She had white hair and wore cardigan sweaters over her shoulders in the middle of summer. I knew it was morally unacceptable to make your grandmother live in like a slave, and I constantly inquired about her well-being. Did she ever have guests? Was there heat on her side? I was relieved when Cathleen H. sneaked me in one day to prove Nana had her own bathroom and kitchen. All along, I’d pictured her with just a pail and a toaster.
My brother Joe was not impressed when I reported the results of my investigation to him. I bet they lose a ton of rent on Nana, was all he said. I repeated this to my mother rather proudly, giving Joe no credit. She said, With five children and her nerves, Mrs. H. is smart to keep her mother nearby.
My mother could always find a way to compliment people who weren’t related to us on their bad habits.
I had a lot of friends in second grade because I didn’t criticize them to their faces and I was preternaturally gifted when it came to anagrams. One Friday, Sister Jeanne Arthur dictated a simple sentence and instructed us to jumble up the letters over the weekend and then see how many new words we could make. She told us this was going to be a weekly contest to improve our vocabulary.
On Monday, most kids came in with ten or fifteen new words, a lot of them written with crayons on construction paper, as if they didn’t know the difference between language arts and visual arts. It didn’t surprise anyone when Barbara Jean held up her Palmer-method cursive list and flipped it around dramatically to show that she’d needed the second side to fit in her thirty-something words. She’d already won the first big spelling bee of the year, and she was getting pretty famous for her study habits.
I had not used both sides of the paper, so I worried that I’d broken a rule and would be disqualified. I had used seven pages of my brother Joe’s best lined paper and four of my mother’s staples for my words, about 140 of them, from which I had purged plurals, possessives, and proper nouns based on accusations of loafing made by my brother Gerard against me.
Sister Jeanne didn’t play favorites based on brains. She congratulated us all, and instructed us to walk up in orderly rows to place our results on her desk. We’d spent the first couple weeks of second grade practicing this assembly-line delivery system, which involved a full classroom circuit on the way back to your desk. When I got up to the front, she opened the bottom drawer of her desk and handed me a bag of State Line potato chips, but she wasn’t smiling. You know what this means, Michael, she said, shifting into her all-business baritone. I did not, and neither did the other kids, who automatically froze in place, which left everyone at somebody else’s assigned place. I’d shut down the second grade. I was the wrench in the works. Sister Jeanne said, No weekend homework for the class this Friday. The place erupted in cheers and victory dancing. Before anybody got hurt or accidentally peed, Sister Jeanne loudly instructed me to offer a handful of chips only to those kids sitting quietly at their proper desks.
As usual, I got exactly what I wanted and exactly what I didn’t want. I liked winning, but for a prize I would have preferred a new assignment with some tougher letter combinations. I didn’t really need more popularity or party invitations. I needed something to do at home when the older kids were playing Scrabble or shouting out the answers as my mother filled in the blanks in the Jumble puzzle in the daily newspaper.
Word games were a chance for my family to enjoy the brains God gave us, but you couldn’t expect the older Downings to participate in Chutes and Ladders or Parcheesi. And forget party games. Party games were a sign of desperation. After the cake was cut at home, you did the dishes and then went outside and played if you didn’t have anything original to say about Vatican II or the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming elections. Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Musical Chairs were associated with small families that lacked children and had to rely on noisemakers and store-bought crepe-paper decorations to create cheap imitations of family events. I liked having a reason based on moral superiority not to play games in other people’s houses. I wasn’t crazy about being blindfolded or dizzy in front of strangers, and by second grade, because of painful accidents, the mothers of a lot of children had started throwing parties where they substituted Scotch Tape for pins on the donkey tails, and everybody was looking for an excuse not to play.
By second grade, even my First Communion was an imposition. The parish let Catholic-school kids cut a lot of the preparation classes, but they forced even us to memorize the Ten Commandments. When I brought them up, my family didn’t show much interest in the Commandments. They were just grateful they were there so the Jews had something from the Bible to guide them. After a while, I stopped trying to interest people in my First Communion. Most of the other eight kids in the family had received the Holy Sacrament years ago when it was a more sacred event in St. Charles parish, where we lived before my father died. Plus, my First Communion was scheduled for May, and I was born in May, so every time I brought it up I was competing against myself for attention.
And then Father F. turned up. I never knew where Father F. came from, but he was always on his way to Haiti, a hot country specializing in witch doctors. Father F. was a missionary. No matter how hot he got in Haiti, he never took off his black cassock and white collar, and he wore rosary beads around his waist, instead of a normal belt. The crucifix was usually all that was protecting him from the latest tropical jinx or curse. He was a small man. There was something appealingly wrong with his face—maybe his skin was pockmarked, maybe one side didn’t line up properly with the other. You could see he had suffered. This wildly inflated his romance quotient for me.
Father F.’s last visit that I recall coincided with my sister Marie’s birthday. Marie was four years older than I was, two years older than Joe, and about ten times more spoiled than either of us because she was the youngest girl in the family and always willing to cry for sympathy. Visiting missionaries were a bigger deal than birthdays in our house, so Father F.’s just happening to turn up at the right moment to make Marie’s party memorable seemed suspicious to Joe and me. Joe was in fourth grade by then. He’d long since figured out that most of the benefits of being Downing kids had been used up or worn out by our seven older brothers and sisters. For instance, Joe had seen home movies from before we were born starring a rented pony and dozens of party-hatted guests eating fistfuls of chocolate cake. Joe and I weren’t allowed to invite extras, and the supply of ponies and pointed hats had completely dried up. And after my father died in 1961, no matter how old you were, you got the same birthday cake. My sisters Elaine and Mary Ann must have made two or three hundred of those pink-frosted white cakes with seeded raspberry jam between the layers. I can still hear my mother saying, Can one of you girls whip up a one-egg cake for tonight?
Somebody, somewhere along the line, must’ve preferred a dense cake.
Father F. was good with kids because he didn’t mind frightening them. This made him my favorite priest. Usually we ate in the dining room when we had priests in the house, but Father F. was an old friend of the family, so we ate in the kitchen around the oval maple table. Father F. told stories about “the dark side of Haiti,” but he made it clear he wasn’t talking about the color of people’s skin. Like us, he couldn’t care less about your color as long as you were a Catholic who voted for anybody named Kennedy. His worst enemies were the witch doctors, who could paralyze people with the Evil Eye.
If Father F. visited your house in Haiti, anything could happen. Once, when he was young, he stayed overnight on a big farm operated by recently baptized Catholics who wanted to give him the profits from their sugarcane crop to build a church. All night, the witch doctors hooted in the fields like crazy owls. In the morning, the sugarcane was nothing but crispy black stems. They could burn down your house without ever lighting a match, Father F. said. We didn’t have dimmer switches in those days, but something made the pendant light over the kitchen table flicker and fade.
My mother asked Father F. what the Catholics did to survive. He said, You fight fire with fire. Everyone else nodded solemnly as if they knew what this meant. Before I could ask for clarification, somebody turned out the light and the one-egg cake was carried in from the dining room by candlelight, and we sang for Marie.
The older kids had long ago perfected their rendition of “Happy Birthday,” and they did just fine without the two oldest, Roberta and Jack, who were absent because Jack had gotten married the year