They were studying American history in seventh grade.
Drill began at the front of the room, the far right row, and continued around the room to the back of the far left row, then to the front again. It went on forever; it never stopped. When the day was over it simply began again, the next day. If there was a weekend or a holiday, it simply began again at the next desk, the next day. Each child seemed to take a long time with his answer. Jules tried to listen, but after a while his mind began to disintegrate, shattering slowly into lovely erotic fragments. He did not want to put together Sister Mary Jerome and what Ramie said, the two thoughts, the two realities, but they came together of their own accord and left him baffled and trembling. The nun who taught seventh grade was old, and looked old. She had a voice like Jules’s father. “Who was Abraham Lincoln?” she asked, her coarse, downy face turned toward the student who was to answer next. A child responded slowly, as if full-witted, “Abraham Lincoln was a President. Of the United States.”
On to the next student: “Which President was he?”
“He was the…the sixteenth President of the United States.”
And on to the next: “When is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday?”
“Abraham Lincoln’s birthday is February twelfth.”
And around the drill went, around the room, relentlessly up and down the rows, while Jules kept his head up and tried to listen. They all had their battered old books open; they glanced down to find out the answers to Sister’s questions, sometimes running their fingers slowly along the lines of smudged print. They were all frightened when it was their turn to recite. Jules dreamed of Sister Mary Jerome and her ears and her music, and sometimes when his turn came he was unprepared, startled, and had actually to look down at his book to find out the answer. That was not quite the way Sister wanted the drill done: she wanted everyone to know the answers and to recite sitting up straight, looking at her. So she would frown at him, sour and suspicious and motionless at her desk, and after a few panicked seconds Jules would repeat the answer, not looking down at his book, coming out with the answer that was the only right answer, the words that were the only words to be spoken at this particular moment: “Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in office. In eighteen sixty-five.” Then he returned to his dreaming again.
At noon hour they were herded into a “lunchroom” where they ate their lunch out of paper bags brought from home, and fifteen minutes later they were herded out to the “playground.” Beyond the fence, out on Howard Street, trucks bound for the bridge to Canada rumbled by, and Jules felt a sharp envy for adults who could drive back and forth across the continent and even into a foreign country. They need never return to any particular home. In their trucks they were elegant, free, the distance they covered was godly and magical. But he fooled around with the other kids, letting their jokes and fighting drive such things out of his mind, and when he was feeling especially good he plotted strategies for them. He thought of himself as a commander of some sort. A general, an admiral, a minister of war. He got his friends to ambush other kids or to sneak back into the school building, which was forbidden. He made plans for them; sometimes he drew diagrams for them to follow. “Now you got to take this route, the side route,” he would say sternly, poking one of the boys, “and you, you got to take the other route. I won’t stand for no mess. Deserters will be shot.” He happened to be taller than most of his friends, and some accident of voice or energy kept him ahead of them; he bullied them until they could no longer take it and ganged up on him, then scattered and came back in a day or two, unable to resist him, drawn by his ideas and his daring. He led them into the basement of the school, chanting, “On to the Tigris! On to the Euphrates! The Mississippi! The Hanging Gardens of Babylon!” His magic words drove them on, frightened and giggling. If they were caught, it was always Jules who was blamed.
“You have the Devil in you,” the Mother Superior told him one day.
He sat in her dour office, a captive. She was a large woman like his grandmother, and in her own way just as coarse and strong; he had to respect her. She was not quite a woman, like his mother and Sister Mary Jerome, but he respected her. With three careful, hard blows she struck his extended hands, his shoulder, and the side of his head.
“Why are you always getting into trouble? Why can’t you sit still right now? Why are you so bad?” she asked him angrily.
“I’m sorry, Sister,” said Jules.
He had been caught smoking in the boys’ room. The janitor had walked in on him.
“Who taught you to smoke?”
“Nobody, Sister.”
“Who gave you cigarettes?”
