Читать книгу Life with Sudden Death - Michael Downing - Страница 8
Оглавление2. Other People’s Parties
By second grade, I considered an invitation to a birthday party an imposition. After my father died, cleaning the house and fixing up the yard took up most of my family’s time on Saturdays, and a lot of kids in my class chose to pretend they were born on Saturdays, as a way of attracting bigger crowds to their birthday parties. The worst ones began with hand-delivered envelopes you couldn’t open because the kid had finally found a use for all the Easter Seals his parents had bought from him during our annual sales event.
Sister Jeanne Arthur did not allow mail delivery during class time because too many kids ended up with hurt feelings. You’d find the party invitation in your desk after lunch with an RSVP demand, usually in capital letters or underlined. If the kid was unpopular or not well known in class, he’d spend the rest of the day distracting you with notes asking if you’d received the invitation yet. The only way to protect yourself was to raise your hand and ask Sister Jeanne Arthur to remind you what the punishment was for passing notes.
Sister Jeanne Arthur was popular and strict. She was bigger than anybody else at Notre Dame grammar school, and she used size to her advantage when necessary. She never hit second-graders full-force, but she’d just as soon punch a sixth-grader as look at him, and if anyone brought a radio or a weapon into school, Sister Jeanne Arthur was the one they sent in to steal it from him by force.
Sister Jeanne Arthur had rules for just about everything, including gifts for the teacher. Gifts didn’t work as bribes on her, but they were a good way for second-graders to practice the Golden Rule. She let us know she was pretty well provided with rosary beads and holy cards, and she had to share any cash she got with a houseful of other nuns. Unless it was a lot, money wasn’t going to do her much good. She knew children often had a hard time picking out the right gifts, so she saved us the trouble by asking for potato chips, and she hinted that the State Line brand was especially worthy of our attention.
My mother admired Sister Jeanne Arthur for knowing exactly what she wanted. She also admired this trait in total strangers at the supermarket who “moved along at a decent clip” instead of blocking the aisles while making up their minds. My mother always knew exactly which item any person with a brain in her head should buy.
If you were ever confused about a choice, all you had to do was examine your conscience. This worked for all the Downings we knew, except me. I was about three when this became apparent, and the story was retold a million times. Unfortunately, my father was still alive when this happened, so it was probably one of the few things about me that stuck in his mind for eternity.
I had to be punished by my mother because I wouldn’t stop asking to try on the boxing gloves my father had bought Gerard for his tenth birthday. I was sent to the laundry room to examine my conscience. This was not my first trip to the isolation booth, but my mother had never closed the door between me and the kitchen before. I admit I was probably sobbing and ruining the party atmosphere.
Things went wrong immediately. I got distracted by the idea of turning the laundry room into my private bedroom. In part, I blame the bleachy darkness, which made me think of nighttime and clean sheets. When I lay down on my back on the cool linoleum between the laundry machines and the built-in cabinets, I fit perfectly, with room to spare for growth spurts. I folded my hands behind my head, bent my knees, and crossed my legs. Directly above me, I noticed, the ceiling light had already been outfitted with a pull-chain. If I added a shoelace, I’d be able to operate it as a nightlight. If I drummed up a decent pillow, the world would be my oyster.
A knock at the door brought me to my feet. Somebody, not my mother, said, Are you done examining your conscience?
I remember almost nothing of what happened next. It’s just a story told about me. I don’t even remember my father being in the kitchen, so if I ran into him when I was released, I hope I was polite. I doubt it, though, because I do know I was panicky. I also remember that Gerard’s new inflatable boxing bag had been attached to the door of the built-in broom closet in the kitchen, and it was hanging there like the shiniest apple on the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. And I remember one other detail. I remember clearly that I did not know the meaning of the word conscience. Still, it was nobody’s fault but my own that I had wasted my prison time on another of my many home-makeover fantasies.
Either my mother or my father asked me if I was sorry for causing a ruckus. (The sources vary on this point.) Everyone agrees that I said I was sorry, acing that test. But my mother expected our A’s to come with plusses, so she tossed me a bonus question: What do you want to say to your brother for interrupting his birthday party?
