The Crazyladies of Pearl Street (34 page)

She never scolded me for the blots, the cramped writing, the punctures, the creative cacography, but her little sigh before moving on to the more commonly gifted students stung me to the heart.

Given my repeated failures to earn Sister Mary-Theresa's praise, I was surprised by her appearance in a dream one night during Christmas vacation, a dream that had a confused but seemingly anodyne narrative, but from which I awoke with my heart pounding, my stomach cramped from tension, and the troubling, irrational image of Brigid Meehan's breast beneath Sister Mary-Theresa's starched bib. I dreamed about her the next night, and the next. And pretty soon these dreams settled into a regular little narrative. I would be writing, and her hand would touch mine to guide it. Then we would slowly rise into the air together... something to do with the wings of her wimple... and we would float along bathed in the perfume of bread and yellow soap... our faces would come closer and closer until our cheeks touched beneath the shelter of her wide wings...

...And I would wake up with fragments of the dream still clinging to my consciousness together with confused tactile memories of Brigid Meehan's breast. I couldn't work out what Brigid Meehan had to do with Sister Mary-Theresa. And why was it so comforting, so pleasurable to float along, our cheeks touching as we wafted through the clouds?

One afternoon, Sister Mary-Theresa asked me to stay to help her with the blackboard. Both excited and anxious about what this might lead to (...rising into the air together?... a weightless ballet through scented clouds?...) I brought the erasers out onto the fire escape and clapped up a storm of chalk dust while she wiped the blackboards with a damp rag. When I returned, she said in a suspiciously offhand tone that Sister Angelica, my mathematics teacher, had mentioned that I often worked problems in my head while other kids slogged through them on paper. I explained that Sister Angelica was wrong; I didn't work the problems out. The answers just seemed obvious. But I wasn't really very interested in math. I just couldn't make myself care how long it took Farmer Jones to meet Farmer Brown if they were driving towards each other at different speeds, and one took a lunch break while the other got a flat tire. She asked where I had picked up the uncommon words I used, and how I happened to know the names of the various geological eras, and the rulers of France, and things like that, and finally she got around to asking if I had ever had my IQ tested. (So that was what this staying after class was all about. Nothing to do with weightless ballets and Fels Naphtha. Nuts.) I described the tests I had taken for Miss Cox when I was seven, and she said she would like to have me tested again, if I didn't mind.

So a few weeks later I spent most of an afternoon taking a battery of tests down in the school library, sitting beneath the hand-tinted photograph of a painfully smiling Pope Pius. The results were not revealed to me, but she asked if I would be willing to spend an extra hour after school each day, improving my writing and spelling. I was glad she wanted to give me special help, and I was secretly excited about the idea of spending time alone with her.

Winter came, and by the time the four-thirty bell emptied the school of students, the evening sky gravid with snow was already beginning to draw in around Sister Mary-Theresa and me, alone in her classroom. I would move up to a front-row desk and work at whatever she had assigned, while she sat at her desk in front of me, correcting papers or reading. Every once in a while, she would rise and come to bend over me to see how I was getting along, and I would breathe in the nun-scent of bread and soap, and my concentration would skid. But my spelling improved rapidly. Once I learned a couple of rhyming rules like 'i before e except after c or when sounded like a, as in neighbor and weigh', the rest was simple memorization, which rote drudgery I was willing to do to earn her praise, although I secretly considered spelling to be a pretty arbitrary business—as indeed it is in English. But while my spelling became more conventional, her efforts to improve my handwriting were thwarted by the total inability of any left-handed person to write with a dip nib using the Palmer Method.

