Unto the Sons (14 page)

Since I had not a clue about the first two parts of the question, I ignored them summarily and moved to the third part: How wide? Here I felt somewhat more confident, having spent my entire life around the water. Knowing that the bay separating the island of Ocean City from the liquor-selling mainland, where Billy Maenner’s father had his bar, was two miles wide—and imagining no reason why the Panama Canal should be wider (despite all the money the United States had, incredibly, invested there)—I wrote down, to be on the generous side, “Three miles.”

Looking at my watch, and realizing that I had only twenty minutes left in which to answer the six remaining questions, I began to panic. Quickly I gave a sweeping glance at the rest of the test, eager to salvage whatever I could from this disaster, and was relieved to discover that many of the questions sought information about which I was not totally unaware. For example, in the third through sixth questions—which concerned, respectively, the acquisition of Florida in 1819, and Texas in 1845, and Oregon in 1846, and Alaska in 1867—I had fortunately memorized most of the isolated facts and other minutiae that now qualified me to respond knowingly to the questions posed by Sister Irma.

The seventh question, however, concerned the so-called Gadsden Purchase, a procurement about which I was completely ignorant. I had no idea where Gadsden was located in the United States,
if
it indeed was; and until this examination, in fact, I had never ever heard of Gadsden. So in response to the questions about Gadsden—from whom had the United States purchased it? When? And for what amount?—I repeated the same financial figure and date that I had used earlier for the Oregon Purchase (reasoning that this perhaps doubled my chances of getting
something
right), and I cited “France” as the selling nation because I had an inkling that I had overused “Spain” in my replies to previous questions.

As I moved down to the eighth and final question, there was a sudden uplifting of my morale. Here I was confident, having carefully memorized this material with some inadvertent assistance from my father. The eighth question was: “From which nation did the U.S. obtain the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico? By what treaty was this ratified? In what
year?” I had been reading about this in my bedroom, seated at my desk, when my father had looked in and asked: “How are you doing?”

“I’m reading about the Spanish-American War,” I said, “and how Spain lost it, and then had to give up the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico to the United States.” With my finger on the paragraph of my textbook, I continued irrefutably: “These were ceded to the United States in 1898 by terms of the Treaty of Paris.” At the mention of Paris, my father’s interest increased, his eyes twinkled, and he began to recall in detail his youthful days in Paris as an apprentice tailor in 1920, and how he had worked in a shop near the Rue de la Paix.

As my father reminisced about Paris, and as I kept my finger pressed on the paragraph about the treaty, I could almost
feel
the mental connection clicking in my head: Paris, my father, the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the official termination of the Spanish-American War by the terms of the Paris Treaty of 1898. And as I now incorporated this information into my answers, it brought my examination to an auspicious conclusion—and I still had five minutes left to fill in the blank spaces of the earlier questions.

Racing toward what I hoped would be a worthy finish, jotting down whatever seemed plausible in these frantic final moments, I found myself looking around the room every few seconds to see how my classmates were faring. In the first row I observed that two of the smarter students were idling comfortably at their desks, apparently having completed the examination and handed it in to Sister Irma. They were Bobby Becotte, the son of a local policeman, and Mary Chester, a realtor’s daughter who gradually was becoming even prettier than Rosemary Kurtz. Mary Chester’s family fortunes seemed to be rising, too, for word had gotten around town that her father had bought a secluded mainland mansion that had a private tennis court and had once belonged to a flamboyant scion of Ocean City’s founding family of Methodist ministers—Harvey Lake, who during the 1920s drove around the island in a flashy Duesenberg. Behind Mary Chester sat three mainland boys who wore brass Army buckles and were still struggling with the examination; and across from me, I could see that Rosemary Kurtz was reading over her answers with a composed expression. And behind
her
, with his sharp copyist corneas blazing down on her paper, reproducing her answers on
his
paper as quickly as possible before the bell rang, was Billy Maenner.

