of the “Saint of Mahoningtown.” As we walked along, shopkeepers came to their doors to say good morning. Curly-headed women leaned, waving, out of windows, and from their porches stogie-smoking, coffee-drinking men nodded to him. In recent years, Hollywood has tended to portray the 1960s as a mosaic of free-form bliss, which, in fact, aligns completely with my kiddy-brain memories.
When Popi had opened the bakery door for me, it puffed out a sweet canopy of unverified fruit. To my dismay, I’d learned that I had to wait approximately five and a half hours to get a fork-full of it.
Now that plate of long-awaited goodness lay on the paint-peeling table before me. The first bite is always the best, although I probably would have eaten the whole pie if Grandma had let me. Instead, I swallowed a sizable lump of blueberry paste and washed it down with some water. The glint of sunlight caught my eye, again. The five men seemed engaged in jovial conversation.
“Grandma, who are those guys?”
Her face squished together as she squinted toward the crowd.
I pointed to their table. “Those guys. There.”
She batted down my arm. Then her bottom lip pushed-up into her firm upper lip and her squinted eyes unraveled. Her head tilted toward me with eyes still on the five men. She placed her right finger up to the side of her nose and proceeded to give it two taps. Over the years I had deduced that guys who got the nose tap were “up to no good.” And they were up to a special kind of “no good” that exceeded just regular old “no good,” but nobody ever told me the difference. A tacit rule existed banning anyone from asking about things that they weren’t told. Dad gave me beatings once or twice, before I finally realized I’d cause a lot less trouble if I kept my damned mouth shut.
One of the men, the one with a nose of distractible size, leaned his head back and let out a howl. Despite his fearsome stature, his laugh honked like one of those dumb seagulls that circle parking lots. Something was peculiar about him, and it wasn’t just his missing tooth. When he jerked his head back to laugh, he revealed a thick rosy scar circling the base of his neck.
Grandma swung one arm around my shoulder, while the other nudged my hand to the pie. “Mangia!” Eat!
She always did have the tendency to end things melodramatically.
Chapter 2
“Ambridge—there is a convent in Ambridge,” Mrs. Morganson stated. It seemed like she was answering a question for once. Mrs. Morganson really didn’t like questions all that much. I think it was due to the fact that she rarely knew the answers. She always, and I mean as-the-clock-tics always, read straight from the catechism, from lesson books, and sometimes pamphlets. That made me wonder if she volunteered to teach CCD for her own sake, since she appeared to know less then the rest of us combined.
“Yes, a convent in Ambridge. They are Franciscan sisters, and they run a school for girls.” She sounded fairly confident, even though she recalled the information from her very own brain.
Ah, and there it was. She reached down to a shelf hidden in her podium—a pamphlet. “If anyone is interested, you can read about them.” She flipped the pamphlet into the air and then slapped it onto Johnny Primivera’s desk.
Mrs. Morganson’s voice provoked the internal quake I got when I heard nails on a chalk board. Her nails even did that screech on the board sometimes. Not on purpose—her nails were just so long and thick that when she used a worn down chalk, they dragged along beside her script. I guess she never noticed, even though I would have thought it would feel like driving with the emergency brake on.
That sound provoked in me stomach-turning horror. Her voice sounded like that too. Loud with screechy peaks and tenebrous warbles. I found it both impossible to listen to her and impossible to ignore her.
Charlotte sat in front of me, straight-backed and attentive. Her white short-sleeved blouse had sweat stains at the base of the neck and under her armpits. A tear the length of a pin raveled down her right shoulder-blade. Light blue thread criss-crossed over it, fashioning a string of three stars. That snag happened recently, I supposed, since I hadn’t noticed any stars last week.
Charlotte twisted around and set the holy pamphlet on my desk. A smirk crept up her cheeks and her right eye winked. Charlotte made this face a lot. Her eyes seemed to know something that I didn’t know. It always made me shiver a little.
I picked up the blue pamphlet.
“School Sisters of St. Francis,” I read. Under the title, a black-and-white picture of seven solemn-faced nuns spread to the edges of the page. Four sat, and three stood behind them, all wearing robes and white collars and black hoods. I imagined them gardening together. St. Francis liked to garden. He liked to speak to the animals. I supposed that they most likely did that too.
Mrs. Morganson’s rubber-soled shoes clonked down the cement aisle. She stopped beside me and snapped a ruler on the head of Mugga’s little brother. It didn’t break, but I’m sure it stung like hell. Mugga’s little brother, otherwise known as Hog, shot up in his seat. Charlotte jumped. Mrs. Morganson proceeded to screech at him and about him for the final six and a half minutes of class. At one point I saw a tear trickle down Char’s face. I rarely saw Char cry, but when she did it likely had to do with someone getting hit. Contrary to Char, I suppressed a smirk. I figured Hog deserved it. I’m sure he, being Mugga’s little brother and all, was used to that kind of thing. He lived in, like, constant penance for his family’s doomed bloodline.
Mugga was kind of a hoodlum, similar and dissimilar to most of the damned Dagoes, who never looked like he was up to anything good. I would see him walking down the alley behind our house. Grandma saw him once. After peering out the window over the stove at him, she slid the curtains closed. One of them got stuck on the rod, so she got on her tip-toes to reach it. As she yanked, her head shifted back-and-forth, back-and-forth while she clicked her tongue. I couldn’t be sure if she disapproved of Mugga or the curtain.
Mrs. Morganson clearly disapproved of Hog. She’d constructed some reason to reprimand him every Sunday since the fourth grade, which is when she started to teach our CCD class. Her badgering didn’t end until we got our confirmation and were released from our screech-permeated incarceration.
I tried not to ignore to Mrs. Morg. Charlotte on the other hand watched closely. Another tear dribbled from her eye as she watched Hog get screamed at and hit for the hundredth time. Yet he looked unfazed by the whole shebang.
I flipped open the pamphlet. There were more pictures inside—some of girls in classrooms all dressed in uniform, one of a sister resting her hand on a baby’s head, but the last picture showed a nun looking down. A smile beamed across her face, and her hands lay clasped, resting on her chest. A string of beads trickled down the back of her hand. The rosary seemed to have been in mid-swing when the picture flashed. I wondered if she was moving into the frame or out of it.
“You are all dismissed,” Mrs. Morganson stated. She marched her rubber-soled shoes up to the front of the room.
Char and I got out the door first. We sprung down the dusty stairs out onto the pavement.
“Ah, there’s my mum.” She nodded, eyes fixed on a group of women across the street.
Mrs. Pasika stuck out like a sore thumb. Her straight blonde hair was a dead give away that she wasn’t Italian.
“You working tomorrow?” Char asked.
“Yea. Just a little in the morning. Popi wants to teach me to click.”
She laughed. “What does that even mean?”
I sneered. “It’s cutting out the uppers for a shoe. You know—the part that goes around the top of your foot.”
“Okay, well . . .” Her downcast eyes lingered and then swung up into a sudden and probably false joy. “That sounds great!”
“It’s really important, you know.” I always hated when people took shoemaking lightly. That’s who we were, the Luces, the shoemakers. “It’s