The phone rang, Rory’s pencil hesitated above a page of fractions dividing fractions. Came his mother’s expected voice, “Rory! Phone!”
“Someone else!” Rory pleaded.
“No, you, now.”
He left pencil and homework on the folding TV tray table in the nook between refrigerator and kitchen corner where he studied. His mother waited near the phone. He took up the receiver. “Hello,” he said in his firmest treble.
“Mrs. Leary?”
Rory knew the script from prior performances. “No, this is Rory,” he said. “May I ask who’s calling?”
“Tell her it’s Mr. Ghilardi.” The voice held gravel that was none of the phone’s doing.
Mr. Ghilardi rented the house to them. Rory had seen him more than once but only by parts when his mother placed herself across the front doorway to block his entry, and from this the sum: A man shorter than her, gray hair slicked imperfectly back, front panels of a short-sleeved plaid shirt untucked by his belly from his belt, rheumy brown eyes under lushly untamed brows in a dried-apple face a range of odd folds and excrescences.
“I’ll look for her, Mr. Ghilardi,” Rory said and looked at her.
She shook her head.
Rory counted slowly in one-eighth fractions – one eighth, one quarter, three eighths, one half, to one – then in their inverses, then uncovered the mouthpiece. “She’s not available.”
“When will she be?” said the rough voice.
The unwritten script said, and so did Rory, “I don’t know.”
His mother made wringing gestures with fists side by side.
Thus reminded, Rory added, “You can’t get blood from a turnip. Thank you. Goodbye.” and hung up.
His mother kissed his forehead.
“Why am I the one for this?” he said. He was in fact one of seven, with an eighth coming.
“Because you’re best at it.” Her big rosy cheeks bloomed in a smile and she passed her long fingers, once a pianist’s, across the dark buzzcut she had given him that week.
He returned to the nook and the sheet of fractions. His mother remained in the kitchen to put away dishes he and his older sister Maurie had washed and dried but been too short to replace on their high shelves. She hummed something and it was a distraction. He had no other place to study. A room away his father presided before the television in sweatsuit and laborworn sprawl on a recliner, the day’s grit and smear and sweat freshly showered from him, while on the carpet at his sides clustered faces wore the screen’s glow. The bunks and dressers in the small room Rory and his brothers shared left nowhere to sit, one bunk too tight above the other, the floor too narrowed for chair and tray table. He was in any case too eaten by questions to continue homework.
He left it for his mother’s side. “How is it,” he said, “that what you have me say is not a lie, and so a sin?”
She turned to him and stiffened. “Think carefully,” she said. “What I’ve taught you to say is no lie.”
“But how is it true?” He was in reach of her right hand, but he was growing and so feared it less. He believed he saw her weigh its use.
She said at last, “The Jesuits called it ‘mental reservation.’ They told enough truth to keep an evil from doing them harm, but no untruth. They had no obligation to tell the whole truth.”
What here, Rory wondered, was the evil? He had seen the writing of checks to Mr. Ghilardi. He knew that the last months had not been ordinary. His father had left the house less regularly for work. Rory had heard arguments that had no sense for him, the name of a woman he didn’t know snarled from his mother’s lips, and from his father’s, “I give you enough. Where does it go?” and then the right hand caught and held an instant from his father’s cheek, dark with the day’s grime and hard now from his fury. To this he could add, as some fractions of the whole, cost of heat and light in this chill season of rain and wind and the growls of seven bellies. “Will Mr. Ghilardi make us leave?” he asked.
His mother eased a moment and swayed as though she thought to bend and embrace him. “Mr. Ghilardi is a good Catholic,” she said soft-voiced. “He’d be very slow to put a Catholic family out. He might never.”
“Then what is the threat I keep away by … by not committing the sin of lying?” Rory said this as it came to him and only then considered the hand. He closed eyes to await it.
It didn’t come. “You have your homework, don’t you?” said his mother, and she left the kitchen.
He returned to the nook and tried to resume his work. In his mathematics each single-digit whole number had a character, a near-human personality – the four, for example, stolid and hard-working, the three wild and undisciplined except in music, and the seven that combined them clever and adept in navigating the stark world. He had been puzzling how the dramas of their interactions would play on the stage of fractions and delighting in the puzzle, but the numbers now lay inert on the page. He was turned from them to imagining the blood of a turnip, if blood it had. This would not be like his own when it dripped red from cut or scrape. It would, he supposed, run clear, with a heat and sharpness in its taste. He asked himself where – if he were of the family of the turnip-blooded – it might in reservation flow in him.
