by June Ahern
Task completed, they snuck into the basement through a side door. It was there they stashed the booty in a trunk filled with old toys and household things.
Before the week ended, Annie’s plan to set up the ironing board in the laundry room to give the girls easy access to the new altar had been put into motion. As Cathy watched the three girls carry the board, iron, and basket of wrinkled clothes downstairs, she wondered aloud what was going on.
“It only makes sense, Mom,” Annie said nonchalantly. “The basement is only steps away from the clothesline. Plus, the dining room will be free of cluttered laundry.”
“Is that right?” Cathy murmured and went back to sweeping the kitchen floor.
As Annie predicted, Jimmy never noticed the altar was set up in the laundry room. She also decreed that June was to cease talking about her visions and angel for the sake of peace in the family.
Grateful for her sister’s help, June readily agreed. “No! Away!” she would say sharply. Dismissing her visions was not as easy. She’d squeeze her eyes shut and shake her head to free her mind of them. Unfortunately, a headache always followed the dismissal.
Maggie was under threat to keep her mouth shut, or suffer the penalty of their father finding out about her make-out sessions with Eddie at the Castro Theater. When Maggie retaliated by saying she’d tell their father about Dave, her sisters banded together and said they’d all deny any knowledge of Annie having a boyfriend.
On Monday morning when June returned to school the elderly music teacher, and not Sister Noel, greeted her. The substitute teacher announced to the class Sister Noel had been called away unexpectedly and she would be teaching the fourth grade for the remaining weeks until summer break. The old nun was kind, although rather dotty and yet, June was still too fearful of creating more trouble to venture an inquiry into Sister Noel’s whereabouts. Numbly, she did as told, finishing schoolwork and housework without question or joy. In time, her father resumed ignoring her and the nuns ceased causing her grief.
On the eve of her tenth birthday, depressed over the events that month, June opted to snuggle in bed rather than pop outside onto the rooftop. The weather had been miserably wet with low-lying fog, making the MacDonalds’ big Victorian house feel cold and damp. That night she dreamt of Sister Noel for the first time. In the dream June was standing close to a blazing bonfire when her Catholic school uniform caught fire. Quickly Sister Noel came to her rescue, beating out the flames and comforting the hysterical girl by cuddling her close. June awoke, her pillow wet with tears and her heart aching for her friend.
In the fifth grade June made no effort to be friendly with her schoolmates and she soon went unnoticed.
The sixth grade at Holy Savior marked a big change for June. Mary’s recent graduation from grammar to high school left June alone without a sister to talk with or protect her. In silence, her unhappiness grew.
Unwilling to forget or forgive Maggie’s betrayal of the secret the sisters had held, a silent feud continued to brew hotly in June’s mind. The two sisters basically avoided each other. June blamed Maggie for bringing an end to one of the happiest times in her life. Soured over the loss of Sister Noel, she no longer found pleasure in sharing her psychic powers. With bitterness, she held onto her misery and the memory of it all ate at her.
Her resentment spilled over to Brian. Their walks home from school were no longer full of jokes, or the hatching of plans for the weekends. Instead, June repeatedly complained about the miseries of the past and her present dull life.
Sick of hearing his friend’s constant complaints, they had their first argument.
“Man, shut up! I can’t stand you anymore, June,” he grumbled between clenched teeth. “Get off your cross about everybody being mean to you.”
“Not everybody,” she said defensively.
They argued back and forth about June’s pitiful “poor, poor-me attitude,” as Brian called her behavior. He mimicked a sad expression and pulled his face downward with his hands, which didn’t humor her. She smacked his hands and started to cry. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her close.
“You’re acting like a quiet little mouse. Going unnoticed isn’t your personality, June. Show them you’re still a spitfire witch,” he advised jokingly.
In time she did ease off the complaining. Soon, the two returned to kidding around and talking about the movies they saw at the Castro on Saturdays. Although June continued to be quiet, she began to participate a bit more in class, especially with art projects. Her art became an expression of the words she no longer spoke and her enthusiasm to share her drawings with Brian gave a lift to their conversations.