I could not believe how blatant he was. He sat with his neck stretched forward and, seemingly unconcerned that he might be caught in the act by Sister Irma, he forthrightly filled in the blanks of his paper with Rosemary’s
responses. I watched with amazement as he concentrated with hawklike attention on Rosemary’s page, zooming in over her shoulder to consume piece by piece the content of her intellect and then, with dizzying speed, to appropriate all that he saw. As the bell rang and I put my pencil down, I furtively leaned across the aisle to scrutinize more closely what Billy had copied. In addition to her answers, I noticed that he had neatly printed, in the upper right corner of his page, her name—“Rosemary Kurtz.”

Stupefied, I said nothing. Should I whisper to him to erase her name? It occurred to me to do that, but before I could act, he walked quickly up the aisle behind Rosemary to place his examination paper on the pile in the center of Sister Irma’s desk. As I followed with my paper, I looked to see whether Sister Irma had observed anything unusual, but her attentions were devoted only to how neatly the students were placing their exams on her desk. She wanted all the papers to be stacked in a straight pile, with the edges even; if the edges were infinitesimally askew, she would immediately tidy them up with the tips of her chalky white fingers. Then, after all the students had delivered their papers, Sister Irma carefully tucked them into her black leather briefcase. After the Christmas holidays, she would return them to us with her grades. Between now and then, I could only wonder what her reaction would be when she saw the same student’s name on two examinations in distinctly different handwriting. Perhaps it would amuse her. Perhaps it would make her furious.

After returning to my desk to await the start of Sister Helen’s geography class, I sat gazing up at the blackboard, admiring the flying row of what might be the last flight of Billy Maenner’s guardian angels.

I drifted through the rest of the school day peacefully and inattentively, relieved that the examination was behind me and that I had a vacation to look forward to, starting the next afternoon. For me it would not be a real vacation—I would be helping out in the store during the busy holiday season; but, except for the task of putting cardboard guards on the hangers, the time I spent in the store was usually diverting and pleasant.

I did not mind dusting the glass cases or cleaning the mirrors in my mother’s dress department, and I enjoyed accompanying the drivers in the trucks that traveled the length of the island, stopping at small midtown hotels or at customers’ homes to deliver ticketed garments in boxes or brown paper bags, and at the same time collect rumpled trousers, jackets, and overcoats, which we took back to the store to be dry-cleaned—or, as my father insisted on calling it, “French dry-cleaned.”

While there was absolutely nothing Gallic or special about the process used at my father’s plant—the clothes were spun around in a large standard circular basin afloat with naphtha, then tossed into a drying machine, then conveyed to the pressers—my father liked to embellish his business with a certain socially acceptable foreign éclat whenever possible. Which was why his newspaper advertising in the local weekly always specified “French dry-cleaning”; and why he prominently hung on the wall of the store his grandiloquent French tailor’s diploma (signed in Paris in 1920 with the flourishing hand of his cousin Antonio); and why the side panels of the trucks displayed, in addition to the store’s name in Gothic lettering, my father’s coat of arms in the shape of an opened pair of scissors and crossed needles, and under it his motto in Latin:
Pro vobis optimum
, For you the best.

The white-and-black-trimmed trucks, Fords purchased from Rosemary Kurtz’s father, were such spacious, high-roofed vans that a grown man could stand inside without stooping and I could swing from the overhead clothes pipes as if I were in my own private gym.

My job during these outings was to assist the driver when necessary in carrying large quantities of clothing in or out of the truck, and to write up the voucher slips on all the clothing that we collected to be cleaned—this latter chore being one that I especially relished, for it allowed me to pick through other people’s pockets with impunity and with a thrilling sense of anticipation.

It was remarkable how careless men in particular were about leaving things in the pockets of their jackets and pants, and after a single day’s excursion my booty often included fountain pens, nail clippers, toll tickets for the bridge to Atlantic City, love letters, cigarettes, unopened packages of chewing gum, tubes of Chap Stick, Trojan condoms, keys, matchbooks with women’s names and phone numbers written on the inside cover, handkerchiefs, and countless other things, including, of course, money. One day I found five twenty-dollar bills that had been folded into a small rectangular shape and tucked into the watch pocket of a man’s vest.

