by Trevanian
“I’m afraid of them,” Mrs McGivney said, offering me a second cookie, which I politely refused, then, because she continued to hold it out to me smiling, reluctantly took.
“You’re afraid of radios?”
“Of everything electric,” she admitted with a little smile of self-disparagement.
Only then did I notice that she didn’t have electric lights. All the houses in our row still had their gas fixtures in place, but the gas had long ago been cut off except for kitchen stoves and hot-water heaters. In some rooms the gas pipes had been used as conduits for the electric wires, so naked bulbs dangled from fabric-wrapped wires that sprouted from the ceiling rosettes of former gas chandeliers. In our bathroom and kitchen the disused gas pipes had fancy wrought-iron keys, but you couldn’t turn them because they’d been painted over so many times. But Mrs McGivney still had cut-glass gas lamps on her walls, with bright brass keys to turn them on.
“Mr McGivney loves the gaslight,” she said. “He’s always glad when it gets dark enough for me to turn it up.” She smiled at the unmoving old man, her eyes aglow with affection.
I looked over at him, sitting there with his pale eyes directed out the window, his face expressionless, and I wondered how she could tell he liked the gaslight. Could he speak? Did he smile? And what was wrong with him anyway? Was he crazy or something?
I felt her eyes on me, so I quickly looked away.
“Mr McGivney is a hero,” she said, as though that explained everything.
I nodded.
“My goodness! Do you know how long it’s been since we’ve had a little boy come visit us?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.” I didn’t really care. What I wanted was an opening to tell her that I’d better be getting home.
“It’s been a long, long time. Michael—that’s my nephew?—he used to visit us sometimes. I don’t think he much liked coming up here, but Ellen—my sister?—she used to make him come. And every time he came, I’d give him a sugar cookie. He loved my sugar cookies, not like another little boy I could mention.”
“I like your sugar cookies, Mrs McGivney. I think they’re...nice. Real nice. Well, I guess I’d better be going. My mother’s been sick and—”
“Mr McGivney is a hero,” she said again, clinging to her own line of thought and ignoring mine. I could tell she wanted to talk about him, but I was uncomfortable with the waxy-clean smell of the place, and with that smooth-faced old man staring out at nothing, so I told her that my mother would be wondering where I was, and I thanked her for the milk and cookies. She sighed and shrugged, then she opened the door for me, and I escaped down the dark staircase.
I sat on my stoop for a while before going into our apartment where I knew my mother would be lying in her sick bed, bored and wanting company after a long siege of lung trouble that had left her smelling of mustard plaster and Balm Bengu, smells that combined with the floor wax of Mrs McGivney’s apartment to evoke memories of the orphanage that Anne-Marie and I had been put into the previous winter, a grim institution out in the country, surrounded by a high chain-link fence with barbed wire stretched along the top, located in wintry fields of corn stubble that seemed infinitely bleak to city kids. The first day, one of the Brothers took me aside and told me that I should pray every night for my mother’s recovery and, that failing, for her soul. That night I alternately prayed and cried into my pillow, because it had never occurred to me that she might die, leaving Anne-Marie and me in that home forever.
We boys wore gray uniforms of a canvas-like material that was so stiff with starch that new kids were chafed at knee and elbow. We marched in silence to meals, classes and chapel, our lives punctuated by clamorous electric bells. We showered beneath jets of cold water and slept in cavernous unheated dormitories. The cold water and fresh air were supposed to ‘harden us’ against the rigors of life, but they only kept us in a permanent state of drippy noses, sore throats and earaches.
The first problem I met was going to the bathroom. There were urinals on the first floor and a long common trough in a shed beside the exercise field, but the only toilets were a bank of eight along the wall of the wash room at the end of the dormitory, and these not only lacked seats to mitigate the shock of cold porcelain but they were open to the view and the ridiculing comments of everyone, to the intense embarrassment of the boy uncomfortably perched and vulnerable. I used to wait until the small hours of the morning to slip into the deserted wash room and relieve myself. Fortunately, I was in the habit of being awake late into the night, but in the orphanage there was no street outside my window to absorb my interest, so I spent the time making up acronyms for memorizing names from history classes and lists from science and geography.
