Today I saw the man who hurt me. He was standing in front of the deli drinking a can of beer. I was walking to the red house with my father to pick up his railroad check. He knows everybody in the neighborhood and has to stop to talk to almost each one of them; his words buzz about my head like bees. My mother says he could talk a door off its hinge. We are hardly out the door when we have to stop and talk to Mr. Condemi who is cranking out the striped awning in front of his shoe repair shop.
“Any news?” he asks my father. “Don’t worry, Ned, he’ll get his.” He pulls a Turkish Taffy out of his pocket. “You come see me for the best heel in the store next time you play Potsy, Peggy.” The bigger kids send me for the heels because he always gives me the best he has from the pile he’s throwing away.
“You’re his favorite,” they say, but I know I’m just the gofer. I don’t mind because I love the smell of leather and glue, the sawdust on the floor in his shop. I sit on the red leather seats in the booth and kick the swing door to the rhythm of Mr. Condemi singing along with the opera on his cathedral radio.
“O Mio Bambino,” he sings to me as he smoothes the rough edges of the leather sole he cuts on the inverted iron foot. He’s like an artist; he makes my scuffed oxfords look brand new. My father told me Mr. Condemi lost his oldest boy during the war in France.
As we pass by the deli, the man smiles at me. I guess it’s not so much a smile but a grin, an ugly grin. I tug my father’s sleeve as he searches for his matches, first in his shirt pocket, then in his pants pocket. I tug again. I think I might throw up.
“What, child?” he says.
“There’s the man,” I say.
“What man?”
“The man, please, please,” I beg, “don’t let him see you looking, Daddy.” My father lights his cigarette and glances in the direction of the deli.
“The bastard, the bloody, arrogant bastard,” he says.
The bastard grins at me again. “Come on, Daddy, I’m frightened.”
“You need not worry,” he says, as he squeezes my hand a bit too tight. “I know where that boyo works,” my father says more to himself than to me as he stomps the cigarette under his shoe and pulls me down the street.
Earlier today, my father and I attended Mass with my mother who always goes on the First Friday of each month which is devoted to the Sacred Heart. Mama says you receive truly special blessings if you make nine First Fridays like a novena. “Lord knows, we need those blessings now more than ever,” she says. I was surprised my father went with us because he hardly even goes to Mass on Sundays. “It’s a sad example you give to the children,” I once heard my mother say to him.
When Monsignor shook my father’s hand after Mass, I was counting the buttons on his long black gown from the bottom up because I have a nickel bet with a friend on the exact number. “I’m praying for you all,” he said. He must get up at dawn just to close those buttons.
“I’m praying, too,” my father said.
“I hope that’s all you’re doing, Ned,” Monsignor said as he placed his hand on my head.

“It’s easy for you to talk, Monsignor, you not having any children, how hard it is…”
“Ned,” my mother said, catching him by his elbow.
“Pray, Ned. Be patient,” Monsignor said as he turned to enter the rectory.
My father and I quickly continue our walk down 138th Street, past Levy’s Hardware, past PS 9, past The Casino Theater on Willis Avenue. The stores are all open and busy with customers on this cool spring day. Last Saturday we saw The Three Stooges who I think are goofy because when we come out of the theater, the boys keep hitting us girls over the head with their caps. Boys are so stupid. Then we pass St. Jerome’s and walk towards The Harlem River. The whole time I take two steps to my father’s one.
Saturday morning the sun shines on the gleaming fire truck parked in front of our building across the street from the firehouse. It’s only 9 A.M. but I yell up to Mrs. White on the third floor who cushions her plump arms on pillows on the window sill. “Can Jen and Bess come down?” I yell. Jen and Bess White are both in school and soon I will be, too. I can’t wait. They’re both lots taller than me but I can read fat books like Hans Brinker better than them because Momma has always taken me to the library to take out books which I read over and over again until I memorize them. Sometimes Jen and Bess come with us because Mrs. White is so fat it’s hard for her to walk that far. She spends most of her time looking out the window. My father calls her our local guardian angel because she sees everything that happens on our street.
On the day the man grabbed me on the stairs, I had been playing in Mrs. White’s apartment. After everything calmed down, I heard her apologize to my parents, “I should have taken her down to you,” she said weeping. I never saw Mrs. White cry before.
“She’s gone up and down those stairs a hundred times, Helen, without a problem,” my mother said. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“Whatever it takes,” Mrs. White said to my father, as she dabbed her eyes with her flowered hanky. “Whatever it takes.”
Months had passed since the great blue bear of a policeman sat in our kitchen. “Let the police do their work,” my mother said looking at both Mrs. White and my father. The older kids told me she runs the numbers on our street. She takes bets. On what I do not know. But I see her long-legged son dashing in and out of buildings delivering winnings in brown paper lunch bags.
I love the firemen because while they polish the brass bell and wash down the sides of the truck, they let us kids sit up in the seat on top of the ladders or the driver’s seat. They even ring the siren for us. On hot summer nights, they open the hydrants so we can run through the sprinkler. Today, my father walks over to the firemen smoking cigarettes in a small circle by the truck. One has an American Eagle tattooed on his right forearm. The more my father speaks, the tighter the circle becomes. When he points towards the deli, the firemen nod their heads and then my father tips his tweed cap to Mrs. White. His blue eyes sparkle.
Ever since the man hurt me, my mother won’t even let me walk upstairs alone to play with my friends. “But I’m almost six,” I keep reminding her, even though I’m still a little scared.
“But that’s where it happened, in the hall,” she says, as she tugs too hard with the comb to remove the knots from my long hair. Every time I go out the door, my mother says, “Go with her,” to my older sister.
When I’m playing Potsy or I Declare War, my sister’s always butting in the game or sitting on the stoop playing Rummy or Knucks with her know-it-all friends. Last night the one with the buck teeth told us a story about the super of 537 who murdered a ten-year- old girl, chopped up her body, and buried her in the basement of the building. “I think that’s bunk” my sister says. “People make up stories like that so girls like us stay tied to their mother’s apron strings.”
“I think it’s bunk, too,” I say, not that anyone was listening. But whenever my sister and I walk past 537, we both hug the curb more closely.
On July 6, my birthday, my sister took me to Mass to celebrate. “Today is also the day on which Blessed Maria Goretti was slain rather than give up her purity,” she said, as we knelt next to each other on the hard wooden kneelers.
“What’s slain?” I asked.
“Murdered,” she said, “Slain like they say in Robin Hood.”
“What’s purity?”

