I knew if I complained to my brother Joe, who was in third grade already, he’d probably tell me to offer it up. He’d be serious. Joe and I shared a bedroom, so I eventually complained to him anyway.
To my delight, Joe said I was in a serious situation. He said Mom would tell me to offer it up, “so leave her out of the loop.” He advised me to write a report stating everything Sister Rose was doing wrong and then leave it on her desk. When he thought about it some more, he said I should write the exact same report again and mail it to the principal of the school because I wasn’t a good enough writer yet to use carbon copying paper in public. This made me mad, so I reminded him he was famous for his bad penmanship. Joe hated being criticized for things that weren’t his fault. He reminded me that the second-grade teacher had made him write something on the blackboard a thousand times and ruined his right hand forever. He also said, I know the Nazi death grip. I can cut off your blood supply.
I said, If I had brass knuckles on, I could punch you and go through your skull.
I’d have a steel helmet, then, he said, and a Bowie knife, which is designed to spill your guts and make it feel like nothing, or maybe a paper cut, before you bleed to death.
About half of our many fights were hypothetical. Joe was a history buff and won most of them.
It was soon after Joe threatened to eviscerate me that Sister Rose made all the first-graders stand up and say aloud what their fathers did for a living. We had to do it by last names, alphabetically, she said. After a dramatic pause, Sister Rose added, “but starting with the letter Z.” The backwards rule caught us off guard, which we liked. This was the sort of teacher story you could take home to dinner. Sister Rose was starting to get the hang of it.
I only remember two of the jobs—that is, if Joey T.’s father was a welder at General Electric, and Barbara Jean’s father repaired televisions and radios. I wasn’t paying strict attention. I was nervous. When we got near the Ds, I wasn’t even sure whether I should stand up or just stay seated, but Sister Rose nodded and smiled, so I stood up.
Jobs were about the least important thing anyone did in my family. You had to have one until you figured out your vocation, but then you could quit it. The worst mistake you could make was taking a year-round office job with regular hours, which interfered with family obligations, especially in the summer, when the rest of us liked to spend a couple of hours in the morning discussing politics until my mother announced the peonies needed weeding, and the fifty-odd windows with triple-track storms and screens had to be washed, and someone had to collect in the neighborhood for the American Cancer Society.
I know that the job quiz in first grade happened in the autumn of 1964, around the first anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy. I know that his vicious murder had been the most significant event in the lives of my eight brothers and sisters that year. My mother didn’t allow any Republicans to teach us, so I bet my kindergarten teacher had set up a TV and forced my class to watch the president’s funeral. I don’t remember. Unlike normal Americans of my age, I don’t even remember where I was when I heard about the assassination.
A couple of years later, in third grade, Mrs. Shaw assigned us to interview people we knew and ask them private questions, like how they were affected by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I asked my mother. Mrs. Shaw was a lay teacher who’d already forced us to write our autobiographies, so my mother was used to her taking such an unusual interest in our personal business. This time, though, Mrs. Shaw was showing bad timing. One of the girls in my third-grade class had recently died by being thrown out of the back of a truck, and for third-graders enough was enough.
My mother ended up giving me some great quotes for my assassination story, but she started out by talking off the record about the girl who’d died. I’d been at the funeral with my class, and I’d reported on the unfriendliness of the girl’s parents to us. They’d acted like we weren’t there. My mother told me I couldn’t blame them. After Daddy died, she said, I didn’t feel anything for a long time.
My father died in 1961. After that, when something terrible happened to somebody else, my mother explained, she could make herself say all the right things at the wake and funeral, but she couldn’t feel them. She said she didn’t really feel anything for two or three years. When I asked what it felt like not to feel anything, she said either it was like everything went black or everything went blank. I wasn’t taking notes on this part, and I often tried to remember which word I’d heard, but eventually I figured out that either one would fit in and make a complete sentence.
I didn’t totally black out the Kennedy tragedy. I do remember being shown a newspaper picture of the president’s kids and feeling something like a paper cut in my guts when I noticed the little boy. I’d seen some old black-and-white photographs of my mother and the nine Downing kids lined up at public events to honor my father, and I knew exactly what it felt like to be the only one forced to wear short pants in public.
When I announced to my classmates and Sister Rose that instead of having a job my father was dead, some kid said, Already?
I sat down.
Barbara Jean said, Maybe his mother has a job.
It was the first time Barbara Jean had ever spoken out of turn. It made me brave enough to stand up again. But I didn’t have anything to add. My mother was unemployed. She did her chores every day, but none of us paid her. Plus, a couple of the older kids were in college, so my mother’s job was easier than ever, with only seven school lunches to make while we ate breakfast, and less laundry, too.
Michael’s father is with the angels in heaven, Sister Rose said, and Mrs. Downing is a saint.
I’d heard this before, but I had nothing to back it up.
Sister Rose told the class the Downings said the Rosary every single night, including weekends. Obviously, she’d been doing her homework. And she added, “as a family,” just in case some kid was thinking about mentioning an old aunt or a grandmother who owned some rosary beads. Sister Rose also hinted there was a lot more where that came from, and then she suggested that the other kids go home and ask their mothers and fathers if they could say the Rosary as a family.
This was the final blow to the significance of jobs and the sort of people who had them. I mean, Sister Rose didn’t tell us to go home and ask our parents to teach us to weld or how to repair our own TVs.
I’m sure I sat down and the next kid with a D name stood up. I ignored him. I probably worked ahead in my phonics book. Even the chickadees and sparrows knew the game was over unless your father was an archangel, or the president of the United States.
To show my gratitude to Sister Rose, I let it be known that she was now my favorite teacher. I was good at the important subjects in school, like any Downing, but it helped to be able to coast on my family’s prayerful reputation when it came to math so I could get into a good college and major in the liberal arts. This was the most effective way of not turning higher education into a career mill. Your next-best choice was the social sciences. Whenever one of their friends decided to major in nursing or business administration, my brothers and sisters would lead a dinner discussion to identify the most boring or sickening aspects of the job that poor person would be stuck with after graduation.
Everything went according to plan until I actually applied to colleges. I hit a snag with the personal essays they required. I had used up my best material—the surprise death of my father when I was three—filling out the financial-aid forms. To protest, I complained bitterly about being forced to do assignments before they even let me in the door.
During one particularly heated outburst from me about the indignity of having to tell a bunch of strangers about the person who had influenced me the most in my life, my mother said, For God’s sake, and started fishing around in the deepest drawer of the desk we called Daddy’s desk. She pulled out my autobiography. You can write a little essay about yourself, she said. You wrote your whole life story in third grade.