Unto the Sons (12 page)

She was the youngest of the school’s eight nuns, and as a result she perhaps inherited the mundane duties that the older sisters had risen above—such as standing like a sentry each morning in the cold weather to await Mr. Fitzgerald’s imprecise arrivals, and then lining up the students along the sidewalk in two sexually segregated files to be marched into school, a routine that she often hastened by lightly prodding the backs of stragglers with a rubber-tipped blackboard pointer that she held in her right hand like a whip.

Once she was alleged to have lashed the buttocks of an errant boy
with the metal crucifix that hung from the large rosary beads she wore around her waist; and while I could not testify to the accuracy of that tale, I did personally observe Sister Rita on two occasions rapping with a ruler the knuckles of older boys who had lingered at the urinals, touching their forbidden parts for periods of time she deemed excessive.

She seemed to be obsessed with what took place in the boys’ rest room, and she was forever banging in and out of that place, grabbing by the scruff of the neck any youth who sought refuge there. It was she who instructed students on how they should sleep each night: on their backs, with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders—a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible. Masturbation, or even the thought of it, apparently represented one of the great anathemas to Sister Rita. One morning while I sat in her geography class, looking down at a book of maps and listening to her lecture, I was aware all at once of her sudden silence. Looking up, I saw that she was staring at me, or more precisely, at the way I was sitting, with my right leg in the aisle and my right hand in my pants pocket.

“What are you
doing
with your hand?” she demanded. Everyone in the classroom turned toward me. I felt myself redden with embarrassment and confusion—I was being reviled, precipitately, for committing some indefinable act that was inscrutably deviant. Slowly, I removed my hand. With my eyes focused on the floor, I waited.

“Never,” she said, in a trembling voice, “
never
put your hands in your pockets!”

Now Mr. Fitzgerald turned off the bus engine, and—with what sounded like a sigh of relief—pushed the metal handle that forced the greasy rod to open the door. I could hear Sister Rita calling up from the sidewalk: “All right, girls and boys
—straight lines, straight lines
, and be quick about it!” As she held the pointer in the folds of her long skirt, I hopped off the bus behind some younger boys and took my place within an emerging line that began in front of the school steps and was soon backed up almost to the curb. Parallel to us, but three feet away, was a line formed by girls—headed, I noticed, by Rosemary Kurtz. In all, there were fewer than forty of us. But dozens of other students were now arriving on foot, or by bicycle, or in parental car pools; complying with Sister Rita’s instructions, they joined the lengthening lines that soon bent at right angles near the curb and extended along the edge of the sidewalk.

Cold as it was, we were detained for a few minutes to be ventilated, more or less, by the frosty ocean air; and then, with our schoolbags on the
ground, Sister Rita began to count aloud—“One-two, three-four” signaling us to begin our daily ritual of calisthenics. This consisted of stretching our arms above our heads, taking deep breaths, and leaning forward with our fingertips toward our toes. Although Sister Rita did not join us in these exercises—being less than ideally attired in her towering headdress, flowing veils, and starched white, half-moon-shaped clerical collar that encircled her neck like a yoke—she did zestfully tap her feet in time with her counting, and she moved her pointer back and forth like a metronome. And as she shouted to us from the top step of the entranceway, urging us to accelerate our movements on this bone-chilling morning, vaporous clouds floated out of her mouth, blurring and briefly transforming her image into that of an ascending apparition, a cloaked and nebulous figure commanding us with transcendent force and clarity—calisthenics
ex cathedra
.

For nearly ten minutes the workout continued along the sidewalk; and while it was intended to circulate our blood and heighten our sensibilities for the schoolwork ahead, it merely made me dizzy and opened up my mind to aimless wandering. Still, this class represented the only organized sports activity conducted by the school, which lacked the interior space or financial resources for a gymnasium, and which otherwise offered, later in the day, only two fifteen-minute recess periods in the school’s gravel yard. At one end of the yard stood a Maypole painted a purplish black—the paint having been left over from a recent retouching job to the school bus; and hanging from the spinning top of the Maypole were six long pieces of hemp, each with a knotted end that was supposed to keep—but did not succeed in keeping—children from slipping off the rope as they gripped its lower end and glided in a circular arc around the pole.

