Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  When the bus stopped again, we were joined by a student I knew better. She sometimes came into the store with her parents, who were steady patrons. She was Rosemary Kurtz, the genial daughter of the local Ford dealer, a loquacious, rotund, balding man who was the island’s preeminent Catholic parishioner, the foremost financial supporter of the church, and the sponsor of the parish’s annual Altar Boy Award, which I entertained no foolish expectation of ever winning.

  Although Rosemary was already showing some tendency toward inheriting her father’s large-boned, plump body, she had a delicately shaped face with radiant eyes and pink complexion that was uncommonly attractive. Whenever the nuns were looking for someone to wear a halo in a school play, or to represent the Madonna in the nativity scene, Rosemary was usually their first choice; and she played the role equally well offstage. She was serene, considerate, poised, although socially distant. She seemed to have no close friends and belonged to no clique. She came to school dressed each day in primly fashioned coats of pastel shades and matching hats that were sometimes trimmed with my father’s fur pieces; and while she conversed with everyone on the bus, and occasionally even took a seat close to the hooded-mackinaw crowd in the rear, she nonetheless conveyed the impression that she expected to be treated at all times with the respect and dignity that the parishioners at Sunday Mass bestowed upon her magnanimous parents. And insofar as I could tell, she did indeed receive such treatment even from the school’s rowdier students, who refrained from cursing in her presence, or blowing cigarette smoke in her direction, or firing spitballs in her general vicinity. She was therefore the ideal traveling companion when riding the parochial school bus, and I was comforted by this when she chose to sit near me on this Monday morning—and consequently I was more astonished than upset when, suddenly, while we chatted as the bus moved uptown, a small flying object nearly grazed my cheek, caromed high off the empty seat in front of me, and hit hard against the windshield close to the face of Mr. Fitzgerald.

  It was a chunk of rubber eraser. And as it bounced along the floor, Mr. Fitzgerald slammed on the brakes, spun around, and, his bloodshot eyes examining us with wrath and suspicion, bellowed: “Okay, who’s the wise guy?”

  More than two dozen students in the front and middle rows all turned immediately toward the back, where the disruptive older group now sat motionless in a posture of innocence, their white faces and unfurrowed brows under the hoods of their mackinaws making them seem almost as guileless as a gathering of monks at prayer. I, too, turned and waited for some admission of guilt, some twitch that would betray the malefactor—until it occurred to me, as I scrutinized the older faces, that I was doubtless making eye contact at this very moment with the mysterious culprit; and quickly I turned away, not wanting to risk offending the offender with an accusatory stare that could provoke retaliation later in the schoolyard from someone who possibly owned a brass-buckled U.S. Army belt.

  As I turned around I noted that Rosemary Kurtz was the only student who had not looked back to examine the others. She had kept facing the front—uninterested, uninvolved, and thereby untainted by the back-bus boorishness. Mr. Fitzgerald soon lost interest, realizing that there would be no confessions of wrongdoing today. And so, after a kind of face-saving admonition—“If you don’t cut it out, I’ll throw you out!”—he pressed the gas pedal, and we resumed our journey along a damp black macadam road that ran parallel to the beach, passing foggy white rows of vacant apartment houses with gingerbread verandas and boarded-up windows.

  In summertime, the sidewalks were crowded with sandaled sunbathers carrying wood-framed canvas chairs and long-poled umbrellas, and wearing straw hats and cotton robes over their modestly designed bathing suits—which included tops for men, who were prohibited by local law from exposing their bare chests on the avenue, on the beach, or even in the sea. Since in summer the number of Catholics on the island increased significantly, overcrowding the parish’s single church downtown, auxiliary Masses were offered on Sundays in the chapel of our school. No Masses were said there during the rest of the year, however, although the architecture of the school was unmistakably ecclesiastic—the familiar outlines of which I could now see through the rising mist as the bus turned inland from the ocean.

