Clara Destiny

Ingrid Hill

That snowy gray February afternoon in 1954 when all the confessionals went up in flames—Father Ealing’s, Monsignor Szelansky’s, and the inky-dark, squeezy-uncomfortable one labeled VISITOR, deep in the corner by Saint Lucy’s statue—we didn’t even get to cut class to evacuate. Someone in command—the principal? the fire chief?—figured the church was the church and the school was the school, and, the twain never meeting, we sat in our seats drilling times tables (sevens through nines) while all the firemen in town wrestled hoses like mythic sea-serpent leviathans, pouring water into the church and drenching the trio of arsons.

Even though we heard all the clanging, we had no idea the fire was our own. The hard, hollow bells simply stopped, and Sister Ann Aloysius told us in no uncertain terms that anyone who chose to lollygag rather than keep on reciting would be staying after school and cleaning the coatroom. We all knew the coatroom had giant rats so fearless that they came out even in daylight after school. Jerry Wayne Towler said he’d seen them one Saturday morning, that they moved in a pack, that they slobbered and had something that looked like dried blood caked around their mouths. So we kept reciting, even the most horrible boys. (The rat story was fresh and had not been disproven.)

The three fire engines were parked out of our line of sight, blocking Gilly Street, catty-corner and higgledy-piggledy on account of the high, hard snowbanks that had been accumulating since mid-October. The Michigan wind blew hard toward the river, above and around the shoe factory, so we didn’t see even a wisp of smoke.

The smoke scarred the mural above the nave, a bevy of saints, mostly brown-bearded men, casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. The confessionals were not destroyed, due to the nature of the wood, some dense and resistant black stuff from the African jungle, but the interiors had to be scrubbed down and re-upholstered. It seemed the arsonist had soaked several boxes of rags from the janitors’ closet with kerosene and put a match to them.

The principal, Mother Vianney, announced over the loud-speaker that God had spared the confessionals, but that her own judgment would not be as merciful toward whoever had done the deed. Even over the public-address system, we could hear her corn-colored teeth clicking in nunly rage, top against bottom.

Several boys in my classroom made fun of the clicking and had to write five-hundred lines a piece on the subject. I never knew the content of those lines. I imagined them writing over and over again: I will not mock Vianney’s false teeth clacking. More likely it was a generic assignment including abstractions like respect and silence; words like mock and clack were not in the lexicon of punishing-lines.

One of the janitors was Lithuanian, the other mute. When they worked, they worked silently, except when the Lithuanian would occasionally hum odd snatches of something, a dark-sounding tune that escaped like dots and dashes of a janitorial Morse code from his near-closed lips. I went into the church the next morning to survey the damage. First I went to the drug store for a box of boric acid for my grandmother, but it was a bogus errand. For a long while she hadn’t been able think of a single thing she needed, but I’d pestered her till she assented. I came prepared with all my church paraphernalia so that I could spy out what was going on in there.

I carried my prayer-book against my chest, pinned my wrinkly chapel veil to my hair, and pushed my chin down against my coat collar to look devout. I knelt down to pray, or to seem to be praying. The janitors were ripping the purple-red velvet upholstery out of the visitor confessional. The fabric looked like bloody animal-flesh, freshly dead and stripped thin. The janitor nearest me—the Lithuanian—tossed a heap of dark, sodden fabric into the aisle near me. Red-gray hose-water splashed onto my missal.

In high school, the first time I saw a football stadium scoreboard, lettered VISITORS—and every time I have been in a football stadium since—I saw the sign above the visitor confessional and its succession of occupants: the fierce, hard-voiced missionary priests who had come to appeal for funds, whiskey priests who moved from parish to parish because they had to be somewhere, and parishioners’ relative-priests who used that confessional on Saturday afternoons. I imagined those priests trooping onto the high school field, crag-jawed and gin-eyed and cradling primitive old-fashioned footballs like the ones in the black-and-white pictures in the trophy case in the main hall. There were so many sins to be heard, you could always use one more priest listening.