The dormitory rules were arbitrary and quixotic, and discipline was hierarchical, the older boys being in charge of the younger. This led to bullying and late-night punishments carried out in the shower room, where the offender was surrounded by a ring of older boys using sodden towels that hurt like hell but didn’t leave bruises. The kid being punished stifled his cries because if the big boys got caught and punished for their illegal punishments, they would make his life a hell of secret punches, sneering taunts, and the torment of preference in that particular orphanage, Indian Burns, which consisted of grabbing a kid in a headlock and scrubbing his forehead or cheek with knuckles until the skin was raw and slippery with that clear fluid that becomes scab. These thin scabs identified their bearer as a victim and therefore fair game for further torment. Any passing bully could grab him and give him a few quick Indian Burns that would scrub off the scab and produce a new slippery rawness. Some kids always carried four or five of these blemishes on cheek and forehead that branded them as permanent victims and targets. Visitors from the social services identified these marks as impetigo and prescribed a bright blue medication, yet further marking and targeting. They didn’t inspect the wounds closely for fear of catching impetigo.
Late one night when I had just finished going to the bathroom, four grinning older boys appeared at the doorway to the wash room, and the slack-lipped bully who was their leader told me that it was against the rules to go to the toilet late at night because that led to jacking off, which was a sin. He shrugged and sucked his teeth and said he guessed he’d just have to punish me, and he grabbed me and tried to give me an Indian Burn, but I responded with a rush of red rage that gave me the wiry strength to squirm out of his grasp and the next moment I had my fingers entwined in his hair and was banging his head on the tile floor until his eyes glazed over and he bit his tongue. His mouth filled with blood, and he was gagging and choking on it when his stunned buddies dragged me off him. They tended to him themselves, so he wouldn’t ‘get caught’, and I returned to my cot in the darkened dormitory, my heart pounding with adrenaline, and with fear of reprisal, which was often threatened by word and gesture over the ensuing week. But nothing came of their threats, and they took out their anger on easier targets, the natural victims. In time I was able to relax, except in the chaos of the exercise yard where I felt in danger of being surrounded by enemies hidden in the screaming, madly romping throng.
But if social life at the orphanage was tense and menacing, the time spent in school was a blissful mitigation. For one thing, the classrooms were the only heated spaces, except for the infirmary. For another, while the Brothers were lax in protecting their charges from bullying, they took pride in their teaching, which was rigorous but caring. There were special classes for backward kids to help them catch up, and for those who did exceptionally well, there were accelerated classes with only five or six students. For the first time since Miss Cox I was not bored with schoolwork. One of the Brothers gave me an old grammar that had been published in 1898. I can still call up that book’s smell of pleasing mustiness, and can feel the grainy greasiness of its worn fabric cover. I had always been fascinated by words, those little packets of sound that encased nuggets of meaning or feelin
g or attitude, like primitive insects in amber. That grammar book and those special accelerated classes in English helped my enjoyment of words to blossom into an interest in language: its structures, its shape; the machinery of grammar that binds words together, and the architecture of syntax that lets them spark meanings off one another like flint against steel.20
Inevitably, the favor I earned from certain of the Brothers because of my interest in language marked me as unforgivably ‘different’ in the eyes of the older boys, and this led to occasional tussles in meal queues or out in the anarchic exercise yard. Because of my involvement in these brief, covert and mostly silent skirmishes featuring elbows, knees and thumbs, and because I sometimes played the clown in class out of a pusillanimous desire to be one of the regular guys, I racked up more than my share of ‘minutes’, which were the general currency of punishment in the orphanage. The smallest unit of correction was five minutes. A Brother would give you a ‘Five’ for such venial transgressions as talking or fidgeting, or trying to sneak food out of the dining hall or failing to finish homework. Fighting always earned you at least a ‘Ten’, and a ‘Fifteen’ was the minimum for being cheeky or disrespectful. The heaviest penalty ever given for a single trespass was the two hours awarded, along with twenty smacks with the Paddle (which had holes drilled in it so it could move through the air faster), to a mentally deficient boy for masturbating in the shower in the presence of a score of other boys and the Brother in charge of our dormitory. The Brother could hardly believe his eyes as the oaf stood there, looking right at him, grinning as he performed his Onanesque outrage.
