by Lamb, Wally
Ca-chunk.
When were they going to call us fifth graders over there? Next year? Not that I really wanted to go over, with what I had to confess. Oscar Landry’s already on page 42 and all’s I’m on is page 37. There’s an illustration on page 40 and Oscar’s way past that and I won’t even get to it until three more pages….
After Popeye died, I didn’t even want any other pets because I was sad. And I was kind of sad and kind of glad that Ma was going on her California trip. Sad because she had never gone away before and I was probably going to miss her, but glad because Pop said if Ma won the grand prize, we could buy a brand new car, either a Cadillac or a Buick Riviera, and it was going to have air-conditioning, no matter which one we got. I was hoping we’d get the Riviera because the ’65s had concealed headlights that you could only see when you put the headlights on, and when you turned them off again, these doors came down over them, kind of like eyelids. Me and Pop and Frances seen one in the showroom at Broadway Buick and the guy demonstrated the headlights for us. Royal Blue, the showroom Riviera was, which was the color I wanted. Fran wanted Country Club Red. Pop said Ma would be the one who got to pick the color out because—
Click, click. “The fifth graders may now pass.” Click.
Before any of us kids could stand up, Madame sprang from her seat, clapping her hands. “Dépêchez-vous, mes enfants! No dawdling, now. Hurry, hurry!” Everyone was looking at each other, wondering why she was having a nervous breakdown about us going over to the church, but once again, I knew that it was because of her “needs improvement”s.
And you know how I knew? Because the day before, out on the playground at recess, Ronald Kubiak had fired the dodge ball and hit me on the shoulder, tagging me out third to last. (In dodge ball, the Kubiak twins always started the game as “ends” and often kept those positions until recess was over.) As I waited on the sideline to see if Rosalie or Johnny Bartlett would survive or get nailed by a Kubiak, Madame had approached me. Would I please be un bon garçon and run up to our room and fetch her sunglasses, heh heh heh? (That was one of the weird things about Madame: she was always chuckling at things that weren’t funny.) “Oui, Madame,” I’d said, aware that Rosalie was watching us when she should have been watching out for the dodge ball, because Roland Kubiak fired it at her and got her in the small of her back, which threw Johnny into “sudden death.” Rosalie started crabbing that it wasn’t fair because she hadn’t been ready yet. But she would have been ready if she wasn’t always minding everyone else’s business.
Back in the building, I’d mounted the staircases and, at the water fountain on our floor, had treated myself to a long, relaxing drink. (With Pop’s warning whispering in my ears, I took care, of course, to avoid contact with the spout.) The opportunity to get an extra drink had been planned but the opportunity to snoop around Madame’s desk hadn’t been. I just did it without thinking about it first, so it was probably a venial, not a mortal, sin. (Sins that you plan out are worse than sins you just do without thinking about it first.)
Madame’s grade book lay open on her blotter. Since she’d discontinued Sister Dymphna’s practice of publicly ranking each of us on the left end of the blackboard, I decided to check out the current standings. Rosalie still had the longest string of check-plusses, big surprise, and I was still in second place. But from the look of it, both Oscar L. and MaryAnn H. were closing in on me. Lonny’s check-minuses had put him in dead last place.
Madame’s top left desk drawer held a collection of stuff that she, and Sister Dymphna before her, had confiscated: a kind of graveyard for squirt guns, wax lips, Lonny’s whoopee cushion, et cetera. There was a Beatles magazine in there, a Jughead comic book, a “Watermelon Pink” lipstick, some packs of Wacky Plaques. And tons of candy: Mounds, Milky Ways, a Sky Bar, a box of malted milk balls. All of the above, plus enough packs of gum to fill the rack down at the lunch counter. I reclaimed the Juicy Fruit I’d lost the week before. “Gum, monsieur?” Madame had asked, one eyebrow raised. “Or are you chewing your cud? Heh heh heh.” I grabbed the whoopee cushion, too, and hid it in my social studies book, figuring I’d give it back to Lonny once we were safely off school property. I was being a little like Robin Hood, I figured.