I screamed, I want boxing gloves.
I won a return trip to the isolation booth. The story leaves me stranded there, cut off from the family, wanting things I should not want.
After my father died, instead of missing him or the status and money that accrued to us during the last years of his life, most of my family just stopped wanting the things we didn’t have—hence their attitude about strangers at our parties. It was not economic or space constraints that dictated our policy. It was our good fortune not to need outsiders to gin up a celebration.
Anybody can turn necessity into a virtue. My family could perform moral alchemy, turning anything that was not available to us into a vice. I never mastered this skill. I constantly craved what other people had, but I also craved the heady feeling of being a Downing—being morally superior to people who craved that stuff. I wanted it all. I wanted to live above reproach with a heated in-ground pool in the backyard.
By second grade, I knew it was not okay to want all the right things and all the wrong things. Managing my irreconcilable longings was going to require some fancy footwork. The world was famously a minefield of sinful pleasures for normal Catholics, but our family catalogue of shameful indulgences went way beyond color television sets and jewelry. It included pets, family vacations, and grandparents.
The H. family up the street had a live grandmother, and they kept her in the other side of their duplex house. As I understood this arrangement, they’d installed her as a built-in babysitter. I never had any live grandparents, so it was lucky I came from a family that didn’t need the kind of help they could offer. Nana spoke to us only through the window screens, like a prisoner, to tell us when we were about to trample her flowers, and she often showed signs of weakness. She had white hair and wore cardigan sweaters over her shoulders in the middle of summer. I knew it was morally unacceptable to make your grandmother live in like a slave, and I constantly inquired about her well-being. Did she ever have guests? Was there heat on her side? I was relieved when Cathleen H. sneaked me in one day to prove Nana had her own bathroom and kitchen. All along, I’d pictured her with just a pail and a toaster.
My brother Joe was not impressed when I reported the results of my investigation to him. I bet they lose a ton of rent on Nana, was all he said. I repeated this to my mother rather proudly, giving Joe no credit. She said, With five children and her nerves, Mrs. H. is smart to keep her mother nearby.
My mother could always find a way to compliment people who weren’t related to us on their bad habits.
I had a lot of friends in second grade because I didn’t criticize them to their faces and I was preternaturally gifted when it came to anagrams. One Friday, Sister Jeanne Arthur dictated a simple sentence and instructed us to jumble up the letters over the weekend and then see how many new words we could make. She told us this was going to be a weekly contest to improve our vocabulary.
On Monday, most kids came in with ten or fifteen new words, a lot of them written with crayons on construction paper, as if they didn’t know the difference between language arts and visual arts. It didn’t surprise anyone when Barbara Jean held up her Palmer-method cursive list and flipped it around dramatically to show that she’d needed the second side to fit in her thirty-something words. She’d already won the first big spelling bee of the year, and she was getting pretty famous for her study habits.
I had not used both sides of the paper, so I worried that I’d broken a rule and would be disqualified. I had used seven pages of my brother Joe’s best lined paper and four of my mother’s staples for my words, about 140 of them, from which I had purged plurals, possessives, and proper nouns based on accusations of loafing made by my brother Gerard against me.
Sister Jeanne didn’t play favorites based on brains. She congratulated us all, and instructed us to walk up in orderly rows to place our results on her desk. We’d spent the first couple weeks of second grade practicing this assembly-line delivery system, which involved a full classroom circuit on the way back to your desk. When I got up to the front, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and handed me a bag of State Line potato chips, but she wasn’t smiling. You know what this means, Michael, she said, shifting into her all-business baritone. I did not, and neither did the other kids, who automatically froze in place, which left everyone at somebody else’s assigned place. I’d shut down the second grade. I was the wrench in the works. Sister Jeanne said, No weekend homework for the class this Friday. The place erupted in cheers and victory dancing. Before anybody got hurt or accidentally peed, Sister Jeanne loudly instructed me to offer a handful of chips only to those kids sitting quietly at their proper desks.