Brian didn’t tell her about the darkness he saw in her artwork, with its downcast faces amidst dark clouds and turbulent waters. The drawings made him think of June’s description of how her mother would hide away from the family at times. He thought June must have been suffering from the same inner turmoil.
By the seventh grade, she no longer cared to keep her views on Catholicism quiet. She parroted the nun’s teachings during religious study.
“Jesus left the building of his church to Peter. Men were therefore the leaders, and only they can be priests. They are the head of the Church and women are the heart,” she said before sassily questioning the teacher. “Where does that leave the women of the Church? Are we just to be good little girls and follow without questioning? Why can’t we lead, too?”
Her salty attitude continued throughout the school year. Her report card had checks for “improvement greatly needed” in the conduct section. Cathy hid it from Jimmy, hurriedly signed and returned it to June.
By the time June entered eighth grade, her sisters had become so absorbed with friends and boyfriends she rarely saw them. She found solace in her clandestine trips to the Callaghans. Unlike the MacDonald home, the Callaghan house was open to Jeannie and Brian’s friends. Kids stopped by often, usually when Sadie and Bernice were at work. Any free time she had to spend away from home was with Brian, hanging out in his room reading comic books, playing records, and talking about magical things.
While searching for a soda in the Callaghans’ refrigerator one day, June overhead Jeannie talking to Mary about how there was going to be a worldwide revolution.
“Everything’s changing real fast. Haven’t you noticed even here in The Valley a different kind of people are moving in? There’s a revolution coming,” Jeannie said. Her fingers plucked at the strings of her guitar as she sang a few lines from the song “If I Had a Hammer.”
Mary took a long drag from her cigarette. “Yeah?” she said, blowing perfect smoke rings.
“Sure is. You can always tell the political climate from contemporary art,” Jeannie explained. “Just listen to how the music is changing. People are getting fed up with the oppression of the government. It’s up to us, the younger people, to change society. The sixties will go down in history as a time of revolution. It’ll be a fight.” She stroked her guitar strings.
“Are you taking June’s place with making predictions?” Mary kidded as she opened her large handbag, pulled out a 45 record and put it on the portable record player. The song “Louie, Louie” was soon blasting.
Jeannie’s right about how quickly things are changing, June thought, dwelling on how much her family life had changed. The house felt empty. Jimmy spent more time at Twin Peaks, a bar down on Castro and Market Streets, which would have been fine if he was not so quick to anger when he got home. Urged by Annie, her mother attended secretarial courses at night. Even Annie was now busy day and night. She had taken a job after graduating from high school. After work she would secretly meet Dave. She wasn’t ready for him and her father to meet in fear Jimmy would disapprove of her boyfriend. Popular Maggie, more focused on her busy love life than school, helped only minimally with housework and spent every free moment gossiping on the telephone. Mary, whose busy life was kept mostly secret, only caught up with The Valley’s gossip with June while they lay
in bed at night.
June popped off the cap from the 7-Up bottle she had taken from the refrigerator and poured two tall glasses of the soda. She didn’t understand what kind of changes Jeannie meant, but it sounded exciting to become part of a fight for a cause.
In the summer of June’s thirteenth-year, her menstrual flow started. When Mary learned of it, she immediately took charge of educating her.
“You’re a woman now, so I’ve got to tell you some things,” she told June. She then set up her little sister with a box of Kotex and a belt to attach a pad to, and told her about sex.
“Be careful because you could get knocked up,” she warned her sister, before describing the sexual act necessary to conceive a baby.
June listened wide-eyed. “That’s sick! I’m never going to do that,” she declared.