We had been warned not to eavesdrop on each other, if we were first in line and near enough to hear someone else’s voice making his or her weekly or monthly confession. Of course, what we did was try to stand perfectly quiet and still when we’d moved to the head of the line, so that fragments of a penitent’s monologue might leak through the curtain like dust-motes dancing in the sunlight of the Saint Lawrence window above. Then, we who were so gullible as to believe in bloody-mouthed coatroom rats might snag in mid-air an idea of what lay on the other side of the veil of our ignorance.

I prayed in the end of a pew ten feet from the confessionals as the janitors ripped and slopped, ripped and slopped. The dark song of the Lithuanian janitor wove in and out of my recitation, under my breath, of the Memorare. It was a prayer that needed to be spoken aloud, in a group, militantly and demandingly, as if we were all cadets in the army of Mary, and with the proper pauses for rhythm. The magic of it seemed to be in the rhythm, and perhaps in its Latin name, oddly attached to a prayer in American English. Anything Latin—outside of the words of the Mass itself—seemed to have magic.

Remember, O most Gracious Virgin Mary (breath) that never was it known (breath) that anyone who fled to thy protection (breath), implored thy help (breath), or sought thy intercession was left unaided. I loved all that syntax.

The janitors seemed to have finished the ripping and slopping and had begun gathering the meatlike rags into a barrel. I pretended to be unconcerned with their noisy activity.

Inspired by this confidence, I fly unto thee (breath), O Virgin of virgins my mother (breath). To thee I come, before thee I stand (breath) sinful and sorrowful. I closed my prayer book. I knew it by heart. I rubbed the mother-of-pearl cover of the prayer book as if my rubbing could summon a genie. O Mother of the Word Incarnate (breath)—and then, in a grand ski-run rush to the final demand—despise not my petition, but in thy mercy hear and answer me. Amen. I rested as at the bottom of the ski run at Kaukkonen Mountain, sending up an imaginary spray of dry prayer-snow.

I genuflected, keeping my eyes on the eyes on the dinner-sized gilded plate held out by the statue of Saint Lucy: two eyes the size of golf balls, with blue irises. Saint Lucy had died in some horrible way, her eyes gouged—though perfectly cleanly, apparently—by her pagan captors. We all loved those eyeballs of Lucy’s. They gave us a sense that life was elemental and visceral, even with all of the ethereality of these candles and statues and censers and vaporing litanies. I picked up the white drugstore bag with the box of boric acid and walked out. I knew nothing more than I had when I came in. The janitor’s humming reverberated in my head: his song had become mine.

In the lunchroom we sat in clumps at both ends of long double-benched tables. One clump did not speak to the next. There were spaces in between. For the rest of the week, due to the fire damage and the work that was still going on, there was no midday Mass, so we had an extra half-hour at lunch and an extra half-hour of afternoon lessons. It felt quite luxurious. We had the luck to have art right after lunch.

My brother Thad was just one grade behind me, but a boy at that age is a child, and I saw myself as near womanhood. Furthermore, according to Mother Vianney, Thad was headed down the greasy chute to perdition. He shoplifted cinnamon buns from the bakery every First Friday, when we had to go to communion and so came to school without breakfast. He had never gotten caught, and we marveled at his daring. We imagined that the bakery owner must have kept track for two years, and that the length of Thad’s sentence at the boys’ reformatory would be proportional to the number of cinnamon buns he’d snagged. We suspected he’d stolen the air rifle we’d seen him stash in his friend Earl Perkins’ garage. We imagined that there was far more that we did not know.

Thad swore at me daily, pissed in my toothbrushing cup so that I had to throw it away, and drew pictures of naked people in strange and contorted positions and left them around the house. Publicly, I found him mortifying; privately, I admired his daring. I was pallid and bland, a girl who thought concocting an errand to buy boric acid was wild.

