English: 88%
Algebra: 94%
Science: 96%
Civics: 88%
Well, I made the honor roll and not one subject under 80%. Wait till Derm hears! He’ll flip! I did!
I saw my name with a little star next to it like this!
*BLAIS, RAYMOND M.
At first I thought that, like the last time we got marks, it meant I failed two or more subjects. I was sick until I saw the marks. Then I thought how surprised you would be when you saw the marks.
We wrote to him, about how we lost our teeth and scraped our knees, which had to have iodine, a crucial detail, proof of the seriousness of the injury—IODINE—which we never spelled the same way twice. We told him that Christina could do the hula hoop. “Mike has one too,” we reported, “but he can’t do it too good yet.” Maureen wrote a poem: “Wind, Wind, Please blow my Kite.” We told him how we went to Forest Park. Mike was afraid of the lions and tigers. We saw pretty birds. We saw Santa’s reindeer. Every letter ended with the same basic reminder: “Do good work in school.”
It was never clear why Raymond wouldn’t stay at Mount St. Charles, but after his sophomore year he refused to return, first begging and finally demanding that he be allowed to stay home. The argument that he should remain at Mount St. Charles because he was doing so well was the same one he used to come home. Once back at 5 Center Street, he entered his junior year at the public high school. That spring, just when he turned sixteen and it was legal to leave school, he did.
America is geared toward nothing if not toward creating high school graduates. Dropping out became fashionable later, when doing your own thing was an acceptable mantra, but at the time of Raymond’s action, it was a fringe gesture of despair reserved for certified juvenile delinquents, for boys in black leather jackets with Camel cigarettes tucked into the rolled-up sleeves of their T-shirts, their hair arranged in greasy dunes thanks to Brylcreem, and for the girls they knocked up.
“P.C.,” Dermot would call him, short for “privileged character.” And the rest of us chimed in. It was plain irritating, Raymond’s inability to toe the line.
“But what,” said my mother, “will people think if you leave school?”
Up until the time of my brother’s decision to leave school, our mother was still proceeding with her head high, sustained by the fantasy that my father’s death had not changed the course of our future. But now the worst had happened, external proof that her stewardship as head of the family contained a grievous flaw. It was a manifestation that defied hiding, that could not be spruced up in a Christmas photo.
At the public high school, where I would be enrolling in the fall as a freshman, the word was out. My brother had left school. Was there a contagion in the family? How could I be trusted not to do the same?
I was told I could take four, but not five, classes. If my brother couldn’t finish high school, perhaps I should think twice about college. That callous triage hit home. Maureen Shea Blais would show them. Their snub became her fuel. For years, since the school had opened in 1956, our mother had thought of sending my sisters and me to the Ursuline Academy in Springfield, run by the smart nuns. The Ursulines were not the worn-out, scary nuns of popular lore, dried up, with vague, saltine cracker features, exploited women put in charge of overpopulated classrooms regardless of whether they liked children or had a gift for teaching, the kinds of nuns who were sour and literal and who believed in the supremacy of the Church and the implicit virtue of Good Penmanship as the universe’s two leading principles. The Ursulines took pride in their own intellects and in the intellects of their charges.
Ursuline was the school with which parents all over the Pioneer Valley, and in the hill towns, and even across the border into northern Connecticut, threatened their daughters if they didn’t behave. At least some of the enrollment consisted of girls who possessed what was known then as a “faulty temperament” or a “wild streak,” though it’s difficult to imagine just what wild meant in that constrained world. But our mother, acting on the decidedly modern concept that packaging counts, told us that this was a place for la crème de la crème. Only the finest young ladies worthy of the most rigorous spiritual and intellectual training were allowed to go to “the academy,” as she always called it, as if it were a female West Point.
The summer before school began I was sent a pamphlet on which I wrote my name in big, careful, loopy letters, proud and proprietary, and the words “Important. Must be taken care of.” It was titled:
Reading List
for
Students of
Ursuline Academy
of Springfield
I pounced on this list the same way I seized upon the convent-school uniform, as part of my grand scheme to cut loose. It was summer and, despite being stuck in one of those mythical muggy interludes, I wore the gray flannel jacket all one morning, practicing the right way to get the white collars of our camp shirts to rest over the collar like two sleeping doves. Finally, exasperated, probably close to suffocation at the sight of me, our mother pointed out, in a voice hot-wired with false patience, that the only other person she’d heard of who swaddled herself in wool on a similarly unendurable boiling day was, of course, Lizzie Borden. She was always fascinated by Lizzie Borden’s patricide and matricide, which, considering that she was, as she so often pointed out to us, both our mother and our father, struck us as distinctly against her self-interest: “It’s the choice of weapon that is so compelling,” she always said. “A gun or a knife is one thing, but an ax shows a very distorted personality.”
I was a typical teenager. To me my family consisted of a group of demented individuals united in their passion for invading my privacy, hampering my style, and pointing out my faults with the hideously accurate radar bred of intimacy.
My plan was to read my way out, to tunnel through hundreds of books to a better fate.
