My Beloved World (13 page)

At that age, we fought routinely, and our fights were physical. At least that’s how it worked at home. Outside, at school or on the street, I was still Junior’s protector, and I took it as a grave responsibility, suffering lots of bumps and bruises on his behalf. For these I would settle with him later, privately. We continued in that manner until the day I recognized the beginning of a growth spurt I knew I could never match. He would always be three years younger, but he was a boy, with all that entailed hormonally, and a boy who spent hours every day on the basketball court. The time had come for war by other means: “Junior, we’re too old for this. Let’s be civilized, we can talk things out and”—though I don’t remember saying this last bit in so many words—“we can always blackmail each other.” Henceforth that was the form our hostilities took. We tracked each other’s trespasses, we snitched to Mami,
or threatened to, whichever availed the greater advantage. Our snitching often entailed phone calls to the hospital that must have driven my mother nuts, not to mention her supervisors, bless their forbearance. I’ve always believed phone calls from kids must be allowed if mothers are to feel welcome in the workplace, as anyone who has worked in my chambers can attest. Eventually, in high school, Junior and I outgrew our warring ways, and over time we’ve become very close. We don’t talk all that often, but when something really matters, each of us naturally reaches out to the other before anyone else. Still, to this day my brother claims a deep resentment that he spent his childhood waiting to get big enough to beat me up and on the threshold of his triumph I changed the rules.

WHEN POPE PAUL VI CAME TO
New York in the fall of 1965, Monsignor Hart arranged for a group of students from Blessed Sacrament to go see him. I wanted more than anything to be included. This wasn’t just a field trip—not that we ever went on field trips at Blessed Sacrament. It was history in the making, the first time a pope had visited the United States. And Paul VI wasn’t just any pope. He was elected the summer after my father died, when I had spent so much time reading. Everything I’d read about him inspired me, and now once again there were magazine and newspaper articles appearing almost daily, describing the plans for his visit and the ideas he had—about ending the war in Vietnam and using the money from disarmament to help poor countries, about dialogue between religions, and about continuing the work of Vatican II to make the Church more responsive and open to ordinary people.

I was often moved and excited by books, but how often does a newspaper article give you chills? I had to look up unfamiliar words—“ecumenism,” “vernacular”—but all his impulses resonated deeply with me. I loved this pope!

So I was especially upset and disappointed at not being allowed to see him—though not surprised: only kids who had attended church regularly were included. Ever since Father Dolan had refused to pay a call on my mother in her misery, my Sunday attendance at Blessed Sacrament
Church had faltered. I often went to St. Athanasius with Titi Aurora instead. That didn’t count at Blessed Sacrament, though. And so I would conclude that I had to figure out for myself what really counted.

“So what was it like? Did you shake hands? Did he talk to you?” I interrogated my classmates. Despite the bitterness of exclusion, I was hungry for details. It was a relief to learn that I hadn’t missed much. The kids from Blessed Sacrament were among a crowd of thousands, and they saw less than I did on television. The cameras had followed the pope through the thronged streets of Manhattan, into St. Patrick’s, to a meeting with President Johnson, and to a Mass at Yankee Stadium. Best of all, they had captured his address to the UN General Assembly: “No more war, never again war. Peace, it is peace that must guide the destinies of people and of all mankind.” All in one amazing day.

IT OCCURRED TO ME
that if I was going to be a lawyer—or, who knows, a judge—I had to learn to speak persuasively and confidently in front of an audience. I couldn’t be a quivering mess of nerves. So when they asked for volunteers to do the Bible reading in church on Sunday, I spied an opportunity to test myself. Girls reading was a new thing, a small ripple from Vatican II along with the tidal wave that had changed the Mass from Latin to English. We couldn’t be altar servers, though; that was still for boys only.

Doing the Bible reading was not the same as giving a speech, of course, because you didn’t need to worry about what you would say or even memorize it. It was a long way from arguing a case in a trial, but a small step in the right direction. And I had to start somewhere.

