He’d never seen anything as white as the armband and tie he wore for his First Holy Communion. Blue serge suit from A&S. The host tasted like glue. “All the girls are so cunning, they look like little angels.” Even the Mother Superior smiled.
As long as he was washed and in bed he could stay awake and listen to Lux Radio Theatre.
“Tito Guizar will sing for you.”
Sister Andrew said that a boy once bit a host and it started to bleed, and some boy didn’t tell all his sins in Confession and when the priest put the host on his tongue he dropped dead right at the altar rail. Jack Gannon asked if you by accident swallowed a drop of water when you were washing your face in the morning before Communion, could you receive? You couldn’t.
Mrs. Schmidt sat down next to Gramp on a wooden lawn chair and started talking to him and Mom turned her head away and made a face.
He helped Louis bring the cows into the barn at night. They smelled delicious, like sweet hay and milk.
Max, the Russian barber who was Cousin Katie’s friend, smoked long cardboard cigarettes and cut all his curls off. His hair grew in straight and Mom cried about it for almost three days. “He has to look like boy, not girl and sissy.” Mom told Cousin Katie that as far as she was concerned he was a goddamn Polack greenhorn who had no business being in this country.
Vinnie Castigliano passed him a note in class and it had a stick-figure drawing of a girl and between her legs a big dark pencil scribble. Vinnie had written “Pat Christie’s bush” and drawn an arrow pointing to the scribble. That was another word. Kickie said that Vinnie used to play with his own sister’s cunt and she was fourteen, with a bush and all.
He won a Missal for getting the best mark on the Catechism test, the regular Catholic School kids got a Missal plus a comb in a little black cardboard case.
Mr. Bloom, the druggist, took a cinder out of his eye and gave him two Hershey kisses.
When he had the measles, Mom pulled down the shades and made him poached eggs and junket.
Tom Thebus made him laugh when he imitated Mrs. Schmidt: “Oh, ja, undt vor der lunsh ve haff it der Floadingk Islandt dessert, zo-oo-oo nize.” Gramp said he was a goddamned overgrown horse’s ass.
Mom saw a picture of Daddy and Margie in the Eagle with some other man and got so upset and mad that she started to cry. Daddy had a suit on with a bow tie like rich people wear, and Margie looked really fat.
He saw Gramp drinking whiskey right out of the bottle one day. Wilson’s “That’s All.”
Mom had an argument with Gramp across on the old church steps one hot afternoon.
Uncle Charlie took him out of the funeral parlor and bought him a black-and-white in Holsten’s.
Mom dried him after a bath in front of the kitchen stove at Cousin Katie’s.
He had three pennies and lost one and threw the others in the snow because now they were no good.
As soon as he got a new Big Little Book he tore out all the pictures he didn’t like.
A stack of cardboard things they called “coasters” right next to a ball of string. And the buttons said “Erin Go Bragh.”
Bubbsy said that Mrs. Long caught one of the big kids feeling a girl up in the auditorium and he got sent to reform school. How did a girl feel? A bush.
He never wanted anything so bad as to smoke tobacco like Tom’s in a pipe like his.
He saw Mom clap when Tom made a really good croquet shot and she looked like a girl.
When The Shadow laughed on the radio he would start to cry in fear.
The bookmaker gave him a nickel once and he was afraid to tell Mom.
Why did God make the world?
He played Alkali Ike in a school play and everybody said he should be a movie star, Dolores Marshall kissed him once in the middle of the play and her mouth tasted like orange Lifesavers.
To know Him and love Him in this world and to be happy with Him forever in the next.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
Surely she doesn’t look like the mother of a ten-year-old boy. Perhaps the woman thinks this as she examines herself in the mirror in her small room. Her figure, in a flowered bathing suit, is trim and well-shaped, is what may be termed desirable. She does not think this word and has not thought of herself as such for years, six, seven?
The bathing suit is of one piece, rather too generously cut, and skirted: one cannot know whether out of modesty or a desire to conceal what she fears is a slight thickening of her thighs. She grasps the skirt at its hem and pulls it to either side in a flare, as if she is about to curtsy, looking at herself in the glass. Her face seems to disapprove. The bathing suit is, for a woman of her age, somewhat prim, much like the kind her mother wore the last time she wore a bathing suit. She has had this garment for four years, it is as it is, although she has done her best to ignore it or deny it to herself, because of her wish to preclude what would have been her mother’s mocking laughter had she bought a suit that showed her figure to advantage. Her father, too, would have laughed, desperate as usual to ingratiate himself with his wife. He would have contributed the words “chippy,” and “jane,” the phrase “like Astor’s pet horse,” and her mother would have repeated it.
Do you want to go around looking like Astor’s pet horse?
Sure. She wants to go around dolled up like Astor’s pet horse. The mother of a six-year-old boy!
She suddenly pulls at the skirt and wraps it closely around her thighs, which are, despite her fears, still firm and smooth. They are not the thighs of an old woman, not even those of a mother of a ten-year-old boy, they might be the thighs of a, what do they call them? career woman? A mature woman who just never married. She knows, with absolute clarity, and in misery, that it is the bathing suit that has filled her with doubts about her attractiveness. She is not her mother! Damn it to hell, she is not. And her breasts are still firm. Surely she might be childless, she might be in her late twenties.
She hears Mr. Thebus and her son on the lawn below, although she cannot see them, her one window facing across the road to the old white church. They are laughing together, having a catch with a beach ball, while they wait for her to appear. Appear in this bathing suit, that she now pulls at — the waist, the skirt, the bodice, the shoulder straps — in frustration and embarrassment. She will soon be at Budd Lake with her son and Mr. Thebus. The latter will be in his navy-blue woolen trunks with the immaculate white web belt and its gleaming brass buckle, and his white athletic top. She will be in her flowered rag. Eleanor Stellkamp and her fiancé, Dave Warren, will be there, with the Copan girls, Helen and Peggy. Eleanor will wear her white, shiny, bathing-beauty suit; her flat breasts and oddly protruding belly will be displayed to all, but she will be in her white, shiny, bathing-beauty suit. Helen and Peggy will be the young, slim girls that they are, oh, how they are! The blankets will be laid on the sand next to each other, and she will sit, the heavy folds of this disgusting garment encasing her in ugliness.
She is not her father’s wife, she has a right to something, doesn’t she? She hears her son calclass="underline" They’re all ready and waiting for her, and she pulls on her rubber bathing shoes and a flannel beach robe. She tightens its sash, rolls two towels together and takes her change purse, tightens the sash again. She will go downstairs now, the skirt of the bathing suit clinging to her thighs as if made of iron, out onto the lawn and into the sunlight and the appraising glance of Mr. Thebus. The beach ball will be under his arm, and he will smile, as he did that early afternoon five days ago when they got out of Louis’ car, fresh from the station at Netcong, to find him waiting on the porch, to see him rising from the glider in his white ducks, puffing aromatic wisps of smoke from his pipe, his finger in the pages of Gone With the Wind. Her navy dress with the white polka dots seemed to her wondrously fashionable, incredibly flattering, held, as it was, in his bright glance.