I am hoping against hope that Sister Urban is not to be found, but there she is, sitting at her desk reading papers. I never have the luck.
“You wait here,” my mother says.
I don’t think I have ever seen her this mad.
The door is wide open, and I listen to what my mother has to say. She doesn’t give Sister Urban a moment to say anything back, and she is talking like a Gatling gun.
“I just want to tell you,” she says, “that my son has a red mark across his face the exact size of your hand, and I don’t give a fiddler’s anything what he has done, you are never to touch him again, and you can come to see me and I will do all the punishing, but if you ever put your hand on my child again, I swear on all that is holy and good that I will come across the street to this school, and I will find you, and before everybody I will tear the hood off your head and put a match to it.”
Sister Urban is as stunned as I was when she whacked me, and in less than a second my mother has me by the hand, and we are walking out of the school, across the street, and back up the stoop on 56th Street.
“She is going to hate me, Mom,” I say as we walk up the gum-stained marble steps of the hallway.
“She’ll do no such thing,” my mother says. “She’ll respect you.”
I guess my mother is right. I know she wouldn’t do anything to get me in trouble. But I’m glad about one thing, anyway: that there were no kids in the class when my mother got there.
M
y mother has been seeing this guy named Tommy Quigley. Billy says that Quigley is a queer name, and not a name to make you like someone. But she goes out with this Quigley sometimes, probably too much if you ask me. Quigley comes over and has dinner with us at the kitchen table. My mother makes fish sticks or something good like that when he comes.
“He is just a friend,” she said one day when Billy asked her why he comes around.
I think of Daddy every time I see this Quigley guy, but Billy says that I shouldn’t worry about it, that she has to have friends. She only has Aunt Kitty and Aunt Helen to make her laugh.
Sometimes I feel so sorry for my mother. She doesn’t have time to make a lot of friends because she is always running from one apartment to the other trying to get together more money than the welfare will give her, just so she can buy things for the house and for me and Billy.
“Don’t tell anyone that he comes here,” she told me and Billy.
She always wants to keep everything a secret. I guess she feels bad that this guy comes here when she already has a husband up in the hospital. I don’t even know how she met him, and she wouldn’t tell me, anyway. She never talks much about herself, except when she tells us how hard it was for her mother and father when they came here from Ireland. I don’t even know the name of the high school she went to, or if she had a best friend, or what her first job was. And if I ask her things, she usually says, “Oh, it’s not important” or “We just got by.”
One day, though, I got her talking, and she told me about growing up beside a firehouse in Brooklyn, and that she loved the firemen who would send her to the store for sandwiches when she was a little girl because they couldn’t leave the firehouse, and then they always gave her a big tip. That’s as much as I know about the way she grew up.
Billy told me he thinks her big secrets come from her being poor when she was little, that she didn’t want to think about it anymore. I don’t know what it’s like to be poor like that, but I remember her saying that you are only poor if you miss a meal when you want one. And I remember, too, when she told Pop that it was easier to be poor when you have steam heat. I don’t know what it could have been like for her.
Quigley works in a delicatessen somewhere, and I don’t like people who work in delicatessens, ever since Mr. Dempsey. I don’t even go into delicatessens anymore. I wouldn’t go into a delicatessen if they were giving away potato chips for free.
My mother went out with Quigley tonight, but she came home earlier than she said she would. She said she’d be home at nine-thirty, but she came back at eight. Billy was still listening to the radio in the living room, and I was on a kitchen chair reading about Heidi. I don’t know why my mother gets me these books about people in other countries. I’m in the sixth grade now, and should be reading mystery stories like Scarry does.
She didn’t say anything much when she came in. She just put her robe on and read a magazine, the way she does most nights.
Now it is the middle of the night. I have just eased out of my sleep. I didn’t put my pajamas on when I went to bed tonight. I don’t know why. I was lying on the top bunk, thinking about putting my pajamas on, but Billy came in and turned off the light.
