ONE WINTER NIGHT, about thirty years ago, I stood in The Pen and Pencil Club in Philadelphia, listening to a man in his thirties tell me stories of his childhood.

A woman we both knew walked by, smiling, and said, “Are you listening to tales of Chester?”

I laughed. “As a matter of fact, I am,” I said.

I can’t recall what episode I was hearing for the first time that night. I think it might have been about Jonesy, who went to the store in fairly good health to buy his funeral suit and died a week later. Or maybe it was the time Buttons was almost arrested for killing a Persian cat while on vacation at the Jersey shore.

I can’t recall which true story it was, but I pretty much decided that night I wanted to marry that man.

Listening to his memories was like standing by a burning hearth. The warmth penetrated me, the room and the world beyond it. I figured anyone who could so love the flawed and idiosyncratic people of Chester could possibly love me too. For a long time. Through thick and thin.

I married A. Wood and, for 27 years, I have lived by the warmth of that fire.

Compared to the human landscape in a depersonalized suburb, the people of this industrial city on the banks of the rat-gray Delaware River, living with us intangibly all this time, are brimming with personality. They are exotica. Eccentricity and its sharp singularity seem to be among the fruits of economic hardship and God’s sanctifying graces.

Though the industrial and social microcosm of my husband’s Chester is long gone, almost completely demolished and replaced with a hulking casino, vacant lots, crime-ridden streets and government offices, his stories evoked something permanent and undying. Chester was alive still.

Enough from me.

Here is Part III of my husband’s own recollections, “Tales of Chester.” For Parts One and Two, you may go here and here.

 Crying Angels

When day broke that morning, Renner was sitting in my father’s easy chair, his legs propped over the arms, smoking a corncob, a bowl of cold oatmeal on the coffee table.

“Terrible thing to lose your home,” he said.

No doubt it was. To me, though, the loss of his home was the best consequence of the fire. Since he had lost his home, he would have to stay with us. I wouldn’t have to visit him; he would be right here. More immediately and excitingly, we had become the central figures in a high drama. A neighborhood legend had lost his house in a fire that everyone would be talking about. We were giving him shelter.

School that day was endless. How could the tedium of learning decimals and fractions and penmanship compete with the excitation of being a star of such a drama? When at long last school ended, when the dismissal line finally approached my house, I burst into the front door to resume my starring role and to comfort the neighborhood legend who had lost his home.

Renner wasn’t there, to my immeasurable disappointment. I went to find him at his brother-in-law’s tobacco shop on Eighth Street.

He wasn’t there.

He did not show up that evening in our dining room to claim the 10th seat at our supper table. He did not return to sleep at our house that night, nor the next, nor the next.

Renner, whose ghostly appearances had so often frightened the other children in the neighborhood, had disappeared. Worse, in the view of the police, he had become a fugitive.

Renner’s house did not disappear.

This erstwhile sanctuary, museum and enchanted castle became a haunting, deteriorating hulk that would have an immensely contaminating effect on the neighborhood. Until the fire, I had been familiar with all the figures who walked my street. I knew all the people who ran the businesses and their customers. Renner’s vacant house lured people I had never seen, or dreamed of seeing. It became a magnet for freight-train hobos, burglars and squatters who defecated on the floors. Piece-by-piece the house was picked clean. It was an all-out sacking. One night I watched a burglar make off with the tabernacle-shaped radio.

The fallout from the fire had an unsettling effect on the cluster of houses and businesses within the wiggly boundaries of the neighborhood. The orderly business of a neighborhood consists of certain rhythms, rituals and protocols. Renner’s mansion-like house, his orderly back yard and the rare sightings of the man, himself, were as much a part of that business as the smell of steak and onion exhaust from Pat’s sandwich grill and the flickering television in Eddie Teaball’s candy store.

After the fire, changes in the neighborhood accelerated. Families, like the Bentleys, were moving to the brand-new homes outside the city Unconsciously, perhaps they saw the future at Renner’s house. Each family that moved represented a loss of familiarity, and nothing changes the landscape of a neighborhood more than new people. The new residents were universally poorer and, except for the Wiers, appeared to have more difficulty, or at least showed less interest, in keeping up the properties.

Eddie Teaball closed his store. Eddie was drinking and sleeping more. No man who falls asleep when the store is open and does nothing to stop kids from looting it, could stay in business much longer. Still, the closing of the store represented the loss of another important institution.

