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

by Lamb, Wally

  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?”

  I thought quickly about an answer that might really bug her. “Because I’m getting some big award,” I said.

  She went wide-eyed. “What for?”

  “You writing a book?” I said. “Make that chapter a mystery.”

  “I’d rather write a monster story,” she shot back. “About an ugly little dwarf named Dondi Funicello.”

  I told her her legs were so hairy she should comb them.

  “Mademoiselle et monsieur!” Madame Frechette called to us. Red-faced, Rosalie rushed back to her seat. I flashed Madame my innocent Dondi smile.

  At home after school that day, Ma was at one end of the kitchen table, doing the books for the business. I was seated at the opposite end, alternately tonguing the “surprise” out of the middle of a Hostess cupcake—why did they call it a surprise when it was always the exact same cream inside?—and drawing a picture of the PanAmerican jet that, the following Thursday, was gonna fly my mother to California. Simone was making supper—the same thing she always made when it was her turn: English muffin pizzas, salad, and lime Jell-O with Reddi-Wip for dessert.

  “Are you ever going back to your regular hair?” I asked Ma.

  She patted her beehive and smiled. “You like my old hairstyle better?”

  “Much better,” I assured her.

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to think about it then. Are you going to be okay while I’m gone?” I told her I didn’t know yet because she hadn’t left yet. She said that, after she came home from being on her TV show, she couldn’t wait to see me on TV, too—Ranger Andy. Then she smiled and said that my father and sisters were going to take very, very good care of me until she got back. “Aren’t you, Simone?” she asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” my sister said. “And don’t listen to him about your hair, Ma. It looks real gear.”

  Ma smiled and, to me, said, “Is ‘gear’ good or bad?”

  “Good,” I said. “It’s Beatles talk. Means ‘groovy.’”

  “Ah,” she said. “Now maybe you’d better start your homework, huh?”

  When I opened my social studies book to the chapter we were on, both Lonny’s whoopee cushion and Monsignor’s booklet revealed themselves. I looked again at the cover picture of Aloysius Gonzaga, then began thumbing through the pages. “A noble lad of Venice, he was so offended by the vulgar talk of the palazzo and the waterways that he would faint when he heard it,” it said. It said, too, that Aloysius avoided females, even his own mother, and put chunks of wood in his bed at night to distract him from “temptations of the flesh.” His hobbies—“mortifications,” the book called them—were whipping himself, bathing lepers, and carrying away their slop pails. I wasn’t positive, but I was pretty sure that slop pails meant buckets of shit…. Merde!…The booklet said Aloysius had died of some plague he caught while tending to the sick. This was who I was supposed to be like?

  Well, I sure wasn’t going to whip myself or bathe lepers, whatever they were. I could do the chunks of wood thing, though, I figured. So what I did was, before bed that night, I fished my can of Lincoln Logs out of the bottom of my toy chest and dumped them into bed with me. That lasted for about five minutes’ worth of tossing and turning before my foot got an itch and I tried to scratch it with a Lincoln Log and it gave me a sliver. I sent the Lincoln Logs flying onto the floor. French-kissing Annette’s poster might be the kind of sin that could get me cast into hell, but if heaven was going to be full of goody-goodies like Aloysius Gonzaga and Rosalie Twerski, then I figured I’d just go to H-E-double-toothpick instead. After all, Lonny was probably headed there. And Chino. And a bunch of our regulars down at the lunch counter.

  It rained on Halloween, gently at first—a moist caress that made the glistening, streetlamp-lit fallen leaves slippery, but not the kind of rain that made your parents say you couldn’t go trick-or-treating.

  Lonny was a bum: rippy dungarees, a busted straw hat, and flannel shirt, and cheeks smeared with ash from his mother’s ciggy butts. (He’d carried them over to my house in a Baggie.) A lot of people thought Lonny was Huckleberry Finn. I was Speedy Alka Seltzer, although so many people mistook me for a flying saucer that I started singing, “Plop, Plop. Fizz Fizz. Oh, what a relief it is!” whenever homeowners opened their door. We were trick-or-treating for UNICEF, too.

  Lonny said everyone in his neighborhood turned off
their lights and sat in the dark because they were too cheap to buy kids candy, so he’d had to “borrow” my neighborhood. My mother told me that when she’d called Lonny’s mother to see if he could sleep over, Mrs. Flood had said sure—we could keep him as long as we wanted, forever as far as she was concerned. She’d been joking, Ma said, but Ma hadn’t thought it was very funny.