As usual, I got exactly what I wanted and exactly what I didn’t want. I liked winning, but for a prize I would have preferred a new assignment with some tougher letter combinations. I didn’t really need more popularity or party invitations. I needed something to do at home when the older kids were playing Scrabble or shouting out the answers as my mother filled in the blanks in the Jumble puzzle in the daily newspaper.
Word games were a chance for my family to enjoy the brains God gave us, but you couldn’t expect the older Downings to participate in Chutes and Ladders or Parcheesi. And forget party games. Party games were a sign of desperation. After the cake was cut at home, you did the dishes and then went outside and played if you didn’t have anything original to say about Vatican II or the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming elections. Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Musical Chairs were associated with small families that lacked children and had to rely on noisemakers and store-bought crepe-paper decorations to create cheap imitations of family events. I liked having a reason based on moral superiority not to play games in other people’s houses. I wasn’t crazy about being blindfolded or dizzy in front of strangers, and by second grade, because of painful accidents, the mothers of a lot of children had started throwing parties where they substituted Scotch Tape for pins on the donkey tails, and everybody was looking for an excuse not to play.
By second grade, even my First Communion was an imposition. The parish let Catholic-school kids cut a lot of the preparation classes, but they forced even us to memorize the Ten Commandments. When I brought them up, my family didn’t show much interest in the Commandments. They were just grateful they were there so the Jews had something from the Bible to guide them. After a while, I stopped trying to interest people in my First Communion. Most of the other eight kids in the family had received the Holy Sacrament years ago when it was a more sacred event in St. Charles parish, where we lived before my father died. Plus, my First Communion was scheduled for May, and I was born in May, so every time I brought it up I was competing against myself for attention.
And then Father F. turned up. I never knew where Father F. came from, but he was always on his way to Haiti, a hot country specializing in witch doctors. Father F. was a missionary. No matter how hot he got in Haiti, he never took off his black cassock and white collar, and he wore rosary beads around his waist, instead of a normal belt. The crucifix was usually all that was protecting him from the latest tropical jinx or curse. He was a small man. There was something appealingly wrong with his face—maybe his skin was pockmarked, maybe one side didn’t line up properly with the other. You could see he had suffered. This wildly inflated his romance quotient for me.
Father F.’s last visit that I recall coincided with my sister Marie’s birthday. Marie was four years older than I was, two years older than Joe, and about ten times more spoiled than either of us because she was the youngest girl in the family and always willing to cry for sympathy. Visiting missionaries were a bigger deal than birthdays in our house, so Father F.’s just happening to turn up at the right moment to make Marie’s party memorable seemed suspicious to Joe and me. Joe was in fourth grade by then. He’d long since figured out that most of the benefits of being Downing kids had been used up or worn out by our seven older brothers and sisters. For instance, Joe had seen home movies from before we were born starring a rented pony and dozens of party-hatted guests eating fistfuls of chocolate cake. Joe and I weren’t allowed to invite extras, and the supply of ponies and pointed hats had completely dried up. And after my father died in 1961, no matter how old you were, you got the same birthday cake. My sisters Elaine and Mary Ann must have made two or three hundred of those pink-frosted white cakes with seeded raspberry jam between the layers. I can still hear my mother saying, Can one of you girls whip up a one-egg cake for tonight?
Somebody, somewhere along the line, must’ve preferred a dense cake.
Father F. was good with kids because he didn’t mind frightening them. This made him my favorite priest. Usually we ate in the dining room when we had priests in the house, but Father F. was an old friend of the family, so we ate in the kitchen around the oval maple table. Father F. told stories about “the dark side of Haiti,” but he made it clear he wasn’t talking about the color of people’s skin. Like us, he couldn’t care less about your color as long as you were a Catholic who voted for anybody named Kennedy. His worst enemies were the witch doctors, who could paralyze people with the Evil Eye.
If Father F. visited your house in Haiti, anything could happen. Once, when he was young, he stayed overnight on a big farm operated by recently baptized Catholics who wanted to give him the profits from their sugarcane crop to build a church. All night, the witch doctors hooted in the fields like crazy owls. In the morning, the sugarcane was nothing but crispy black stems. They could burn down your house without ever lighting a match, Father F. said. We didn’t have dimmer switches in those days, but something made the pendant light over the kitchen table flicker and fade.
