Devlin got over to the parish hall at six-thirty. The kids were due at seven. He opened the place up, put the basketball at one end under one of the baskets, lowered that basket while leaving its opposite-ender bent up against the steel ceiling supports. He checked out the record-player and pop machine.

At quarter to seven, the Skelton kids came, Tom arranged chairs the way he wanted them. Donna looked over the records and put the first one on, something croony and swoony in Devlin’s view, almost a dirge but with some heavy thumping in the background, It was one of dozens he would hear that evening that would sound that way to him, all of them merging into one continuous roar of swoony, dreamy stuff punctuated by thumping.

Donna Skelton wore excitement on her sleeve. She had that wide-open, perpetually grinning way about her that some kids get when the party’s on its way.

“How are you tonight, Father?” she asked, not dying to know but glad to include Devlin in her general good will and good feeling.

“Doin’ fine, Donna,” said Devlin. “You look like you’re doin’ 0.K. too.”

“Oh yes.” Her eyes wandered. “Yes, I’m doin’ fine too. It’s been a nice day, hasn’t it?” She smiled benevolently on the good father.

“As a matter of fact, it has been,” said Devlin. It was almost as if the nice day was his. Or were they talking about the weather? No matter.

Devlin basked in Donna’s delicious love of her life. He was refreshed by it.

Her brother Tom puttered with some chairs. He seemed absorbed in achieving just the right formation. “It’s got to be right,” he said when Devlin asked him what he was doing. “How the seating is arranged makes all the difference.”

“You sound like you’ve given the matter some thought,” said Devlin, half kidding him. “How people sit at parties can make or break one.”

Devlin remembered it wasn’t good to kid the young folks too much. He was a kid who attacked problems as if there were no time left at all. He’d been beaten up by black thugs when he wandered out of curiosity where he had no business going. He’d run away once, for a wild half hour or so, when he came on Devlin and his mother embracing — rather, on Devlin being embraced in a fit of girlish enthusiasm by Tom’s hearty, zesty mother. He’d come upon his friend Alex McGee’s’ father dead of a gunshot by his own hand in the McGees’ living room. He was as committed to interracialism as Alex was to bigotry. Tom Skelton had same already gotten in a fair amount of living for a 15-year-old. It didn’t do to josh him too much.

Harold Williams came promptly at seven. Tom greeted him warmly. He eyed Donna, who was over talking to Devlin with her back to him. “You brought the better part of the Skelton family with you,” he said to Tom.

“She brought me,” he said.

By seven-fifteen there were a dozen kids, by seven-thirty two dozen. The music got turned up somehow. A few shot baskets at the far end of the jamnasium-dance floor. There was some horseplay in one corner as two planted one foot next the planted foot of the other, and tried to pull the other off balance. Some black girls danced with each other in another spot. And Tom Skelton sat in one of the chairs he had arranged, by himself.

He was being stubborn about it, but Devlin wasn’t about to comment. He did go over and sit down (he had to go somewhere), cross his legs and look ready for conversation. He did this convincingly enough to draw a few boys thinking Father Devlin might. So they gave it a shot.

Devlin got all the names straight, first. He was not a regular at this “What do you know, Harold?” he began. “I’m going to be with your parents tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, they said something about it. You’re bringing a friend, they said?”

“Yes, a newspaper reporter,” said Devlin, unsuspecting.

“Gonna write you up, Father?” asked another kid, grinning.

“Already did, Jasper,” Devlin responded. “That story last fall about my sermons.”

“Oh yeah, I remember, Father, when you got atheistic.” Jasper grinned some more. He was a jabbery kid, good to have around.

“What do you mean, Jasper? I haven’t got an atheistic bone in my body.”

“Your head, Father, your head. That’s where the atheism comes.” He got up and pointed at Devlin’s head, touching his scalp slightly with a finger.

“That’s what my mama says. You think too much, you go atheistic if you don’t watch out. She thinks you sounded funny, way you preached there for a while.”

Jasper grinned.

“What’d you think I sounded like?” Devlin asked.

“I thought you sounded great,” said Jasper. “What’d you say?”

The others burst into laughter. Jasper joined them. Devlin laughed the hardest he had in a long time. Others turned to see what was going on over by the chairs.

Tom was vindicated. His chair-arranging had worked out. He relaxed and laughed with the rest at Jasper’s question.

“She’s your date?” It was Harold Williams.

“Who?” Devlin asked.

“The reporter. Tomorrow night.”

“No,” Devlin said. “She’s my friend.”

“Girl friend?”

