“Go through it again,” his father said as they came to the end.
They sounded better on the second go-round, more together, and his father improvised on the melody, adding trills and flourishes that weren’t in the written music. Frank wished he knew how to do that.
When they got to the end, they went right back to the beginning without having to say anything. Despite the piano’s less-than-perfect tuning, they sounded terrific. They sounded together. Frank and Dom had never sounded this good.
“You play the melody,” his father said when they came to the end again.
Frank played the written music, picking single notes and strumming single chords. He flubbed a lot of notes, but the next time around he was much better, his father couching his notes in subdued piano chords.
“Okay, go back to the chords,” his father said. This time around, he played louder with a lot of melodramatic feeling, sort of the way he played his other song. When they got to the end, he built up to a thundering crescendo, and they both knew it was time to stop. They each held the last chord so that it hung in the air for a while. They should do this more often, Frank thought.
His father lifted his fingers from the keys. “We got a call from your school today.”
Frank’s jaw drooped. He’d forgotten about that while they were playing. Shit.
“That Mr. Whalley, the disciplinarian. He told us the whole story. Did you really jump out a window?”
Frank mumbled. “Yeah.”
“Like Errol Flynn?”
Frank shrugged. The jig was up. He was fucked.
But his father was laughing. “I didn’t think you did stuff like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You read, you listen to your records, you play guitar. You know what I mean?”
That I’m a candy-ass? Frank thought.
“And is it true, you really told that priest off? The monsignor?”
“Yeah… I guess.” Frank wasn’t sure he wanted to explain everything. His father probably wouldn’t understand.
“I can’t believe you did that.” His father was still smiling, shaking his head as if he were proud.
“You’re not mad?”
He stopped smiling. “Am I supposed to be? Grandpa took the call. He was up here fixing a leaky faucet for your mother. She was out shopping. She doesn’t know anything about this yet. Grandpa told me what that guy Whalley said.”
Frank was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“You should have seen your grandfather. He was clapping his hands, doing a little dance.” His father whispered. “You know how he feels about the church.”
“Yeah, he hates it.”
“He was so happy you told the priest off, he said he’d co-sign on a student loan for you. So you can go away to college.”
“What?” Frank was sure he hadn’t heard that right.
“Yeah, Grandpa really wants you to go to college. Because the priests in Italy screwed him out of going to school. You know that story, the cross and all.”
“Yeah, I know the story.” God, did he know that story.
“So now you can go to the bank and apply for a loan.”
Frank felt a little light-headed. Jesus.
He plucked his high E string a few times. He was afraid to ask this, but he had to know. “But you don’t want me to go to college. Do you?”
“No, you can go.” His father tickled a few high notes on the piano.
“But I thought you didn’t want me to go. I’m confused.”
His father looked up at the ceiling and blew out a long breath. “It’s not that I don’t want you to go. I mean, I don’t want you to go so far away, but…” He shrugged. “What can you do?”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
He plunked out the melody of “Fascination. “Because… because we couldn’t afford it.”
“But I was gonna apply for a student loan—“
He suddenly stopped playing. “You don’t understand,” he snapped, raising his voice. “I can’t co-sign a loan for you. We don’t have any collateral. I went to the bank and checked it out a long time ago when you first started talking about going to college. I don’t own any property. The truck is paid off, but I still owe a lot of money on the car. I’m not a good risk. Grandpa’s the one who owns this house. He has collateral.” He looked down at the keyboard as he played slow single notes with one finger. He seemed ashamed.
Frank felt terrible. He wanted to do something for his father, but he didn’t know what. “You wanna play the song again?”
His father flashed a sad smile and shook his head. “There’s a little catch.”
Frank’s heart sank. He knew it. It was too good to be true.
“Mr. Whalley told Grandpa you’re suspended for the rest of the school year.”
“That’s no big deal. There are only two more days of school.”
“And you can’t go to graduation.”
“I thought they cancelled graduation.”
His father shook his head. “They changed their mind about that. They’re having it, but you can’t go. Your mother’s gonna have a fit.”
Frank sat down on the bench, the guitar on his lap, neck pointed straight up. He had to think about this. Being banned from graduation was bad. Not that he cared all that much about going to a big ceremony to receive his diploma, but his mother was going to be very disappointed. And his grandmother. And what were they going to tell his aunts and uncles? Fuck.
“But that’s not the catch,” his father said.
Frank’s heart thumped. “What’s the catch?”
“This guy Whalley was hopping mad, and he said you weren’t going to get your diploma, and without your diploma you couldn’t enroll at any college. But you know how Grandpa is. He’ll debate with you till you’re blue in the face. He’s always nice about it, but he’s persistent. He doesn’t give up.”
“So tell me. What’s the catch?”
“Grandpa made a deal with Mr. Whalley. You won’t get your diploma at graduation, but they’ll mail it to you. But you have to do something first.”
“What?”
His father stopped plinking the keyboard and looked at him sideways. “You’re not gonna like it.”