One day, after the rest of the class had clattered out of the cloakroom and down the hall, and I had moved up to the front row and opened my writing tablet, Sister Mary-Theresa beckoned to me with her forefinger. There on her desk was a tubular object wrapped in a piece (i before e) of flowered wallpaper. It was a fountain pen with a little silver lever on the side that you worked to suck up ink from a bottle. It wasn't new, but it was very fine nonetheless. And there was a second present, a bottle of blue-black ink. The bottle had a 'patented hexagonal design', that made it possible to stand it at a forty-five-degree angle so you could dip your nib in and suck up a load of ink when the bottle was nearly empty. That bottle's clever design was my first encounter with modern communications technology. I had never written with a fountain pen before, and while I still had to turn the paper sidewards and keep my hand above the line of writing to avoid smearing the wet ink, the fountain pen's rounded nib glided smoothly over the paper without the point digging in and making splats, and I could guide it easily, without gripping it so tightly that it dented my index finger. Sister Mary-Theresa gave me an exercise to write out, and when she leaned over my shoulder to compare my new work with something I had written the day before (I felt her warm breath stirring my hair, and I closed my eyes and breathed in that sublime essence-of-nun), she said that my writing, if not beautiful, was at least decipherable, save for a big blot where I had fiddled with the pen, wondering how far you could lift this little lever without causing the ink to—oops... not quite that far, I guess.

That night Sister Mary-Theresa appeared in my dreams, smiling down on me, the radiant whiteness of her winged head-dress blurring her features, like an over-exposed photograph. I was lofted towards her until our cheeks touched beneath the wings of her wimple, then she gripped my pen and we floated through space. When I awoke with a great erection—well, as great as I could manage at the age of eleven—I was deeply troubled... yet happy. What the hell was going on here?

It was a rainy afternoon in early spring when Sister Mary-Theresa asked me why I didn't work harder to make good grades when I had so much ability. I knew she was referring to civics class, where I did not agree with my teacher that we should accept poverty as a 'trial' given to us by God to test and strengthen our faith. On my next report card she graded me down for 'bad attitude'. I explained to Sister Mary-Theresa that grades didn't really matter because I wouldn't be staying in school past the age of sixteen, when I would have to get a job to help my family. And anyway, I had the feeling that I would make my way in the world, if I made it at all, by doing something outside the conventional professions and jobs. Inventing things, maybe. Or entertaining people. Something like that. But she was wrong to think I didn't care about grades. On the contrary, I liked doing well on tests. It was a kind of game, and I liked winning.

“I see,” she said. Then, in what I had come to recognize as her too offhand voice, she asked if I had ever thought about praying for help with tests. I felt uncomfortable that the idea of prayer had come up between us. I didn't want to think of us as nun-and-kid, but rather as teacher-and-inventor/comedian... or even as man-and-woman. But she went on to say that scholars often prayed to Saint Thomas Aquinas, and youngsters can pray to Saint Nicholas, patron saint of children, or to Saint Rose of Lima for good luck. When I added that maybe the dumber kids in our class should pray to Jude, patron saint of lost causes, she frowned. “That was an unkind thing to say, Luke.” Then she told me that she'd once had personal experience of the positive power of prayer.? HYPERLINK “file:///C:\\Documents%20and%20Settings\\Administrator\\Impostazioni%20locali\\Temp\\Rar$EX00.266\\Trevanian%20-%20The%20Crazyladies%20of%20Pearl%20Street.htm” \l “note37#note37” ??[37]? When she was training to become a teacher, she had been worried about a test she hadn't studied properly for, so she prayed hard to Saint Rose of Lima, and she did just fine. I suggested that her confidence in prayer may have kept her from the panic that often chokes people faced with important tests. She smiled and said, yes, she supposed that working from within could be one of the ways God answers your prayers. I admired her fast footwork. If she had been born a man, she could have been a Jesuit.

After this first casual mention of the power of prayer, Sister Mary-Theresa began slipping little comments on faith and belief into our afternoon work sessions, and the material she gave me to copy out was no longer taken from a penmanship book, with its awkward sentences contorted by the effort to use all the letters in the alphabet. Instead, the little paragraphs I was assigned to copy out were about boys who didn't know what they wanted to do with their lives until somebody, often a wise old priest, advised them to pray for guidance. Then something happened to show them that they had a calling. Maybe it was God's will that they become...

...She was trying to draw me into the service of God!

At first I resented her oblique slyness, but soon I found myself working up story games about becoming a priest and working in the slums with kids who accepted me because I was tough and street-wise. I would win the kids' admiration and confidence by beating them at ledgey, the way some Spencer Tracy might.

