​​​​The Sky and Its Limits

The first thing I noticed about St. Jude’s School was its smell. A dry, dusty odor clung to the hallways and classrooms and a nun who passed by gave off the whiff of old furniture that had been stored in a garage. 

After I was introduced to the class, a towheaded kid with a poorly executed bowl cut leaned over and whispered to me, “You’ll hate it here.” He smiled mischievously, his two front teeth protruding over his bottom lip. He looked like a deranged rabbit. 

“I hate it,” I said to my mother when I came home. 

She frowned and hugged me. My father placed a hand on my shoulder and mumbled something about toughing it out. He didn’t understand his wife’s leap into Catholicism any more than I did. It had happened quickly: mom taking me and my sister, Doris, to Mass, the first time either of us had set foot inside a church; religious books appearing around the house (The Catechism of the Catholic Church, Return of the Prodigal Son, Introduction to the Devout Life, the Confessions of Saint Augustine); the sprinkling of holy water on my head by a distracted, palsied priest. I was enrolled at St. Jude’s for 6th grade while Doris, through a series of tantrums and threats, won the right to continue at public school for 8th grade. 

This was the ’70s and the energy of the Jesus Movement with its long-haired, hippie Savior was in the air, but I don’t think my mother was influenced by that. She was harkening to a different call. 

“It’ll be like gardening,” my dad whispered to me, motioning to the brown, brittle plants outside the window. When Mom had been in the throes of her gardening mania, she was either kneeling in the dirt or staring out the window at her flowers as if they held the secrets to the universe. 

Before that, her obsession was Old Hollywood. She would stay up late watching black-and-white movies, reading, and smoking Salem Lights. On weekends when she would let Doris and me stay up with her, she would name the actors and actresses on the screen with a sigh of pleasure: Grant, Bogart, Bacall, Bergman, Davis. The winter break before we had flown to Los Angeles, rented a white Chevy Impala, and made pilgrimages to old studio lots, hotels, and nondescript stucco buildings where Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, or Gloria Swanson had allegedly done something significant. 

That obsession had also faded. She hadn’t watched a Bette Davis movie or recounted a Tallulah Bankhead anecdote for months. 

On my second day at St. Jude’s, our class was taken to confession at the parish church across the street. Everything about the church, including the statue of the Virgin Mary with an unusually prominent big toe, made me uneasy. “You didn’t do this bullshit in public school, right?” asked the towheaded kid, whose name was Johnny Duffy. Johnny’s pants terminated several inches above scuffed Hush Puppies. His gray shirt was threadbare and his black socks bunched up around his ankles. Soon I would hear Fred Relican and Darren Desmond refer to Johnny behind his back as “The Troll.” They claimed that he and his alcoholic father lived in a dilapidated house underneath a railroad bridge. 

When I entered the confessional I was so nervous that I started talking before the priest was ready. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I mumbled to the closed partition. I sensed that something was amiss but once I started, it was difficult to stop. I don’t remember which sins I enumerated before embarrassment overcame me and I fled the claustrophobic box. 

Each day I brought home my complaints about St. Jude’s and laid them at my mother’s feet. My classmates were bizarre, I said. What I meant, although I lacked the vocabulary to describe it, was that they were a disconcerting mixture of vulgarity, fear of authority, and misdirected piety. I claimed that the nuns hated us. I suspected the truth was more complicated than that, but in my attempt to guilt her, I was pulling out all the stops. 

Her reaction was always the same: compassion mixed with conviction that she had made the right decision. An eerie calm had settled over her, the ease of a true believer that left no room for guilt. 

One Sunday she broke into tears just before she went up to receive the Eucharist. I turned crimson with shame. “Why do you cry in church?” I demanded when we got in the car. 

She beamed at me. “I pray that one day you will understand the beauty of the Mass,” she said. 

Ms. Leoni was our English teacher. A statuesque, raven-haired woman who wore large tortoiseshell glasses, she was soft-spoken but had a quiet intensity that gave rise to brief flashes of anger when she was frustrated or disappointed. 

“Who knows what the word ‘disaffected’ means?” she asked one morning when Fred Relican mumbled a petulant rejoinder after she had told him to stop talking. 