As I walked up the few stone stairs to the pulpit, my knees were buckling. I watched my hand tremble as it came to rest on the banister, as if it belonged to someone else. If I couldn’t even keep my hands still, what would happen when I opened my mouth to speak? Every pew was packed, rows and rows of faces looking at me, waiting, it now seemed, for me to make a fool of myself. I could feel a faint gagging reflex. Suppose I threw up right there, all over the Bible? I had practiced the night before, read the passage aloud so many times—would it all be for nothing?

Wobbly at first, my voice soon steadied, and so did my knees. The words started to flow. I knew it was important to look up at the end of each sentence, but I didn’t dare. The faces terrified me. If I looked in their eyes, I’d be lost, maybe even turn into a pillar of salt. So at the end of each sentence I looked at the ceiling instead: the wooden beams marking off rectangular coffers, gold spiral edges, lamps hanging from black metal rings. But soon the weirdness of looking up made me even more self-conscious, and I began to worry how this was coming across: “Does this kid think she’s reading to God?” Fortunately, after the next verse or two came inspiration: to avoid the trap of their eyes, I would focus on their foreheads …

Before I knew it, I made it down the stairs and back to my seat. I had done it, and I knew I could do it again.

I SPENT EIGHT YEARS
at Blessed Sacrament School, far more than half my life by the time the last bell of eighth grade rang. Ted Shaw, a high school friend who later became the legal director of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, describes Catholic school as his salvation and damnation: it shaped his future and terrified his heart. I identify with this depiction. The Sisters of Charity helped to shape who I am, but there was much that I wouldn’t be sad to leave behind.

IN THE MIMEOGRAPHED PAMPHLET
that was our eighth-grade yearbook, each child wrote a “last will and testament” to the life being left behind at Blessed Sacrament; the Sisters responded in turn with a few words of “prophecy” about each child. Looking over those pages, I am struck by how low were their expectations for their young charges. Of one girl, for instance, it is written that she had “hopes of becoming a fashion designer but we think she’d make a better mother with six children.” Sadly, such discouragement, directed even at the many girls who aspired to more traditional occupations like secretaries, was not unusual. And yet for a tiny school with very limited resources, in a poor neighborhood where many young lives were fatally seduced by drugs and alcohol or cut short by violence, Blessed Sacrament launched so
many of my classmates toward a productive and meaningful existence, success often well beyond those mimeographed prophecies. There is no denying that credit is due to the Sisters of Charity and the discipline they instilled, however roughly.

My own yearbook entry surprises me with its self-assurance. I was confident by then of my own intellect:

And here, less confident but still hopeful, is what Sister Mary Regina wrote:

I RECENTLY RETURNED
to Blessed Sacrament for a visit. It has many fewer students and much smaller classes than when I attended. It is also clear that the teachers, now more laypeople as well as nuns, subscribe to a more nurturing approach since abandonment of the rod. Every generation has its own way of showing it cares.

C
ARDINAL SPELLMAN HIGH SCHOOL WAS
a good hour’s ride from the Bronxdale Houses, assuming the trains and buses were running on time. The school building was divided right down the middle by a crack in the wall, girls on one side and boys on the other. On each floor, a nun stood guard at the crack to make sure that neither sex crossed over into the other’s side without a teacher’s permission slip. The nuns were Sisters of Charity, the same as at Blessed Sacrament, but by the time I entered high school in 1968, many had shed the black bonnets and long black habits, looking a lot less menacing than they used to.

Girls and boys were allowed to mix in the lunchroom, but we had separate classes, except for religion and a very few upper-level courses, mostly Advanced Placement. Another exception was freshman Spanish. All the kids who spoke Spanish at home were in one accelerated class, taught by a nun recently arrived from Spain. It was her plan, she told us, to condense three years of high school Spanish into one month of “review” and then start teaching us literature.

We were only a week into the semester when the class was on the verge of mutiny. A desperate mob surrounded Eddie Irizarry and me—the two biggest mouths—asking us to plead the class’s case.