They never discussed what June later experienced with the onslaught of her monthly bleeding––intense mood swings that rapidly changed from high to low. And each month, two days before her cycle started, a recurring dream occurred. In it she stood in front of a full-length mirror talking to her own image, except the reflection was of her at an older age. The red hair and blue eyes with small nose and cupid lips matched her own features, but the reflection was of an older female in her early twenties. Each time the older female repeated the same message to her, “Someday you and I will know why we see each other.” Though puzzled by it, June was also relieved that she would someday gain an understanding of her visions.
During one especially gloomy mood in the eighth grade, June disturbed her class by spewing forth her utter disbelief that Our Lady had a virgin birth. Loudly, she scoffed at the “Catholic miracle.”
“It’s not possible for a woman to get pregnant without having sex,” she ranted to the class before getting cut short by the nun.
Fueled by June’s rebellious stance, her teacher’s pencil-thin lips quivered in anger and her fat face, encased in the tight headdress, become redder. She calmed herself. “I know of your reputation of criticizing the Church and our religion. I will not tolerate impertinence in my class, Miss MacDonald.”
Her sacrilegious opinions flourished with her newfound audience. Some of her classmates also began to voice their doubts about their religious beliefs.
An especially quiet student inquired about Jesus. “In the Ten Commandments it says kids are supposed to honor their parents. Jesus disobeyed His stepfather Joseph by wandering off to be with the rabbis instead of going home. And because He didn’t follow the Jewish religious leaders or the laws of the country, He was crucified. Even though it sounds like He caused a lot of trouble, He became one of the world’s most important religious leaders. Sister, should we follow what God tells us, or do as the Church says?”
Then the girl voted to crown Our Lady that coming May Day also had a question. “When Jesus was crucified why do you think it was His women followers who were there for Him and not His men apostles?”
Sister replied by saying how dangerous it would have been for the apostles to show support. They were slated to be the builders of Jesus’ Church and had to stay safe. She reminded the class that Jesus had one faithful male supporter at His crucifixion.
June interrupted before she could continue. “Would you say the women were braver and more loyal than the apostles, Sister?”
Her rebellious uprising was squashed with a command from her teacher to see Mother Superior.
June walked confidently to the school office and handed Mother Superior her teacher’s note. She stood still in front of the principal’s desk with her arms at ease at her sides and a shadow of a smirk on her face. The November rain tinkled in a gutter outside.
Mother Superior watched June with stern reproach. “You are trying our patience, Miss MacDonald. If you continue to do so, there will be grave consequences,” she warned.
The student’s defiant stare did not waver. The principal was all too familiar with such attitude from trouble-rousing students throughout the years.
She pondered the girl’s Achilles heel. “Perhaps a meeting with your father is in order. Is that what you want?” Mother Superior coolly asked.
“No, Mother,” June said shrinking away from the threatening words and her fear of her father’s rage.
Suddenly, the school secretary barged into the office, crying loudly, “Oh my God, the president’s been shot!”
Mother Superior sprang up from her chair and gasped, “Mother of God!” She fingered her rosary beads hanging at her side.
“You are dismissed. Go back to class,” she said curtly. She waved June out of the office and closed the door behind her.
The tragic assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November of 1963 was mourned worldwide, although not as greatly as it was by the citizens of the United States. Even Jimmy sniffled tears, while Cathy wept openly.
June had liked the handsome president and his popular wife, Jackie. Watching the funeral on television, she was brought to tears when the president’s young son, John John, bid farewell to his father with a salute. She confided to Brian if only someone, like the holy woman Hildegard of Bingen, had a vision that predicted the impending danger, perhaps Kennedy would have been saved and the visionary would have been seen as a hero.
Her comment gave Brian an idea on how June could redeem herself. “I bet if you had a vision and saved someone, your Dad and the nuns would see you like one of those holy women you talk about,” he said.
“That’s kinda stupid, Brian,” she said. “Besides, I don’t get visions anymore.”
Her friend’s suggestion stayed with her and gingerly she opened her mind. Praying to Hildegard as well as to the goddess Juno, she asked for a worthwhile vision to tell her if she was to become a savior. Her petition for a vision was answered later that week.
