I heard her replace the receiver in its cradle. A moment later she reseated herself and draped her napkin in her lap. “You’ll need to get a good night’s sleep tonight, Samuel. You start first grade in the morning at Our Lady of Mercy.”
12
We spent the rest of the evening in a chilly silence. I pretended to watch television until my bedtime at seven thirty. The minute hand had no sooner struck the six when my mother and father spoke nearly simultaneously—“Time for bed, Samuel.” I needed no further encouragement this night.
I hurried upstairs, brushed my teeth, washed my face, and pulled on my pajamas. Then I slid beneath my bed and inched close to the floor vent. Ordinarily I had to press my ear to hear my parents’ conversations in the room below, but this evening I could hear them both just fine.
“Why on God’s green earth would you do that, Madeline?”
“I won’t have him discriminated against.”
“You drew more attention to him than if you stood on the church steps and blew a bugle.”
“Don’t be melodramatic. I stood up for my son; if that makes me a bad mother—”
“And don’t pull the martyr act. This isn’t about you, Maddy. This is about Sam. He is the one who has to walk into that school tomorrow and confront the bed you have made for him.”
“He will be stronger for it.”
“He’s six years old!”
“And what? You think it will get easier for him as he gets older?”
“Precisely my point—the cruelty will begin soon enough.”
Cruelty? What kind of school was OLM? Jefferson Elementary was looking better and better.
“The cruelty has already been inflicted by a Dominican nun who had the temerity to call my son, our son—”
“Who will be his principal—”
“The ‘devil boy.’”
“Good God!” my dad shouted. “And you want to send him there?”
“She won’t be his principal for long, not if I have anything to do with it.”
“Please. Are you going to get every teacher who is unkind to Samuel fired? What about every child who mistreats him—are you going to have them expelled?”
Unkind? Mistreatment? What had I gotten myself into?
“Don’t be ridiculous, Maxwell.” My mother rarely called my father Maxwell.
“Me being ridiculous? I’m not the one who made a spectacle of myself on local television.”
“I certainly didn’t make a spectacle of myself.”
“You indicted the entire community. Our community.” There was a lull in the battle. Then my father said, “Sam is different. There’s nothing that can be done about that.”
“He certainly is.”
“Then why draw more attention to him? Why make him stand out any more than he already does? Why not let him just . . .” My father did not finish.
“What? Blend in?”
“Yes, to whatever extent he can.”
“Because he can’t blend in, and the sooner Samuel learns that is the case, the sooner he can learn to deal with it.”
There was another silence. Then I heard my father say, “Devil Boy?”
Later, I lay in bed listening to the rhythmic flow of my mother’s prayers. The cadence of her Our Fathers and Hail Marys ordinarily helped me drift to sleep. Not this night. I contemplated breaking that piggy bank and using my stored prayers for a good case of the flu, but I knew the flu would not last, and, eventually, I would be forced to attend OLM and face the cruelty and the mistreatment, whatever that meant.