The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (28 page)

After our earlier encounters, the young priest avoided the nuisance of my questions by ignoring my raised hand, so I passed the time in catechism class by repeating some word the priest had said over and over in my mind until the meaning was ground out of it and it became just a pulp of sound, or by working out the total number of tiles in the ceiling by counting the ones down and the ones across, multiplying them in my mind, then estimating the tiles lost when a supply cupboard had been built in the corner, and subtracting these from...

“...maybe young LaPointe thinks he can find the answer written on the ceiling,” the priest said in his most scathing tone. “Or is he looking to heaven for guidance?” Some of the girls obligingly giggled.

My mind scrabbled for a fragment of what the priest had been saying before I drifted off... but I drew a blank, so I just grabbed the first thing that came to mind. “I was thinking over what you said about transubstantiation, Father.”

“I wasn't talking about transubstantiation.”

“Ah-h... yes. That's true, but I'm still thinking about it from back when you explained it to us the other day.”

“...And?” His tone was cautious, like a man poking a stick at a snake.

“Well... I don't have any problem accepting that the wine and the wafer are the body and blood of Christ—”

“That's good of you.”

“But it's still a wafer. Right?”

He frowned and his eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, '...it's still a wafer'?”

“I mean, even though the communion wafer has become the body of Christ, it's still bread, right?”

“Wrong. Once consecrated, the Eucharist is the body of Christ.”

“Yes, I know. I accept that on faith. But it's still bread, right? I mean, it looks like bread and tastes like bread, so it's still—”

“No, no. The communion bread becomes the very body of Christ.”

“I'm not contradicting you, Father. What you say is all right with me. I know that the wafer is a symbol of—”

“Not a symbol! That's where you're wrong. It's not a symbol. It is the actual body of Christ! Can't you get that through your head?”

“I realize that we accept the host as the body of—”

“It's not a matter of what we accept. The bread is the body of Christ! Therein lies the miracle! Why can't you understand that?”

“I do understand, Father, but—”

“Get out.”

“Father?”

“Leave the room. Go stand in the hall.”

I collected my books and went to the door, muttering.

“What was that you said?” the priest demanded.

“Nothing.”

“Don't give me that. You said something.”

“I said, 'But it's still bread.' ”

“Out! Out! Out!”

I went into the empty hallway and nursed my sense of injustice. I hadn't been trying to bait or annoy the priest, and I had no intellectual antagonism to the idea of transubstantiation. I accepted the miracle in all its poetic and symbolic significance. I was only insisting that we all keep a little grip on reality here. It was, after all, a bread wafer, and I refused to pretend either that I was stupid or that I had been conned.

Years later, when I read about the recanting Galileo leaving the chamber of the Inquisition muttering '...eppur si muove, I had to smile at the comic strip parody acted out between a rattled young priest and a wiseassed kid.

I decided not to seek any further clarification of theological quandaries. Instead, I gnawed on these doubts late at night. The first of these conundrums was the one that every child has pondered at one time or another: how can God be benevolent and all-powerful, and yet there be so much pain and injustice in the world? I dismissed the glib answer the catechism priest had offered: that God allowed evil and injustice to exist in order to test our faith. If God is omniscient, He knows in advance which of us will pass the test and which will fail, so of what use is the test? It's not as though we had a chance to improve on our destiny. No, it would not be benevolent of God to test us, when He knew what the outcome of that test would be; it would be cruel and pointless.

Then, late one stormy night, I came up with a way to slip between the horns of the dilemma that God is benevolent and omnipotent yet the world is full of suffering, evil and injustice. I could account for this seeming contradiction by assuming that God was indeed benevolent and omnipotent, but also... insane.

That was too spooky to dwell on, so I let this dilemma fall into the growing category of things that were beyond my comprehension, like my newly discovered ability to lift certain sounds out of the background stew of sounds that is 'silence' in a big city, then let them drop back in. From the mantelpiece above the blocked-up fireplace our cheap alarm clock ticked with a loose, scratchy sound that had long ago been enfolded into the ambience of our apartment. As long as my attention was absorbed by what I was reading or thinking about, I was unaware of the ticking, but if something broke my concentration, the sound of that clock would return to my ear, only to be enveloped again by the sounds of silence when my attention drifted away from it. Once I discovered this phenomenon, I would play with it, pulling the sound of the clock out of the background 'silence', then letting it fall back in.

I kept the clock on the mantel rather than on my bedside table so that I would have to get out of my warm bed and stagger across the room to kill the nerve-shredding racket of its alarm. By then I was sufficiently awake to get dressed and go on my paper route. In winter I had to get up half an hour earlier and go to the basement to shake down and feed the monstrous old boiler, carrying half-shovelfuls of coal back and forth from bunker to furnace. After the boiler was stoked, I got the bottle of milk out of the orange crate nailed to the side of the back window and set it on the kitchen table to warm up a little while I was in the bathroom. The frozen milk would have expanded, lifting a column of 'ice cream' that wore a flat bottle-top hat. I would splash water into my face and brush my teeth with Dr. Lyon's Tooth Powder, which always made the milk taste funny. When we ran out of Dr. Lyon's, we would sprinkle a little baking soda and salt into our palms and brush our teeth with that. Baking soda also made the milk taste funny. I sat at the kitchen table, numbly eating the breakfast my loyal mother had made for me, either hot oatmeal or one of her dense pancakes made with powdered eggs. Then I would put on my jacket, a knitted toque that I could pull down over my ears, a scarf and my finger-nipping galoshes, and I would step out into the dark of the street and set off on the long up-hill trudge to the newspaper broker's basement den where, together with a dozen other bleary-eyed newsies, I folded my papers and put them into my shoulder bag. Then I would slog around my route, into strange-smelling apartment houses, up stairs and down, ending up back at my house to drop off my bag and begin the long walk up the Lexington Avenue hill to be at school by the eight-thirty bell.

