Vanity Insanity (7 page)

I dreaded the usual dialogue. I knew that we couldn’t afford for me to go to the Catholic all-boys Jesuit school, Creighton Prep. Mac had offered to help with that, but my mom knew she couldn’t pay him back. She’d said no to offers for my sisters to go to Marian High School. With our financial situation, my family would stay on the public-school track.

“You know, I’m not sure yet…”

Grandpa Mac honked from the curb and waved at Mrs. Webber. “Gotta go. Congrats, Hope.” I ran to the big silver boat of a Buick that Grandpa called Babe.

“Heya, Benny,” Grandpa Mac yelled. Note: Grandpa Mac is the only person who got away with calling me Benny besides my mom.

“Heya, Grandpa, heya, Babe,” I addressed his silver femme-auto that only slightly embarrassed me as we drove by the kids on the block. “It sure is hot.”

The talk would remain on the surface during the ride to the church. Weather, ball games, and gas prices. Pretty much it. I think our great effort to sound nonchalant was an attempt to make this little ritual seem natural. And for sure, we never talked about my mom during those ten-minute drives. Mac always allowed me to turn the radio in his car to WOW. That evening, the Righteous Brothers were singing about heaven in the song “Rock and Roll Heaven.”

As we pulled onto the blacktop parking lot at Saint Pius, I took a deep breath. Going to a church that I didn’t feel much a part of. Standing up in front of large crowds of people watching me try to remember every little cup I must give Father. Lighting candles twice as tall as me. Kneeling for what seemed like an eternity. Wearing a dress that I guess was supposed to make me look like a “minipriest” or maybe an angel. This was not easy.

But Grandpa Mac would be sitting out in the pews. He would drop me off near the sacristy and then park out front. Mac would enter the church through the front doors and would sit on the left side, halfway up the aisle, always. He was never too far, not too close or obvious. He would make eye contact with me only once, as I walked down the aisle in the procession with Father Whelan. Grandpa Mac would wink.

Grandpa Mac dropped me off, and I headed toward the back door to the sacristy. Just outside the door against the building leaned Father
Whelan, smoking a cigarette. I can still hear A.C., as he puffed on a candy cigarette from Ben Franklin Five and Dime Store: “Winston tastes good…like a cigarette should.”

Most of the priests that I knew at that time smoked. Heck, most of the adults that I knew smoked at that time in my life: Grandpa Mac, most of the dads, and some of the moms on our block. I had my suspicions about a few teachers. A.C. and I used to think that Father Whelan was one of the coolest smokers ever, though. He seemed deep in thought as he inhaled and squinted. Maybe he was contemplating his sermon for this five thirty p.m. Mass. Maybe he was praying for someone he had visited in the hospital. Maybe he was thinking about some of the more awful or interesting confessions he had listened to recently.

“Good evening, Ben.” Father exhaled as he spoke. Father Whalen was the only priest who knew my name. Father Whelan was cool. A.C. and I had names for each priest in our parish. Big Father Laverty, Young Father Gusweiler, Old-Fart Father Dailey, Fun Father Spokinski, and Cool Father Whelan.

“Hey, Father!” I always liked serving for Father Whelan. He didn’t make me feel nervous if I forgot to bow or get the wine right away. I ran into the sacristy hoping that he would think that I was eager to serve.

Calling these men “father” was always strange to me. They weren’t my father. My own father wasn’t even my father. The name, I figured, even then, was to show that a priest held great responsibility to the people of the church. He was supposed to nurture the people and be their strength and safety during challenging times. People looked to the priest in this way. I could see that in the older women in the church as they told Father Gusweiler he gave a great sermon, or in the faces of children as they ran to Father Spokinski on the playground.

One Thanksgiving as the choir pounded out an impressive performance of “Faith of Our Fathers,” I listened to the words:

Faith of our fathers, living still,
In spite of dungeon, fire and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy
Whenever we hear that glorious Word!

I pinched my eyes together to see what face would pop up in my mind as the father, living still. The father who made my heart fill with joy. I saw Grandpa Mac. Not the priests of Saint Pius.

Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.

A.C. and I had analyzed the whole priesthood thing. Having people look up to you and call you Father would be kind of cool. Giving our lives to God would certainly gain us some points and impress the adults in our worlds. If I knew that I could be as cool as Father Whelan as a priest, I might consider the priesthood, especially if that whole girl thing never worked out.