My mother asked Father F. what the Catholics did to survive. He said, You fight fire with fire. Everyone else nodded solemnly as if they knew what this meant. Before I could ask for clarification, somebody turned out the light and the one-egg cake was carried in from the dining room by candlelight, and we sang for Marie.
The older kids had long ago perfected their rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and they did just fine without the two oldest, Roberta and Jack, who were absent because Jack had gotten married the year before and Roberta was annoyed Jack had beat her to the punch, so she was not wasting any more date nights on birthday parties or priests. Roberta was the oldest Downing kid, and she’d fallen in love plenty of times but always managed to meet somebody else she liked better than the guy who’d just given her a diamond ring. She was known for giving us all fits. She was also known as the prettiest one in the family because of her dark wavy hair, pale skin, dark eyes, and lipstick, all of which the actress Loretta Young copied but not successfully. Of all the sisters in the photographs above the piano, Roberta was the only one who dared to wear a strapless gown. Joe pointed this out to me, but he said it was sinful to bring it up in polite conversation. This was another mystery for me to contemplate while we said the Rosary nightly in the living room—that, and why Roberta had recently announced she wanted to marry a fat guy.
Elaine sang the melody. Mary Ann added an alto harmony. Next came Peg, who was the middle child but a natural soprano who’d eventually end up an octave above everyone else. Gerard usually did an Al Jolson imitation. Joe and I were expected to be able to stay on tune, which was impossible since all the on-tune parts were taken. Marie stood up on her chair. She didn’t need the extra height to blow out her candles, but she was wearing a new dress and showing it off for Father F. This was the sort of behavior that would win Joe and me a trip to the laundry room to examine our consciences. Everybody tolerated it from Marie because she’d lost her father. Joe was considered too young to have really lost much of a father. I was even younger, and when I’d had my chance to start a relationship with him, I’d made it pretty clear that my father’s legendary charisma was lost on me.
This was proven by one of the few stories from my father’s life in which I figured. He comes home from work, is mobbed by eight kids, and finally notices that I am playing on the floor near the stove. He’s amused and confounded by my lack of interest in him. I think you brainwash him when I am at work, he says to my mother in his good-natured way, but everybody knows he really doesn’t mind losing one out of nine times.
This story was a source of great pride to me. It allied me singularly with my mother. It also implied I had miraculously foreseen the tragic future and saved myself a terrible loss. And it tallied perfectly with my one visual memory of my father.
My father was available to me in a fifteen-second sequence I had committed to memory. It is morning in our big, square kitchen. The windows are silvered with the sun, and the fake-brick linoleum floor is warm, as if I am walking on the real-brick hearth in the living room while a fire is crackling. I am two feet tall, and I walk into the kitchen wearing footed pajamas with rubber soles. My parents are seated at either end of the oval maple table. My mother is drinking orange juice. It must be a Sunday: There are place mats beneath the eleven breakfast settings. I walk straight to my father, who balances his no-filter Camel in a clear glass ashtray, picks me up, turns my face to his, kisses me on the lips, and settles me down on his lap. His torso is broad and soft. Beneath the pleasing scent of the toasty cigarette smoke, I smell coffee. I put both of my hands on the edge of the table. Everything that is happening is deeply familiar to the three of us. We’ve been through this routine many times. We are all still waking up, but we’re happy. My father helpfully shoves his chair back a few inches from the table. He doesn’t say anything. I hop down, walk around the table, past the warm radiator covered with pairs of mittens smelling like winter, and climb into my mother’s lap, where I intend to spend some time with her, watching my big, dark-haired father enjoy a few minutes without the other kids.
It’s all I ever had of him, priceless footage, the only original, singular claim I ever had to knowing him, feeling him, smelling him, measuring and negotiating the distance between him and me. Without it, I was not a real Downing but a spectator, a witness to what happened to a family.
Father F. caught Marie’s attention just before she blew out her birthday candles. He said her name, and he smiled, and then he told her she’d forgotten how to blow out the candles. She nodded. Somebody turned on the pendant light, and Marie tried mightily to blow it out. It was hilarious and scary.
