Where is she? I wonder. I begin to panic. I don’t care about the neighbors, and I don’t care if they see me running through the hallway in my underwear. I just want to see my mother. I want to see if she is okay.
M
y mother is holding me in her arms. I am eleven years old and my mother is holding me in her arms like I was two. She is sitting on a kitchen chair, and she is just staring at the hole in the kitchen door, and she is rocking. Billy is standing next to her, with his hand on her shoulder.
“I just have you guys,” my mother says, wiping a tear off on the shoulder of my undershirt. “I just have you guys to help me.”
I
don’t know why kids have to die. I mean, we don’t even know half of what we’re supposed to know yet, and we haven’t even done half the things we’re supposed to do, and still, we can die. Just like that, your guardian angel looks away for just a split second, and then
pow,
you’re gone.
I’m in line now with the rest of the class, walking quickly to Frank C. David’s Funeral Home on 55th Street just off First Avenue. It is a warm day, and we have left our coats in the classroom. First Avenue seems very bright as we glide down the hill from 56th Street.
I feel so sorry for Ann Kovak. I think the whole class does, because no one says the smallest peep as we walk the avenue. She was so nice. She didn’t just say hello in the morning the way everybody does. No, Ann always said, “Good morning, Dennis.” She’d mention your name so that you felt you were a little important with her. And that was good because Ann was so pretty, quiet and pretty, with skin as white as a full moon, and a shy smile that my mother said was like a sweet song.
She sat between Mary Hanlon and Angela Gaffney in the second row, the three of them always with their hands folded on their desks when they weren’t writing, heads and shoulders straight as boards, looking like they were dolls on a prize shelf at Coney Island, looking like you could pick them up whole with your hands. They never said anything they shouldn’t, and they always had the right answers, like the angels were on their side.
But Ann died yesterday. She was so thin, and when she tripped on a curb on 57th Street and hurt her spine, she wasn’t strong enough to take the pain. She just smiled and closed her eyes, they told us at school, and passed away.
And Harry Shalleski just died, too.
I didn’t really know Harry, and even though I don’t like his brother, I’m sorry he died. He’s just another kid, like us.
I don’t know what it is to die, and it is something I have never thought much about. I am thinking now, though, that I am feeling pretty spooky because I don’t know what to expect. Not afraid, just sort of weird.
I suppose everyone in the class thinks it’s weird, too, for there is not much going on, and everyone is so quiet, except for a few of the girls who are crying. I have never seen a dead person, except when Joey Jurgensen’s mother died a couple of years ago, and the whole class came to Frank C. David’s. I remember thinking then that her face seemed to be flat, that the air had gone out of her cheeks. But Mrs. Jurgensen had been sick for a long time before she died, and I guess Joey sort of expected it to happen. He didn’t seem so sad, and he thanked the class for showing up.
But, here, this is not just a dead person. This is Ann, a kid, like us, and we are not supposed to think about an eleven-year-old in a dead condition. And so this visit to the funeral parlor is a lot different because everyone was Ann’s friend and no one believes it’s her in Frank C. David’s Funeral Home.
And Harry was just a kid, too. He wasn’t sick a day in his life, and he died from a mistake.
Harry Shalleski and Michael Harris were sneaking into the RKO up on 58th Street and Third Avenue. Just a few weeks ago. They climbed a fire escape next to the movie as far as they could go, which was five stories up. There they saw a catwalk, I guess a ledge on the side of the movie house, and if they could go along that ledge, they could reach the top exit door and fire escape of the movie house. I heard the catwalk was about four feet long or six. And there were two ropes there, hanging from the roof. Michael grabbed one rope and pulled himself along the ledge to the movie house fire escape. He told Harry to just grab the rope, but Harry made a mistake, and he grabbed the other rope. The other rope hanging from the roof wasn’t tied to anything, and so Harry and the rope fell away from the catwalk, and Harry went down five stories.
Michael slid down his rope for the whole five stories, and his hands were burned and cut from the rope, but when he got to the yard, Harry was a bloody mess.
It is in the middle of the afternoon. People are crowded in little groups around the big room at Frank C. David’s. Everyone is whispering. No one is laughing, or telling stories, or remembering good times. I guess you don’t remember good times when a kid is dead like this. I’m straining my neck to see around the crowds, to see if I can see Ann, but I’m also thinking of Harry.