Frank’s heart was rattling his ribs like a scared little monkey trapped in a burning monkey house. “What? Tell me. What do I have to do?”
Chapter 29
The good thing about mowing grass is that it gives a person time to think, and thanks to his grandfather and Mr. Whalley, Frank was given the opportunity to do a lot of thinking. The field on the far side of the parking lot at St. A’s where the track team practiced had to be twice a big as a football field, Frank guessed. Maybe more. As he pushed the mower in super-long strips, he wasn’t even aware of the whiney gas engine anymore. It was white noise that wrapped around his head like a towel and helped him think. He had only mowed ten or twelve strips, and he had a lot more to go. A dented, red five-gallon gas can sitting on the grass at the edge of the field reminded him that he would probably be here all day. Not that he needed a reminder. This was the deal his grandfather had negotiated. To get his diploma he had to mow this big mother of a field with a push mower. And he had to do it during the graduation ceremony. He wiped the sweat off his brow with the tail of his tee shirt and peered at the gym in the distance. Graduation would be starting pretty soon.
Fortunately it wasn’t terribly hot—a sun-and-clouds kind of day. But unfortunately it was spring, and the grass grew thick and wet. Every twenty feet or so the mower coughed up a big green clump like a smoker hawking up phlegm. He hoped Whalley wouldn’t come out later to inspect his work and tell him he had to rake up the clumps. Whenever he worked for his father, he always had to rake up the clumps and
then mow the lawn again to even it out.
Naturally Frank had been pissed when he found out about this medieval punishment, and he was pissed when he’d started the job, especially when he saw the other guys arriving with their parents, everybody all dressed up, nobody forced to wear a raggedy school blazer the way Monsignor Fitzgerald had originally threatened. Frank was singled out as the primary instigator of the blazer-ripping frenzy and the riot at the assembly so he was the only one being punished. Even wiseass Vitale was getting to go to graduation.
But Frank didn’t hold a grudge. The more he thought about it, the more he liked the distinction of being the Bad Boy of the Class of 1970. He figured he would go down in legend at St. A’s. The most rebellious kid ever to go through the school. The revolutionary. Too dangerous to allow at graduation. The Che of A.
Frank came up to the end of a long strip and positioned the mower for the return, pulling on the handle instead of pushing it. He made sure his wheels lined up with the wheel marks he’d just made the way his father had always taught him. The mower was less that two feet wide, and he didn’t want any overlap, not when he had this much grass to mow.
He watched cars pulling into parking spaces, sedans and station wagons. Seniors and their families getting out, guys he knew putting on their caps and gowns, their mothers straightening their shoulders and adjusting the tilt of their caps. That made him sad. Not that he wanted to wear the stupid royal-blue robe and mortarboard his parents had paid good money to rent. No, it was the fact that his mother was being denied the opportunity to see him up on the stage, getting his diploma. She’d screamed at him when she first heard about the punishment and what he’d done to get it. “How could you do such a thing? What’s wrong with you? You don’t talk to a priest like that! How selfish could you be?” But after a while she ran out of steam and retreated to her bedroom and cried with the Yankees game blaring on the radio.
When Frank got up that morning, no one was around. His mother stayed in her room, and his father had already left for work. It was a Saturday and it was odd that his sister Carol wasn’t in front of the TV watching cartoons. He went to her room to see if she was all right and found her sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking up at the ceiling. Rosary Bead Barbie was on the blanket next to her, but she was naked, her coarse blond hair splayed out around her plastic head as if she’d just been through shock therapy. Carol was holding the rhinestone rosary beads, swallowing beads between her little fingers, moving her lips silently with Hail Marys.
“You want breakfast?” he asked. He wanted company.
She shook her head. “I’m praying for you,” she whispered.
“For me?”
“For your soul.”
“Oh…”
“Mom said you did a bad thing.”
“Motor Mouse is on,” he said, trying to entice her. “Isn’t that your favorite?”
She shook her head, rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, and continued with her rosary.
“You want me to make you something for breakfast? French toast? Pop-Tarts?”
She shook her head as she kept praying.
Frank went back to the kitchen and wolfed down a bowl of Sugar Puffs and a glass of orange juice while he made himself a ham and Swiss sandwich for lunch. He brushed his teeth and went back to his sister’s room to say goodbye, but he could see from the doorway that she was in a state of ecstasy, so he just left, taking the bus to school the way he did on weekdays.
Frank pulled the mower to the end of the strip where the ground was wet, and his sneakers squished in the mud. As he started pushing back in the other direction, he noticed a two-tone green sedan in the parking lot, trawling for a space. He thought it was Mr. Nunziato’s Cadillac, but as he got closer he saw that it was an Oldsmobile, not a Cadillac. Anyway what would Mr. Nunziato being doing here on graduation day? And Dom? Forget about it.
It made Frank mad and sad that Dom wanted nothing to do with him anymore. They’d passed on the street a couple of days ago, and Frank barely got a “hello” out of him. It was a “hello” that sounded more like a “fuck you.” Frank was dying to know how his band with Johnny Trombetta was coming along. Frank would probably never find out unless they had a hit record that Cousin Brucie played on WABC. Frank also wondered if Dom had made a play for Annette, but he would probably never find that out either.