It was whispered that two of Thad’s friends might have been involved in the confessional fires. They hated the priests, who were constantly on their tails, telling them they were going to hell. Thad’s friends had less restraint than he did. One had hitchhiked for a whole Saturday morning and afternoon, all the way to Ironwood, and been brought back in a police car. The other had goosed a nun—through all that drapery!—at his last grade school, and been expelled for it. They were genuine outlaws.

My friends and I sat in a clump at the far end of our long table, having cleaned our plates, smelling the same pale-brown gravy smell of school lunch that children across the whole county were smelling. Tessa Vanderjag said she believed that not only were these boys responsible for the confessional fires, they were planning more bad stuff. We tried to imagine what more might be. That sort of imagining was not my strong suit, so I asked.

“Like what?”

“Like anything,” said Tessa Vanderjag, with a sort of frisson of disgust and thrilled anticipation. It sounded like the plot of a Hollywood movie, that anything.

Perhaps it was that—the feeling of Hollywood in Tessa’s remark—that sent us over into talking about Hollywood stars. Tessa said she thought that all five of us could be Hollywood stars—even Erna Pzykiewicz, with her terribly thin, stringy hair, though she would have to change her name.

So we spent the rest of the bonus half-hour preparing ourselves for our film careers by changing our names. It was decided by acclamation that I would transmogrify from Mary Clara McGinty to Clara Destiny, and from then on when I prayed, I identified myself to God that way, as Clara Destiny. It seemed to be a declaration of trust that he had something for me, something special, a destiny brilliant and clear as the stars over Hollywood, which—as Tessa Vanderjag pointed out—were the same stars that shone down on us.

My grandmother was a thin, small woman who smoked cigarettes called Fatimas. Her voice was hard and raspy. She painted her fingernails, and the blood-ruby enamel was usually quite eroded. She worked part-time as a waitress at the Kresge’s lunch-counter. My mother waited on booths at the Antlers, a smoky tavern downtown, in the evenings. Her hair always smelled like fried onion rings. That left one or the other of them at home most of the time.

My father was in prison downstate for a holdup where he’d been the driver. He said he had not known at all what was going on, was just waiting for his buddy to buy some beer, but the judge and jury didn’t believe him. He had hit my mother a lot, so it was a good deal more peaceful with him gone, though my mother cried two or three times a week anyway. She cried profusely and noisily and always needed something substantial to wipe her eyes with afterward. Kleenex were not enough.

Once I spent a whole evening, a Tuesday, in the last booth at the Antlers, the one with the high back that climbed the wall, warmed by the heat from the kitchen, doing my geography homework. I had made up another errand that night: bringing my mother’s boots to her. My grandmother and I had been watching our tiny TV, and the weatherman had said we would be getting a whole load of snow before midnight. My mother had to walk home. It was over a mile. I looked out the window and saw the snow starting already. I told my grandmother I had to go out. I waved the black rubber galoshes at her as she sat in her TV chair, their fake fur collars and buttonhooks flapping.

She made a small effort at protest but quickly realized that stopping me would be lose-lose. If she didn’t let me go, my mother would have to walk home in her two-week-old white waitress shoes through the six or eight inches we surely would get. I stuffed the boots into my school bag and pulled out my geography texbook and waved it at her. “I can get all my homework done,” I shouted, as if she were as hard of hearing as Erna Pzykiewicz’s grandmother, whom Erna called Zaza Babushka. I went out the door.

We were studying Africa. There were no black people in our town, not a one, though I had once stood near a black person at the bus station, a tall busty woman in a purple cloth coat. Her bag seemed so heavy, but she did not put it down, just kept holding it with both hands in front of her, at knee-height, as if its contents were valuable. The smell about her was so rich, as if she were a great living statue molded of coffee-bean clay. I wondered if everyone in Africa smelled this way. At the Antlers, I was answering a question about what these people ate. Manioc root, said my book.