  It felt pretty grown up trick-or-treating with just one of my friends; this was the first year Ma hadn’t made my sisters take me, against their protests and mine. Lonny and I worked our way down Chestnut Street, then up Franklin and McKinley as far as Warren Street, then right onto Broad Street, and back down Grove. “How can they not know you’re a bum and I’m Speedy Alka Seltzer?” I sighed.

  “Because people are idiots,” Lonny said. “Get used to it.” Lightning illuminated him as he said it, then thunder cracked the sky. Seconds later, the sky let loose, soaking our costumes, our candy, and us. The cigarette soot on Lonny’s cheeks dripped down his face and then washed away altogether and my sneakers were squishing with every step I took. The bottom of the First National bag I was using to trick-or-treat with gave way from the weight of my loot. “Let’s go home,” I said. Me and Lonny were transferring my candy from the sidewalk to his pillowcase when my father pulled up in our army green Studebaker. “You fellas need a lift?” he asked. We both got in the backseat, so it was kind of like Pop was our chauffeur. “Take us home, Salvatore,” I said.

  “Don’t push it, wise guy,” Pop said.

  After we changed into our PJs, Lonny and I poured all our candy out onto my bed, divided it into piles, and traded. Ma told us we could each eat three things and then we had to stop. We could stay up until eleven o’clock, she said, and then it was lights off and go to sleep. “Do we have to go to church tomorrow? I whined. She said yes, we certainly did; it wasn’t only Sunday but also All Saints Day—a holy day of obligation, which meant mandatory Mass on two counts, not just one.

  “Well how come he never has to go?” I demanded, pointing to Pop.

  “Because your father has a business to run,” she countered. “And may I remind you, Mr. Knows Everything There Is to Know, that that business is what puts food on our table. Now maybe you should stop arguing with me and embarrassing yourself in front of your guest. What do you think?”

  “Oh, I ain’t embarrassed, Mrs. Funicello,” Lonny assured her. “Our family fights all the time.”

  “Well, Lonny, that’s very polite of you to say,” Ma assured him. “But we’re just having a discussion, not a fight.”

  “Oh,” Lonny said.

  Since Pop was in the room, I decided to negotiate. It worked, too. We got Ma to compromise: five pieces of candy each, an eleven thirty bedtime, and Lonny and I didn’t have to go to the 9:15 A.M. mass with my mother and sisters. Instead, free agents, we could go by ourselves to last mass at noon.

  Of course, what Lonny and I had agreed to didn’t mean that, once my bedroom door was closed, we had to stick to it. I ate nine pieces of candy and Lonny ate about twice that much. Hepped up on sugar, we had a tickling war and a pillow fight. Then we each opened our packs of Sugar Babies and NECCO Wafers and started whipping them at each other. When Lonny began pouring packets of Kool-Aid down his throat, I warned him that he was gonna get sick.

  “No, I won’t!” he insisted, and then, immediately after, began clutching his stomach and moaning. Then he ran to the corner of my room and started up-chucking. At least that was what I thought he was doing. “Are you okay?” I asked, approaching him cautiously. The two of us stood there looking at the pool of chunky brown puke on the floor. Then, to my horror, Lonny reached down, picked it up, and threw it at me. All’s it was was plastic puke; he’d bought it off the Tricks & Jokes rack at Central Soda Shoppe so’s he could fool me.

  “Oh, that reminds me,” I said. I went over to my desk, opened my social studies book, and took out his whoopee cushion.

  “Hey, this is the one Dymphie took away from me,” he said. “How’d you get it back?”

  “That’s for me to know and for you to find out,” I said.

  “No, really.”

  “I’m Robin Hood,” I said. “I rob from the rich and give to the poor.”

  I thought Lonny would think that was funny, but he didn’t. He got kind of mad, actually. His eyes got crazy and his nostrils opened and closed like a bull’s in a bull fight. He shoved me up against the wall and held me there, his arm pressed against my chest. “What makes you think I’m poor?” he demanded.

  “I don’t think you are,” I assured him (though I knew he was.) “All’s I meant was that the teachers are like the bad guys and us kids are the good guys.” I was on the verge of tears, either from the pressure against my chest or his sudden, unanticipated move against me. I wasn’t sure which.

  “Okay then,” he said, and let go. “You gonna eat that Almond Joy or can I have it?” I handed it over.

  At lights out, Lonny and me lay side by side in the dark. I was in my sleeping bag and he was borrowing my sister Frances’s. At first, we were both quiet. Then, out of the blue, Lonny said, “Your father’s old, isn’t he?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “Older than my mother. She’s 42 and he’s 51. Why?”

