The Case Against My Brother

by Libby Sternberg

  Now those jokes seemed sour. I should have been keeping more of an eye on him. Back in Baltimore, we’d go to Mass together—me, Adam, and Ma. We’d go to the mid-morning Low Mass and sit together in the third pew on the right. While Ma prayed her Rosary, I’d look around for my friends. Sometimes Esther and her family came to that Mass, too.

  On this Sunday, I nearly made myself sick with concern, sneaking food up to Adam, watching the street for signs of Miller, and worrying about Briggs’s story. Maybe Adam had been right, and Briggs would betray us. I wasn’t used to being in charge, and no doubt I was making all kinds of mistakes I wasn’t even aware of.

  To make matters worse, Pete came home from church angry.

  “Carl Casimir Matuski, come down here this instant!” he shouted, bursting through the front door.

  Signaling to Adam to be quiet, I closed the bedroom door behind me and scurried down the stairs to Pete.

  He was standing at the foot of the steps, his hands on his hips. He still had on his Sunday best—a clean pair of brown trousers and a rumpled herring-bone coat. The fingers of his right hand held a dark gray fedora.

  “You like your job—at the Academy?” Pete asked me, his moustache quivering. His face was white and his eyes blazed with irritation.

  “Yeah. . . I guess. . .” I answered, not sure where this was heading.

  “You know it’s a good school run by good sisters?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you know why it’s important to have such a school?”

  I nodded again. Catholic schools taught the Catholic religion. Was that what Pete meant?

  His jaw muscles rippled. His voice was hard and cold when he spoke again.

  “The little ones up the street—the Petrovich girls—they went to the city school,” he continued. “The teachers there tried to make all the kids, including the twins, say the same prayers and sing the same hymns—ones the girls don’t sing at church.”

  The Petrovich twins were about five years younger than me.

  He raised his hand in defiance, shaking his finger at me. “The Petrovich girls—they would not say the school prayers. They said the prayers your mother said—the prayers I said this morning at Holy Mass!” His voice trembled and filled the room. “And you know what the teacher did? He beat them—hit them on their hands, and made them bleed! In front of the whole class!”

  The Petrovich girls were sweet little things. How could anyone think they were bad enough to punish like that, especially when all they’d done was pray a certain way? What had happened to the world when I wasn’t paying attention? It was one thing to try and pass a stupid law. It was quite another to smack little girls for their religious beliefs. My fists balled and my muscles stiffened.

  Abruptly, Pete stopped, his face contorted, his eyes rolling upward. “I told Mrs. Petrovich I would go talk to the teacher, but she will not let me,” he said in a tight voice. I knew he would have done more than talk. “I should go anyway!” He hit the banister with his fist.

  I felt like I was seeing something I wasn’t meant to see, and it bothered me. My uncle was confessing to weakness. He regretted not giving that teacher a dose of his own medicine. It had to make Pete feel like a coward, not setting the man straight because a woman had insisted. I could understand that feeling—wondering whether you had given in because you thought it was right or because you were afraid. I wanted to pummel that teacher myself. I wanted to beat up all these bullies trying to make folks like us something we weren’t. Yet here I stood, as powerless as Pete.

  He calmed down and looked at me.

  “I help out now. I give money to send the girls to St. Mary’s.” He grabbed my chin and forced me to look at him. “Why did you tell your boss there you had no time to take down those papers about the woman who claims to be an ‘escaped nun’? Huh? What’s so important you can’t spend an hour helping put out the lies those people say about us? That—that woman—will speak this week to hundreds of people. Hundreds! And you could have helped keep people from hearing her. Just a simple favor your boss asked of you. A simple favor you could not do.”

  So that was why he was so angry at me. Pete must have talked to Lester after Mass. Lester was no tattler, so my guess was the story came out innocently enough. Maybe, when Pete and Lester started planning how to stop the school vote, Pete volunteered me to help out. Lester would have probably mentioned how I couldn’t spare the time, because I’d turned down the chance to remove posters when I was there the other day.

