And when I came out, my mother continues, the punk just looked at me, real snotty-like, like he was daring me, and then he said come on and hit me, lady, you just come right on and hit me. I’ll show you, lady, come on. And then he used the F word. She shakes her head and looks at me.
Later, inside, as she irons one of my father’s shirts, she tells me another story. It happened last week, at night. The ten o’clock news was on. Time to walk Alfie. She’d been feeling lousy all day so Jim took the dog out front instead.
So he was standing out there waiting for Alfie to finish up her business when all of a sudden he hears this engine and he looks up, and you know what it was, Tony? Can you guess, of all things? It was this car, this car, driving right down along the sidewalk with its lights out. Jim said he dove straight for the curb, pulling poor Alfie in the middle of number two right with him. And when they went past him they swore at him and threw an empty beer can at him. She laughs and looks at me, then stops ironing and sips her coffee. Her laughter is from fear. Well, you should have heard your little brother when he came back in. Boy was he steaming! They could have killed him they were driving so fast. The cops caught the kids up at Tastee-Freeze corner. We saw the squad car lights from the front windows. It was a good thing Jim took the dog out that night instead of me. She sprinkles the shirt with water from a Pepsi bottle. Can you picture your old mother diving then for the curb?
She makes a tugging gesture with her hands. Pulling the leash. Saving herself and Alfie. Again she laughs. She tells the story again when Jim comes home.
At first the doctors thought she had disseminated lupus erythematosus. Lupus means wolf. It is primarily a disease of the skin. As lupus advances, the victim’s face becomes ulcerated by what are called butterfly eruptions. The face comes to resemble a wolf’s. Disseminated lupus attacks the joints as well as the internal organs. There isn’t a known cure.
And at first they made her hang. My mother. They made her buy a sling into which she placed her head, five times each day. Pulling her head from the other side was a heavy water bag. My father put the equipment up on the door of my bedroom. For years when I went to sleep I stared at that water bag. She had to hang for two-and-a-half hours each day. Those were the years that she read every book she could get her hands on.
And those were the years that she received the weekly shots, the cortisone, the steroids, that made her puff up, made her put on the weight the doctors are now telling her to get rid of.
Then one of the doctors died, and then she had to find new doctors, and then again she had to undergo their battery of tests. These new doctors told her that she probably didn’t have lupus, that instead they thought she had severe rheumatoid arthritis, that the ten years of traction and corticosteroids had been a mistake. They gave her a drugstore full of pills then. They told her to lose weight, to exercise each night.
A small blackboard hangs over the kitchen sink. The markings put there each day appear to be Chinese. Long lines for these pills, dots for those, the letter A for yet another. A squiggly line for something else.
The new doctors taught her the system. When you take over thirty pills a day you can’t rely on memory.
My father called again. He said there was nothing new. Mary is in the hospital again, and she’s been joking that she’s somewhat of a celebrity. So many doctors come in each day to see her. Interns. Residents. They hold conferences around her bed. They smile and read her chart. They question her. They thump her abdomen. They move her joints. They point. One intern asked her when she had her last menstrual cycle. My mother looked at the young man, then at the other doctors around her bed, then smiled and said twenty-some years ago but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you which month. The intern’s face quickly reddened. My mother’s hysterectomy is written there in plain view on her chart.
They ask her questions and she recites her history like a litany.
Were the Ohio doctors right? Were they prophets? Please give her to us. Maybe we can experiment.
My father and I walk along the street. We’ve just eaten, then gone to Osco for the evening paper—an excuse, really, just to take a walk. And he is next to me suddenly bringing up the subject of my mother’s health, just as suddenly as the wind from the lake shakes the thin branches of the trees. The moment is serious, I realize. My father is not a man given to unnecessary talk.
