covered up, and we thought they walked around in twos and
never said a word and had their heads bowed and shaved and
their hands together in prayer. But we didn’t know. We weren’t
supposed to go too near it, the convent, and we were afraid of
disappearing in there for life, because once you went in you
could never come out. There were ghosts there too. We didn’t
know if anyone in there was really alive. When you saw the
top of the convent and the menacing trees above the backs of
the row houses and the wooden cage with a slight figure inside
it hoisted high on the telephone pole and tied there with a rope
and the afternoon began to fade and it got dusky or cloudy
and there were just the silhouettes of things, the starkness of
the cage and the figure in it, the tautness of the rope, the city
ugliness, barren, of the telephone pole, all against a sky that
had begun to lose light, reigned over by old European stones
and impenetrable trees, you knew you were near something
old, chill, something you knew but didn’t know: something
God was supposed to protect you from: something on the edge
of your memory, but not your memory. When it got late in the
day or the sky darkened with clouds or oncoming rain, the
silhouettes were awful drawings of something you had seen
before: maybe in a book: somewhere: and you stood completely
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still and watched and prayed for the wooden cage to come
down, for the figure in it to disappear, not be there, that slight
figure, for the convent to go away, to be somewhere else: and
especially for the dread boys, the crowd, to notice the coming
dark and be afraid of what they had done. We were overcome
watching: the great shadow of the convent and its thick trees,
its cold walls of stone, and the great imposition of the wooden
cage and the caged figure on the darkening sky. It was eerie
and unhappy: and one was drawn and repelled: drawn to the
convent and the cage, wanting to run inside the house.
We were all supposed to stay away from Catholics. The
convent represented their strangeness and malice: the threat of
their ghostly superstitions. A holy ghost lived there and they
drank blood and ate cookies and kneeled down. They wanted
all the children: and at night you could disappear into those
walls and no one would ever see you again. Standing outside
the great stone thing, even in broad daylight, even with traffic
all around, because one side of the convent was right on a very
big street at a very big intersection, a child was frightened of
the unscalable cold stone and the height of it. We could never
find a way in or out and the walls were too high to climb. I
wanted to see it and go into it but I was afraid even to stand
near it. Once another girl and I stood on that street corner for
hours collecting money for a charity and if you got enough
money you got to go to a special dinner in a restaurant and I
just thought about the traffic, how regular it was, and the sun,
how bright it was, the people walking on the street, how they
looked and dressed, because behind me was the penetrating
silence of those stone walls and I was cold and afraid. I could
feel it behind my back and I could feel the cold stones there
and I could feel the giant height of the wall and I could feel the
reaching coolness of the shadows from the great trees. Then a
car stopped to give us money after we had been there for hours
and this girl I was with went up to the car and then she got
real frightened and wouldn’t say what the man said to her and
said we had to go home right away and was really scared and
since it was right next to the convent I knew it was something
really bad so we went right home and she talked to her mother
who talked to my mother and I kept asking what had happened
and what the man had done to her. Finally my mother said he
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asked her to get in the car with him. It was very terrible and
ominous to get into the car. The air was heavy with warning
and fear and my own inestimable incomprehension. There was
this edging of my fear away from the convent to the man in
the car and to getting into a car. I thought he must be Catholic.
The girl would never speak of it or answer anything I asked.
My mother said never to say anything about it. I asked if he
had hurt her. My mother said: he didn’t get the chance.
*
There were Jewish blocks and Catholic blocks and black
blocks. We were supposed to stay off the black blocks, though
it was never put that way. We were always just showed how
to walk, down which streets, and told where not to go, which
streets. The streets we weren’t supposed to go on just had that
in common: black faces, black children. The Catholic streets
and the Jewish streets were all inside the same area, alternating,
no mixing. But I liked to go where I wasn’t supposed to, and I
often walked home alone down the Catholic streets, because
no one could tell by just looking at me exactly. I would make
new routes for myself down streets my friends didn’t go on.
Sometimes I went down black streets, because I wanted to.
Then, getting closer to the one central elementary school,
where all kinds of children converged from every direction,
there were blocks that we all had to walk down because we
were all going to the same place and it was just a fact that no
matter who lived there we all had to walk by or through,
however timidly.
Our street was bounded on one end, the one going to school,
by a busy street with lots of cars and across that street was a
Catholic block, Polish. We were supposed to walk up half a
block before crossing that busy street and continue going
toward school on a Jewish block, and usually I did. But coming
home I would want to walk down the Catholic block because
it was different and it seemed more direct. I knew I shouldn’t
but I didn’t exactly know why I shouldn’t except that it did
seep in that they were different from us and we weren’t
supposed to marry them. I wasn’t even ten yet because I was
ten when we moved away.
I had a friend on that block, Joe, and we would say hello
and talk and say shy things to each other. Their houses were
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different, all brick row houses, but right on the sidewalks, no
flights of steps going up to the door, just one level block. There