I was familiar with the word. I had encountered it while reading Treasure Island. 

I raised my hand hesitantly. “Nasty?” I said. 

“Close enough,” Ms. Leoni said, smiling. 

Fred, after the bell rang: “You calling me nasty?” 

“Watch it, Allen,” Darren said, spitting out my name like it had a bad taste. “The Troll won’t always be around to protect you.” 

“Leave him alone,” said Elena Ristucci, who had the personality of a kind but uptight nun, as she passed by. 

I glared at Fred and Darren but said nothing. I wasn’t hopelessly passive or unable to stand up for myself. I had been in a few fights at public school and had held my own. But I didn’t yet have my bearings at St. Jude’s and Fred and Darren were different specimens than any I had encountered at Kennedy Elementary. Although they were freshly scrubbed altar boys, there was a menacing hint of impending manhood in their deepening voices, cold stares, and cocked chins. They were good students and in the advanced reading group with me, yet they fearlessly tormented everyone around them. The contradictions perplexed me. 

They didn’t perplex Johnny. “Freddy’s mom is a cripple and Darren’s dad beats the shit out of him,” Johnny told me, as if that explained everything. “I know what they call me and I don’t give a fuck. At least my Dad doesn’t hit me,” he said, searching my eyes for signs of disbelief. I nodded approvingly. “Mine either,” I said. 

I had seen Fred’s mom once on campus, lurching forward on a walker, her legs bent inward. I had never seen Darren’s dad but I hadn’t noticed any bruises on his son. But who knew what weird things went on behind closed doors? My own home proved it. 

Johnny insisted I join the baseball games that took place at recess on the long strip of grass that ran between the two buildings that comprised the school. We used a tennis ball and the bases were marked by balled-up clip-on ties. Johnny, long-limbed and wiry, was the best player in the class. He was so fast he could outrun almost anything he hit. I was both embarrassed and grateful when Johnny would shout “Hell yeah, Al!” whenever I made the slightest contribution. I wasn’t a terrible athlete but I had little interest in sports, especially the part that declared one team the victor and the other the vanquished. 

“What do ya like, anyway?” Johnny asked about a month into our friendship, baffled by my lack of enthusiasm for his preferred pastimes: sports and plotting revenge against Fred and Darren. I mentally ran through the list of things I enjoyed: solitary excursions into the woods behind our house, where I pretended to be Huck Finn; cracking the spine of a new book and inhaling the smell of its pages; the week we spent in the summer at the Catskills cabin that Aunt Ruth, my mother’s older sister, owned; the surge of warmth I felt when my mother nestled her head into my father’s shoulder when we played board games on Sunday nights. I rejected all of them as unacceptable responses to Johnny’s question. 

“Comic books,” I finally said, although I had only read one comic in my life: Spider-Man (“Featuring the Return of Dr. Octopus”). 

“Right on,” Johnny said, after pondering the response for a bit. 

Near the end of my second week at St. Jude’s, Ms. Leoni discreetly motioned for me to stay while the rest of the class filed out. As she sat at her desk and looked me over, I caught a faint whiff of her rose-scented perfume. 

“Your vocabulary is impressive,” she said. 

I blushed. 

“Really, it’s quite remarkable for your age. Do you read a lot?” 

“I have to,” I said. I told her about my mother’s book list, from which Doris and I were required to pick and finish one per month. Mom was an English professor at the local community college. She had named me after Allen Ginsberg and my sister after Doris Lessing. 

“I’m glad you’re in my class, Allen.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I’d bet your classmates never read a book unless it’s required. And sometimes even then, they don’t. But don’t worry, I won’t rat you out. It’ll be our secret.” 

Although I was hesitant to depart the glow of her smile, I mumbled my thanks and left. 

Although Johnny didn’t understand my warm feelings for Ms. Leoni or my “fancy talk,” I was glad to have him on my side. His jaundiced views of St. Jude’s delighted and consoled me. 

In my third week of school, my mother began peppering me with questions about my religion class, taught by an elderly nun, Sister Bernadette. “What has she taught about the Annunciation? The Resurrection? The Holy Spirit’s visit to the Apostles?” Mom’s obsessions made her intense, like a bad cop trying to break down a suspect. 

