Uphill Walkers Page 3

  Dear Maureen,

  A week ago or so I wrote to Mr. L.W. Francis at New Haven and told him that I would like to assume the expense of Ray’s stay at Camp Leo this July, as I know if the tables were turned Ray would have been the first one to have done something like this for my child.

  Today I received a reply from Mr. Francis stating that the fee had already been paid by you. He suggested that Ray might stay for two months. You can use your own judgment. Meantime, in memory of my best pal I am enclosing a check to help underwrite the expense of Ray’s stay at Leo this summer.

  One phrase leapt out, the unsolicited tribute in it:

  If the tables were turned Ray would have been the first one to have done something like this.

  Others of my father’s friends followed Tim Collins’s suit with actions of their own, including doctors like Tim Murray, Eddie Welch, and Ed Mahoney. They saw us throughout our childhood at a moment’s notice, checking Christina’s knee when she got water on it, removing from Michael’s nostril a fat purple crayon, prescribing hydrocortisone cream for me when my face broke out in mysterious blotches, never once sending a bill.

  I watched with envy as Raymond’s trunk was being packed, while he paraded about with his new canteen and pre-stamped postcards for writing home.

  There was no kindergarten in town the year I was five, so as I awaited the beginning of first grade, I was in a fever to learn, the kind of child that would be instantly clasped by teachers. I think of that time after my father’s death, before the start of school, as the loneliest time of my life. Despite all the people in the house it had been bereft, marked by a sad hush, except at night, when I thought I could hear soft weeping noises. For a big house, it never seemed to have enough bedrooms or enough privacy. My mother had a room; Jacqueline and I shared another, which we decorated with lipstick flowers, using the deep red shade that was in favor in the early fifties. There was one for Raymond and Michael, one for Lizzie and Christina and Maureen, one for Nana.

  In first grade, I recognized in the way my teacher, Mrs. Knightly (whose very name possessed a perfect balance of chivalry and darkness), looked at me—the slightly longer gazes, an undisguised curiosity—that as a half orphan I was one of the lesser but still real wonders of the world, a child who had been dealt a difficult hand. Our town didn’t have any divorce then, and it didn’t seem to have any other dead fathers. Yet we were hardly the worst off, not by a long shot.

  The kids who were the worst off were the state kids, who were always unscrubbed and several years behind in their schooling. The state paid people to let them live on their farms, and the children were expected to sweeten the ransom with their labor. More often than not, one would have a mangled leg or a hand with parts of the fingers missing because he’d operated a thresher or a tractor before he was really old enough. It was understood that their futures were as bleak as their present and their pasts. The teachers put them in the back row and never called on them. I learned early the paradox of public schools, theoretically the fairest places in the world, welcoming one and all, but in practice often guilty of a callous triage.

  My father had left very little insurance: he had not planned to die. But there was enough to pay off the mortgage, and there was a little telephone stock, which meant that for a few years we subscribed to the Wall Street Journal as well as the Transcript-Telegram, the Springfield Union, and the Springfield Daily News.

  We had the big house, the TV, and an overlay of grown-ups including my mother, my grandmother, Lizzie, and from time to time, my mother’s brother, Uncle Dermot. We had parties and studio portraits from Grenier-Ducharme of ourselves in dresses with sashes and ruffles. We had toys and of course, when we got old enough, a series of infernal lessons, which took up less time than one might imagine because, except for elocution with Mrs. Guild, they always fizzled for one reason or another. It was too much work to get to class. The ballet teacher went suddenly and disastrously modern, specializing in a bizarre jungle dance that required us to crouch as we crossed the stage in leopard-skin leotards with our toes pointed inward. The piano lady dyed her hair blond, went back to college, and left her husband.