I looked up at the stained-glass window over the Sixth Street door. It depicted an elk in the forest in golds, browns and greens, with a brilliant blue sky behind. The window was elegant, and out-of-keeping with that place. Because of it, I always thought that the Antlers shared something with church. When my mother was offered a job up the avenue, where she would actually get an hourly wage, she turned it down. I thought the window had something to do with it.

My mother bustled by, carrying four compartmented plates of the Tuesday night special, breaded veal cutlet and navy beans. The plates nestled, two and two, into her forearms. Beans sloshed halfway over their plastic dikes toward the cutlets, but not all the way. My mother was expert at this.

I was now answering a question about French explorers hacking their way through the jungles with sharpened machetes. My mother winked as she went past. She was proud of my doing my homework. Once while I was doing my spelling sentences at the kitchen table, she said to me, making a thumbs-up gesture from across the room, “You keep it up. Your brother Thad’s going to wind up in prison to show his pap how much he loves him. Somebody here has to do something good.”

The customers thinned out, and my mother sat at the end of the bar on a stool with her legs crossed. Her kneecaps, pressing elegantly against the pale skin in her nylons, were like shields of bone. I wanted kneecaps like that when I grew up. Mine were padded with baby fat. She looked out at the snow, holding her menu-pad pencil between two fingers as if it were a cigarette.

The snow was the staying kind, tiny flakes thick in the black night, bathed in milky emulsion by the streetlamp. I looked down at my notebook. The French explorers had set up a government. Government was far less interesting than machetes or manioc. I began to feel sleepy. Even the mention of government on the TV news made me sleepy. I looked up at where my mother had been. She was gone.

She stood at the far end of the bar, wiping it down with a stinky, damp dishcloth, her back to me. A tall, red-haired man with a green jacket that read Franky’s Garage and Gas leaned on the end of the bar, talking down at her. My mother was no more than five-two. To me it looked a lot like flirting, and though I could not have imagined anyone flirting with my mother, I guessed I was seeing it. She looked up at him with a half-puzzlement not unlike my own. She said something that looked flippant and dismissive.

He reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and took out a twenty-dollar bill. He might have been a little drunk, or maybe not. My mother had her dishrag in one hand and a pair of salt and pepper shakers in the other. He leaned forward and, quicker than I thought a drunk could, crumpled the soft twenty into a ball and stuffed it down the V-neck of her uniform. He danced back, laughing a big, tall mechanic’s laugh.

My mother made a small, angry sound, looked around for the boss, and threw her smelly, gray, wet dishrag into the mechanic’s face. He laughed louder. She ran through the doors back of the bar, to the storeroom.

Nobody saw this but me. The guys at the pool tables were absorbed in what they were doing. The other waitress was somewhere else. I didn’t even exist. The mechanic went out the Michi-Mac Avenue double-doors into the snow.

Not too long afterward, the owner sent my mother home for the evening. He said there would be nothing but bar business for the rest of the night, and there were six inches already and two more per hour expected. No plows were out yet. Cars were stuck everywhere, this way and that. The snow sneaked down the tops of our boots.

We walked in silence, shuffling through the deep, perfect white, except when we got to the corner of Sixth and Van Loo where the street lights were out, where my mother looked up into the black sky—all we could see was the snow sifting down—and said, “Oh, my. The stars are all out in space, out in the back of that. Can’t you just not wait to get up to heaven?” I could smell the smoke and fry-batter smell in my own hair and hers as we walked through the pure night. I thought about that until we got another block, to Sixth and Pervinkler Street, and then I said I could probably wait to die and go to heaven, because I had a long life to live yet. She didn’t say anything to that. When we got home that night I could hear her crying in her room. In the morning I went in to make her bed for her for a surprise, and my father’s blue-checkered shirt, still smelling like him after all these months, was crumpled up wet on her pillow.