Harry was Billy’s age. They weren’t friends, but Billy was pretty upset when he told my mother all about it. We were eating spareribs boiled in sauerkraut. Mom made it specially for Billy because he likes the spareribs, which the butcher mostly throws out. But Billy couldn’t eat anything that night. He said he just wanted to go to bed and to sleep because he didn’t want to think about Harry any more that day.
“Harry was one of those guys,” Billy said, “who you like but don’t think much about. You don’t look to hang around with him, or wait for him on the stoop, or ask him to go down to Kips with you. But now, after this, we’ll never forget him.”
I remember thinking that I don’t want to die just to be never forgot.
Harry’s family took him to Philadelphia to have a funeral, and none of Harry’s friends on 55th Street got to say goodbye to him.
But now we’re saying goodbye to Ann. We are lined up single file, and Sister Cyril is pushing us gently past the casket. The boys and girls aren’t going fast enough and we are being jammed up like sardines. Suddenly, I see Ann. We were told by Sister to say a prayer for the repose of her soul as we walk past, but I can only think that she looks like she is just a pretty girl taking a nap in a white dress. I am stopped now in front of the casket, staring down at Ann. I want to pray and to ask God to make sure she’s happy, but there is something else on my mind, something I don’t like, and I can’t say any prayers as I see her there, her skin more white than the moon, as white as snow, and looking as cold. That’s what I don’t like. She looks so cold lying there, puffs of white silk all around her, under her head, curving around her shoulders, down over the sides of her arms, and then across her waist. She is like a cold angel on these clouds of silk, and I want to make her warm.
We can’t see her legs. It is like her upper body is lying in a pie plate surrounded with meringue. I wish that she looked warmer and happier, that she was taking one of Sister Stella’s lessons where nothing matters unless you’re happy, and I want to push her thin hand up to her pretty face and put a finger near her mouth, so that Father Hamilton would get angy when he comes with his white socks to say the prayers, and he would yell at Ann and tell her to stop biting her nails, and to put her hands by her sides, and Ann would wake up and laugh.
We pass by the family, and I see Ann’s mother sitting on the edge of a long row of wooden seats. Her eyes are closed and she is clutching a pair of rosary beads. Tears are coming from her eyes like from a fire hydrant. These are the real tenement tears, I am thinking, tears that come from her insides, insides that must be ripped apart, and I wish the baby Jesus would come to her and sit on her lap, because only the baby Jesus will come to sit on the lap of a mother who is looking at the face of her dead daughter in a funeral parlor.
Sister Cyril ushers us to the back of the room, where we stand quietly. No one really knows what to say, anyway, and even if we did, we would be careful about speaking because all the mourners are whispering and Sister Cyril would be fast with a hard pinch if we talked.
You learn two things early with Sister Cyril, the first that she will get you with no exception if you act up in the line, and the second is that if you tense up all your muscles when she approaches, she won’t get as much skin, and the pinching won’t hurt as much. Some days I walk around the whole day long making muscles like Charles Atlas.
Father Hamilton enters the room and stands by Ann’s coffin to say a silent prayer. Ann’s hands are by her sides, so Father Hamilton doesn’t yell at her, thank God, because I don’t think Ann’s mother could take Father Hamilton yelling at her coffined daughter.
Father Hamilton turns to us. I can see his white socks shining out beneath his cassock and I wonder if his feet itch. There is dead silence in the room. He turns his Chinese-apple face from side to side, I guess making notes in his mind about who is here, and what questions about their families he will ask when this is over.
“Please,” Father Hamilton says, “kneel for the rosary.”
I pull a pair of rosaries out of my pocket. I don’t know why I call it a pair. Maybe because it has all the beads together with the crucifix, so that there are beads for the Hail Marys, and the crucifix to remember why you are saying the rosary to begin with.
But, wait a minute, there are also single beads that are used for either the Our Father or the Glory Be. So maybe it’s not a pair. Maybe it’s a set. A set of rosaries, but that doesn’t sound right.