Peering into Madame’s open pocketbook (and shaking it a little), I’d spotted a pink wallet, a pack of brown cigarettes called Gauloises, some keys on a key chain, and two bottles of perfume: that lily-of-the-valley stuff that made me sneeze whenever Madame roamed the aisles to check our seatwork, plus a second kind of perfume called “cognac.”
Recalling my official mission, I’d grabbed Madame’s sunglasses and turned to go back outside, but then had done an abrupt about-face, curious to check out something I’d seen out of the corner of my eye: a sheet of paper turned face down on Madame’s desk, on the back of which she’d scrawled, in red correcting pencil, Merde! On the bus the day before, a seventh grader named Jacques Lavoisseur had taught Lonny and me some French words that were never going to show up on any of Madame’s mimeographed sheets. I’d forgotten most of them, but for some reason remembered that merde meant shit. I flipped the paper over.
From what I could figure out, it was some kind of report card for teachers. It had three categories with typed comments under each. Mother Filomina’s signature was at the bottom.
SATISFACTORY
1. Rapport with students seems generally positive.
2. Bulletin boards are educational and neatly organized. I especially liked your display of the upcoming presidential election. You should note, however, that it is Electoral College, not Collage. Please correct.
NEEDS IMPROVEMENT
1. Students should refer to you by your surname, not your given name, as this more formal appellation is more respectful and will result in fewer discipline problems. Speaking of which, were you aware that several of the children were passing notes during your arithmetic lesson, and that Pauline Papelbon was surreptitiously sucking on a Sugar Daddy before I gave her a sharp look?
2. Fifth grade students should be assigned 60 to 90 minutes of homework per night. Playing outside so as to experience the joy of the natural world should not be considered homework. (I have received calls from parents.)
3. Please try to dress as demurely as possible. Open-toed high heels and seamed fishnet stockings, for example, are not appropriate for a parochial school environment.
4. You must work on delivering your class more promptly to the cafeteria at lunchtime and to their “extras”—gym, music, assemblies, Final Friday confessions, etc.
ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
1. While I have no strong objection to your acquainting the children with the French language, you must remember that this instruction falls under the category of “enrichment” and should not supersede academics and/or religious instruction. You might also wish to emphasize French culture, in particular the fact that France is a Roman Catholic country from which many saints have hailed. These include, of course, Joan of Arc as well as Martin of Tours, and Teresa of Lisieux (“the Little Flower”).
2. I appreciate your having volunteered to stage a series of costumed “tableaux vivants” for this year’s Christmas program, given your experience with theatricals, and I will certainly consider and discuss with the rest of the faculty in the coming weeks. However, you should know that our Christmas program is well established, and that the audience who attends annually has certain expectations as to the format. They might not embrace the sort of pageantry you propose.
Very truly yours,
Mother M. Filomina, Principal
Reading Mother Fil’s comments, I felt sorta sorry for poor Madame. Sure, she was weird, but she meant well. And compared to Sister Dymphna, she had way more of what Pop called “zippity-doo-da.” But Madame’s report card read kind of like a teacher’s version of Lonny Flood’s. I didn’t know what “vivants” meant, but I figured “tableau” was French for “table.” I didn’t get why Madame was volunteering to put a costume on a table, unl
ess, maybe, a “tableau vivant” was like a French tablecloth.
No dawdling now! Line up! Dépêchez-vous!” she pleaded. Yup, she was definitely working on her “needs improvement”s.
