The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  SAINT MARTIN:

  No, that is not the reason why I am so unhappy.

  NARRATOR:

  Saint Martin de Porres puts his hands over his face and starts to cry.

  SAINT TERESA:

  Then tell us, Martin de Porres, why are you so sad that you are crying? Maybe we can help you.

  SAINT MARTIN:

  I am sad because all the children around the world have forgotten the true meaning of Christmas. All they care about is leaving cookies and milk for Santa so they can get presents under their tree and get their stockings stuffed with treats. They have forgotten that Christmas is a celebration of the birth of Baby Jesus, the Son of God. It is not about candy canes and wanting stuff from the store and having a big Christmas dinner with all your relatives. It is not about Christmas vacation where you don’t have to do any homework for over a week. Christmas is about Jesus in the manger.

  SAINT TERESA AND SAINT ALOYSIUS TOGETHER:

  You are right, Martin de Porres. Jesus is the reason for the season.

  SAINT ALOYSIUS:

  Hey, I have an idea. Let’s travel all around the world and remind all the kids that Christmas is about the birth of the Christ child in Bethlehem.

  SAINT MARTIN:

  But how will we travel around the world, Saint Aloysius? We live in olden times before jet planes and airlines like TWA were invented. Oh, oh, what shall we do?

  SAINT TERESA:

  Hey, I know. Let’s get a ride with Santa and his reindeer. When they go around delivering presents to children all over the world, we can go down the chimney, too, and deliver our message about Baby Jesus being the real reason why we celebrate Christmas.

  SAINT ALOYSIUS:

  That is a great idea, Saint Teresa!

  SAINT MARTIN:

  Yes, let us go get ready. It is almost Christmas Eve.

  NARRATOR:

  And so the three saints rode all night long with Santa in his sleigh, delivering their important message. And on Christmas morning, all the kids in the whole wide world, before they went downstairs and opened their presents, knelt and said their prayers and thanked God the Father for sending His only son down to Earth so that he could be born in Bethlehem with Mary as his mother and Joseph as his stepfather, even though the inn keeper was so mean to them that he made them sleep in a stable. And everyone was happy, except for atheists and Jewish people who don’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God and so they only get to have Hanukkah where they light candles and get just small presents like shampoo and yo-yos and things like that, and they can’t have a Christmas tree either.

  The End.

  After the read-through, I raised my hand. “Felix?” Rosalie said, her eyes squinting with suspicion. I told her I liked her play okay, but that the end didn’t make sense.

  “Yes, it does,” she said. “Why doesn’t it?”

  “Because nobody in fifth grade still believes in Santa. How can they ride around the world with someone who doesn’t really exist?”

  Geraldine intervened. “Because they’re saints, stupid. So they can fly.”

  “Angels can fly,” I retorted. “No one ever said saints can.”

  Several classmates entered into the argument about whether or not saints could fly, and then MaryAnn Haywood pointed out, reasonably enough, I thought, that the younger kids in our school still believed in Santa, and so for their sake, Rosalie could have the three saints travel with him in his sleigh on Christmas Eve so’s it wouldn’t wreck their innocence.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I still think it’s kind of a dumb ending.”

  “Not as dumb as you are,” Rosalie noted.

  Then Marion Pemberton said he was quitting Rosalie’s play. “You can’t quit,” Rosalie informed him. “You’re the only one in our class who can play Martin de Porres.”

  “Why?” he shot back. “Because I’m black?” He made the point that Rosalie was playing one of the Three Kings in the tableaux. So if a female could play a male, why couldn’t some white kid play a black saint? In return, Rosalie pointed out that Marion was also the black Wise Man in the tableaux and that that didn’t bother him. “Yeah,” he said, “but in your play, I have to cry, and I ain’t crying in front of my father and my brothers Marvin and Roscoe and a whole bunch of other people that I don’t even know.” Rosalie made a big show of counting to ten with just her lips, no sound, and then she blew out this long, slow breath and said okay, all right already, he didn’t have to cry. He could just look real, real sad. “Okay?” Reluctantly, Marion agreed.

  When Madame returned, she let us get drinks and go to the toilet. Coming out of the boys’ room, Lonny and I ran into Zhenya coming out of the girls’ room. I asked them both what they thought of Rosalie’s play.

