Vanity Insanity (8 page)

Saint Pius X, Lewis and Clark Junior High, Creighton Prep High School, and many other schools were out of commission for weeks that spring. No one complained as every normal tradition for the end of a school year was turned upside down. Creighton Prep’s graduation was delayed until early June that year. Louis and Ava Mangiamelli’s son Sebastian, or Subby, would graduate in the auditorium at Boys Town. Ava came to Mom to have her hair done for the event.

About fifteen minutes before Ava blew in to have her hair done for her son’s graduation, I was eating breakfast in our tiny kitchen. Couldn’t get enough of Super Sugar Crisp. I was studying the back of the cereal box when Tracy, my second-oldest and most annoying sister, plunked down in the seat next to me. The minute she got her driver’s license, Tracy chose to use her driving powers for evil rather than good. When my mom asked her to take me places, she thought it was funny—once we were alone in her clunky Volkswagen—to taunt me by saying, always in a deadpan tone, that Mom had really asked her to drive me to Boys Town and drop me off since she no longer had room for me at home. The seventh time she performed this little antic—the time that she actually drove to Boys Town and parked in front of the
He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother
statue out front—it was no longer funny.

Tracy would also pull the ole “I’m flyin’—Buckey’s buyin’” routine. I would be playing the role of Buckey. This translated to A.C. and me that Tracy would drive us to her favorite fast-food spot, but we had to buy her
lunch. When you’re housebound with only a ten-speed for transportation, you tend to get a little desperate.

Tracy slammed her transistor radio on the table from which Rufus and Chaka Khan were singing “Tell Me Something Good” and attempted to take a knot out of the cords of her earplugs. She may have been older than I was, but she was just a brat to me. I chomped on my cereal and ignored her.

“Oh, my gosh, I
love
this song…OK, Ben, you need to do me a favor. Tell Grandpa Mac that I went to Confession. I don’t want to go to Pius since the priests we see all the time would know my sins, and that’s just creepy. OK, so I’m going to Saint Walter’s. I want Grandpa Mac to know ‘cause if he thought I hadn’t gone, he would take me when he takes you. I’m running over there right now. Ben, are you listening to me?”

Tracy was sixteen going on nine. My apologies to nine-year-olds everywhere.

“I heard you, but how do I know if you’re telling the truth? Maybe you’re lying. Maybe you
need
to go to Confession with me since you would need to confess that you lie about going to Confession. Aren’t you the one who sent me into church one time to grab a bulletin to show Mom that we had gone to Mass? I believe you called it a receipt. And why do you think that the priests at Pius even care about your stupid sins?”

“Just tell Grandpa!” Tracy got up and headed out of the house, leaving the earplugs on the table, throwing the radio, still playing, in her fluorescent, oversized bag.

“You have to live with yourself!” I yelled. I went back to studying the back of the Sugar Crisp cereal box. In addition to the fun yet useless toy I would find in the bottom of the box, I could also cut out a forty-five record of Bobby Sherman’s hit “Easy Come and Easy Go” right from the back of the box. My mind was buzzing with all sorts of ideas, like how I was going to cut the record out when the box was still over half full. Should I cut the record out or dig for the plastic sugar bear first? Could you really play a cardboard record on a record player? I heard the basement door slam, shaking the table holding my cereal. My spoon was suspended in midair. I heard the muffle of a conversation.

Ava.

My mom.

Ava.

My mom.

Ava sobbing, “What am I going to do, Marcia?” I sensed they weren’t talking about the weather, though in a strange way, the meteorological events that year had certainly started to wear down the adult community that I knew. Maybe Ava was barometrically frustrated.

“She’s the thorn in my side, I tell you. She will drive me to my grave!”

I heard my mother muffle a laugh. “Oh, Ava! Lucy will be fine.”

Aside from this moment, my memories of Mrs. Mangiamelli were all of a well-oiled mother-machine of many children who, despite her stature, maintained a high position of power over her children in a very organized household. When I speak of the tiny houses on our street, I can’t stress enough the word “tiny.” Ava, in her motherly wisdom and driven adaptability, raised four very large sons and one very bossy daughter under a very tiny roof. With a floor plan quite similar to my little white house, the Mangiamelli home was a lesson in resourcefulness.