Mr. Nunziato, on the other hand, was friendlier than he’d ever been, going out of his way to give Frank a big hello whenever he saw him. He almost got into an accident calling to Frank as he drove by the house the other day, cigarette jammed into the corner of his big smile, waving like a beauty queen on a Thanksgiving Day float. Frank hoped this friendliness wasn’t just because he had seen Mr. Nunziato coming out of Mrs. Trombetta’s bedroom.
Frank became a continuous motion machine, pushing and pulling, walking and walking, his mind free floating, letting things just pop into his head at random. The Beatles, the Stones, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, the Electric Prunes, the Soul Survivors, Nixon, Agnew, Kissinger, Vietnam, the Viet Cong, the Chicago 7, Timothy Leary, pot, B.U., living on his own, taking courses he really wanted to take instead of the high school shit he had to take, living in a dorm, meeting new girls, college girls, kissing college girls, sleeping with college girls. He looked at Mulvaney Hall in the distance. All that high-school crap was all behind him now. Soon as he finished mowing this fucking grass.
He got to the end of another long strip and wiped the sweat off his face with his tee shirt. He thought about stopping for a rest just to break the monotony, but he wasn’t that tired yet, and he wanted to get this over with. Hopefully before the graduation ceremony was finished. He knew some of the guys would come out to talk to him and he just didn’t want to deal with them, not like this.
He positioned the mower wheels on the line he’d just made and started to pull backwards. There weren’t as many clouds now, the sun more out than in. He shaded his eyes with one hand, wishing he’d remembered to take his sunglasses. The sun was more intense, and by the time he’d reached the middle of the field, sweat was pouring off him. Maybe he would take that break, he thought. Just to get some water. As soon as he finished this strip.
He peered ahead at his goal, the marshy end of the field, and that’s when he spotted a figure in his peripheral vision. Someone coming toward him from the parking-lot side of the field. He slowed down and squinted to get a better look. It was a girl. Bell-bottom jeans and a flowing hippie top. It looked like she was carrying a book. Jesus! It was Yolanda. What was she doing here? Did she know he was going to be here? Had she come to see him? No way.
His first impulse was to smell his armpits. He’d used Right Guard that morning, but he was sweating like a pig. He didn’t want her to smell his B.O. But it was too late. She was too close for him to sneak a sniff. She’d see him doing it, and he’d look pathetic.
She stopped about ten feet away and gave him a little wave to get his attention.
“Oh, hi,” he said, pretending to be surprised.
She shook her head and shrugged, pointing at the lawnmower. She couldn’t hear him because it was making such a racket. He was so used to the noise, it didn’t even occur to him. He reached down to the engine and shut it off.
“Hi,” he said again.
She had a weird look on her face. Kind of friendly but wary.
“Hi,” she said.
God, she looked good.
She nodded toward the gym. “How come you’re not at graduation?”
“I’m doing hard time. Breaking rocks in the sun.” In his head he could hear “I Fought the Law,” the Bobby Fuller Four song.
“I don’t see any rocks. You’re mowing the grass.”
“Well, might as well be breaking rocks.”
“Is this for what you did at the gym the other day?”
“You hea
rd about that.”
She nodded. “It was big news at Mother of Peace.”
“Really?”
She gave him a don’t-be-stupid face. “Tina and the monsignor? A lot of us knew about that.”
“Really? If you knew about it, why didn’t you do something to help her?”
Her face drooped. “Well, we knew and we didn’t know. Not for sure. All we knew was that she was spending an awful lot of time with him working on that one stupid term paper.”
“Oh…” He looked down at the green-stained toes of his sneakers. “So did they…? You know.”
“You mean, did they do it?”
“Yeah. Did they?”
Yolanda shrugged. “She says no.”
“Do you believe her?”
Her eyes flashed. “Why shouldn’t I? She’s my best friend.”
“But they had to be doing more than just working a term paper. You know that.”
Yolanda looked at the ground and mumbled. “They were doing something.”
“Is she gonna be all right?”
“I hope so. She has nothing good to say about him now.”
“That’s good to hear. Does she know what I said to Fitzgerald at the assembly?”
“I don’t think so. She’s gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?”
“She’s spending the summer with relatives in Ohio. She left last week. Didn’t even stick around for graduation.”
“Oh.” Frank’s brain was churning. Tina in Ohio. Yolanda without Tina. No best-friend buffer. Divide and conquer. But what about the Vaz? Is he still on the scene?
“So what’re you doing this summer?” Frank trying to ease into a little information gathering.
“Not much. I got a part-time office job—typing, stuffing envelopes, you know. And I’ve got a few books I have to read for a lit class next fall.” She held up the book she was carrying. The Brothers Karamazov. Dostoyevsky. She had a newspaper, too.
“Long book.” Not knowing what else to say.
The Temptations of St. Frank Page 35