(Being a continuation of Part 1 and Part 2 of the story of Paul, a young boy living on the Irish West Side of Chicago during the Time of the Great Vatican Council.)The following weekend found Paul still in a panic about what to do about the relic. At school that week he had been so distracted that the nun had had to punish him just to get his attention. At home, he just moped around, hardly eating, and mostly staying in his room.---Hes turning into his mother, said his mother.Everyone around him assumed that this was because of the attack on Halloween night and the breaking of Julias antique crozier. But Julia, in fact, had already forgiven him.---Poor Pauli, God bless him, Julia said to Grandma Jane over a dinner of spaghetti, green beans, Italian bread, and a gallon jug of red table wine that Julia always kept on the kitchen table but that Grandma Jane never touched, because her secret shame was that she was a beer drinker, and then only a single can on the hottest summer day, and only then if she had done something that day that she could be proud of.---I told Pauli that he was lucky; that it was the Hand of God that that thing broke like that when he was attacked. A good Sicilian crozier is built to be able to cut a grown man in two. Good thing it was so old. Ill have my nephew Mikey fix it.Grandma Jane had hoped she would elaborate on the cutting a grown man in two part, but she didnt.So Paul had been totally exonerated over the antique crozier incident, but he would still not eat his dinner or even his favorite dessert of strawberry Jell-O with sliced bananas in it that his mother had made for him to try to draw him out.Instead, Paul hid in his room poring over the Yellow Pages like a Talmudic scholar. He had been shocked to find that in a city of four million people there was not a single reliquary repairman listed. He looked into religious goods stores (both wholesale and retail), jewelers, glassmakers, lock smiths, antique dealers, hardware stores, candle companies, convents, monasteries, and art supply stores. There was no mention of relic repairs anywhere. He even tried calling a few places, trying to sound as grown up as possible with his eleven year old voice, but the answer he invariably got was No, maam, we dont do that kind of thing, which embarrassed him so much that he stopped making calls after three tries.Paul had determined that the broken glass on the reliquary was extremely thick. It reminded him of Sister Mary Francis glasses and for a few moments he considered stealing her glasses and somehow using one of the lenses to repair the reliquary. But he realized with a start that his terrible sin was leading him into temptation, so he blocked the idea from his mind.There was a knock at Pauls bedroom door and he quickly slid the phone book under his bed. The door opened and Pauls father walked in.---Hi, dad.---Hi, son.Pauls father looked at him carefully for a moment. Paul was wearing a couple of rosaries around his neck as usual (although Pauls father didnt know that Paul felt abandoned by God and was now mostly wearing them for show). He suspected that Paul probably had a holy card taped to his belly button where hed said the crozier had hit him. But he was too polite to ask.---Im going to my mothers for a few minutes and I would like you to come with.---Oh. Okay.---Wear a hat and gloves. Its cold out. And take off those rosaries. You know how she feels about that sort of thing.Paul was a bit ambivalent about his Grandma Jennie. On one hand he loved her very much. And as the only son of her only son, she spoiled and doted on him. On the other hand, she was a very intimidating person by nature and she scared the hell out of him. She was a tall grim looking woman with a ramrod straight posture. She was the kind of person that seemed to stop all conversation when she entered the room. Her presence was overwhelming and was enhanced by the amount of eye shadow she wore around her piercing brown eyes, which made her look like a very angry raccoon. Her voice was very clipped and commanding. He nickname for Paul was love, as in What do you mean you dont like cheeseburgers? Nonsense. Everyone likes cheeseburgers. Eat it, love. When she said love he felt both affection and like a brick was being dropped on his head.Grandma Jennie was a police officer. She was almost 80 years old. She had had Pauls father in her mid-forties. Her husband wasnt so much dead as somehow out of the picture. What had happened to him no one would say. Even Pauls mother wouldnt say. All she would tell him was that after the black widow spider reproduces, it eats its mate, which Paul felt was somehow close to the truth.Almost 80 year old police officers were relatively rare, even in Chicago, even among people with a lot of political clout. But the truth was, the Force was afraid to retire her. And at that point she had so many brothers and sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews on the Force that it made a certain amount of sense to the local West Side politicians to keep her there just to keep the rest of them properly organized into a single voting block.The core of the Chicago Police Department was Irish in those days. They believed that that having worked their way into the control of the police force, they were the God-given protectors of American civilization, which they defined as