The disappearance of Renner had a subtle and insidious impact. Before long he vanished from the collective consciousness. The neighborhood was redefining itself, and the erasure of Renner was a monumental, if unnoticed, step. Other changes were more palpable.

**** 

“This place,” she would snarl day after day, morning and afternoon, pausing to grit her teeth and bunch her pleated black habit in two clawed fists. “I can’t wait to get out of this place.”

This was our eighth-grade nun at St. Michael’s School, and it was a refrain we would keep with us the rest of our lives. Compared with our experiences in the first seven grades and with other nuns, her behavior was shocking and left us with an overwhelming sense that something had gone terribly wrong in her life – and our’s.

Watching the dissolution of an important authority figure was unsettling and challenged a truth we held to be beyond self-evident: Sister does it, therefore it is right. It was so hard for us to believe that this was happening at St. Michael’s, the neighborhood’s axis of order, that we didn’t believe it.

Although it was a close call, the Catholic Church was the only institution more powerful than the Republican Party. In that era it was impossible to overrate the pull of the parish, the axis upon which everything else rotated. St. Michael’s Church was the cathedral of Chester. God couldn’t have had a better house, with its immense stained glass, marble altars, stately organ and palatial heights. The priests were celebrities. They drove black cars and smoked cigars, except for Father Higgins, the pastor. They lived in a sumptuous rectory with a housekeeper who cooked all their meals and screened all visitors.

It was the downtown parish, the one frequented by businessmen and the mayor. The church was always open. No religion or denomination on earth could match the Catholics for quantities or services, or fund-raising activities, and St. Michael’s had more than most: Masses, novenas, benedictions, processions, bingos, card parties, communion breakfasts, block collections, the works.

Like Renner’s house among the humble homes of Madison Street, the grandeur of St. Michael’s, a cathedral in all but name, was out of scale with downtown Chester. The gilded cross atop the 180-foot stone tower and spire, was by far the closest object to the heavens above. The solemn stone facade was an elegant evocation of the late Middle Ages among the otherwise prosaic and unassuming buildings that housed the shops in the business district. No one escaped the influence of the church, named for the Archangel who was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the war against the bad angels. A 30-foot mural to the left of the altar depicted St. Michael, his foot on Satan’s throat, downwardly thrusting a spear into the Satanic stomach.

Renner’s house was a mystical mansion; St. Michael’s, a mystical kingdom. A corridor of statuary overlooked perfectly varnished, sumptuous pews. The stained-glass windows depicted complicated scenes in detail that belied the limits of the medium – Jesus changing water to wine at Canaan, the fingers of the miraculous hand visible; Jesus walking on water, down to the sacred toenails; Jesus ascending to Heaven, through the rounded perimeters of cumulus clouds, scenes emblazoned to life when the sunlight animated the south-facing windows. The original church was built at the behest of Irish stoneworkers and completed in 1843. When the milling industry, along with the immigrant population, exploded, the congregation jumped eight-fold, and construction of the new church began in 1874.

From the choir loft on the Wednesday nights of the Lenten novenas, we could hear Joe Hoffman’s amplified voice intoning “I-29” to the blue-headed bingo ladies frantically scanning their multiple cards in the church basement. Everyone, including the children, was expected to give to the Sunday collections, even the poor people, of which there were many. Everyone in the house received packages of coded and colored envelopes for each Sunday, each with an identification number in the upper left-hand corner. At the end of the year, the parish published a list, ranked by contribution total, of what everyone had given during the calendar year. If you gave 25 cents, that’s what appeared next to your name.

This increased the pressure to give, obviously. Parents had to stuff their own and their children’s envelopes to prevent public embarrassment. Children were expected to give a quarter a week, $1 to $5 on Christmas and Easter, so that at the end of the year, $15 would be an acceptable total. The system also raised the stakes for the major benefactors. The two funeral directors, George White and Johnny Clancy, maintained a brisk competition. Both were church regulars. Clancy looked appropriately corpse-like, and White had a magnificently luminous bald head that seemed to be covered with skin-colored patent leather. Both typically would put in $300 – or about $2,000 at today’s rates – on Christmas and Easter alone.

