by Greg O'Brien
DA-DING, DA-DING, DA-DING.
The first ding ordered us to stop in motion. Instantly. Didn’t matter if you were in the air, mid-sentence, or taking a pee in the hedges: you held the position. The second ding was a call to line up in silence like prisoners of war; the third ding heralded our entrance to the cellblock, err, school. All in stillness, mind you, looking straight ahead. The nuns excoriated the boys that there was to be no staring down at the shiny patent leather shoes of coeds to see their undergarments in reflection. Of course, none of us had ever thought that was possible, but what a great freakin’ idea.
In class, we had 30 to 40 kids packed to a room, and hardly anyone stepped out of line. There were always exceptions. The nuns, with cold stares, would burn your retinas with a force that would frost a lawn. In the first grade, Sister Syra took no prisoners. If you were out of line, you were hung out to dry in the “clothes cupboard.” Literally. In those days, the blue blazers had collar loops made of tin, and if you acted out, Sister Syra hung you on a cupboard hook like a piece of meat until your mom claimed you at the end of school, or if you happened to have a more modern blazer, the ones with a cloth loop, you were relegated to a crouch position under her desk. The discipline, while clearly over the top and flirting with abuse, had a stinging influence on me. I was afraid to go to class and skipped school one day in the first grade, hiding out in a side altar of church, one designated for Our Lady of Perpetual Help. The nuns, realizing I was AWOL went nuts. My mom was called, and the boy hunt was on. Mom ultimately determined that I was probably hiding in a pew. In short order, I was returned to class.
Second grade with amicable Sister Monica was a slide, but third grade and beyond was a call to arms. Sister Timothy would slap you silly in the mind; Sister Anthony in the fourth grade sported a moustache, and I thought I saw her once on a black-and-white television heavyweight wrestling match against champion Bruno Sammartino from Abruzzi, Italy; and Sister Joseph in the eighth grade, a long, thin women who looked remarkably like the Wicked Witch of the East, could cut right to the heart!
“I’ll get you, my little pretties, and your little dogs, too!”
I still recoil at the thought of what seemed like a long, bony index finger, the length of a tractor trailer in my young imagination, reaching down a row of desks to pluck by the chin an insubordinate and carry them, on the sheer strength of hand ligaments, all the way to the front of the class for a holy thrashing, then a trip to the principal’s office for yet another ceremonial kick in the ass.
Our classroom was a cattle call with the likes of incorrigible Jimmy Dianni, my alter ego in some ways, a guy who rose later in life to the position of lieutenant and chief fire inspector in the Rye Fire Department.
Dianni’s foil was a classically awkward, blameless kid of the day; let’s call him Liam Kelley, to protect the innocent. Kelley likely now heads up a Fortune 500 company, but Mom always felt sorry for him; she had a heart for the muddled and affronted. We’ve all had them in class, and many of us will do hard time in Purgatory for not coming to their relief. But as Divine or dumb luck would have it, the nuns always found a way to fuse the two—Dianni and Kelley, repelling magnets. I looked on as a voyeur just for the mere fascination of it.
Serendipity, possibly, but it all started in the fourth grade when Dianni, a freckled-faced, slightly chubby boy, hurled, for some enigmatic reason, his tattered brown book bag, the kind with silver metal corners at the bottom, into a crowded playground. Perhaps he was just mad at his mother. But who did it hit right in the squash? Kelley! Was it by design? Maybe just dumb freakin’ luck? But, game on!
****
Halloween, no doubt, was in the air late on a Friday afternoon in October in the early 1960s. Dead, fallen oak leafs were swept by a coastal wind across the asphalt parking lot at Resurrection, like screaming pucks at a hockey practice, as the nuns herded us from the bulky red brick school building to Resurrection Church for weekly hymn practice for the obligatory 10 am Sunday Mass, which students and families were all expected to attend; the nuns took names at the church door. At this particular Friday practice, Sister Aloysius was orchestrating like Leonard Bernstein—spine upright, arms pumping in baton-like fashion, thick white-matted hair beneath her black bonnet. We filed into the church like lambs to a slaughter; no one was allowed to speak; we were entering “Oz” after all. We were warned: Nobody talks to the Wizard. God has the whole world in his hands, and frankly, there’s no room for you. So, buck up, just sit in silence, pray the Rosary, hope you’re not struck by lightning, and listen up for further orders. I got it, but Jimmy missed it.