I don’t know what I’d do without her, he says. I say nothing, for I can think of nothing to say. We’ve been together for over thirty years, he says. He pauses. For nearly thirty-four years. Thirty-four years this October. And, you know, you wouldn’t think it, but I love her so much more now. He hesitates, and I look at him. He shakes his head and smiles. You know what I mean? he says. I say yes and we walk for a while in silence, and I think of what it must be like to live with someone for thirty-four years, but I cannot imagine it, and then I hear my father begin to talk about that afternoon’s ball game—he describes at length and in comic detail a misjudged fly ball lost in apathy or ineptitude or simply in the sun—and for the rest of our walk home we discuss what’s right and wrong with our favorite baseball team, our thorn-in-the-side Chicago Cubs.
I stand here, not used to speaking about things that are so close to me. I am used to veiling things in my stories, to making things wear masks, to telling my stories through masks. But my mother tells her stories openly, as she has done so all of her life—since she lived on her father’s farm in Ohio, as she walked along the crowded 1930 Chicago streets, to my father overseas in her letters, to the five of us children, as we sat on her lap, as we played in the next room while she tended to our supper in the kitchen. She tells them to everyone, to anyone who will listen. She taught Linda to read her lips.
I learn now to read her lips.
And I imagine one last story.
Diana and I are children. Our mother is still young. Diana and I are outside on the sidewalk playing and it’s summer. And we are young and full of play and happy, and we see a dog, and it comes toward us on the street. My sister takes my hand. She senses something, I think. The dog weaves from side to side. It’s sick, I think. Some kind of lather is on its mouth. The dog growls. I feel Diana’s hand shake.
Now we are inside the house, safe, telling our mother. Linda, Bob, and Jim are there. We are all the same age, all children. Our mother looks outside, then walks to the telephone. She returns to the front windows. We try to look out the windows too, but she pushes the five of us away.
No, she says. I don’t want any of you to see this.
We watch her watching. Then we hear the siren of a police car. We watch our mother make the sign of the Cross. Then we hear a shot. Another. I look at my sisters and brothers. They are crying. Worried, frightened, I begin to cry too.
Did it come near you? our mother asks us. Did it touch you? Any of you? Linda reads her lips. She means the funny dog. Or does she mean the speeding automobile with its lights off? The Ohio doctors? The boy behind the alley gate? The shards of broken glass? The wolf surrounded by butterflies? The ten-and-a-half-pound baby?
Diana, the oldest, speaks for us. She says that it did not.
Our mother smiles. She sits with us. Then our father is with us. Bob cracks a smile, and everybody laughs. Alfie gives a bark. The seven of us sit closely on the sofa. Safe.
That actually happened, but not exactly in the way that I described it. I’ve heard my mother tell that story from time to time, at times when she’s most uneasy, but she has never said what it was that she saw from the front windows. A good storyteller, she leaves what she has all too clearly seen to our imaginations.
I stand in the corner of this room, thinking of her lying now in the hospital.
I pray none of us looks at that animal’s face.
The Eyes of Children
The two seventh-grade girls came running to the playground, their pink cheeks streaked with tears, the pleated skirts of their navy-blue uniforms snapping in the wind. It was a windy Friday. Some of the chil
dren looked at the sky to see if it would rain. They gathered in loose bunches by the gate near Sister Immaculata, the sixth-grade teacher, her skirts swirling like a child’s pennant caught in a stiff breeze. The black folds of her habit whipped away behind her, flapping toward the gate and the alleyway, now shifting as the wind shifted, as she turned to face the wind. Dry leaves and scraps of paper whirled in circles on the ground beneath the basketball hoops. Dust stung the children’s eyes. Not even Patrick Riley, the tallest eighth-grader and captain of the basketball team, risked trying a shot against the wind. He sat on the parish basketball against the fence, flanked by his teammates who chewed their fingernails or stood, hands in pockets, turning into the wind like Sister Immaculata.
