The fifth grade’s morning mass daze is punctured by this development. They turn shocked faces to Madeleine, who unceremoniously climbs over them to reach the aisle.
Principal Randles goose-steps onto the altar. She and Miss Greene hold a muted, brief debate. Madeleine freezes in the aisle. The children squirm in their pews. The microphone catches a few words. “Assembly … unpleasant.”
The knot of teacher/principal/priest untangles, leaving Father Gary to announce the call into the microphone: Madeleine Altimari.
In her relief, Madeleine forgets to go slow, kneel, genuflect, bow at the cross, or acknowledge the priest. She races to the microphone, narrowly avoiding Miss Greene, who attempts to give her a good-luck pat. The organist plays a plucky intro. Madeleine makes it to the podium. Here I go, Mama. She plants her child size twelves into the altar’s plush. Every child in every pew leans forward. The organist winds down the intro. Madeline opens her mouth to sing.
“Here I am!” Clare Kelly step-crutches up the aisle, her arm tucked into a sling and her parents trailing. “I can sing!” she says, reaching the front. The organist stops playing. Madeleine’s mouth, poised in an angelic O, shuts.
“A miracle!” Principal Randles jumps from her seat, applauding. Sarina protests. The principal asks, will Miss Greene join her in the back hall near the statue and the vigil candles? There she explains that while it was remarkable, exemplary even, worthy of Student of the Week if that ribbon hadn’t already been written out to Clare, that Madeleine was willing to step in at the last minute, when they thought Clare would be an unintelligible mess for days, but Clare is here, telligible, with her parents, the same parents who last year financed the building of this back hall, that statue, and these vigil candles. “It’s the daughter of all this.” She gestures around the hall. “Versus the daughter of a prostitute.”
Sarina removes her glasses. Two red stars appear on her cheeks. “Madeleine’s mother was not a prostitute.”
“Dancer,” Principal Randles says.
“Not the same,” Sarina says.
“It’s settled!” Principal Randles throws up her hands and returns to the Kellys with bright eyes.
Sarina scans the aisle for Madeleine, but the girl has already returned to her pew and is watching Clare step-crutch onto the altar toward the microphone.
Sarina takes her place next to her grade partner. “Isn’t she an angel?” the woman says, meaning Clare.
The organist restarts the intro. Clare opens her mouth to sing.
10:30 A.M
The first thing Ray asks when he answers the phone is whether the roof he installed in 1985 is intact. When Lorca assures him it is, Ray delivers a sermon on The Importance of a Sturdy Roof. “… The plumbing will rot, the floors will join them, but I used the best materials money could buy on that roof.” Lorca listens, sitting amid the wreckage of Gus’s model plane. Flaps, wheels, the fuselage, emergency doors. Ray runs a construction company in Reading that employs wanderers and harmless crooks. “I loved your father a lot. Jackie?” Ray interrupts himself. “How much trouble are you in?”
“Am I that obvious?” Lorca says.
Lorca hears laughing, then the unmistakable sound of nose spray. “Only one reason to call Reading.”
Lorca tells him about the citation and asks for the money.
“Can’t do it, buddy,” Ray says. “They slaughtered me.”
Blood evacuates Lorca’s ears and cheeks. He doesn’t know who “they” are. They could be the government, the union, the clattering aunts on Ray’s wife’s side who take dazed, hospitalizing falls twice a year.
“I always thought it’d be Max who’d run the club into the ground,” Ray says. “Always disappearing. Showing up with this girl or that.”
“That would have been what they call a safe bet,” Lorca says.
“At least you don’t have to spray a boatload of chemicals up your nose every second,” Ray says. “Be thankful for your health. And Alex and Louisa. You still smoking?”
Lorca says he is.
“Maybe quit. Do you pray?”
“I don’t,” Lorca says.
“Maybe start.” More coughing. This time Ray is laughing. “Why did the cop come today?” he says. “As opposed to last week, or never?”
Lorca rolls a plane wheel over the table. “Last night,” he says. “We set fire to Gus’s drum set and someone called the cops.”
The purgatory of his uncle’s silence follows. “Why would you do something like set fire to a drum set?”
Lorca wants to bring his fist down in the middle of the table and send the plane’s pieces hurtling into the dirty walls. The tail is separate from the body. The cockpit arranged at an awkward angle to dry. Lorca has asked Gus several times to get rid of the plane. He gets nervous around delicate things.
“Louisa left,” Lorca says. “I wanted to see something”—he rests his forehead against the hard wood of the table—“bright.”
11:10 A.M
The twenty-four children of Miss Greene’s art class wear twenty-four Santa hats and color twenty-four pictures of Santa. Each child’s name is spelled in glitter on the cotton brim of his or her hat. The classroom smells like fish and damp lunches.
Because the seats are arranged by height order and because when it comes to height Madeleine is nothing special, she sits in the third row, first desk, coloring and giving herself pep talks. Her mother taught her not to dwell so Madeleine cheers herself by replaying the moment in the third chorus of “Here I am, Lord,” when Clare squeaked on the word I.
Clare colors her Santa methodically, using classic hues: scarlet for the coat, white for the trim, forest green for the holly leaf that hangs above his head. When she needs red for Santa’s cheeks, she muscles the crayon from diabetic Duke’s hand.
In the space next to Santa’s outline, Madeleine lists songs she will practice later. “Take the A Train,” “Hey There.” At least there will be caramel apples. Madeleine spies them on the craft table, covered by a festive sheet.
Each child has been guaranteed one apple to cajole and twist through a pot of caramel. Madeleine will suffer through the hundreds of questions her classmates will ask about each step. She will lay her coated apple with the care of a surgeon on a sheet of wax paper to dry. She will not sprinkle it with peanut butter chips or walnuts or rainbow sprinkles. She has never had a caramel apple and wants a pure experience.
At the front of the room, Miss Greene clears her throat for their attention.
“It is eleven eleven,” she informs them. “Make a wish.”
The children of Homeroom 5A bow their heads and wish. Madeleine discards hers—May Clare Kelly get laryngitis—so she can watch Miss Greene. When her head is bowed her soft hair reaches her collarbone. What do fifth-grade teachers wish for?
Miss Greene claps to signal the end of wishing. The school nurse has appeared and wants everyone to listen to her. Madeleine assumes she is there to administer the apples.
“Lice,” she declares, “are bugs that live in your hair.”
Several of the girls give their pony- and pigtails vague tugs. The nurse snaps gloves on and asks them to line up. “We’ll go one by one.”
The first to go is Denny Pennypack, who with his brothers and sisters maintains a multigrade bullying contingent. The Pennypacks keep at least five smaller children in tow at any given recess. The purpose of these children seems to be to congratulate the Pennypacks and to offer them a stray glove or scarf if one of the Pennypacks forgets theirs. These children are for parts. If she were interested in minions Madeleine would be a bully, but she doesn’t like weak people hanging around.