The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin' (277 page)

Reading Mother Fil’s comments, I felt sorta sorry for poor Madame. Sure, she was weird, but she meant well. And compared to Sister Dymphna, she
had way more of what Pop called “zippity-doo-da.” But Madame’s report card read kind of like a teacher’s version of Lonny Flood’s. I didn’t know what “vivants” meant, but I figured
“tableau”
was French for “table.” I didn’t get why Madame was volunteering to put a costume on a table, unless, maybe, a
“tableau vivant”
was like a French tablecloth.

N
o dawdling now! Line up!
Dépêchez-vous!”
she pleaded. Yup, she was definitely working on her “needs improvement”s.

I got in line by the back door and Marion Pemberton cut in front of me. Marion’s a boy, not a girl, even though he has a girl’s name, which, in a way, is worse than having everyone call you Dondi. Marion’s the only colored kid in our grade. Black, I mean. At Sunday dinner last Sunday, Pop started telling us about, the day before, this sailor was sitting at the lunch counter having a tuna salad sandwich and a Fresca? And Pop could tell he was from the South
because he had a Southern drool, which is an accent like that creepy little girl on the Shake ’N Bake commercial who, when her father comes home and says, “What’s for dinner?” and the girl goes, “Mama made Shak’n’Bake and ah hailped.” But anyways, Pop said, “And then this colored guy comes over and sits down at the stool next to him, and the Southern guy gets up and moves two stools down, as if the colored guy—” And Frances interrupted him and said, “What color was he?” And Pop went, “Huh?” And Frances said, “Was he green? Yellow? Purple?” Then she told us that her civics teacher told her class that, from now on, colored people didn’t want to be called “colored” or “Negro”; they wanted to be called either “black” or “Afro-American.” And Pop rolled his eyes and went, “Well, excuse me, Martin Luther King’s secretary, but do you mind if I finish telling my story now?” But anyways, when Marion Pemberton cut me in line, I said, “Hey! No cuts, no butts, no coconuts.” And he looked back at me and smiled and shook his finger in my face and said, “Wait’ll the NAACP
hears about
this!”
And I elbowed him in the back. (But we were just kidding. Marion and me are friends. One time, he and his mother were at the bus station picking up one of their relatives who was coming in on the New York bus and Pop let me make Marion a free float—orange soda with vanilla ice cream.) Marion’s always saying that for a joke: “Wait’ll the NAACP hears about
this!”
Like when he doesn’t get picked right away in dodge ball, or when he wants to trade you something in his lunch for something in yours and you say no. NAACP means National Association for the something of Colored People. I mean
black
people. Except why don’t they call it the N.A.A.B.P.?

Exiting the classroom, the thirty-four of us clomped in thunderous silence down the two flights of stairs and out the front door. With Madame clucking and clapping behind us, we slogged past the holly bush we’d planted for all the poor kids around the world who weren’t lucky enough to live in a democracy. We passed the statue of Martin de Porres,
the Afro-American saint from Peru or someplace who, Sister Dymphna told us, used to
glow
when he prayed and could be in two places at once, and could communicate with animals using ESP. We ambled past the Blessed Virgin’s grotto where, each May, an eighth grade girl was chosen to dress in a bride’s gown and veil, climb the step stool, and put a crown of flowers on Mary’s head. (Simone had been chosen as the bride in her year; Frances had not been in hers but had insisted she wouldn’t have done it, even if she
had
been picked over Bryce Bongiovanni, who was a brown-noser at school but a chicky boom-boom out
of
school, and who, Frances knew for a
fact
, had shoplifted at Rosenblatt’s Clothiers and made out in the indoor show with “Jesse” James Bocheko.) My classmates and me rounded the corner, made the sign of the cross, and mounted the church steps, accompanied by Madame’s
“Dépêchez-vous! Dépêchez-vous!”
And I was like, jeeze, all right already, relax.

Inside, we faced a vestibule inspection conducted by the aforementioned skin-twister, Sister Mary
Agrippina. We boys were lined up, eyeballed, and ordered to tuck in our shirts, check our zippers and shoe laces, and, if necessary, spit onto our hands and pat down our cowlicks. Girls who had forgotten to bring a hat or mantilla to school that day were assigned detention and ordered to cover their heads with bobby-pinned sheets from Sister M.A.’s roll of paper towels—or, if a girl happened to be wearing a cardigan sweater over her St. Aloysius Gonzaga uniform, she could put her sweater on her head and button it beneath her chin. Two Final Fridays ago, I had noted to one sweaterhead, MaryAnn Vocatura, that with her sleeves drooping down the sides of her face, she looked like a basset hound. MaryAnn’s response had been reasonable enough, I thought; she’d socked me in the arm. But Rosalie, whose business it
wasn’t
, had ratted me out to Sister Mary Agrippina, who, in turn, had grabbed the back of my neck and squeezed hard, dropping me to my knees on the vestibule floor.

