The Cape Ann (4 page)

When we were close to the depot, Papa turned off the engine and we coasted into the little parking lot. Before we climbed out of the pickup, Papa whispered, “We’ve got to be real quiet. We don’t want to wake your ma. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I whispered, noticing that Papa’s face was red, and his eyes, too. Did they hurt? Suddenly I remembered something. “Who took care of the late freight train?” I asked, worried that he’d forgotten.

“Art took care of it,” he rasped impatiently. “Now keep quiet. I’ll come around and open the door. Just wait.”

He lifted me down to the gravel, and we tiptoed toward the platform, stones crunching softly beneath our feet. As we rounded the corner of the depot, a pair of grackles, loud and angry, flew down, lit on the semaphore, and starting yawking at us.

“Goddamn,” Papa whispered under his breath, turning the door knob slowly, stealthily, and pushing the door open just enough for us to slip through.

At the kitchen table, Mama sat waiting.

“GO TO BED, LARK,”
Mama directed in a too-calm voice, never taking her eyes from Papa, who was at the stove checking the coffee pot, feigning innocence, stalling.

When Mama was preparing to fight, she sent me to the crib. There was no way, without solid walls and real doors, that she could prevent me from hearing every word, but whatever small distance the crib could provide, I was to enjoy.

“Wait a minute,” Mama said, grabbing my arm as I passed. “What’s in your hair?”

“My hair?” Sure enough there was an awful messy feeling lump in my hair. The jawbreaker bubble gum Mr. Wendel had given me.

“For God’s sake, Willie,” Mama spat.

“It’s not
my
fault,” Papa told her, foraging in the refrigerator.

Mama shoved me along toward the bedroom.

Removing my chenille robe and hanging it over the end of the crib, I climbed in. The house plans were still scattered on the Three Pigs quilt. Piling them at the foot of the crib with #127—The Cape Ann on top, I lay down, pulling the quilt tightly around me.

In the kitchen, Mama exploded. “Where in hell have you been, Willie?”

“You know where.”

“Until five-thirty in the morning?”

Papa didn’t answer.

“What kind of man keeps a child out all night while he gets drunk and loses his money?”

“I’m not drunk.”

“You’re not sober.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Arlene, the kid was fine. She had a good time.”

“You’re the biggest liar in St. Bridget County, Willie.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“I’m talking to somebody who takes a six-year-old that’s got to be at first communion instruction at eight o’clock this morning
out to a stranger’s house, keeps her there till five-thirty
A.M.
, and then says she had a good time.”

“Herbie Wendel’s not a stranger.”

“Where was Vera Wendel while this was going on?”

“At her folks.”

“Why didn’t you leave a note so I’d at least know where you were? I could have come and got Lark after bridge club.”

“That’s why I didn’t. You’d have flounced in there and made a scene. I wanted to have a good time for a change.”

“I don’t notice you denying yourself. And you’re damned right I’d have flounced in and had a word with a husband who’s too damned stubborn to call a high school girl to stay with his daughter, but drags her off to poker like she was the same trash he is.”

A chair fell over, and Mama screamed, “Keep your hands off me, Willie.” Then there was the cruel “thung” of a fist landing. I climbed out of the crib and ran to the kitchen. Mama was bent over the table and Papa was standing over her, his fist raised to hit her again. Mama grabbed the Heinz ketchup bottle from the table and swung around, catching Papa in the ribs. He fell back against the stove, and Mama grabbed a butcher knife from the drain board. She was a formidable fighter.

“Come near me and I’ll kill you, Willie.”

Papa moaned, “You broke my ribs.”

“Good,” Mama whispered, breathing heavily. “Get out of here.”

Holding his ribs, Papa shuffled to the door. When he had left, Mama stood for a long minute with the ketchup bottle in one hand and the butcher knife in the other.

I hurried back to the crib. It was because of me that Mama and Papa had fought. If Papa had wanted me to tell her I had a wonderful time at Herbie Wendel’s, he should have explained on the way home. Was I supposed to know without him telling me? Would most first graders? How did other children keep their mama and papa from fighting?

It was harder to be six than to be five or four. Before four nothing was hard except not wetting your pants and not spilling things.