  “I think it’s cornier than corn on the cob,” Lonny said.

  “I theenk eese sheetier than sheet,” Zhenya said. “And I theenk, too, Rosalie ees zhopalís.”

  “What’s that?” Lonny and I both asked.

  “Zhopalís? Means peerson who gets nose brown from…how you say here sheet vit plinty vauter?”

  “Diarrhea,” I volunteered, thinking of poor Ma at the big Bake-Off.

  “Ya, ya. Gets nose brown from direeya so det everyone theenk she good, good geuhl when she rilly just, how you say? I heered on TV last night: funny blunny.” Lonny and I looked at each other and shrugged.

  It wasn’t until we were back in the classroom, starting science, that I realized Zhenya had called Rosalie exactly what she was: a brown-noser and a phony baloney.

  After the Christmas program, Madame explained, each grade was going to invite their guests back to their own classrooms for refreshments. So all of us were supposed to go home and, for homework, find out what our mothers were making. The next day, she called us each by name and, when we told her what our mothers had said, she wrote it down.

  The Kubiaks were bringing milk from their farm: five gallons, plus paper cups. Arthur Coté was bringing three cans of Hawaiian Punch and a can opener. Pauline Papelbon said she’d be bringing cupcakes with sprinkles if her mother felt good enough to make them or, if she didn’t, either Hostess Twinkies or Hostess Sno Balls. Eugene Bowen was bringing potato chips on account of his father was a driver for State Line. “Aw, crap,” Lonny said. “I was gonna bring potato chips. Okay, I’ll bring napkins then.”

  Bridget Mann: Scottish shortbread cookies.

  Monte Montoya: sopaipilla cheesecake pie.

  Jackie Burnham: plum pudding.

  Edgy Chang: Chinese almond cookies.

  Me: pizelles. (The Christmas before, Pop had given Ma a bottle of perfume, a bottle of anisette from Italy, and a pizelle iron.)

  Rosalie: Polish poppyseed roll, rum babka with marzipan Christmas decorations, and chrusciki. “Otherwise known as angel wings,” Rosalie added. “And I’ll have my mother put extra powdered sugar on them. They’re so good.”

  “How about you, Zhenya?” Madame said. “Will your mother be able to make something?”

  “Een our house, my fodder eese cooker,” she said. “He mek for party samouk vid pruns.”

  “Did you say prunes, Zhenya?” Madame said.

  “Ya, ya. He mek dat end he mek strudel vid meelk curds end raisins.”

  Prunes and raisins? Milk curds? Well, it could have been worse, I figured. At least she wasn’t bringing that stinky herring she ate at lunchtime.

  “Merveilleux!” Madame said, clapping her hands together. “Our food table will be worthy of l’Organisation des Nations Unies! And I myself shall add two desserts québecoise to our fête internationale.” She wrote what she was making on the board—tartelettes au sucre and bûche de Noël au chocolat—then turned back toward us, beaming. “Sounds good. Oui?”

  We said it in unison. “Oui, Madame.”

  7

  Noël

  By the Thursday before “the big shew,” things were falling nicely into place. Ernie Overturf and his dad arrived at school in their pickup truck and a bunch of us boys he
lped them unload the plywood animals they’d made: stand-up cows, sheep, a donkey, identical triplet camels. Mr. Overturf and Mr. Dombrowski, our janitor, carried the biggest and heaviest prop: the front of the stable where Jesus was going to get born in the big finale. (There was nothing in back; just these wooden braces that held it up. Madame said it was a “façade,” which was one of the many, many English words that everyone had the French to thank for.)

  Madame had cast the three MaryAnns as angels in the final nativity scene and Franz Duzio as the only boy angel, Gabriel, in the Annunciation tableau. MaryAnn V.’s mother had gone to Careen’s Costumes and rented four curly blond wigs, four sets of wings, and these really cool halos that you put batteries in and they lit up. Madame told the MaryAnns to wear floor-length nightgowns—white ones. Franz Duzio wanted to know what he was supposed to wear, and Madame said a white nightshirt if he had one, and Franz said he didn’t—that he just slept in his underpants, and when he said that, some of the girls covered their mouths with their hands. Well, then, Madame said, maybe his mother or sister had a nightgown that he might borrow. Glaring at the rest of us, Franz scanned the room, trying to locate who had just laughed. (Me.)

