Table of Contents
7. Second Verse, Same as the First
7. Second Verse, Same as the First
for Peter Bryant
The peculiar striations that define someone’s personality are too numerous to know, no matter how close the observer. A person we think we know can suddenly become someone else when previously hidden strands of his character are called to the fore by circumstance.
—Elliot Perlman, Seven Types of Ambiguity
Elementary School
1. Occupational Hazards
Sister Rose was young for a nun. She had blue eyes and sometimes cried in class, so I was not surprised years later when I heard she’d left the convent. Her blond hair often caused her problems by sticking out around her ears, and there was a lot of whispering during recess about her not being holy enough to shave her head like a total nun. I think she might have been a rookie when I had her. She often had to go out into the hall to adjust her veil, and instead of lying, she’d tell us all exactly what she’d been up to out there. This was a mistake. It let us know we could leave class to get a drink of water or pee whenever we felt like it.
During the first week of school, I noticed that Sister Rose didn’t know half the things my kindergarten teacher had known. For instance, she tried to force us to take naps while sitting in our chairs with our heads resting on our wooden desks. By the second week, some kids just ignored her and went back to the cloakroom and curled up on their jackets for half an hour. Also, she never prepared snacks, and when we complained about it, she told us that snacks weren’t the teacher’s responsibility. This didn’t inspire confidence.
Our lessons never went as well as she hoped they would. Reading groups were a perfect example. First of all, when she divided us all up, she pretended to think really hard before choosing a bird name for each group. Notre Dame was a Catholic school, so most kids had plenty of older brothers and sisters. We knew what was coming. You just hoped you didn’t get labeled as a chickadee or some other puny bird. Second, Sister Rose pretended the sparrows were just as good as anybody else, as if first-graders had never heard of the American bald eagle. Third and worst of all, after we got into our groups, instead of patrolling the aisles with a ruler or some other weapon, Sister Rose usually sat on her desk at the front of the classroom, smiling and swinging her legs. She looked like a swimming instructor who forgot to take off her shoes. Nobody was afraid of her.
Birds will be birds. A blue jay would overhear a stupid mistake in another group and crack a joke, and one of the girl chickadees would start bawling halfway through her out-loud sentence. Sister Rose would call her up to the front of the classroom and make her stand there until she stopped crying. Then one of the robins would start chirping and flapping his wings like a scared baby chick, and he’d be called up to the front, along with a couple of the other boys who thought he was so funny. As a result, Sister Rose was constantly sharing the stage with the most entertaining kids in first grade.
I liked Sister Rose for her unmanageable hair and her blue eyes and because she allowed a few of us to work ahead when she was having discipline problems. Still, I had my doubts. I complained about her to my best friend, Joey T., early in the school year.
Joey T. lived across the street from me in a duplex that his family owned. They needed the rent because their father worked for General Electric, which forced men to get up early and leave the house before their kids ate breakfast. My family was proud of GE’s patriotic past, like when the Nazis hand-wrote a secret list of bomb targets in America and made Pittsfield number two. We were right after Washington and Boston, which were in a perfect tie for first place because of the White House and Boston’s Irish Catholic population, including most of my parents’ relatives. Still, we couldn’t forgive GE for taking people who just wanted a decent life for their families and turning them into working men who couldn’t afford half the stuff I took for granted, which explained Joey T.’s getting his haircuts on the front porch without the advice of a barber.
Joey T. had bowl-cut silvery blond hair, and because he was half Polish, he was a big kid. Older boys and teachers used to put pressure on him by telling him he was a natural-born football player, but he always shrugged it off like they had him mixed up with somebody else—namely, his older brother Chucky. Chucky T. was already a sports star. He was the exactly the same age as my brother Gerard, who was sixth oldest out of the nine Downings but the smartest kid ever to come down the pike, by his own admission. As a result of being compared unfavorably to our famous brothers, Joey T. and I never got into competitions. For instance, I could freely admit his mother was a better baker than my mother based on sampling her drop cookies, both with and without the chocolate frosting. We stayed friends, even though Joey T. usually was not allowed to work ahead because he was apt to devote an hour