and fling himself into one of the centre seats with a kind of satisfied violence, then huddle up tight against the window and stare out it the whole trip like someone seeing a landscape for the first time, his head turtled down into the collar of his coat.
“Hey Georgie,” the older boys would say, “tell us about the time your face caught on fire and your father beat it out with a crowbar.”
Sometimes then he’d glance furtively toward the back of the bus. But his face would be screwed up in what seemed like agrin, as if he were shyly pleased that the boys were paying attention to him, or as if he hadn’t understood them at all, had only turned at the sound of his name. The girls and the younger boys made fun of him as well, crossing their fingers and drawing away from the aisle when he got on the bus and passing on Georgie-germs if he should brush against them. Usually George seemed not to notice them; but once when a girl drew away as he was coming up the aisle he lunged toward her suddenly and made a face, and afterwards he seemed strangely pleased at what he’d done, settling into his seat with an air of impish self-satisfaction.
My own feeling about George was simply that I didn’t want to be like him, didn’t want other people to think I was like him; but whenever I was forced to sit beside him I’d feel a kind of rage build in me at his stupidity and strangeness. When other kids had to sit with him they’d call attention to themselves by making fun of him or by touching other people in the seats around them to pass on his germs. But I couldn’t do these things, didn’t have the right feeling inside to do them, and I knew my failure made me seem more like George to the others, even made me, in a way, more despicable than he was, because George was protected at least by the severity of his strangeness, had no one beneath him whom the others expected him to make fun of. I’d cross my legs under the seat sometimes the way the others crossed their fingers, furtively though, so that not even George would know I’d done it. But this useless concession made me feel worse than if I’d done nothing at all, made me think that it was only fear that kept me from making fun of George, fear that George too was stronger than I was, because of the way he flung himself into his seat each morning with a force that wasn’t angry or bitter but almost carefree and gay, orthe way he hummed quietly to himself sometimes as he stared out the window as if even he guarded some secret place inside him, a place that was his alone and could not be touched.
At school we went from the bus to the church, a sudden shift from the bus’s strange containment into the wider containment of St. Michael’s, the little world it formed with its huddled white buildings, its chain-link fence, its special logic and rules. Sister Jackson, the vice-principal, presided over our arrival from the bottom of the church steps; two other sisters stood at the fonts at the foot of the aisle. The girls sat in the left-hand pews, the boys in the right, in order of class, our heads rising in a gradual slope toward the back of the church. During the service the sisters on duty hovered in the side aisles like sentries; some of them, the older ones, carried long wooden pointers, and reached out quick and silent to rap you on the back of the neck if you whispered to your neighbour or fell asleep.
The church rose up to a high, arched roof that gave it the sense of an emptiness that couldn’t be filled, that hung over us during the service as if we’d made no impression in it. In the church in Valle del Sole the pews had stood so close to the altar you could see the beads of sweat on Father Nicola’s upper lip as he preached; but here the chancel was raised up four steps from the nave, separated from it by the low marble rail where people knelt for communion and by the wide expanse of the transept. The altar, of green and brown marble, was flanked by two
“Hey Georgie,” the older boys would say, “tell us about the time your face caught on fire and your father beat it out with a crowbar.”
Sometimes then he’d glance furtively toward the back of the bus. But his face would be screwed up in what seemed like agrin, as if he were shyly pleased that the boys were paying attention to him, or as if he hadn’t understood them at all, had only turned at the sound of his name. The girls and the younger boys made fun of him as well, crossing their fingers and drawing away from the aisle when he got on the bus and passing on Georgie-germs if he should brush against them. Usually George seemed not to notice them; but once when a girl drew away as he was coming up the aisle he lunged toward her suddenly and made a face, and afterwards he seemed strangely pleased at what he’d done, settling into his seat with an air of impish self-satisfaction.
My own feeling about George was simply that I didn’t want to be like him, didn’t want other people to think I was like him; but whenever I was forced to sit beside him I’d feel a kind of rage build in me at his stupidity and strangeness. When other kids had to sit with him they’d call attention to themselves by making fun of him or by touching other people in the seats around them to pass on his germs. But I couldn’t do these things, didn’t have the right feeling inside to do them, and I knew my failure made me seem more like George to the others, even made me, in a way, more despicable than he was, because George was protected at least by the severity of his strangeness, had no one beneath him whom the others expected him to make fun of. I’d cross my legs under the seat sometimes the way the others crossed their fingers, furtively though, so that not even George would know I’d done it. But this useless concession made me feel worse than if I’d done nothing at all, made me think that it was only fear that kept me from making fun of George, fear that George too was stronger than I was, because of the way he flung himself into his seat each morning with a force that wasn’t angry or bitter but almost carefree and gay, orthe way he hummed quietly to himself sometimes as he stared out the window as if even he guarded some secret place inside him, a place that was his alone and could not be touched.
At school we went from the bus to the church, a sudden shift from the bus’s strange containment into the wider containment of St. Michael’s, the little world it formed with its huddled white buildings, its chain-link fence, its special logic and rules. Sister Jackson, the vice-principal, presided over our arrival from the bottom of the church steps; two other sisters stood at the fonts at the foot of the aisle. The girls sat in the left-hand pews, the boys in the right, in order of class, our heads rising in a gradual slope toward the back of the church. During the service the sisters on duty hovered in the side aisles like sentries; some of them, the older ones, carried long wooden pointers, and reached out quick and silent to rap you on the back of the neck if you whispered to your neighbour or fell asleep.
The church rose up to a high, arched roof that gave it the sense of an emptiness that couldn’t be filled, that hung over us during the service as if we’d made no impression in it. In the church in Valle del Sole the pews had stood so close to the altar you could see the beads of sweat on Father Nicola’s upper lip as he preached; but here the chancel was raised up four steps from the nave, separated from it by the low marble rail where people knelt for communion and by the wide expanse of the transept. The altar, of green and brown marble, was flanked by two
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