While my mother maintained a business in her basement, Ava directed her husband, Louis, to build the frames of two sets of bunk beds against the cement walls of their own underground Boys Town. No one ever complained about the accommodations except during the colder days in the basement in the winter. With four twin mattresses and carpet remnants, the room served as a dormer of sorts that I found resplendent. Posters of the Huskers, The Who, Adrienne Barbeau, and Raquel Welch covered the cinder-block walls, warming the look of Mangiamelli cellar. The summer before, the boys had bought a gigantic
Jaws
poster that was cooler than snot. The four boys slept there year-round. Lucy shared a room on the main level with Grandma, the sewing machine, and a desk from which Mr. Mangiamelli did his bills.

Ava’s order and resourcefulness went beyond the home when she told Louis that all of her boys would go to Creighton Prep High School for a fine Jesuit education. Paying tuition for four boys when the public school
was right down the street would surely be a challenge, so Ava went up to Prep and gladly filled a position in the cafeteria kitchen. Children of employees were given free tuition. Problem solved. With all of the order and control she maintained in her life and in her home and with her children, Ava was not one who was comfortable when something went awry. Case in point—that day in my mother’s shop.

“This. This is awful! Do you think that my baby girl is turning into a floozy?” Ava shouted.

I muffled a laugh. Lucy, a floozy?
Luuucy, you got some ’splaining to do!

I slowly put the spoonful of cereal into my mouth. I knew that any noise I made in our tiny little kitchen would send a loud, creaking sound to my mother’s shop. If I wanted to run away, I would make it known that I had heard the exchange. If I ran, I might miss out on what sounded oh so much more interesting than the Sugar Crisp cereal box.

“Even though we’re out of school, I got a call from the principal at Pius this morning. Evidently the day before the tornado, Lucy and seven other kids were called into the office. Lucy was the only one who admitted to…you know. They had to put the punishment for their crime on hold because of the chaos with the tornado. Sister Annunciata said the janitor had found the kids in the tornado shelter between the two locker rooms…doing stuff!”

“Stuff?” my mom asked.

“Stuff!” Ava shouted. “Boys and girls doing stuff.” I heard her crying as my mom soothed her. The milk and soggy cereal mellowed in my mouth. I swallowed quietly.

“C’mon, Ava. Sit down.”

The tornado shelter or crime scene was yet another interesting architectural decision in the Saint Pius facility. The guy in charge of the blueprints must not have been wearing his thinking cap the day he drew the plans for the Pius tornado shelter. Stairs leading down from the girls’ locker room took children to a long, dark, safe hallway. Stairs leading down from the boys’ locker room took children to the safety of the same hallway. Great for tornado protection. Not so great for adolescent hormone protection following seventh and eighth-grade basketball games.

Even I, simple public-school boy, knew about the Hall. Some called it Horror Hall, as the lights were not on when kids went there to do stuff. Some called it the Whore Hall. Whatever. The Hall was known. Ava seemed concerned about the scarlet “H” or “W” Lucy would wear the rest of her life with the news of this heinous crime.

She may have been guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I knew for a fact that Lucy was innocent of the Whore Hall charges. She was always where the action was; however, Lucy was not one bit guilty of the “stuff” that flustered her mother. I knew this. Now I was in an even more-awkward position since the valuable piece of information that I had in my little kitchen was pure and simple: Lucy was innocent.

I wanted to run downstairs with this information and shout it out loud. I wished I’d left with Tracy for Saint Walter’s. I suddenly had to go to the bathroom.

“I know she has her moments…” Ava sobbed and then blew her nose. “She’s not a bad girl…What if she doesn’t get confirmed?”

“She’s a very good girl,” Mom consoled Ava during more quiet sobbing.

What if she didn’t get confirmed? Did Ava really think that someone other than Lucy had control over her soul? Did she think that someone other than Lucy could confirm her faith? I felt a bit stormy. Linda Ronstadt’s song “You’re No Good” echoed in the basement as Ava sobbed.

I should know about Confirmation. I had gone through the whole process the year before the tornado with A.C. We were the CCD kids who were tucked in the pews between the Saint Pius school kids on the Sunday of Confirmation. I remember the looks from kids, the same looks we got during First Communion and First Confession.
Who the heck are you? Are you the one that messes with my desk on Wednesday nights?

