Unto the Sons (13 page)

But soon after the driver had rung the bell, a soft beam of light streamed down from a bulb within a black tin can that hung from the porch ceiling—a fixture installed in conformity with the wartime dim-out policies of the island—and then the door was opened wide by a cheerful black woman. She accepted the packages one by one as the driver carefully checked off the items on his inventory slips. I stood behind him, holding the two final packages, while gazing into a large living room that was revealed faintly in the light of small candles on the wainscoting ledges and larger candles that stood on the refectory table in the dining room. Hanging from one wall above a sofa was a large ebony cross on which was nailed a silver figure of Christ, and on another wall within a gilt frame was an oil painting of the Virgin Mary.

Behind the dining room was a small room sharply outlined in light. There, I suddenly saw a moving shadow, and then a woman’s naked back and extended arms, and a delicately shaped head with dark hair cropped high above the ears. From behind, another pair of hands touched her neck, massaging it; and as her head tilted back, I turned away, holding my breath.

The housekeeper closed the door, and I followed the driver to the truck, telling him nothing of what I had seen. Certainly I did not mention it to any of the students with whom I was now praying in the assembly room. But as the recitation continued, I shifted my eyes toward the cluster of nuns who stood with bowed heads in the aisles, and I wondered, as I had repeatedly, which one I had seen.

When the prayer session ended, there was the sound of shuffling feet along the rows and the clacking of chair slats; but the Mother Superior, silencing the students with her raised hand, said, “One moment, please—Sister Rita has today’s announcements.”

Sister Rita ascended the platform and, in an imperious tone of voice, said: “There will be a fire drill later today, replacing the midafternoon recess period.…” There was soft hissing from the boys, especially from Billy Maenner standing next to me.

“And after the fire drill,” she continued, “all altar boys are to report to the sacristy, where you’ll receive your Mass assignments for Christmas week.…” I hoped I would be included among those to serve the ceremonious Christmas Midnight Mass, which would allow me to sleep late on Christmas morning. “As you know, all Masses this season are dedicated to the welfare and personal safety of our Holy Father the Pope, who must live in the midst of the terrible war in Italy.…” The students were more than aware of this august figure, for a picture of Pius XII hung in every classroom: a brooding man with a long face and thin nose who wore a white skullcap, and steel-rimmed glasses exactly like my father’s.

“And finally,” Sister Rita went on, “and
this
is important: I want each and every one of you to clean out your lockers before the final day of school tomorrow. Your lockers
must
be aired out during the Christmas holidays. Am I making myself clear?” Everyone stood in silence, some quietly bending to pick up their schoolbags. “All right, then,” she concluded, looking at her watch—it was eight fifty-five—“you may proceed to your homerooms.”

This gave us five minutes to hang up our coats and, if necessary, use the bathrooms. The girls’ and boys’ rest rooms were behind two large metal doors along the far wall of the assembly room. The boys’ room, which had six urinals and six enclosed toilets, had its stone floor hosed and mopped twice daily by a custodian who applied such liberal amounts of ammonia that anyone entering the place felt his eyes burn. This was Sister Rita’s method of achieving sanitary conditions as well as discouraging boys from using the room as a center for fraternization. On those frequent occasions when she entered, she invariably carried a handkerchief in front of her face.

The homerooms to which we reported were eight in number—the four lower grades along the western side of the building, and the four higher grades along the eastern side, which was exposed to the ocean breezes and had misty classroom windows. We remained in our respective homerooms all day, while the various teaching nuns rotated every hour from room to room. After a fifty-five-minute session, there was a five-minute interim during which students were permitted to stand and talk in the aisles, or to pay hasty visits to the rest rooms.

When a loud clang from the corridor’s wall clock signaled the start of a new hour, order was immediately reimposed in each room by the arriving nun, and the students returned to their desks for another fifty-five minutes of exposure to the curriculum. Since we sat in alphabetical order, arranged in four rows from left to right, I occupied what I considered a desirable position in the rear of the room—on the fringe of the nun’s purview, and frequently concealed behind the incessantly raised hand of a studious mainland student named Mary Steelman, whose avidity for answering questions relieved me of what little desire I ever had for being heard.