Before I could fall into dreams, Mama was waking me up. Time to get ready for catechism class. I wasn’t going to have my first communion
for a year. I didn’t see why we had to start so far ahead. It was one more thing that made six harder than five.

Most of the children in my instruction class couldn’t even read the
Baltimore Catechism
book that prepared us for the sacraments. We were only first graders. But the nuns said our mamas could teach us the words we didn’t know. It was their responsibility as Catholic mothers. Mama didn’t mind teaching me the words. Not only was she a Catholic mother, but she was also the mother of a future college student; she was concerned that I know every kind of word so that there wouldn’t be a lot of surprises when I started reading college books.

Mama had washed her face and changed into a cotton dress, but I didn’t think she’d been to bed. She was slow moving and short tempered. Her hair wasn’t combed, and she wore no lipstick. Normally the first thing she did after washing her face was put on lipstick and comb her hair.

Turning my back and pulling on clean underpants, I asked, “Are you afraid Papa won’t come back?”

“No,” she said. “He’ll come back.
You’re
not afraid, are you?”

“No,” I lied. One more lie to add to the inventory of sins I was keeping on a pad I had hidden away. If I didn’t keep track, I’d never remember them all when I got in the confessional next year.

The nuns had suggested that if we were afraid we’d forget something when we knelt in that dim little closet, we should take with us a list of our sins. We were not to write anything on the paper but sins. The rest of the ritual must be memorized. And no forgetting!

That very night, asking Mama for a tablet for catechism class, I’d begun my sorry record, which I hid in the bottom drawer of a doll chest that had been Mama’s when she was a child.

“Have you got your lesson memorized?” Mama inquired, heading me toward the kitchen. There was water heating in the tea kettle, and she poured some into an enamel basin in the sink, then added a little cold from the single faucet.

“I think so.”

Soaping a cloth, Mama scrubbed my ears, and after that my face and neck, rubbing me half raw. “A bath tonight,” she said, slipping a favorite dress over my head. She always let me wear one of my favorites to instruction. “For luck,” she said. This was a red one
with little white polka dots and a white collar. Mama had starched it within an inch of its life. I liked the skirt to stand out stiff. It made me feel like I might be able to tap dance. Mama tied the sash in a perfect bow at my back, then fetched my shoes and socks and handed them to me.

“Come in the living room.” She carried in a chair from the kitchen and, when I had pulled on my shoes and socks, she motioned me to sit on it. Slipping a comb with big teeth from her pocket, she grabbed my
Baltimore Catechism
from the sideboard and handed it to me.

“Look at that while I get the gum out of your hair.” From her glum, resigned tone, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

I’d gotten gum in my hair before but never such a wad. I only hoped she wouldn’t have to cut all the hair off that side of my head. She worked for several minutes with the big-toothed comb, then, grunting in disgust, went to the bedroom for the brush and scissors.

I was in tears from the pain and from the anticipated disgrace of arriving at instruction with half a head of hair. It was impossible to concentrate on the catechism book while Mama yanked my head around as though she were pulling weeds.

At length she said, “Look at that,” and held out her hand to show a great, nasty straw pile of hair and gum.

I put my hand to the side of my head. There was
some
hair still there. Mama finished brushing what was left, then fastened it back with bobby pins and little red bows. I fled to the bedroom for a look in the mirror. Thank God for a clever mama.

While I downed a bowl of puffed wheat, a dish towel tied around my neck to protect my dress, Mama sat down at the kitchen table. “How many men were at Herbie Wendel’s?” she asked coolly, as if she didn’t really care.

“Counting Papa, five.”

“Who were they?” In front of whose wives would she have to hold up her head, pretending that Papa’s losses were unimportant?

“Mr. Wendel, Mr. Grubb, Mr. Navarin, and Mr. Nelson.”

“Axel Nelson?” she said with some distaste.

“Yes.”

“Did you watch them play poker?”

“Not very long. Papa told me to go in the living room. He said poker wasn’t a game for kids.”

With her index finger, Mama traced the flower design in the oilcloth. “So you don’t know if your papa lost money?”