The evening went apace. After some very strange maneuvering, some girls danced with some boys. Harold paired with Donna Skelton, who seemed to like his attention but seemed also to want more and more of party as such. This girl loved the excitement of it, Devlin saw.

At nine-thirty he flicked lights. By nine-forty-five the two Skeltons, Harold Williams and he were cleaning the place up. By ten o’clock he was on his way to the rectory to catch what he could of the news.

He fell asleep listening to Walter Jacobson give a civics lesson to the fifth-graders he talked to every night over the heads of the rest of the listeners. He woke at eleven-thirty and stumbled to bed, regaining enough consciousness to worry for a few seconds about whatever was bothering Harold Williams and then to smile as he fell asleep thinking about the woman who was his friend but not his girl friend, whose memory warmed his heart and with a little luck might show up in a dream or two before the night was over.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Mimi Skelton slipped into the front seat of their Chevy Nova and pulled away from the curb. She was on her way to visit her brother-in-law in his ghetto parish. Her friend Carol Goodman had planned to join her but at the last minute had excused herself. One of her children had chicken pox. She had to stay home.

Mimi’s last had gone out the front door to his first-grade classroom not ten minutes before she drove away. Her husband Ted had been kind enough to drive for milk earlier, and then thoughtful enough not to put the car away when he got back. She was off to the West Side, eager to be instructed in the ways of the semi-foreign nation that abutted her home village and mildly worried about making it to St. Albert’s and back.

In minutes she was on the Eisenhower heading east. Minutes more, and she was leaving it at Independence Boulevard, heading south to Douglas, then east again a few blocks to the old stone church and rectory where Irish once worshiped and where an Irish priest still lived in solitary splendor.

“I wouldn’t say it’s splendor,” said her brother-in-law Jerry when she commented on the place at the door.

“Well I mean it once was splendid, wasn’t it, Jerry?” she asked.

“Yes, it once was.” Jerry spoke slowly, not wanting to douse Mimi’s commentary but loath to concede the point.

“How’s the boiler?” she asked as they sat in the dark-velvet-covered, high-ceilinged parlor.

“Want to see it?” He got up. He was used to showing off the new boiler, bought for the parish in the nick of time by some men from St. George’s parish in Oak Park, with enthusiasm he once reserved for the Blessed Sacrament. Or so Father Terry Dolan, an Oak Park pastor, had observed to him and Pat Devlin one day.

“A boiler does not a parish make, Jerry,” said Dolan. “You have to remember that as you plow through life.”

Jerry had smiled and continued in his praises of the treasure he had come into at the 11th hour. “It’s a quarter the size and four times as efficient,” he said.

To Mimi he repeated this, which he made part of his litany of benedictions for what Zarofsky the boiler man and the St. George’s group had wrought in the St. Albert’s rectory basement.

“And we’d be closed down by now without it, church, school and everything,” he added to Mimi. Would have been a real blot on the church on the West Side.”

To the basement. “How’s your column project coming, Mimi?” he asked.

“Well, it’s nice of you to ask, but it’s not coming at all. We haven’t heard anything.”

“You could write about St. Albert’s,” he said. Mimi cringed. People were always telling her what she could write about, when she didn’t even have an outlet and was groping for one more desperately by the day.

Jerry showed her the school, a shabby-genteel version of what the Catholic, mostly Irish, schools of thirty, even twenty years ago, looked like. The kids wore uniforms. Some of the sisters did too. Some didn’t but clearly were sisters. Some didn’t look like sisters at all but were, she deciphered from Jerry’s running commentary.

The shabby part was the wood that needed finishing, the floor boards that creaked, the occasional cracked or broken window, the general air of repair having staved off disaster, as the boiler had done.

The genteel part was the good order, the seriousness of the teachers — not all sisters, not all women — and the overall air of professionalism. Mimi, in fact, was shocked. She found seriousness here she hadn’t found in the school her kids attended.

There the mood of the day was cheerfulness. A cheery attitude permeated all. And she frankly resented it. She wondered what there was to be so cheery about. She wanted a more serious, even sterner approach to the business at hand.

Laughter was 0.K. but it ought to be part of a generally more businesslike atmosphere. Her kids’ school seemed well organized. She had bumped into kids in the halls who were helpful and courteous. In general, good order prevailed, though she felt supervision could be more conscientious at recess and other more relaxed times.

But apart from one or two teachers whom she’d heard criticized by parents for being too stern or demanding, the staff seemed intent on being cheerful and relaxed, first and foremost. At St. Albert’s that was secondary, though it seemed to follow well enough. The dominant attitude was an alert seriousness, which the kids sensed, accepted and in the end, liked. She mentioned it to Jerry.