Gino Martini, a dark seventh-grader, knew he would have tried a shot. He stood near the players, fighting a yawn, his skinny arms folded across his chest. If he had the ball, he’d put it up. The ball would fall cleanly through the chain net, and everyone would cheer him. A yellowed sheet of newspaper rose suddenly in the air and slammed into the playground fence, spreading flat against the weave of chain link. Gino was sleepy from serving the week’s 6:45 morning Masses. He stared at a light-haired girl whose name he didn’t know, watching how the wind pressed her skirt back against her legs. The blonde girl was pretty and stood all by herself, but Gino was shy and she was an eighth-grader. The only seventh-grade boys the eighth-grade girls talked to were the guys on the school team. Gino had wanted to be on the team, but his father insisted he work after school, to learn responsibility, the value of a dollar. His mother insisted he serve God by being an altar boy. He had to obey. But no one knew him. The pretty girl didn’t look at him, and Mrs. Bagnola and Sister Bernadette walked past her toward Sister Immaculata, and Mrs. Bagnola looked at her wristwatch and shook her head. The wind blew. Traffic rushed by in the street. Someday, Gino thought, I’ll be part of something wonderful someday. Then everyone heard the cries of the two girls who ran inside the fence bordering the playground, and the girls grabbed the arms of their teachers, and the children crowded around them, pushed by the wind.
“The church!” shouted Donna Pietro, sobbing against Bernadette’s chest.
“He was there,” Maureen Ostrowski screamed, “he was there, in the church!” Her hands squeezed Mrs. Bagnola’s arm.
“There now,” Bernadette said. She stroked Donna’s dark hair. “Take deep breaths. You’ve frightened yourselves.”
“We—” Donna cried. “We didn’t do anything, Sister!”
“All of a sudden he was just there!” Maureen said. “And he was bleeding!”
“Who?” Mrs. Bagnola said. Her hands grasped Maureen’s shoulders and shook them until the girl’s eyes steadied.
“Start from the beginning,” Sister Immaculata said.
Donna gulped a breath, then stared at the sky. “Maureen forgot her scarf, Sister, so after lunch we went to church.”
“During choir practice, Sister,” Maureen said. “This morning.”
“Maureen left her scarf up in the loft during choir practice.”
“It was my mother’s—” Maureen stomped her foot. “And she didn’t know I borrowed it.” She began to cry.
“So you two went to the choir loft—” prodded Mrs. Bagnola.
“We should send someone to the rectory,” Immaculata said.
“Not yet,” Bernadette said. She looked at Mrs. Bagnola, then at the two girls. “You went up to the loft?”
“We didn’t do anything, Sister!” Donna said. “Then all of a sudden he was there.” She spread her arms and bent at the waist. “At the top of the loft by the stairs, just looking at us!” Donna again began to cry.
“Who?” Bernadette said.
“We thought he was Mr. Lindsey,” Maureen said in a low voice. She wiped her tears with her fingertips. Mr. Lindsey was the parish choirmaster. “But he didn’t say anything when we said hello—”
“We said, ‘Good afternoon, Mr. Lindsey.’ We only whispered.”
“—and then he turned, and his face was horrible and bleeding.” Maureen’s lips quivered. She looked out at the street. “And he wouldn’t move or anything. He just stood there, blood dripping from his face. We couldn’t run because he was by the stairs. Donna screamed—”
“We both screamed, Sister.”
“—and then he wasn’t there anymore, and then we heard someone making noise downstairs in the church.”
“Send a boy to the rectory,” Bernadette told Mrs. Bagnola.
Gino waved his hand and bounced on his toes. Since he served so many Masses, it was only fair. But Mrs. Bagnola’s eyes looked beyond him over the crush of children. She motioned to Patrick Riley.
“—down the steps,” Maureen was saying. She held out her hand like she was grasping a railing. “And there were drops of blood on the marble—”
“Tiny drops of blood,” Donna said. She shook herself.
“—didn’t step in them, Sister, because we were afraid! He was horrible, standing there by the stairs holding the door open like he wanted us to come to him. And behind him was the stained-glass window.” Maureen made the sign of the Cross. Around Gino some of the children crossed themselves too.
“I didn’t want to get any of the blood on my shoes,” Donna said. “These are my only pair of good shoes!”
“It’s all right, Donna,” Sister Bernadette said. “Your shoes are fine.”