We lived in a duplex, on Sixth Street between Ferro and Marty. There were trees in the side yard, on our side. My mother thought this was enchanting, as if we had inherited a country estate. She was saving some of her tips in a fat Hellman’s Mayonnaise jar in back of the flour cupboard to buy a white, wooden two-seated arbor swing from the Sears catalog that next spring. She said we would be elegant people when we had that swing.

On the other side of the duplex Jerry Wayne Towler lived with his father and mother and grandfather, their family a near-mirror image of ours, except that Jerry Wayne had no sister and I had Thad. The day after the confessional fires, Thad and Jerry Wayne were caught shoplifting ice-fishing lures at the hardware store. They were let go only because Jerry Wayne never had gotten in trouble before. That night Thad and I could hear scraping and squeaking through the walls upstairs. Thad made a high sign at me, as if he knew something about this and it were a choice piece of news.

That weekend Jerry Wayne’s grandfather asked my grandmother if he could please walk her to nine o’clock Mass.

My mother’s eyebrows went up in astonishment. “You’re not,” she said.

“You know that plot where your father is buried?” said my grandmother. “The other side’s empty.” She sounded lively and dry. The tone was a Real Person tone, something I had not often heard from my grandmother.“Jerome is just asking to walk me to church.”

“Jerome now, is he?” said my mother. She sounded disgusted. She slammed the door of the Crosley refrigerator too hard, and the handle fell off. She just looked at it lying there on the linoleum and made a small sound in her throat.

That Sunday I walked half a block behind them on the way to church. As they crossed the street, Grandpa Towler put his gloved hand carefully on my grandmother’s back, between the wings of her shoulderblades. She did not flinch.

I sat near the Saint Lucy statue and stared at Lucy’s eyeballs there on the gold plate. I imagined my own eyeballs, gouged but still operative, taking wings. I imagined them flying above the school, above the rectory, above the convent, seeing everything.

I had heard the old story that there was a tunnel between the priests’ house and the nuns’, and that a whole lot of traffic passed through there. The stories had held little interest for me. I understood about sex—or, I knew the facts of it—but I could not imagine that Vianney had a body underneath all that black cloth, or that if she did, that she might want to do anything at all with it, much less anything sinful. I imagined her taking out her false teeth to kiss Monsignor Szelansky. I wanted to throw up. But there was my grandmother calling Jerry Wayne’s grandfather Jerome, and there was his gloved hand on her back.

That night my brother Thad was jumping on his bed, as he often did. It mesmerized him, as rocking sometimes calms an autistic child. He was too big to be rocked, of course, but there was the problem of all of this nervous energy he had, the source of his troubles. From my room next door I could hear the ka-squeeg-a, ka-squeeg-a, of the elderly metal spring-frame. And then I heard something else: an almost-coordinated twin sound from the other side of the wall. Jerry Wayne Towler had moved his bed so that it exactly mirrored Thad’s. He had been caught in my brother’s web, brought into the circle of boys who shoplifted and played truant. Jerry Wayne and Thad were jumping now, in unison, as if in a two-ring circus of mischief and maybe malevolence. Who knew, after all, who had set the confessionals afire? There were no leads, only rumors.

The following week I went into the church with a half-dollar I had found on the floor at the Antlers, near the bar. Drunks dropped money, and I had found money that way before, lots of times. My mother said it was mine if I found it. To burn a vigil light cost ten cents. I put the fifty-cent piece into the slot in the metal box. It made a clanking sound. I looked around. I didn’t want anybody to stare, as if I were a Pharisee making a show. A dime would drop in near-silence into the tiny pile of others. CLANK, went my half-dollar, into the now-empty metal box. I hoped Thad had not robbed it.

There were several banks of candles, white, waxy nubbins stuffed into red-glass holders, ranged like spectators at a game. The Altar Society ladies replenished the array when enough had been melted down. Now there were many new candles to choose from. I picked five fresh ones close together, near the top. I lit the long-handled silver lighter and set the five wicks afire. I was not sure of the theology of this. The small fires seemed prayers, somehow bright-purgatorial.

