestapo’s reign of terror to an end. And besides, maybe she only liked to torture kids.

When we returned to school the following Monday, other things had changed as well. Madame Frechette was wearing high heels with a leopard skin pattern, a new “poodle”-style hairdo, and a bright red beret, which she wore both outside of class and in. As director of the upcoming
tableaux vivants
, she also had a new, strictly business attitude. Lonny and Zhenya, over our four-and-a-half-day hiatus, had somehow become boyfriend and “geuhlfriend.” About a third of our female classmates had returned from break wearing braids or pigtails. Three girls—two of the MaryAnns plus Nancy Whiteley—had tried conditioning their hair with mayonnaise and were now doing it on a regular basis. No fewer than seven girls had pierced their ears with little gold threads—“starters,” they called them.

Even Rosalie Twerski had transformed herself. She showed up that Monday with shaved legs—the left one bearing Band-Aids in two different places, the right leg in three. Shockingly, she, too, had pierced her ears and was wearing tiny gold crucifixes on her punctured lobes. More shocking still, she had emerged from her mother’s maroon Chrysler Newport that morning wearing a lime green Carnaby Street cap—and a bra! At first I assumed Rosalie was mocking Zhenya—that she had turned her into a belated Halloween costume. Then I took into account Turdski’s fiercely competitive nature and realized what was really going on: if she could not defeat this foreign interloper whose popularity had soared into the stratosphere as a result of her having assaulted and banished the scourge of St. Aloysius, then she would try her damnedest to out-Zhenya her.

The race was on. The
tableau vivant
was upon us. The role of the Blessed Virgin Mary was up for grabs.

M
onday, December 7, 1964. I had awaited its arrival for weeks, little suspecting that it would become a day that would live in Felix Funicello infamy.

My classmates, too, had been anticipating the arrival of Monday, December the seventh, as Madame Frechette had told us this would be the day when, after Current Events and recess, she would announce her decisions about who would be who in our
tableaux vivants
. But for me, the casting of a Christmas
program still two weeks away was of lesser importance than what would happen later that afternoon. I’d arrived at school that morning dressed not as a parochial school student but as a seafaring boy. (Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Junior Midshipmen had permission to wear their uniforms to St. Aloysius on the days when they had after-school meetings.) During Current Events, my current event was that in six more hours I would board a bus to Hartford with my fellow Midshipmen and, at 4:00
P.M
., appear on Channel 3’s
Ranger Andy Show
. Over the weekend, I’d rung doorbells up and down our street to let neighbors know about my impending television debut and had made a sign for Pop to post at the lunch counter alerting our regulars. When I’d suggested that he might also want to lug our TV down to the lunch counter again and pass out more free pie, Pop had nixed that idea, claiming that more heavy lifting might give him a “sacroiliac attack” and that the last thing he needed was for our customers to get too used to free food.

“Ah,” Madame noted. “First your mother was on
télévision
, and now you shall be, too, eh?”

“Yeah. Plus, my third cousin, Annette Funicello, has been on TV billions of times.” Turning back to the class, I asked if there were any questions. Zhenya’s hand went up. “Zhenya?”

“Who eez det? H’Annette Foony Jello?” (To Zhenya, I was Fillix Foony Jello, as in, while choosing sides at recess, “H’okay, I peeks Fillix Foony Jello.”)

“Well, she used to be a Mouseketeer on TV and now she’s a movie star.”

“Ya? Movie star at seenima? Wow-ee, Fillix! You cousin beeg shut, ya?”

I nodded. “Anyone else?” Turdski’s hand went up. “Rosalie?”

She wasn’t at her desk; she was over at the first aid station by the pencil sharpener that had been set up for the girls whose pierced ears had gotten infected. “Just a sec,” she said. Upturning the bottle of rubbing alcohol, she soaked a pair of cotton balls
and applied them to her inflamed and oozy earlobes. Then, instead of asking me something about my current event like I thought she was going to, she turned to Zhenya and phony-smiled. “Zhenya, I just want to point out to you that it’s pronounced ‘cinema,’ not ‘seenima.’ Like ‘mortal or venial
sin
.’ Say it:
cinema
.” From his seat in the back, Franz Duzio, who’d never quite mastered the art of whispering, wondered not-so-quietly who’d died and made her the teacher.

“Seenima,” Zhenya said.

Rosalie shook her head. “
Sin
…ema. Try it again.”

“
Seen
…ema.”

“En…ema,” someone mumbled. Giggles followed.

Rosalie smiled with patronizing patience and, turning to Madame, promised to work with Zhenya on her pronunciation during recess. Zhenya shook her head. “Uh uh. Nyet. At recess, I play bezbull or dujbull.”

As a parochial school student, I was, of course, well acquainted with the story of Jesus’s crucifixion
and knew that a kiss or a sugary smile from a “friend” could be treacherous. And so, in defense of Zhenya, I smiled, too—at my nemesis. “Oh, that reminds me, Rosalie,” I said. “It’s ‘picnic,’ not ‘pitnic.’”