  But most of all we had airs and aspirations. At her most determined, our mother saw us as part of an overarching narrative, a kind of pioneering, live sitcom in which so what if the father wasn’t around to know best? The weekly plot would not vary. Widow carries on! One-parent family beats odds! Kids have six-for-six success rate! Everything stays the same! For her own part, she seemed to fare best when she pictured herself as a character playing a role, a fey combination of Scarlett O’Hara and Lucille Ball, turning draperies into gowns, pratfalls into soft-shoe. We would attract a prestigious corporate sponsor such as Monsanto (“Better Living through Chemistry”) or Maxwell House coffee (“Good to the Last Drop”). For a theme song there were any number of maudlin Irish ballads to choose from. We wanted to be part of the nationwide sweep of progress, the coming together of ingenuity and imagination resulting in one breakthrough or invention after another. Every day, it seemed, there was something new to be grateful for: a vaccine or a harvester, commercial jet service to Europe, the first kidney transplant, power steering, artificial heart valves, even nonstick saucepans.

  On the playground in Granby in the 1950s we jumped rope to the time-tested chants. We had word games that involved going through the alphabet and naming kinds of cars and their manufacturers: “American Motors, Buick, Chevrolet, Dodge, Edsel, Ford….” We sometimes switched to cigarette brands or movie stars.

  We were racists, of the most unthinking variety.

  “Eeenie meanie minee mo,” we said when picking someone to be “it.” “Catch a nigger by the toe.”

  World War II and the Holocaust barely grazed our consciousness. We thought Hitler and his followers walked funny, and for some reason we often repeated the joke, “What did Hitler’s mother say when she had a baby?” “Hotsy totsy, another Nazi.”

  The most disturbing game, day in, day out, morning recess, lunch recess, and afternoon recess, was one in which you could spread a disease that was worse than cooties. You got it from a girl whose name I have changed, but consider that it might have been something like Beverly Kaye, a quiet grayish sort of girl who never fought back. She stood there like a box of oatmeal on a shelf while people tagged her and then sought to contaminate others with this terrible virus that afflicted its victims with oily hair and a dirty, ill-fitting coat.

  Tag.

  “You’ve got Kabies.”

  Tag.

  “Pass it on.”

  Tag.

  “Oh, no, it’s the bell.”

  Teasing is the basic discourse of people caught in certain kinds of childhoods. Diminished people are the first to diminish others.

  “Uphill walkers, are you ready?”

  There was a self-conscious boom in the voice of Maureen McCool, our patrol leader when she was in the eighth grade and I was in the first. Across her chest was a white sash, attached to a belt around her waist. We stood at attention, the girls in their plaid dresses, the boys in their striped shirts. In our small ink-stained hands we held black metal boxes with thermoses clanging inside along with the gnawed apple cores and crumpled waxed paper containing the residue of our deviled ham sandwiches, which for some reason we always saved to throw away at home. It wasn’t until I was in the fourth grade in 1956, one year before Sputnik, that Granby, Massachusetts, entered the Modern Age and we got a cafeteria that served hot lunch, in which the offerings were like object lessons in a color chart: red Sloppy Joes, orange canned peaches, green Jell-O.

  “All present,” we would reply, “aye, aye, ma’am.” How eager we were to turn everything into a parliamentary procedure or a military operation.

  “Well, then,” she would say, “let’s go,” to which we replied, “Forward march.”

  And so we would head home toward the center of town, leaving behind our classrooms filled with thirty or forty students, overseen by a single teache
r who invariably claimed to have eyes in the back of her head, leaving behind the smell of peanut butter on nearly everyone’s post-lunch breath, the graininess of the dust from the chalk used to draw a hopscotch grid, the cold metal bars of the jungle gym, off limits for most girls in their skirts, except for the more daring or thoughtless. Everyone, even the most backward child, knew how to pronounce, if not spell, the word antidisestablishmentarianism. “I like Ike” buttons in flag colors brightened many corduroy jackets and wool sweaters, though not ours. In 1956 I had my first, and last, fistfight, defending Adlai Stevenson.

