Mary Lou exchanged smiles with two female classmates. “Sister Hip-PO-ly-tus,” they chimed in unison. “The Hippo didn’t refer to her size,” Mary Lou explained to me. “We weren’t that mean. It was short for hypocrite.”
“She wore makeup,” accused one woman whose photo showed her younger self in a pageboy and bangs, “and we were supposed to act like we didn’t notice. I mean, no one’s cheeks are that red. Not even if they’re spray painted.”
“She was so vindictive,” said the second classmate, a heavyset woman with a tight perm. “She hated me, but the feeling was mutual. I heard she lost her position after we graduated and got demoted to housekeeping duties at the rectory. A lot of important people filed complaints about her to the diocese, so she got the shaft. And atheists say there is no God. Huh!”
“Did you know there was a massive turnover in the teaching staff after we left?” asked Mike. “Keeping us in line for four years wore them all down.”
“We didn’t wear them down,” corrected Mary Lou. “We kept them on their toes. Our standardized test scores showed that we were a bright class. That’s not bragging. It’s the truth.”
“The only reason you girls did so well was because you didn’t have us boys in class to distract you,” teased Chip.
“Wait a sec,” I interrupted. “You all went to the same school, but you didn’t have co-ed classes?”
Mike nodded. “Boys on one side of the building, girls on the other, with a big auditorium in the middle to keep us separated. The brothers taught the boys and the nuns taught the girls, with a sprinkling of lay teachers thrown in for local color.”
“Remember Mr. Albert?” Mary Lou asked the group. Then to me, “He taught algebra and geometry to both sides, but he was so shy, he could never look us in the eye. He’d explain theorems while he looked out the window or stared at his shoes. Poor man. Paula Peavey mouthed off to him continually, but he was too embarrassed to punish her. The boys were always playing practical jokes on him, like sticking imbecilic signs on his suit coat or gluing his desk drawers shut. Pete Finnegan thought he was smarter than Mr. Albert, so he never missed a chance to argue with him over the simplest math problems. We made a nervous wreck out of the poor guy. We antagonized him so much, I honestly think he grew afraid of us.”
“He never threw chalk at me,” said Chip, “so I liked him.”
I frowned. “Why would he throw chalk at you?”
“The brothers always fired chalk across the room at us if we gave them wrong answers,” said Mike. “And they nailed us every time. The Xaverian brothers had exceptional throwing arms. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of them left the brotherhood for more lucrative careers in the major leagues.”
The heavyset woman beside Mary Lou sighed. “Just think. They’re probably all dead by now. That’s a little depressing.”
“On the other hand,” Mike announced in a booming voice, “the rest of us are very much alive, so let’s celebrate that.” He gestured toward me. “By the way, this lovely young woman is Emily.”
I waved a quick hello.
Mike continued with enthusiasm. “Would you believe, Emily, that not only were we the brightest class to walk the hallowed halls of Francis Xavier High, we were apparently the healthiest and least accident prone? Not one person in our graduating class has died.”
Chip cranked his mouth to the side and gave his jaw a thoughtful scratch. “Well, that’s not exactly true. What about Bob Guerrette?”
Smiles stiffened. Limbs froze. Exuberance dissolved into sudden silence.
“He never graduated,” said the lady with the pageboy picture, “Remember? So he really shouldn’t be included.”
“Why didn’t he graduate?” I asked.
“He died,” Mike admitted uncomfortably.
“We assume he died,” corrected Chip.
“Everyone assumes he died,” said Mike, “but I wish we knew for sure. It’s tough not knowing. Every time the evening news airs a story about a backcountry hiker in Maine tripping over a decomposed body in the woods, I always wonder if it could be Bobby’s remains.”
Chip shook his head. “Poor bastard. I’ve often thought about how much he missed in life—marriage, kids, Super Bowl I—”
“Vietnam,” said Mike.
“Colonoscopies,” added Chip.
“Has anyone seen my husband?” asked the lady with the tight perm as she surveyed the near-empty parking lot.
“What does he look like?” asked Mike.
“He has hair. Does that narrow it down enough for you?”
The sound of screeching tires and blaring horns suddenly filled the air. I fired a glance toward the main street, my heart stopping in my chest as I replayed an image of Nana sprinting in front of Bernice to be first out of the parking lot.
“What do you suppose all that ruckus is about?” asked Mary Lou.
Shouts. Echoing cries of distress. A cacophony of car horns.
“S’cuse me.” Overwhelmed by a surge of panic, I raced toward the street as if I were wearing tennis shoes instead of leather ankle boots with four-inch heels. Traffic had slowed to a standstill.
Drivers were stepping out of their cars and rubbernecking to identify the cause of the holdup. Turning the corner, I saw an ever-widening circle of pedestrians gathered on the sidewalk, their eyes riveted on the street.
Oh, God.
What if my guys had been texting each other while they were crossing the street? What if—
I saw legions of tourists on the perimeter of the crowd, but no Nana, no Tilly, no George.
Oh, God!
Spying a familiar face, I ran toward him. “Do you know what happened?” I asked Pete Finnegan.
He regarded me, stone-faced. “Dunno.”
I stood on my tiptoes, unable to see over the bystanders’ heads, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Squeezing around a baby carriage, I created a tiny opening and excused my way through the crowd until I reached the curb, where I stared in numb horror at the scene before me.
The tortured wreck of a bicycle lay on its side, surrounded by loose Brussels sprouts, a smattering of broken eggs, and a woman’s walking shoe. The cyclist was curled in a fetal position nearby, his trousers ripped, his face and hands bloody, being attended by several people who were yelling desperately into cellphones.
A dozen feet away, in a swirl of diesel and exhaust fumes, a woman in a pea-green blazer with jumbo shoulder pads lay facedown on the pavement, seemingly unaware of both the foul air and the people who were hovering over her. Her legs were twisted into impossible angles. Her shoeless foot hung limply from her ankle. She neither coughed, nor groaned, nor moved.
She was still. Absolutely still.
“I know that woman!” I cried, hoping that someone who spoke English would understand me. “Her name is Charlotte.”
The cyclist fought to sit upright. Propping his elbows on his bent knees, he braced his head in his hands and threw an anguished look at Charlotte’s lifeless body. He let out a tormented sob, then wailed something in a language I couldn’t understand.
It was gut wrenching. The poor man was so beside himself with grief that I felt guilty bearing witness to his heartache. I blinked away tears as I turned to the woman standing beside me. “Do you know what he’s saying?”
“Ja. He says, ‘Damn these tourists. They’re going to be the death of me.’”
Four
If the cellphone reception in our Amsterdam hotel lobby had been subpar, my conversation with Etienne might have been reduced to a few minutes of frustrating static, but aided by a profusion of cell towers in the area, I was able to recount the tale of our most recent tribulation with landline clarity.