After each snowfall, car wheels churned the sooty slush into grooves and crests which froze over night into sharp peaks and ankle-twisting channels that I would stumble over as I crossed the street carrying my heavy canvas paper-bag, my head down against the wind that stung tears out of my eyes. I was clumsy in galoshes that were always too big in the hope that we could make them last two seasons, but they never did because the sharp peaks of frozen sludge cut them until they leaked, so we would have to buy another pair... another of those grand plans that have only one flaw: they don't work. By the time I finished my round, cars would have mashed the sludge into new shapes, which would freeze with the next night's cold so I could slip and trip over a new arctic gutterscape the next morning, and swear bitterly as I gathered up my scattered papers.

I had been lucky to get a paper route when I was still a couple of years under the legal age. The newspaper broker couldn't find anyone who wanted the route because it was in the slums where the few people who could afford newspapers were thinly spread, which meant there was a lot of walking between deliveries. Also, it was often hard to make the slum customers pay up at the end of the week. But I was willing to take it on because we needed the extra income. After 1939, when war in Europe brought work to factories and farms producing the war materiel and food we supplied to England, the upturn in our economy had its inevitable inflationary effect on prices, so the purchasing power of our weekly seven dollars and twenty-seven cents diminished.

I was nine years old when I experienced one of those terrible moments that haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life. Somewhere along the twenty-two blocks between the FSCC warehouse and home, I lost the 'two children' card that gave us access to surplus food, and although I walked back and forth over my trail, my eyes scything the sidewalk from edge to edge until it was too dark to see, I couldn't find it. It took three weeks for the welfare officials to accept that we weren't trying to gyp the system and to issue us a new card... three pretty thin weeks. From then on, I always carried the card in the foot of my sock, and it always smelled of tennis shoe.

The loss of that Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation card led to my running away from home. It wasn't until the next morning that I got up the courage to confess that I had lost it, and my mother, already at her wits' end because both Anne-Marie and I had needed shoes in the same month, reacted with panic and accusation. How were we to get through the month? What in Christ's name had I been daydreaming about this time? She thought she'd brought me up with a little sense of responsibility, for God's sake!

Having already passed a night chastening myself for my stupidity, I reacted to her hysteria with hysteria of my own. Give a guy a break! If I'm so damned irresponsible, why don't you drag the wagon down there and pick up the crap yourself?

She gave me a slap, and I stormed out of the house.

But I soon came back, shame-faced. I found my sister sitting out on the hall stairs, playing intensely with her paper dolls. She looked up at me, silently begging me to make peace with our mother.

I found Mother crying in that silent, son-lacerating way of hers. She asked me how she was going to feed us children for the next week. I put my arm around her and muttered something about how we'd find a way, just... but she shook my arm off.

So I stormed out again! This time slamming the door. My sister clutched at my leg as I passed, but I pulled away and rushed down the stoop and across the street. I turned towards the river, furiously driving my heels onto the pavement as my vision swam with self-pity. I was determined to run away and this time never come back. Never. Muttering to myself, gnawing on my grievance, I passed through the freight yards and followed the tracks north, then I climbed over the barriers and started to cross over to Rensselaer on a dangerous but seldom-used single-track railroad bridge. About halfway across I stopped and looked back to see how far I had come, and I saw two men back on the Albany side waving their arms and shouting at me. I ignored them and continued on, assuring my balance by keeping one hand in contact with the rough wooden railing along the downstream side, as I carefully stepped on the center of each creosoted tie, not letting my eyes focus through the gaps down to the roiling surface of the Hudson far below. What if I fell into the river and drowned? That would show her! I was sick of it! Sick and tired of being responsible for everything! Was it my fault she married a bum? I thought I felt an approaching train vibrating the girders underfoot, and I turned to look behind me. But no train came.

I got across the bridge and picked my way through the Rensselaer freight yards, then I cut through town and headed east. I was in open country with fields and a few scrawny cows when the first plump raindrops splatted dark on the dusty road. Fine! Now I'll get pneumonia and die! Like Miss Cox. That would teach her.

I was soaked through and rain was running down my collar by the time I reached a scattering of houses at a crossroads called Snyders Corners, where I cowered in a bus shelter improvised from rusty advertising signs. I shivered as diagonal rods of rain drilled on the Beechnut Tobacco sign that served as a roof. After a long time spent conjuring up vindictive scenarios in which I was ill or lost and Mother was suffering remorse for having treated me so badly, I became aware that the sound of rain on the roof had stopped and the wind had fallen to a sigh. It was twilight, and dense banks of sodden, low-hanging clouds made it dark enough for the people of Snyders Corners to light their kerosene lamps. And it was at this moment, in this unlikely place, and for no reason I can account for, that I experienced what I suppose people mean when they talk about the mystic. It had something to do with the sudden silence after the long, isolating, narcotizing din of rain on sheet metal, and something to do with the darkening sky so close overhead, and with the golden light of kerosene lamps glowing in the windows of those simple clapboard houses. I suddenly felt that I was otherwise and elsewhere... someone who was not quite me, experiencing the moment from somewhere that was not quite here, a witness more than a participant in an epiphanous revelation, and I knew... knew with a certainty beyond the rational... that I was destined to be a drifter. I sat in that bus shelter, shivering, alone, anonymous, no longer connected to anything, unable to hurt or disappoint anyone. And it felt so good!

Adrift. A drifter. Not responsible for anything or anyone. I knew that someday I would leave home, and once I got away I would never, never...