cone of light—illumined and silent. She tilted and spun. She wore a short skirt, as if Edgerton Avenue’s asphalt had been the ice of an Olympic arena. She wore mittens and a red knitted cap below which her black hair lifted when she turned. Under her skates the street’s packed snow shone; it illumined her from below, the cold light striking her under her chin.
I stood at the tall window, barely reaching the sill; the glass fogged before my face, so I had to keep moving or hold my breath. What was she doing out there? Was everything beautiful so bold? I expected a car to run over her at any moment: the open street was a fatal place, where I was forbidden to set foot.
Once, the skater left the light. She winged into the blackness beyond the streetlight and sped down the street; only her white skates showed, and the white snow. She emerged again under another streetlight, in the continuing silence, just at our corner stop sign where the trucks’ brakes hissed. Inside that second cone of light she circled backward and leaning. Then she reversed herself in an abrupt half-turn—as if she had skated backward into herself, absorbed her own motion’s impetus, and rebounded from it; she shot forward into the dark street and appeared again becalmed in the first streetlight’s cone. I exhaled; I looked up. Distant over the street, the night sky was moonless and foreign, a frail, bottomless black, and the cold stars speckled it without moving.
This was for many years the center of the maze, this still, frozen evening inside, the family’s watching through glass the Irish girl skate outside on the street. Here were beauty and mystery outside the house, and peace and safety within. I watched passive and uncomprehending, as in summer I watched Lombardy poplar leaves turn their green sides out, and then their silver sides out—watched as if the world were a screen on which played interesting scenes for my pleasure. But there was danger in this radiant sight, in the long glimpse of the lone girl skating, for it was night, and killingly cold. The open street was fatal and forbidden. And the apparently invulnerable girl was Jo Ann Sheehy, Tommy Sheehy’s sister, part of the Sheehy family, whose dark ways were a danger and a crime.
“Tell your maid she’s a nigger,” he had said, and when I said to Margaret, “You’re a nigger,” I had put myself in danger—I felt at the time, for Mother was so enraged—of being put out, tossed out in the cold, where I would go crazy and die like the dog.
That night Jo Ann alone outside in the cold had performed recklessly. My parents did not disapprove; they loved the beauty of it, and the queerness of skating on a street. The next morning I saw from the dining-room windows the street shrunken again and ordinary, tracked by tires, and the streetlights inconspicuous, and Jo Ann Sheehy walking to school in a blue plaid skirt.
Jo Ann Sheehy and the Catholic schoolchildren carried brown-and-tan workbooks, which they filled, I knew, with gibberish they not only had to memorize, they had to believe.
Every morning they filed into the subterranean maw of St. Bede’s, the low stone school attached to the high stone church just a block up Edgerton Avenue. From other Protestant children, I gathered St. Bede’s was a cave where Catholic children had to go to fill their brown-and-tan workbooks in the dark, possibly kneeling; they wrote down whatever the Pope said. (Whatever the Pope said, I thought, it was no prize; it didn’t work; our Protestant lives were much sunnier, without our half trying.) Every afternoon, authorities “let out” the surviving children to return to their lightless steep houses, where they knelt before writhing crucifixes, bandied racial epithets about, and ate stewed fish.
One afternoon the following spring, I was sitting stilled on the side-yard swing; I was watching transparent circles swim in the sky. When I focused on them, the circles parted, as fish flew from a finger poked in their tank. Apparently it was my eyes, and not the sky, that produced the transparent circles, each with a dimple or nucleus, but I always failed to find any in my eyes in a mirror; I had tried the night before.
Now St. Bede’s was, as the expression had it, letting out; Jo Ann Sheehy would walk by again, and all the other Catholic children, and perhaps the nuns. I kept an eye out for the nuns.
From my swing seat I saw the girls appear in bunches. There came Jo Ann Sheehy up the dry sidewalk with two other girls; her black hair fell over her blue blazer’s back. Behind them, running back and forth across the street, little boys were throwing gravel bits. The boys held their workbooks tightly. Probably, if they lost them, they would be put to death.
In the leafy distance up Edgerton I could see a black phalanx. It blocked the sidewalk; it rolled footlessly forward like a tank. The nuns were coming. They had no bodies, and imitation faces. I quitted the swing and banged through the back door and ran in to Mother in the kitchen.
I didn’t know the nuns taught the children; the Catholic children certainly avoided them on the streets, almost as much as I did. The nuns seemed to be kept in St. Bede’s as in a prison, where their faces had rotted away—or they lived eyeless in the dark by choice, like bats. Parts of them were manufactured. Other parts were made of mushrooms.
In the kitchen, Mother said it was time I got over this. She took me by the hand and hauled me back outside; we crossed the street and caught up with the nuns. “Excuse me,” Mother said to the black phalanx. It wheeled around. “Would you just please say hello to my daughter here? If you could just let her see your faces.”
I saw the white, conical billboards they had as mock-up heads; I couldn’t avoid seeing them, those white boards like pillories with circles cut out and some bunched human flesh pressed like raw pie crust into the holes. Like mushrooms and engines, they didn’t have hands. There was only that disconnected saucerful of whitened human flesh at their tops. The rest, concealed by a chassis of soft cloth over hard cloth, was cylinders, drive shafts, clean wiring, and wheels.
“Why, hello,” some of the top parts said distinctly. They teetered toward me. I was delivered to my enemies, and had no place to hide; I could only wail for my young life so unpityingly snuffed.
These are the few, floating scenes from early childhood, from before time and understanding pinned events down to the fixed and coherent world. Soon the remembered scenes would grow in vividness and depth, as like any child I elaborated a picture of the place, and as my feelings met actual people, and as the interesting things of the world engaged my loose mind like a gear, and set it in forward motion.
A young child knows Mother as a smelled skin, a halo of light, a strength in the arms, a voice that trembles with feeling. Later the child wakes and discovers this mother—and adds facts to impressions, and historical understanding to facts.
When she was in her twenties, my mother’s taste ran to modernism. In our living room on Edgerton Avenue we had a free-form blond coffee table, Jean Arp style, shaped something like a kidney, and also something like a boomerang. Over a heat register Mother hung a black iron Calder-like mobile. The mobile’s disks spun and orbited slowly before a window all winter when the heat was on, and replaced for me the ensorcerizing waving of tree leaves. On the wall above the couch she hung a large print of Gauguin’s Fatata te miti; those enormous rounded women, with their muscular curving backs, sat before a blue river in a flat and speckled jungle. On an end table she placed the first piece of art she ever bought: a Yoruba wood sculpture, a long-headed abstract woman with pointy breasts and a cold coil of wire around her neck.