Turdski’s smile turned sour. “Yeah? So?”

“You always pronounce it ‘pitnic.’”

“I do not!”

“Yeah, you do, Rose,” one of the unassailable Kubiaks chimed in. Several of the boys nodded. Some of the girls might have nodded, too, had Rosalie not wielded so much power. Geraldine Balchunas sprang to the defense of her best friend. “If she says ‘pitnic,’ then how come
I
never heard her, and I go over to her house all the time?”

“
Et bien, mesdames and messieurs, ça suffit
. And now—”

Ignoring Geraldine and Madame, I kept my focus on Rosalie. “Repeat after me: I will bring potato salad to the class
pic
…nic.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Madame cover her grin with her hand.

“I’m not repeating anything,” Turd Girl said. “I
know it’s ‘picnic,’ so you can just shut up,
Dondi
.” At this point, Madame intervened in earnest, reminding Rosalie that telling others to “shut up” in her classroom was grounds for a check-minus. Opening her grade book, she turned a deaf ear to Rosalie’s argument that she hadn’t
told
me to shut up; she’d merely said that I could shut up—if I wanted to. Madame rose and wrote the French spelling,
pique-nique
, on the board. To me she said, “Finish up now,
monsieur, s’il vous plait
.”

I nodded. “Any other questions?”

Geraldine was gunning for me now. “When you go on that show today, are you afraid you’ll break the TV camera and have to pay for it because you’re so ugly?” None of the boys laughed, but several girls did. Madame Frechette came to my defense—or tried to, anyway. I wish she hadn’t. “That will be enough of that,
mademoiselle
. I am quite sure no cameras will be broken. And I’m sure you will all agree that
Monsieur Felix
looks quite dashing in his seaman’s uniform.”

Lonny’s shocked whisper carried up from the back of the class. “What’d she just say then? Did she just say what I thought she said? Holy crap!” I didn’t get why he was going so mental.

“Ah, recess time,
mes élèves
,” Madame noted with a sigh of relief. “And
après votre récréation
, we shall discuss our tableaux vivants. Class dismissed!”

Some of the girls retrieved their jump ropes from the cloak room and others made for the rubbing alcohol and cotton balls. Us boys took bats, balls, and bases out of the closet and pushed past the girls and down the stairs.

“Hey,” I said to Lonny on our way out of the building. “What’d you think Madame said back there?”

He guffawed. “Oh my god, don’t you know what semen is?” I told him yeah—a seaman was a sailor. A squid. He shook his head and laughed even louder. “It’s, you know, spunk.”

“What’s spunk?”

“Oh, man, Felix. Ain’t you ever had a wet dream?”

Was he talking about bed-wetting? “Not since I was real little,” I said. That made him laugh so hard that he dropped to his knees. I still didn’t get it, but at least now I realized we were in the birds-and-the-bees ballpark. My ignorance was Pop’s fault, of course. All’s he’d told me about sex was that stuff about drinking fountains. If I was ever going to figure it all out, I’d just have to listen harder on the school bus—be Sherlock Holmes, kind of.

Out on the playground, everyone was talking about whether Rosalie or Zhenya would get picked to be Mary when we went back inside. Ever since we’d returned from Thanksgiving break, the class had divided itself, more or less, into two factions. Most of the girls wanted Rosalie and most of us boys wanted Zhenya. Both candidates, in their own way, had been campaigning for the part. Zhenya had taken out her braids and begun wearing her long brown hair (made lustrous with mayonnaise) down, and, I noticed, too, that she’d begun jacking up the vol
ume when we prayed the rosary: “Blissid art dou kh’amongst vimmin and blissid eez duh froot uff die voomb.” Rosalie had left an anonymous typewritten note on Madame’s desk. (It
had
to have been her, although when Madame asked the writer to reveal him-or-herself, she hadn’t owned up.) The note said how Communists were atheists, and how atheists had no right to celebrate Christmas. In addition to the note, Rosalie had taken to wearing a winter scarf to school—not wrapped around her neck but draped over her head like a veil. Lonny, who, in the Virgin Mary sweepstakes, was rooting for his “geuhlfriend,” had at one point confronted potato-nosed Rosalie with the question, “How come you’re wearing that stupid thing all the time now?” Rosalie had fake-coughed and claimed that she had a very,
very
bad head cold and that her mother had insisted she cover her head in our draughty classroom. “Yeah, right,” Lonny scoffed. “You got a head cold and I’m the Leader of the Pack.” With a laugh, he crouched into
a motorcyclist’s stance and made loud
rum-rum-rum
engine noises. Twerski’s retort was that Lonny was the Leader of the Retards.

