AT ST. FRANCIS we learned about the Jordan River. On the other side was the Promised Land. Jesus was baptized there. When I was eight, I believed I’d seen the Jordan, that the fields and wooded hills on the other side of Jordan Creek were the Promised Land. I was afraid to go there because heaven and the Promised Land were confused in my mind, and if someone went to heaven, as Mommom had earlier that year, they did not come back. Along part of the creek, in summer, I could look across and see the superheated air boiling in ripples over a meadow yellow and purple with goldenrod and thistle. I’d never seen that anywhere else and believed I was glimpsing all you could see of the angels who would be visible if you crossed to the other side, the angels who were stirring the air with their wings.
Two hours a week were set aside for art. When we weren’t studying the black-and-white reproductions in our art books, we were decorating the classroom along seasonal themes: turkeys, snowmen, Easter eggs. One of my classmate’s parents had a turkey farm and they offered to bring a live turkey to school one day, but the nuns didn’t think it was a good idea. Instead, we cut brightly colored construction paper into feathers and attached them to Styrofoam balls. The turkeys’ heads were made of paper cups. At Christmastime we made countless pictures of snow and snowmen by applying a thick layer of blue crayon to a piece of cloth and then wiping it across our pencilled snowmen and snowdrifts to shade them in a way that, in fact, changed how I experienced real snow.
I liked to draw. Superman, Jesus, and Mickey Mantle were my subjects again and again. My mother was always effusive in her praise; my father could always spot a tracing. “Hell, anybody can trace a picture,” he’d say. I couldn’t understand how he could tell, every time. I tried to make a drawing so realistic he would mistake it for a tracing. Then I could challenge him to find the original.
In school, when we took out our art books, we got to see what heaven looked like. Some days we had color slides of paintings by Michelangelo, Fra Angelico, Leonardo. These were accompanied by scratchy records that beeped when it was time to press the red button to go to the next slide. Each depicted an event: the creation, the fall of Lucifer, the banishing of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the resurrection of Jesus, the assumption of Mary. One of my classmates asked if there were any photographs of Jesus. After explaining that the camera hadn’t been invented yet, the nun turned the subject to the shroud of Turin, which was a kind of “miraculous photograph,” much like Veronica’s veil, which held the likeness of Jesus’ face but had since been lost, captured, or destroyed, like the Holy Grail, by heathens. She passed around a book with a brown photograph of the shroud, and I saw that it was true: Jesus did have that distinctive double-pointed beard he had in the books and in the stained-glass windows of the church. Some of the painters had gotten the contours of his face wrong, however; it was long and square like a shoebox. Of course, it was further explained to us that the “miraculous photograph” was not really of Jesus, but only of his dead body, which he would reclaim on Easter morning. I never doubted any of it. The pictures ratified the stories, and the stories, read in church and cited and recited every day in school, confirmed the pictures; therefore, it was all true.
More than incense, music, Latin, candles, and robes, for a child the Catholic Church is the human figure, again and again, the body’s beautiful proportions, the shadowed declivities of ankles crosshatched on the stained glass, the statues almost calling out to be touched, the veins in the hands almost pulsing. The men, all of them, luxuriantly bearded, rugged, and serene.
Jesus’ hands in cryptic gesture. Joseph holding lilies or tools. Peter, the one with the keys.
And Francis, Francis of Assisi, his hands and feet mutilated with the stigmata, eyes closed in ecstasy beneath his smooth brow and bony crown, his beautiful, strong-looking, too-big feet in sandals. The public-school kids called him St. Francis the Sissy.
In his studio, Mr. Neff was working on his stained-glass window of St. Francis for the new church. He invited Bob and me inside on our way to school. There were racks of colored glass, a set of stairs that moved on a short length of track in front of a wall of white fluorescent light. There were long flat drawers he pulled out to show us his drawings, and a rack for what he called cartoons. They were watercolors, really, that would be translated into glass, piece by colored piece. In back, his assistant, wearing a visored helmet, moved around, taking no notice of us, welding things with an acetylene torch. Mr. Neff put his huge hand on my head and gave it a twist that brought my body around to face him.