June slouched low in her chair at the kitchen table. She covered an ear in hopes of keeping out the sound of her father reading aloud from the Sunday newspaper, The San Francisco Examiner. She then began the process of sending a telepathic message, just as Sister Noel had taught her to do. First she imaged her father’s lips shut tight, reading the paper silently. Seeing that clearly, she next sent the clairaudio message of “quiet.” The last part of the process was to send a feeling, which she decided would be “calm,” opposite to the jumpy gurgles in her stomach.
Jimmy snapped back the newspaper and folded it, then meticulously creased it into a quarter section. He adjusted his eyeglasses, cleared his throat and continued the front-page article about the assault and battery of two men at Dolores Park the previous Friday.
“The police arrested three boys and one girl. There’s a warrant out for another young man. Oh, oh! Two of the boys are the O’Hara brothers from Eureka Valley. Isn’t the youngest one an altar boy at Holy Savior?” Jimmy inquired to Cathy’s back.
Cathy cracked an egg into the frying pan and shrugged an indifferent answer, knowing quite well that Billy O’Hara had been an altar boy in their parish before joining his older brother, Mickey, at a Catholic boy’s high school. Recalling the mayhem her own brothers had caused while altar boys in Glasgow, she held her tongue and refrained from telling Jimmy that being an altar boy was not a guarantee that a lad would be good.
“He was, Daddy. Now he goes to Sacred Heart,” Maggie answered him as she picked up a sausage to nibble.
“Use your fork, young lady,” Cathy said flipping the egg onto to a plate. “Jimmy, this isn’t a very nice conversation at breakfast, especially right after Mass.”
He continued, “It says that the oldest O’Hara repeatedly hit Dwayne Smith with a baseball bat while the other brother and another kid knocked Cedric Nottingham to the ground, kicking him unconscious. Sounds like a right dandy name. It says both men that were attacked are residents of Church Street.”
Reading from the paper, he continued, “Let’s see, it also says, ‘They were taken to San Francisco General Hospital where Mr. Smith remains in a coma. He’s on the critical list. If he dies that’ll be a mur
der charge. Carmen O’Connell drove the getaway car. A woman driver. No wonder they didn’t get away.”
In disgust at Jimmy’s personal views, Cathy tsk-tsked while dodging the flying oil spitting from the sizzling bacon.
Paraphrasing the long article he said, “O’Hara said that it was an older boy who came up with the idea to ‘bash some queers.’ They drove around drinking beers the older boy bought and when they saw these two men near Dolores Park, they followed them, asking if they were queers. It says Nottingham shouted back, ‘What if we are, you punks.’ Sounds like these men challenged the boys. No wonder they were upset.”
Jimmy flicked the page and pulled it straight. He slurped his tea and continued, “That’s when an argument ensued. The boys got out of the car with two baseball bats, demanding an apology. When Mr. Nottingham tried to grab a bat, a fight broke out. I’d say them fags…”
“Please. That word.” Cathy tut-tutted reproachfully as she slid a fried egg onto Mary’s plate alongside three sausages. “Still, it’s a shame those two men were hurt.”
“They’re homosexuals. That’s a sin against God,” he declared.
“What’s a homo…” June interrupted him, pushing away her plate with remnants of scrambled eggs.
“Ho, ho it gets worse,” Jimmy spoke over her. “It says, ‘A warrant has been issued for Douglas (Mad Dog) Dougherty, the man responsible for buying the beer.’ Seems he’s already got a criminal record for violence.”
Annie gasped loudly when she heard Dave’s brother Douglas––Mad Dog––was involved. He had just gotten out of prison and Dave was trying to help him stay straight, though he had said that Mad Dog had been bad news since they were kids. Dave had suspected more trouble for his brother in the future.
Jimmy peered at Annie over the top of his bifocals and the newspaper. Her sisters ducked their heads, not wanting to get involved.