But as I walked toward my homeroom on this morning, I knew that I would be unable to hide behind Mary Steelman: a written examination was scheduled for our first hour, an American history test that dealt with the territorial expansion of the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Our teacher was Sister Irma, a kindly but shy individual who spoke in a singsong manner and presented history as a series of impersonal episodes and precise dates that were largely devoid of the passions and vagaries of the human spirit. History as she related it was unrelievedly monotonous; and during those evenings when I sought help from my father, whose favorite subject was history, I would receive an interpretation of American history from an Italian viewpoint that, while interesting at times, was entirely irrelevant to Sister Irma’s class and contributed nothing to my elevation in her grading system.

For example, on the question of the Louisiana Purchase—about which Sister Irma cared only that it was bought from France in 1803 for $15,000,000 and added 827,987 square miles to American territory—my father saw in the land deal the “fine Italian hand” of his adopted fellow ethnic, Napoleon Bonaparte, who, in selling a distant possession that was reachable only via the ocean on which the British fleet was preeminent, wisely enriched his war chest and shifted his priorities toward battling the British in a place closer to home; indeed, my father continued, the French forces in 1803 were massed along the English Channel, prepared for a British invasion, and among Napoleon’s troops were six thousand Italian soldiers.…

“But,” I interrupted, “this has nothing to do with
American
history!” To this he emphatically responded: “You’ll never properly understand American history unless you understand the history of Europe, including Italy.… Don’t ever forget that America was discovered by an Italian, was named after an Italian, and that the American Declaration of
Independence—those words about mankind being born free and equal—were taken by Jefferson from the writings of Philip Mazzei! Have you ever heard of Philip Mazzei?”

“No,” I said, wishing I had never gotten involved in this conversation.

“Do they ever mention Mazzei in your school?”

“No, but I’m being tested on the Louisiana Purchase, and the Panama Canal, and how the United States got to own Florida, and Texas, and whatever else.… 
That’s
what I’m worried about for my test!”

And I was still worried about it as I walked into Sister Irma’s classroom on this morning of the examination, and took my place behind Mary Steelman and in front of a skinny, ebullient boy named Jackie Walsh, and across the aisle from Billy Maenner—who seemed not to have a worry in the world. As Sister Irma began to walk up and down the aisles handing copies of the test to each student, Billy sat casually at his desk, with a hand under his chin, staring at the blackboard with a smile on his face. He turned toward me and winked. Then, with a finger, he directed my attention to the blackboard, on the top of which were drawn, in varicolored chalk, small figures of flying angels, and cherubs, and a reindeer leaping through the clouds toward what I assumed was supposed to be the Star of Bethlehem. The top of the adjacent blackboard was also decorated like a Christmas card, with colored chalk drawings of the Madonna and Child in a manger, surrounded by cattle and Wise Men, and more angels fluttering above—and under it all, in neat printing, was the artist’s signature: “B. Maenner.”

Within a moment I understood why Billy had been treated so courteously by the nuns at the end of the previous week, and had received permission to cut certain classes. He had probably been busy planning these sketches, which he must have drawn on the blackboards during the weekend. I wondered if similar drawings by him were in other classrooms. I did not know. I knew only that there had been no art on our blackboards when I left school on Friday.

And suddenly the incident just before Thanksgiving, in the Mother Superior’s religion class, made sense. Billy had been sitting at his desk paying no attention to her lecture; his head was down, and he was doodling with his pencil across his notepad. Twice the Mother Superior had glared at him, but he did not notice her until her shadow was nearly upon him, and she was seeing on his pad what at first appeared to be a sensuous female figure, a woman with her arms tossed high in the air in the frisky manner of a magazine pinup.

“And what is
this?
” the Mother Superior had asked, grabbing his pad.
But before he could reply, the Mother Superior’s eyes softened and the tense lines around her mouth diffused into a demure smile. And as she held the pad close to her face and studied it, she saw that Billy had been drawing an angel.

It was a copy of the angel that adorned the cover of our religion textbook—it was, on one level, a line-for-line imitation,
except
, as the Mother Superior could see, Billy’s version had an ethereal quality that surpassed the stylized work of the professional illustrator. Billy’s angel floated across the page. It was as if his pencil had received guidance from above.