This reading list was no mere mimeographed sheet with a few tried and true titles from the era, like Hiroshima and The Bridge of San Luis Rey. It was fourteen pages long, consisting of about thirty titles per page of suggested readings.
We were not actually expected to read each and every book. I observed on the back page, once again in careful fat script, a notation as to the “minimum requirement” for fourteen year olds entering their freshman year:
3 classics
2 biographies
2 novels
1 communism
1 spiritual life
9 books
We were also, according to my notes on the back cover, called upon to prepare index cards containing the title of the books we read and the name of the author. We were to “state briefly one fact about him,” and then, in accordance with the proposition that “a good novel should be an inspiration to its reader,” we were to name two ways in which the book had been an inspiration to us.
Communism?
Spiritual life?
The former included titles like Whittaker Chambers’s The Witness and Herbert Philbrick’s I Led Three Lives.
These many years later, the category of books on the list that causes me the most amusement is called “Personality and Conduct of Women,” with titles such as The Rosary and the Soul of Women, Planning Your Happy Marriage, and Girls, You’re Important, all written, I cringe to report, by men. (Where are these works now? Once bright and urgent and modern, they are surely as moldy and forgotten as attic detritus, as old lace, as dead dolls, as crippled lamps.) For some reason, aviation was a big subject back then: Last Flight by Amelia Earhart; Listen! The Wind by Anne Lindbergh and The Spirit of St. Louis by her husband, Charles; Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; and the one I probably preferred to all the others, Skygirl: A Career Handbook for Airline Stewardesses, written in 1951 by someone named Mary F. Murray. What a comforting name, warm as scones, solid and sincere. Under “Science and Nature,” we could learn about the sea around us, about the flowering earth, and about Louis Pasteur and the microbe hunters. “Art and
Music,” a mere ten entries, was heavy on biographies: Mozart, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Beethoven. Under “Personal Narratives” there were sixteen choices, all taking World War II as their theme, including works such as Mark Tennien’s Chungking Listening Post and Heinrich Harrer’s Seven Years in Tibet. “Biography” occupied nearly four pages, and was divided by first, second, third, and fourth years but also subdivided into “men of heroic stature” and “women of heroic stature.” Inspiring men for first-year students included Thomas Edison, Father Flanagan of Boys Town, Nathan Hale, Cardinal Newman, Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, and Father Junípero Serra. Inspiring women included Saint Angela of the Ursulines, St. Bernadette, Francesca Cabrini, Clara Barton, and Harriet Tubman. By the time you reached the third year of biography, the categories had expanded to “converts,” with books such as Gladys Baker’s I Had to Know and Bella Dodd’s School of Darkness.
Converts: that special quarry, human proof that we were right all along.
Fiction was saved for last, perhaps because it was the most unruly, the most potentially revolutionary. (Wasn’t it Orwell who called the novel a “Protestant art form requiring a free play of mind”?) Even before we were allowed to select our two novels with their two points of inspiration, there was a daunting hurdle entitled “Preliminary background,” a list of twenty-six books we were already supposed to have read, including the childhood classics of Peter Pan, The Secret Garden, Little Women, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe, Heidi, Bambi, Treasure Island, Lassie Come Home, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Gulliver’s Travels, Penrod, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Fiction for first-year students was once again divided and organized: classics, standards, supplementary titles, and modern books, featuring Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Seventeen (classic) and the works of James Fenimore Cooper, that old fascinator, especially for girls (standard).
The modern books were for the most part disappointing in the way of trinkets in a cereal box, having stirred inflated hopes, but there were a few breezy titles that my younger self would surely have found enticing, such as Come Be My Love by Lavinia Davis, Going Steady by Anne Emery, and Marcia, Private Secretary by Zillah MacDonald.
That summer of 1961, just before Ursuline, when I wasn’t baby-sitting for the magnificent sum of thirty-five cents an hour (I still think I deserved fifty cents), much of which was squirreled away in the hope of purchasing a new Villager outfit, or going to see Psycho with my girlfriends, I could be found more often than not with my nose in a book.
The list was as self-satisfied as it was innocent. Although we did not know it at the time, the world in which reading was required to yield two examples of inspiration and one point of high interest was a vanishing one indeed. The nuns loved predictability, admired neatness, lived for alphabetic order. But my goal as a reader was neither grandiose nor noble nor alphabetical. I read because I liked language more than I liked music or sport and because I had a simple desire to learn the facts of life, physical and emotional. I read in order to understand how it is that men really treat women and vice versa, to get definitions for cowardice and passion and revenge. I read about whiskey (Hemingway), whores (Salinger), rape (Harper Lee). The heroines I liked stole and schemed, they eavesdropped and they told tales in the name of higher truths. The heroes were no better.
In short, I read because the world seemed various and dangerous and complicated, not alphabetical. People weren’t always nice and high-minded and predictable in person, and I didn’t expect them to be that way in print. I enjoyed a little dirt with my uplift.
“If anyone asks how long you’re going to stay at Ursuline, just say it depends on how you find the commute,” our mother said.