Declared acceptable, we fifth graders were given the go-ahead to enter the church proper, where we
were met by St. Aloysius’s vice-principal and Final Friday traffic cop, Sister Fabian—not to be confused with Sister Elvis, Sister Ricky Nelson, or Sister Bobby Rydell, this being a standard joke among the St. Aloysius student body. “You to the right,” Sister Fabian decreed. “You to the left. Right. Left. Right. Left.” Confession, absolution, and penance under these circumstances was, as Pop would say, a crap shoot. That morning my luck was crappy. I got Monsignor Muldoon.

“You’re next, Felix! Get the lead out! Let’s go!” Sister Fabian ordered, loudly enough to be heard by the angels in heaven, let alone by my father-confessor. Reluctantly, I detached myself from the boys’ line and approached the confession box. I parted the curtain, entered, and knelt.

Like a life-sized shadow puppet, Monsignor shifted behind the confessional screen. I waited while he unwrapped a Life Saver and popped it in his mouth. Butter rum, the same flavor my father liked; I could
smell it through the gray-silk screen that separated us. For a month or more during morning exercises, our class had been asking God to help Monsignor break his smoking habit. Doctors’ orders: emphysema. I heard the crunch of hard candy. The Monsignor’s shadow-fingers made a coaxing gesture:
Come on, kid; let’s get the show on the road; cough it up
. This one time, Simone told me she heard that Monsignor “liked his liquor, too.” But butter rum’s not liquor, because if it was, how come
kids
can buy butter rum Life Savers?

I crossed myself and began. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last confession. These are my—”

A wheezy sigh interrupted me. “Speak up, boy. You’re mumbling.”

Well, of course I was. I was about to own up to a doozy that morning—a sin to which I did
not
want my peers to be privy, particularly Geraldine Balchunas, our class’s biggest gossip who, as luck would have it, had stood at the front of the girls’ line when
I’d slinked toward Monsignor’s confessional seconds earlier. Behind Geraldine had stood my nemesis, Rosalie Twerski. Eavesdropping on other kids’ confessions, our class had been assured, was sinful, and there was a strategy by which we could avoid this particular transgression. We were to close our eyes, cover our ears with our hands, and hum quietly to ourselves. This was small comfort, however, in my hour of need. Of the thirty-four of us, the number who actually used this technique was zero.

“It’s been two weeks since my last confession,” I began again. “These are my sins.” I admitted that, having forgotten to do my sentence-diagramming homework one night, I had copied someone else’s paper on the bus. That I had called my sister a retard twice. That swear words had come out of my mouth on six different occasions. “But not the really bad one, Monsignor. Just ‘h’ and ‘d’ and ‘s.’” I cleared my throat and mustered up my courage. “And…”

Monsignor fished another Life Saver from his
roll and popped it in his mouth, crunching and waiting. “And
what
?” he finally asked.

“I…had impure thoughts.”

“What was that last one? Speak up.”

“I had these certain thoughts…. You know.”

“No, I
don’t
know, unless you tell me. What kind of thoughts?”

“Impure ones…. About my cousin.”

“Your
cousin
?”

“Yeah. My cousin Annette. She’s famous.” I could practically see Geraldine and Rosalie out there, leaning forward, their hands cupped behind their big Dumbo ears.

“And did you act on these thoughts?” Monsignor inquired.

Had I? Was French-kissing a poster as bad as French-kissing a person? I told Monsignor I wasn’t sure.

“What do you mean, you’re not sure? Either you acted upon them or you didn’t.”

“I kissed her poster…. On the lips.” I edited out the tongue part.

“Her poster? What do you—”

“The one of her at the beach. In her bathing suit, listening to her transistor…. But anyways, Monsignor, I’m sure glad you gave up cigarettes. My father used to smoke, too. Chesterfields. But then he—”

Monsignor cut me off and started telling me about how incest was a mortal sin, and how what I’d done made Jesus very, very,
very
sad. Had maybe even made Him weep, as He had the day He died on the cross for our sins. Then he gave me a
whole, entire
rosary to say for penance which, if I’d gotten Father Hanrahan, I probably would have had to say only a few “Our Father”s and “Hail Mary”s and maybe a “Glory Be.”