For some delightful reason, maybe the sheer pleasure of it, the nuns positioned Dianni in a pew next to Kelley, who sat unaffected up against a granite pillar that rose from the floor to the roof of the church that seemed to us the height of the Empire State Building. On this particular Friday, I was sitting to the left of Dianni; Kelley was to the right of him, plumb against a cold stone pillar with enough room between the pew and pillar for a small pumpkin. We were rehearsing the hymn Army of God in full, uplifted voice:
And I hear the sound of the coming rain,
As we sing the praise to the Great I Am
And the sick are healed, and the dead will rise
And your church is the army that was prophesied
As the chorus reached its holy peak, and the Lord’s grace was raining down on us, we could hear a piercing cry from the back of the church.
“Get my head out! Get my head out!”
Kelley had dropped his hymnal between the pew and the pillar, and Dianni obliged on cue by wedging Kelley’s head between them.
“Get my head out!” Kelley yelled in a voice that overpowered the saints.
“Dianni, you fuck, get my head out!”
The sisters were apoplectic. They raced to the back of the church as if someone had just burned down a convent full of nuns. At the scene of the crime, a decision was made to call in church sexton, John Quinn—a gnarly man with a brogue as thick as Guinness and looking a bit like Bilbo Baggins in Lord of the Rings. He was asked to pry the swelled head loose. With the sturdy hands of an apostle rebuking the devil himself, Quinn safely extracted the head intact.
“It’s free, it’s free!” he declared, having snatched Kelley’s head from what all had feared were the jaws of death.
With baton still in hand, and looking as if she had just witnessed a vomit scene from The Exorcist, Sister Aloysius tersely dismissed hymn practice. “I think we’ve sung enough today!” she said, the pleats of her habit swaying with a shake of her knees.
The imbroglio ensued, and I looked on in awe of Jimmy, yet with a guilt of Jesuit proportions, but I knew that Kelley would have his day. Witnessing the conflict refined me in calculation of character, moments in long-term memory that I can never forget. It is reassuring for me. Months later, with 38 students sandwiched in math class, authoritarian Sister Joseph ended the session with a repressive homework assignment from our Progress In Arithmetic textbook. The room groaned as if crushed by a school bus. Dianni, sitting again next to Kelley, goaded him to protest, and Sister Joseph became enraged at the class defiance.
“Add to your assignment,” she ordered, “the worksheet at the end of chapter two!” she ordered.
The moans continued with Kelley leading the charge.
“And just for that, copy all the times tables in the back of the book, three times!” Sister Joseph declared, as if challenge by the underworld.
The wailing subsided, although some laments could still be heard. Dianni prodded Kelley again for a response. Kelley was waiting to pounce.
“Fine,” Sister Joseph screamed, the veins in her neck popping, that long index finger poised. “We’re gonna have a test tomorrow on the first four chapters!”
There was a frightening silence. Sister Joseph had prevailed.
Not so quick. Dianni looked at Kelley, Kelley looked at Dianni, and then Kelley cried out, “Ah shit!”
The wo
rds echoed throughout the classroom. Sinewy Sister Joseph sprinted to the back of the room and pounced like a linebacker. What was left of Kelley seconds later was sent to the principal’s office.
But God is good, justice is certain, and in Dublin, one never gets mad, right? Kelley retaliated in time.
****
A rite of passage at Resurrection in the seventh grade was the day students moved up from writing in lead pencil to fountain pen, filled to the brim of the cartridge with blue India ink. A successor of the dip-pen that Ben Franklin once used to sign the Declaration of Independence, the fountain pen had a stainless steel or gold nib that washed a wave of ink onto a page. You had to write fast, or the ink flooded; a practical reality that may have taught us Baby Boomers to think quicker when writing.