  It was a chunky brick building with a gray peaked roof and a stunted, cross-topped steeple that rose above a white double-doored entranceway. Along the sides of the building, which extended a half-block behind a wide newly paved sidewalk, were tall clear-glass windows that looked into the classrooms, providing added light for brighter students and vague vistas of escape for daydreamers like me. Two smaller windows in the rear of the building, stained-glass, marked the location of the chapel. On the far side of the building, and behind it, was a weedless acre of isolated land composed of steamrolled light gravel and windblown sand that, in the gray light of the morning, resembled snow. As the bus slowly cruised to within half a block of the school, I could also see, emerging beyond the windshield, a stark white-and-black-clad figure. She was standing on the stone steps of the entranceway, awaiting our arrival. She was Sister Rita, the mistress of discipline.

  She was the youngest of the school’s eight nuns, and as a result she perhaps inherited the mundane duties that the older sisters had risen above—such as standing like a sentry each morning in the cold weather to await Mr. Fitzgerald’s imprecise arrivals, and then lining up the students along the sidewalk in two sexually segregated files to be marched into school, a routine that she often hastened by lightly prodding the backs of stragglers with a rubber-tipped blackboard pointer that she held in her right hand like a whip.

  Once she was alleged to have lashed the buttocks of an errant boy with the metal crucifix that hung from the large rosary beads she wore around her waist; and while I could not testify to the accuracy of that tale, I did personally observe Sister Rita on two occasions rapping with a ruler the knuckles of older boys who had lingered at the urinals, touching their forbidden parts for periods of time she deemed excessive.

  She seemed to be obsessed with what took place in the boys’ rest room, and she was forever banging in and out of that place, grabbing by the scruff of the neck any youth who sought refuge there. It was she who instructed students on how they should sleep each night: on their backs, with their arms crossed on their chests, hands on opposite shoulders—a presumably holy posture that, not incidentally, made masturbation impossible. Masturbation, or even the thought of it, apparently represented one of the great anathemas to Sister Rita. One morning while I sat in her geography class, looking down at a book of maps and listening to her lecture, I was aware all at once of her sudden silence. Looking up, I saw that she was staring at me, or more precisely, at the way I was sitting, with my right leg in the aisle and my right hand in my pants pocket.

  “What are you doing with your hand?” she demanded. Everyone in the classroom turned toward me. I felt myself redden with embarrassment and confusion—I was being reviled, precipitately, for committing some indefinable act that was inscrutably deviant. Slowly, I removed my hand. With my eyes focused on the floor, I waited.

  “Never,” she said, in a trembling voice, “never put your hands in your pockets!”

  Now Mr. Fitzgerald turned off the bus engine, and—with what sounded like a sigh of relief—pushed the metal handle that forced the greasy rod to open the door. I could hear Sister Rita calling up from the sidewalk: “All right, girls and boys—straight lines, straight lines, and be quick about it!” As she held the pointer in the folds of her long skirt, I hopped off the bus behind some younger boys and took my place within an emerging line that began in front of the school steps and was soon backed up almost to the curb. Parallel to us, but three feet away, was a line formed by girls—headed, I noticed, by Rosemary Kurtz. In all, there were fewer than forty of us. But dozens of other students were now arriving on foot, or by bicycle, or in parental car pools; complying with Sister Rita’s instructions, they joined the lengthening lines that soon bent at right a
ngles near the curb and extended along the edge of the sidewalk.

  Cold as it was, we were detained for a few minutes to be ventilated, more or less, by the frosty ocean air; and then, with our schoolbags on the ground, Sister Rita began to count aloud—“One-two, three-four” signaling us to begin our daily ritual of calisthenics. This consisted of stretching our arms above our heads, taking deep breaths, and leaning forward with our fingertips toward our toes. Although Sister Rita did not join us in these exercises—being less than ideally attired in her towering headdress, flowing veils, and starched white, half-moon-shaped clerical collar that encircled her neck like a yoke—she did zestfully tap her feet in time with her counting, and she moved her pointer back and forth like a metronome. And as she shouted to us from the top step of the entranceway, urging us to accelerate our movements on this bone-chilling morning, vaporous clouds floated out of her mouth, blurring and briefly transforming her image into that of an ascending apparition, a cloaked and nebulous figure commanding us with transcendent force and clarity—calisthenics ex cathedra.

