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

  Mother Filomina again: “Three dozen reams of mimeograph paper! My stars, with our budget as tight as it is, we’re so grateful for this generous…”

  Mrs. Twerski again: “…Sister Mary Agrippina having been transferred after the incident with that awful Russian girl…. And speaking not so much as an Advisory Board member but as a parent, it seems to me that if you’re at all interested in the permanent substitute’s position, you’d be a very viable…”

  Rosalie again: “Please, Madame. Pleeease.”

  I could tell they had poor Madame on the ropes, and since when was four against one a fair fight? Putting the last period at the end of my one hundredth I shall not distract my neighbors sentence, I grabbed my paper, cleared my throat, and walked back there. “Finished,” I said.

  Madame took my paper. “Et bien, Felix. Then you may go now.”

  I hesitated, scuffing the toe of my shoe against the floorboard. “Could I say something first?”

  Rosalie shook her head. “This is a private meeting, in case you didn’t notice, Felix. Mind your own beeswax.”

  “Now, sweetheart,” her mother said. Mother Filomina asked me what I wished to say. I didn’t know, really. I just wanted to stop the bullying.

  “Just that I think Madame Frechette…as a teacher…is magnifique!”

  Madame’s eyes blinked back tears. “Merci bien,” she said.

  I nodded. Asked her if, before I left, did she want her boards wiped down and her erasers clapped? Madame said she would like that very much. Rosalie rolled her eyes.

  Maybe it was the power of her leopard-spotted shoes and red beret, or my having just proclaimed her magnificence. Or maybe Madame hated Rosalie’s guts the same as me. Whatever it was, by the end of their meeting, she still had not yielded to the Twerskis’ and Mother Filomina’s full-court press. What she offered, instead, was un accommodement—a compromise. Pauline Papelbon would retain the role of the Virgin Mary; Madame did not have the heart to snatch the role away from the poor girl, she said. But if Rosalie didn’t mind a bit of cross-gender casting, she could be upgraded from a shepherdess to a king. “Caspar, Melchior, or Balthasar, mademoiselle. You may have your pick, as I’m sure any of the boys would be happy to become a shepherd instead of a Wise Man.” (The Kubiak brothers, through their 4-H contacts, had offered live lambs for our grand finale. Madame had vacillated for a while but finally had surrendered to our pleas.) “Now which of the Magi might you wish to be?”

  “Not the colored one,” Rosalie blurted. I saw Mother Filomina wince a little, and Rosalie must have seen it, too. “Because Marion Pemberton said he really, really wants to be that one and so I think he should.” This, of course, was what Zhenya Kabakova would classify as “boolsheet.” Marion wanted to be a shepherd just as much as the rest of us boys.

  “Well, let me put it another way,” Madame said. “What gift would you like to present to the Christ child: gold, frankincense, or myrrh?”

  Mr. Twerski answered for his daughter. “What the hay, honey? Go for the gold.” Which meant that Turdski would be Caspar and Eugene Bowen was going to give up his crown in exchange for one of those live lambs, the lucky duck, and all’s I was gonna get to hold was my stupid pa-rumpa-pum-pum drum.

  After they left, I heard Madame’s sigh all the way from the back of the classroom. She was holding a tissue in her hand and looking out the window. I was pretty sure she was crying. “Well,” I said. “The blackboards are done and I clapped the erasers. I guess I’ll go now.”

  “And I will erase your check-minus for bothering Arthur,” she said. Then she turned toward me, daubing her eyes and smiling. “Monsieur Dondi,” she said. “Merci beaucoup.” She approached me, shook my hand, and then leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead the same way Ma sometimes did. I sneezed all the way down the stairs.

  As it turned out, the recasting of Rosalie as Caspar did not placate her. (Nor did she find it amusing when, as we walked side by side in the boys’ and girls’ lines on the way down to the lunchroom, I began singing, “Caspar, the friendly ghost, the friendliest ghost you know…”) Determined by hook or crook to be the star of the Saint Aloysius Gonzaga Christmas program, Turdski sat down that weekend and wrote a play, which, on Monday, she submitted directly to Mother Filomina and Sister Fabian, having bypassed Madame Frechette. Rosalie’s script was so pukily worshipful that Mother Fil exulted even before Turdski claimed to have felt the hand of God pushing her ballpoint pen across the page as she wrote it. As a result of her experience, Rosalie said, she was now considering a life of Holy Orders.