“And in the window Jesus was looking down on us, pointing to His Sacred Heart. And all we could see then was that big window. All the colors. The bright light.” Maureen looked into the distance.
“I’ll throw them away,” Donna said, lifting her feet. “Even if the blood just got on the bottom! I’ll throw them in a furnace! They’ll burn, won’t they, Sister?”
“We’ll clean your shoes in Mother Superior’s office,” Bernadette said.
Mrs. Bagnola stepped forward. “This man, he didn’t say anything to you or do anything, did he?”
The girls didn’t move, then stared at each other and shook their heads.
“Thank God,” said Sister Immaculata.
Her words rippled through the children. Some girls nodded and grabbed one another’s hands. Donna ground the bottoms of her shoes on the asphalt. Maureen held one arm at her side, her finger pointing to her heart. Then Mrs. Bagnola checked her watch and nodded to Immaculata and Bernadette, and Bernadette blew her whistle, and the children assembled in three lines that buzzed with talk. Sister Bernadette left the playground first, walking between Maureen and Donna, shrinking as she moved up the alley that led to the school. Already the little children were marching toward school from their smaller playground across the street. They sang a merry song as they marched. Gino watched everything, standing silently in line, thinking maybe there’d been a terrible car crash and the man had smashed his face against the windshield, then run to the church looking for a priest who’d give him the Last Rites. Gino wished Mrs. Bagnola had chosen him to go to the rectory. He wanted to see the drops of blood, and if they made a trail. If the priests followed the trail they’d find the man and could hear his confession. A girl in the front of Gino’s line began to cry. Maybe she got a cinder in her eye, Gino thought. Sister Immaculata’s group walked from the playground. The wind was blowing up lots of dust. The man was most likely waiting inside one of the confessionals, and right now Father Manning was probably forgiving all his sins. The girl wept, circled by other girls. It wasn’t a big deal. Just a man and some blood. A stray mutt ran past the children nearest the fence. Mrs. Bagnola shooed the dog away, and the wind blew and bent the heads of the children, and Gino’s line began the march up the alley to the school.
That afternoon passed slowly. All the seventh-graders stared at the fifth row, at the pair of empty desks. Mother Superior explained that Donna and Maureen had been given the afternoon off. Hands rose in the air. Mother Superior said there would be no discussion, and when she knelt next to the wooden platform beneath Sister Bernadette’s desk and took out
her rosary Gino realized they’d spend the afternoon praying. The children knelt, as noisily as falling blocks, on the wooden floor. When Sister Bernadette returned to her classroom Gino tried to read her face, but the woman was as somber and unreadable as Latin. Gino’s class prayed three rosaries: one for Maureen, one for Donna, the third for the bleeding man.
“It’s an unfortunate incident,” Bernadette told the class. She stared at the clock on the wall. There were a few minutes before the bell.
“The church is a refuge for the sick and needy,” Sister continued. “The doors of the parish are always open. The priests receive calls at all hours of the day and night. Once, at midnight, a poor woman knocked on the rectory door because she had no food to feed her hungry children and she was tempted to go out and steal, and the priests gave her food. Another time a very rich man was driving around in his limousine thinking of committing the unforgivable sin of suicide, because you know wealth does not bring a person peace or true happiness, and the priests listened to him and gave him their blessing, and the man renounced all his earthly belongings and went on to live a life dedicated to Christ.” She smiled. “So you see, children, sometimes the church does have unhappy visitors, but God greets them all with forgiveness and love.” Then the final bell sounded.
The sky looked like it would rain. Gino thought about Sister’s words as he hurried home. Maybe, he thought, there wasn’t a car accident. Maybe the man was just an unhappy visitor. But then why was he bleeding? Gino hoped it wouldn’t rain until after he finished his paper route. Why was he bleeding? He heard a bouncing basketball and saw Patrick Riley and his friends standing inside the playground. The boys were talking loudly. They didn’t answer Gino’s shy hello. He walked slowly so he could hear what they said.
The Evening News Page 2