Almost every family sent the children to St. Michael’s school, where arithmetic, grammar, the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost and the Apostles’ Creed were branded into your soul before you knew you had one. We looked down on the kids who went to Larkin School, where they were allowed to wear play-clothes and walked back and forth to school any which way. We wore jackets and ties and stayed in line on the way home.

We were held to a higher standard of discipline, and, we imagined, academic expectations. Parents didn’t question the nuns or the curriculum, and corporal punishment was accepted, if not encouraged. We complained, but we were proud of it all.

The popular images of nuns, including the legends we perpetuate in our family, are mere caricatures. We never called them “nuns,” a word that suggested a secular, if not pejorative, categorization. They were “Sisters,” and what they did was quite remarkable. They had their complexities and nuances. They were not all holy terrors, at least on most days.

After attending 6:30 Mass, a sister had the privilege of spending the entire day in front of a class. No team-teaching. No changing of classes. No “intervention teams,” no gifted programs, no “learning disabilities,” no attention-deficit disorder. One nun teaching everybody, everything, every day.

My eighth-grade class had 54 pupils. That’s a student-teacher ratio of 54:1, which would be unacceptable even in the most forsaken public schools in the country. Yet that was by far the smallest class of our grade-school careers. In first grade, we had 72 kids. My brother, a fourth-grader, had 109, so many that the class had to be broken into two sessions.

They did not indulge behavioral idiosyncrasies. In the nuns’ view, you were one of the “good” children or one of Satan’s recruits. They were not above cracking knuckles with their thick and perfectly varnished wooden yardsticks or administering loud slaps in the face, but their arsenals were more sophisticated than the popular stereotypes suggest.

They wrapped themselves in the Fourth Commandment – “Honor thy mother and thy father.” They made it clear that while we were in their presences, they were mother and father and they were to be honored.

One of the most-effective behavior-control techniques was to enlist the “guardian angel.” Everyone had one. Remember that time you were almost run over by car? It was your guardian angel who pushed you out of the way. When you misbehaved – talked in class, cheated on a test, failed to do homework – you didn’t only let sister down, not to mention yourself. You shamed your guardian angel, and he/she/it would go off into a corner and cry. Could angels cry? Absolutely.

The Sisters had us convinced that once they had taken their vows, their relationship with the divine had transformed them into super-beings: all-seeing, all-hearing and all-perceiving. They knew what we were up to, from the short kids in the front of the rows to the tall and alienated girls in the back, their uniforms shiny from over-wearing.

The Sisters all wore the same style of rim-less glasses, and this, they told us repeatedly, gave them extraordinary vision. They wore severe headpieces that covered their ears but did not disable them. Far from it. Beneath their black veils, the crowns of stiffly starched white linen drove creases into their foreheads. Their ears were covered by starched cloths anchored by the crowns and sealed by the rounded white bibs that were so severely starched they appeared to be hard plastic discs. Occasionally a sister would turn her head in such a way that we might catch sight of a soft fragment of ear, verification that the habit was inhabited by a human being, and a hearing one. The nuns warned us that that the cloth ear-coverings gave them super-hearing, so if we had any impulse to whisper to a neighbor, yes, God and your guardian angel would know — and so would Sister. God was all-just, and we would be judged accordingly in the fullness of time. The guardian angel would have a good cry and get back to the business of guarding. We had far more to fear from Sister.

The specter of her omniscience lingered even on those infrequent occasions when she left the room. When she re-entered and asked how many boys and girls were talking while she was gone, invariably 15 or 20 kids would stand up and take their medicine – a slap in the face or a yardstick on the knuckles. Sister would wax eloquent about their characters, while those among us who suspected that the advertised omniscience had its limits, might wonder quietly about their judgment.

Character counted, for certain. We knew there were seven sacraments, seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, seven fruits of the Holy Ghost, 40 days in Lent and six character traits on which we were graded every quarter on a scale of A to F. The two big ones were Obedience and Self-Control. An “A” indicated that you didn’t have to be told to “sit up straight and fold your hands!” The implication was that you could be failed for character as well as arithmetic, and one thing you did not want to do at St. Michael’s was to fail anything.

We saw the wages of failure every day. St. Michael’s had no such thing as social promotion. The nuns would flunk you, and every class had one or two oversized leftovers from the upper grade. Some got left behind twice. Rumor had it that one of my fourth-grade classmates was 13 going on 14. He looked about 16.

