8

I guess the title of a movie about the next day would be The Lady Vanishes. Most Sundays after twelve o’clock Mass I’d tote grocery bags for tips at the market, but the stupid heavy rain and fierce wind never stopped, as if some Hollywood studio had arranged it to coincide with the release of The Hurricane, a South Seas Jon Hall starrer, so I sat around at home with a three-inch paper scissor cutting out a Barney Google mask from the Journal-American Sunday funnies, thus setting up the reason that at the end of my life my tombstone should be totally blank but for the single word in tall block letters, DUPE! for I’d followed the paper’s instructions that by “thoroughy mixing” flour and water I would wind up with glue. The lying fucks! I also entered a couple of their fraudulent puzzle contests. “Neatness counts!” they always said. Yeah, sure. Well, I gave the right answers to all of the questions in all of the puzzles all of the time, and as for neatness my answers were in perfect block letters, I’d even dust them for flyspecks, for crimminey sakes! But do you think I ever won? Not once! I tried everything, even setting down my answers on paper that I’d cut into the different geometric shapes of the most popular and bestselling bars of soap, and at the end, in humiliating desperation, a bleeding, humongous heart on the back of which I wrote in neat letters, IT FLOATS. Yes. Memories are made of this.

Monday morning Jane wasn’t in school. Bummer. I had so many things to ask her. Come lunchtime I tried to console myself, trudging despondently to Lexington Avenue and 27th where the publishers of Superman comics were ensconced and I wound up talking to some girl in reception and doing my ever so insouciantly charming and engagingly innocent altar boy act while underneath I was seething and basically asking where in freak was the Superman badge I’d written in for, a demand I finished off with hooded lids and a barely audible, “Neatness counts.” The girl gave me a pretty odd look at that but then must have decided that she hadn’t really heard it since not only did she give me the badge but a Superman Club decoder ring as well!

Some Mondays don’t have to be all that bad.

But by Friday things were rotten: still no Jane.

“Hey, you seen Jane Bent anywhere?”

The eighth-grader in the school yard, a truck-sized brute named Leo Zalewski, put down the ruler whose end he had placed against a loose upper molar. He’d been about to bang it hard with the butt of his fist, this being our version of “affordable dentistry.” Leo’s eyes were always moist but now as he looked down at me they seemed on the verge of drowning. “Joey, thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”

“What for?”

“I was about to bash out the wrong tooth.”

“Geez, I’m glad I just happened along.”

“Some coincidence, huh?”

I said, “Yeah.”

I’d decided not to mention the Holy Ghost.

“So whaddya want?” he asked me.

“Have you seen Jane Bent?” I repeated.

“Seen who?”

“Jane Bent.”

“Who’s she?”

“Who’s she?”

My response not having advanced the state of either his knowledge or undoubted deep interest in who should be favored in the Joe Louis–Billy Conn heavyweight boxing match that night, Zalewski looked bored and turned away. “Gotta find myself a mirror,” he mumbled. He’d started walking toward a door to the school and the basement boy’s room that was constantly redolent of urine and chalk, turning briefly to wave and stare at me wetly as he uttered, “I’ll never forget you, pal.”

I went and collared another eighth-grader that I knew, Billy Burns. “Hey, what’s up?” he said, unwrapping a penny Hooten bar.

“Listen, Burnsy, have you heard why Jane Bent’s not in school? What’s the story? Is she sick? What’s goin’ on?”

“Jane who?”

“Jane Bent.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Whaddya mean?” I said. “Jane! Jane Bent! She’s in your class!”

“Since when?”

“Are you nuts?”

“Are you?”

It could be that I was. I went on to ask other eighth-graders, but every one of them told the same story. I mean, talk about Gaslight! I’d seen her in the school yard! She’d been here! This was some kind of crazy mistake, I was thinking, like these guys must have misheard her name. And then the bell rang out in the school yard and we all trooped back to our classrooms, me being the only one walking like a zombie. Before the second bell for the start of class, Sister Louise was preoccupied with searching for something in this big black satchel of hers on her desk and I could pretty well guess what it was. Different nuns had different variations on torture. Sister Marguerite’s, for example, was mental and perhaps the most fiendish of all. We would scribble away, writing compositions, which after you had finished it you’d take to her desk and hand it to her and then stand there watching her read it, and when she’d finished she wouldn’t look at you, she’d just turn away with this quiet moan like she was getting warmed up to spend a couple of weeks in the Garden of Gethsemane as she placed your paper atop the stack on her desk and then quietly said to you, her expression inscrutable, “Thank you. You may go back to your seat,” and then you’d hear this pained sigh from behind you. But then sometimes, when one of the brighter kids handed in a paper, she would dredge up a tight little weary smile and say with her thick Irish brogue, “Ah, well, now maybe here’s something sure to brush away the cobwebs from my heart,” and she’d read it and then slowly turn away with that same dead, unreadable expression as she wordlessly placed your composition on top of the others, after which she’d prop her elbows on her desk, lower her face into her hands and then slowly shake her head. Equally effective, though far less inhumane, was the special weapon that Sister Louise was now groping to find in her bag, her dreaded nail-studded “Guidance Ruler,” and seizing the chance while she was distracted, I grabbed hold of Paulie Farragher and asked him in urgent whispers to confirm that he’d actually seen and met Jane.

“Jane who?” he hissed back at me.

“Bent! Jane Bent! Pretty girl with pigtails? Came over and shook your hand and said, ‘Nice’ when you’d finished up a fight in the yard?”

“Who told you that?” he hissed.

I gurgled, “You!”