A.C. had already committed his life to God in the second grade following his First-Communion ceremony. He had announced in front of the cake and coffee at the family party that he was going to be a priest. He would live his life and offer all he did up to God. He also wanted to be a zookeeper and an NFL football player. If anyone could juggle the three, Father A.C. would be the man.

As soon as I signed in to serve that summer evening, I bumped into a kid whose last name must have been right next to mine in the altar server roster since I more often than not got stuck serving with him. Ken or Keith Kemper or something like that. I just remember I didn’t care much for him.

“Dibs on the book. Oh and I’ll do the bell, too!” Ken-or-Keith skipped off to light the candles on the altar—another fun thing I wouldn’t get to do. The “book” happened to be the easier of the two jobs assigned to the servers. These jobs had been taught to me earlier that year during a forty-five-minute training session where Young-Uptight Father Gusweiler magically made me an altar boy. A flock of half minipriest hopefuls and half this-was-not-my-idea youths sat listening to Father while their mothers sat in the back of the church.

Hey, I have an idea! Let’s get the boys in their most awkward, self-conscious state of puberty and put them on the altar for all to gawk at during Mass. Oh, and don’t let the girls up there. Did they really want to give the key to the tabernacle to a sixth-grade boy? Did they have any idea how hard it was for a twelve-year-old boy to keep a straight face when he saw his
friend from the pews crossing his eyes? Did they not know how tempting it was to shine the shiny-crumb-catcher thing right against the light so that it would reflect on the ceiling? Did they know how hard it was to get up at 5:45 in the morning on days that boys served at the 6:30 a.m. Mass and stay awake for that next hour? I think they knew. Oh, they knew. No one had spared them, either.

Those who schemed up this whole altar-boy thing must have felt that young men might gain some character taking part in the liturgy. They must have hoped that the overwhelming, nauseating stench of the incense would knock some sense into the young boys. Maybe the holy-water thingy that the priest shook at the congregation would look like something fun to do. Maybe some of those young participants would consider the priesthood. I’m sure they had an agenda. I just know that the roller coaster of emotions every time my name showed up on the altar-server roster was absolute. From the moment I put on the ugly church clothes to the moment I was dropped off after the Mass, I would endure that anxious feeling that I might screw something up.

Occasionally, while enduring my “anxiety and suffering” offering to God, I would have moments of awe. As I held a gold plate under the communicants’ chins as they stuck out their tongues for the Holy Eucharist, some people looked hungrier than others to me. Hungry for something. Hungry for what? Of course, the younger communicants focused more on the style of receiving the Eucharist. After watching and anticipating their time to partake in the Communion, they wanted to do it right. It was the older people of the community who always struck me. They looked so hungry.

During the mornings that I served, I had to wonder, what had gotten these older people out of bed to come to Mass? I know that if Grandpa Mac had not prodded me along, I certainly would still be in a nice, warm bed. What made these people get up so early to come? They could have slept in. If you are over one hundred years old or so, you shouldn’t have to go to 6:30 a.m. Mass. Right? Yet they all looked so hungry. They actually wanted to be there. It was during this time that I felt completely unworthy. Unworthy to be standing on the altar. Unworthy to be partaking in this amazing ritual. Unworthy to receive such grace I did not understand.

After Mass that evening in the summer of 1974, once Ken-or-Keith and I had cleaned up, snuffing out candles and putting everything in order for the next Mass, I hung up my robe and headed out to the blacktop parking lot. Grandpa Mac and Babe were waiting for me. The ride home was pretty much the same as the ride to church except that every once in a while Grandpa Mac would stop by Goodrich Dairy and get two chocolate malts for us. That night on our way home, we saw a small black man walking down Blondo Street with an armful of brooms and a white cane. Mac waved at the man. The old man, in a suit and tie, wearing a capped hat, held about five brooms over his shoulder. He moved the cane back and forth as he walked down the sidewalk.

“That’s Reverend Livingston, Ben,” Grandpa Mac said quietly. “He’s a blind man who sells brooms for a living and preaches God’s word. Makes the brooms, too. The man’s a saint, a quiet little saint weaving around the city.”

“He’s blind? How does he know if people are paying him the right amount of money?”