I prayed one prayer for each candle: that my mother would not cry so much, that Thad would not wind up in prison too soon, that my grandmother would have a very good time with Grandpa Jerome and that my buried grandfather would not mind, that my friend Erna would not have the terrible disease they thought she might have when they took her downstate to Detroit to the doctors, and that I might do whatever God wanted me to in my life, even just be lit quietly like a small candle, not needing to be Clara Destiny, wonder of Hollywood.

I was praying against sins in myself that I had newly learned to be sins: pride and worldliness. They seemed much more interesting and complex than whatever went on or did not go on in the rectory tunnels.

In March we had a half-thaw, and the snow turned to slush and then back to a nasty ice when the wind came off the lakes. My brother Thad had played hooky eight times since the church fire, and twice he had convinced Jerry Wayne Towler to take off with him. Jerry Wayne’s father had beaten him that second time, with a belt, and my mother had heard the screaming and gone over next door to warn him that she would be calling the cops if he ever did that again. I heard him raising his voice at her as she stood at their door. “Maybe if your no-good husband could stay out of jail and take his own belt to your boy, you’d be a whole lot better off,” Jerry Wayne Towler’s father said.

“Maybe you better just remember what I said,” my mother said to him, quietly. She seemed to have gotten stronger since my father was gone. She turned and came home.

My grandmother sat in the living room with her head bent over almost into her lap, sort of wringing her apron silently and holding it up to her eyes. The phone rang. It was old Jerome calling my grandmother to tell her just not to worry.

“Can’t you keep him somehow from beating the boy?” she said. From the this-way-and-that look on her face, he seemed to be saying that he was trying, and that he would try some more, but that he was not totally in control, since his son with the belt paid the rent.

Out on the back porch, sitting between the rusty old wringer washing machine and the piled newspapers, Thad was smoking one of my grandmother’s Fatimas. I knocked on the kitchen window at him, but he gave me the finger. He got up slowly, pulling his collar up around his ears, and came to the back door and stuck his head in, half a cigarette still hanging from his lower lip as if he were Humphrey Bogart. I admired his aplomb despite myself.

He lifted the cigarette from his damp lip as if he had been smoking since birth, and he stuck his tongue out at me. I laughed, and he knocked me over onto the floor. I was silent. I would not get my mother into this. She had too much already. Thad made a fist and busted my upper lip, bloodying my gum, too, and my middle teeth. He stood up, brushed off his hands on his pants as if I had somehow dirtied him, and went back out to smoke.

I told my mother I wasn’t sure how I had gotten my mouth bloody. I sounded stupid. I couldn’t think of a lie. It was not my strong suit. It was not really my suit at all.

That night when my mother was at work Thad bounced on his bed till the spring-frame gave way and he fell through, hooting and laughing. When he stopped, we could hear Jerry Wayne Towler through the wall, still bouncing on his own bed next door, twin-rhythmic, persistent. Thad got two half-filled paint cans from the shed and propped up the foot of the bed.

On Saint Patrick’s Day, Sister Ann Aloysius gave us a party. The room mothers made shamrock-shaped cookies with green icing and brought orange drink in big pitchers. We all had slightly green lips with shadows of sunset-bright orange above them. Outside it was colorless, cold, and gray.

Jerry Wayne and Thad had started walking to school with me that morning, but when we reached Fourth Street they told me to go on ahead. They had something they had to do. I started to warn them, but Thad grabbed my hair near the base of my neck and tugged sideways, hard, so that my neck hurt all day. I did not see either of them in their classes’ lines as we filed into school.

At about two o’clock, a messenger came to the classroom door. Sister Ann Aloysius called me to her desk. There was a problem at home, she said, and I was excused for the rest of the day. She said she knew no more. I put on my jacket and stocking cap and went to Vianney’s stark office, which smelled of ditto fluid, and asked if I could use the phone. She said that the neighbors had called, neighbors from across the street, and that there had been a fire. We heard the clang of a fire engine passing, going in the direction of my house. “Yes, they’re probably going there,” she said, nodding somberly. “Be careful.”