Father F. said, That isn’t a candle, Marie, and Marie nodded again and started trying to blow out her fingers. Then she stared at the candles for a while. She looked delighted and confused.
I sat up, trying to divert Father F.’s attention to me, but my sister Peg was laughing the loudest. Father F. smiled and said, Peg? You know what else is funny, Peggo? You forgot how to cut the cake, so cut the cake. Peg banged the silver cake server on the table a couple of times, and then she picked up her empty dessert plate to examine the bottom of it, as if her slice of cake should be there. He told somebody else to serve the cake, and then told the older kids it was too bad they’d forgotten how to eat it. A couple of them tried to push it through their cheeks and necks. This went on for about an hour. He sent some people to the hall closet to forget how to put on their coats, and he made a couple of my sisters believe their feet were so heavy that they couldn’t move. He could make them cry and laugh and wander around and bump into each other like blind people just by paying close attention to them for a couple of seconds and saying their names.
I’ll never forget how he said their names. He spoke them as soft and confident questions, as if he knew they believed they were lost but he knew they were not. Gerard? Marie? Peg? I’d never heard a man speak so tenderly to children. It was definitely a good weapon to use against the witch doctors.
Out of respect, Father F. did not mesmerize my mother. He did not mesmerize Joe out of respect for the miracle cure my mother arranged after he was born with an incurable disease. He wouldn’t mesmerize me, he said, because he didn’t know me well enough, which I took as an insult. I really didn’t mind not being forced to smash cake into my own face, but I desperately wanted him to speak my name as a question only he could answer. He never did.
Like so many memories made in that stucco house on Howard Street, Father F.’s last visit ended with Joe and me in our bedroom above the kitchen, listening for a while as the party continued beneath us. We didn’t try to hear what tricks were being performed in the kitchen without us. We drowned out the laughter by regaling each other with accounts of what we had been allowed to see, convincing each other that we were lucky just to have witnessed such amazing goings-on.
Joe and I taunted each other constantly and cruelly about being born sick and being born too late to remember our own father. But we didn’t use it against each other that night. We didn’t even make each other admit we hadn’t been worth mesmerizing.
Years later, in that same bedroom, I will confess to Joe that I have only one real memory of our father. Joe will ask me to tell it to him. I will. But even before I get to the coffee and cigarettes—my favorite details, as they supplied me with the material for conjuring my father later in life—Joe will ask me to stop the story and start again, “from the top.” As I rewind the well-worn tape, Joe will say it seems suspicious that the floor was warm enough for me to feel it through my footed pajamas. He will remind me that they probably had slip-proof rubber safety soles. I will stop the tape and examine one frame—my feet, the fake-brick pattern, sunlight, a table leg, one of my father’s feet in a black sock. Joe will say Daddy usually wore shoes in the house. I will worry over that sock. Maybe his foot was slippered? Did he own black loafers? Joe will tell me not to worry about the shoe. That shoe is the least of your worries, he will say. Michael?
At that point, I will pretend to be asleep, but Joe will say my name forty or fifty times—his version of Chinese water torture—until I say, What?
For your information, he will say—Joe-code for it pleases me to inform you—that brick linoleum was installed about five years after Daddy died.
In May 1966, exactly one day before my eighth birthday, Jack’s wife suddenly had a baby, the first Downing grandchild. She wiped out my party, and my First Communion was now competing with a baptism. I was eight and Joe was ten, and we’d heard a rumor that Jack and Jerry and the baby were moving back to Pittsfield so Jack could look for a job. While everybody was trying to embarrass Joe and me by telling us we had to start acting like uncles, all we could think about was our erratic oldest brother being back in town. We couldn’t discuss it in public, but we stayed up late in private, planning our defenses. We certainly weren’t going to sleep well anymore. I compared the situation to a flood in a Fizzy factory. Joe said Nagasaki, which sounded worse.
When the parish priest issued me a full-length clip-on 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 my game. I blew my first line, claiming it had been “one week since my last confession,” and Father H. said, Start again, Michael.