All the paper money I found, along with any object of more than a dollar’s value (I chewed the gum, threw away the Trojans), I later relinquished to my mother, who then notified the customer and arranged for the items to be returned. But I never felt obligated to report the discovery of change, which, while never a sizable amount on any given day, added up to cover my cinema and soda fountain expenses during the weekend.

As I stood in the school corridor after my last class waiting for the bell that would signify it was our homeroom’s turn to get our coats in the
cloakroom, I was trying to remember what film would be playing in town this weekend—was it the revival of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
? or was it
The Phantom of the Opera
, which starred one of my mother’s favorites, Nelson Eddy?—when suddenly my classmate Bobby Becotte came over and asked: “Why weren’t you at the altar boy meeting this afternoon?”

I groaned; and after cursing my lapsed memory and chronic capacity for daydreaming, I raced down the hall toward the sacristy, hoping that I would find Sister Rita and might offer her some acceptable excuse that I planned to concoct along the way. When I arrived, however, the sacristy was empty. But on a table in the middle of the room I did see a small white envelope addressed to me. These envelopes were given to the altar boys every week, and they contained a card notifying us of what Masses we were scheduled to serve. But on this occasion it would also list the names of those altar boys who had been chosen for Midnight Mass, the service that most of the parish, including my parents, would attend, and that I yearned to be a part of.

Slowly I opened the envelope. Then, reading the card, I felt all at once a surge of anger and the agony of being left out. I was not on the list. Instead, I had received the least desirable assignment: Christmas Day at seven a.m.

Mr. Fitzgerald had delivered his message.

8.

A
fter school I decided to walk home, avoiding the bus. It was a fourteen-block walk in the cold, but the light drizzle that had fallen through most of the day had stopped, and I wanted to spend some time alone before tending to my obligations in the store. I left the school building through a side door, then hastened across the damp gravel yard past the Maypole toward a concrete path that cut between two vacated apartment houses and led to a side street. Twice I heard a boy’s voice calling out to me from the front of the building, where moments before I had noticed a line of students waiting to board the bus.

I headed toward Wesley Avenue, which in winter was the quietest street in this town of quiet winter streets. It extended through the center of the island, midway through the bay and the ocean, and was flanked by
once grand Victorian houses now deteriorating with age and neglect; too expensive to heat, they were occupied only in summertime, by people who were attracted to their low rent. Although I could hear the pounding of the waves as I walked, I knew from the complaints of summer customers in the store that Wesley Avenue was an inconvenient walk to the beach when the sidewalks were burning hot, and that on sweltering August evenings the ocean breeze barely was felt on the verandas of these spacious old homes. Our dry-cleaning trucks did scant winter business along this wide street, for which I was most grateful—nothing could have appealed to me less at this moment than seeing a familiar face and, as I did with customers in the store, feeling an obligation to be convivial.

Not for this reason alone did I proceed with a certain ease and reposeful contentment along Wesley Avenue. This was the route my mother had always taken, with me in a baby carriage, when she strolled on mild afternoons during the 1930s from her bridal cottage on the north end of the island to visit my father at the store downtown. In our photo album I have studied snapshots that she had paused to take along the way, of me sitting in the carriage, a rattle in my hand, the familiar houses of Wesley Avenue in the background, showing early signs of abandonment.

The Depression had already debased the resort economy; the town’s leading bank had gone into receivership, dollars had been replaced by scrip, and these homes, which the leading Methodist families had proudly occupied at the turn of the century, were soon in foreclosure or were forced to open their doors to monthly boarders or to frugal vacationers who in summer would complain about the ten-minute walk to the beach.

Still, as I walked along carrying my schoolbag, feeling in my surroundings a remoteness from my disappointment, it seemed to me that with coats of bright paint and the repair of a few filigreed fences, this tattered part of town could once again reflect the better times of the past, an age of splendor and innocence, of women in frilly long dresses carrying parasols through the park I was now approaching.