Wishin' and Hopin'

Wishin' and Hopin'\ A Novel \ \ By Wally Lamb \ Harper Perennial\ Copyright © 2010 Wally Lamb\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 9780061941016 \ \ \ Chapter One\ Flight\ The year I was a fifth grade student at St. \ Aloysius Gonzaga Parochial School, our \ teacher, Sister Dymphna, had a nervous \ breakdown in front of our class. To this day I can \ hear Sister's screams and see her flailing attempts to \ shoo away the circling Prince of Darkness. I am, \ today, what most people would consider a responsible \ citizen. I have an advanced degree in Film Studies, a \ tenured professorship, and an Eco- friendly Prius. I \ vote, volunteer at the soup kitchen, compost, floss. \ A divorced dad, I remain on good terms with my \ ex- wife and have a close and loving relationship with \ our twenty-six-year old daughter. That said, my\ conscience and I have unfinished business. What follows \ is both my confession and my act of contrition. Forgive\ me, reader, for I have sinned. It was I who, on \ that long ago day, triggered Sister's meltdown. For \ this and all the sins of my past life, I am heartily \ sorry.\ \ Lyndon Johnson was president back then, Cassius\ Clay was the heavyweight champ, and John, \ Paul, George, and Ringo were newly famous. Our \ family had a claim to fame, too. Well, two claims, \ actually. No, three. My mother had recently been notified \ that her recipe, "Shepherd's Pie Italian," had catapulted\ her into the finals of that year's Pillsbury Bake-Off \ in the "main meal" category and she was going \ to be on television. I was going to be on TV, too— \ a guest, along with my fellow Junior Midshipmen \ on a local program, Channel 3's The Ranger Andy \ Show. So there were those two things, plus the fact \ that our third cousin on my father's side was a \ celebrity.\ \ At the lunch counter my family ran inside the \ New London bus station, we displayed three posters \ of our famous relative that if, say, you were a customer\ enjoying your jelly doughnut or your baked \ Virginia ham on rye, you could, by swiveling your \ stool from left to right, follow the arc of our cousin's \ career. The black and white poster on the wall behind\ the cash register showed her in mouse ears and \ a short sleeved sweater, the letters A-N- N-E- T-T- E \ spelled out across her flat front. In the poster taped \ to the front of the Frigidaire, she'd acquired secondary\ sex characteristics and moved on from TV to the \ movies, specifically Walt Disney's The Shaggy Dog, in \ which she had third billing behind Fred MacMurray \ and a half-human, half-canine Tommy Kirk. Poster \ number three, positioned over the fryolator and polka \ dotted with grease spots, depicted our cousin in \ living color. Transistor radio to her ear, she wore a tower \ of teased hair and a white two piece bathing suit, \ the top of which played peek-a-boo with what our dishwasher and \ part time grill cook, Chino Molinaro, referred to as her "bodacious bazoom-booms."\ Alongside Frankie Avalon, Annette had by \ then become the lead actress of such films as Beach \ Blanket Bingo and How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, her celluloid \ star having ascended as her bra cup size worked its \ way through the alphabet. That's something that is \ much clearer to me today than it was when I was in \ fifth grade. Still, even back then, poster number \ three had already begun to set something a twitch in \ me, south of my navel and north of my knees.\ I'm not making excuses here, but Sister Dymphna's\ emotional state was already fragile before that \ October afternoon, a scant six or seven weeks into \ the 1964– 65 school year. My older sisters, Simone \ and Frances, had both survived tours of duty with \ "Dymphie," who, faculty wise, was widely recognized\ as St. Aloysius G's weakest link. In Simone's \ year, she had yanked a kid's glasses off his face and \ snapped them in half. In Frances's year, she had \ turned her chair from her students to the blackboard\ and, elbows against the chalk tray, indulged \ in a crying jag that lasted all the way to the three \ o'clock bell. (Frances, who would later become a \ teacher, took it upon herself to stand and announce \ to her peers, "Class dismissed!") Sister Dymphna was \ thought of as moody rather than mentally ill—\ "high strung" during her manic episodes, "down in \ the dumps" during her depressive ones. The latter \ mood swing was the preferred one, my sisters had \ assured me. When Dymphie got riled up, a heavy \ dictionary or a hooked blackboard pointer could \ become a dangerous weapon. But when she was \ depressed, she'd wheel the projector down from the \ office, thread it, and show movies while she sat slack \ jawed and slumped at her desk, oblivious to bad \ behavior.