“He just trusts them, I guess. I bought a broom from him when I was working downtown. He was walking around the UP building at lunch time, but I’ve seen him all over Omaha.”

Grandpa Mac turned Babe past the Wicker Witch house and onto my cul-de-sac. He parked in the driveway. “Thanks for serving, Benny.”

“You bet. Hey, Grandpa?”

Grandpa Mac looked at me as I opened the door to get out of his car.

“You waved to a blind man.” I started laughing. “Did you know that?”

Grandpa Mac smiled. “Wondered if you’d caught that.”

I ran up to my porch and went into the house. The summer of 1974 was stinkin’ hot. Gas prices were wacky. An old, blind man sold brooms on the streets of Omaha. And over in England, after a stint as a ditch digger and an English teacher, my future hero, was playing music wherever he could get a job. Gordon Sumner, music man of England, was starting to make a name for himself.

And Ben Keller, not-quite-Catholic kid of Omaha, was serving the evening Mass at Saint Pius X in Omaha, Nebraska.

7

Mrs. Mangiamelli: Wash and Set,
Delayed Graduation to Attend

Thursday, June 5

1975

T
he winds across the state of Nebraska misbehaved during the year 1975. They mastered the perfect blizzard in January and later performed a mind-dazzling “ten” of a tornado in early May. Those same angry winds blew Ava Mangiamelli into my mother’s basement in early June for a wash and set.

The official icebreaker for any hairstylist is the weather. In Nebraska, this was most definitely a volatile topic. How ’bout that blizzard? Hey, how ’bout that tornado? “If you don’t like the weather in Omaha, just stick around an hour or two. It’ll change.”

So much to talk about in 1975.

In January, when mothers were hurrying to get their children back to school following two weeks of Christmas break, the blizzard of ’75 hit.
Major winds and almost twenty inches of snow took fourteen lives in Omaha. The National Guard rescued four hundred stranded motorists. Employees of businesses around the city were stranded for days in their offices. Mr. Webber spent three days at a light company that was near a gas station and a liquor store. Mr. Webber and three other employees found a TV in the storage area and played cards until the snow plows unburied their cars. I still have a picture of A.C. and me standing on a drift that was as high as the roof on his house. No joke. We had the longest Christmas vacation that year since school was canceled an additional week. The city was paralyzed. The kids were ecstatic.

As if we hadn’t already missed enough school, in May we had another unexpected break from the classroom since, barely an hour after school kids made it home for the day, some of the classrooms were no longer there. At about 4:15 p.m. on May 6, several major tornados, with winds gusting up to 260 miles per hour, decided to blow down the center of town, turn left on Seventy-Second Street, and swing by the Ak-Sar-Ben Racetrack and Archbishop Bergan Mercy Hospital before driving out of town and lifting at 4:38 p.m. The afternoon tour chopped a path across ten miles of streets and residences. Nearly a year after Elvis Presley sold out performances in his “Tornado over Omaha” concert tour of June 1974, the real-life tornado of ’75 caught our city’s attention.

The miracle of it all is that this F4 natural disaster took only three lives. Omahans were proud to say that their sound-warning system was the real hero; one of the three fatalities had been a hard-of-hearing elderly lady who had not heard the sirens.

Omaha drew a breath as the paralyzed community picked up toasters and wallets in their yards belonging to people who lived miles away. An entire block wiped out near Saint Pius had only one wall standing, with a cross hanging soundly. Lucy’s friend Beth Taber, who lived two blocks from Pius, spent the next three months in a town house while her home was rebuilt. When the sirens sounded on that day in May, Beth and her three sisters and mother had gone to the southeast corner of their basement and hid under a mattress during those twenty-three minutes. The tornado
lifted the house from above them and replaced it with a car. Within seconds, glass whirled around the basement. Beth and her sisters watched from under the mattress as the corner of the house lifted off the foundation. Beth remembers bobbing up off the floor, holding onto her sister.

When the tornado passed, the girls found their neighbor’s car suspended just above their heads and their mother on the floor bleeding from a deep cut, apparently inflicted by the car’s bumper. Mrs. Taber was knocked out by the blow but revived by the gasoline that was pouring out of the car onto her face. When Mrs. Taber came to, she and her girls noticed that the house was gone. The Tabers didn’t realize at the time that one of the twister’s three victims lay dead in their backyard.