I shook my head.

The way to St. Boniface Catholic Church was straight and simple. You went out to First Avenue, which ran past the depot, turned right, and kept going. It was also easy to find Main Street, which ran perpendicular to First. You just walked two blocks toward the Catholic church, and there it was.

Outside, on First Avenue, the morning was sunny and warm and intimately buzzing. Inside St. Boniface, it was dark and chilly and echoing. A few stragglers from daily Mass, mostly old ladies in battered black hats and cotton lisle hose, were leaving the pews. They remained after Mass, saying rosaries and lighting candles. Now and then there was one making her way through the Stations of the Cross. Long after instruction class had assembled and begun lessons, the old woman would be tiptoeing from station to station, denying herself the smell of May blowing in off the prairie and the pleasant sensation of a toasty sidewalk beneath the soles of her chunky black shoes. Could I ever hope to be as devout and self-denying as that?

Seven of the nine would-be communicants were already gathered in the back pew, squirming and poking one another, when I genuflected and pushed Delmore Preuss over. He gave me a kick in the calf and resumed picking his nose. Sally Wheeler, my best friend in first grade, was seated toward the middle of the pew. Sally had thick, black hair which her mother braided into two long plaits that fell over her shoulders in front. Next to having short, blond curls like Katherine Albers, having long, black braids was best. Sally dropped the braid on which she had been chewing and waved to me.

Mrs. Wheeler, like Mama, was a convert. This had created a special bond between Sally and me. Sister Mary Clair and Sister Mary Frances saved the most difficult catechism questions for us. They also reprimanded us more often than the other children, although, really, no one got off lightly. Putting our heads together, Sally and I concluded that because our mothers were converts, the sisters had doubts about our ability to be A-plus Catholics. Our only hope, as they likely saw it, was indoctrination of the sternest, most rigorous kind.

At our mamas’ urging, Sally and I studied catechism together on Friday afternoons after Miss Hagen dismissed first grade. One week at Sally’s house, the next at mine.

Mrs. Wheeler, Sally’s mama, was a pretty, fragile-looking woman who spoke softly and regarded everything with great intensity, as if the true meaning and value of things were eluding her or somehow being kept from her, and she must discover it. Sometimes she waylaid Sally and me for half an hour in the kitchen as she set out milk and cookies, inquiring persistently into the character and respective merits of Fig Newtons and Mallomars.

At four-thirty she walked me to Main Street, explaining that I must stay on it until Truska’s Grocery and then turn right onto First. I could easily have found my own way, but Mrs. Wheeler needed to do this. She needed to carry everything out thoroughly and properly, no matter how cumbersome or ritualistic it became. It was her burden and duty to dot all the world’s undotted
i’
s.

Now and then, when a regular member was sick or out of town and a substitute was required at Mama’s bridge club, Mrs. Wheeler was called. The next morning Mama would say to me, “Look how gray I turned waiting for Stella Wheeler to bid one heart,” and she would bend over and point to her imaginary gray hair. Mama was a headlong person with instincts as sharp as darts. She couldn’t conceive of uncertainty like Mrs. Wheeler’s.

Sally and I never asked her mama to help us with catechism, although she invariably volunteered. Instead we went up to Sally’s room, closed the door, and played paper dolls until four, then opened the
Baltimore Catechism
and ripped through the week’s lesson.

In June, when school let out, class would meet six mornings a week for a month. I didn’t look forward to that.

Most Saturday mornings Mama reviewed the lesson with me before I left home. This morning there had been no time. Now I sat, cramped between Delmore Preuss and the end of the pew, eyes closed, reeling off answers in my head. I was like someone preparing for citizenship in another country—terrified I would be found unworthy.

The nuns rose from the front pew, where they had been praying since Mass, and strode briskly back to where their charges waited—picking scabs, elbowing neighbors, kicking the pew in front, and biting hangnails—torn by our great reluctance to be there and our equally great terror of hell.

Sister Mary Frances stood in the center aisle just outside our pew, while Sister Mary Clair took a seat in the pew directly opposite to observe. They taught us as a team, one spelling the other, as by turns they flagged under the burden of our ignorance.