based on Irish Catholic culture. Other ethnic groups each had their good qualities, even Negroes, but all of them were treated as though they were in America on suffrage that could be revoked at any time by any beat cop. The parishes were heavily integrated into this system; Paul knew that all three of the night sticks that Grandma Jennie kept with the umbrellas in the umbrella stand had been blessed; one by a bishop. The Irish as the enforcers of the law were not especially bound to it themselves. The watchers were watched by God and the local alderman, both of whom were known to be strict and demanding, but also indulgent when it came to the Irish.Grandma Jennie, for all of her political clout, was a truant officer (which was as high as a woman could go on the Force in those days). But even she would find her dining room table groaning under the weight of the scotch and whiskey bottles (not to mention the cash) at Christmas time when the boys from the precinct would bring her share of the honorariums received from the grateful citizens.Grandma Jennie was a truant officer and woe to the truant who thought she was an easy 80 year old pushover. She had been punched in the face a number of times; had knives pulled on her; had been kicked down a flight of stairs; and had been pushed out of a moving car. When she got back on her feet, she approached the fool with the righteous strength of three generations of Irish police officers and in every case the fool simply stood still and took her beating, sapping, or pistol whipping. No matter how tough the bad boy was, he either had perfect attendance after that or he dropped out of school and got a job. Either way the fool always emerged from the hospital reformed.Grandma Jennie lived on the third floor of a 24 flat apartment building made of yellow brick. Paul liked it because when he entered the courtyard he felt like he was going within the walls of an old castle. But he was also a bit afraid of the building, because Julia had told him that West Garfield Park was now a bad neighborhood. It was a bad neighborhood, because colored people had started moving into it for some reason. Paul didnt know what the reason was, but he knew that Grandma Jennie was not at all happy about it. She had lived in that apartment for 35 years and she was not about to move out now just because the neighborhood was filling up with a bunch of(here she would have to be reminded by Pauls father that Paul was in the room)people.What Paul was too young to know was that West Garfield Park was being swept up in the great Chicago West Side Integration Boom. Chicago had a great many racially integrated neighborhoods on the West Side, something that the hated South Side Irish Mayor of Chicago and head of the South Side Irish Democratic machine often pointed to with pride. The neighborhoods would become integrated one street at a time and then would stay integrated for up to six or eight weeks, until most of the white people had moved out. When the process was finished, the only white people who continued to live on the street were the very old, the very mean, or those rare people that didnt mind living in a neighborhood with colored people. Grandma Jennie belonged to the old and mean categories, and she was confused as to why her beloved West Side Irish neighborhood with its established political base and parishes should collapse at the first hint of a black face on the block.To Paul, the neighborhood looked exactly the same, as well it should since the newcomers were generally of equal or higher social status than the people they had replaced. They too had moved west, not wanting to live in dangerous colored neighborhoods. When Pauls father pulled up to the apartment building and parked on that crisp fall day, there was no one to be seen on the quiet well kept street. Grandma Jennie buzzed them in from the hallway and they climbed the six half flights of stairs to her apartment. She met them at the door and after glancing suspiciously behind Paul and his father, she gave each of them a hug.---You look good, Paul, she said in a way that made it sound like an order.They then entered the apartment and she locked the five locks on the front door.She had them sit in the living room and wait for her while she made them a pot of tea. Paul always felt that he had to sit at attention in the living room. It was well furnished but rather dark; dark brown crown moldings and woodwork, dark wood furniture, dark brown upholstery, and a black baby grand piano in the corner. Paul had never heard the piano played and Grandma Jennie had told him that everyone who had played it was now dead. Paul took this as a warning that he shouldnt try to play it himself.Grandma Jennie also had lots of pictures of saints in her apartment. These werent cheap looking pictures like Grandma Janes or Technicolor ones like Julia had. They reminded him of the ones that Olivetta had, except that Grandma Jennies saints didnt have pious looks on their faces. They had accusatory looks and they reminded Paul of a bunch of police officers, which was the last thing he needed, because they immediately reminded him of the broken relic, and it was clear to Paul that the saints knew. They knew, and Paul had an irrational fear that they were likely to say something. So he kept very still.Grandma Jennie came out of the kitchen with a tray of china cups and saucers. Being quite nearsighted (but too vain to wear her glasses), she thrust his cup of milky tea in his general direction and he caught it before she dumped it on his lap.When they had settled in, Pauls father asked he how she was doing.