“So?”
“So next time don’t hit back. Turn the other cheek. Think about what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, and pray for anyone who you think is mean.”
I am not so sure about this turn-the-other-cheek thing, because I know Shalleski, and, just as I am praying for him, you know what Shalleski will do? Shalleski will clout the other cheek, too.
I
think about telling my mother all the way up the four flights of stairs at 337 East 56th Street. I count the gum blotches on the twelve marble steps of each flight to keep from crying. No one ever told me about how to keep from crying, but I figured out that if you just thought about something else, concentrated on it, the tears wouldn’t come. Thirty-one gum blobs, each a square inch or so, mopped over a couple of hundred times so that the edge of the gum looks like it’s blended into the marble.
There is an
O’Dwyer for Mayor
sticker on the windowpane at the fourth-floor landing, and I begin to peel it off. I want to wait for another while before I see my mother, to relax a little. I always tell her everything, and I want to get it right about Sister Maureen, about being put up in the front of the class and getting it with the pointer. I can feel my eyes begin to get tight, and I stretch them wide open.
One of the doors at the front opens and Mr. Gentile comes out to walk his dog. There are two apartments in the front, richer people than us, because they have a view of the street, and everybody knows the apartments cost more to rent, probably more than thirty dollars a month. Mr. Gentile must have money in the bank, because he talks to himself and never smiles. Mommy told me that people with money in the bank never smile and they talk to themselves. The dog barks, and Mr. Gentile raises his hand toward me, and I flinch backward.
“Leave that alone before I give you one.”
I feel stupid and embarrassed to let him make me flinch like that. I want to curse at him, but I know that I will meet him again in the hall and, like Shalleski, he will want to get even. So I run the length of the long dark corridor back to apartment 26.
“Goddamn kid,” I hear him say as he pulls the dog down the stairs.
M
r. Gentile cursed at me.”
“Don’t pay any attention to him.”
She pours a bit of Karo syrup onto a piece of white bread and places it in front of me. The table has a piece of red linoleum across the top, and the linoleum is cracked and splitting apart. The wood below is rotting out.
“Why shouldn’t I pay attention to him?”
I am now picking at the linoleum.
“He’s just one of those guineas who don’t know nothing,” Mommy says as she slaps my hand away from the linoleum.
“Sister Maureen must be a guinea, then.”
“Why do you say that? What happened?”
Mommy can always tell when something is a little off, not quite right.
I again begin to feel a tug of the skin around my eyes, and I want to stretch my eyes out to get rid of the tug, and so I begin to make the dreaded face as I tell Mommy the story, pulling my chin down and stretching my eyes upward. It feels good. It gets rid of the tug.
“Stop making faces.”
I do it again because I can’t help it, and my mother reaches for the strap. I freeze, because I know I can’t run. The three rooms are each not more than eight feet long, and the kitchen is about five. Not much space to run.
“Mommy, no.”
The strap comes across my shoulder, stinging. But I don’t flinch. Flinching from Mommy is like running. It gets you nowhere.
The strap is a piece of belt an inch wide and a little more than a foot long. It has a slit at the end which opens to fit over the back rung of the kitchen chair.
The faces are hard to control if I think about them, and so I put all my energy into the story about Shalleski, but before I can get through it I begin to feel the tears building up in my eyes, and my nose begins to run. I don’t want to cry. I am not supposed to cry about such things, but I can now feel the tears on my cheeks. I put my head on the table and let my shoulders heave up and down.
“It is so unfair, so mean of her to take the erasers away from me.”
“She was right to punish you,” Mommy answers. “Stop the crying, alligator tears. Sister Maureen was right.”
“She wasn’t. And, anyway, I don’t know what alligator tears are, except that they’re phony, and I’m not being phony.”
“Don’t correct me. You have no control. You have to learn to control yourself or you’ll never get out of trouble.”