The Brother who assigned you so many minutes of punishment time would write your name and the duration of your penalty in one of the small notebooks they all carried in their breast pockets (close to their hearts). They snatched out their notebooks as an arresting detective might snatch out his handcuffs.Their penalties were communicated to Brother Bernard, who was in charge of the Glory Hole, the name given to our chapel during the half hour in the morning between breakfast and the first class, and the ‘free hour’ in the evening at the beginning of Quiet Time, when we were supposed to do our homework and assigned reading. Instead, you had to report to Brother Bernard, who always sat in the back row of the chapel, and tell him how much of your punishment you intended to work off, usually five or ten minutes at a time. He would take note of your intention in a ring notebook open on his knee, next to a large pocket watch, and you would sit in silence until his watch’s minute hand reached the next numeral, then he would raise his hand and you could join the penitents kneeling on the stone step of the communion rail with their arms spread out wide, for your minutes had to be worked off kneeling straight up on the stone (No slouching there, Murphy!) with your arms straight out and your hands closed into heavy fists. And if, after five or ten minutes, your quivering arms started to lower (Arms, LaPointe! Arms!), there was only one warning about slumping posture or arms that were not straight out. Upon the second show of physical weakness or failure of will, Brother Bernard would say, ‘Get out, Kennedy!’ and you had to leave the Glory Hole without receiving a single minute’s diminution of the time you owed. For this reason, it was wise not to try to work off too large a chunk of punishment in one go, a bitter lesson I learned during my first session in the Glory Hole where, after thirteen minutes of struggling to work off a quarter of an hour, my throbbing shoulder muscles weakened and I could no longer keep my quivering arms from drooping an inch or two. Brother Bernard’s voice echoed from the back of the chapel ‘Get out, LaPointe!’ and I got no credit for the thirteen minutes of torment...well, about seven or eight minutes of torment. The first five minutes weren’t all that bad.
Failure to work off your time and get your name out of the punishment book by the first of the month meant that you couldn’t go into the exercise yard during recess. Instead, you had to sit in the library under the eyes of a Brother, but you couldn’t read. Just sit there, silent. You also had to report to the library to sit in silence from noon to one-thirty each Sunday, thus missing out on Sunday dinner, which was the best meal of the week. In addition, you lost ‘all privileges’. At first, I couldn’t imagine what these elusive ‘privileges’ could be. I had come just after Christmas, so I didn’t know that there was a party and presents and cake to celebrate the birth of Our Savior, or that amateur performers came from the city once a month to give us a Saturday evening ‘concert’ in which local church choirs sang at us, or a man-and-wife team did ‘dramatic readings’ of poems and bits of novels, or a man who owned several reels of film and a projector would show us flickering silent films of the explosion of the Hindenburg zeppelin, and a parade of men in old-fashioned uniforms and plumed hats passing the camera jerkily, and bottles on an assembly line spinning and rushing by as they were filled with some liquid. These opportunities for cranks to display their hobbies and for local hams to inflict their meager talents on a captive audience were the ‘privileges’ you lost if you failed to work off your minutes by the first of the month.