---Im doing all right, considering that Im old and the entire world is going to hell. The coloreds are all the way to Cicero Avenue now, which should stop them for a while. (Most whites on the West Side believed that there was something about main arterial streets that created a natural un-fordable psychological boundary between ethnic neighborhoods. Jumping this boundary was rather like breaking the four minute mile mark.) I dont know. They seem to be Democrats, and Horan thinks hell have not trouble keeping his seat and Branigan has been tearing his hair out trying to keep our guys on the city payroll. (Horan was the local alderman and Branigan was the local Democratic Committeeman, which put him in charge of the precinct captains and the patronage jobs.) Branigan wants to do the right thing, but once our guys move out of the neighborhood, unless they stay in the city he has to let them go. And our guys get so spooked when a black face move in next door, that they move as far west as they can move and still catch a train into the city. Theyre not moving to Austin or even to Oak Park. Theyre moving to God knows where places like LaGrange and Des Plaines. Sure, they come into the city to go to church, but how long can that really last? Paul, would you like a slice of cheesecake?---No thank you, grandma. Im not very hungry.---Nonsense. All eleven year old boys are hungry. And its the best cheese cake recipe on the West Side. I should know. My father was a precinct bag man and he got it one Christmas from the William Tell over at Crawford and Madison. Its their own famous secret recipe. Ill just go and get you a slice.Paul glanced up at a portrait of Saint Joseph holding the Baby Jesus. They both looked back at him with stern disapproval, that he would be eating cheesecake despite the fact that he had broken a relic.For the rest of the visit, Grandma Jennie talked on and on about Police Department gossip and the seemingly endless number of friends of hers that had died since Pauls fathers last visit. She reported what funeral home they had been waked from and what parish they had been buried from. She also noted how so many of the old family plots in the cemeteries were now filling up. Grandma Jennie enjoyed going to wakes as much as Grandma Jane did. But Grandma Jennie went to wakes to be seen doing her duty and a good Christian and not to see and to reassure herself that she had outlived whomever it was that was on display.Finally it was time for Paul and his father to leave.---Now you be careful down there with all of those Negroes. Ill be in the window watching. And I have my pistol in my purse.---Dont worry mom, well be fine.---Good bye grandma.---Give grandma a hug. Work hard in school, love.Paul and his father walked back down the stairs and Paul pulled open the heavy security door that led them into the tiny lobby. Paul looked out the window of the outside door just to make sure. He had his gloves in his hand, but he distractedly stuck them in his coat pocket as he stepped outside. It was still a crisp fall day and the street was very quiet. Paul walked behind his father to the car, which was parked right at the end of the courtyard.Suddenly, he heard a voice behind him.---Son, are these your gloves?It was a Black man who had apparently come out of one of the other doors in the courtyard. He had Pauls gloves in his hand.At that moment he heard a window slide open and he looked up and saw that his grandmother had opened the window. He could see the top of her purse that she had apparently rested on top of the radiator and she pulled out of it a pistol with a long barrel that she proceeded to hold with both hands and aim at the stranger. Her hands were shaking.---Son, are these gloves yours?Paul glanced at his father who was focusing on the cars lock, which seemed to be stuck. He looked back at the stranger then up at his grandmother. He was so afraid that he couldnt say a word.---I say, son, are these yours?Pauls grandmother continued to aim the pistol, but she was squinting badly. Paul saw her put the pistol down on the window sill and start rummaging through her purse again. This time she took out her glasses and put them on. Then she picked up the pistol again.---Hey Paul, the man has your gloves.Pauls father came around from his side of the car and walked over to the strange who was now handing the gloves to Paul. He put himself between the stranger and his mother.---What do you say, son?---Um, thank you sir.---Sorry about my son. Hes a bit shy. Thanks for spotting his gloves.---Oh no problem. Wish I had a nickel for every glove I ever lost.Paul glanced up at his grandmother who had put the pistol down again and was rummaging through her purse. This time she came up with a handkerchief, with which she vigorously wiped her lenses.The stranger was had already walked up the street, out of range.---Paul, lets get in the car and leave before that crazy women remembers to put bullets in that gun and shoots us all.

unagidon is the pen name of a former dotCommonweal blogger.  

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