I got in line by the back door and Marion Pemberton cut in front of me. Marion’s a boy, not a girl, even though he has a girl’s name, which, in a way, is worse than having everyone call you Dondi. Marion’s the only colored kid in our grade. Black, I mean. At Sunday dinner last Sunday, Pop started telling us about, the day before, this sailor was sitting at the lunch counter having a tuna salad sandwich and a Fresca? And Pop could tell he was from the South because he had a Southern drool, which is an accent like that creepy little girl on the Shake ’N Bake commercial who, when her father comes home and says, “What’s for dinner?” and the girl goes, “Mama made Shak’n’Bake and ah hailped.” But anyways, Pop said, “And then this colored guy comes over and sits down at the stool next to him, and the Southern guy gets up and moves two stools down, as if the colored guy—” And Frances interrupted him and said, “What color was he?” And Pop went, “Huh?” And Frances said, “Was he green? Yellow? Purple?” Then she told us that her civics teacher told her class that, from now on, colored people didn’t want to be called “colored” or “Negro”; they wanted to be called either “black” or “Afro-American.” And Pop rolled his eyes and went, “Well, excuse me, Martin Luther King’s secretary, but do you mind if I finish telling my story now?” But anyways, when Marion Pemberton cut me in line, I said, “Hey! No cuts, no butts, no coconuts.” And he looked back at me and smiled and shook his finger in my face and said, “Wait’ll the NAACP hears about this!” And I elbowed him in the back. (But we were just kidding. Marion and me are friends. One time, he and his mother were at the bus station picking up one of their relatives who was coming in on the New York bus and Pop let me make Marion a free float—orange soda with vanilla ice cream.) Marion’s always saying that for a joke: “Wait’ll the NAACP hears about this!” Like when he doesn’t get picked right away in dodge ball, or when he wants to trade you something in his lunch for something in yours and you say no. NAACP means National Association for the something of Colored People. I mean black people. Except why don’t they call it the N.A.A.B.P.?
Exiting the classroom, the thirty-four of us clomped in thunderous silence down the two flights of stairs and out the front door. With Madame clucking and clapping behind us, we slogged past the holly bush we’d planted for all the poor kids around the world who weren’t lucky enough to live in a democracy. We passed the statue of Martin de Porres, the Afro-American saint from Peru or someplace who, Sister Dymphna told us, used to glow when he prayed and could be in two places at once, and could communicate with animals using ESP. We ambled past the Blessed Virgin’s grotto where, each May, an eighth grade girl was chosen to dress in a bride’s gown and veil, climb the step stool, and put a crown of flowers on Mary’s head. (Simone had been chosen as the bride in her year; Frances had not been in hers but had insisted she wouldn’t have done it, even if she had been picked over Bryce Bongiovanni, who was a brown-noser at school but a chicky boom-boom out of school, and who, Frances knew for a fact, had shoplifted at Rosenblatt’s Clothiers and made out in the indoor show with “Jesse” James Bocheko.) My classmates and me rounded the corner, made the sign of the cross, and mounted the church steps, accompanied by Madame’s “Dépêchez-vous! Dépêchez-vous!” And I was like, jeeze, all right already, relax.
Inside, we faced a vestibule inspection conducted by the aforementioned skin-twister, Sister Mary Agrippina. We boys were lined up, eyeballed, and ordered to tuck in our shirts, check our zippers and shoe laces, and, if necessary, spit onto our hands and pat down our cowlicks. Girls who had forgotten to bring a hat or mantilla to school that day were assigned detention and ordered to cover their heads with bobby-pinned sheets from Sister M.A.’s roll of paper towels—or, if a girl happened to be wearing a cardigan sweater over her St. Aloysius Gonzaga uniform, she could put her sweater on her head and button it beneath her chin. Two Final Fridays ago, I had noted to one sweaterhead, MaryAnn Vocatura, that with her sleeves drooping down the sides of her face, she looked like a basset hound. MaryAnn’s response had been reasonable enough, I thought; she’d socked me in the arm. But Rosalie, whose business it wasn’t, had ratted me out to Sister Mary Agrippina, who, in turn, had grabbed the back of my neck and squeezed hard, dropping me to my knees on the vestibule floor.
Declared acceptable, we fifth graders were given the go-ahead to enter the church proper, where we were met by St. Aloysius’s vice-principal and Final Friday traffic cop, Sister Fabian—not to be confused with Sister Elvis, Sister Ricky Nelson, or Sister Bobby Rydell, this being a standard joke among the St. Aloysius student body. “You to the right,” Sister Fabian decreed. “You to the left. Right. Left. Right. Left.” Confession, absolution, and penance under these circumstances was, as Pop would say, a crap shoot. That morning my luck was crappy. I got Monsignor Muldoon.