There was a handful of vicious fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds who were so deeply in debt to Brother Bernard that they didn’t even try to catch up; they turned up every afternoon to do a minimal required ‘five’, and let it go at that. They never ate Sunday dinner, never had the privilege of watching some old gal strangle a handkerchief as she sang the ‘Indian Love Song’, in a wobbly soprano, never had a chance to run and shout in the exercise yard. These boys vented their pent-up energy and resentment late at night in the dormitories; they were the punishment teams.
Anne-Marie and I had been separated upon arrival at the orphanage; she was put in the care of nuns in the girls’ wing where, only six years old and having no idea where I was, she cried herself to sleep every night and reverted to bed-wetting, for which she was both ridiculed and punished. She was picked on because she was pretty and vulnerable. Bigger girls yanked her around by her long blonde hair. One afternoon a couple of weeks after we arrived, I was in the tangled mass of boys that ran and hooted and screamed wildly during the pandemonium of our unmonitored exercise periods, when I thought I heard Anne-Marie’s little voice within the chaos. I searched for her among the tight-packed shoal of blue-uniformed girls who used to watch the rampaging boys from their side of the high chain-link fence that separated us, but before I found her the bells rang and we had to run back inside and leave the exercise yard for the girls. I later learned that I had walked right past her while she vainly called my name. I hadn’t heard her through the din of screaming kids, and I failed to recognize her because a nun had cropped her hair in an effort to save her from being tormented by envious girls. She cried all that night, devastated because I had walked right past her, and she might never see me again. But the next day I walked up and down my side of the fence until I found her, and we held fingers through a chain link while she sobbed with a mixture of relief and misery. She leaned against the fence, closed her eyes, and took long slow breaths, drawing in the smell of wool and of boy from my jacket as she slipped into that deep peace that was necessary to her well-being. And that’s how we spent our exercise periods for the next six weeks, pressed against opposite sides of the chain-link fence, until the day we were called into the director’s office and told that we were being sent home. Our mother was well again.
After we got home I learned that the social workers had decided Mother was not healthy enough to qualify as a ‘fit parent’, so we kids would remain at the orphanage until we were sixteen, old enough to get jobs. But Mother unleashed the formidable weapon of her French-’n’-Indian temper to browbeat the astonished social workers into letting us live together again. But next time...
To avoid there being a next time, when Mother got sick again and had to go into a hospital, Anne-Marie and I did everything we could to conceal the fact that we were at home alone. I washed our clothes in the bathtub, and Anne-Marie kept the house tidy, if not clean, and we shared the meal preparation, which relied heavily on
potato soup and peanut butter sandwiches. When I was shopping at Mr Kane’s, I would mention offhandedly that my mother had told me to get this or that, or that she was feeling just fine, thank you...anything to deceive any welfare spies that might be lurking around. Our deception gave me a chance to hone the dramatic skills I had developed by playing all the roles in my story games. When I left the apartment in the morning to walk Anne-Marie to her school before going on to mine, I would stop at the door of our apartment and loudly say something like, “What’s that, Mom? All right, I’ll take care of it. You just get well. I’ll see you this afternoon!” Just in case there were welfare people hiding in the upstairs hall trying to find out if my mother was taking good care of us.
But soon Mother was back with us and life returned to its routine. From time to time, Anne-Marie would wake up crying from a recurrent nightmare that she was back in the orphanage pressed against the chain-link fence, calling my name, but I just walked away and she was left alone. Mother would take her into bed and assure her that everything would be all right. Don’t worry. One of these days our ship will come in and carry us far, far away. When I was very young, I had envisioned Mother’s metaphorical ship pulling in at one of the Hudson River piers and, dressed in matching sailor suits, the three of us would walk up the gangplank and never look back. It was a pleasant and comforting fantasy until one day when Mother was describing the splendid house we would live in when I became rich and famous because I had a high IQ and could invent things, I suddenly realized with an icy sinking in the pit of my stomach that I was the ship my mother was waiting for, and it was my task in life to rescue us from Pearl Street. The weight of this responsibility made me dizzy. I began to involve myself in my story games more intensely.