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at the slightest provocation. A missed homework assignment called for four sharp blows to each hand. Lateness carried a penalty of two shots. A smile, a smirk, a glance in the wrong direction, could easily set fire to his wrath and bring the leather belt crashing across a hand or face.
    Brother Reynolds was an angry man, his frustration fueled by drink and an answer to a call he was ill suited to handle. We all at one time felt the pain of his strap. My friends and I dealt with him in much the same way we dealt with all our other problems, through humor, pranks, and wisecracks. If we couldn’t beat them, we decided, we might as well laugh at them. It can safely be said that Brother Reynolds had more water balloons dropped on his head, more pizzas delivered to his door, more scarves, gloves, and hats stolen from his office than any clergyman in the history of Hell’s Kitchen. Healways suspected me and my friends, but he lacked proof.
    One day I handed him all the proof he would ever need.
    I was bored, halfway through a math class that never seemed to end. To pass the time, I reached behind me and, scraping snow off the windowsill, made a wetball. I was sitting in the last row next to the clothes closet. I bet a pimple-faced Puerto Rican kid named Hector Mandano a sour pickle that I could make the snowball curve, throwing it from my seat in the back out an open left window in the front. Windows were always open in class, regardless of weather conditions, since the teachers felt fresh air kept the students alert. We never objected, especially in the colder months, when the heat in the building was enough to make the strongest student sink into a pool of sweat.
    Brother Reynolds had his back to me as he wrote a series of math problems on the blackboard. He was a few feet to the right of the open window. Since I had the utmost faith in my ability to throw a curveball, and since I would do anything for a sour pickle, I tossed the packed piece of snow across the room, convinced it would find its way.
    Whitey Ford would not have been pleased with my throw. The snowball not only
didn’t
curve, it actually picked up speed, moving like a missile toward the back of Brother Reynolds’s head. It landed with the kind of splat I’d heard only in cartoons. The entire class took in one collective breath. My only hope to survive was that the snowball had landed hard enough to cause a hemorrhage.
    It didn’t.
    Brother Reynolds flew down the aisle like a runaway bull, leather belt held high, swinging it from all sides, hitting the innocent and heading straight toward me, the guilty. He attacked me with an accumulation of rage and embarrassment, landing blows to my hands, head,and body, flailing away until he fell to his knees, exhausted. But nothing he did could stem the tide of laughter around him, which had grown so loud that it more than outweighed any pain I felt.
    The memory of Brother Gregory Reynolds shaking snow from the back of his neck, his face lit like a flame, his eyes bloated with fury, his body too angry to form words, will be one that will stay with me always, as will the laughter heard in that classroom on that dreary day.
    Brother Reynolds died less than two years after the incident, victim of a bad heart and too much drink. At his wake, his open casket surrounded by an array of flowers and a stream of mourners, someone in the back of the room brought up the story of the snowball that never curved.
    The laughter began all over again.

4
    S ACRED H EART C HURCH was quiet, its overhead lights shining down across long rows of wooden pews. Seven women and three men sat in the rear, hands folded in prayer, waiting to talk to a priest.
    My friends and I spent a lot of time inside that small, compact church with the large marble altar at its center. We each served as altar boys, working a regular schedule of Sunday and occasional weekday masses. We were also expected to handle funerals, spreading dark clouds of incense above the