Confirmation in the Catholic Church is usually the fourth sacrament that a precious, young Catholic might experience, following Baptism, First Communion, and Confession. Though the ages of those to be confirmed may vary across the nations, most young boys and girls confirm their faith in the Catholic Church around the time that their hormones start clicking
away.
Hey, your body is growing up; now you need to be an adult, spiritually as well.

In the traditional Roman Catholic rite of Confirmation, the sacrament indelibly seals us to the Holy Ghost, hence its name. During Confirmation, a young Catholic publicly “confirms” his or her Catholic intentions in this crazy world. Parents have spoken for these kids at Baptism and up to this point. Now these young men and women come forward and say, “I am Catholic because I say so!”

The added bonuses that go along with the whole Catholic Confirmation process include naming a sponsor, who stands by the child during this big decision, and taking on a new name, one added to the birth-given name. That name should be one that a person takes on because of its significance. It looked really good to the teachers and other adults if you picked a name of a saint.

My sponsor was Grandpa Mac. This was an easy decision. He had stood by me all those years while I served Mass and confessed my sins. He would stand by me as I confirmed my faith.

Then there was the name picking. A young person could really make a statement about himself by picking a certain name. Marty, for example, picked the name Ann since she had intentions of going into the medical world. Saint Ann was a nurse. Theresa was unique, as she chose the male name Gerard, taken from Saint Gerard, the patron saint of mothers. I don’t need to tell you that Lucy had been planning her Confirmation name for years. Quite possibly, she’d made her mind up years earlier when she had been excluded from the great Mary procession of 1969. You guessed it: Lucille Bell Mary Mangiamelli.

The year before, A.C. and I had picked out Confirmation names with careful consideration. Of course, A.C. had to be unique with his decision. While the rest of the to-be-confirmed chose names like Elizabeth, James, and Thomas, A.C., after studying many books on the saints, chose the name Aloysius. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga was the patron saint of compassion and Catholic youth. Maybe A.C. couldn’t pronounce it. He certainly could pull it off.

I chose the name Joseph. Benjamin Howard Joseph Keller, a no-brainer decision. Joseph, father of Jesus, was the great Background Guy. He married
a young pregnant woman, knowing that he had not fathered her child. He protected her and her child through many a turbulent day. That good-father factor certainly weighed heavily on my decision. Jesus was not even his biological son, yet he loved Jesus like a father should.

From my chair in the kitchen, I listened to more sobbing. Would Mom ever do Ava’s hair? I sat at the kitchen table with the truth and my soggy cereal. I knew that Lucy was not a floozy. I knew that the only thing Lucy was guilty of was being honest and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had not done any of the stuff that seemed to be bothering Mrs. Mangiamelli. I knew this because Lucy had told me.

A month earlier, before the tornado, Lucy had her first baby-sitting job. Because she was twelve, she had taken the Red Cross class on babysitting. In perfect Lucy style, she handed out flyers to everyone within a three-block radius that shouted “Pick Me!” My next-door neighbors, Ted and Nancy Shanahan, were past the years of needing babysitters since their “baby” was thirty-two years old, but their daughter, Tammy, and her husband and four-year-old twins would be visiting. Mr. and Mrs. Shanahan, who happened to be one of the only non-Catholic families in our neighborhood, had asked Lucy to baby-sit their grandchildren while they went to a wedding reception. A perfect baby-sitting job for a first-timer.

When I answered the phone that Friday night in April, I didn’t recognize her voice. Lucy was terrified.

“Ben!” Lucy cried. “I’m scared to death. You’ve got to help me.”

A million things went through my head as I felt panic growing in my gut.
What! Where? How much blood?
Before I could say a word, Lucy continued, “You’ve got to come over here. I just watched
Wait until Dark
. My mom’s gonna kill me…”

“You’ve got to give me a little more information, Lucy. What are you talking about? Where is ‘here’?”

Lucy explained that, after putting down the kids, she had watched a movie about a blind woman and some bad guys hiding in her house to steal a doll stuffed with drugs that had been planted on her—something
her parents would never have allowed her to watch. The Red Cross had prepared Lucy for feeding kids, giving baths, reading bedtime stories in goofy voices, and putting them to bed. She even knew what to do in case of an accident. What the Red Cross failed to do was teach Lucy not to watch scary movies after the little ones were down for the night.