*
Father Sánchez faced the class. Rory’s row was seventh of the class’s front-to-back rows and rightmost of its seven across. Seven by seven: The class was an array of cleverness, and outside in its San Francisco neighborhood, where men cut adrift by fading shipyards and industries rode the day’s tide, and where the crisp hard rhythms of gunshot some nights supplanted the dithyrambs of firecrackers, any adeptness from seven-by-seven was – even Rory knew, unversed in adult realities as he understood himself to be – a thing to be sought and, once gained, prized. Father Sánchez looked back and forth, up and down the multihued faces above forty-nine forest green wool cardigans, twenty-six above the white Peter Pan collars of girls, twenty-three surmounting the white point collars of boys, while Sister Athanasius introduced him, whom they all knew. She wore still the long black habit that the younger nuns, given recent opportunity, had abandoned.
“Father,” she said, “wishes to speak to you today of vocation.”
The priest had removed his jacket and was in short black sleeves. His forearms were much more slender than Rory’s father’s, which Rory assumed his own would someday resemble. After a “Good morning” and bright-toothed smile in the dark olive face that told Rory this visit would be friendly, not admonitory, Father Sánchez said, “My children, a ‘vocation’ is a calling of God to the kind of life any one of us is to live.” He went on to list by example many occupations, some of which Rory didn’t recognize, but most known to him from his neighborhood’s daily sweat and one, Carpenter, from his father’s.
“Like Saint Joseph,” said the priest, his accent charming the “J” into a “Ch.” “And for some of you boys, the vocation may be to the priesthood, like mine, and for some of you girls, it may be to serve the Lord in a community of sisters, as does Sister Athanasius. I pray this will be so. You have time, all of you, to come to know your calling, but even now you can ask in your prayers what it is. Do this, and someday you will know, whether by a sign or by a feeling. I felt mine when I was not much older than you, as I knelt one day in the Catedral de Santa María in my birthplace of Trujillo, Perú. Please join me now in prayer. O Lord Jesus, o Holy Mother Mary….”
Rory listened past the melody and trilled R’s of the priest’s continuing tenor for some first rustle of response to what it asked. He heard the fidgets of the class’s boys in their deskbound constraint.
This seemed too ordinary to speak for God.
He heard beyond the classroom windows the skirl of gulls contesting on the play yard the remnants of lunches not long ago finished. This, too, was ordinary, but did inspire in him a question: Did stronger gulls always prevail, or was there sometimes a gull, a seventh maybe, who took the contest by cleverness?
*
Arturo’s brother and brother’s friends ruled their block, which Rory walked going to and from school. Some few of them were always there, on or near the sidewalk, except on rainier winter days, and even then Rory would meet from within his raincoat hood the eyes of one or another posted at a window. Arturo had another brother whom Rory had known from walking the block while he was yet smaller, but who now had to be away. Rory had asked “Away where?” only once. Arturo’s pinched lips and turn told him not to ask again.
Arturo was Rory’s friend. After school they walked together as far as the block. In some of these walks Arturo professed his love for Diana Rinaldi. Whatever his feelings for girls, Rory qualified none as love, which seemed reserved for when his treble broke; but friendship committed him to acknowledging the reality of Arturo’s love for Diana Rinaldi.
In class she sat directly in front of Rory and to Arturo’s right. Every day confronted Rory with Diana Rinaldi’s blond hair, which she wore always in single thick French braid at the back of her head. He had asked her once how she could be Italian and so blond. This departed from the norm he had known in the parish. “We’re Po River Italian” had been her reply, quick and sure enough to tell him it was family habit, as was in his own “Granda was out a back door in Cahirciveen as the Black and Tans came through the front.”
Several times daily the braid took more of Rory’s eye than Sister Athanasius’s chalk marks or the letters and numbers splayed on his desk. The hair’s rich wave swelled the braid, and the braid’s volume in deepening the plaits and their internal shadows combined dusky tones with the blond in a spectacle that changed with each movement of her head and with each gradient of daylight through the near windows.
One afternoon as his eyes wandered the braid’s landscape of hillock and ravine Rory glimpsed Arturo’s hand extending a folded paper across the aisle to Diana Rinaldi.
Sister Athanasius, whose face had been to the board, turned at that moment just enough to see the paper offered. “Arturo Sandoval,” she said, turning now completely to him, “bring that here.”
The green wool of his cardigan hunched, he obeyed.
She did not take the paper from him. “Anything to be shared in class,” she said, “is to be shared with the class. Read.”
He unfolded the paper and stared at it in silence.
“Read.”
“You are so beautiful. I love you so much. When can I kiss you?” The voice was smaller than Rory had ever known it.
“I’ll have that now,” Sister Athanasius said. “Back to your desk.”
Rory’s friend came hunched still down the aisle. Just before his desk he lifted his eyes to Diana Rinaldi. Rory saw not the least stir of her head Arturo’s way.
