Weekday doubleheader

The Irish Dominican nuns at St. Rita’s in the South Bronx were tough, even the pretty ones. After Sr. Catherine Michael would finish speaking with a parent at our first-grade classroom door, her broad lovely smile darkened into a scowl as she turned to face us. We had inevitably been chattering behind her back, and she immediately rearmed herself with the pointer or yardstick she had left on her desk.

Richie, my first friend in school, had a markedly oblong head and would tremble with excitement in anticipation of fun, such as when we played Americans against Germans in the schoolyard. He appointed himself the American general, and I was happy to be a colonel because I thought the latter outranked the former. The Germans we fought against were invisible foes, but even more devious and treacherous on that account. In one of our charges against a park-bench pillbox, I scraped my finger, so Richie picked at an old scab on the back of his hand until a micro-drop of serum oozed out. When we rubbed our wounds together, we became blood brothers forever, or at least until he moved to Long Island later that year.

In class, Richie and I sat very close to each other because the pupils’ desks were arranged in double rows to maximize capacity, since class rosters over 50 were not out of the question. Side by side we flubbed our way through class performances of “Jingle Bells,” in which we dashed through the snow “in a one-horse soapin’ sleigh,” meaning one that had been rendered squeaky clean. Or we sang “Silent Night,” which featured the irrepressibly jolly “Round John Virgin.” In catechism, we learned that God was the Supreme Bean who made all things, and baby Jesus, in his guise of the Infant of Prague, was transformed by our limited geographic horizons into the Infant of Frog.

But one day, a tiny classmate named Maria was rehearsing a tiny speech in her tiny voice at the front of the room in preparation for a ceremony honoring our venerable pastor, Father Mackin, who had just been made a monsignor. We were all supposed to listen to Maria in silence, but Richie had a nagging doubt from our recent arithmetic lesson. Our twin-seat arrangement facilitated sotto voce communications, so leaning his impressive head sideways toward mine with his hand at the side of his mouth, he whispered:

“What comes after 29? 29 again?”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I didn’t want to go into it under the circumstances, so I shook my head vigorously. Maybe Richie had noticed phone numbers like MO5-2929 or addresses like 2929 Third Avenue? But sometimes you find out things about even your close friends that make you never view them in quite the same light again. Still, what did we expect for tuition of $1 a month?

“What comes after 29?” Richie insisted.

“Shhhhh, she’s looking,” I said, casting a sidelong glance at our tall nun at the back of the room.

“It’s 29 again, right?”

“I’ll tell you later — shut up!”

Then, nodding toward little Maria, who was still squeaking away in front of us, I whispered to Richie, to distract him from his numerical obsession, “If that was me, I’d talk so loud I’d make the whole room turn upside down.”

Stifling a laugh, Richie tried to modulate it into a cough, but it was poorly disguised. And then I saw it: our teacher’s right hand. It materialized from behind us, between my face and Richie’s, hovered in mid-air an instant, and proceeded to administer The Double Slap of Sr. Catherine Michael. First, with its knuckle side, the agile hand struck Richie’s left cheek, and then, as if rebounding, smacked my right cheek with the open palm. They were both crisply stunning shots — though executed without much room to maneuver — and marked by flawless technique for such a young nun. As a result, we two boys paid the strictest attention to the rest of Maria’s piping, albeit with crimson faces decorated with transient finger marks. The pressing question of who or what the successor of number 29 might be was allowed to lapse.

Richie and I both decided independently that the best way to deal with this flagrant instance of gratuitous corporal punishment was never to breathe a word of it to our parents.