“If I die,” she said, “no one will be able to tell Grandma Dorsey.” I knew I would never die on a roller coaster, but I had no such confidence in the constitution of a nun, and so I allowed her to ride with me. We spent the minute-or-so of terror howling and laughing at one another. On the second hill I thought she’d lose her habit but it didn’t budge. After that, we went on the Tilt-O-Whirl and the Ferris Wheel and became fast friends.
Poised in the topmost car as the great Ferris Wheel took on a fresh load of passengers, nothing around us but a sky bleeding purple, we chatted, this nun just back from the Lord’s Missions in Guatemala and I, and for an adult she made incredible sense.
“This is my favorite place in the whole park, Danny, the top of the Ferris Wheel. From here you can see your whole life spread out down there. I can see where you live, and I can almost see my mother’s house over on Evergreen, and I can see the houses of all the people for miles.”
I agreed with her that this was a wonderful place, and she nodded happily, then surprised me with her next question.
“Do they make you feel like an oddball?”
“Who?” I asked but I knew who.
“Your family—well, mine, too. Our families, then. Do they make you feel a little strange?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” I was unsure how to answer: she was an adult, after all, and Grandma Flynn had once said she was the smartest one on either side of the family, though the men had been unwilling to go so far.
“They make me feel like one of those poor souls in the freak show,” she said.
“Are they poor souls? Will they not go to heaven?”
She laughed. “Of course they will. Maybe sooner than a lot of us. Anyhow, we’re different from the rest of the family, you and I. I’m different because I became something … something not so strange but people don’t understand why a girl does it, and so they’ll never again treat me like a normal person. I’m not a member of the family anymore, I’m a nun. My first Christmas back home after taking my vows, my own brother Gerald was calling me ‘Sister’ like I’m some character out of the Lives of the Saints. I could have brained him.”
I blinked here and gave myself away.
“You want to call me that too, don’t you? When I’m home with my family, I’m Teresa. Aunt Teresa to you.”
“What does Uncle Gerald call you now?”
“Nothing. He’s afraid to call me ‘Teresa’ and he knows I’ll do him an injury if he calls me ‘Sister’ again. He always was a little slow,” she said under her breath, but I heard her anyway.
“And you’re different because they can’t quite bring themselves to treat you like any other small boy. You’re a special problem for them, and they’re going to treat you like one. Just don’t take it to heart. Don’t think you’re a special problem. None of it is anyone’s fault, that’s the thing to remember.” I must have shown some reaction to this mention of fault, for she turned toward me, but she had misunderstood. “They all … they all mean well. You’re a lucky boy to have so many people love you. Just don’t let them drive you crazy.”
“I won’t.” We’d begun our slow descent now, and she was quiet for a moment. “Are they nice? The people there?”
“The people? In Guatemala, you mean? Oh, sure, they are, they’re grand. You’d like them—they’re like the Irish.” This seemed to strike her as a fine joke, and she put her head back and laughed, and I found myself chuckling along with her.
When the ride was finished, she patted me on the head and asked after Grandma Flynn.
“She’s fine,” I said without thinking.
“Oh, Lord, no, I’m sure she’s not fine. She’s lost her daughter, and they were great friends, your mother and Mrs. Flynn, great friends. Be very good for her.”
“I will.”
She nodded, then looked away in distraction, and I remembered that she had lost a brother. After a moment she fished a half-dollar out of some secret compartment in her habit.
“You’re a nice boy, Danny. I enjoyed our rides together.”
“Me, too, Sis … Aunt Teresa.”
“Well done. Here.” She handed me the fifty-cent piece, made a brisk turn on her heel, and walked off, tall and handsome and self-assured, ignoring the many curious faces that took a moment to gawk at her. My Uncle Tom had once remarked with a rueful note that it was “too bad that one became a nun.” Uncle Mike had simply said, “Yeah, what a waste,” and though I didn’t understand what either of them meant, I knew I liked her, too.
In Riverview I entered a tiny porthole into the adult world. I was a watcher of people, I studied strangers the way I eavesdropped on my uncles, and the rickety old park rewarded me with dark glimpses into the behavior of the species. I saw fights there between older boys and once between two very drunken men outside the beer garden. They were both fat, both bleeding from scalp cuts that exaggerated their injuries and made the scene wonderfully lurid. The police came rushing over from the little police station inside the park and collared them both. As they pulled the men away, someone clapped, whether for the action of the police or the quality of the fisticuffs, I wasn’t sure.
There were other tensions in the park. I always stopped to watch at the place where you tried to make a man in a cage fall into a tub of water by hitting a target with a thrown ball. The men within the little cage were usually black, the ones outside were white, sometimes cocky young ones with good aim, but usually older men, sweating, grunting drunks. The black men sat on little perches like dark-skinned birds and laughed at the efforts of their tormentors. The more the men threw and missed, the angrier they became, muttering threats and racial epithets at the black men, who responded with loud doubts about the white men’s manhood. Once as I watched this little two-headed rite of racist hostility, my grandmother grabbed my arm and yanked me away. Behind me I heard my uncles chuckling at the scene, then a loud shout as one of the black men went into the drink.
On a humid night toward the end of that first summer, I was patrolling with my cousin Matt when we came upon a scene that struck me as something from a movie. Two groups of young men had come upon one another, four or five on a side. One group included my uncles, Tom and Mike, and a pair of their friends. The other group was led by Philly Clark. Perhaps someone had put a shoulder into someone else in the crowded midway, perhaps there had been a choice remark tossed over a shoulder. Something had already happened, I couldn’t tell what, but it was clear from the way the men had formed a pair of facing lines, and from the way they all watched Philly and my Uncle Tom, that these young men all expected trouble.
We moved closer ’til we could see the angry faces—some were angry, though a tall thin guy behind Philly looked nervous, and my Uncle Mike simply looked like a man who has found himself in an unpleasant situation out of his control. In truth these two groups had faced each other before over other matters. From opposite ends of the neighborhood, they viewed each other as rivals, for jobs, for girls, for status. Matters usually crested during the summer, for both groups fielded baseball teams that faced each other in the various men’s leagues in the parks. There had been individual fights, and at least one group effort.
I had heard Philly Clark’s name in my grandmother’s house. My uncles talked about him and my grandmother had called him a “hooligan.” From what little I’d been given, I pieced together that there was trouble between Philly and Uncle Tom, part but not all of it over a girl. At that time, I knew no more about her. More than this, they detested each other. Philly was tall and handsome, had been a star athlete at Lane Tech and, it was said, was well-connected, and not only because his father was a precinct captain.