I
love the way Mommy always finds a way to the back end of a situation. If there is something on her mind, and she does not know how to speak it head-on, she goes around it to get where she wants to be. And so she begins to tell a story that I suppose is about Sister Maureen, but I know she isn’t going to mention her by name.
“When you were fourteen months old—this was just before your father went to the hospital—you were sitting in your stroller. Your father was holding Billy in his arms. You leaned forward and the stroller tipped over, and as you fell you put your little arm out to block your fall. Well, your little hand went out, and the stroller handle hit your little thumb, and then your little thumbnail just popped off your finger.”
I want to tell her that since I was just a baby my arm and my hand and my thumb and my thumbnail would have had to be little.
“Oh, how you howled, even after we bandaged it all up. You must have howled for three days. I felt so bad, because I guess I just wasn’t paying attention, but it does show you how you have to watch out for yourself in this world, and don’t ever rely on someone taking care of you. So if you lost the eraser job, there is not much you can do but find some other way that might bring you the joy and satisfaction that came from the erasers. You have to take care of yourself, Dennis.”
She is a pretty woman, Mommy is. I know because the guys on the street sometimes whistle to tease her. The sun is bouncing off the window box where we keep the milk in winter so that we do not have to buy ice to keep the milk cold. And her teeth are sparkling as she speaks. She reminds me of the pictures the nuns are always showing us of the saints and the Virgin and the Divine Trinity, where their heads are always in halos and shining, except for the Holy Ghost, who looks like a bird, and God, who looks like Moses. She wraps her arms around me now. She is always wrapping her arms around me and kissing me on the head.
Her voice sounds as if she is singing.
“I just let my eye wander for a moment, and there you were on the ground. Your own mother let you down. And now you have to find something to replace the erasers.”
“Are there any bottles?”
“Look under the tub, and I think you’ll find some. But change your shirt first.”
“What’s wrong with my shirt?”
She is always making me into a quick-change artist.
“Look at the collar. It’s dirty. Just remember that you’ll always think about yourself the way you feel you’re dressed. Do you feel dirty?”
“No.”
“Well, you should feel dirty, because you don’t have a clean shirt on.”
“If I’m dressed like a circus clown, I’ll feel like a circus clown?”
“Yes.”
“If I have big fireman’s boots on, I’ll feel like a fireman?”
“Maybe you need more than boots, because the boots alone might make you feel like a fisherman, but right now I want you to feel like a young man who is going out in the streets with a clean shirt.”
I want to ask her how I would feel if I was wearing Sue Flanagan’s clothes, because I would do anything to be that close to Sue Flanagan, but I know that she’ll just say that I’m being silly, and that Sue Flanagan is ten years older and I shouldn’t be thinking about her. But it’s like the faces. I can’t help it.
The bathtub is in the kitchen, next to the kitchen sink, and is topped by a shiny metal cover. It is too high for me to get into, and I have to use a kitchen chair to step into it when I have to take a bath. Taking a bath is something I have to do, like saying night prayers or doing homework. Sometimes Billy is doing homework at the kitchen table when I am taking a bath, and I flick water onto his page, which is always a mistake. If there was no place to run in the apartment, there was really no place to run in the bathtub, and he would give me knuckles until my mother came from the living room and reached for the belt. I don’t mind the belt so much when it stops Billy from giving me knuckles.
I study the three Rheingold bottles. They are in the shadow under the tub, and I can barely see them. They are worth six cents, but they are also pretty risky, I know. I can’t just pick them up, and so I put my hand in toward the bottles slowly, carefully, and shake one. I make as much noise as I possibly can, hoping that if there are any roaches there they will scurry away. I take the bottles out from under the tub, one by one, by the neck and with two fingers, and lay them side by side on the floor, rolling them over and over to make certain they are clear of the roaches.
Mommy told me that the builders put the roaches in the walls when they built the place because they had a grudge against the Irish and the Italians. There are fifty roaches in the walls for every one you see, and sometimes I think, when I am lying on the top bunk at night, that the walls are shaking with all the roaches running around behind the plaster. There are more roaches in my building than there are fish in all the five oceans, and I think that I could get used to just about anything, but I can never get used to roaches. Some nights I just can’t go to sleep thinking about the shaking walls.