I fumbled my answers. Religion class was like arriving at a movie titled Catholicism in the middle and trying to piece together the plot. 

My father peered over his Wall Street Journal. “Give the boy a little peace, Susan.” 

As if waking from a trance, she smiled and said, “Very good, Ally.” 

After Mom left the room, Doris, who was usually neither affectionate nor empathetic, put her arm around me and whispered, “Hang in there. It won’t last long.” 

My parents were mismatched in every way. My father, short and powerfully built with dark, neatly trimmed hair, resembled a mild-mannered bulldog. My mother, tall, thin and bespectacled, with unruly strawberry-blonde curls, was a neurotic stork. He was apolitical; she was a passionate Democrat. His religion was the stock market; my mother treated money as a baffling, irrelevant nuisance. Although their bond had always seemed as ironclad as it was mysterious, the sudden addition of religion, like a branch blown through the living room window by a strong wind, was testing it. Her interest in spirituality wasn’t new: there were well-worn copies of the Bhagavad Gita, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and Tao Te Ching on the bookshelves. But this, of course, was different. 

“Check it out, Al,” Johnny said to me one day during class, making a rounding motion with his hand and nodding toward Ms. Leoni at the blackboard. “Knocked up,” he said, smiling his rabbit smile. 

Although Ms. Leoni had put on some weight, pregnancy didn’t seem possible. She wasn’t married and although I hadn’t yet fully puzzled out the facts of life, she seemed too old to be pregnant. But as the weeks passed, Ms. Leoni’s solid figure rounded and her upright bearing softened. Reactions to her transformation ranged from Fred and Darren’s titillated delight to Elena Ristucci’s teary pronouncement that our teacher had committed a grave sin. 

I didn’t want to think about Ms. Leoni’s situation. I couldn’t bear to entertain the possibility that the delicate progress I had made at school might be upended by change. 

A couple of weeks after Johnny had voiced his suspicion, St. Jude’s principal, Sister Mary Bernard, was waiting for us as we filed into the classroom. She was rarely seen but, like a ghost that makes unexpected, unsettling appearances, she was feared. 

“Please welcome your new teacher, Sister Eileen,” she said. Sister Eileen, a middle-aged woman with a trace of a mustache, greeted us with a half-smile. 

“Where’s Ms. Leoni?” Fred Relican asked, without raising his hand. 

Sister Mary Bernard glared at him as if he were a previously unnoticed fly that had started buzzing. “She decided to leave her position and pursue other opportunities.” 

“More like they gave her the heave-ho,” Johnny whispered to me. 

The ensuing silence was interrupted only by muffled laughs from Fred and Darren. 

When I got home, I stifled tears as I explained the situation to Mom. “She was the only good teacher there.” 

She nodded solemnly, then hugged me. “I’m sorry, Ally. But who knows? Sister Eileen may be an even better teacher than Ms. Leoni.” 

“How could she possibly be better?” I demanded. 

She seemed confused. “Why couldn’t she be?” 

“Because nuns are not . . . real people.” 

She tilted her head like a fawn puzzled by an unexpected rustling in the bushes. “The Sisters of Saint Mary have devoted their lives to the service of God and others. They’re the realest people.” 

“Real people don’t smell like old furniture!” I shouted.

I don’t recall much of our conversation after that. There was too much roiling inside me. At some point I do remember Mom saying something about Ms. Leoni and sin. It wasn’t an accusation, just a statement of fact, as if she were remarking on inclement weather.

“Let’s mess with the new nun,” Johnny said a few days later. “She looks like she doesn’t know her habit from her asshole.”

I grinned but shook my head. I can’t say the idea didn’t have some appeal, but I couldn’t work up much enthusiasm for causing problems for a teacher, even one who had the misfortune of replacing Ms. Leoni. I had gone into a mourning period for her absence that I knew was excessive, but I was powerless to stop. What would happen to her? Who was the father? Did she ever think of me and wonder how I was doing?

One day during recess while I was standing uselessly in right field, I caught myself daydreaming about Ms. Leoni being my real mother. I imagined that she would reveal it in a letter that would show up in our mailbox bearing the hint of rose perfume. The final sentence, written in Ms. Leoni’s gentle, sloping script, would be, “I can’t wait for you to meet your new brother.” The fantasy provoked such guilt that, had I not been terrified of the bizarre ritual, I would have run to confess my sin to the parish priest.