A lot of kids hated the idea that the priest might know who you were, but I took it as an advantage. He wouldn’t be expecting any big sins from a Downing. On my second attempt, I got through the opening without any problems and told Father H. I had been tempted to lie and almost had, but I hadn’t.
He said, Who tempted you?
I didn’t know he had the right to ask questions, so I panicked. I knew Marie would never forgive me if I used her real name, so I said, An older kid I know from school.
Father H. said, How did he tempt you?
I said I couldn’t remember, but I reminded him that I hadn’t lied, trying to change the subject.
He said, How well do you know this boy?
I said, It’s a girl, which was a huge mistake. I’d opened up a whole new area for investigation.
Father H. said, Why were you talking to her at all, then?
Now all I could see was Marie in curlers, chasing me with a hair-brush. I said, She’s a crossing guard. Our only crossing guard was Sister Jeanne Arthur. To get myself back on track, I forced myself to imagine Sister Jeanne Arthur wearing an orange shoulder strap. It worked. I whispered, And I said unkind things about my brother Joe to his face. I used his name for realism.
Father H. said, How many times?
I closed my eyes. This was a lot like Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
I said, Three. At least three.
He forgave me.
If this had happened at home, my mother would have been holding the telephone receiver in one hand and handing me the telephone book with the other so I could look up the girl crossing guard’s home number.
For my penance, Father H. gave me one Our Father, three Hail Marys, and one Glory Be. This was basically a belated birthday gift. These prayers were exactly what we said at home every night just to warm up for the Apostle’s Creed, five decades of the Rosary, a long praise prayer that began Hail, Holy Queen and a longer prayer “for Daddy” via the Sacred Heart, followed by the litany of the names of the nine Downing children, plus one uncle, my godfather, the one who had the troubled marriage that made it impossible for him to concentrate on my birthday every year.
I had to wait more than ten years for a godparent to do anything about my birthday. I was turning nineteen, and I had made two true-blue friends during my first year of college, though I really didn’t know it until they showed their colors on the event of my first birthday away from home. One was Perry, one of my two assigned roommates in a two-bedroom suite in Harvard Yard. The other was Liz, a sophisticated, generous, sardonic smoker who’d arrived with sophomore standing in English and lived two flights above us. Her affection was singularly heartening to me, and it was occasionally undercut by an inexplicable diffidence—just my style.
Perry was a six-foot-tall Japanese American football player from Southern California who intended to major in economics. We had almost nothing in common and no mutual friends. We didn’t even share a bedroom, though we both disliked our other roommate, with whom I shared a bunk bed. Perry never offered to trade off and give me a break from the other guy. This solidified my admiration for him. He knew what he wanted. If I’d got the single bedroom, I’d have traded with Perry halfway through the year and ended up resenting Perry as much as I did the other guy.
My birthday fell on a Sunday in May that year, and late on Saturday afternoon Perry announced that his godmother, Aunt Mary, had sent him a check to take me out to dinner. His aunt had previously flown us both to Washington, D.C., to celebrate his birthday, and she’d funded a number of other outings during which I had acquired a profound fondness for roasted duck. When I balked at the idea of a birthday celebration, Perry said we were eating at the Hampshire House overlooking the Public Garden. When he made the reservation, he said, he had checked—we needed ties, and they served duck.
When we sat down in the leather club chairs and took in the room and the view, I relaxed for the first time in months. I felt I’d finally got in to Harvard. We ordered mixed drinks—if nothing else, in my first year of college I learned that most people didn’t take their gin straight, as I had whenever I nicked a couple of shots from the dusty bottle in the pantry in Pittsfield. Instead of a toast, Perry said he had a confession to make. Way too quickly, I said, Whatever it is, I forgive you. He was a Lutheran, and I hoped he would take my word as a Catholic that he didn’t have to ruin a perfectly good friendship by telling me the truth about anything.
I have to tell you this, Michael. Right about now, a bunch of people are standing around in Liz’s room, probably with the lights out. They’re waiting for me to get you up there with some excuse about an English paper Liz is writing on Thomas Hardy.
I was genuinely surprised Liz liked me well enough to throw me a party. I was even more surprised Perry knew me well enough to whisk me away from the event. I said, I hate surprises.
I was elated.