At the other end of the yard was a wide open area on which was played a provisional form of cold-weather baseball. The sphere was a hard rubber ball; the hitter used his mittened fist instead of a bat (which Sister Rita disallowed as a potentially dangerous weapon), and the boundary lines for the infield and outfield were scratched into the earth with the sharp ends of tree branches or sticks, which were constantly in use since the lines were forever being obscured by the wind or the footprints of the players. Not so eradicable were the pitcher’s mound and home plate, which were marked by pieces of rock or brick.

Because we did not have enough players or time during the luncheon and afternoon recess periods to play baseball properly, our version of the game had ten or twelve boys scattered at random through the infield and outfield forming a defense against a single self-appointed hitter—who,
swinging his fist at a ball tossed underhand by a self-appointed pitcher, slapped it hither and yon until someone in the field caught it before it touched the ground. At that point, the person who caught the ball changed places with the hitter; and this system normally produced such a quick rotation of hitters that everyone had a chance to hit before the recess period ended—unless Billy Maenner was at bat.

Billy was a freckled, sorrel-haired boy whose father owned a tavern on the other side of the bay. He was my only friend among the mainland students. During Sister Rita’s calisthenics class on this morning, as I reached to touch my toes, I saw Billy wink at me from his upside-down position near the curb. Then he shook his head slowly and raised his eyebrows, indicating that he was as bored as I was with these exercises; the gesture belied the fact that he was the closest thing our school had to an athlete. Although he was no larger than I, and was also a sixth-grader not yet in his teens, Billy Maenner could hit a ball harder and farther than any of the older boys; and he was adept at punching the ball into places where no one could reach it. For five or ten minutes, or even longer, he would cock his fist at each of forty or fifty pitches served to him high or low, inside or outside, and solidly pop each one beyond the infielder’s outstretched fingers, or between the converging outfielders or over their heads entirely, the ball rolling all the way to the Maypole.

Such prowess earned him sufficient status to sit as an equal among the older boys in the back of the bus. But unlike them, he was never mischievous or discourteous—not the type to hurl rubber erasers through the air; and with me he was always very cordial. In the yard one day during autumn he gave me hitting tips that subsequently improved my never spectacular performances at the plate; and sometimes after I had boarded the bus and sat alone, he would leave his friends and come up to join me; and with his modest and pensive demeanor he gave the impression of being a lonely person, intrinsically an outsider like me.

According to my father, there was some German blood in Billy’s family, which, if that was true, may have been a factor in our kindred feeling. We were both, to a degree, on the wrong side of the war. And like me, he received mediocre grades; in fact, academically we both ranked near the bottom of our class. And yet he seemed far less upset than I about the report cards that were mailed to our homes each month, perhaps because our fathers reacted in different ways to the somber news.

My sensitive and protective father, who cared greatly about the reputation of his family in this town of few secrets, saw my inferior grades as demeaning to himself, an affront to his pride and dignity as a parent and
leading Catholic layman—who, incidentally, contributed more money to the church than anyone except the Ford dealer. My father had also cultivated an intimate relationship with the venerable pastor, Father Blake, whom he had finally persuaded to hang a picture of Saint Francis along the side wall of the church, and it went without saying that my father always dry-cleaned gratis the pastor’s black suits, coats, and priestly apparel, as well as the long black habits of the nuns.

When scrutinizing my report card, my father often wondered aloud if there was not something wrong with the school’s grading system rather than with my diligence as a student; and, despite my objections, he would telephone the Mother Superior for an appointment, and days later, through the windows of my classroom, I would see my moustachioed father stepping out of his Buick, walking with a dour expression on his face as he entered the side door, his homburg in hand, looking like a foreign diplomat en route to discuss one of the pricklier issues of the long-disputed Lateran Treaty. As far as I could see, none of these dialogues ever accrued to my benefit, for when the next report card arrived the nuns seemed to have judged me with more severity than before.