About two months after Ms. Leoni’s departure, I spotted her at the A&P. She was leaning on a cart in front of the cantaloupes, dressed in a blue-and-yellow-flowered jumpsuit against which her belly strained mightily. Her hunched body was a contrast to her face, which had acquired a glow that made her appear lit from the inside. Initially paralyzed with indecision about whether to say hello or hide, I opted to take a detour to the canned food aisle, leaving my mother baffled.

“Where’d you go?” Mom asked when she caught up to me.

I put my finger to my lips and pointed in the direction of the checkout line, where a cashier was unloading boxes of diapers from Ms. Leoni’s cart. “Ms. Leoni,” I mouthed. She nodded and directed the cart toward the back of the store. For all my mother’s obliviousness, there were some things that didn’t need to be spelled out for her.

Not long after that, Mom ramped up her Mass attendance to four times a week. She informed us that she was planning a family trip to Rome and Jerusalem, an itinerary that provoked little enthusiasm from me or Doris and the threat of a veto from our father. One night at dinner, she suddenly looked up from her chicken tetrazzini with wide eyes and an inscrutable grin. “What if I took a sabbatical from teaching and went on a spiritual retreat? I read about one at a Trappist monastery in West Virginia. A silent retreat. No talking. For a month!”

Doris’ gaze leaped from me to Dad, her brow scrunched in alarm. “Cut it out, Susan!” my father said, waving a fork on which a single green bean was impaled. “Stop it! Right now.”

I had never heard my father raise his voice to my mother. I was both worried and thrilled. Something needed to be done.

The idea of Mom, who was given to endless monologues about arcane points of Catholic doctrine, attending a silent retreat would have been hilarious had it not panicked me. Although that was the last time we heard about the retreat, things only got weirder. She rarely slept. I would come down for breakfast and find her sitting at the kitchen table, absorbed in a religious tome, her knee bouncing with what I assumed to be spiritual fervor. When she wasn’t teaching or attending Mass, she was talking incessantly, often in late-night telephone conversations with one of her three sisters. From what I was able to overhear, the topics varied, but the prevailing theme was that she was exceedingly happy, even ecstatic. The phrase that stuck with me was this pronouncement, uttered to my Aunt Ruth with the conviction that now marked everything Mom said: “From here on out, the sky’s the limit!”

A few weeks after Christmas unusual sounds from the living room brought Doris and me out of bed. We found ourselves eavesdropping on a disaster: Mom sobbing while Dad held her in place and spoke sternly to her. The only word I could make out was “hospital,” to which my mother responded by shaking her head vehemently and squirming in an attempt to escape his grip. I had a sudden wish for Dad to smack her, as the tough guys in old movies did to calm down dames who had become hysterical. My father spotted us in the hallway. “Get out,” he ordered in a voice that seemed to be somebody else’s.

I had to piece together the events that led to Mom’s hospitalization from the crumbs my father was willing to disburse. The tipping point was an impromptu lecture she delivered, after not having slept for several days, to her English 305 students on the superiority of Catholic writers to the Transcendentalists. The lecture ended with her standing on her desk and exhorting the students to recite the Lord’s Prayer with her. Understandably, the community college insisted that she take a leave of absence.

She landed in a psychiatric facility in rural Connecticut, an hour and a half away. Dad, hollow-eyed and exhausted, quoted Mom’s psychiatrist to Doris and me: “Your mother has a complex, but treatable, constellation of symptoms,” he said, a phrase that was as sinister as it was impenetrable. The primary symptom was mania, the result of what was then termed manic depression.

I have only seen my sister cry once. It was the first time we visited Mom in the hospital. A hospital gown was draped over Mom’s slender body like a thin sack. She tried her best to talk but the words emerged slowly, as if coated in molasses. Doris held it together until we got in the car, at which point she let loose with a flood of tears, a sight almost as shocking as Mom’s deterioration. I also cried: in the bathroom at school, standing in the outfield at recess, and in the midst of reading Robinson Crusoe. I tried to be discreet about it but Johnny caught me sniffing and wiping my eyes near the coat rack in homeroom. He guided me over to the corner near the class’s hamster, who was whirling wildly in his wheel.

