Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

He creeps out of bed, oh, this is a good idea.

He steals through the empty dormitory, past the beds lined up in a row, the washstand and basin beside each bed, the toothbrushes in glasses, the night light burning in the corridor outside. There is a nun sitting on a straight-backed chair at the end of the hall, engrossed in saying her beads, why are they always fingering their beads and mumbling to themselves? She does not notice him as he stealthily opens the screen door at the end of the hall and slips outside. The air is clean and fresh, he knows he is in the country someplace, but he does not know where, maybe as far away as the Bronx, maybe that is where they’ve sent him. He can hear crickets in the bushes, and can see fireflies flitting through the trees. He once caught a firefly and pulled off the part that glowed and stuck it to his finger like a ring, and Sister Giustina limped over to him and said that he would be punished for hurting one of God’s creatures, and she took him to the room she shared with Sister Rosalinda, and they beat him again that afternoon, even though he had not wet the bed the night before, and of course he wet the bed again after the beating. Why had God made such tempting creatures as fireflies, whose lights could be pulled off and made into rings? He had never seen a firefly before he came to this place, and no one had warned him that it was one of God’s creatures. Didn’t Sister Giustina slap mosquitoes dead, and were they not also God’s creatures? Or did Sister Rosalinda later punish her in the small white room they shared? He had once spied Sister Rosalinda whipping herself with the same cat-o’-nine-tails she used on him, her habit lowered to her waist, flailing the leather thongs of the whip over her left shoulder, her bare white back covered with welts. Had Sister Rosalinda wet the bed the night before? He did not understand nuns.

He can hear her voice in the darkness as he crawls across the lawn, still wet from the day’s rain. She is telling the children that in Hell there is no recourse, there is no one to turn to because the Devil presides and he is thoroughly evil and without mercy, and his assistants are as fiendish as he, and the people suffering in Hell are evil, too, which is why they were sent there in the first place, and wherever one turns there is only evil to be encountered in the flames, and one can expect no succor from those who have fallen from God’s grace and who fear not the Lord and who have in their hearts no remorse for their evil deeds; he creeps closer.

The summerhouse is an octagonal-shaped building constructed entirely of wood, latticework covering the base, a screened wooden platform lined on all eight sides with benches upon which the children sit, columns supporting the roof. Giacomo crawls under the lattice and under the platform and covers his mouth with his hand to suppress a giggle. His initial idea has been to let out a moan from the depths of Hell, frightening and delighting the other children. But now that he is actually under the platform, he notices that there is a space between two of the boards, and he can see one of Sister Rosalinda’s black shoes and the hem of her habit, and he has a better idea that suddenly comes to him from the text of her story and almost causes him to wet his pants with glee right there under the summerhouse. Sister Rosalinda is expanding upon her theme by telling the children that just as there is no recourse in Hell for those who are evil, so it is on earth for those who will not follow the teachings of the Lord Jesus. The Devil will seek out the sinners, he will reach up from the subterranean depths (oh, this is such a good idea, much better than the first), will reach out with his hairy hand to claim them as his own, seize them in his powerful taloned fingers...

It is here that Giacomo reaches up through the space in the boards, reaches up from the subterranean depths beneath the summerhouse, and clutches Sister Rosalinda’s ankle in his powerful taloned fingers.

My father was, and still is, an inveterate joker.

He tells the story with enormous relish, even though he insists Sister Rosalinda almost had a heart attack, and even though he was to regret his prank for the remainder of his stay at the orphanage — eighteen months and four days of a living Hell without mercy or recourse, just as the good sister had promised. She steadfastly maintained, incidentally, that after the hand reached up to grab her from below — and she let out a yell that must have alerted even Saint Peter up there at the pearlies, screaming, “ Il Diavolo, il Diavolo!” while the children scattered and stumbled and shrieked in echo, “ Il Diavolo, il Diavolo!” one of them crashing through the screen in his haste to get away from this infernal creature who had reached up to grab one of God’s many wives (if he could grab a nun , who on earth was safe?) — she swore on a stack of Bibles, that smiling religious bitch who made my father’s life miserable, swore that the imprint of the Devil’s hand remained on her flesh for weeks after the episode, bright red against the lily white of her virgin fields. Nickie told my father he was stupid for trying to buck the system. (“Don’t buck the system,” my Uncle Nick always said. “You try and buck the system, the system busts your head.”)

My father hadn’t been trying to buck the system. He was going for a laugh. I don’t know when he began protecting himself with humor, maybe it was way back then when he was standing in the hot sun breathing in the stink of his own piss. I do know that he uses it the way other men might use anger or brute strength or guile. If things are getting a bit too serious (or even if they aren’t), my father immediately tells a joke. Whenever I telephone him, he will answer my call (or anybody’s call) in one of two ways: (1) He will disguise his voice and say, “Police Headquarters, Sergeant Clancy speaking,” or “This is the Aquarium, did you want some fish?” or “Department of Sanitation, keep it clean,” or (in a high falsetto) “This is Stella Di Palermo, how do you do?” (2) If he answers in his own voice, he will invariably say, “Your nickel start talking,” or “This one is on you,” or sometimes, abruptly, and impatiently, and in mock anger, like a busy executive at General Motors called to the phone during an urgent meeting, “Yes, what is it?” (This one still gets a laugh from me, though» he’s done it perhaps ten thousand times.) He can calm a tense moment at the dinner table, and there were plenty of those between Rebecca and me, by suddenly tossing in a pun from left field, usually way off target but sometimes genuinely funny. I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious conversation with him in my life.

When I called to tell him I’d left Rebecca, he answered the phone and snapped in his General Motors manner, “Yes, what is it?” I told him Rebecca and I were through. There was a long silence on the phone. Then he said, “Just a minute, I’ll get your mother.” Only months later did he say, “Ike, sometimes things work out for the best in life.” That’s the closest we’ve ever come to exchanging confidences. He used to talk to my brother Tony a lot. I can remember him and Tony having long conversations in the kitchen of our Bronx apartment. I never knew what they were talking about, and I thought at the time that I was too young to share such intimacies, that when I got older — like Tony — maybe my father and I could talk together the way they did. It never happened. (Once, and God forgive me for ever having thought this, I figured he didn’t talk to me because I was blind.) The comic routines became more and more frequent after Tony was killed. He never mentions Tony now; it is as though his first son never existed. Except sometimes, when he turns away from the television and, forgetting for a moment, says to me, “Watch this guy, Tony, he’s a riot,” without knowing he has used his dead son’s name, without realizing that each time he makes such a slip it brings sudden, unbidden tears to my eyes.