\ \ On the day Sister went crazy in front of us, she'd \ been mopey since morning prayers. We were therefore \ watching a double feature: before lunch, The Bells of \ St. Mary's with Ingrid Bergman and Bing Crosby in \ nun's habit and priest's cassock, and after lunch, The \ Miracle of Marcelino, a film about a pious homeless boy \ who is adopted by a community of monks. Lonny \ Flood and I hatched our plan in the cafeteria during \ what I guess you could call intermission.\ Not unlike radio's Casey Kasem, Sister Dymphna\ rated my classmates and me each week from \ first to last based on our grades. She published a list \ at the far left of the blackboard and seated us accordingly,\ her smartest pupils in the first row from left to \ right, the academically middling students in the \ middle, and the slowest kids stuck in the back by the \ clanging radiators. Rosalie Twerski and I were, \ respectively and perennially, numbers one and two. \ My friend Lonny Flood usually found himself in the \ back row, often next to Franz Duzio. Lonny was \ both the tallest kid in our class and the oldest: a \ twelve-year-old double detainee whose sideburns and \ chin fuzz would become, by Easter vacation, shave\ worthy. Conversely, I was the shortest and scrawniest \ fifth grader, counting boys and girls— a ten-year-old \ who, to my mortification, could have passed for seven. \ To make matters worse, with my big black eyes, up slanting eyebrows,\ and mop of dark, curly hair, I bore a striking resemblance to Dondi,\ the adorable little Italian war orphan in the comic strips. On \ numerous occasions when I was down at the lunch \ counter, some new arrival would enter the bus depot, \ sit at a stool, and stare at me for a few seconds. We \ all knew what was coming next. "Say, you know who \ that kid kind of looks like?"\ "Dondi!" Pop, Ma, Chino, and whichever of my \ sisters had drawn waitress duty that day would say it \ simultaneously.\ \ Looking like a lovable little cartoon character \ was a double edged sword. On the one hand, it made \ me vulnerable to my sisters' ridicule. On the other \ hand, my resemblance to Dondi— hey, even I had to concede that \ I was adorable— would frequently afford me the presumption of innocence\ when, more often than not, I was guilty. If, for example, Lonny Flood \ and I had stood shoulder to shoulder in some junior police lineup,\ I would most likely be the first suspect eliminated and Lonny the one fingered. \ "It's him!" the eyewitness might announce, pointing \ at Lonny, who kept a foil wrapped Trojan hidden in \ the change pocket of his Man from U.N.C.L.E. wallet \ and who claimed to know the dirty words of the \ song "Louie, Louie."\ And who, in fact, had brought the pocketful of BBs to school that day.\ Lonny and I conspired over half-pints of fruit punch and the lunch room's \ "turkey a la king with savory buttered rice." That said, neither of us had\ targeted the winged vermin that, an hour later, would cause such havoc\ and send Sister Dymphna on a temporary trip to "the funny farm." \ No, our intended victim, whose guts Lonny and I \ both hated, was the aforementioned Rosalie Twerski.\ Rosalie was pigtailed, hairy legged, and insufferably\ obsequious— the kind of kid who, two minutes\ before the dismissal bell, might raise her hand \ and ask, should the teacher have miraculously forgotten\ to assign a page of arithmetic problems or a \ dozen Can You Answer These? questions from our \ social studies book, "Do we have any homework tonight,\ Sister?" As I've mentioned, Rosalie's position \ at the top of the academic heap was a virtual lock, \ but nevertheless she was forever foraging for extra \ credit points she didn't really need. Her family was \ rich, or, as my mother used to put it, "la di da." The \ Twerskis' house on White Birch Boulevard had columns in front\ and a trampoline and a Shetland pony out back.