“You’re next, Felix! Get the lead out! Let’s go!” Sister Fabian ordered, loudly enough to be heard by the angels in heaven, let alone by my father-confessor. Reluctantly, I detached myself from the boys’ line and approached the confession box. I parted the curtain, entered, and knelt.
Like a life-sized shadow puppet, Monsignor shifted behind the confessional screen. I waited while he unwrapped a Life Saver and popped it in his mouth. Butter rum, the same flavor my father liked; I could smell it through the gray-silk screen that separated us. For a month or more during morning exercises, our class had been asking God to help Monsignor break his smoking habit. Doctors’ orders: emphysema. I heard the crunch of hard candy. The Monsignor’s shadow-fingers made a coaxing gesture: Come on, kid; let’s get the show on the road; cough it up. This one time, Simone told me she heard that Monsignor “liked his liquor, too.” But butter rum’s not liquor, because if it was, how come kids can buy butter rum Life Savers?
I crossed myself and began. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession. These are my—”
A wheezy sigh interrupted me. “Speak up, boy. You’re mumbling.”
Well, of course I was. I was about to own up to a doozy that morning—a sin to which I did not want my peers to be privy, particularly Geraldine Balchunas, our class’s biggest gossip who, as luck would have it, had stood at the front of the girls’ line when I’d slinked toward Monsignor’s confessional seconds earlier. Behind Geraldine had stood my nemesis, Rosalie Twerski. Eavesdropping on other kids’ confessions, our class had been assured, was sinful, and there was a strategy by which we could avoid this particular transgression. We were to close our eyes, cover our ears with our hands, and hum quietly to ourselves. This was small comfort, however, in my hour of need. Of the thirty-four of us, the number who actually used this technique was zero.
“It’s been two weeks since my last confession,” I began again. “These are my sins.” I admitted that, having forgotten to do my sentence-diagramming homework one night, I had copied someone else’s paper on the bus. That I had called my sister a retard twice. That swear words had come out of my mouth on six different occasions. “But not the really bad one, Monsignor. Just ‘h’ and ‘d’ and ‘s.’” I cleared my throat and mustered up my courage. “And…”
Monsignor fished another Life Saver from his roll and popped it in his mouth, crunching and waiting. “And what?” he finally asked.
“I…had impure thoughts.”
“What was that last one? Speak up.”
“I had these certain thoughts…. You know.”
“No, I don’t know, unless you tell me. What kind of thoughts?”
“Impure ones…. About my cousin.”
“Your cousin?”
“Yeah. My cousin Annette. She’s famous.” I could practically see Geraldine and Rosalie out there, leaning forward, their hands cupped behind their big Dumbo ears.
“And did you act on these thoughts?” Monsignor inquired.
“What do you mean, you’re not sure? Either you acted upon them or you didn’t.”
“I kissed her poster…. On the lips.” I edited out the tongue part.
“Her poster? What do you—”
“The one of her at the beach. In her bathing suit, listening to her transistor…. But anyways, Monsignor, I’m sure glad you gave up cigarettes. My father used to smoke, too. Chesterfields. But then he—”
Monsignor cut me off and started telling me about how incest was a mortal sin, and how what I’d done made Jesus very, very, very sad. Had maybe even made Him weep, as He had the day He died on the cross for our sins. Then he gave me a whole, entire rosary to say for penance which, if I’d gotten Father Hanrahan, I probably would have had to say only a few “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s and maybe a “Glory Be.”
“Now let’s hear you make a good Act of Contrition,” Monsignor said.
Unsure if I was apologizing to God or the Monsignor, I rattled from rote how “heartily sorry for having offended Thee” I was. But I was thinking, as I recited the prayer, about how my impure thoughts were really more Pop’s fault than mine. He was the one who’d led me into temptation by taping Annette’s poster above the fryolator in the first place. And Chino’s fault, too. I wouldn’t have even known what French-kissing was if he hadn’t told me. In a way, they should be saying whole rosaries for penance, not me.
Monsignor told me to imitate Jesus and gave me his blessing. Exiting the confessional, I tried to ignore Geraldine’s and Rosalie’s stares. “Take a picture. It lasts longer,” I suggested as I passed by them on my way to the altar. I may have heard kissing sounds from one of them.