  But if Saint Aloysius’s Sisters of Charity were taken in by Rosalie’s fake piety, Madame Frechette was not. As director of our tableaux vivants, she now had a competing impresario—one of her very own students. Madame was not pleased. Her players would be required merely to stand in place as the curtains opened, mute and still as statues, with the exception of a miscellaneous twitch or nervous tic. In contrast, Rosalie’s actors—her faithful disciple Geraldine, the browbeaten Ernie Overturf, and a somewhat indignant Marion Pemberton—were free to speak, move about, and if need be, scratch an itch.

  It wasn’t an out-in-out battle between Rosalie and Madame; it was more like a tug of war. When Rosalie asked Madame if, instead of discussing our religion chapter, she and her actors could sequester themselves in the cloakroom for the purpose of practicing her play, Madame said non.

  “Why not?” Rosalie asked. “It’s religious.”

  “Why not? Because I said so, mademoiselle, that’s why not,” Madame said, in a tone of voice so contentious that, if you’d closed your eyes, you might have thought Sister Mary Agrippina had returned. A few minutes later, Rosalie said she had a headache and could she go see the nurse? And whether or not she really checked in with Nurse Gadle, it was obvious that she’d checked in with Sister Fabian, the assistant principal. The note she returned with, signed by Sister, gave her and her players permission to proceed to the lunch room on an as-needed basis during the ten o’clock religious instruction hour for the purpose of rehearsing “Jesus Is the Reason for the Season” for the upcoming Christmas program.

  “Et bien,” Madame said through clenched teeth after she read the note.

  But the following day she retaliated. Madame handed Ronald Kubiak her car keys and had Ronald, Oscar Landry, Eugene B., and me go out to her car, open her trunk, and bring back the boxes of Christmas decorations she’d brought in from home: wreaths with fake holly, strings of lights, a garland, a ceramic tree. There was a crèche in there, a plastic Santa Claus, some blow-up vinyl reindeer, a dozen or so Styrofoam candy canes with hooks at the top for hanging up. “We must make room for Christmas!” Madame declared just before we started our silent reading of the next-to-last Yearling chapter. And while the others read, I watched an energized Madame circulate about the room, yanking down the dozen or so posters that Rosalie had made for extra credit. When I looked over at Rosalie, I saw that she, too, was watching Madame, her nostrils aflare and her hands gripping The Yearling so tightly that her knuckles had turned bone white. “Madame Frechette?” she finally said. To which Madame responded, “Silent reading means just that, mademoiselle. Continue reading en silence!”

  “Aplomb” was one of our vocabulary words that week, and after lunch, when we had to use all our vocab words in sentences, I wrote, “Madame took down all of Rosalie’s posters with aplomb.” The next day, when I got my paper back, Madame had written beside that sentence, “Monsieur, vous êtes un fripon!” Later, I looked up fripon in the big French-English dictionary in the bookcase and it said, “A rascal or rapscallion; one who is playfully mischievous.”

  Out on the playground at recess that day, Rosalie began organizing a grade-wide game of Octopus, Octopus, Cross My Sea. But Zhenya, who’d played Octopus once before, said, “Thet stoopit game for stoopit pipples. C’mun, Fillix. Go beck to clissroom and get bezbull gluff and I throw some grounders end flyink bulls for you ken prictiss.” Lonny was absent that day, which was p
robably why Zhenya wanted me and her to hang around. I told her nah, I didn’t really feel like it. The truth was, I liked playing Octopus, Octopus and was pretty good at it, too. Laughing, Zhenya reached over and jabbed me in the ribs. “C’mun, Fillix Foony Jello. You need prictiss. You throw and ketch bezbull just like leetle geuhl.” To demonstrate, she did a comical version of the way I threw and caught. I tried not to laugh but couldn’t help it; her imitation was pretty funny. “C’mun, Fillix, pliss. I titch you gooder than Meeky Mentels of New H’York H’Yinkees.”

  I told her okay, but when I asked Sister Scholastica, the teacher on playground duty, if I could go back in the building for my glove, she said no. So Zhenya and I ended up just walking around the school yard and talking.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  “There is saying in Soviet Union,” she said. “Esk me no kestyuns, I tell you no lice.” Then she said she was only kidding. What did I want to ask her?