I ran, slipping twice on the ice. I twisted my knee and fell on my elbows the second time. I started to whimper. A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk in front of the house. Three fire trucks had parked at strange angles, trying to access the lone hydrant. I heard firemen cursing. The house was in flames, orange flames that licked at the cold afternoon sky. The top floor was ablaze, and the kitchen was lit from inside. I could hear myself whimpering. I worked to keep the keening from bursting out of my throat. I looked around. There were neighbors, and strangers. My mother was nowhere around, nor my grandmother. Where were the Towlers, and where was Thad?

“No one was inside,” said a neighbor woman whose name I did not know. She put a gloved hand on my shoulder. I would see her walking her dog in the summer, but I had not seen her since winter set in. “I expect it was the heater, the wiring,” she said. “Your landlord was warned last year, before you moved in. But he never did anything to fix it, that I know of.”

I could hear something ready to break from my throat, a wild sound of grief, despite her firm reassurances. “Where is my mother?” I said.

“No one’s in there,” she said, firm and certain. She did not add what I knew: if anyone was, they’d be burned—as people love to say in dire circumstances, cutely, as if this were a cartoon of a fire—to a crisp.

Someone was in there, in fact: Jerry Wayne. Thad came walking around the corner of the house looking as if he had just arrived, though of course he had been home all day. He wore a shirt I did not recognize until later as Jerry Wayne’s.

“Jerry Wayne is in there,” he said, in a tone I had never before heard him use. He started almost to break, to cry, or maybe to laugh a horrible 4laugh, but pulled himself hard out of that nosedive. “We were just fooling around. Pussy Jerry,” he said. “Pussy chickenshit baby.”

“Where’s everyone else?” I said. He shrugged his shoulders, as if it did not much matter.

I looked back toward the school and the church. I was not sure what I was looking for, but I remembered a movie where I had seen somebody blow up a building by pouring a thin line of gunpowder from somewhere else all the way there. I was half-looking for an invisible line of that powder from the confessionals, following the curb, zigzagging with the turns, going up the steps into the house. I was thinking somehow that a whole bunch of sins from the confessional had escaped, like a poured powder or a line of gasoline, and caught us on fire, something as stupid as that.

The flames crackled and leaped, and the firemen swore. Dark smoke curled, and there was all this yelling to stay back, stay back, and the neighbors made strange faces at us, as if we were orphaned, or criminals, or both.

Jerry Wayne Towler died of smoke inhalation. He was not burned to a crisp. They found him naked, sprawled on the side of his face on the back porch of his side of the duplex, as if he had just shivered and coughed and fallen. There was a look of surprise on his face.

My mother had been to the grocery, and on a couple of other errands, and arrived with her three brown bags ten minutes after I did. My grandmother had gone with Jerry Wayne’s grandfather in his old Packard to visit someone they knew at the old folks’ home out Foxtail Road.

Jerry Wayne’s funeral at church was open-casket. They dressed him in a white satin-lapelled suit like a tap-dancer in an old movie. His face looked ruddy-cheeked and angelic. I wondered if they had had to manipulate his face to get him looking that way, to get rid of the look of surprise. Thad did not cry once. He clenched his jaw a lot. He made loud hocking sounds during Father Ealing’s elegy about aborted possibility. Father Ealing mentioned boy saints. They kept Jerry Wayne in the mausoleum until the ground softened, and then buried him at the far end of the cemetery from my grandfather.

We moved to Eighth Street, an apartment house. Somehow my mother had bought renters’ insurance, and we could buy new clothes and other things. We got a better TV, and my mother bought me a dressing table for my room, with a ruffled skirt. Thad went to the psychiatric hospital outside Detroit a few months later, for a year. He came back almost a teenager, suave at eleven, having had ballroom dance lessons there, among other advantages.