“Nobody, Sister.”
“Did you steal them?”
“No, Sister.”
“Where did you get them from?”
Silence. Jules sat in the hard-backed chair, wondering how he looked and whether his face was red, whether the other kids would be able to see the marks of Sister’s fingers on his face. Sister leaned across her desk, grunting, and struck him again on the side of the head. He fell back against the chair. His nose began to bleed.
“Don’t you have a handkerchief?”
“Yes.”
“Then use it! Are you that much of a pig?”
He held his handkerchief to his nose, glad for something to hide behind, frightened and miserable and yet a little excited by this attention. Why did he feel so excited whenever anyone looked at him, even if it was a glance that preceded a blow?
“Do you want to wind up in the electric chair?”
“No, Sister.”
“Yes, I think you do. I think that’s what the Devil in you is planning.”
She spoke seriously, even a little flatly. It was clear to Jules that she was not inventing, not calculating; she was recalling. His future was known to her, like the past. She knew everything. Jules sniffed the blood back into his head, not wanting to make a mess. It got into the back of his mouth somehow and he had to swallow it. Giddy, the taste of this bad blood. He would get drunk.
Sister was talking about a boy who had been bad in this school ten years before. He was now at the state penitentiary for life; he should really have been sent to the electric chair. But he would go to Hell when he died. “Do you want to wind up like that?”
“No, Sister.”
“A certain number of boys must grow up to die in the electric chair,” Sister said distantly.
He thought suddenly of the lovely flash of electricity that would kill him: he’d seen preparations for many electrocutions, in the movies and in comic books. Hangings, firing squads, gas—these were promised as well, and in other countries you could be garroted, but the electric chair, with its clumsy, homely similarity to ordinary chairs, fascinated him. She was staring over Jules’s head. Then she looked at him again with her distant, cold gaze.
“Your sister Maureen is in Sister Mary Jerome’s room, isn’t she?”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Your sister is a very good girl. A good student.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“And your other sister, Betty, tries hard.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Why are you different?”
She was silent for a while, contemplating him. Women contemplated and judged, he had discovered; men did the hitting, but without thinking about it. Their blows were senseless, had to be avoided, that was all. But women were always thinking, sifting, judging, preparing. Jules sat very straight, his handkerchief to his nose. He waited. Into his mind came a sudden weird thought—maybe Sister Mary Jerome would get fed up with all of this, all this crap, the ugly building and the ugly nuns, the noisy, bratty kids, the snot-nosed kids, the early Mass, the stink from the lavatories; maybe one day he would see her out on the street, strolling the way certain other young women strolled, watchful and without a destination, their eyes alert for passing cars. Sister Jerome’s pale nervous face would do
well in such a setting: there were too many overdone faces. Jules had gathered from innumerable arguments between his mother and father and between his parents and his father’s relatives that his mother had been “out on the street” once and hadn’t even been able to succeed at that. “What a cow, what a stupid cow! Ain’t that the last straw!” His father had laughed about this many times; his father brought out this old story whenever he was drunk. It seemed to please him. So Jules imagined Sister Jerome in an outfit like her nun’s outfit, with long black skirts and sleeves and a kind of hood, making her way toward the hazy downtown streets, timid and a little arrogant, and he, Jules, coming up beside her and saying, “My ma would love for you to come home with me. You can have supper with us right now…” And she would come to live with them.
After school, if he couldn’t get a job at the five-and-ten, he drifted around with a few other boys, in and out of alleys, on the lookout for whatever they could find. Because the streets here were heavy with traffic and because trucks were parked everywhere, their territory was broken up; they couldn’t see very far ahead of them. They played in vacant lots and down toward the bridge, where the river lapped up dead fish and great floating streams of oil. They fooled around in warehouses, in parked trucks, explored the railroad yard, the Trans-American Cartage Company, the Greyhound garage, anything. They collected pop bottles and kicked through gutters looking for crumpled popsicle wrappers that could be saved up for prizes. When their mood was more restless they drifted into small grocery stores, and the smallest of the boys played chickie for them up front while Jules himself, smooth and blind with daring, would march right out with a ten-cent pie stuck in his pocket. A few times he was caught and knocked around, but most of the time he got out safely. When he escaped he felt curiously deflated, disappointed. The territory he wandered in stretched from about 21st Street to about 10th Street.
