Life with Sudden Death. Michael Downing
white tie to wear, I got excited about First Communion again. My family was used to seeing me only in bow ties. Right at that moment, though, my sister Roberta started appearing around the house at odd moments in a wedding dress, demanding everybody’s attention. She was quitting her teaching job at a local junior high and getting married in June to Dick. He was a nice guy with a giant beer belly who used to be a bus driver in Springfield, Massachusetts, but was hoping to land a job at Bickford’s Pancake House. Joe and I were not allowed to crack the obvious fat jokes. My mother just said, He’s the man your sister is determined to marry. She treated Dick very well, allowing him to sleep on the sofa in the den when he visited, which might’ve looked bad morally but was actually Christian charity because Dick couldn’t afford to stay at a decent motel. Plus, there was another rumor flying around about his mother being alcoholic.
Although we all ate oatmeal on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and poached eggs on toast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and cold cereal on Saturdays, and bacon and eggs on Sundays, Dick was allowed to order eggs any day of the week. This impressed me as my mother’s way of showing him a good example for his career at the pancake house, but not a particularly good way of teaching him the discipline he and Roberta lacked. I think Dick’s breakfast privileges started after my mother accidentally totaled his car.
My mother had been in a rush to get to morning Mass. She was going by herself, probably to persuade a saint to intervene in Roberta’s wedding plans. The driveway was rimmed with four-foot banks of shoveled snow. It ran about seventy-five feet downhill from the garage to the street. This was a dicey drive in reverse, but midway you could back into the carport—where Joe forced you to play half-court basketball in the summer—and then drive straight down the rest of the way. When my mother backed the green Pontiac Bonneville three-seater station wagon out of the garage and into the carport, she heard something unusual. She got out to look and didn’t see anything but the snow-banks, which was odd, because Dick’s VW Beetle had been parked there when she left the house. It took her a while, but she finally spotted it. She’d banged Dick’s Beetle right up over the snowbank, where it had sunk clear out of sight into the drifts in the backyard. She’d tried to wake up Dick, she claimed, but he was snoring, so she figured she’d tell him when she got back. Dick woke up while she was gone and noticed his Beetle wasn’t in the carport. He didn’t panic and call the police like a normal person. He just waited around. This confirmed his reputation for being an easygoing guy and his reputation for lacking initiative.
Meanwhile, changing your mind had caught on like wildfire with the older kids. My sister Elaine was ditching her last year of college in Vermont so she could go work with recently baptized Catholics on an Oklahoma Indian reservation. Jack had flunked out of college before he got married. Joe tried to launch investigations into all this dropping out, but nobody would discuss it out loud because it didn’t make sense of our being smart and valuing a college education. Elaine was not punished, probably because she didn’t ever admit she was dropping out in front of us. Elaine’s punishment was the way we learned to compliment her for being kind and for having good sewing skills.
At the same time, my sister Mary Ann was attending Berkshire Community College instead of a four-year college, even though she’d had all A’s in high school and had been told to apply to Smith College by a guidance counselor who obviously hadn’t heard about Catholic four-year colleges. Mary Ann was my favorite sister. Her being at home was good luck for me, but it was not okay to be happy about it in public. She was on punishment because she’d changed her mind about going into the convent in the middle of her senior year of high school, after her name had already been sewn on tags attached to her towels and bedsheets and black dresses. She was grounded, which my mother liked to call “campused” to emphasize where Mary Ann wasn’t. This included not dating and not even attending funerals for members of her friends’ families. And Mary Ann was allowed to be only a part-time student. The rest of the time, she had to work counting the collections in the rectory, and then catch up by taking summer-school courses. I took it on faith that this somehow proved how highly my family valued a college education.
In First Communion classes, they moved on to drilling us in how to walk in pairs up the aisle without concern for our partner’s appearance. Some nuns we didn’t know who were experts in perfect unison were brought in to run these sessions for the priests. A lot of our practice time was taken up by girls’ questions about their veils and how to handle them, until a public school boy said too loudly that the veils would make it so you didn’t have to worry if you were paired up with a real goon.
Public school kids could always dish it out, but they could never take it, and nobody knew this better than the nuns. One of them asked him to stand up and say his name out loud. She asked him if his parents were planning to attend his First Communion.
He said yes, and his little sister. And all four of his grandparents were expected, he said. I started to feel a little sorry for him. He thought he could talk his way out of it. But then he started bragging, adding in godparents from out of town, too. That’s when I lost sympathy for him. All the good godparents for my family had been used up by the time I was baptized, so I got the uncle and the bleached-blond aunt who lived in California in a troubled marriage. As a result, I wasn’t expecting any great gifts. I was just praying they didn’t get divorced.
For punishment, the nun said, the wiseacre was not going to have a partner for his march up the aisle on the day of his First Holy Communion.
For a minute, the kid thought he could handle the punishment.
It was entirely a matter of his own free will, the nun said, whether to tell his out-of-town godparents in advance or just let them make the trip to St. Teresa’s parish and be surprised to see he was the only boy in the class not worthy of a partner. “Who’ll be the goon then, mister?”
The kid started to cry, completely proving her point.
I was always confident that when it came to the actual day of my First Communion, my family would act in a way that would make other kids envious. If they felt like it, a couple of my brothers could arrange to be altar boys for the event, and some of my sisters could sing in the choir, and the rest would still fill up one of the front benches. The only thing I was really worried about was First Confession.
I tried to bring it up at dinner one Friday night, but my mother had fried smelts, which we loved because tartar sauce was a mayonnaise byproduct and no other seafood item supported such a disproportionate ratio of tartar sauce to fish. No one wanted to talk. After the Rosary, I stopped outside Marie’s bedroom to see if she’d be willing to give me some tips. She opened her door just enough to accommodate her ear. She was experimenting with a wedding hairdo by wearing somebody else’s curlers, but I ignored them to stay on her good side. I said I was worried. A lot of my friends were practicing pretty hard for First Confession. She said to make up a bunch of sins of omission, and then she closed the door. I knocked for a while and finally yelled, Like what? Through the oak door, she said, Like failing to remember to thank Mom for cooking your meals. And then she turned on the hairdryer to drown me out.
I checked this with Joe. He told me it would be a sin, and I wouldn’t be pure enough to take Holy Communion at Roberta’s wedding. We were in our bedroom. He shut the door and made me get down on my knees and show him how I examined my conscience.
Joe said my method was all wrong, starting with bad posture. He turned out the desk light and turned on the closet light, and in that dimness he demonstrated his technique. It put mine to shame. His eyes were closed tight enough to cause wrinkles, and he held his hands like somebody getting ready to karate-chop a brick in half. At first, he seemed to be staring straight down into the fires of hell. I noticed how he started to move his lips after a while, and then he slowly raised his head bit by bit, but not so far that he’d be accused of trying to talk to God directly. It helped that he was amazingly skinny and always pulled his pants up under his ribs so he could cinch his belt on the very last hole. It made him look like a starving hobo whom anybody would forgive.
I didn’t tell him, but I decided to memorize a list of sins of omission. In the heat of the moment of my First Confession, though, I changed my mind. As soon as I closed the curtain in the confessional, I wished I’d practiced better posture. The darkness really threw me off