And when the light went out, I stopped thinking about anything but Marilyn Rolleri. I fell asleep thinking about her, and now I am awake again thinking about her. It is funny about being in the dark, for when the lights are out, I can be completely alone, just alone to think about my life. In the dark you can make things happen, things you never speak of. I can take Marilyn Rolleri and walk with her anywhere, say anything to her, do anything. A separate world can begin when the lights go out, and I put myself into Marilyn Rolleri’s life, and now in the darkness of my room I am sitting with Marilyn Rolleri on a park bench down by the Pepsi-Cola sign.
I don’t know what it is I like about Marilyn Rolleri because she hardly ever says hello to me. Still, she doesn’t have skinny legs anymore, and she has the biggest breasts in the class. I am wishing that I sat across from her like I did in the third and fourth grades, so I could watch her breasts moving up and down as she breathes. Maybe I could watch them grow, too, a little more each day.
Some of the guys in the class are always talking about getting boners, and I am wondering why I never can get one except when I am sleeping, even now when I am thinking about Marilyn’s breasts, thinking about moving my hand into her blouse on the park bench, wondering what they look like naked, what size are the nipples, what color?
Jeez, when will I ever be old enough to have a boner?
I now begin to put my hand down inside my underwear, thinking that I can make it work, that I can have all that fun the guys talk about. I think about holding myself, but I suddenly stop. I can feel my face glowing red in the darkness because I know that I shouldn’t be doing this. Boys shouldn’t do this at eleven years old, or even at sixteen. It’s a sin, I know that, and that I can go to hell if I get hit by a car tomorrow.
I know I’ll have to go to confession. Some of the guys go to St. Agnes where the priests are from foreign countries and hardly speak English, and confession is a breeze. If you say that you copped a feel in the back row of the RKO, or you Mary-palmed it twice this week, or you murdered the mayor, it’s all the same with them: three Hail Marys and two Our Fathers. But to me, confession probably works better with God if you get a priest who speaks your language, at least if you want it to do any good.
Jeez, I can’t get away from thinking about religion in everything I do. Religion and Jesus and the Blessed Virgin are such a part of my life, like my name or even my legs. Everything I ever learned about God and the saints begins now to pass through a kind of veil that is before my eyes, and I suddenly see Blessed Maria Goretti, that young girl in a plain dark dress on a dirt road, just standing there, minding her own business, like in the photograph of her I saw in school. Even though she had no father and her mother had to slave for bits of food, she did everything she could to make her life decent, so that God would say that her life is okay. And now I see Marilyn Rolleri, sitting with me on a park bench, in a tight skirt and a blouse that is half open, and then I see my guardian angel right there next to me, shaking his head, saying that God would never think that this is okay, and I’m realizing that I don’t want to do this because my mother and Billy and Father Ford and even Sister Urban would not like it if they thought I did something like this, and so I tell myself to think about the DiMaggio brothers or the Marx Brothers or the Brothers Grimm and all those stories, and to think about me and Billy going off to Kips for a Ping-Pong game, anything but this famous boner that everyone talks about. And I think about Ping-Pong and a good slice shot until my eyes are so heavy that I forget where I am.
I don’t know how long I have been sleeping before I hear an explosion.
Bang.
It is frightening, and I jump up out of my sleep, and I can see Billy is out of bed completely in his underwear.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Somebody has kicked the door,” Billy says.
“Why?” I say. “Why would somebody do that?”
I was feeling my stomach turning. Where was my mother? Were we all going to get killed?
Bang,
the crash comes again.
I can feel my body beginning to shake, the way I felt before I punched Shalleski. I wish there was someone here to take care of us, but I know that we are alone. We have to stop whatever is going on, we have to get someone here, some big person. My mother is now up, and she turns on the kitchen light.
Bang pow.
Another loud kick at the door, and this time I can see that the wood at the bottom of the door is caving in. I know now that the door is going to be kicked in, and I jump down from the bed, and Billy and I are standing here, both of us shivering in our underwear, staring at our mother, wondering what she will do, afraid to say anything to her.