When he was loose on the street, though, his heart was still with Sister Mary Jerome: when he was bad he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help being bad. He couldn’t help feeling guilty. He went to confession and said breathlessly to the old priest on the other side of the confessional, “I was inattentive during Mass. I was disobedient to my mother and father. I neglected my morning and night prayers…” One by one the sentences came from him, exactly the same every week, and he kept in the back of his mind his sinful fascination with Sister Mary Jerome and his occasional thefts and his slapping around of certain kids who wouldn’t obey him. Of God he had no thoughts at all. He had no belief in God, no interest. He pressed his fingertips against his eyeballs and tried to imagine, deep in the interior of his own brain, a being not quite himself who watched him, angry and hateful and loving of him, but he could not imagine it, not really; who beside Jules could love or hate Jules? When he turned quickly on the street it was usually to see no one—nothing. There was nothing behind him. Nothing followed him. At night, when he woke suddenly, there was nothing close to him, breathing over him, watching. He was only himself, free. But it was still possible that he had a devil in him; a devil was to his imagination a kind of persistent failing, a dragging over to one side, as when a car’s tires begin to go on one side and drag everything over that way, relentlessly. If he had a devil, the devil’s name was Jules also. This devil might draw him to the electric chair. Ramie Malone said that if you killed somebody in Chicago you would go to the chair because they didn’t fool around. Chicago seemed attractive to Jules.
On Thursdays he was impatient to get into the assembly room, wanting to hear Sister Jerome’s music. He was angry with the thumping footsteps of the other students. All those stupid kids! Those snot-nosed little bastards! Jules sat hunched forward in his seat, drowned with love for Sister’s deft fingers and arms. During the assembly Sister Jerome sat off to one side on the stage, primly and quietly. Jules’s eyes burned upon her. He did not think she was a beautiful woman but he had no interest in beauty; he needed something fierce and pure, lips without lipstick, a pale, grave brow, a face shimmering with tears.
One day, after the assembly, he made his way up toward the stage. He said to Sister, “That piano playing is so nice…”
She looked around at him in alarm.
“I like to listen to piano music,” Jules said, nearly stammering.
She tried to smile. “Do you have a piano at home?”
She was putting together sheets of music; the knuckles of her hands were white and prominent. “No, not at home,” he mumbled.
She bowed her head, silent, as if his words puzzled her, then turned and disappeared behind the heavy velvet curtain. Jules wanted to call after her but could not speak, could not think of anything to say. She did not return. He wandered out into the sunlight, making fists, staring at his own knuckles, and wondering if he could learn to play the piano.
After that he hung around her homeroom from time to time, standing with his arms folded, waiting for her or for something. Nothing happened. If she noticed him she gave no sign. She hurried by, her head ducked, her face very pale, and in her arms books and papers. His very soul shivered at the rattling of her long black loose rosary.
Maureen came up to him in the hall and said curiously, “What are you doing here?”
“Go to hell,” he said, blushing.
Sister Jerome gave piano lessons in the auditorium to certain girls on certain days. Jules managed to find out these days. He crouched in the darkness at the rear of the room, staring at the half-lit stage, at Sister’s grave bent head and her pale, humorless, precise lips as she said sternly, “One-two, one-two, one-two—what are you doing?” The piano’s pedals thumped, the notes were hollow and too loud. Jules crouched in the darkness and dreamed of certain tender things, his fantasies stroked by her one-two, one-two, the relentless rhythm of her half-angry voice. Why was she so angry, what was it that kept her pale and held back, so timid? He imagined her tears flowing to violence as brutal, brutal music broke from her, all that was held back by that one-two, one-two of her music lessons. He believed that he loved her.