  “Are you an atheist?”

  “Ateist? No beleef in Gud? Nyet. I em Russian Ortodux.” Which, she said, was close to “Rummin Catoleek.” She made the sign of the cross and shrugged. “No Ortodux skool here, so I comes to Catoleek skool. H’okay?”

  I nodded. “Can I ask you something else?”

  “Ya ya, Meester Kestyun Man,” she said. “Vut ilse you need to know?”

  “How come you and your parents picked here to live?”

  They hadn’t at first, she said. When they’d first moved to America, they’d lived in Washington, D.C. “Just for month or so. Then we come to Kennedekett. We come for my mama’s verk.”

  I asked her, didn’t she mean for her father’s work?

  “Nyet. My fodder ees writer. He can verk ennyvares. But not my mama.”

  “What does she do?” I asked.

  “She engineer. H’okay?”

  I shrugged. “Sure.” Why was she asking me?

  “So why did you guys leave Russia, anyways?” I asked.

  To which Zhenya responded, once again, this time not grinning, “Esk me no kestyuns, I tell you no lice.” Recovering her smile, she said, “Come on, Fillix, I change mind. Let’s play dumb end stupit Octopus gemm.” But when we walked over there, Rosalie said the game was already well underway and we couldn’t just jump in—it wasn’t fair.

  “H’okay,” Zhenya said. “No beeg dill, Rosalie blyad’ geuhl.” Turdski wanted to know what that was supposed to mean, to which Zhenya answered, “For me to know, for you note to know. And thees for you, too.” Turning her back on Turdski, she bent over and wiggled her fanny at her. In response, Rosalie halted the game and ran to inform Sister Scholastica. While she was gone, Zhenya cupped her hand at the side of her mouth and whispered, “Just now? I call her slut geuhl.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Geuhl who, you knows, Fillix, opens hair legs for boyzes. Like, how you say? Prusteetoot.”

  “Oh,” I said. “A chicky-boom boom.”

  She laughed. “Ya, ya. Cheeky-bum bum geuhl.”

  Sister Scholastica told Rosalie she could do nothing about what Zhenya had done because she hadn’t witnessed the act herself, and that Rosalie should just go back and play. Poor Sister had better watch it, I thought. Next thing she knew, she’d be sitting in some stupid meeting with the Twerskis.

  The next morning, while I was eating my Cheerios and finishing my homework sheet on gerunds, I glanced over at the newspaper. Only eight more shopping days till Christmas, it said. Later that morning, in social studies, we finished the Middle Ages. Madame said we would not move on to la Renaissance until after vacation. During arithmetic, we took our chapter test on fractions and in reading we finished The Yearling. (Flag croaked at the end, same as my purple Easter chick, Popeye, only at least I didn’t have to shoot Popeye in the head the way Jody had to shoot his deer so’s he could both put him out of his misery and become a man.) With all these pre-vacation wrap-ups, and only a week left before the big Christmas program, we started spending less and less time on schoolwork and more and more time on our tableaux vivants.

  Via a letter each of us carried home the week before, Madame had assigned our parents homework: they were supposed to buy or make us our costumes if they could (except for the angels, whose costumes would be on loan from Careen of Careen’s Costume Shop, who was friends with MaryAnn Vocatura’s mother.) Because Chino Molinaro had come down with the flu, Ma was pinch-hitting for him at the lunch counter with Pop, so she handed over the costuming assignment to Simone, who was the most theatrically inclined of any of us Funicellos anyways, not counting Annette. And since Lonny had been assigned the pivotal role of Joseph and his mother, as usual, had shirked her responsibility, Simone agreed to outfit him as well.

  In my opinion, Simone was not that successful in costuming me as the little drummer boy. With my shorts, knee socks, and tricorn hat, I looked more like Johnny Tremain than a boy from Bethlehem. For my drum, Simone covered one of Ma’s hat boxes with contact paper, poked holes in the sides, and threaded it with yarn so’s it could hang down in front of me. My souvenir chopsticks from China Village, where we’d gone after Frances’s eighth grade graduation, would do as drumsticks, Simone said.