Most of the class is standing on a thick green rug, but I am off the rug and in a corner of the back of the room. Below me is a floor of hard wood, and I realize this as I kneel. I should have found a piece of the rug. And I realize, too, that my handkerchief is in my jacket pocket, which I left at school, so I don’t even have anything to put under my knees.
“In the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Ghost,” Father Hamilton says.
All the prayers, I am thinking as I bless myself, sound like one word when Father Hamilton says them. I don’t think he likes the English language very much, because he only speaks slowly when he is saying Latin.
I am not kneeling for more than ten seconds when my knees begin to hurt.
“The first Sorrowful Mystery,” Father continues, “the Agony in the Garden, OurFatherwhoartinheavenhollowedbethynamethykingdomcomethywillbedoneonearthasitisinheaven.”
“Give us this day,” I begin to mouth the words, thinking that this day is a day I want to forget, a sad day. Maybe if I fool around with the prayers, I could forget the funeral parlor and how sad we all are, “our daily bread,” which I think could be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, “and forgive us our trashpasses,” except I never know why we are praying about passing trash, and do we pass it like a football or like the salt and pepper, “as we forgive those,” and I think about Shalleski and forgiving him for punching me all the time now that his brother Harry died and went to Philadelphia, “who trashpass against us,” all this garbage piled up against us like a wall, “and lead us not into Penn Station,” but, I know it’s temptation, though I always say Penn Station to see if anybody hears, and I think of the temptations in the world, like Sue Flanagan’s hard-starched nurse’s uniform and Marilyn Rolleri’s tight skirt, “but deliver us from evil,” folding and throwing, delivering the way we deliver the newspapers from the
Daily News
and the
Daily Mirror,
“Amen.”
“… HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththeeblessedartthouamonk’swomanandblessedisthefruitofthywoundjesus,” Father goes on.
“Holy Mary,” I say, thinking is this the monk’s woman in the blessed-art-thou-a-monk’s-woman, and I thought Joseph was a carpenter, but maybe he was a monk, too, and if he’s not a monk, what’s this other monk doing with Mary anyway, “Mother of God,” and this fruit of the wound of Jesus, maybe instead of a wound where the Romans put a spear in him Jesus has a Chinese apple like Father Hamilton’s face, there in the wound where he’s supposed to have a Sacred Heart, “pray for us sinners,” oh my knees are buckling out from under me, and there are so many sinners, almost everybody, I guess, and they expect me to kneel here with little glass needles in each knee, for the lights go out sometime in everybody’s room and they are alone with the dark and the thoughts of going into anybody’s life and doing what you want with them, and if that’s not sinning I don’t know what is, “now and at the hour of our death,” and I guess we will all die together here if it is the same hour, and I will certainly die soon if I have to kneel here through a whole rosary, and I am so sorry that Ann is dead, because I will miss her very, very much, “Amen.”
The “Amen” is like a chorus because everybody in the room says it.
We say the other five Sorrowful Mysteries, the Crowning with Thorns, the Scourging at the Pillar, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Nailing to the Cross, each mystery a decade of ten Hail Marys and an Our Father and a Glory Be. My knees can last maybe another thirty seconds, and I say a fast prayer to the baby Jesus asking him to make Father Hamilton stop here, and don’t let him go into the Joyful and the Glorious Mysteries, too.
The prayer works, and Father Hamilton finishes the last Glory Be.
“GlorybetotheFatherandtotheSonandtotheHolyGhost.”
“World without end,” everybody answers but me, “Amen.”
I am quiet, because I am now thinking about the Holy Ghost, and why does everybody, Billy and Betty Fallon down at the library of Kips Club and my mother, say that there aren’t any ghosts except for this one exception, and I wonder if someday someone will tell me there isn’t any Holy Ghost the way there isn’t any Santa Claus. And I think, will they ever get their ghosts right?
And what will become of Ann?
I am in my kitchen and pouring Karo syrup over a piece of white bread before me. Mom has a big bagful of shirts on one of the four small kitchen chairs, the one where the leg won’t stay in the socket. She is wetting each shirt and then rolling it up and piling it on the tub top, getting ready to iron them, I guess. I have never seen so many shirts, and they are so big that Billy and I could get in one of them together. There is an iron being heated on the stove, sitting on a hot plate.