Portrait of a young con artist
Chapter Two:
Communion
"The tree called me; that's why I climbed it," Kenny reported years later. "The birds picked on it, stealing all its cherries before any got ripe. Leaves shred to get a taste; and me, grabbing at the clumps of fruit before the birds got it all."
This was as much a ritual of spring as the arrival of new boats to his grandfather's yard next door. Each year, Kenny and the birds went at it.
"Even before I was old enough to climb up into the lower branches, I wanted to," Kenny recalled. "I knew those cherries must have tasted sweet."
But one year, just after Kenny turned seven, the ritual was interrupted.
Kenny remembered hearing Uncle Ed shouting for him from the porch.
"Get your ass down from there, boy!" the harsh man yelled. "What do you want to do, break a leg?"
Kenny remembered holding himself back, hoping his uncle would go away. But when the man refused to budge from the porch, Kenny relented, letting himself down from the lowest branch, one thin leg at a time.
"I was stretched out like an earth worm, hanging three feet from the ground," Kenny recalled.
Ed kept grumbling about the boy killing the tree, as if a boy of seven could do more to turn those leaves sour than the near by test tank did with its unending plumes of smoke -- grandfather and his fishing cronies clinging around as the outboard motor roared.
"Didn't you hear me, boy?" Ed yelled. "I said down."
"So I let go and landed, mud spattering up from the soft soil, so dead even the grass wouldn't grow no matter how much rain came," Kenny recalled.
"Your mother's looking for you," Ed said.
"Momma? Looking for me?"
Three weeks out of the hospital and she still seemed like a stranger, haunting her old bedroom just as Kenny got used to seeing it empty.
"What does she want me for?" Kenny asked.
"She says you got to get some clothes."
"I got clothes."
"Special clothes for Religious School."
"I got clothes for Religious School," Kenny said.
"This is different. This is for your communion."
"At school, the nuns had talked of it, praying over us all day long to make us ready," Kenny recalled. "But I didn't know why they prayed or what they wanted, despite all their talking."
"Do I have to?" Kenny asked Ed in a voice so pained Ed frowned.
"What's wrong with you, boy? What do you think we sent you to religious school for?"
"I couldn't explain how uncomfortable I felt whenever the nuns talked of communion," Kenny said later., "about how pure we had to be, and how we were all the same in God's eyes."
"Do I have to go with Momma?" Kenny asked, drawing an even darker look from Ed.
"That's your mother, boy, what's wrong with you?"
"I couldn't explain it," Kenny said later. "My mother wasn't the same person I remembered from before she'd gone to the hospital. She seemed far away all the time, as if thinking of something, and quiet, too. She hadn't laughed once since coming home, but kept mumbling to herself about things I didn't understand, saying how she'd have to get me out of this place before I came to hate her, too. Deep in the house, I could hear her, stirring around, moving up and down the hall, her shoes scuffing at the tiles, her voice filling the cracks and crevices with panicked whispers, each bearing my name. She kept thinking something would happen to me if she let me out of sight, crying out for me as when she did see me again, as if shocked I had survived those few minutes."
Kenny's mother's moan rose from the house, making his name into a wail.
"Answer her, boy!" Ed said, "before she has a fit."
Kenny called out, and his mother answered, and answered again, each sound of her voice working closer and closer to this side the house.
"I thought she'd throw open the upstairs window, but she popped out of the porch door instead, her eyes so bright I knew she'd been crying, and so relieved, I wanted to cry instead," Kenny recalled.
"There you are," she said in a voice so sad she might have still been in the hospital.
"I found him up in the tree again, Jane," Ed said, Kenny glaring so hard at his uncle he might have killed the man with sheer intensity.
"In the tree?" mother moaned, and went on with what both Ed and Kenny knew would come, Ed coughing slightly before excusing himself and making his retreat out to the boat store, leaving Kenny to suffer the assault alone. "What were you thinking of climbing a tree like that? And your clothing? You're full of mud."
"I wanted to tell her how I hadn't gotten muddy until Uncle Ed made me come down," Kenny recalled. "But I knew she wouldn't hear me, and that in fact, she wasn't listening any more than she was really looking at me, she hearing and seeing things that didn't make sense to me, as if she saw me as someone else, someone I used to be, that baby she left behind when she was sentenced to that hospital, she thinking I still couldn't take care of myself, when I could."
"Well there's no time to clean you off now," she said, glancing around, as if her madness had given her a sense of time the rest of humanity didn't have, a clock ticking off in her head, making her constantly aware of that invisible something being lost.
Ed said it was because she spent so much time in that hospital waiting that she had absorbed time itself, internalizing, he called it, with each second a torture the way it was to prisoners of very kind.
"We have to hurry if we're to catch the bus," she said and grabbed Kenny's arm, leading me down the walk to the front of the store, passed Grandfather and his smoking test tank, passed his curious friends, passed the line of boats and motor and trailers, and the front window of the store where Ed stood around with Uncle Fred and Uncle Harry and other people Kenny didn't know, all of them nodding as they passed, all of them seeming to know what was going on and how Kenny was being dragged off to get communion clothes he didn't even want.