Billy’s father, on the other hand, never appeared at the school. As a tavern owner who worked until the early hours of the morning, he perhaps had the habit of sleeping through the entire school day. Whatever the situation, Billy never showed any stress as his lowly marks each month matched my own; if anything, his morale seemed only to improve as time transpired—and despite their downgrading him, the nuns often smiled at him in the corridor between classes, and even allowed him to cut a class on occasion.

“Straight lines!” Sister Rita called from the steps, her breath trailing through the air like the words of a sky-writer, her pointer waving toward the pathway in front of the entrance. Calisthenics was finally over on this Monday, and now we were to proceed in an orderly manner into the building. It was almost eight forty-five. Unenthusiastically I picked up my bag and took my place in line. Billy Maenner slipped in behind me.

“Hi,” he said, “how’d you like that eraser flying past your nose in the bus?”

“I didn’t. Who threw it?”

“I did,” he said, gleefully. I was dumbfounded.

“Well,” I said, finally, “you missed.”

Just then Sister Rita directed her pointer toward us, demanding our silence; but not before Billy had whispered back: “Yes. I was trying to miss.”

Up the steps we marched, girls and boys in separate files, into the
warm corridor, not stopping until we reached the assembly room. Along the way we passed the classrooms, their doors closed to retain the heat, and inhaled a blended fragrance of incense, candles, and floor wax. In the assembly room were ten rows of wooden folding chairs, all facing a wide, green-carpeted platform in the back of which was a small altar. In summers this was where Masses were said, but during winter the room served varied purposes: it was the students’ dining hall at lunchtime, it was the PTA’s meeting room on certain weeknights (often followed by bingo parties), and each morning before class it was where the Mother Superior, seated in a high-backed chair, greeted the students and led them in prayer.

She was tall and slender, and she was waiting on the platform with authoritative ease as we settled along the rows, schoolbags near our feet. She waited and said nothing until the room was quiet, so intensely quiet that we could hear the clicking sounds of the rosary beads she held dangling in her long fingers. Her hands were abnormally white, as if the chalk she used for writing at the blackboard each day had become permanently ingrained in her skin. Her eyes were a pale shade of indefiniteness—indefinite to me because I had never once looked closely into them. Nor had I ever had a private conversation with her. My father did enough talking for both of us; and the dubious results of his intercessions on my behalf convinced me that it was better for all involved if I remained far from her sight.

Finally, standing and bowing her head, the Mother Superior began a decade of the Rosary: “Our Father, who art in heaven …”; and her reedy voice immediately became lost in the murmurous response of the entire room, with the other nuns’ voices rising higher as they stood together in the outer aisles, their lofty bonnets tilted so far forward that it seemed they might soon topple off their heads to the floor.

Indeed, no sight would have been more welcomed by most of the students in this room, who speculated endlessly on what exactly was beneath the nuns’ bonnets. Were the nuns’ heads completely shaven? Was their hair cut short, like boys’? Which nun’s hair was blond, or brunette, or gray, or white? These women who hovered over
our
heads all day in school, who conditioned our minds, who regulated our hours, who invaded our rest rooms, remained for us shrouded in mystery, dark brides of Christ, elusive and aloof. Few of us ever saw them arrive at school in the morning, or leave in the afternoon; nor did we have any idea where they spent their nights.

I, however, was an exception. Not only did I know where they lived—my father’s dry-cleaning trucks often made deliveries there—but
I myself had recently accompanied the driver to that quiet residence on the other end of town from the school; and while helping him carry packages onto the porch, I looked through the open doorway where the housekeeper stood, and caught a brief glimpse of something in the house that was perplexing and exciting.

The house was a spacious but simple three-story frame residence located in the middle of a street lined with similar-looking buildings that in wintertime were mostly unoccupied. It was two blocks from the church. On the house there was no religious symbol or sign that identified it as the domicile of the nuns. Draperies were pulled closed behind all the first-floor windows, and when the driver and I arrived in the truck in the late afternoon we saw no lights burning in the front of the house.