  The children who lived close enough to walk to and from school were divided into two groups, the uphill patrol and the downhill patrol. Despite the more challenging nature of our journey, we uphill walkers thought of ourselves as lucky not to have to take a bus, and lucky also in our direction. “Up” was the anthem of the fifties. It meant progress, prestige. It implied hard work and inevitable rewards. Vance Packard’s book The Status Seekers caused people all over America to try to figure out whether they were middle middle class, lower middle class, upper middle class, or the category most coveted by my mother, lower upper class. We were the kids on the common; our houses were considered if not better, at least older and bigger. The downhill walkers lived in the kind of housing I admired, convenience-laden postwar ranches in which the picture window in the front and the garage on the side were given equal architectural weight. Some defect in my nature had turned me into a person who would gladly trade charm for efficiency. A bit beyond the ranches was the trailer park, which occupied a huge field and was always the subject of controversy as to whether it possessed the requisite toniness for a town such as ours, a somewhat comic concern given our big calling cards, which included a place called Dinoland, in which the owner advertised dinosaur tracks and the cure for leukemia; more than one turkey farm, their slippery landscapes composed of feathers, mud, and manure; and, at the edge of town, a motel never once referred to by a grown-up without a nudge, a sneer, or a guffaw.

  Moving up West Street, we stopped first at a low-slung white farmhouse on the left to drop off daydreamy Eileen O’Sullivan, who married young and moved to Ohio, and her younger brother, Brian, who became a doctor specializing in pediatric pulmonary disease. We shaved Brian’s eyebrows when he was a toddler because younger siblings invited that kind of experimentation in the same way that basements invite flooding. Eileen and Brian lived with their buttoned-down Yankee mother and their dashing Irish father, P. Pearse O’Sullivan. Mrs. O’Sullivan went to the Congregational Church on the hill across from our house: its leaves blew onto our lawn every autumn. Mr. O’Sullivan was Catholic, and he went to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, also in the center of town, along with our family. In our town the divisions were simple: you could be young or old, male or female, Catholic or Protestant. Mr. O’Sullivan would leave his house late on a January afternoon in 1964, just as the light thinned into dusk, and after traveling a short distance on Route 202, be hit head-on and flung against his windshield. There were no seat belts in those days, and although he lived for years, he never in fact recovered.

  The Protestants were different from us in that they did not kneel in church and they sang more during their services. We sang haunting robust songs in a foreign language, “Stabat Mater” and “Ave Maria,” while their hymns were pale and plain with wispy little rhymes, like hills and rills: scraps of sound, word tendrils. The inside of their church was also plain, with none of the garish colors of our stained glass, the gilt and pomp of our altar, the smell of incense, foreign and molecular, and candles, waxy and hopeful. Protestants, from what I understood, had firm and positive feelings about Christ the King, but they did not revere Mary with our special ardor. Our mother, who had, after all, given birth six times, sometimes thought Mary had had it pretty easy. Yet she thought the Church was right to fuss over her. “The Protestants are wrong,” she often said, “not to give the Blessed Mother her due.”

  Next, we would pass the common on the left and cross Route 202, a main thoroughfare famous not only because it cut through our town but also because it kept on going to faraway foreign places like Delaware. In front of us at this point would be John’s Center Pharmacy, decorated with a mortar and pestle. The Brooks kids detached at this juncture, turned left and headed home. They were Mormons, an obscure form of Protestant—or so we wrongly assumed—and although they liked to dance, they did not believe in coffee, tea, cigarettes, whiskey, or gambling, which Catholics, more or less, did believe in. Just beyond their house on the same side of the street was the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. During the fifties, it expanded, sprung an addition, as did the whole known world, Big Y Supermarkets sprouting up in empty fields, highways slathering tar where once the green trees grew, new restaurants with signs bragging about how many hamburgers they had sold. My family had the opportunity to subsidize two stained-glass windows in the newly renovated church in honor of my father and my grandmother, who died in 1957. We children could not easily embrace the excitement the grown-ups felt at these memorials, which we saw as rubbles of color and weak substitutes for the living, breathing humans. We had our own ideas about what was worth jumping up and down about: snow, Tastee-Freez, the first dip of the summer—certainly not the unveiling of ecclesiastical tributes.