The instant they reached the street after class Rory put himself at Arturo’s side. As they walked nothing that came to Rory’s thoughts seemed fit to pass his lips. He matched Arturo’s pace wordlessly, then, in hope of shouldering some of his hurt. Along Mission Street, just after they passed an old woman sweeping the sidewalk, they arrived at a cluster of empty beer bottles at the foot of stairs to a house recently vacant, like others in the neighborhood. Most of the bottles stood upright, but some had toppled. A few had broken.
They were just one side of Arturo’s line of travel.
“Watch out,” said Rory.
But Arturo veered slightly and aimed a foot through them. Bottles flew and shattered loudly. The force and reach of his sweep having unbalanced him a little, Arturo stumbled but did not fall, and immediately his shoulder was in silence again by Rory’s.
Turning his head to note this, Rory side-glimpsed that the woman had paused her broom and stared.
A half-block on he glanced back. A police Ford had stopped by her. She spoke through its open passenger-side window and gestured toward him and Arturo.
As Rory continued with Arturo he listened to the distinctive roar of the Ford as it sped toward them. It stopped just ahead of them. Arturo’s cardigan hunched.
“Hey,” said the policeman in the passenger seat. He and his partner, who looked younger, came from the car to block the path of Rory’s brown-skinned friend, but not Rory’s. Rory stopped anyway. Both policemen hooked thumbs into black belts with cross-hatched tooling so that one hand was by holstered pistol, the other by can of mace. “What do you think you’re doing, breaking glass?” the younger policeman said to Arturo.
The older gestured with chin at Arturo’s uniform sweater and salt-and-pepper corduroy trousers. “What would the Sisters do if they knew you were breaking glass?”
Rory watched the small twist of the body beside his and felt its misery.
“Breaking glass on a City sidewalk is vandalism,” the younger policeman said to Arturo. “That could get you Juvie.” Rory and all his acquaintances knew this to mean Juvenile Hall, jail for boys.
Rory had never contemplated the distinction between a policeman in blue with seven-pointed star and a policeman in black and tan. He wondered if the latter’s reputation for abundant violence, in his family’s telling, applied to the former. He felt in this moment they might at least be kin. Heat rose in him, but no red took his eyes. They saw clear, hot, sharp. It came to him: Turnip-blooded. “It wasn’t his fault,” he said loudly.
The policemen looked at him for the first time.
“I was talking to him. He looked at me. He tripped over a bottle. It broke. So did a bunch of others. He’s lucky he didn’t fall and get cut up.” Rory spoke with a vehemence that did not seem to himself uncalculated, but surprised him nonetheless. He accompanied his statement with an acting-out of Arturo’s near-fall. “Who is it leaves this stuff on the sidewalk for us to trip over?” he concluded. “Why aren’t they in trouble, not us?”
It was all truth, so far as he told it.
The younger policeman regarded him impassively, but the older let go of his belt and crossed his arms. After a moment he said, “Be more careful.” He started toward the car. He stopped and turned again to Arturo. “What’s your name?” he said.
“Arturo Sandoval,” said Rory’s friend.
With a glance at Rory, the policeman asked Arturo, “The Sandovals up there?” He flicked his head toward the block.
Arturo’s nod was small.
Looking still at Arturo, the policeman held an index finger to his own eye. Then he and his partner were in the car. The roar carried it away.
Rory and Arturo took the last steps to the block in silence. At his door, Arturo caught Rory’s cardigan and, turning Rory toward him, touched right shoulders.
From across the street, Arturo’s brother and the rulers of the block watched.
Arturo’s and Diana Rinaldi’s eyes didn’t once cross the aisle in the next day’s class. Although he told himself his friend’s pain was no fault of hers, Rory’s inevitable regard of her blond braid putrefied through the day into revulsion. At recess, across the play yard and away from Rory’s ear, her friends knotted around her and glanced singly or in bunches at Arturo, and Rory saw but did not hear gusts of laughter blow through them.
He kept to Arturo’s side. He wished Arturo had a crew beside him, as Diana Rinaldi did. Arturo needed one.
He was by Arturo again on the walk home. When they reached the block, before arriving at Arturo’s door, Rory saw Arturo’s brother stand from the window of a BMW, where he and the young white driver had just touched hands, and start from the street toward them. Two of the brother’s companions crossed the street in something both of saunter and swagger to join him. The three stood athwart Rory’s path.
“Little man,” Arturo’s brother said to him.
Rory did not believe this attention a threat, but belief was not certainty and did not preclude fear. They were all three bigger than him and likely faster. If they meant to hurt him, he had no hope in either fight or escape.
“Little man,” Arturo’s brother said, “little bro told us what you did yesterday. You have skills. We admire skills. They can be useful. We talked. We talked to people. We all think you should come hang with us, so we get to know you.”
Something in the voice, a voice broken within Rory’s memory out of a boyhood very like his own among meager cabinets and freighted men, a voice now richening into baritone, this something seemed to Rory a calling.
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