HIS EIGHT YEARS at St. Ursula’s Grammar School coincided with the depression. Families could not afford to move from one neighborhood to another so that the student body stayed the same. The first grade was taught by Miss Thoma, who was pretty and young and told him that he always arrived at school with a smile. The second grade was taught by Miss King, whose breast once fell out of her brassiere when she was picking up chalk from the floor; she turned to the blackboard to put the breast back. The third grade was taught by Sister Noelita, whom everyone liked—boys and girls, bright and stupid, docile and sassy. One day she brought to class her twin brother, who was amusing and played the guitar. The class asked her to bring him back. She said she would, but he never came. The fourth grade was taught by Mother Ecclesiastica, the oldest nun in the school. She was brown and wrinkled and once whipped him and another boy with a cat-o’-nine-tails after ordering them to bare their calves by dropping their socks from the bottoms of their knickerbockers. His mother went with him to school the next day, complained to the principal, and there were no more beatings, not even with a ruler. Sister Noelita, again, taught the fifth grade; everyone thought this was great good luck. She left the order the next year, just before she was to make her final vows. One of his classmates said he would marry her someday. In the sixth grade, boys and girls, who had studied together, were separated. The boys’ class was taught by Sister Barnabas, a tall handsome woman who said she preferred teaching girls. The seventh grade was taught by Sister Clement, a pleasant and sensible woman whose skirts he and some other boys tried to look up, through the grated landing of the rear exit, from which she oversaw play at recess. Sister Clement gave him the biography of a Catholic youth, dead twenty years, blessed but not canonized. She said the youth reminded her of him. He did not read the book; the idea of it made him feel like a fraud. The eighth grade was taught by Sister Immaculata, who held that modern inventions and discoveries other than medical ones were bad. For instance, radio waves made street noises carry farther, and therefore teaching was more difficult. She also claimed that the classroom floors were getting harder year by year. She told how her uncle, an independently wealthy man, had developed from herbs a cure for cancer. However, he had taken the secret with him to the grave. “May God forgive him,” she said. Following on the cue, one boy asked whether her uncle’s refusal to share his discovery with mankind was a mortal sin. Her eyes glistened with tears as she said that it was not for her to judge. A couple, friends of Sister Immaculata, asked her to take their son into her class; the boy had been expelled from a number of schools. She explained to the class that this boy came from a privileged background and was spoiled. The boy had a big head. The class rallied against the boy, and after three months the boy was put on trial. Sister Immaculata appointed a prosecuting attorney, a defense attorney, and the jury; she was the judge. After two days of argument, the boy was found guilty of being a cheat, a coward, and a bully. In passing sentence, Sister Immaculata said that the trial had been punishment enough, that the boy had obviously been taught a lesson, and that she hoped he would turn over a new leaf. The church organist was a frail, slow-gaited, gray-haired man who was said to have once been a religious. The organist and his wife had an idiot son, who stumbled and slavered. Sister Immaculata confided to the class that the boy may have been God’s punishment for past sins of one or both of the parents. Every now and then he drives past the church and school, always at night. Like so many landmarks of his childhood, these seem to have become smaller. The once German and Irish neighborhood is black and brown. By happenstance one of the older boys in a family from his early summer community is pastor now. He hears from friends that this priest is bitter at having been assigned to a poor parish. The local candy store and the garages that served the nearby middle-class Jewish population remain. In a few years he will, on impulse, take a newspaper ad calling for a reunion of his classmates. Three, all male, will come to a downtown restaurant—a police lieutenant, the manager of a hardware store, and an unemployed former boxer and stagehand. He will learn that the brightest boy of the class was an executive in a Maryland engineering firm and is now dead, that the boys who ranked second and third at graduation are also dead. He will wonder if there is meaning in this, since he was fourth.