\ Instead of clomping off the bus or hoofing it like the rest of us,\ Rosalie arrived at school every morning in her mother's maroon\ Chrysler Newport. Each year, she returned from Christmas vacation\ a week later than the rest of us, with a Florida tan and \ a bucket of stinky show-and-tell seashells that we had \ to pass from person to person during science. Her \ father owned a printing company, Twerski Impressions,\ which made Rosalie the recipient of an endless \ supply of the cardboard she was forever converting \ into the extra credit posters and placards with which \ our classroom was festooned. Suck-up that she was, \ she specialized in visual aids that lent themselves to \ the nuns' two favorite subjects, grammar and \ religion. In one such poster, the parts of speech were \ anthropomorphized: the active verb did push-ups, \ the passive verb sat and snoozed, the interjection \ slapped its hands against its cheeks, exclaiming, "Oh!" \ In another poster, cartoon letters "A" and "I" held \ hands like best friends or boyfriend and girlfriend. \ Said letter "A," "When two vowels go a-walking, the \ first one usually does the talking." "That's true," letter\ "I" agreed. "But remember, it's I before E, except \ after C!!"\ \ On our first day in Sister Dymphna's class, Rosalie\ had arrived locked and loaded with a poster titled \ Mortal Sinners: Burning in Hell or Headed There! Below\ the Magic Markered headline, she had scissored and \ glued magazine pictures of the damned and, beneath \ their images, had identified the transgressions that \ had cast them into Satan's lair: Lee Harvey Oswald \ and Jack Ruby (murder), Marilyn Monroe (suicide), \ Nikita Khrushchev (Communist), Rudi Gernreich \ (invented the topless bathing suit). Sister Dymphna \ loved Rosalie immediately and installed her as line \ leader, office courier, and our class's ambassador \ to the diocese-wide United Nations Day. So you \ couldn't really blame Lonny and me for putting BBs in our\ mouths and straws between our lips that afternoon as Sister,\ engulfed by a melancholy so profound that, as The Miracle of \ Marcelino unspooled, she did not even register that Pauline Papelbon\ was eating State Line potato chips right out of the bag, or \ that Monte Montoya and Susan Ekizian were playing\ Hangman instead of watching the movie, or that \ I had surreptitiously moved my seat to the back of \ the room for better positioning. By a prior agreement,\ Lonny and I had agreed to aim for the back of \ Rosalie's neck.\ "Ow! Who did that?" she shouted when Lonny's\ very first BB hit its target dead-on. Heads swiveled\ from Marcelino to Rosalie, and then to Sister \ Dymphna, who seemed not to have heard a thing. \ Lonny fired again, but this BB flew past Rosalie's left \ shoulder and ricocheted against the blackboard. His \ next one whizzed over her head and hit the movie \ screen. I somehow managed to inhale my first BB \ rather than propelling it forward, but coughed it \ right back up again— luckily, since the Heimlich \ maneuver had yet to be invented. On the screen, \ saintly little Marcelino was weeping for the poor. \ With my tongue, I repositioned the regurgitated BB, \ took a deep intake of breath, and raised my straw \ in preparation of a forward thrust. That's when it \ caught my eye: the little black blob nestled against \ the left side of the public address box.\ \ Unsure of what I was aiming at, I fired and \ missed. Fired again and hit it. It moved. When my \ third BB also hit its mark, it emitted a high-pitched \ pinging sound. A wing unfolded. My fourth try was \ a miss, but my fifth was bull's-eye accurate. The bat \ skidded several inches along the wall, flapped its \ wings twice, and took flight. It soared from one side \ of the classroom to the other and then began circling\ the perimeter. It dipped and swooped between \ the projector and the screen, its shadow bisecting \ Marcelino's face in close-up. Alarmed, my classmates \ sprang from their seats, screaming, running for the \ door and the cloakroom. Arthur Cote raised the top \ of his desk, stuck his head inside, and let the top \ bang back down. Rosalie Twerski ripped one of her \ posters off the wall and curled it over her head like \ a tent.