“Now let’s hear you make a good Act of Contrition,” Monsignor said.

Unsure if I was apologizing to God or the Monsignor, I rattled from rote how “heartily sorry for having offended Thee” I was. But I was thinking, as
I recited the prayer, about how my impure thoughts were really more Pop’s fault than mine.
He
was the one who’d led me into temptation by taping Annette’s poster above the fryolator in the first place. And Chino’s fault, too. I wouldn’t have even known what French-kissing was if he hadn’t told me. In a way,
they
should be saying whole rosaries for penance, not me.

Monsignor told me to imitate Jesus and gave me his blessing. Exiting the confessional, I tried to ignore Geraldine’s and Rosalie’s stares. “Take a picture. It lasts longer,” I suggested as I passed by them on my way to the altar. I may have heard kissing sounds from one of them.

Later that day, while we were conjugating French verbs, the school secretary appeared at the back door of our classroom.
“Excusez-moi, mes élèves,”
Madame Frechette said. “Yes, Mrs. Tewksbury? May we help you?”

“Would you please excuse Felix Funicello for a few moments?” Mrs. T said. “There’s someone down in the office who wishes to see him.”

Approaching Mrs. Tewksbury on what seemed like my “perp walk,” I felt the 66 eyes of my 33 classmates upon me. Out in the corridor, I asked Mrs. T who was waiting downstairs. “You’ll see,” she said. As I descended the staircases to the main floor, my mind raced with scenarios good and bad. Had a policeman come to deliver some grim news about my parents? Had my cousin Annette heard about me and come to St. Aloysius Gonzaga to make my acquaintance and, perhaps, to sign some autographs for my friends? Had a detective figured out that I was the one who’d awakened that bat and driven Sister Dymphna cuckoo? “They’re waiting in Mother Filomina’s office,” Mrs. Tewksbury said. “You can go right in.”

I heard Monsignor Muldoon’s labored breathing as I approached the inner office. “Hello, Felix,” Mother Filomina said. “Come in. Have a seat.” She was behind her big desk, and the only available chair was the one opposite the Monsignor. I sat. He smiled, something I’d never seen him do before. He had little
peg teeth, brownish from tar and nicotine, I figured. And little squiggly veins on his cheeks and in the yellowy whites of his eyes. And there were white hairs growing out of his nostrils. I was seated close enough to smell his blasts of butter rum breath, too.

“The Monsignor has brought you a gift,” Mother Filomina said. “Wasn’t that nice of him?” My head bobbed up and down, as if jerked by a puppeteer.

The Monsignor handed me a booklet,
Aloysius Gonzaga, Patron Saint of Male Youth
. There were veins on his hands, too, and big brown freckles. When he asked me if I knew much about the life of our school’s namesake, I shook my head. I took a quick glimpse at the cover. It had a picture of Aloysius Gonzaga the Boy Saint, his hands clasped in prayer, his head surrounded by a big halo that kind of looked like an electric hula hoop.

“Have you anything to say to Monsignor?” Mother Filomina asked. I shook my head again. “No, Felix? Nothing at all?”

“Umm…How come you’re giving me this?” When Mother cleared her throat, I finally caught her drift. “Oh. Thank you, I mean. Sorry.”

The Monsignor said I was entirely welcome. “I think you’ll find Aloysius’s story inspirational, given what you and I talked about earlier today,” he said. “He might be just the kind of boy whose example you would wish to emulate.”

“Oh,” I said. “Yeah?”

Mother Filomina frowned. “Yes, Monsignor.”

“Yes, Monsignor,” I repeated. On a
Dragnet
episode I’d seen once, Sergeant Joe Friday’s arrest of a murderer had been thwarted by the confidentiality of the confessional, but apparently no such privilege was extended to kids and/or French-kissers. I didn’t know how much Monsignor Magoo had told Mother Filomina about my confession, but I didn’t really want to know, either. “Can I go now?” I asked her.

“
May
you go now?” Mother said. “Yes, you may.”

Back in class, I stuck Monsignor’s booklet in my social studies book, on top of the whoopee cushion
I’d forgotten to give back to Lonny. Geraldine Balchunas kept looking over at me, so I made cross-eyes at her. Rosalie got up to use the pencil sharpener, even though her pencil was sharp already. (Unlike Sister Dymphna, Madame Frechette let us get out of our seats and go over to the sharpener without asking.) “Pssst,” Rosalie said, as she passed by me. “What did you have to go to the office for?”