Unto the Sons (11 page)

But we often arrived so early in the neighborhood on Saturdays that we woke people up and irritated them so much that they told us nothing. One morning as my father stood on the loose boards of a rotting porch, tapping on the slats of a torn screen door and calling to Jet by name, an elderly woman wearing a bathrobe leaned out of an upstairs window and hurled down a metal pot at my father. Although it missed him, it caused
such a clatter as it bounced off the sidewalk that the dogs barked in the house next door, and children began to cry, and a large black man from across the street abruptly opened his front door and glared.

“Hey,” he said, after a pause, “what the hell you want?”

“I’m looking for Jet,” my father replied.

“Jet
who?
” the man asked, challengingly.

Surprised, confused, my father did not respond. Momentarily he held his breath. It had apparently occurred to him for the first time that he did not know Jet’s last name. The man across the street, his heavy arms folded, stood waiting; and I feared that he might leave his porch and come over to us. But as my father remained silent and kept his eyes downward, the man merely sneered as he said: “We don’t know no Jet around here!”—and, upon reentering his house, slammed the door behind him.

My father turned toward me slowly, forcing a smile. Then, firmly taking my hand, he led me down the icy steps. I assumed that we were on our way home. But after we had walked a half-block in silence, he said: “Let’s try one more place, that house on the corner.” I protested; but he pulled me toward a two-story clapboard house that, like the other peeling buildings on the block, had brown stains streaking down the white walls beneath the drainpipes, and rusty dented automobiles parked in the driveway, and a muddy yard littered with broken bottles, punctured tires, and assorted household rubbish soundly stuck in the frosty, weed-strewn earth.

“Let’s go home,” I pleaded. But my father moved toward the corner house, where he soon was knocking on the door and, with somewhat less force than before, calling out to Jet. This time, however, there was no response whatsoever. No one came to a window, there was no barking of dogs; it was as if it were a totally abandoned house. My persistent father knocked louder, rapping his gloved knuckles against the white door patched with plywood, causing a hollow echo that rose in the harsh morning air. But from the house, continuing silence.

“Okay,” he said finally, “let’s go.” Relieved, I followed him down the path, then toward the street in the direction of the store. I had seen enough of Jet’s world. But a sense of sadness lingered within me as we walked, for I knew that after we had gotten back to the store on this Saturday, as on other Saturdays when Jet was adrift, I would see my father in the back room remove his jacket and tie, and strip to his undershirt, and then begin on this busiest day of the week to labor as long as he could in the steam of Jet’s machine.

And not only my father, but I as well would be confined—until Jet’s
unpredictable return—to the hot and hazy atmosphere where no conversation could be heard above the pounding and hissing of the machines, and where time always passed slowly as my father sharpened the front creases of other men’s pants (while his own tailored trousers became sodden and baggy-kneed), and where I, sitting near him as he expressly wished, listlessly affixed hundreds of cardboard guards onto wire hangers before hooking them along the pipes within reach of the perspiring men.

My father, I unavoidably noticed, lagged behind even the portly gray-haired semi-retired presser whose leisurely pace at other times he had repeatedly criticized; and while this man was at least twenty years my father’s senior, he possessed an enduring stamina that my father clearly lacked. After a half-hour in the steam, my father was a lamentable figure. His eyeglasses were fogged over. His neck seemed to have shrunk within the soaked, sagging noose of his knotted white handkerchief. And after he had extended his slender arms above his head to grip the levers of the machine, he would heave as he pulled downward, straining under the flatiron’s weight, and his face suddenly bore the agonized expression of his favorite saint.

I sometimes wondered, many years later, if there was not a part of him that almost reveled in these moments, these humbling efforts that perhaps put him in touch spiritually with those flagellants he had once described watching intently as a boy, a bedraggled but tenacious multitude crawling uphill on bleeding knees—or those ascetic village elders, among them his grandfather Domenico, who vied for the honor of hoisting on their shoulders the weighty statue of the monk who had extolled the virtues of mortification.

In this period of World War II, with citizens everywhere receptive to sacrificing—and with my father’s widowed mother existing vulnerably in the hills of southern Italy and his brothers in enemy trenches—it was possible that he was experiencing in his discomfort a kindred comfort with his primal concerns. Or at the very least, he was imposing upon me, his only son, a lasting awareness of how hard his life could be, and how little right I had, by comparison, to complain about the minimal obligations required of me in the store.