“I think so,” he said. “They are serious. Part of that is religious life, you know.”

“I suppose so.”

“I don’t mean it’s a guarantee. But it’s a way of promoting dedication. I hate that word. It’s one way of fostering a serious attitude. The frivolous teacher is the problem. You have to defeat frivolity. It doesn’t meet anyone’s needs. We have our problems, though. You ought to realize that.”

One of them shot by Jerry and Mimi in the hall, with a nod to both of theme She was a woman of 40 or so, white and hot-eyed, pulling along with her a black boy about eleven years old — by his ear. The boy’s face was screwed up, not as if he were in pain but as if he were angry. He was angry.

“Let go my ears Let go my ear. You let go my ear.” He kept muttering while the woman pulled him along down the hall to an office at its end.

Mimi watched, fascinated, until the two disappeared into the office.

“There’s not room in this school for the two of them,” she said quietly.

“You said it,” said Jerry as they continued down the hall in the other direction. “We’re working on it.”

“Is she a dedicated sister?”

“She’s a dedicated sister, yes,” Jerry said, opening a stairway door and pointing her upstairs.

“Then dedication isn’t everything.”

“You said it again,” he said, smiling. He opened a classroom door and walked in after getting a high sign from the teacher, in the front of the room.

Mimi followed him. The children all stood as they entered. He motioned them to sit down.

“Thanks for letting us interrupt, Sister,” Jerry said in the direction of the woman at the front, a sandy-haired, blue-eyed 35-ish woman who gave an impression of shyness right off.

“Children, this is my sister-in-law, Mrs. Skelton. She came here to see what a good school looks like.” He didn’t smile when he said it. “She lives in Oak Park, where they are trying hard to have good schools. If you see her in the building or around it later in the day, be nice to her.” He smiled.

Mimi looked out on a pond of black faces, sixth-grade boys and girls, some smiling at her, some not, none surly or blank-faced.

“Thanks, Sister,” Jerry said. “Sorry for the interruption.” The woman nodded, and they left.

“That was quick,” said Mimi as they made it back to the rectory for coffee.

“Well I can’t bust in on classes too often or too long,” he said. “They’ve said I can do it on the basis you just observed: in-out and nothing elaborate in between.”

“The teachers?”

“Yes, I’m the pastor, but there are limits, even considerable.”

“What will happen to the ear-puller?” she asked as they sat at the kitchen table. “Or the ear-pulled?”

“Don’t know. The ear-puller is not dumb. She just came from a school where they pulled ears. On the southwest side. The parents pulled ears, the teachers did, or felt free to. We don’t horse around here. I mean we’re not permissive, as you saw. And our parents give us a free hand. But we aim to succeed, not bludgeon the opposition. Ear-pulling doesn’t usually succeed. As for the kid, he’ll come around. He’s got bad habits, but he’ll learn, and not just to keep his mouth shut either.”

“It’s not what I’d call a light-hearted place,” Mimi said.

“No, it isn’t. It’s a sober place. I’d like to say a mature place, except these are still just kids, and mature is a rubbery word. It’s a serious place. The world presses in on us, you know. The kids hop and skip to school like where you live, but they see more broken windows and fewer trees.”

Mimi connected her street, with its big trees, with the cheeriness of her kids’ elementary school, or tried to. It connected in a sense, but in another sense it didn’t. Couldn’t we be more serious where I live, even with windows and trees? she thought. Couldn’t we pay more attention to what we’re doing and less to —she groped — how good we feel about everything?

She put her conundrum to Jerry, who nodded knowingly. “I remember the civil rights agitator — I wouldn’t call him a leader — on the Near West Side, back in the ‘sixties, when white folks used to come from the ‘burbs to sit in his Roosevelt Road storefront to be wooed by the street orators for their contributions. When the white folks were gone, he’d talk about how white folks are smiling all the time. He enjoyed applying to whites what had been partly said about blacks.

“But he was right. We did smile a lot. Partly because we were nervous — as smiling blacks were nervous on whites’ turf — but partly because that’s our happy-go-lucky style. You know, that old suburban — and Irish makes it more so — easygoing style. Immigrants don’t smile a lot, but later generations do, because things generally have gone better for them.”

“Sometimes I think that without pressure there’s no achievement,” said Mimi. “It’s a vicious circle. Without affluence you don’t have the opportunity, and with it you lack the incentive.”

They talked some more until lunch time, which they had with the teachers, and then Mimi and Jerry walked a little around the neighborhood afterwards, then she went on home to Oak Park, wondering how a little St. Albert’s seriousness might rub off on her and the school her kids attended.

(End of Chapter 8)