  Mrs. Kubiak had dropped off, along with the twins, a half dozen bales of hay, the corn crib that would be Jesus’s manger, and enough burlap bags from Thompson’s Feed & Grain to clothe all nine shepherdesses and shepherds. And the Kubiaks’ older brother, who went to trade school instead of regular high school, had made us this big silver star of Bethlehem that had sockets that you could put Christmas bulbs in. We were using that for the shepherds’ tableau, the Wise Men’s tableau, and the nativity tableau. And this was cool: Ronald and Roland’s brother had even rigged up this special pulley-and-rope thing that you could raise and lower the star with.

  There was a kind of contest between Bridget Mann and Margaret Elizabeth McCormick about which one’s baby doll was going to get picked to be Jesus. Madame Frechette said that, since Bridget’s doll didn’t look as “well-used” as Margaret Elizabeth’s, and since it still had both of its glass eyes, that was the one she was picking, but that Margaret Elizabeth’s doll could be the understudy. When Margaret Elizabeth heard the news, she started crying, so Madame took her out in the hallway for a talk, and while they were gone, Zhenya asked, out loud to no one in particular, “What det is? Onderstoody?”

  Several of us shrugged, but from across the room, Franz Duzio said, “Means the one-eyed doll’s gonna sit the bench and never get in the game.”

  “Gemm?” Zhenya said. “Vut gemme you means?”

  “Bezbull,” Franz said, imitating her.

  Zhenya laughed at that. “Franz, you big cuckoo head,” she said. “You no play bezbull vit bebby dull.”

  Rosalie told them they’d both better shut up. “Because the rule is, whenever Madame is out of the room, we’re supposed to carry on in silence. Remember?”

  “Oh, ya ya,” Zhenya retorted. “I forgetted det. Tenk you for remembering me about it, cheeky bum-bum geuhl.” She looked over at me and winked.

  Margaret Elizabeth was dry eyed when her and Madame came back in the room, but now she was pouting. I overheard her telling Kitty Callahan that understudies were stupid and she was just bringing her doll home.

  On Friday, we all had to bring in our costumes and try them on in the boys’ and girls’ rooms after lunch and then come out and show Madame so she could approve them. When Madame saw Lonny in the costume Simone had put together for him, I watched her eyes move from Anna Ianuzzi’s blue garter stretched over his dish-toweled head down to where my bathrobe ended and Lonny’s bare legs began. Madame asked if, peut-être, he had a robe that dropped a little further down. “This is Felix’s bathrobe,” he said. “I ain’t got one.”

  “Do you think your mother might be able to purchase you one that’s a better fit?” When Lonny shook his head, Madame nodded and told him, very well then, she guessed his costume would be okay.

  Pauline Papelbon’s Mary costume got okayed, too, which kinda surprised me. Pauline told Madame that her neighbors, the Madraswallas, were Indians—from India, not cowboys-and-Indians Indians—and so she’d borrowed this sari thing that showed some of her bloopy stomach in the middle between the top part and the bottom part, plus this sorta see-through veil. I thought Pauline looked not so much like the Blessed Virgin as she did that lady in my 1001 Arabian Nights book—the one that had to keep telling the king stories so he wouldn’t croak her. But I guess Madame didn’t think that.

  When I came out in my costume, everyone was saying all this wiseguy stuff like what was it like meeting George Washington, and how was the Boston Tea Party? And I was like ha, ha, ha, that was so funny I forgot to laugh. (Pop says that, when someone’s teasing you, don’t give them the satisfaction of letting them know it’s bugging you.) But when Arthur Coté told me I had knock knees, I kinda forgot Pop’s advice and jabbed him with one of my chopstick drumsticks—not that hard, but hard enough to leave this little red mark that kinda looked like a bullet hole. Arthur didn’t squeal on me, though. I bet if I’d poked Rosalie like that, she probably would’ve skipped Mother Filomina and gone right to Pope Paul to see if he’d excommunication me.