“No, no,” he said. “Don’t either of you look at the torch. It’ll hurt your eyes.”
It was even more astonishing than church. This was the place where the glass was fired and colored and assembled to trick the sunlight into telling us the story we believed we were a part of. Although I couldn’t fully grasp this, I could feel the power of the place. It was magic.
Bob and I passed the studio every day. Pieces of glass were arranged on shelves in all the windows. I wondered why Mr. Neff would choose to decorate the windows with odd-shaped pieces of blue, red, and yellow glass instead of a picture of a saint or the Good Shepherd or something like that. Bob said it would be a sin to do that, because only a church was allowed by God to have those kinds of pictures in the windows.
Any secular art we saw was bucolic, preindustrial: peasants in the fields, landscapes, horses pulling sleighs. The world of these reproductions was somehow more real to me than the world of sidewalks and traffic lights and snow that got down inside my galoshes and left my ankles red and raw.
THE SCHOOL HAD a triangular yellow SHELTER sign out front, and we had frequent air-raid drills, because, according to the nuns, the Russians were going to bomb us. Bob was in second grade; I was in third. We were afraid. We prayed to the Virgin Mary to stop them.
The sisters told us we need not fear death if we were good Catholics. From what they told us, Bob and I imagined that if the Russians killed us we would get up afterward the way we did when the bell rang while we were playing soldiers in the fields behind the school at recess. Then we would stand in line outside the door—of heaven, not school—to meet Jesus. We went to daily Mass and Tuesday-night novenas and tried hard to believe this.
We played war every chance we got. Sometimes it was just the two of us, so we drew blades of grass to see who would be the American. The other could choose to be a German, an Italian, a Japanese, a Korean, a Chinese, or a Russian. The game was modified hide-and-seek; the object was to sneak up undiscovered on the enemy, and kill him by making the most realistic rifle or machine-gun sounds you could. Sometimes we used dry clods of dirt for hand grenades, because they gave off a little puff of smokelike dust if you hit a rock or a tree with one. More often eight or ten of us from the neighborhood would play. If we played at recess, we used sticks for guns; if we played after school or in the summer, we had plastic rifles or tommy-guns, helmets, Army-surplus belts, and canteens filled with Kool-Aid. Our Viewmasters, stereoscopes that otherwise brought us the Lone Ranger or Hopalong Cassidy in 3-D, became binoculars, hanging from our necks with scratchy twine.
The game began at opposite ends of the uncut meadow we called the prairie, which was soon filled with infantry crawling toward each other in the tall grass, snipers climbing trees, soldiers digging foxholes, voices imitating gunfire and explosions, and occasionally the sounds of a nasty argument. The rules of the game were unclear, and we had no referees, so much of the imaginary warfare took the shape of arguments as to who shot whom first, or how close you had to be to shoot someone. The worst thing you could do was refuse to die. “I had you!”
“No you didn’t! I was covered! You can’t shoot through a tank! I was behind this rock. This rock’s a tank, man.”
“Aw bullshit, man; you’re dead.” After that you were ignored, no matter what you did, and you had missed your chance to die dramatically, throwing your rifle in the air, crying out, staggering and tumbling to the ground, which was one of the best parts of the game.
MY FATHER USED to watch a program on Sunday nights called Air Power, narrated by Walter Cronkite, a documentary of all the major air battles and bombings of World War II. Bob and I watched it often. In jerky, too-fast footage, Allied pilots smiled from bomber cockpits and flashed the thumbs-up sign. A ground crew, in coveralls, laughed while painting a bomb. They stepped back: “Kilroy Was Here.” Then the sky was filled with B-29s in formation. Cronkite’s voice came over the drone of the bombers as the doors in the bellies of the planes opened. The bombs, looking like black fish, fell straight down, evenly spaced, whistling. Then we were seeing towns, and little puffs of smoke, like the ones our dry clods made, in orderly rows. After that the films showed burning buildings, people crying in the streets, and crews of men digging out trapped people and the bodies of the dead.