When I walked down Pearl Street, inwardly playing the priest role and smiling and nodding left and right, kindness and forgiveness in my eyes, I got some pretty strange return stares from other kids, but I persisted in the story game, imagining that the old ladies behind their curtains were looking out at Father Luke and Sister Mary-Theresa walking together, spreading love and charity around the neighborhood. The old dears would nudge one another and say: Look at that fine couple, off on their rounds of good works. They would never imagine that every night the young priest and the nun met in the privacy of his dreams, where their faces drew closer and closer together beneath her winged head-dress and she held his pen firmly as he... No, it was better that the admiring old ladies didn't know about all that. It might shake their faith.

But by the end of the week the priest games dried up for lack of fresh material, and I began rehearsing the moment when I would tell Sister Mary-Theresa of my love for her. I took my models from the women's films my mother dragged us to every other Thursday night. After trying out variants of their avowal scenes for a week, muttering both my lines and Sister Mary-Theresa's responses, I decided that I would wait until our after-school session was over and it was time for me to go home. I would open the door, then turn back and say: “Oh, by the way, Sister Mary-Theresa?” She'd look up from grading her papers and say: “Yes, Luke?” And I'd say in a gentle, grave voice: “Oh, nothing. It's just that... well, I love you.” And I'd turn and leave, closing the door behind me. She'd sit there at her desk, stunned, overwhelmed, speechless, nonplused... or maybe she'd rush to the door and open it, but I'd already have disappeared into the swirling mists, so she'd close the door and, like women do in movies and nowhere else, she'd press the door closed with her butt and lean back against it, a dreamy smile on her lips as she envisioned our glowing future as man and nun confronting a suspicious world.

By the time my baffling, never-quite-innocent dreams of Sister Mary-Theresa brought me to daydreaming about revealing my feelings for her, she and I had been co-workers in the spiritual vineyard for nearly a year, ever since I joined the corps of altar boys at Saint Joseph's.

As soon as my training was over I found myself dragooned into serving the ill-attended six-o'clock low mass, a task the older altar boys avoided because Father Looney, the old priest who said these low-status masses, was notoriously crotchety and eccentric. (And don't imagine that his name escaped comment in the vestry.)

Saint Joseph's was only four blocks from our apartment, but despite its being on the edge of the slums it was an important church with a large, fairly prosperous congregation. In the 1870s priests from Ireland managed to supplicate, bully, threaten and shame the faithful into paying for the vast, echoing neo-Gothic cavern of Vermont granite that was Saint Joseph's, located in the southern end of the thirty-square-block area then known as Irishtown. Over the years, most of the Irish prospered and assimilated into the American ethno-cultural salad. They dispersed west and north, away from the river and the docks, leaving behind a handful of feckless bog Irish marooned on North Pearl Street. This is how Albany's 'Irish church' ended up in what most of its adherents considered a tawdry part of town. But still they came to hear the soft, curling accents of our priests, who continued to be supplied from Ireland.

The ladies of Saint Joseph's Altar Society were locked in pious competition with those of nearby Saint Anthony's, where Italians went because its priests could shrive and console in Italian, a great comfort to the older women who could not help feeling there must be some advantage in praying and receiving blessings in the Pope's (and presumably God's) native language. The kids of my block thought the Italian kids were lucky to have Saint Anthony of Padua as their special advocate because he was the patron saint of Lost Things and kids are forever losing or mislaying things and so have special need for his gifts of location and recovery. I never really believed in all that hokum, but once, just as a test, I shot off a quick prayer to Saint Anthony on the occasion of losing a nickel through a hole in my pocket. Although I didn't immediately find my nickel, I did come across three pennies over that summer (one flattened by the wheels of a trolley car), and this suggested that there might be some value in praying to Saint Anthony... about a fifty-percent value, assuming that a flattened penny is worth half of a normal one. So the Italians' Saint Anthony interceded usefully on behalf of people who had suffered losses, while our Saint Joseph championed more mundane groups: fathers, carpenters and cuckolds—although in reaching out to protect this last constituency, Saint Joseph reveals a refreshingly wry view of his relation to his eldest son.