Still, I did complain, and sulk in silence; and in the back room, when I thought my father was not watching, I would sometimes try to slip away. But he always caught me, and scolded me; and with his feet he pushed in my direction another large box filled with cardboard guards for the hangers. As I kneeled to pry open the box, and as he turned and raised his hands to the lever of the white matted machine, I submitted to my role as
methodically as I served the priest at Mass; and yet, in the store, I sometimes prayed with uncharacteristic fervor and faith, hoping and believing that within a miraculous few seconds the back door would open, and I would hear the shuffling sounds of Jet’s sandaled feet that would soon replace my father’s wing-tipped shoes on the iron pedals—and thus I would gain at least temporary relief from a stifling and wistful Saturday.

7.

T
he school bus screeched to a halt, two minutes before it was scheduled to arrive; and after the door swung open, I saw the stern profile of Mr. Fitzgerald. He wore his gray peaked cap pointed straight forward toward the windshield, and along the edges of the steering wheel his fingers tapped impatiently.

As I climbed the two steps, holding my bulky schoolbag close to my body to avoid brushing it against the grease-coated rod that held the door securely open, I observed that Mr. Fitzgerald’s eyes did not shift even slightly in my direction. He seemed determined to avoid all personal contact; and so I accommodated him by not saying good morning—a social slight to which he might have been responding a second later when he clangorously slammed the door closed and hurtled the bus to a quick start before I had settled into a seat.

Although the bus was less crowded than usual because the primary schoolers were already on holiday, there was actually an increased amount of noise and disorder generated in the back of the bus by some older boys who, relieved of all concern for the physical well-being of the young, were now less inhibited as they hurled spitballs wildly back and forth, and scuffled with one another in the aisles, and took turns pinching and squeezing the arms of the squealing, frolicsome girls who seemed to be enjoying their company. These middle school boys in their early teens were dressed in hooded plaid mackinaws and thick corduroy pants that made whipping sounds when they walked; and under their hunting caps they wore colorful fuzzy earmuffs that I sometimes envied but, for reasons presumably aesthetic, was prohibited by my father from owning. The items of clothing envied by most other male students in my school were the U.S. Army belts that a few boys had obtained from their older soldier
brothers—khaki canvas belts that, in the schoolyard during recess, they would extract from their pants loops and twirl like lassos feverishly above their heads, daring anyone to stand close to the bright menacing blur of the belts’ brass buckles.

The girls in the back of the bus also wore hooded mackinaws, or navy blue pea jackets patriotically complemented by red mufflers and white tasseled caps; and, together with the boys, they would sometimes duck their heads behind the seats to smoke cigarettes. Most of the girls and boys were bused in each day from the agricultural areas, the rustic pinelands, and a small community directly across the bay that had a honky-tonk strip; they were the progeny of rural housewives and truck farmers, hospital nurses and boatyard repairmen, file clerks and firemen, and waitresses and bartenders who worked at night in the neon-lit waterfront establishments that were viewed disapprovingly, if dimly through the fog, by the Prohibitionist standard-bearers of dry Ocean City. The lights blazing above the taverns and dance halls were seen as beacons of indulgence that had a depreciating effect not only on the property values but also on the moral values of the entire Back Bay region—which was perhaps why many conscientious Catholic families in that region sent their children miles away each day to receive a regimental education under the tutelage of the island’s authoritarian nuns.

But whatever positive effect the nuns were having over the mainland children was not evident on the bus this morning. And while I would have preferred sitting as far as possible from Mr. Fitzgerald, I did not want to be within easy target range of the spitball shooters. So I sat near the front, in the third row, among a dozen students who were my own age or a bit younger—individuals whom I knew by name but who, because of the hours I spent in the store, were mainly classroom acquaintances.

When the bus stopped again, we were joined by a student I knew better. She sometimes came into the store with her parents, who were steady patrons. She was Rosemary Kurtz, the genial daughter of the local Ford dealer, a loquacious, rotund, balding man who was the island’s preeminent Catholic parishioner, the foremost financial supporter of the church, and the sponsor of the parish’s annual Altar Boy Award, which I entertained no foolish expectation of ever winning.