“What’re you crying about?”

I looked around to see if anybody was watching. “My mom’s in the hospital.”

“Yeah? What for?”

I searched for the right words. “I guess she’s crazy. She can’t stop talking.”

Johnny pondered this for a moment, frowned and looked up at the ceiling. “Does she hit you?”

I shook my head.

“Get drunk?”

“No.”

He shrugged and lifted his eyebrows. “Here’s what you gotta learn about adults. They’re all crazy. Every one of ’em.” He motioned toward Sister Eileen who was writing something on the blackboard in her rigid, cramped handwriting. “Think about it. You’d have to be crazy to want to be a nun. My Dad’s nuts, so he goes to the hospital, comes back out, and he’s better. Drying out, they call it. Then he gets bad again and he goes back to the hospital. See?”

I nodded, confused but oddly buoyed.

Johnny tapped me lightly on the shoulder with his fist. “Just don’t fucking cry about it, okay?”

The next day was warm for early spring, the red sun blazing like a distant fire. I was watching a squirrel dart around the bare oak tree across the street when I turned in time to see Johnny hit one past Darren in center field. Johnny’s long legs churned around the bases, his untucked gray shirt flopping behind him. I watched as Darren reared back and launched the ball to Fred, who was standing in front of the tie that marked third base. As Johnny rounded third at full speed, there was a quick tangle of limbs and Johnny pitched forward, sprawling face-first onto the grass. I yelped with surprise at the sight of him prostrate and immobile.

After what seemed like an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, Johnny lifted himself to a resting position on his knees and then fully upright. Watching him warily, Fred raised his hands palms-up in a gesture of innocence. Johnny slapped at his grass-stained pants, fingered the angry welt that slashed from right eye to jaw, then started walking toward Fred. He moved slowly, fists balled up. As he approached, Fred’s hands stopped pleading innocence and I heard him mutter, “C’mon, Troll.”

It was a surge of energy, not an act of will, that landed me in the middle of it. One second I was a spectator and the next I was running to join Johnny. While in mid-stride, I spotted Darren moving toward me, chest thrust out, and my arm launched itself and caught him above the ear, enough to stun him. From the corner of my eye, I glimpsed Johnny wrestling Fred, pinning him, and then bringing his elbow down on Fred’s forehead with a dull thud.

I didn’t see the punch from Darren that knocked me out and I don’t remember anything until a day later when I was released from the hospital with a concussion. Doris and my father swear that the first words I said to them at the ICU were, “I had no choice. I had to join the fray.”

I spent the next few days at home in a state halfway between sleep and waking. It felt like I was seeing everything for the first time: Doris’ honey-brown hair seemed more lustrous, Dad’s red silk tie more elegant, Mom’s flowers more dead.

Dad pointed to the green-and-yellow bruise under my left eye. “You’re not going to visit your mother until that thing heals up.”

I protested. I had witnessed Mom dissolve into a helpless puddle and be carted off to the nuthouse, so surely she could witness my temporarily unsightly face. Dad relented only after I agreed to tell her that I got the bruise from falling off my bike.

When we walked into Mom’s room she was sitting on a brown leather couch, hands resting on her knees, her hair tied back in a bun. “Hello, family,” she said, attempting a smile that ended up crooked, more scary than reassuring. But I could see that a bit of light had come back into her eyes, even if it was a fraction of what had once been there.

“Oh, Allie,” she gasped, pointing at my face. She didn’t ask for an explanation, just motioned for me to join her on the couch. Doris shot a glance at Dad, as if wary about what Mom might do.

When I sat down and leaned towards her, Mom put her arm around me and gently tracing a circle around the bruise with her slightly trembling fingers, whispered, “Sorry.”

There, on the couch in the mental hospital, a single phrase from the interminable Masses I had been forced to sit through sounded in my head. Peace be with you.

WIM HYLEN

Wim Hylen’s work has been published in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Rivet Journal, The Cafe Irreal, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among other places. He lives in Phoenix, Arizona.