Joe was devoted to basketball. He practiced his layups and bank shots for an hour every day, using the backboard and hoop posted above our tarred-over carport. He wore terrycloth sweatbands on his head and both wrists. For his birthday, he asked for tube socks and extra lead bars for his ankle weights. Whenever he was waiting for me at the barbershop or Dr. F.’s, he’d snag all the free trial-subscription offers for basketball magazines. He used them methodically, so he appeared to be a regular subscriber and became eligible for all the superstar posters they gave away free to paying customers.
Joe figured out how to mount the posters of Wilt Chamberlain and John Havlicek with masking tape on flattened cardboard boxes he collected from the A&P, and he suspended them from the wooden ceiling molding with string all around his half of our bedroom. We weren’t allowed to nail into the wall, except for crucifixes over our beds and a small foot-square mirror for combing our hair in the mornings, which was always off-kilter, like the parts in our hair, because we stuffed the blessed palms from Palm Sunday behind the mirror. Joe’s ability to invent a poster gallery without breaking any rules or wall plaster caught everyone off guard. At dinner, we discussed how this was a prime example of Joe’s bad habit of doing things according to the letter of the law.
My mother must have complained privately to one of the older kids, because somebody taped up four felt banners on my side of the bedroom—two greenish ones from the Ice Capades and two red ones from the Ice Follies from years before I was born. I really didn’t know if the banners were supposed to be revenge against Joe, home decor, or just proof that the older kids had attended big-ticket sporting events in person when our father was alive. Joe said ice shows weren’t real sports, which annoyed me because I had no other memorabilia. After a bitter argument, I threatened to tell my mother his posters were giving me trouble sleeping. Then Joe said maybe he would consider the Capades a semipro sports event, but definitely not the Follies.
In sixth grade, Joe was still constantly acting surprised that our seven older brothers and sisters were no more interested in his basketball career than they were in our piano lessons or paper route. He used to ask me if I’d noticed that neither of our brothers ever wanted to play one-on-one or coach you in calisthenics. Usually he would ask while he was flat on his back and sweating. I was supposed to be timing his leg raises, but I would lose count and he’d get frustrated and warn me that I was showing signs of lacking the discipline to be a sports star. He’d be lying on his back with his ankle-weighted legs in the air. Despite all we’d heard about our brother Jack—he was practically world famous in our family for being a natural athlete—Joe would darkly add, Name one Downing who ever got a varsity letter.
I’d say Jack, in any sport he tried. And maybe Peg, I’d guess, in basketball and softball and swimming. I knew Joe wouldn’t count a girl, but she was my next-best bet because she was four inches taller than Gerard, and stronger and faster. She also had much better natural aim with balls and rocks. I would add Gerard, in debating.
Usually Joe’s legs would be shaking in midair by then, and he’d be panting when he’d say, That’s why they all have letter sweaters and hero jackets, I suppose.
That I suppose was cynical, according to my mother, and I didn’t like it from Joe any more than she did, so I’d estimate his legs had been in the air for only 24 seconds, or something way below his record. Even though he knew I was lying, he’d keep going until his head started to vibrate. I’d spend the rest of the day scouring everybody’s closets and bureau drawers for evidence of athletic prowess to prove Joe wrong, until a housecoat with snaps or a pair of particularly complicated sling-back shoes with buckles caught my eye.
Unlike Joe, I was not eager to have my older brothers coach me. When I was eight, a new kid named Danny moved onto our street and tried to make friends with me. I was interested in him because he was new, and he was my size, and he kept his Red Sox jacket zippered up to his chin, even if you invited him indoors, because he’d always sneaked out of the house wearing his pajama tops instead of a proper shirt. Also, he owned a jump rope, which I coveted. In my house, only the girls got those.
One day, Danny and I got into a fight about something—my father was dead and his father was in Arizona, and figuring out who was worse off occasioned a lot of fights. Neither Danny nor I had ever landed a blow. We both twirled our arms like propellers and threatened to move closer, and then we’d get tired and call it even. But this time, Gerard, who was too old to be playing with us, came out of the house and sat on one of the swings in the backyard and watched our fight. He called us both sissies and yelled, Stop slapping the air. Make a fist.
I did, and Danny stopped whirring and said, I dare you, and he put his hands on his hips and bent toward me. Maybe he double-dared me.
Gerard said, Punch him.
I punched Danny in the head, and he fell down crying. I felt like crying, too, but Gerard said, He took a dive, which I didn’t understand, so I ran away. My hand hurt, but I wouldn’t look at it. I had a terrible feeling that part of Danny’s skull and some of his hair was stuck to my knuckles. That night, I worried that Danny would call the cops or my mother, but he didn’t. He came over the next day with his jacket zippered up and said, I’m sorry.
I wanted to tell him that I liked his jacket, but I was too ashamed to say anything.
Danny said, I’m not a sissy, though.
I said, Neither am I.
And after that we couldn’t figure out how to be friends. Danny and his mother moved away a few months later. I never had another fist-fight. Nobody ever punched me in the head. I did learn how to tie old window cords together to make a jump rope, and my brother Gerard said it was okay as long as I told everybody I was training to become a boxer.
Joe was never accused of being a sissy. The problem with Joe was that he wanted to become good at things. This went against the idea that members of our family could “wing it” in most situations that other people had to prepare for. We used our God-given talents for winging it and devoted practice time to getting better at saving our souls.
Our daily prayer routine was rigorous—morning prayers by yourself on your knees beside your bed; grace before meals; Mass on Sundays, sometimes followed by nighttime Benediction services; Mass on holy days, brothers’ and sisters’ birthdays, every morning in Lent, all during the month of May to honor Mary, every First Friday of the Month to beef up your plenary indulgence account, and First Saturdays as well—though I suspected early on that this was my mother’s personal innovation, sort of like the coach who makes you do fingertip pushups; ejaculations like “Jesus Save Me” or “Blessed be Mary, Mother of God” for a couple of minutes, at least, on the way to and from school every day, and when you were bored and not allowed to work ahead in class; a sign of the cross and another ejaculation or two whenever you heard an ambulance or fire-truck siren; the Rosary after dinner “as a family”; night prayers by your bed, occasionally with a monitor at your door to make sure you weren’t skipping essential beseechments and litanies; and once you were in bed, you received a final dousing with Holy Water—Gatorade for sleeping spiritual athletes—from the wall-mounted font in the upstairs hall. There was also a Holy Water dispenser by the back door, in the kitchen, which Joe dipped into every time he left the house.
This stuff was just normal. But practicing or training or even quitting smoking for sports or musical instruments meant you were missing the whole point of being one of the Downings. Joe was always in danger of becoming a scrupulous fanatic with the wrong priorities, and one of the best things the older kids could do for him was to try to get him to lighten up with jokes about his training regimens.
Joe often tried to convince me that we were at a disadvantage because our dead father was not able to teach us anything useful, but I mostly liked things the way they were. Unlike Joe or our older brothers, and like most of my sisters, I was a natural swimmer. Every summer, about a week after swimming lessons ended at Pontoosuc Lake, I would enter a few events in the Berkshire County Swimming Championships and come in fifth or sixth. In fourth grade, these races were moved