Read Wait Until Spring Bandini for Free Online Page B

had to go down under the ground and make his living like a lousy damn dago rat. His name was Arturo Bandini, and if there was anybody in this school who wanted to make something out of it, let him speak up and get his nose broke.
    ‘ Arturo Bandini! ’
    ‘Okay,’ he drawled. ‘Okay, Sister Celia. I heard you.’ Then he stood up. The class watched him. Rosa whisperedsomething to the girl behind her, smiling behind her hand. He saw the gesture and he was ready to scream at her, thinking she had made some remark about his freckles, or the big patch on the knee of his pants, or the fact that he needed a hair cut, or the cut-down and remodeled shirt his father once wore that never fit him smartly.
    ‘Bandini,’ Sister Celia said. ‘You are unquestionably a moron. I warned you about not paying attention. Such stupidity must be rewarded. You’re to stay after school until six o’clock.’
    He sat down, and the three o’clock bell sounded hysterically through the halls.
        
    He was alone, with Sister Celia at her desk, correcting papers. She worked oblivious of him, the left eyelid twitching irritably. In the southwest the pale sun appeared, sickly, more like a weary moon on that winter afternoon. He sat with his chin resting in one hand, watching the cold sun. Beyond the windows the line of fir trees seemed to grow even colder beneath their sad white burdens. Somewhere in the street he heard the shout of a boy, and then the clanking of tire chains. He hated the winter. He could picture the baseball diamond behind the school, buried in snow, the backstop behind home plate cluttered with fantastic heaviness – the whole scene so lonely, so sad. What was there to do in winter? He was almost satisfied to sit there, and his punishment amused him. After all, this was as good a place to sit as anywhere.
    ‘Do you want me to do anything, Sister?’ he asked.
    Without looking up from her work, she answered, ‘I want you to sit still and keep quiet – if that’s possible.’
    He smiled and drawled, ‘Okay, Sister.’

    He was both still and quiet for all of ten minutes.
    ‘Sister,’ he said. ‘Want me to do the blackboards?’
    ‘We pay a man for doing that,’ she said. ‘Rather, I should say we overpay a man for that.’
    ‘Sister,’ he said. ‘Do you like baseball?’
    ‘Football’s my game,’ she said. ‘I hate baseball. It bores me.’
    ‘That’s because you don’t understand the finer side of the game.’
    ‘Quiet, Bandini,’ she said. ‘If you please.’
    He changed his position, resting his chin on his arms and watching her closely. The left eyelid twitched incessantly. He wondered how she had got a glass eye. He had always suspected that someone had hit her with a baseball; now he was almost sure of it. She had come to St Catherine’s from Fort Dodge, Iowa. He wondered what kind of baseball they played in Iowa, and if there were very many Italians there.
    ‘How’s your mother?’ she asked.
    ‘I don’t know. Swell, I guess.’
    She raised her face from her work for the first time and looked at him. ‘What do you mean, you guess? Don’t you know? Your mother’s a dear person, a beautiful person. She has the soul of an angel.’
    As far as he knew, he and his brothers were the only nonpaying students at that Catholic school. The tuition was only two dollars a month for each child, but that meant six a month for him and his two brothers, and it was never paid. It was a distinction of great torment to him, this feeling that others paid and he did not. Once in a while his mother would put a dollar or two in an envelope and ask him to deliver it to the Sister Superior, on account. This was even more hateful.He always refused violently. August, however, didn’t mind delivering the rare envelopes; indeed, he looked forward to the opportunity. He hated August for it, for making an issue of their poverty, for his willingness to remind the nuns that they were poor people. He had never wanted to