A bottle of precious blue India ink rested on the oak eraser ledge below the blackboard, and one approached the ledge for refilling the fountain pen with all the reverence of standing before the Holy Grail. The nuns had taught us that it was a mystical privilege to write in blue ink. One day in the seventh grade, I saw Kelley in line for ink; he had the look of a gunman, as the rest of the class sat passively in their seats, blue jackets off, white shirts exposed. Kelley filled the cartridge slowly and deliberately, getting every ounce possible into the reservoir. He turned with intent, walked down the middle aisle toward Dianni’s desk, his eyes affixed to the back of the room so as not to draw attention. Passing Dianni, still in stride, he waved his pen in a fierce jerky motion in front of Dianni’s new clean white shirt, the one his mother had warned him not to soil. In an instant, a large “Z,” the size of the Mark of Zorro, was indelibly imprinted on Dianni’s shirt. Kelley, in the role of the swashbuckling Don Diego de la Vega, a.k.a. Zorro, had left his mark on Dianni, now the dupe, and relegated to the role of Sergeant Demetrio López García.
Nobody messes with Zorro. Class dismissed.
Seasoned altar boys, Jimmy (in his makeshift pinstripe shirt) and I immediately fled for the sanctuary of the church—not for the confessional, but to light up incense in a closet of a room off the sanctuary. The Catholic Church interprets the burning of incense as a symbol of the Prayer of the Faithful, rising to Heaven, a purification process. The incense is burned in a metal container called a thurible, to be dispensed in three ritual swings for the Trinity. The imagery is recorded in Psalm 141:2, “Let my prayer be directed as incense in thy sight: the lifting up of my hands, as evening sacrifice.”
But Jimmy and I weren’t there for the prayer. We just liked the smell of the stuff. Besides, as captain of the school safety patrol and altar boy Master of Ceremonies, a position in the church pecking order akin to Michael the Archangel, I had access to the room. Keys to the Kingdom. It pleased my mother; she was also proud of the way we held sway with the nuns at Mass. Jimmy taught me to hold the gold-plated altar communion plate just above the Adam’s apple of nuns queued up for communion. When the sisters lined up, we would press the plate gently against their throats, just to let them know we were there. A presence almost as good as a supernatural power.
Jimmy always has been a presence with me. Fifty years later, when he learned that I had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he called to express his love and support; he promised me that he wasn’t going to treat me any differently. It was music to my ears. He ended the conversation with a play on Alzheimer’s: “Remember, buddy, you still owe me a hundred bucks!” I’ve passed the exchange along to other friends, who have responded in kind, “You owe me a hundred bucks, too! And don’t forget it.”
Bada-bing, bada-boom.
****
The boom came in October 1962 with the Cuban missile crisis of the Cold War, a 13-day war of words between the U.S., the Soviet Union, and its ally Cuba—a Russian roulette among titans of the day—Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro, and John F. Kennedy. No one was ready to blink.
Two months earlier, after unsuccessful covert U.S. operations to overthrow Castro through a failed Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose, the Cubans and Soviets secretly began constructing medium-range and intermediate-range ballistic nuclear missile bases with the ability to strike most of the continental U.S. Photo reconnaissance captured proof. It is generally regarded as the moment the world came closest to nuclear holocaust. After rejecting tactics of attacking Cuba by air and sea, the Kennedy brain trust opted for a naval blockade of Cuba—no Soviet ship would be allowed to enter Cuban waters. In a letter to Kennedy, Khrushchev called the blockage “an act of aggression, propelling humankind into the abyss of a world nuclear-missile war.”
“Ah, shit!” as Kelley would say.
On October 25, 1962, the Soviet ships were steaming just off Cuba, and the U.S. was not standing down. We were on the edge of extinction, we thought. The nuns were abuzz with images of Armageddon, and tuned-in transistor AM radios throughout Resurrection for the holy unwashed to hear. Last call for us, and no one had passed the height line yet at the Five Points. After wet-your-pants radio reports and a mock class exercise of duck and cover under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack (as if to vaporize us in a position of kissing our asses goodbye), the bell rang to end school, and we all spilled out of the building like flushing tap water, down the second floor stairs, to the first floor, heading to the back door. Billy St. John and I then hung a quick right to the basement.
“Where are you guys going?” cautioned Tony Keating, a life-long friend, who walked home with us every day. “Keats, we’re going to the basement to get ready for the boys’ basketball team tryouts,” replied Billy.