The commute was indeed a complicated formula. It involved several buses as well as cadged rides, during which time I memorized declensions and wrote essays about how “three things especially conduce to a habit of prayer: physical withdrawal from mind and memory, willingness to learn from the advice and examples of others, renunciation of restlessness and frivolity.” I was also supposed to tell people that I liked wearing a uniform because it cut down on my clothing allowance, which might have been handy if I had had one.
At around the same time I started at Ursuline, our housekeeper Elizabeth Cavanaugh left for a nursing home. She was always a puzzle to explain to people outside the family, the closeness of her connection. Though rough in her speech and without much education, her common sense sustained us. One time when I was six years old or so and the feisty Brooks twins, both excellent athletes, ganged up on me and started punching from both sides, it was Lizzie who said, “For goodness’ sake, punch back.” When I did, the twins’ father came down to the house to thank Lizzie. Whenever we wrote compositions for school entitled “My Family,” she always occupied her own stellar category. She was far more than just the extra mother or grandmother. She was the source of total uncensored approval, a wizard with flour and butter and optimism. She never uttered a harsh or impatient word. She led a shadowed immigrant life in service to others. Paid a modicum of a wage, she saved nearly all of it to the penny, often redirecting the cash back to us.
She would die in January of 1965 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Lizzie, who seemed without age, was suddenly aged. The person who had given us around-the-clock care required it herself. Because the home was within biking distance, we visited her often. She had the front room on the first floor, which made it easier to receive us, huffing from the exertion, hoping for a piece of candy or a quarter. Gone from the house was the paraphernalia we associated with her: beer (she had a glass each night before her dinner, which she ate alone, at her insistence, before we had ours), corn pads, basins for soaking sore feet, jars for storing hairs removed from combs, Irish sweepstakes tickets, support hose, flesh-colored girdles of a breathtaking intricacy and magnitude, mass cards, and an army of ointments meant to soothe stiff, swollen limbs. Sometimes she gathered the strength to send us letters in shaky handwriting. “Dear Madeleine,” read one such letter, “I am glad that you are happy. I hope you always will be. Be a good girl you are pretty in fact you all are. No reason why you wouldn’t get along together. Show the people that you was brought up nicely.”
There it was, in plain frail English, the directive that would be the backbone of the family crusade: show the people.
After a year or two of doing nothing other than hanging out, dreaming of sports cars and rock bands, Raymond decided on a course of action that, it was universally agreed, would straighten him right out. He would join the air force. Where Raymond’s own blood uncle and the Christian Brothers of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, had failed, the armed services would step in. In that time-honored tradition in which young men of uncertain prospects are administered a massive inoculation of who’s who and what’s what, Raymond would join the military, and the military, keeping up its end of the bargain, would make a man out of him.
No more sleeping in until midday.
No more odd hours.
No more making some kind of mixture in the kitchen just before dawn, usually, for some reason, lasagna, seeming to conscript every pot and pan and spoon in the effort. Instead of being Lizzie’s sunlit haven, Cloroxed and caffeinated, the morning kitchen was a bloodbath, with red sauce smeared all over the sink, the stove, the table.
When Raymond was feeling crossed, his speedometer worked at an adrenalized speed. It was as if the chaos he must have been feeling inside had to detonate. He would seem to rocket from zero to sixty in an instant, becoming a human rocket, a reckless Sputnik flying through the house, fists flailing, verbiage spewing, no brakes on the horizon.
He flew into fits at provocations big and small.
No, my mother would say, you can’t have money.
No, you can’t have the keys to the car.
No, you can’t slam the doors like that.
No, you can’t
drop out of school.
No, no, no, no.
He was in the thrall of some force within, an unleashed misshapen squalling infant.
He would threaten us with physical force. By the time he was seventeen, he was six feet one, taller and bigger and stronger than everyone else. He didn’t have to use even a fraction of his strength to frighten us with it. Even though he was always threatening collisions, we developed that bird radar for mysteriously avoiding them, absenting ourselves from his line of fire as much as we could.
We would ask him to stop.
We would yell at him to stop.
We would beg him to stop.
Still his wrath grew, and still the words disgorged.
I would be sitting at the dining room table, with the French doors on one side closed, and the swinging door to the pantry also swung shut. Tab was the drink of the hour for young girls, a new low-calorie invention whose name was said to be an acronym for “totally artificial beverage.” I would have my Tab in a bottle by my side, purchased with my own money, as well as Seventeen magazine, which I devoured, wishing I looked like the perky girl on her bike or swimming in a white (white!) bathing suit in the Tampax ads, wishing I had the courage to use Tampax, and consoled by a world in which the biggest problems concerned acne and boyfriends. This was where I studied after school for two hours before dinner and for three after dinner. The mahogany table had large clawed legs. It provided a commanding surface, plenty of room to spread out all the textbooks as well as whatever novel I read from every night after I did my homework.
The exact words he would shout are lost to me now. They exist in my memory as shapes, ugly chunks of sound hurled against the thin curtain of our lives. These thudding missiles were the code words for all the people who were after him, who were responsible for giving his enemies plastic surgery so that they would all look like his friends.
Fleur de lis, I would memorize for French class. That means lily.
Agricola is Latin for farmer.
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