But if Rosalie’s remark was inappropriate for a girl in the finals of the Blessed Virgin sweepstakes, then Zhenya’s conduct out on the playground twenty minutes before Madame’s big announcement that day was every bit as un-Marylike. Designated one of the day’s baseball captains, I was making my picks when, unexpectedly, Father Hanrahan appeared on the opposite side of the playground where the hoop was, dribbling a basketball and wondering real loud who wanted to play some Twenty-One? “Me!” all us boys shouted, throwing down our gloves and running toward him. Father Hanrahan was the only cool person at St. Aloysius—he even let you call him Father Jerry if you felt like it—and his appearance on the playground was almost like having Bill Russell or John Havlicek show up. But though Zhenya loved both “bezbull” and “dujbull,” she was indifferent to, and had no aptitude for, “bezgetbull.” Separating her
self from the rest of us, she glanced over at the jump-roping girls and then walked by herself to the fence. Lonny, older and taller than the rest of us, was the best basketball player in our class. “Hey!” I called to him as he walked toward Zhenya. “Aint you playing?”

“Nah.”

A minute later, he had his arm around her. Two minutes after that, they were kissing, regular or French I couldn’t see.

Jump ropes fell to the pavement and the girls clustered
en masse
, looking over toward the fence. Oblivious, Father Jerry and half of the boys were still playing Twenty-One, but the other half of us were staring in disbelief at Lonny and Zhenya, same as the girls. This was the most shocking thing our class had witnessed since Zhenya’s socking of Sister Mary Agrippina. Glancing back at the building for a second, I saw that Sister Cecilia’s third graders were crowded at their classroom windows, watching the show as well. I figured Sister Cecilia was probably out in the hall talking to Sister Godberta as usual. But if those
two second-floor nuns were unaware of the passion on display, Mother Filomina was not. Her first-floor office window flew open with a bang, and she shook the bell harder than Ma shakes the thermometer before she sticks it in under my tongue when I’m sick. “Evgeniya Kabakova and the rest of the fifth grade girls should proceed immediately to the fire escape on the side of the building for an emergency class meeting with Sister Fabian!” she shouted. “Lonny Flood should come to the office, and any boy not playing basketball with Father should run laps around the school building.
Now!
”

When the recess bell rang, panting and sweaty from all those laps, I trudged up the stairs beside Zhenya, who looked both teary-eyed and defiant. “What was the emergency meeting about?” I whispered, as if I didn’t already know. Instead of answering my question, Zhenya asked under her breath what those “guddamned pinguins” knew about “keesing boyzes.” But at the drinking fountain, Susan Ekizian filled me in on the gist of the fire escape
confab. Addressing all the fifth grade girls, but mostly looking and shaking her finger at Zhenya, Mother Fil had assured them that young ladies who kept themselves pure for their future husbands ran a better-than-even chance of meeting those husbands in the confession line, and that God would reward them with happy marriages and beautiful children. She likewise had warned that any girl who made herself “the occasion of sin for a boy” just might be purchasing a one-way ticket to Hell. The meeting had closed with a recitation of the Catholic Legion of Decency pledge to embrace virtue and to resist lustful behavior and condemned movies.

Back in class, Madame was missing and the girls were abuzz about how Rosalie, beyond a doubt, now had a lock on the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in our
tableaux vivants
. What were they doing with Lonny, I wondered. Torturing him? Making him sit across from Monsignor Muldoon and read that Saint Aloysius Gonzaga booklet? Not out loud, I hoped—Lonny wasn’t too hot at reading aloud. But when I got up to
sharpen my pencil, I saw Lonny back outside again with Father Hanrahan. Father was doing most of the talking, and Lonny’s head kept going up and down in agreement with whatever he was saying. Plus, they kept bounce-passing the basketball between them. Then Father stopped talking and they began playing one on one.

Madame returned, smelling like cigarettes and freshly applied lily-of-the-valley perfume. I had assumed she would simply announce her
tableaux vivants
decisions, but she’d prepared in advance while we were at recess. The world map had been pulled down and, with a bit of dramatic flair, Madame approached it and gave it a yank.
“Voilà!”
she said. Our
tableaux
assignments were revealed on the blackboard beneath.

Most of Madame’s decisions were shockers, with two exceptions. I had been cast as the Little Drummer Boy in the nativity scene and Marion Pemberton, the only colored kid in our class, was to be the only colored Wise Man. But Franz Duzio, with his eight million detentions, as the Angel Gabriel? Lonny
Flood as Joseph? Most shocking of all, neither Rosalie Twerski nor Zhenya Kabakova would be the Blessed Virgin Mary; both had been assigned the roles of lowly shepherdesses. Casting against type, Madame had chosen shy, chubby, cat’s-eye-glasses-wearing Pauline Papelbon to play the Virgin. “Sister Mary Potato Chips,” some of the mean girls in our class had dubbed Pauline because of her fondness for Ripples, Cheetos, Fritos, and Flings. I turned from the board to my fellow classmates. Zhenya looked indifferent. Rosalie looked outraged. Pauline Papelbon snuck something from her desk and put it in her mouth. I thought I glimpsed the trace of a smile.