  As for her dressing Lonny as Joseph of Nazareth, the summer before, Simone had caught the bouquet at our cousin Anna Ianuzzi’s wedding and then had had to sit on a folding chair while Anna’s creepy cousin Frido stretched this blue garter over her foot and halfway up her leg. Now she stretched that very same garter over Lonny’s head, which she had covered with one of our striped dish towels. My blue terrycloth bathrobe, which went down past my knees, looked more like a tunic on Lonny. Simone had me go out to our garage and get the pushbroom. Then she had Lonny unscrew the broom part. After he’d done it, she handed him the handle and told him that was his staff. Lonny was good to go as Joseph, Simone said, except for his feet. On the day of the tableaux, she said, he would have to wear sandals or flip-flops, not his high-top Keds. Lonny said he thought there were some flip-flops in his father’s closet from before he left to go to work in Florida as a fisherman. I didn’t say anything when he said that, and neither did Simone, but we both kinda looked at each other for a second. We knew from our Uncle Bruno that Lonny’s father was in prison in New York, not in Florida on some fishing boat.

  On the Wednesday before the big Christmas program, we all got copies of Rosalie’s play whether we wanted one or not. Her father had printed them on fancy paper at Twerski Impressions. After Rosalie passed them out, she made Ernie, Geraldine, and Marion read their parts. It was raining that morning, which meant indoor recess—unsupervised, for the most part, while Madame went off to the teachers’ room. This was Rosalie’s stupid play.

  Jesus Is the Reason

  for the Season

  by Rosalie Elaine Twerski

  CAST

  Saint Aloysius Gonzaga……Ernest Overturf

  Saint Teresa of Lisieux…Geraldine Balchunas

  Saint Martin de Porres……Marion Pemberton

  Narrator…….. Miss Rosalie Elaine Twerski

  The narrator comes out first. She is dressed in a pretty gown and wears lipstick, eye shadow, and a crown. She is very beautiful.

  NARRATOR:

  Hello. I am your narrator and this is a play about the true meaning of Christmas. We are up in Heaven where it is always beautiful and peaceful for the people who were good when they were alive. Hey, look. Here come some saints. Shhh. Let’s listen.

  SAINT ALOYSIUS:

  Hello. I am Aloysius Gonzaga. I lived in Venice Italy when I was alive, but I died from the plague. Before I died, though, I was nice to children and lepers, and whenever I climbed up or down a set of stairs, I said the “Hail Mary” on every step. So God made me the patron saint of youth. And someday in the United States, which hasn’t even been discovered yet except for the Indians, a wonderful Catholic school will be named after me because I was so nice and helpful to everyone. Hey, look. Here comes Saint Teresa of Lisieux. That’s in France.
>
  SAINT TERESA:

  Hi, my name is Saint Teresa of Lisieux, but lots of people call me Teresa the Little Flower because I am very fragile—as delicate as a little wildflower in the forest. I loved God so much that to show Him my love, I would sleep under a heavy blanket in summer and not use any blanket in the winter when it was freezing cold, and if a fly or mosquito landed on me, I would not shoo it away because I wanted to offer my suffering to God. I was born in 1873 and died from tuberculosis in 1897. If you subtract 1873 from 1897, you get 24, which was pretty young for me to die. By the way, I am the patron saint of florists and airplane pilots. Oh, look who’s coming. It’s Martin de Porres, the only colored person to ever become a saint.

  SAINT MARTIN:

  Yes, it is me, Martin de Porres, the patron saint of mulattos and hairdressers. I can cure people with miracles. I heal them just by shaking their hand. And when I pray for poor people, my prayers are so strong that they make me glow in the dark. And I love animals so much that I even like rats and feel sorry for them when they can’t get enough to eat. I wasn’t made a saint until last year, 1963. And when I became a saint, I was so happy. But today I am very, very sad. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I was born in Peru, which is in South America.

  NARRATOR:

  So the saints start talking to each other.

  SAINT TERESA:

  Why are you so sad even though you’re in Heaven, Saint Martin de Porres? Is it because prejudiced people are so mean to colored people?

  SAINT MARTIN:

  No, that’s not it.

  SAINT ALOYSIUS:

  Are you sad because you like animals so much, and if dogs have to go to the dog pound and nobody claims them, they get put to sleep?

  SAINT MARTIN:

  No, that’s not it either.

  SAINT TERESA:

  Oh, I think I know. You are unhappy because Jewish people think Jesus was a very nice man but not God. Is that it?