  For nearly ten minutes the workout continued along the sidewalk; and while it was intended to circulate our blood and heighten our sensibilities for the schoolwork ahead, it merely made me dizzy and opened up my mind to aimless wandering. Still, this class represented the only organized sports activity conducted by the school, which lacked the interior space or financial resources for a gymnasium, and which otherwise offered, later in the day, only two fifteen-minute recess periods in the school’s gravel yard. At one end of the yard stood a Maypole painted a purplish black—the paint having been left over from a recent retouching job to the school bus; and hanging from the spinning top of the Maypole were six long pieces of hemp, each with a knotted end that was supposed to keep—but did not succeed in keeping—children from slipping off the rope as they gripped its lower end and glided in a circular arc around the pole.

  At the other end of the yard was a wide open area on which was played a provisional form of cold-weather baseball. The sphere was a hard rubber ball; the hitter used his mittened fist instead of a bat (which Sister Rita disallowed as a potentially dangerous weapon), and the boundary lines for the infield and outfield were scratched into the earth with the sharp ends of tree branches or sticks, which were constantly in use since the lines were forever being obscured by the wind or the footprints of the players. Not so eradicable were the pitcher’s mound and home plate, which were marked by pieces of rock or brick.

  Because we did not have enough players or time during the luncheon and afternoon recess periods to play baseball properly, our version of the game had ten or twelve boys scattered at random through the infield and outfield forming a defense against a single self-appointed hitter—who, swinging his fist at a ball tossed underhand by a self-appointed pitcher, slapped it hither and yon until someone in the field caught it before it touched the ground. At that point, the person who caught the ball changed places with the hitter; and this system normally produced such a quick rotation of hitters that everyone had a chance to hit before the recess period ended—unless Billy Maenner was at bat.

  Billy was a freckled, sorrel-haired boy whose father owned a tavern on the other side of the bay. He was my only friend among the mainland students. During Sister Rita’s calisthenics class on this morning, as I reached to touch my toes, I saw Billy wink at me from his upside-down position near the curb. Then he shook his head slowly and raised his eyebrows, indicating that he was as bored as I was with these exercises; the gesture belied the fact that he was the closest thing our school had to an athlete. Although he was no larger than I, and was also a sixth-grader not yet in his teens, Billy Maenner could hit a ball harder and farther than any of the older boys; and he was adept at punching the ball into places where no one could reach it. For five or ten minutes, or even longer, he would cock his fist at each of forty or fifty pitches served to him high or low, inside or outside, and solidly pop each one beyond the infielder’s outstretched fingers, or between the converging outfielders or over their heads entirely, the ball rolling all the way to the Maypole.

  Such prowess earned him sufficient status to sit as an equal among the older boys in the back of the bus. But unlike them, he was never mischievous or discourteous—not the type to hurl rubber erasers through the air; and with me he was always very cordial. In the yard one day during autumn he gave me hitting tips that subsequently improved my never spectacular performances at the plate; and sometimes after I had boarded the bus and sat alone, he would leave his friends and come up to join me; and with his modest and pensive demeanor he gave the impression of being a lonely person, intrinsically an outsider like me.

  According to my father, there was some German blood in Billy’s family, which, if that was true, may have been a factor in our kindred feeling. We were both, to a degree, on the wrong side of the war. And like me, he received mediocre grades; in fact, academically we both ranked near the bottom of our class. And yet he seemed far less upset than I about the report cards that were mailed to our homes each month, perhaps because our fathers reacted in different ways to the somber news.

  My sensitive and protective father, who cared greatly about the reputation of his family in this town of few secrets, saw my inferior grades as demeaning to himself, an affront to his pride and dignity as a parent and leading Catholic layman—who, incidentally, contributed more money to the church than anyone except the Ford dealer. My father had also cultivated an intimate relationship with the venerable pastor, Father Blake, whom he had finally persuaded to hang a picture of Saint Francis along the side wall of the church, and it went without saying that my father always dry-cleaned gratis the pastor’s black suits, coats, and priestly apparel, as well as the long black habits of the nuns.