The Mother Superior had turned the drawing in our direction, holding it high so that we might examine it and share her admiration for it. I was as impressed as everyone else seemed to be by his deft strokes, his charismatic curlicues; and while I had conveyed complimentary words to him across the aisle, and was sincere in my sentiments, I also felt rising within myself a pang of envy. Not only did Billy possess the hardest-hitting fist in the schoolyard, but now he was being hailed for his hand’s artistic touch. It was no wonder that the nuns had been treating him with such deference. They were conforming to the beneficent tradition that the Church throughout the ages had always bestowed on favored artists. Billy was our Michelangelo, a unique personage whose academic shortcomings were being ignored because of the exquisite way he drew celestial creatures; and before the Mother Superior had concluded her religion class on the day of Billy’s discovery, I had watched with mixed feelings as she summoned him to her desk, spoke with him briefly in private, and then placed in his hands a small cardboard box containing chalk of eight different colors. It was more than a gift, I had thought as I stood watching on that day; it was an augury of his rising status, and it seemed at that moment to separate Billy Maenner from us, his classmates, and from me, his friend.

And now as Sister Irma placed a copy of the history test on his desk, my feelings about our separateness came back and were confirmed by the way he was reacting to the tension of this moment: we were jittery in our seats; he seemed as calm as a clam. When he lowered his eyes to look at the examination that was spread before him, I watched closely, hoping to get some indication of how difficult it was—for I still believed, in a scholastic sense, that he belonged in the low category that had always been basic to our compatibility. But his face told me nothing. Within a moment he looked up, glanced toward the blackboard, and seemed to be very contented.

I turned to my test. Automatically I wrote “J/M/J” on the top of the
left margin, as the nuns required on all classroom papers, in reverential remembrance of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. On the upper right corner of the page I printed my name. Then I proceeded to confront the first question, which contained three parts; and at once I knew I was in trouble.

It concerned the Louisiana Purchase, and we were asked to identify the nation from which France had purchased the territory before France had sold it to the United States in 1803, and it also asked that we include the date of this earlier transaction and the price of the sale. To this threepronged question, I could barely hazard a guess. While I doubted that France had gotten Louisiana from Britain—not after the way my father had described the French-British rivalry—I also knew that in written tests the answer that you think is the most definitely wrong is often the most definitely right. Teachers often enjoyed tricking students with such questions. Still, I hesitated, knowing that France could as easily have obtained Louisiana from Spain, or Portugal, or—was it possible?—from Mexico. Was Mexico
Mexico
then? And if so, was it doing business with the United States? When
was
that Mexican-American War?

Aware that I was wasting time on this first question, and even more aware that there was a long list of other questions awaiting my wisdom, I edged up in my seat and stretched my neck slightly so that I might peek over Mary Steelman’s shoulder. On the paper of that bright student, if I could get a look at it, would be the solution to my problem. After first making sure that Sister Irma would not catch me in this compromising position, I leaned forward and, squinting with all my focused power, I saw that Mary Steelman had replied to the first part of the first question: “Spain.” Casually, I wrote “Spain” on my page. But as I leaned forward again, trying to see the rest of her answer, she suddenly covered her test with her arm. All at once I felt resentful,
insulted
—and abandoned. I was now on my own.

I decided to skip the rest of the first question and move down to the second, planning to go back and complete the first later with some wild guessing—and perhaps some inspired help from “J/M/J.” But the second question, also in three parts, offered no relief. It dealt with the United States’ involvement with the Republic of Panama, a complicated relationship that I had never really understood even after I had carefully read the section about it in our textbook, and then reread it almost a dozen times. About Panama I knew only that, unlike Louisiana, it was not owned by the United States. The United States did not own the Panama Canal, either, but as the book explained, our nation did possess the “perpetual right of occupation, use, and control” of the canal, for which the United
States had paid the Republic of Panama $10,000,000, plus an added $250,000 annually to use it. When I had looked at the map and seen how small Panama was (when compared with Louisiana, for instance), I was bewildered by the terms of the deal. But I was even more bewildered by the three parts to the second question on the test: (a) By what treaty did the United States gain use of the Panama Canal? (b) When? (c) How wide is the Canal?