On Pluto (15 page)

Both parents, respectively, were members in good standing of the parish Mothers' and Fathers' Clubs. They also taught CCD, “The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine,” established in Rome in 1562 for the purpose of giving religious education to the heathens. In later days, the nuns defined heathens as the children of Catholic parents who weren't sent to Catholic School. Faithful parishioners taught CCD on Wednesday nights; the
nuns instructed the heathens on Thursdays at 1:30 pm, as if caring for lepers. We were dismissed early on those days. Officially, it was called “Released Time,” and we were told to clear the playground as quickly as possible. The collective body language suggested that we scatter swiftly from the heathens and Huns.
Run home to the bosom of your mothers,
the nuns admonished us!

And God help us, Jesus, if we ever looked at a Protestant! We were warned never to gape at the spiral of the nearby Gothic Rye Presbyterian Church, designed in the 1860s by Richard Up-john, the renowned church architect who built Trinity Church on Wall Street. If we even stared at this magnificent edifice, we feared, it would be akin to looking back at Sodom. We'd be turned to pillars of salt.

The mile walk from pastoral Brookdale Place to Resurrection was problematic for me. I had to pass the towers of Babel, careful not to glance up, just look down at my scuffed Buster Browns. My sisters, brothers, and I walked to school every day—the girls were dressed in the uniform of plaid skirts white blouses, blue jackets, and black patent leather shoes; the boys were required to wear a white-collared dress shirt with a blue tie, gray flannel pants, a blue blazer, and dark socks; we all looked like Encyclopedia Britannica salesmen. The only exception to the socks rule was gym day. On gym days, guys wore white socks with running shorts underneath their trousers for a quick change in the basement for a stinging game of dodgeball or stickball in the playground. To this day, one can detect someone who was educated in the metropolitan New York Catholic school system; they will often quip at work to a friend or colleague wearing white socks: “Got gym today?”

Once at school, regardless of the temperature, five below or pushing 90, we gathered in the playground behind the red brick schoolhouse before the start of class. We were sorted in grades by cracks in the pavement. It was a blueprint to avoid chaos,
the equivalent today of those invisible electronic dog fences. If you crossed the line, you'd be zapped by the nuns, unless you were queued up at the convent steps to carry the bags—the nuns' briefcases, not the old battle-axes themselves. “Brown nosers” like me waited as hungry puppy dogs outside the convent to carry a black bag; I often wondered later if they contained the nuclear code in case Khrushchev stepped out of line. At the back door of the school about 200 feet away, the exchange was made: a pat on the head, a passing of the bag, a return to the playground. We then waited within our assigned cracks, engaged in kickball, punchball, flipping cards, or just yapping. Minutes later with great thunder, an oversized glass window in the principal's office opened—an ancient kind that moved on string cords, not tracks, and made a noise like the trumpeting of angels in the Book of Revelations. The hairy, muscular arm of the Mother Superior then reached out with a cowbell the size of a boxcar. She flushed three times:

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 words 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.