Few seventh graders had ever made the eighth-grade team, and Billy and I were on the precipice of greatness, hoping Coach Pete McHugh would tap us.
Keating stopped us in our tracks. “Where do you want to be when the bomb drops? On the basketball court with Mr. McHugh, or home with your parents where you belong?”
The logic was unassailable. And so, like lemmings, we followed Keating down Milton Road to safe haven. When I got home, I hugged my mom, and then went to my room to pray.
“Dear God, not now, please not now!”
Prayers were answered. The next day, no bomb. Kennedy and Khrushchev had agreed in back-channel negotiations that the Soviets would dismantle offensive weapons in Cuba, and the U.S., in return, would agree not to invade Cuba and dismantle missiles in Turkey and Italy. Still, Billy and I were cut from the eighth-grade team for missing practice and racing home to pray. A small price, I suppose, for saving the world.
Prayer was always a part of the daily routine at Resurrection, drilled into our thick “cabezas” through all the smoke and mirrors of Mad Magazine and Playboy centerfolds. Every May, we had special devotions to the Blessed Virgin Mary, honoring the mother of Christ as the “Queen of May,” a ritual that dated back to the 16th century. We were all schooled in the virginity of Mary, and many of us, at the direction of the priests, nuns, and our parents, wore scapulars—the Blue Scapular of the Immaculate Conception, scratchy cloth images of the Blessed Virgin that were suspended over the chest and the back by thin twine. While often causing a rash, the scapular came with a sacred promise, known as the Sabbatine Privilege, that the Blessed Virgin, through special intercession on the Saturday after the death of a devotee, would personally liberate and deliver the soul from Limbo.
I was all over that.
On May Day, the nuns instructed us to write private letters to the Blessed Virgin, our personal prayer requests, nothing to be held back. It was to be a solemn exercise. We were then assembled, as if awaiting the Rapture, at the rear of the parking lot behind the church, in front of a tall granite statue of the Blessed Virgin. At the base of the statue was a large wire bin into which we tossed our prayers to Mary. Then, Sexton Quinn, on orders, lit the prayers on fire, and we all watched our words drift up to Heaven in the smoke. I could see them.
Still can.
Each year, I had the same prayer: that my mom and dad would live forever.
10
FORGET-ME-NOTS
IN THE SPRING ON BROOKDALE PLACE, THE FORGET-ME-NOTS bloomed like a botanical garden, a sea of soothing pastels that kindle the memory. The Greeks called the flower Myosotis, translated “mouse’s ear,” an allusion to the shape of its leaf. Who could ever forget a patch of ensuring Forget-Me-Nots, delicate five-lobed blue, pink or white flowers with yellow centers? German folklore says the Almighty once overlooked the petite plant in naming all the other flowers. Legend suggests that one of the tiny lobes cried out, “Forget-me-not, Oh Lord.” To which God replied, “That shall be your name.”
Often in life, we remember the diminutive. Henry David Thoreau wrote of Forget-Me-Nots, “It is the more beautiful for being small and unpretending; even flowers must be modest.”
I grew up in a modest neighborhood where memories last forever. Forever is a long time, yet in a long-term memory, it’s a place of persistent peace, a steadfast mooring when the swift high tides of life pull one to treacherous waters where memory implores the brain: forget me not.
****
It took forever in Rye for our stickball games to end on Brookdale Place. Used to drive my mother nuts, as she tried diligently to prepare dinner in two shifts for ten. Most of the time was taken up trying to find the errant ball in Phil Clancy’s shrubs or Mr. Androtti’s ivy, or secure another broom handle for a bat when we had exhausted our stash. I used to sneak broom handles out of the rectory at Resurrection Church, telling Bridie, the matronly Irish woman who cared for the priests, that I needed another broom to sweep the sidewalks for Monsignor McGowan.
Bridie was a tough Gaelic doyenne; it was difficult to discern her age from the deep crevices in her face and her youthful voice. She was always accommodating, but she intuitively knew that I was up to something, yet seemed to enjoy the repartee. After securing another boom, I always tried to do something helpful on my way out of the rectory, like putting a plate away in the kitchen or a glass back on another shelf, usually a spot where Bridie had just baked a stack of chocolate chip cookies.