My mother reaches for the key to Mike Shurtliff’s apartment, the one across the hall. Besides doing his shirts, she now also cleans the apartment for him once in a while, and she has the key in her hand, and she tiptoes over to us and whispers to me as she hands me the key.
“I am going to open the door,” she says as quietly as she can, her voice cracking, “and he will rush in, maybe, I don’t know.”
“Who is it, Mom?” Billy asks. His hand is on her arm, and it looks so small there even though he is thirteen.
“It’s Quigley,” my mother says, still whispering. “But, Dennis, you have to go into the apartment across the hall. The lock is easy, just turn it and push. There is a phone in Mike’s living room. Call the operator. You understand? Call the operator, and tell her to send the police here, give her the address. Can you do that?”
Oh, God, I never had to do anything so important as this. I want to get it right.
“Go in,” I repeat, “and say to the operator to bring the police to 337 East 56th Street, apartment 26.”
“Yes,” she says, “just do it fast, as fast as you can.”
“What about Billy?” I ask. “I want Billy to come with me.”
“I need Billy here with me,” she says, pushing me close to the door.
“Can I get dressed?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “There isn’t time.”
Bang. Pow. Bang.
More kicks to the door, and this time the door is cracked open, and I can see what I just know is Quigley’s brown shoe.
“Go away!” my mother screams. She is yelling at the top of her lungs. “Go away, Tommy, the police are coming.”
There is another kick, and this time his foot comes all the way through the door, and the foot is sticking in the kitchen. And then he kicks more and his foot gets higher and higher. The door is getting a hole in it that is getting bigger.
My mother pushes me to where she wants me to stand, and she puts Billy behind her. She gives me a wild sort of look, and her eyes seem like they are on fire. She then opens the door in one sudden jerk, and Quigley begins to push his way into the apartment. He is grabbing my mother, and I don’t know if I should try to stop him, to hit him with something, or what I should do. I am eleven, and I should be able to beat this Quigley up.
“Go, Dennis,” my mother screams. “Fast.”
I push past them and scrape my arm against the side of the doorway. I can see it start to bleed. I run to the door across the hall and try to push the key into it. But my hand is shaking too much. Christ, I am thinking, help my hand put this key in the lock. Finally, it falls into the lock hole.
I go into the living room and search for the phone, but I can’t find the light. Oh, God, turn on the light for me. I go back into the kitchen and feel around for the string that I know is hanging from the ceiling. I have seen it, and I know it is there, but I cannot find it, and my body is shaking much worse now. At last, I find the string and pull it, and the light shines right on the telephone, and I dial “zero” and tell the operator to send the police because someone is killing my mother. She asks me for the address three times, and she won’t let me off of the telephone.
“I have to go,” I say. “I have to see what is happening.”
“You just stay here on the phone,” the operator says, “until I make a connection.”
“What connection?” I say. “I have to go.”
“Stay on the phone, dammit.” She is yelling at me. My mother is being killed and this operator is yelling at me.
A man comes on the phone now, a policeman, I guess.
“What is the address?” he asks.
“I already told the operator,” I say. “The operator knows the address.”
“What is the address?” he asks again.
God.
“337 East 56th Street,” I say, “apartment 26, fourth floor.”
“What is the matter?” he is now asking.
“What is the matter?” I repeat. “My mother is being killed by Quigley, that is what is the matter.
He’s killing her, don’t you understand?”
I want to hang up the phone, but the policeman on the line won’t let me say goodbye. He keeps asking me why all this is happening, and I tell him that I was just sleeping, and how should I know any of this? How should I know why any of this is happening? I am eleven, and this policeman thinks I am a reporter.
I am still on the telephone when I hear the police. They are right outside. They are running down the hall. I can see them pass by Mike’s door, and I can hear them wrestling with Quigley.
I apologize to the man on the phone. I don’t want to hang up on him, but I have to go. I drop the phone and run. At Mike’s door, I see Quigley being dragged by. He is cursing, and the policemen are punching him as they drag him. All the neighbors have opened their doors, and I know that my mother will be mortified to know that all the neighbors were woken up.