My father came back from prison and got a job at the ball-bearing plant. He never hit my mother again. He and my mother had one more child, our little brother Craig. In 1958 they bought a house in a subdivision, where they still live. No one ever mentioned the hitting, the prison term, any of that.

I am a librarian at the high school, for seventeen years now. A boy from downstate whom I met in college proposed to me, but I was not in the mood at the time, and the chance didn’t come again. But my life is clean and good.

Thad makes a middle-six-figure income in the corporate offices of one of the auto manufacturers. I won’t say which one. Three years ago, his wife Eileen committed suicide. No one knew why. They hadn’t had any children yet, which I suppose I saw as a blessing under the circumstances. She had told me a couple of years before that he was thinking of having a vasectomy, but I was not sure whether that happened.

Two years ago, our little brother Craig’s wife Belinda left him for Thad. She had been a hostess for American Airlines. Craig met her on a business trip. Now Belinda and Thad have a house in Grosse Pointe near the War Memorial, with Doric columns and a circular drive. They went to Cancun this past winter and brought me—Belinda brought me—a T-shirt with metallic gold lettering and a view of wide, bright turquoise water.

That same month, Craig had an accident skiing at Sugarloaf and broke his neck. I had been urging him to get out and do something different. Therapy hasn’t done much for him. His hands are shriveled, like a child’s. He wears soft shoes, his feet going nowhere. I’m thinking about moving in with him, to be his caretaker, except I don’t much want to hear about Thad or Belinda, and I can’t see how Craig could avoid that subject.

My mother calls up and wants grandchildren. I have suggested a Yorkie. She tells me to get contact lenses and try that salon next to the Peninsula Theater where she gets her hair done. I tell her I’m fine.

My friend Erna did have the dread disease, which was leukemia, and was supposed to die, but she did not. She went into remission, and then there was no sign of the disease at all. She lived to have triplet boys, who are now four years old. She named them Brucie and Paddy and Sean, after Bruce Willis, Patrick Swayze and Sean Penn.

Jerome Towler and my grandmother were friends till they died, within months of each other, four years ago.

Tessa Vanderjag I have no clue about. Her family moved away after eighth grade. Perhaps she has gone on to Hollywood. Maybe she has a new name and I see her on MTV all the time. At the high school there’s a TV room where the kids watch nothing else. Maybe she is that woman with the amazing gold curls and the nose ring who sings on a boardwalk with spacey and mesmerized angels on rollerblades skating through, sings as if she were on some herbal high, opening and closing her eyelids in slow motion, like a cat, like a fish, What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us?

I said to one of the students when that video was on one time, that he was, that that’s what Jesus was. I had been standing in the doorway looking for someone tall to help me get the library door’s transom unstuck, and I’d watched the whole video. I walked away and I saw the look the girl gave the guy next to her. Wacko, the look said.

Last spring while I was cleaning out my desk, I found a studio portrait of my father. My mother had it taken for the mantel on the afternoon of one of the days my dad beat her. As he aged, the lineaments of his face had stayed so much the same: still the slight edge of vanity, something almost royal, not the slightest hint of repentance or realization. I remember the day the picture was taken so clearly. The sequence of that evening is etched in me as if on glass.

I stuffed the picture into a stack of five-year-old library journals, two years’ worth of phone bills, and last week’s newspapers, and went out into the yard. I picked up a stool with a cracked leg and tried to break it up for firewood. It would not break. I slammed it against the brick side of the house. It still would not break. I slammed harder, and harder, until I had broken the stool into splinters. I scraped my knuckles. They bled. I heard myself sobbing.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand, and later, indoors, I would see that my face was smeared with blood. I saw my neighbors squeezing their heads together over their sink, gawking at me through their kitchen window. I put the shattered stool into the ash can along with the papers and my father’s face, and I set it aflame.

Visit Ingrid Hill as Image Artist of the Month for November '02

Issue #28 • Fall 2000