Then came the hours after school, a reluctant freedom. Maureen and Betty would straggle home and Jules would be out for a few hours running loose, until, exhausted and sometimes bloody, he showed up at the house (they lived now in a two-family house) around six. By then his mother’s first round of anger would have quieted down, and Betty or maybe even Maureen would be shut up in the clothes closet to “cool off.” So Jules could make his appearance safely. He would say, eying his mother’s loose, soiled bathrobe and a certain arrogant puffiness about her face, “You want me to do anything around here before he comes home?” This put the two of them together, as if on a raft, against him. He wanted her to feel that. And, softened by his gentlemanly tone, his mother might hug him and tell him there was garbage, yes, he could take outside. Or he could run and let Betty or Maureen out of the clothes closet.
Loretta was not always drunk. Sometimes she came home from shopping, wearing a pretty dress and high heels, her hair coming loose but not yet a mess, and she would put out on the kitchen table all the things she’d bought, for Jules and his sisters to look through. Most of it was food. He was fascinated by cans and cellophane packages being produced out of a big brown bag by his mother’s fingers, and Loretta herself enjoyed taking these things out, all these unsurprising surprises. She said to them, “Oh, you stupid dopes! You’re crazy, there’s nothing in here! What do you expect, huh? You’re pests! Julie, you’re a big dope! You think it’s Christmas or maybe your birthday?”
But she was pleased herself. She gave them stamps of green or yellow and the three kids haggled over which of them should paste them in the stamp book. They were supposed to take turns, but in his enthusiasm Jules could never quite remember whose turn it was; he kept insisting it was his. “Give them to Jules, he does the best job,” his mother would always say finally, and that shut up the girls. She was wobbly and warm, his mother, and if she gave in it was usually to him; Maureen was the good girl but
something about her quiet face put Loretta off. “She’s always looking at me, that one. Watching,” Loretta complained. Betty, who was a short, tough, noisy kid, had none of Maureen’s looks and none of Jules’s brains; she made her way by shouting and nudging. Jules and Maureen tended to ignore her. She had no dignity; she did not count.
When their father came home there was not always trouble. Sometimes he came home for supper on time, and he sat at the table with them and ate, and after supper he sat in the living-room and dozed over a newspaper. He had a hairy, large head with prominent ears that gave the appearance of hearing everything, though he was really getting deaf, Jules thought, or getting too lazy to hear. He couldn’t believe that his father had ever been a cop. What a laugh! How could that fat bastard reach for a gun—how could he get it out in time to use? Jules was secretive and polite around his father, fearing his father’s quick temper and his cruelty, but he was open with his mother and the girls: “That old bastard gets next to me, I tell you. One of these days…”
Sometimes there was trouble when his father came home drunk. On these nights there was nothing to do but get out. Loretta went across the way to a girl friend’s house, where the two of them played cards most of the night and sucked Royal Crown Cola or beer, and Jules and the girls went outside if the weather was good enough. They wandered down the alley, free, on their own. Most of the time they climbed to the roof of an apartment building where some of their friends lived, and some of these kids spent the night out—some sneaked out, some had to get out because things were too rough. Maureen sat with her back against the ledge and slept, her arms on her knees, her head drooping onto her arms; Betty fooled around; Jules would look restlessly out over what he could see of the neighborhood and of Detroit, making plans—the next morning he would ask Sister Jerome if he could take piano lessons from her; the next afternoon he would steal something large and salable, maybe a radio; the next evening he would split his father’s skull in two with an ax, then take off across the country, following a map. Why not? Why not across the country, why not across the world? He yearned for the freedom of trucks and trains and planes. Why not split his father’s stupid solid head? Why not seize Sister Jerome’s pale thin hand and bring it to his lips?