  My face hurt where Pete’s fingers pinched into the skin.

  “Nobody can believe that stuff,” I said to Pete in my defense, just as I’d told Lester. But I knew better. People did believe it. And my voice sounded like I didn’t mean it.

  My uncle snorted in disgust.

  I was confused, alone, and afraid, and didn’t want to be. “I had to help Adam,” I finally said, tired of lying. “I really was busy. I’ll help out later. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.”

  Pete looked at me a long time and sighed. He muttered a curse—“Psiakrew”—and closed his eyes for a moment.

  “I know you love your brother,” he said at last, “but you do what Lester asks or I’ll take the switch to you. If you don’t help out, there might not be a job left for you at that school because there won’t be a school at all. . .”

  I didn’t care that much about losing my job at St. Mary’s. After all, I hoped to be working back in Baltimore in short order. No, St. Mary’s’ fate didn’t bother me as much as what the school’s troubles meant to my more pressing problem. If people were riled up enough against Catholics to close their schools and hurt little girls, then what hope did Adam have in my fight to prove his innocence?

  Chapter Nine

  All that day and night, I thought of the story my uncle had told about the little Petrovich girls and the city school. They were little angels with hair the color of autumn leaves whose corkscrew curls bounced when they ran. They were always full of fun and smiles, and not for one second could I see them as troublemakers or disobedient pupils in need of a harsh lesson.

  I saw them sitting in a classroom, practically swallowed up by their desks, taunted by a bully of a teacher with a knuckle-rapping ruler in his hand. I wondered if the teacher had made fun of their name, and talked about “St. Caviar.” I wondered how I would have felt if my teacher had shamed me that way, especially in front of my brother. And I felt as Pete must have felt—my hands clenching into fists, eager to take on that teacher and teach him a lesson or two.

  Pete didn’t say much to me the rest of the day. On Sundays, he tried to cook something special, but all he made for supper that day was potato pie. I couldn’t look at him. Every time I did, I saw his disappointment. I started to think I was turning into something bad by not living up to his expectations for me, and I wanted that to stop. Maybe that’s how it happens—you turn bad little by little, by not doing things you’re supposed to do or doing things you’re not supposed to do. And then when you notice, it’s too late.

  On Monday, I woke up with a nervous ball in the pit of my stomach. I felt like I’d eaten something rotten and had to keep swallowing to stop myself from spitting up. As I waited to read the evening paper, I didn’t know how I’d manage to get through the day.

  But I had more immediate things to worry about. I had to go work at the Academy or Pete would be angry, and I had to make sure Adam was safe for the day.

  The house was quiet when I woke up. Pete was already at work. The overcast sky was filled with clouds pressing down so far I felt like I could touch them if I stood on tiptoe. The air smelled damp, like rain coming. After getting dressed and drinking a little milk—I couldn’t stomach much of anything else—I nudged Adam awake.

  “I’m going to work,” I whispered. “You stay here and out of sight. I’ll stop home before my paper route. Don’t let Pete see you.” He grunted in agreement and I left.

  When I showed up at the Academy, I came across a timid-l
ooking woman standing at the entrance. She seemed to be Pete’s age, and was neat and prim in a brown dress with matching sweater and hat. She held a piece of paper and a bag out in front of her, and the way she twisted up her mouth made me think she needed help. I was in a hurry, but something about her reminded me of Rose—a slightly forlorn expression and the shimmer of fear in her eyes—so I asked if she needed anything.

  When I spoke, she jumped, so lost in thought that I startled her.

  “Is this how you get to the office of St. Mary’s?” she asked, pointing straight ahead to the front stairway, which led to porticoed doors. I usually went in a side door to meet Lester, but I tipped my hat to her and offered to show her the way.