“Tell her we aren’t Spanish, we’re American.”

“Forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that she said!”

Our teacher was totally unaware that Puerto Rican kids raised in the
Bronx would have had no formal instruction in their native language. As for the acquired tongue, many of us had struggled in earlier years through a sink-or-swim transition in schools that had provided no support for kids who’d first enrolled speaking little or no English. And so I started high school having never studied Spanish grammar, conjugated a verb, or read more than a few sentences at a time: an advertisement, or a newspaper headline, maybe a very short article. I had certainly never read a book in Spanish. None of us could understand the teacher’s proper Castilian accent or her elegant diction. We looked on blankly, unable even to follow her instructions, let alone do the assignments.

My Spanish was so deficient that I wasn’t even pronouncing my own name properly. She called me on it. “You have the most regal of Spanish names,” she said. “Don’t you ever let anybody mispronounce it. You are
Sonia Sotomayor—Soh-toh-mah-yor
—and anything less is disgraceful. Say it correctly, and wear it with pride.”

I could tell that her heart was in the right place. And sure enough, when Eddie and I explained the situation, she was very understanding and accommodating. The very next day she came back with a gentle apology and a new plan that was much more realistic: we would still go twice as fast as the regular Spanish class, but we’d cover the basics and learn grammar first, then start Spanish literature the second year. It was a good lesson in the value of learning to express your basic needs and trusting you will be heard. Teachers, I was finally realizing, were not the enemy.

Not most of them, anyway. There was the geometry teacher nicknamed Rigor Mortis. Word had it she’d been at Cardinal Spellman since before the invention of the triangle, standing before eons of freshman classes, like a prehistoric scarecrow, skinny and wrinkled with a bright thatch of red hair.

I was shocked when she called me into her office and accused me of cheating. The basis for her accusation was my perfect score on the Regents geometry exam. No one in all her centuries of experience had ever scored a hundred on the Regents.

“So who did I cheat from?” I asked indignantly. “Who else got a hundred that I could have copied from?”

She looked flummoxed for a moment. “But you’ve never scored
higher than eighties or low nineties on the practice tests. How could you get a hundred?”

The truth, as I explained, was that I’d never once got an answer wrong on the practice tests; points had been deducted only because I hadn’t followed the steps she had prescribed. I had reasoned out my own steps, which made sense to me, and she had never explained what was wrong with them. On the Regents exam we only had to give the answer; no one was checking the steps.

What happened next truly amazed me. She dug out my old tests and reviewed them. Acknowledging the validity of my proofs, she changed my grades. Even Rigor Mortis, it turned out, wasn’t quite as rigid as all that.

PERHAPS THE MOST IMPROBABLE
turn of events in those first months: my cousin Miriam and I signed up to be maritime cadets. On Friday nights, we went to P.S. 75 at Hunts Point and marched around the gym. We wore uniforms. We memorized nautical terms and learned how to tie knots. We would never actually set foot on a boat, but we did march in the Puerto Rican Day Parade.

Our ulterior motive for joining the cadets was to chaperone her brother Nelson, who played trumpet in their marching band. Nelson, my childhood accomplice, my genius sidekick, had grown into a girl magnet. He was incredibly handsome, as smart as ever, with a wicked sense of humor. He’d also become an impressively talented musician. In fact, he was desperate to pursue this love, even though Tío Benny had always wanted him to be a doctor. He’d only agreed to let Nelson join the marching band because he thought the discipline was good for him and it would keep him off the street.

The seductions of girls and music weren’t the only reasons Tío Benny felt someone had to keep an eye on Nelson. Nelson had started at Bronx Science the same year I entered Cardinal Spellman, and already he was struggling. There was no question of his scientific aptitude. By the time he got to high school, he’d won several prestigious awards for his science fair projects, and his teachers had recognized him as a prodigy, equally talented at science and music. No, Nelson’s real difficulties
were not intellectual but emotional: Tío Benny and Titi Carmen were breaking up.