Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes. Jan David Blais
No one knew of my crush on Margaret and I wasn’t about to ruin my sweet, sad secret by doing anything dumb like talking to her. Anyway, what would I say? Girls were strange, unfathomable creatures (not my sister, that was different) and Margaret Foley the most mysterious of all.
Shuffling toward the altar I watched Margaret return, her eyes fixed prayerfully on the tips of her fingers pointed to heaven, palms together. So perfect, she was. I held my breath... our shoulders nearly touched. She smelled beautiful, like soap. Now it was my turn to kneel on the hard rubber pad. My chin barely reached the rail. For this final rehearsal, Father McAdam was giving out wafers, unconsecrated, of course. The hum grew louder. Omer, then Eugene Sullivan who always whined he was taller so should be behind me. Finished with Eugene, Father McAdam’s server jammed the cold, hard, plate against my Adam’s apple. Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi... he traced the sign of the cross with the small white host...custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam.
Amen, I replied. May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve your soul unto life everlasting. I opened wide and stuck out my tongue. What a letdown! It was a piece of... cardboard! Oh well, maybe tomorrow it will be different. This was only practice, after all.
At confession I went through my catalogue of sins, then it was five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, say a good Act of Contrition. The Fourth Commandment came in for special attention, also the time I took Jim’s baseball after mine went down the sewer and didn’t give it back until he found it in my closet. For all the mean things he did to me, I wasn’t sorry at all, which as you know creates a whole new problem on top of the first one.
At home, preparations were well along for the celebration. The kitchen was fragrant with apple and cinnamon. Aunt Moira was sitting at the table drinking coffee. My favorite aunt, always had a nice word and a smile, dark as my mother was fair, and taller. She lived up Chalkstone Avenue past the golf course. Her husband, Uncle Eddie the policeman, told great jokes but people said he drank too much and had an awful temper when he did. One time I rode my bike to their house to deliver something and through the window I saw Aunt Moira crying, sweeping up a mess of broken dishes. I left whatever it was on the step and took off. Uncle Eddie was a sergeant. He used to be a lieutenant but they said he got into some kind of trouble at work.
“How did it go,” my mother asked, “your confession.”
“I hope you had something interesting to tell,” Aunt Moira laughed, tapping her cigarette against the ashtray.
I shrugged. “I don’t feel any different.”
Aunt Moira nodded, “I never do either.”
“You’re not supposed to feel different!” My mother wiped her hands on her apron. “What’s different is how your soul looks to God.”
I opened the fridge for a look but there was a gaping hole where the shelves usually were. Looking around I saw why, a giant ham, thick, round and tapered to a stub, sitting on top of the stove in one of those heavy blue speckled baking pans. The skin was x’d all over with little brown things sticking out of it. “As soon as the pies are done, in it goes.” Baking into the evening, then a warm-up for tomorrow’s feast. Low and slow where pork is concerned. If my mother said that once, she said it a thousand times.
Grandmother Kelley would be at the party but not Grandfather Kelley who died before I was born. Many cousins, all older, since my parents were last in their families to marry. My father’s parents still lived in their little town in Canada but Mémère had been sick. They’d send a card, they always did holidays and special events, and there’d be other cards with bills. Ones and twos for sure, if I got lucky a few fives. It would go into my savings account at the Old Stone Bank in Olneyville but I’d keep a little out for essentials. I liked my bank a lot. It looked like a bank, old and stone.
The mail was late but not to worry. Most days, Francis O’Rourke, our mailman, stopped for a “quickie” at the Melody Lounge which was conveniently located in the late morning of his route. Sometimes I was home from school and still no Francis. When he showed, I could smell the quickie as he handed me our magazines and letters. Francis had been delivering mail so long nobody complained except to him. Francis was one of the many Men who plied their trades in our neighborhood. Henry The Milk Man. Pete The Egg Man who doubled as The Chicken Man and at Thanksgiving, The Turkey Man. Arthur The Garage Man. Mario The Garbage Man. The Rag Man clattered by every Tuesday in his horse-drawn wagon, wearing a top hat and a suit coat winter or summer. He was my favorite Man though I didn’t know his name because for some reason we never asked him to stop.
After dinner, my father was relaxing in his red leather chair, smoking his pipe and reading the paper. Sprawled on the floor I sorted my picture cards. I had decided by team was better than by name. Williams and Pesky and Doerr would now be together as in real life, Sain and Spahn of the Braves and so on. Some of them had wonderful names, especially Spahn, Warrrren Spaahhhnn. Just like my bank, his name was exactly right. It sounded like he pitched, slow, graceful, with a leg kick that floated up and above his head. “Spahn and Sain and pray for rain,” they said all last summer though Cleveland killed them in the Series.
We’d been to a couple of games, my father and I. The first time he picked me up at school and as I got in the waiting car I couldn’t help smirking at the other kids slaving away. My mother fixed it with the nuns. They knew her because she did all kinds of work for the school since she didn’t have a real job. She even knew Father Donnelly personally, though she didn’t like him. Somewhere on Route 1 we pulled off the road and broke out the lunch she had packed. Ham on white bread, the good kind where you can see your fingerprints. For me a thermos of milk, coffee for my Dad.
My first game was against the Yankees. My mother won the tickets by calling a radio station and giving the name of some song, the kind with no words that didn’t interest me until much later. Our seats were down the first base line and about the fifth inning the shade came across and it got cold. We were so close to the field you could even hear the game, that wonderful, milky sound when the bat’s sweet spot meets the ball dead on, fast balls popping the catcher’s mitt, the umpire’s calls, the players yelling at him and everybody else.
The Yankees, the despised Yankees. Okay, I admit I had Yankee cards too – Raschi and Rizutto and Berra, staccato sounds, harsh to the ear. Our neighborhood used to be Irish but it was mostly Italian now and I had many friends and enemies with names like that. Wops, my father called them sometimes, not my friends but their parents, but only when they weren’t around. I didn’t know why wop was so bad but my friends went crazy if I called them that when we were having a fight, usually just names and shoving but sometimes punches. Wop. It got them going every time.
But it was the Irish my Dad really lit into. Drunks and bums, good for nothing but talking and drinking. I remember one time he told Uncle Eddie the Irish were the most arrogant people ever walked the face of the earth, staggered is what he actually said. “And your unions, damn bunch of socialists! The only part of you that works is your mouth!” Now his finger was in Uncle Eddie’s face. “And your so-called failin’ – what a load of crap! Rummies is all you are!” That’s when Uncle Eddie asked him to step outside.
After that my mother didn’t talk to my father for a long time. For her part, she scoffed at his plodding Canucks – nothing above the neck, no literature, no music, no theater. “If excess be the price of culture,” she would say, “then I welcome excess!” How could such different people have ever got married?
Speaking of Uncle Eddie, when I mentioned cousins coming to my party, I forgot the twins, Martha and Mary. They didn’t count, being girls. Of course my sister was thick with them.
Many kinds of people lived in our neighborhood. As I said, my parish, St. Teresa’s, was mostly Irish and Italian with a few French families. You were in the parish your house was in, so we belonged to St. Teresa’s, St. Teresa of Avila which is in Spain. There was the French Church, Our Lady of Lourdes, and the Polish Church whose name I was never clear about. The names up there had a lot of cz’s and ski’s. Holy Ghost was in Federal Hill, the really Italian section where we rarely ventured. One time thieves stole a gold crucifix from Holy Ghost. The parishioners wanted to call the police