  “Thank you,” she said, following my lead. As we scurried up the steps, she became friendlier. “This is my first day teaching. Are you a student?”

  At first, I was a little offended that she thought I was young enough to be one of St. Mary’s students. Besides, it was a school for girls. But I brushed it aside—she was nervous, after all, and probably just trying to make conversation.

  “No, ma’am,” I said, holding open the heavy door so she could go through. “I work at the Academy.”

  I pointed her on her way and headed downstairs to Lester to see what work he had for me. I found him sitting on a stool, reading some papers and smoking a cigarette. When I came in, he looked up and smiled.

  The smile put me so at ease, an apology slipped right from my mouth—a genuine one, remorse without shame.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t help out,” I said, twisting my cap in my hands. “With the posters, that is. Do you have any other work like that? I’ll do it on my own time.”

  He stood and placed his hands on his hips and looked around. “I’m going to be re-plastering a wall in the third floor classroom,” he said, sweeping his hand behind him, still clutching the papers. “On the back of the building.” He looked down at the papers and scrunched up his mouth, thinking.

  “Here’s what you can do,” he said slowly, tapping the top of the three pages. “Take this to the printer—as you go into town, there’s one two blocks over and up. Have him run off a hundred copies or so. And then—” He stopped and thought. “Then leave them around town, in stores and such. Anyplace people gather.” He handed me the sheets.

  Confused, I looked them over. It was a “pastoral letter” from the archbishop, about why the proposed School Law was a bad thing. It was the type of thing we usually heard about only in church.

  I looked at Lester. “Do I tell the printer to send the bill to St. Mary’s?”

  He grimaced, shook his head, and pulled some bills from his pocket. “See if they’ll do it for this.” He handed me a wad of money.

  My eyes widened and I stepped back. Lester’s own money—it didn’t seem right to take it, didn’t seem right he had to pay to counter lies about us. As if reading my mind, he said, “That’s money a group of us collected for something like this.” He scratched his chin. “I don’t think any of us could put things better than Archbishop Christie.”

  “I can give some money, too,” I said, wanting to help. I had some coins on me, and I wouldn’t have to tell Adam or Pete what I spent them on.

  “That’s good of you, Carl, but you keep your money.”

  “Maybe the school can give some,” I said eagerly. “They just hired a new teacher. They must be doing all right.” I told him how I’d run into a woman on the way in, but instead of cheering Lester, this news had the opposite effect—he sighed and slowly shook his head.

  “That would be Elsa Richter. She used to teach at the public school in your neighborhood. They fired her out when they found out her own children didn’t go there.”

  My jaw dropped open. “Who fired her?”

  “The Ku Klux Klan. They made things bad for her—bad for the people who hired her.” He didn’t say any more and turned to pick up his wooden toolbox.

  But I stood stock still, trying to think of something to convince him he had to be wrong, or exaggerating. I still didn’t want to believe that people would be so quick to judge, to do others harm. Yes, I’d come to see how easily some could be fooled by “Sister Lucretia” or The Old Cedar School. But here was an example of folks going from foolish thoughts to mean-spirited action.

  “The Klan,” I said at last, “can’t be that powerful.”

  Lester gave out a laugh, but there was no mirth in it. “Our next governor may well be a Klansman,” he said. “He’s running real strong right now.”

  He came over and patted me on the shoulder. “You do that chore for me and call it a day, son.”

  “But the plastering. . .?”

  “It’s a one-man job. I’ll tell the sisters you’re running errands for the school.”

  I placed my cap back on and left. As I found my way to the printer, I took the time to more carefully read the letter in my hands. Archbishop Christie made the case for why the Catholic schools were just as good as the public ones—why they were just as “American.” He used six points to prove it, but they didn’t make me feel any better—only worse.

  Catholic schools were “absolutely American,” he wrote, because “their history” was American, “their curriculum” was American, “their teachers” were American, and “their pupils” were American. He even emphasized this point by saying in big capital letters that ENGLISH was the language spoken in these schools, even though they taught kids with different nationalities. “The ideals” of these schools were American, and even their mottos (“For God and country”) were American.