\ \ The commotion awakened Sister Dymphna from \ her funk just as the bat zoomed across her field of \ vision, did a U-turn, and landed on her desk. The \ two faced off for a second or two. Then the bat \ opened its mouth, hissed menacingly, and took flight \ once more. That was when Sister began screaming \ about the devil. I was momentarily taken aback by \ this. I'd known that Bela Lugosi, Grandpa Munster, \ and other vampires could transform themselves into \ bats, but I'd not been aware that the Prince of Darkness\ could perform that particular parlor trick, too. \ Then I remembered that Sister Dymphna was crazy \ and that the bat was probably just a bat. \ Her shrieks were high pitched and cringe\ inducing, and I watched in horror as her flailing arms \ sent her statue of the Blessed Virgin teetering back \ and forth on its pedestal, then crashing to the floor \ where its head and torso parted company. "Satan, I \ rebuke you! Merciful Jesus, save these poor children!"-\ To save herself, Sister dropped to the floor \ and crawled beneath her desk in an approximation of \ the duck-and-cover exercise we had practiced in the \ event that those evil atheists, the Soviets, ever dropped \ the bomb on the submarine base in nearby Groton— \ a despicable act of which, we were assured, Khrushchev\ was fully capable. \ \ (Continues...)\ \ \ \ \ Excerpted from Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb Copyright © 2010 by Wally Lamb. Excerpted by permission of Harper Perennial. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

\ Houston Chronicle"Lamb is a very good writer, and Wishin’ and Hopin’ is a charming read with a genuinely funny ending."\ \ \ \ \ St. Petersburg Times"Lamb gets Felix’s voice just right, and he does a spot-on job of evoking the special joys and trials of parochial school in the ‘60’s"\ \ \ Minneapolis Star Tribune"Lamb’s rich panoply of details...render this novel first-rate escapism just begging for a comforter and a cup of tea."\ \ \ \ \ Kansas City Star"Warmly, sweetly retro"\ \ \ \ \ BookPageWe might as well call Wally Lamb the man with the golden pen...[Wishin’ and Hopin’] will leave you laughing and thinking nostalgically about your own school days and holidays past"\ \ \ \ \ Miami Herald"Lamb’s vividly detailed portrait of the 1960’s and the inner workings of a Catholic schoolboy’s mind puts his first Christmas book on par with his previous three novels."\ \ \ \ \ USA Today"Lamb...proves he can be short, sweet and funny"\ \ \ \ \ Body and Soul"Wishin’ and Hopin’ from Wally Lamb reminds us of what innocence was like."\ \ \ \ \ Washington Post"In the hands of Wally Lamb, what emerges isn’t an apology but a celebration of life...Felix makes a hilarious guide through a story that whirs right along."\ \ \ \ \ Hartford Books Examiner"Both heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny…a cast of characters that are both uproarious and unforgettable…a poignant reminder that family and friends are the greatest gift of all."\ \ \ \ \ Columbus Dispatch"Humorous and heartwarming…clever and well-written…A fun trip down memory lane from a skilled writer. The stocking stuffer might just become a cherished possession."\ \ \ \ \ USA Today“Lamb...proves he can be short, sweet and funny”\ \ \ \ \ Body and Soul“Wishin’ and Hopin’ from Wally Lamb reminds us of what innocence was like.”\ \ \ \ \ St. Petersburg Times“Lamb gets Felix’s voice just right, and he does a spot-on job of evoking the special joys and trials of parochial school in the ‘60’s”\ \ \ \ \ Hartford Books Examiner“Both heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny…a cast of characters that are both uproarious and unforgettable…a poignant reminder that family and friends are the greatest gift of all.”\ \ \ \ \ Washington Post“In the hands of Wally Lamb, what emerges isn’t an apology but a celebration of life...Felix makes a hilarious guide through a story that whirs right along.”\ \ \ \ \ Minneapolis Star Tribune“Lamb’s rich panoply of details...render this novel first-rate escapism just begging for a comforter and a cup of tea.”\ \ \ \ \ Kansas City Star“Warmly, sweetly retro”\ \ \ \ \ Columbus Dispatch“Humorous and heartwarming…clever and well-written…A fun trip down memory lane from a skilled writer. The stocking stuffer might just become a cherished possession.”\ \ \ \ \ BookPageWe might as well call Wally Lamb the man with the golden pen...[Wishin’ and Hopin’] will leave you laughing and thinking nostalgically about your own school days and holidays past”\ \ \ \ \ Houston Chronicle“Lamb is a very good writer, and Wishin’ and Hopin’ is a charming read with a genuinely funny ending.”\ \ \ \ \ Miami Herald“Lamb’s vividly detailed portrait of the 1960’s and the inner workings of a Catholic schoolboy’s mind puts his first Christmas book on par with his previous three novels.”\ \