Sister went up and down the aisles, bending to read each tag. At approach distance she smelled laundered and starched, steam-ironed, and her nails were buffed to a glassy lava finish, and the rosary beads that hung from her belt like a zoot-suiter's key chain were blinky bright, and when she rustled low and near she smelled more intimately of tooth powder and cleansing agents and the penance of scoured skin.
She said, "Woe betide the child who is not wearing a tag or who is wearing someone else's tag."
It had been known to happen, in other classes, that a boy and girl switched tags to signify a kind of atomic fondling.
When Sister was finished with her inspection she said nothing, which surprised the class. They were expecting a drill, the duck-and-cover drill, which they'd rehearsed before the tags arrived. Now that they had the tags, their names inscribed on wispy tin, the drill was not a remote exercise but was all about them, and so was atomic war.
Instead she went back to the catechism, to questions and answers, until Annette Esposito, an eighth-grader, came in with a note from the principal. Sister read the note and looked at Annette Esposito and said, "What are these?"
At first nobody knew what she meant. Then the class realized she was looking at Annette Esposito's chest, her breasts, which caused bulges under her blue jumper.
"What's all this? Get rid of this. I don't want to see this next time you come in here."
The boys and girls went low in their seats, tingling a little at the exposure of Annette Esposito as a freak of nature. Their eyes went shifty and bright. They bit their knuckles and made small damp throat noises. When Annette Esposito walked out the door, not unproud, flouncing slightly, shoulders thrown back, every eyeball in the room clicked in her direction, fastened on her breasts of course, not a common object of contemplation in the life of the sixth grade.
Sister did not call the drill. She did penmanship instead, demonstrating on the blackboard the cursive flair of her own hand. She showed the slant, the loop, she stressed the need to stay between the ruled lines, she told them to take their fountain pens and follow the motions she made in the air, and they did, working the wrists, looping in unison, and they shaped a tempestuous capital T that resembled a rowboat in a rainstorm.
Matty sat there nearly spellbound, writing in the air with his brother's old Parker vacumatic, a streaked green model with an arrow clip, but his mood went flat when the bell rang for lunch and Sister crook'd a forefinger in his direction.
"Matthew Shay."
His own name stunned him, coming from her lips.
"See me before you leave the room."
With his two assigned mates he slid open the cloakroom doors and got his coat and waited for the room to empty and then presented himself at Sister's desk.
She had tight blue eyes and thin lips and a nose that was slightly bumpy up near the bridge.
"In the schoolyard yesterday. You were huddled with several others. Looking at a magazine."
The terror of being alone with Sister Edgar.
"I would like to know. Firstly. The name of the magazine."
She leaned on a corner of the desk lightly twirling her beads, the big crucifix moving in a wobbly spin with Christ's body bowed out from the cross.
"Secondly. A summary of the contents."
The answers passed through his mind.
1. Movieland magazine.
2. Full-page faces of Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner. Also, Mario Lanza's Heart Stood Still. There were articles about stars he'd never heard of. There were ads for French nighties and dance panties.
What if she asked him about these things?
Sister peered closely, waiting. He kept his hands behind his back to conceal his gnawed fingernails and the shreds of dead skin at the edges.
Would he have to explain that a dance panty is when they embroider a fox-trotting couple on the leg of a lady's underwear?
And what if the magazine was banned by the Legion of Decency and she asked him who it belonged to? Although she would never end a sentence with a preposition.
"Matthew. Yes?"
If he had a choice between lying to Sister Edgar and snitching on a classmate, he'd have to snitch, instantly and remorselessly. And what about the ads all over the back of the magazine for bust creams and better bust contours?
Matthew-yes was not a question. It was a summons to urgency and truth. And he told her the name of the magazine and who was on the cover and what was inside, sticking to the romances and heartbreaks of the stars, and Sister seemed interested and pleased.
He was surprised and encouraged and became less tentative, describing the Hollywood homes of certain stars, and Sister asked little leading questions, trying to obscure her interest by looking out the window, and he grew confident and expansive, speaking rapidly and more or less uncontrollably, making things up when he couldn't recall the details of a story or a photograph, feeling a sense of desperate elation, and Sister was eating it up.
She knew a lot about the stars. Their favorite flavors and worst insect bites and their wallflower nights in high school. Their basic everydayness inside the cosmetic surgeries and tragic marriages. She looked out the window and asked him sly testing questions and dropped little comments here and there.
He was able to stand outside the scene, hearing his own voice, watching the babbling boy at ease in the company of the hooded nun. But he wasn't completely unwary. It was her after all, habit and hood. The cloth was daunting. She was all cloth. She was a wall of laundered cloth. A woman of the cloth.
In the schoolyard after lunch Richard Stasiak did an amazing thing. Matty saw it without knowing for a moment quite what he'd seen. Richard Stasiak wore underwear so shabby and itchy and threadbare that he unbuttoned his fly and stuck his hand in there and pulled the underwear right off his body, yanking the ratty thing out of his fly and throwing it at Mary Feeley, who skipped away backwards, hands to her mouth as if she'd seen something it was best to keep unspoken.
Then they all went into class again.
Nick grabbed a ride every morning with another packer in the plant, waiting on a cold corner in the dark and then driving down to the ass-end of the Bronx where one river does a curl into the other and the icecream plant sits in the weeds like a pygmy prison on the Zambezi and this was better than taking the train in the lockstep drudge of the rush.
After work he got dropped near the zoo and walked west past his brother's school, where he saw a guy in one car giving a push to six guys in another. He came to the building where they lived and turned at Donato's grocery and went thirty yards down the narrow street and swung into an opening that led down a set of concrete steps into the network of alleyways that ran between five or six buildings clustered here.
Down the yards, this was called.
Close-set buildings, laundry lines, slant light, patches of weeds, a few would-be gardens and bare ailanthus trees and the fire escapes that fixed fretwork patterns of light and shade on the walls and paved surfaces.
Nick ducked under overhangs and passed through narrow openings. There were padlocked doors and doors ajar. There were basement passages connecting utility rooms and alcoves for trash cans and the old coal bins that housed furnaces now and the storage rooms where merchants on the street kept their inventory-a smell that was part garbage and part dank stone, a mildew creep and a thick chill, a sense that everything that ever happened here was retained in the air, soaked and cross-scented with fungus and wetness and coffee grounds and mops in big sinks.
He'd spent his childhood half in the streets and half down the yards with a little extra squeezed in for the rooftops and fire escapes.
He went past a furnace room and opened a door at the end of the passage. George the Waiter was sitting in a small storage room he used as a home, he said, away from home. He saw Nick in the doorway and nodded him in. George had an arrangement with the super. The room had a cot, a table, a rat trap, a couple of chairs, a couple of dangling lightbulbs and an array of paint cans and plumbing equipment, and Nick was pretty sure the arrangement involved a woman who came here to visit George, a woman he paid for sex, and the super let him use the room in exchange for some of the same, periodically, the woman taking care of the super and getting paid by George.