Read The Cape Ann for Free Online

distaste.
    “Yes.”
    “Did you watch them play poker?”
    “Not very long. Papa told me to go in the living room. He said poker wasn’t a game for kids.”
    With her index finger, Mama traced the flower design in the oilcloth. “So you don’t know if your papa lost money?”
    I shook my head.
    The way to St. Boniface Catholic Church was straight and simple. You went out to First Avenue, which ran past the depot, turned right, and kept going. It was also easy to find Main Street, which ran perpendicular to First. You just walked two blocks toward the Catholic church, and there it was.
    Outside, on First Avenue, the morning was sunny and warm and intimately buzzing. Inside St. Boniface, it was dark and chilly and echoing. A few stragglers from daily Mass, mostly old ladies in battered black hats and cotton lisle hose, were leaving the pews. They remained after Mass, saying rosaries and lighting candles. Now and then there was one making her way through the Stations of the Cross. Long after instruction class had assembled and begun lessons, the old woman would be tiptoeing from station to station, denying herself the smell of May blowing in off the prairie and the pleasant sensation of a toasty sidewalk beneath the soles of her chunky black shoes. Could I ever hope to be as devout and self-denying as that?
    Seven of the nine would-be communicants were already gathered in the back pew, squirming and poking one another, when I genuflected and pushed Delmore Preuss over. He gave me a kick in the calf and resumed picking his nose. Sally Wheeler, my best friend in first grade, was seated toward the middle of the pew. Sally had thick, black hair which her mother braided into two long plaits that fell over her shoulders in front. Next to having short, blond curls like Katherine Albers, having long, black braids was best. Sally dropped the braid on which she had been chewing and waved to me.
    Mrs. Wheeler, like Mama, was a convert. This had created a special bond between Sally and me. Sister Mary Clair and Sister Mary Frances saved the most difficult catechism questions for us. They also reprimanded us more often than the other children, although, really, no one got off lightly. Putting our heads together, Sally and I concluded that because our mothers were converts, the sisters had doubts about our ability to be A-plus Catholics. Our only hope, as they likely saw it, was indoctrination of the sternest, most rigorous kind.
    At our mamas’ urging, Sally and I studied catechism together on Friday afternoons after Miss Hagen dismissed first grade. One week at Sally’s house, the next at mine.
    Mrs. Wheeler, Sally’s mama, was a pretty, fragile-looking woman who spoke softly and regarded everything with great intensity, as if the true meaning and value of things were eluding her or somehow being kept from her, and she must discover it. Sometimes she waylaid Sally and me for half an hour in the kitchen as she set out milk and cookies, inquiring persistently into the character and respective merits of Fig Newtons and Mallomars.
    At four-thirty she walked me to Main Street, explaining that I must stay on it until Truska’s Grocery and then turn right onto First. I could easily have found my own way, but Mrs. Wheeler needed to do this. She needed to carry everything out thoroughly and properly, no matter how cumbersome or ritualistic it became. It was her burden and duty to dot all the world’s undotted
i’
s.
    Now and then, when a regular member was sick or out of town and a substitute was required at Mama’s bridge club, Mrs. Wheeler was called. The next morning Mama would say to me, “Look how gray I turned waiting for Stella Wheeler to bid one heart,” and she would bend over and point to her imaginary gray hair. Mama was a headlong person with instincts as sharp as darts. She couldn’t conceive of uncertainty like Mrs. Wheeler’s.
    Sally and I never asked her mama to help us with catechism, although she invariably