  * * *

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  Over and over we practiced the words for our first Communion. We were shown a picture of a bottle filled with black milk: an image of our soul at birth. Then we were shown a picture of an all-white bottle: what our soul would look like after baptism and after every confession, provided we had made an honest Examination of Conscience. It was important that when the priest deposited the Host on your tongue, your teeth did not actually champ down on it. The way to practice was to take Wonder Bread, flatten it into chunks the shape and width of a quarter, and swallow it in one gulp, an activity easily accomplished while also watching Hopalong Cassidy. The nuns who taught us our catechism were imported to Granby on Sundays, having already put in long hours during the week as teachers in parochial schools. With their huge wimples, heavy crucifixes, and pale hands gripping black beads, the nuns had the power of their peculiarity and their easy anger. They offered a compelling invitation into the world of horror and redemption, stigmata, and the Beatific Vision.

  We tried to distract them from the rote drills. “Tell us about Maria Goretti,” we would shout. “Fatima, please.” Certain saint stories infested our imagination more than others, because either the gore factor or the spook content was especially high. We liked Fatima because we wanted to be like those lucky foreign children chosen for some mysterious reason to be witnesses to a divine apparition.

  As for Maria Goretti, the nuns always began her story the same way, referring to a book called Lives of the Saints: “On a hot afternoon in July 1902 Mary, as Maria was sometimes called, was sitting on the top of the stairs in a cottage, mending a humble shirt. She was not yet twelve years old, and it must be remembered that in Italy girls mature earlier than in more northern countries. A devout but cheerful girl, Maria repelled a bullying farmhand who tried to rape her, but he killed her anyway. The man who killed her was released from prison, having repented, and lived to see her canonized in 1950.”

  We heard about heaven, hell, purgatory (our likely stopover spot), and limbo, the refuge of unbaptized babies and good-hearted heathens who through no fault of their own missed out on the Word of God.

  Death, the nuns declared, consisted of a process in which the room goes white and fills with angels. This principle would someday be proven with scientific accuracy, just as soon as those smarty-pants physicists who had figured out how to split the atom learned how to do something really complicated, such as weighing an angel.

  Holy Communion was special because you got to dress like a bride and you were given a scapular, a scratchy cloth necklace that protected you from evil and clued ambulance drivers to the fact of your Catholicity, should there arise
a need for Extreme Unction, the sacrament of the sick and dying.

  Over and over, we recited our rote drill:

  “Who made you?”

  “God made me.”

  “Why did God make you?”

  “God made me to know, love, and serve Him in this life so as to be happy with Him forever in the next world.”

  Simply seeing the church reminds me of the argument my mother and I had on my first Holy Communion day, when I wanted more than anything to go to the Hilltop Nook, a greasy spoon that catered to truck drivers hauling loads through our town to all the other places that were lucky enough to have Route 202 slicing them down the middle. Girlie calendars enlightened patrons as to the exact day and month of the year. The jukebox played “The Yellow Rose of Texas” constantly. The smell of flesh being grilled, fifteen-cent burgers and ten-cent dogs, was thick and insistent. These things, and especially the tendency of the truck drivers to graze a heavy hand against a slender young back and to let it linger there, made it obvious this was not a place to visit except in a group. The owner had said that if I showed up in my dress (spousal and radiant, veiled and holy) with my First Communion certificate, I would get four free candy bars.

  “That’s four,” I said to my mother when she refused to let me cash in. “Not one, but four.”

  “If your father were alive,” she said, “he would never permit it.”

  I came to loathe her propensity for reading my father’s posthumous thoughts. The very words if your father were alive guaranteed in me a knee-jerk reaction of impatience and frustration. He wasn’t, so her hypothesizing was an exercise in futility. “Besides,” she added, “weren’t you pleased with all the presents from your brother?”