  All’s the shepherds and shepherdesses had to do for their costumes was cut holes in the top of their burlap feed bags, slip them over their heads, and tie a rope around their waist. But from the looks of it, Zhenya had gone a little crazy with the scissors when she was cutting her head hole. You couldn’t see her bazoom-booms or anything, but if she’d cut away a few more inches, you maybe could’ve. Scrawny Geraldine and Zhenya were standing next to each other in the inspection line, and it reminded me of down at the lunch counter—looking first at Annette when she was in Mickey Mouse Club and then at the poster of her from Beach Blanket Bingo—the one I French-kissed and had to have that talk with Monsignor about. When Zhenya asked Madame if, during the shepherds’ scene, she could wear her Carnaby Street cap, too, Madame put her hand over her heart and went, “Non, non, non!”

  “H’okay, boss lady,” Zhenya said, patting Madame’s arm and smiling. “I nut wear het. H’everytink eese groovy, ya ya?”

  Rosalie’s costumes were the fanciest—both of them. For her Wise Man outfit, her parents had paid some seamstress to make her this long red velvet cape with fake white fur trim. Plus, after Turdski and her mother went to Careen’s Costumes and didn’t find anything they thought was good enough, they drove to this other costume place all the way down in New York City! Down there, they rented this fancy-looking crown with big fake jewels that looked real. Plus, they bought Rosalie a fake beard and a tube of this stuff called spirit gum that real actors use to stick beards and things on their face with. As the narrator of her play, Rosalie was wearing one of her mother’s old evening gowns and these long, dangly earrings, and another crown that Rosalie kept telling everyone was “an exact replica of Miss America’s crown.” Mother Filomina had okayed her wearing makeup, too—lipstick and eyeshadow—but only for her play, and then she’d have to go to the girls’ room and take it right off before she came out as Caspar the Wise Man. Plus, Mother said, none of the other fifth grade girls had better get any ideas about wearing makeup for the tableaux. This was just a one-time special privilege because Rosalie’d written her stupid play.

  Like Rosalie, Marion Pemberton had two parts, Saint Martin de Porres and the black Wise Man, but he was wearing his same costume for both, on account of, even though Rosalie didn’t want him to, Madame Frechette said he could. Marion’s mother had sewn his costume out of an old shiny silver sheet, and she made him a turban out of a pillowcase that went with the sheet, and I thought he looked pretty cool.

  I thought the three MaryAnns looked good, too, in their white nightgowns and angel wings and light-up halos. But one angel didn’t look so hot: Franz Duzio. With his bushy black eyebrows, his curly blond wig, and this lady’s nightgown he had to borrow “from my fat aunt,” Franz looked not so much like the Angel Gabriel as he did some psycho c
ombination of Cupid and Shirley Temple. When he first came out of the boys’ room in his get-up, a bunch of us started giggling. We couldn’t help it. But Franz said whoever kept laughing was gonna get beaten to a bloody pulp as soon as we got off school property. So after that, nobody laughed. Franz was the second oldest and toughest boy in our class after Lonny, and in a fight he might even be able to take Lonny, I’m not sure. Not that they were gonna fight or anything. Franz and Lonny got along pretty good. When they arm-wrestled during indoor recess, sometimes Lonny won and sometimes Franz did, but they always shook hands afterwards like gentlemen.

  Saturday afternoon was dress rehearsal for every single kid who was in the Christmas program. Attendance was mandatory, Sister Fabian said over the P.A. the day before, which meant you had to be there unless you or one of your parents were croaking or something. Or maybe one of your grandparents.

  The first and second graders were lucky stiffs. Even though they were going on second to last in the program the next day, they got to practice first because Sister Fabian said they’d get ants in their pants if they had to wait around. They were singing the only song in the whole show that wasn’t holy. This is what they were doing: first Father Hanrahan comes out on the stage carrying this fake Christmas tree. Then he goes to the audience, “Hey, do you folks hear what I hear?” And backstage, there’s these jingle bells that the audience can hear but not see yet. Then one of the stage hands—Ernie Overturf’s older brother, Richard, who’s in eighth grade but doesn’t play a musical instrument—starts a record backstage and holds a microphone up to the speaker. And all the first and second graders come out holding hands, and they start circling the tree and singing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” along with Brenda Lee (not the real her, just the record). Plus, every first and second grader’s wearing reindeer antlers and they got jingle bells tied to their shoelaces—which was where the jingle bell sounds were coming from when Father asked, “Hey, do you hear what I hear?” See, while they’re still backstage, all the little kids shake their feet to make their jingle bells jingle.