Mother and child got to the corner just in time to catch the bus, the doors hissing open before them, swallowing both whole before closing again, bus bumping forward even before mother finished handing the driver the fare.
"The driver recognized her," Kenny recalled. "She had taken so many rides on this route for so long each driver knew her. And she had to explain why she was going in the wrong direction, towards Passaic rather than the heart of Paterson. I remember how embarrassed I felt when she pointed to me and reported how I needed clothing for communion. I remember how relieved I felt when we finally made our way down the aisle to find a seat -- my muddy sneakers leaving a wet trail down the rubber mat."
The aisle was full of the elbows and knees of people who glared at mother and Kenny -- mother pushing Kenny into the seat first to keep him out of trouble. He pressed his nose against the glass to study the unfamiliar landscape.
"I knew the way to downtown Paterson by heart from traveling so many times with momma, each turn full of the same faces and the same stores that I could recite the route from memory if anyone had thought to ask," Kenny recalled. "But this way, towards Passaic, I'd gone with her only once or twice, and mostly, when I wandered this way from Religious School. But I always stopped at the parkway bridge beyond which was a long hill thick with unfamiliar stores and buildings and strange people."
The bus huffed and puffed into this new world. Everything here looked polished and new, different from the dusty, deterioration of downtown Paterson.
"We passed through the heart of Clifton," Kenny recalled. "And I didn't see any of the gangs of kids that used to scare my mother. But she still looked scared, biting her lower lip as the bus chugged on. She kept mumbling about whether she had enough money or if the store would have the night size."
"You're such a big boy for your age," mother mumbled.
Kenny tried to interest the woman in the sights as they passed, the park, the statues, even people scrambling around the bases on a baseball diamond.
"I kept asking her to get off early so I could walk around, and she kept telling me, later," Kenny recalled.
The park passed into a small business district, where yellow awnings hung over the sidewalk like frowning brows. Most of the windows displayed a single word, "sale," although others also said, "going out of business."
Pickup trucks and large cars were parked two deep on either side of the street so that when mother pulled the cord the bus had to stop in the middle of the street. Car horns blared from behind, drivers casting dirty looks at mother and child existing the bus.
Mother stopped in front of a shoe store that had see-through yellow paper drawn down over the inside like a shade. Everything inside looked yellow and old, much in the way things in the attic did at home.
"She dragged me inside and sat me down in one of the chairs and told the clerk to fix me up with a pair of white shoes," Kenny recalled. "When the clerk said he didn't know if he had white shoes in my size, mother nearly cried."
"You must," she said. "Kenny needs them for his First Communion."
The old man promised to come up with something and did, although these pinched terribly.
"I tried to tell momma how much they hurt, but she was so relieved at finding anything that remotely fit, she cast her crumpled money at the man and dragged me out to the street again, leaving me clinging to my muddy sneakers as I wore the white ones," Kenny recalled. "Then, Momma pulled me down the street again, this time stopping at a clothing store that smelled like Grandma's basement on laundry day, with racks and racks of so much clothing I didn't think there would ever be enough people in the world to wear them all. A woman no older than Momma asked if she could help us, and frowned when Momma told her she wanted a white suit for me."
"We don't get much call for white suits of any kind, let alone in his size," the woman said.
But when mother expressed the same regret she had in the shoe store the woman agreed to try, leaving them for a moment while she searched the racks.
"She came back after a long time carrying a hanger, holding up the suit against me that looked more yellow than white," Kenny recalled, "the kind of yellow that newspapers get after a day or two sitting on the front lawn in the sun."
"It looks a little small," mother said.
"We'll see," the woman said and led Kenny to a place she called a dressing room, Mother making sure he put down his sneakers before trying to pull on the pants, both of them waiting as he came back out, dressed all in white. Momma and the woman stared down at him.
"It's too tight," mother said.
"Not by much," the other woman said. "It wouldn't show if he didn't jump around or anything."
"How does it feel, Kenny?" mother asked, her voice edged with despair.
"I didn't have the heart to tell her the clothing hurt, pinching me under the shoulders and between my legs," Kenny recalled. "But she knew, biting her lip as she looked me over, mumbling to herself how I would only have to wear it once, and never again, and how she might put it up in the attic with the rest of the things nobody used any more, calling it `a memory' the way Grandpa did the other stuff."
"We'll take it," Mother said with a sigh, and counted out from her small pile of wrinkled bills the money the woman wanted.
"Perhaps she was afraid that I might tear it if I took it off again, that she wanted me home where she could help me off and could stash it away until the next Sunday when I would march up the aisle in it," Kenny recalled. "I know people on the bus stared at us, even nodding their complements at me as if I had already taken up the host."
Everybody at boat store stared at mother and child made their way up the drive, Kenny so white against the backdrop of dust and smoke he seemed to glow.
"Even grandpa paused, puffing on his cigarette as if he'd seen a ghost," Kenny recalled. "And that was when the birds called to me. I heard the vague sound of my mother's gasp as I ran. But the sound of ripping fabric as I jumped seemed louder to me than a scream, and for a moment, I clung barely to the limb, my white shoes scuffed by the bark, my dirty fingers slipping before I fell. I don't remember landing, but I'm sure I did."