  I stepped up my pace and puckered my lips into a grim frown. The archbishop shouldn’t have to write that stuff. My free hand balled into a fist. Why didn’t people know these things already? It was a humiliation to have to write it all out! The archbishop was lowering himself to say these things, practically pleading with folks to accept Catholic schools as being just as good as public ones. He shouldn’t have to do that, and a big part of me wished he hadn’t—it humiliated me.

  I would do as Lester asked me, but I wasn’t at all happy or proud to pitch in this way.

  Doing the job took me into late afternoon. While I waited for the printer to finish, I walked around town pulling “Sister Lucretia” advertisements from poles and walls. Lester and his friends had done a good job getting most of them, but I found a good half-dozen in my search. Then I spent some time waiting for the ink to dry on the letters the printer had run through his noisy machine.

  Time crawled by as slow as tugboats in the harbor, and I wasn’t in the mood to rush it. As I left the letters on counters and tables at stores and restaurants, I carried my anger with me. I borrowed a few tacks from the printer and even put some of the letters up where I’d found the “Sister Lucretia” posters earlier, taking a righteous satisfaction in clobbering the tacks with a rock as I pounded out my rage.

  When I’d handed out the last of the papers, I felt wrung out, as if I’d worked a long day of hard labor. My muscles ached, and my jaw was stiff from clenching my teeth. It rained softly that afternoon, and the wet, cool air helped revive me. Now I was free to fight my own battles in my own way, and that meant finding the evening newspaper. It had to be out by now, and the closest place to see it was a store across the street from the Academy.

  I ran faster than I’d ever run before. I was so desperate to see the Telegram that I plunked down my own hard-earned coins for a copy, even though I’d be picking up a stack of newspapers to deliver in a few minutes.

  Heart racing, I scanned the front page. Nothing. My hopes sank. Walking home to check in on Adam, I flipped through page after page, searching for Briggs’s story. Had he given up, thought better of it, decided it was no story at all?

  “Hey, watch it!” a tall man with an umbrella cried out as I ran into him.

  “Sorry,” I said. Frowning, I stopped and looked through the rest of the paper.

  And there, at last, I saw it. On the front page of the city section, in big, fat bl
ack letters: “CATHOLIC BOY FALSELY ACCUSED?” I breathed out a welcome sigh of relief. Here, at last, was an argument I was comfortable with. It wasn’t the pleading defensiveness of the archbishop, but an attack on those who were attacking us! Thank God for Vincent G. Briggs! Thank God for the Telegram!

  With each word I read, my spirits rose. Briggs had not only written the tale, he’d done it in such a way there could be no doubt Adam was innocent.

  Briggs must have called the Peterson family, because Mr. Peterson was quoted in the story saying he “distrusted that scallywag Matuski from the moment I saw him.” And Briggs discovered that Bernard Peterson, Rose’s brother, did indeed have some financial debts to pay off.

  But what was even more interesting was how Briggs connected the story to the bigger one—the one that Lester and Pete and the archbishop were concerned about.

  “That boy is precisely why we’re having to vote on the School Question,” Mr. Peterson was quoted as saying. “He’s a vagabond and probably a Communist to boot, picking up who-knows-what kind of ideas in that Catholic school he and other poor unfortunates go to.”

  In the article, Briggs explained how the School Question’s supporters wanted all of Oregon’s children forced into one kind of school—public—so they could learn to be “true Americans.” If the measure was approved by voters, St. Mary’s and all other religious schools—even plain old private ones—would be shut down. It would be illegal to attend.

  By the end of the story, you were convinced not only that Adam was innocent, but that he was being singled out because he was a poor Catholic—persecuted by the very same folks who supported the School Question.

  With a broad smile, I sprinted towards home to show the story to Adam.