  When scrutinizing my report card, my father often wondered aloud if there was not something wrong with the school’s grading system rather than with my diligence as a student; and, despite my objections, he would telephone the Mother Superior for an appointment, and days later, through the windows of my classroom, I would see my moustachioed father stepping out of his Buick, walking with a dour expression on his face as he entered the side door, his homburg in hand, looking like a foreign diplomat en route to discuss one of the pricklier issues of the long-disputed Lateran Treaty. As far as I could see, none of these dialogues ever accrued to my benefit, for when the next report card arrived the nuns seemed to have judged me with more severity than before.

  Billy’s father, on the other hand, never appeared at the school. As a tavern owner who worked until the early hours of the morning, he perhaps had the habit of sleeping through the entire school day. Whatever the situation, Billy never showed any stress as his lowly marks each month matched my own; if anything, his morale seemed only to improve as time transpired—and despite their downgrading him, the nuns often smiled at him in the corridor between classes, and even allowed him to cut a class on occasion.

  “Straight lines!” Sister Rita called from the steps, her breath trailing through the air like the words of a sky-writer, her pointer waving toward the pathway in front of the entrance. Calisthenics was finally over on this Monday, and now we were to proceed in an orderly manner into the building. It was almost eight forty-five. Unenthusiastically I picked up my bag and took my place in line. Billy Maenner slipped in behind me.

  “Hi,” he said, “how’d you like that eraser flying past your nose in the bus?”

  “I didn’t. Who threw it?”

  “I did,” he said, gleefully. I was dumbfounded.

  “Well,” I said, finally, “you missed.”

  Just then Sister Rita directed her pointer toward us, demanding our silence; but not before Billy had whispered back: “Yes. I was trying to miss.”

  Up the steps we marched, girls and boys in separate files, into the warm corridor, not stopping until we reached the assembly room. Along the way we passed the classrooms, their doors closed to retain the heat, and inhaled a blended fragrance of incense
, candles, and floor wax. In the assembly room were ten rows of wooden folding chairs, all facing a wide, green-carpeted platform in the back of which was a small altar. In summers this was where Masses were said, but during winter the room served varied purposes: it was the students’ dining hall at lunchtime, it was the PTA’s meeting room on certain weeknights (often followed by bingo parties), and each morning before class it was where the Mother Superior, seated in a high-backed chair, greeted the students and led them in prayer.

  She was tall and slender, and she was waiting on the platform with authoritative ease as we settled along the rows, schoolbags near our feet. She waited and said nothing until the room was quiet, so intensely quiet that we could hear the clicking sounds of the rosary beads she held dangling in her long fingers. Her hands were abnormally white, as if the chalk she used for writing at the blackboard each day had become permanently ingrained in her skin. Her eyes were a pale shade of indefiniteness—indefinite to me because I had never once looked closely into them. Nor had I ever had a private conversation with her. My father did enough talking for both of us; and the dubious results of his intercessions on my behalf convinced me that it was better for all involved if I remained far from her sight.

  Finally, standing and bowing her head, the Mother Superior began a decade of the Rosary: “Our Father, who art in heaven …”; and her reedy voice immediately became lost in the murmurous response of the entire room, with the other nuns’ voices rising higher as they stood together in the outer aisles, their lofty bonnets tilted so far forward that it seemed they might soon topple off their heads to the floor.

  Indeed, no sight would have been more welcomed by most of the students in this room, who speculated endlessly on what exactly was beneath the nuns’ bonnets. Were the nuns’ heads completely shaven? Was their hair cut short, like boys’? Which nun’s hair was blond, or brunette, or gray, or white? These women who hovered over our heads all day in school, who conditioned our minds, who regulated our hours, who invaded our rest rooms, remained for us shrouded in mystery, dark brides of Christ, elusive and aloof. Few of us ever saw them arrive at school in the morning, or leave in the afternoon; nor did we have any idea where they spent their nights.