Sister Louise looked up, half amazed and half not gruntled. “What is it, El Bueno?” she husked in her gravelly Lionel Stander voice.

“Nothing, Sister. Some kind of bug just landed on my neck.”

“So instead of slapping at it you decided just to accuse it?”

I hadn’t thought fast enough. She’d been as likely to swallow my story as to take off her hood and then fill it with drugged Brazil nuts to feed to the pigeons camping out on our window ledges, cooing and strutting around like they thought they were really special and the white stuff all over the ledges was tributes from subservient finches, but she hadn’t found her weapon as yet, so she lowered her glare to her briefcase in what I would describe as extreme slow motion, maybe thirty-six frames per second, and possibly wishing that she were the Medusa. She ended it all with a “Hmph!”

At mid-morning recess I landed on Farragher again until at least he said maybe he remembered Jane. “Yeah, some girl shook my hand,” he allowed, but then he had to add “Maybe,” explaining that his windmill defense could at times cause “some dizziness” in the “aftermath of battle.”

“Where’d you learn that word?” I said, my blood running hot.

“What word?”

“The word ‘aftermath,’ you moron!”

Many hands at last disengaged mine from his throat.

For now.

At recess I collared Baloqui, grabbing him forcefully by the front of his sweater and pulling him close to ask, my eyes wide, my nostrils flaring, “Listen, tell me, is there really a Jane Bent at this school?” And after his usual trademark frowns and glares of intently probing paranoid suspicion, not to mention his infuriating quietly uttered demand to know, “Why is this important to you?” he confirmed to me that Jane was enrolled at St. Stephen’s and confided in a whisper behind his hand that the boys in eighth grade were just having me on. But then what did that mean inasmuch as he had previously confirmed the existence of the Asp and Mr. Am, and, if pressed, would have sworn that not only was Nancy Drew a real person but she would “probably be coming to Thanksgiving dinner.”

“Come on in, El Bueno. Take a seat.”

There was no other way.

Miss Doyle motioned to a chair beside her desk where she was probably bringing my tardy record up to date by inscribing an infinity symbol in the box headed “Number of Times.”

“Be with you in a minute,” she said.

I sat down. Through the glass partition of the file room I saw Sister Veronica’s hood bobbing up and down and out of sight a few times very quickly in succession like some huge cloistered blackbird high on amphetamines and thinking that worms could be found in file drawers. On Doyle’s desk I saw a Glidden’s Paint color chart with the odds pretty even she was making a selection for either her apartment kitchen or her hair. I was also surprised to see a little framed photo of Clark Gable on her desk behind a clutch of white daisies in a water glass half filled with water. I was strangely touched. I could hear Judy Garland singing “You Made Me Love You” and wondered whether Doyle wrote “Dear Mr. Gable” letters in her mind. Finally, she lifted her pen from the ledger, and as she swiveled around to warily appraise me, the humongous cross that always dangled at her chest made a soft bumping sound against the edge of the desk. “So what’s up, El Bueno?” she asked me. “You got a new mask to show off or am I looking at it right now?”

I said, “No, ma’am. No mask. I’m all me.”

This didn’t seem to relax her.

“And then?” she said.

“And then what, please, ma’am?”

Doyle squinted suspiciously. “What do you want?”

I want nothing but the best for all of mankind, came to mind as a way of sort of easing into things, but in the presence of Miss Doyle’s overwhelming emanations of greatness, all I could think of was to blurt out, “My dad would really really like to meet you.”

She looked at me blankly for a moment, then said, “Why?”

Oh, well, what to say now for cripessakes! “I don’t know” was a total loser, and “Because he thinks you’re crazy,” I imagined, doubtless worse. But then my basic feral cunning returned to coat my honeyed, lying tongue with moonbeams:

“Oh, I talk about you almost all the time!” I gushed.

“You do?”

“Oh, yes, truly, Miss Doyle! I do!”

Her eyes narrowed.

Looking back, I think the error was the “truly.”

“Okay, let’s have it, El Bueno. What’s really on your mind?”

“Jane Bent, ma’am.”

“Who?”

“Ah, come on. Jane Bent. You see, her birthday’s coming up next week and I wanted to send her a birthday card and maybe a couple of”—my eyes flicked to the daisies on the desk and then back—“well, daisies. Just a random choice. But I don’t know her address and she hasn’t been in class all week so I…”

“Okay, hold it, kid, hold it,” Doyle told me as she lifted up a hand palm outward. “You say her name’s Jane B-e-n-t, Bent?”

“Yes, that’s right,” I said. “The one in eighth grade—I mean, just in case there’s two of them.”

“Just in case there’s two of them,” Doyle echoed dully.

She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms.

“Is this another of your put-ons, El Bueno?”

“Put-ons?”

I was frowning in puzzlement, my expression more pious than Frank Morgan’s as the Old Pirate in Tortilla Flat when he asks his dogs about a vision of St. Francis of Assisi in the woods: “Did you see him, boys? Did you see him?”

“Yeah, put-ons. Like the time you called a limousine service to come pick up Sister Veronica and take her to a prom at the Hotel Edison.”

“You’re seriously telling me I did that?”

Inclining her head a little, Doyle seemed to be appraising me with a distant, guarded fondness.

It was as if she were discerning a kindred spirit.

“Is your father anything like you?” she asked me.

“Ma’am?”

She didn’t answer. She just swiveled around, picked up her pen and went back to work. “Someone else would kick your butt for this, El Bueno. Of course we both know that there’s no Jane Bent at this school, much less two of them, for God’s sake!” She shook her head. “Why do you do these things, would you tell me?” Then she sighed and murmured something very softly.

It sounded like, “It must be in your blood.”