“I guess it’s clean like Ivory Soap, 99 and 44/100 % pure. You know how Mama always makes us scrub our ears and nails. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” she says. She got slain because she didn’t want to give up being good, I guess.”
“That’s silly,” I said. “Maybe that’s a made up story, too.”
“It may be silly to you but Sister told us about her and she doesn’t lie and she also said she’s blessed now and soon she’ll be canonized a saint.”
“Canonized, like she’ll be shot out of a canon,” I said.
“Very funny, Peg. She’ll have a feast day and be on a calendar and in a missal.”
“Do you think if I’m good I’ll get that, too? I should be canonized just for kneeling on these kneelers. Saint Peggy O’Toole. How does that sound?”
“Shhh,” my sister said, as the altar boy rang the tiny gold bell and Monsignor climbed the marble steps to the altar.

“I want my feast day in August so’s there’s no school and it’s not near my birthday or Christmas so’ s I don’t get cheated on presents.”
“You’ll be dead, Stupid,” my sister said as she pressed her index finger against her lips. Monsignor mumbled something in Latin and we both stood.
The following Friday as Dad and I get ready to go for our walk, my mother looks up from The Daily News she’s reading at the kitchen table and pulls off her glasses. “Dear God,” she says to my father. I’m sitting opposite her gagging on mushy oatmeal and prunes in a striped bowl. On the box of Diamond Crystal Shaker Salt sitting in front of me, there’s a picture of a boy holding a box of salt with a picture of a boy holding a box of salt and so on and so on. I always stare at the box and think of how the picture goes on and on forever-there’s no end to it like the priest says about hell. But lately when I stare at it, I feel I’m falling and falling and falling backwards and I hear myself screaming, my sticky spoon in hand, “I’ll eat my oatmeal I’ll eat my oatmeal, I promise I’ll eat my oatmeal.”
“What?” my father says to my mother.
“Go pack your library books,” my mother says to me. “You can return them on your way home.” I jump up delighted to leave the oatmeal uneaten. I leave the room but stand by the living room door and listen to them. “A man was beaten almost to death in the basement of 613,” she says. “His face was so bad they couldn’t identify him. They smeared brown shoe polish all over his face and in his hair. He had no ID on him.”
“A robbery, no doubt,” my father says, as he sips his tea.
“No, according to this, the police don’t think so. It wouldn’t have been necessary to beat him almost to death just to rob him. They thought it had been done by more than one man.” I had to creep closer to the kitchen to hear what she said next because she was almost whispering. “The thing is, Ned,” she says, “His description sounds like the description of that man. I think I’ll have to call the detective who interviewed us.”
“Well, if you noticed that, don’t you think the police would know that, too?”
Don’t worry yourself, love,” my father says. “Prepare the sole for supper. We’ll be late back, I’m taking Peg for a special treat today at the ice cream parlor.”
As my father and I walk down the front steps of our building, the firemen are sitting on milk crates playing Dominoes outside the firehouse. The American Eagle guy runs across the street to us and says, “Rub my tattoo to bring me good luck, Peg of My Heart.” Then he rubs his hands together and blows on them like he’s tossing dice in Monopoly. Both he and my father give our local guardian angel a thumb’s up. She thumbs back. When we pass by Mr. Condemi’s store front, he stands behind the inverted foot, hammering into a shoe the nails he takes from his mouth. With his free hand, he waves backwards to us like the Pope.