We became afraid of planes. We watched to see if the doors in their bellies would open, or if paratroopers would tumble from behind the wing. At night I often dreamed that Bob and I were roller-skating on the sidewalk when we heard the drone of a plane overhead; I looked up to see the trickle of bombs beginning to fall. We skated as fast as we could to the school, looking back over our shoulders and hearing the first explosions. When we got to the school, Sister Anne Catherine was in the doorway telling us to hurry. We tried to clatter up the steps in our skates but kept falling down. Bob was crying, and I tried to drag him up the steps. One time he woke me because I was calling his name in my sleep. I told him the dream, and we stayed awake the rest of the night and talked.
THE NUNS HAD given us comic books in school. Usually our comics were of Sergeant Rock battling the Japs or Nazis with a gun that said “Ratatatatatatatatatat,” but these showed a Catholic family in their fallout shelter saying the rosary together. We tried to get my father to build a fallout shelter and to say the rosary with us. We talked about what we would do if we survived the bombs. We agreed that we’d play possum so the enemy would think that we were dead. Sometimes in bed at night we would practice keeping still and holding our breath.
My parents had a world atlas, and in the back of it were color plates of the flags of all the countries of the world. We tore out those pages and stuck them up in the window of our bedroom. We weren’t sure who the enemy was—the Germans or the Japanese or the Italians or the Koreans or the Chinese or, probably, the Russians—but the idea was that a pilot flying over Ninth Street would spot his flag on our window and not bomb our house.
THE NUNS AT school were sure Russia was the enemy. Russians hated Jesus, and they loved to torture people to test their faith. They would try to make us deny Jesus, like St. Peter. If we were caught alone, they would try to make us lead them to our families so they could kill them too.
Otto Schlemcher was my idea of a Russian. He was big—an eighth-grader—who bullied Bob and me almost daily. Dark and ugly, he walked with a sort of lurch and he mumbled; it was hard to make out what he said. We knew that the other eighth-graders laughed at him. Bob and I feared and hated him; we thought his name was as weird and ugly as he was.
It was that spring of 1957 that Bob began to weaken. Stairs gave him trouble. One day he fell on the way home from school. I was giving him a hand getting up, when Otto was suddenly there. He pushed me, and Bob went down again. “Leave us alone, you Commie,” I said.
“What you call me?”
“You’re a Commie Russian,” Bob said. He’d gotten himself on all fours, and Otto grabbed him by the hair. “Take that back,” he said and pulled.
Bob started crying. “I take it back, okay, I take it back.”
Otto let go.
“Leave him alone,” I said.
“What it to you, punk-face?” He came after me and got me in a headlock and rapped my head with his knuckles until I cried. When he let me go, I swung at him and hit him as high as I could reach, on the shoulder. “You can’t even talk right,” I yelled at him and ran across the street. Bob tried to run. Otto caught him and knocked him down, hard, on a low picket fence that bordered someone’s front yard. He shouted something across the street at me and lurched away.
Bob’s shirt was torn and his back and ribs were scraped and bleeding. Dad called the Schlemchers while Mom painted Bob’s ribs with Mercurochrome. He must have got Otto’s father on the phone. He started yelling. “Don’t give me that crap. That’s no excuse. Next time I’ll call the cops. Oh, yeah? You better hope I don’t come over there, that’s all I have to say.” My mother called the school.
The next day Bob was absent from school, but Otto and I had to go to the principal’s office and apologize to each other. There were four nuns in the room, looking sternly at us and slowly shaking their heads. After Sister Elizabeth Mary told Otto he could leave, they all sat down and explained to me that I should never make fun of Otto again, because he couldn’t help the way he walked and slurred his words. He had a terrible disease called palsy.