  “No reason. Did they have to get married?”

  “Have to? Uh uh. They wanted to, I guess.”

  “Oh. Because my old man had to marry my old lady. Because my brother Denny was already in the oven, if you get my drift.”

  I didn’t, but what he’d just said reminded me of that joke one of the sailors had told Chino down at the depot. “How is a woman like a stove?” I said. Lonny said he didn’t know, and I said, “Because you gotta heat the oven up before you stick the meatloaf in.” I still didn’t get why that joke was funny, but Lonny laughed the exact same way Chino had.

  Both of us were quiet some more, and I started wondering if Lonny’d already fallen asleep when he said, “You know something. You’re lucky. My old man, when he used to live with us? If he knew I was out trick-or-treating in a thunderstorm, there’s no way in hell he woulda come looking for me.”

  “How do you know?” I said. “Maybe he would have.”

  He laughed. “I can see you don’t know my old man.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say that would make him feel better, so all’s I said was, “Well, I’m getting kinda sleepy. G’night.”

  He reached over and poked me. “Night, shithead.”

  I poked him back and said what Frances always said whenever I called her a name. “I’m the rubber and you’re the glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”

  “Yeah, you’re the rubber, all right,” Lonny laughed. “For a teeny, tiny, little dickie.” I wasn’t sure if, when he said dickie, he meant a guy’s you-know-what or one of those fake turtleneck things that kids wore under their shirts. But knowing Lonny, he probably meant the first thing.

  “I know you are,” I said. “But what am I? Gate’s closed!” Which, when you say “gate’s closed,” it means the other person has to stop. So Lonny was the little dickie, not me.

  The next morning after 9:15 mass, Ma had Simone drive her and Fran down to the lunch counter and then come back so she could make Lonny and me pancakes for breakfast. I was pushing it, I knew, when I asked Simone if we could have soda instead of milk and she said no. “What do you think, Felix? That you died and went to Heaven?”

  Simone had set her hair and Scotch-taped her bangs because she had a modeling job that afternoon—some stupid fashion show that Ma was making me go to after we dropped Lonny back at his house. Lonny had a hoody older brother, Denny, but no sisters. “What are those things in your hair?” he asked Simone.

  “Transmitters,” I said. “She’s a space alien. Her boyfriend is Robby the Robot.” The last time Lonny had come over to my house, we’d watched the movie Forbidden Planet on Big 3 Theater.

  Simone rolled her eyes. “They’re Spoolies,” she said.

  Lonny kept looking
over at her while she was making our pancakes. Looking at her funny, I mean—mouth-breathing and swallowing like he was thirsty. Every time he’d swallow, his Adam’s apple would go up and down. What the heck was the matter with him, I wondered.

  And then in the middle of eating our pancakes, Lonny said to Simone, “Aren’t you having any?” She said she was going to, but that first she had to put away all the stuff.

  “I’ll help you,” Lonny said. He got up. Grabbed the milk and eggs and put them back in the fridge. I didn’t get why he was acting so weird. “Come on, Simone,” he said, “Sit down and eat before these delicious pancakes get cold.”

  She smiled and nodded. Placed her plate on the table. But when she sat down, there was this fart that was so loud it practically broke the sound barrier!

  Simone jumped up, mortified, and looked down at her chair.

  “Gotcha!” Lonny guffawed.

  She picked up his whoopee cushion and started whacking him with it: once, twice, three times, four. Then, giggling, she put her hands around his neck and pretended she was choking him. It was pretty funny, and I was laughing, too, kind of—and then, all of a sudden, I wasn’t. Because I could see Lonny’s you-know-what poking up from inside his pajama bottoms. And I guess Simone must have seen it, too, because she said, “Oh!” and ran out of the kitchen. And that was the last either of us saw of her that morning.

  Later, walking over to St. Aloysius for noon mass, Lonny said, “You know what we should do? Ditch church and go to the movies instead.” I reminded him that it was not just Sunday but also All Saints Day—the Catholic church’s equivalent of a baseball double-header. “Yeah?” he said. “So what?”

  “So what are we going to buy our tickets with? Our looks?” Pop used that line whenever my sisters and me argued that we should buy a color TV like the Shaefers next door: and what do you kids suggest we should use for a down payment? Our looks?

  “How about we use this?” Lonny said. He reached into his coat pocket, took out his UNICEF carton, and shook it like a castanet.