Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [39]
The most embarrassing moment of my life up until the day Lorie left me was when Marcie Birkenheimer and her mother walked past us on a corner of Tenth Avenue East as my father regaled indifferent passersby with quotations from the Scriptures and from Dreams of the Afterlife. I was in eighth grade and had nursed a crush on Marcie all term. The look of abject pity she bestowed on me humbled me down to the fillings in my teeth.
The Saints’ children went to public schools and were expected to be at the top of the class in all academic subjects, a goal I never achieved. Because of my faltering grades I was perpetually in hot water with Markham and was tutored by one aspiring Saint after another. During my early teens my tutor was a woman named Constance Desmond, sweet-natured and unaffected, a body to kill for, with a complete absence of pretense. She had a way of leaning against my arm as we looked over one of my papers so that the heat of her breast sent a fever straight to my brain. Under the table I would invariably achieve an erection. Except for the boners, Constance’s tutelage served no purpose, and my grades grew worse. We were both punished for this, she by being repeatedly reassigned as my tutor, me with additional hours on the street.
I was in love with Constance, and since by then virtually all of my assigned proselytizing time was secretly spent at the downtown public library, where I habitually broke Markham’s injunction against reading literature about other religions, I took the punishment stoically.
Several times during this period, one of the elders ordered me to wear a cardboard sign around my neck: IF I TRIED HARDER, I’D BE SMARTER, or, MY GRADES ARE BAD, I AM SAD. There was a synagogue down the street that had dozens of my signs hidden behind it.
These were long miserable months laced with exhilarating minutes with Constance, whose beautiful brown eyes flooded with tears whenever she saw a cardboard sign around my neck. In later years, I realized Constance had been struggling with her own demons, that the accidental pressure of her breast against my arm might not have been so accidental after all. Her husband, a huge, greasy, balding man, would have done almost anything to reach Sainthood, including, I often speculated, cutting off his own pecker, though Markham did not have a basketful of peckers in the back room.
That I knew of.
In later years, I came to the realization that Constance had been as lonely as I was.
And perhaps almost as horny.
Nothing ever happened between us. The emotional fallout from such a liaison would have destroyed Constance and certainly would have paralyzed me.
My affiliation with Six Points left me feeling like an oddball, as if there were constant parties and friendships going on around me to which I not only wasn’t invited, but which I didn’t even know about. It wasn’t until I’d been in the fire department in North Bend for a good ten years and had two daughters that I truly overcame the sense of being an outsider.
My father, a natural-born lackey and former engineer, quickly became an indispensable cog of the inner circle. Mother was a tad too candid in recounting her wilding years during our weekly Confessions, a recounting that probably kept her from attaining the inner circle with my father. Their disparity of status as Saints was a source of much friction between them, as were the misspent years of my mother’s youth.
Then, abruptly and without warning, when I was eight, my mother disappeared from Six Points and from my life.
My father was not normally a cruel man, but one night he told me my mother had left because I wasn’t following the tenets of the Sixth Element of