Although Rosemary was already showing some tendency toward inheriting her father’s large-boned, plump body, she had a delicately shaped face with radiant eyes and pink complexion that was uncommonly attractive. Whenever the nuns were looking for someone to wear a halo in a school play, or to represent the Madonna in the nativity scene, Rosemary
was usually their first choice; and she played the role equally well offstage. She was serene, considerate, poised, although socially distant. She seemed to have no close friends and belonged to no clique. She came to school dressed each day in primly fashioned coats of pastel shades and matching hats that were sometimes trimmed with my father’s fur pieces; and while she conversed with everyone on the bus, and occasionally even took a seat close to the hooded-mackinaw crowd in the rear, she nonetheless conveyed the impression that she expected to be treated at all times with the respect and dignity that the parishioners at Sunday Mass bestowed upon her magnanimous parents. And insofar as I could tell, she did indeed receive such treatment even from the school’s rowdier students, who refrained from cursing in her presence, or blowing cigarette smoke in her direction, or firing spitballs in her general vicinity. She was therefore the ideal traveling companion when riding the parochial school bus, and I was comforted by this when she chose to sit near me on this Monday morning—and consequently I was more astonished than upset when, suddenly, while we chatted as the bus moved uptown, a small flying object nearly grazed my cheek, caromed high off the empty seat in front of me, and hit hard against the windshield close to the face of Mr. Fitzgerald.

It was a chunk of rubber eraser. And as it bounced along the floor, Mr. Fitzgerald slammed on the brakes, spun around, and, his bloodshot eyes examining us with wrath and suspicion, bellowed: “Okay, who’s the wise guy?”

More than two dozen students in the front and middle rows all turned immediately toward the back, where the disruptive older group now sat motionless in a posture of innocence, their white faces and unfurrowed brows under the hoods of their mackinaws making them seem almost as guileless as a gathering of monks at prayer. I, too, turned and waited for some admission of guilt, some twitch that would betray the malefactor—until it occurred to me, as I scrutinized the older faces, that I was doubtless making eye contact at this very moment with the mysterious culprit; and quickly I turned away, not wanting to risk offending the offender with an accusatory stare that could provoke retaliation later in the schoolyard from someone who possibly owned a brass-buckled U.S. Army belt.

As I turned around I noted that Rosemary Kurtz was the only student who had not looked back to examine the others. She had kept facing the front—uninterested, uninvolved, and thereby untainted by the back-bus boorishness. Mr. Fitzgerald soon lost interest, realizing that there would be no confessions of wrongdoing today. And so, after a kind of face-saving
admonition—“If you don’t cut it out, I’ll throw you out!”—he pressed the gas pedal, and we resumed our journey along a damp black macadam road that ran parallel to the beach, passing foggy white rows of vacant apartment houses with gingerbread verandas and boarded-up windows.

In summertime, the sidewalks were crowded with sandaled sunbathers carrying wood-framed canvas chairs and long-poled umbrellas, and wearing straw hats and cotton robes over their modestly designed bathing suits—which included tops for men, who were prohibited by local law from exposing their bare chests on the avenue, on the beach, or even in the sea. Since in summer the number of Catholics on the island increased significantly, overcrowding the parish’s single church downtown, auxiliary Masses were offered on Sundays in the chapel of our school. No Masses were said there during the rest of the year, however, although the architecture of the school was unmistakably ecclesiastic—the familiar outlines of which I could now see through the rising mist as the bus turned inland from the ocean.

It was a chunky brick building with a gray peaked roof and a stunted, cross-topped steeple that rose above a white double-doored entranceway. Along the sides of the building, which extended a half-block behind a wide newly paved sidewalk, were tall clear-glass windows that looked into the classrooms, providing added light for brighter students and vague vistas of escape for daydreamers like me. Two smaller windows in the rear of the building, stained-glass, marked the location of the chapel. On the far side of the building, and behind it, was a weedless acre of isolated land composed of steamrolled light gravel and windblown sand that, in the gray light of the morning, resembled snow. As the bus slowly cruised to within half a block of the school, I could also see, emerging beyond the windshield, a stark white-and-black-clad figure. She was standing on the stone steps of the entranceway, awaiting our arrival. She was Sister Rita, the mistress of discipline.