The only exception was our third-grade class, and that was the work of our second-grade nun, the most notorious disciplinarian and feared sister in the school. She had been around so long that she had taught my mother and her brothers and her cousins. By the time I had her, she was having trouble staying awake, was taking small, white pills, and evidently had a flatulence problem. She was known to beat kids by mistake after waking up from her daily in-class nap. We lived in such fear of her that we kept up with our work and didn’t dare talk, even when she was napping.

On the last day of school, the greatest day of any year by any measure, Sister announced that all of us had been promoted to the third grade. It was truly a miracle. We had all survived a year with the toughest nun in the Archdiocese and escaped with our lives.

“I have more good news,” she announced. “I’ve been promoted, too. I’ll be teaching third grade.”

By the time she was done with us, we could read, write with perfect penmanship, add, subtract, multiply and genuflect. We had no choice.

The nuns most-effective teaching tool, however, had nothing to do with intimidation. They led by example. They came to school prepared. Other than hitting a wrong kid, I never saw a nun make a mistake. They knew thoroughly the material they were teaching. They had magnificent handwriting. I never understood how they could write so beautifully, legibly and straightly with chalk. Their penmanship was a form of blackboard calligraphy. The report cards were hand-written, with the letters for the character traits and numbers for the 15 subject grades, perfectly executed. From their splendidly neat roll-books, they copied more than 1,000 letter and number entries every quarter.

They were all business. They got right to work. They were orderly, their desks always uncluttered. Their habits and sashes were perfectly pressed, each bead of the rosaries that clacked at their sides as they walked was polished, the brass on the crucifixes shiny. They did not complain. They insisted that even on the hottest days, with 70-plus hot children in a room without air-conditioning and the classroom air heavy with the odors of soiled pants, their heavy black garments actually kept them cool.

No matter how chaotic life might be at our homes, where chaos had few upper limits, we knew that when we entered their rooms we were entering a world of order. Thus, our eighth-grade experience was a chilling and disorienting one, a clear symptom that something was awry.

We had the sense that Sister had been sentenced to play out her days in a lost world and that we had been conscripted to be part of her torment. We got that sense from her. “This place. I can’t wait to get out of this place.”

She raged against us. She raged against our parents. She raged against Chester. She raged against “The Sisters Before Me” who had tolerated untold misconduct. She raged against Jacqueline Kennedy’s “big bony knees,” grotesquely exhibited beneath her short skirts. We hadn’t given it a thought. We had barely noticed the bumps in the chests of our classmates.

Her tirades would be interrupted by a peculiar, it not entertaining, form of corporal punishment. “Come here, Snip,” she should say to the alleged offender, who might have done something as odious as jiggle a leg. (Or, “Come here, Boob,” if it was a boy.) She would beckon with an extraordinarily crooked index finger.

She would hook that crooked finger under the offender’s chin, lead him or her to the front-center of the room, grip his or her jaws with her right hand and shake the daylights out of the alleged offender.

When she did this to the boobs, the whole class would get a laugh. At the peak of the shaking process, the boobs’ hands naturally would fly away from the body. The hands invariably would have middle fingers extending from fists for the whole class to see.

Her daily agenda was so subscribed with her endless repetitions and eruptions of her inner torment, she could barely get around to teaching.

We heard the same stories – relentlessly. The one about the priest who took the same walk along the same route every night. It was hard for us to envision what neighborhood he lived in; we took her word for it. One night he decided to vary the walk by detouring along a narrow alleyway. There, he came across a dying man who, it turns out, was a parishioner known to be a devout Catholic. He administered Extreme Unction (last rites), and the departed soul immediately went to heaven.

She also told us about a priest who took a group of boys our age to a cabin in Maryland. One night, they all died because of a gas leak, which just went to show that you never knew when your time was going to be up. “You’re not dead yet,” she would tell us, something that we couldn’t dispute.

She told us about her formerly celebrated career in a Philadelphia parish and how she and her eighth-grade safeties, who helped kids cross the dangerous streets of Center City, were featured in the Sunday magazine, and how Trooper Newcombe would come to class someday and tell us all about it, and her past glory.

At the end of her stories, she would intone: “The mills of God grind slowly,” and, by mid-October, we would reflexively join in the refrain, “but they grind exceeding fine.”

TO BE CONTINUED

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