Taking back the empties before my brother gets to them is always a special treat, and six cents is a penny more than we put in the collection basket at church. The sacrifice, my mother calls the collection. It could take a half hour at Abbie’s candy store on First Avenue to spend six cents, because it isn’t easy to decide between the candy corn, the dots on the sheet, the banana marshmallows, the juju fruits, the caps that I can bang with a rock on the pavement. All two-for-a-penny treats, and you have to fight through a crowd to get to them, for the boys in the neighborhood are always trying to create excitement in Abbie’s so that the old Jew doesn’t see them stuffing their pockets. The bottles are a chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and they come two or three times a week if my brother doesn’t get to them first. They are like an allowance. Anyway, the only kind of allowance I have.
But the bottles do not come without the risk. I once put an empty to my mouth and had to spit out a cockroach. If you do that once, you will never do it again, and so I turn the bottles upside down over the sink to drain them and then shove them into a paper bag.
At Rossi’s grocery I wait in line until Mrs. O’Bannon gets her roast pork sandwich, the guinea hero I dream about. Almost a foot long and oozing from the sides with mayonnaise sprayed with salt and pepper and topped with lettuce leaves, the roast pork is the most expensive one you can get at Rossi’s, except for the roast beef at sixty cents. We hardly ever get sandwiches, and when we do, it’s just salami or cheese, but I had the roast pork guinea hero once when Mr. Dempsey from the delicatessen on First Avenue gave me a half dollar for sweeping up, and Mommy said I could keep all of it.
The nickel and the penny chime together in my hand as I walk down the First Avenue hill in the shadow of St. John the Evangelist Church. My church. The traffic light changes as I am about to cross 55th Street, and I have to wait for a few moments for the cars to pass through from Sutton Place. I look next to me, at the twelve steps of the church, and decide to pay my Uncle Tommy a visit. A navigator, he went down with six others in a B-29. In a fog. In Bayonne, New Jersey, searching for an airport on their return from Germany. He had been on forty missions in the war, and so St. John’s put a plaque up just for him in the back of the church.
Forty missions in Germany and lost in Bayonne. My Uncle Pat says it is like winning the Kentucky Derby and then getting killed by your horse in the stall.
I genuflect at the back end of the center aisle and eye the red sanctuary lamp which signifies that Christ is present in the tabernacle. It is burning at the side of the altar. He was always there, I found out from Sister Maureen, except for the time between the three hours’ devotion on Good Friday and the first Mass on Easter Sunday, and I think that they would save a lot of candles if they just burned the red lamp when he wasn’t there.
The church is huge and beautiful, with paintings on the ceiling from one end to the other, and great big columns going down either side, maybe twenty or more of them. I walk up to the shrine of the Immaculate Conception at the small altar to the right and kneel before it. I always do this because the Virgin, her hands spread far apart, smiles at me in return for any kind of a request. She lived for requests and applications, Mommy says.
I know that I have to say a prayer, and so I begin the Hail Mary. I know all my prayers. Even the Hail Holy Queen, which took a long time to put into memory. The Hail Mary is easy, and you get to say a lot of them because that is what the priest always gives you for penance when you go to confession. Five Hail Marys and two Our Fathers is what I always get.
Confession is great, because if you did anything wrong you can just say it in confession and then forget about it. You don’t have to carry it around with you like a bag of bad apples over your shoulder.
I look up at the Immaculate Heart of Mary and wait for her to smile.
“Hail Mary, full of grace! The Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.”
I always think about this wound of Jesus, and what wound it is, and what kind of fruit they are talking about. I suppose it is the bloody gaping hole in his side where the soldiers put in a big spear, and I am thinking that the fruit might be bananas and oranges because I don’t think they grow apples in Bethlehem, which is the neighborhood Jesus comes from.