MY NAMESAKE WAS born on the other side of two world wars and on the other side of an ocean so big that crossing it to the west catapulted my family centuries forward, out of a world we’ve simply named Old and into the modern age, and crossing it to the east… well, no one in my family ever successfully tried that as far as I know, but I imagine something just as magical would happen.

I was named for my legendary Polish ancestor Józef, and by the time I was eight or nine had appropriated an image of him in my head that, in retrospect and with not a little embarrassment, I can identify as being loosely based on another Joseph, whom I had seen in my father’s history books: Stalin.  Fortunately for me, I did not yet know of that mustachioed Joseph’s oppression of my kin, and so his image, given the spirit of my namesake, remained always a comforting figment in my head.  I even became very close with my imaginary Józef, which was natural enough, as our family believes that our namesakes live on with us, shaping us to be like them.  We believe that you even come to look like your namesake, a belief proven by the fact that we look so much like our shadows, which are our namesakes, forever walking with us. 

Do not assume then that we see our namesakes as guardian angels of some sort, watching over and looking out for us.  We think that sort of fantasy is rather shallow.  On the contrary, our namesakes follow us to watch our every move, to take note of our every word, and to judge our every action.  The namesake thus keeps us honest, reminding us that in this life we can get away with nothing.

Even if our namesakes are a bit severe in this way, being perpetually watched is still better than facing life alone.  As much as I feared disappointing Józef, I depended on his company and always made sure to walk in the light so that I could see my shadow.  This all caused me endless problems at school, and teacher after teacher called parent meeting after parent meeting to discuss my behavior.  As if it wasn’t disconcerting enough that I talked with my shadow—often in the middle of class—it was downright strange that I did so in some alien tongue full of “zhuh” and “tchuh” sounds. 

My father always faced these meetings with a mixture of bemusement and pride.  Cursed with a streak of humor—inherited, I’m told, from his namesake, his grandfather Franek—he would make thunderous proclamations in Polish while pounding his fist on my child-size plastic desk, at which the teachers invariably sat him.  My father was a small, wiry man who I believe could have folded himself into a tuna can if he ever cared to, but nonetheless sitting at a grade-schooler’s chair and desk challenged at least his patience.  Each year, the desk made for a little less of an absurd fit for my father, but little other progress was made in these meetings.

In the fourth grade, however, my father expected a year’s reprieve from the meetings.  In fourth grade, I had the nun. 

None of the kids really knew the nun’s name.  She was always “Sister” to her face and “the nun” or “the last nun”—she being the only one left at Queen of Peace School—behind her bent, bulging back.  I had been placed with the nun partly because my father requested her.  She was from the same neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago as my father, which, as I learned again and again across my childhood, ensured that my father thought of her as an old friend even though they had never met, she having already enrolled in a nunnery when my father entered this world in the backseat of a stalled Buick in an alley behind 47^th Street. 

“Imagine that, Joseph!” my father exclaimed after meeting the last nun.  “A real live nun from the City surviving out here in the boonies.”  My father considered everywhere that wasn’t Chicago “the boonies.”  What had possessed him to move to Wisconsin, he never could explain beyond opaque parables of a search for paradise.  “She’s from the Back of the Yards, even.  Back of the Yards, Joseph!”

My father’s immediate, timeless bond with the nun aside, it would also be fair to say I had also been placed with the nun because the 59 other families in my grade had each requested their child be placed in the other fourth-grade classroom, the teacher of which they adored, despite her dry mediocrity, simply because she was not the nun. 

We all assumed that the omnipresent ruler the nun carried had long ago become a mutant appendage to her hands—which, blotch-covered and knurled, appeared to be sites of several mutations.  Every year there would be a parish meeting, usually after she had hit the wrong parents’ child with her ruler, stuffed with politely irritated fathers in polo shirts requesting she be relieved of her calling and less polite and rather irate mothers threatening to involve the authorities—an empty threat that failed to even permeate the thick-skinned nun, who knew the word to be hollow in its plural form.  The heat in the school auditorium during these meetings could scorch the meek.  This heat emanated only partly from the stagnant September air (the annual outrage usually took place within a few weeks of the advent of the school year).  With the meetings always well past capacity, mothers would hang from the rafters, swooping down at the nun, testing her, seeing if she had been in the heat long enough to pick at.  No one wanted to be the one who drew fatal blood, and so they only feigned attack, hoping that their near boldness would be enough to stir another to strike.  The nun always sat immoveable in the middle of the bare sand-yellow stage, never flinching at these maneuvers: a broad marble boulder at rest atop a rusting folding chair, alone save whichever tired principal the diocese had just assigned to the school (the school ran or scared off thirteen principals in my eight years). 

So many wrinkles unfolded and refolded across the nun’s face that it was impossible to determine which crevice concealed her eyes, yet everyone felt the penetration of her pious glare.  Aside from that archaeological dig of a face, the only body parts discernible from the black boulder were her hands, which seemed to emerge from the midsection of an armless body—like those awkward blimps of cartoon characters that floated over our heads on Michigan Avenue when we would drive down to Chicago to see the parade and the Christmas displays in the windows of Marshall Field’s.  The ruler in one hand, she fingered a rosary in the other, summoning God’s authority over those who cleared their throats and spoke against her with their eyes anywhere but on her.  Each year, a different principal explained to the soccer-mom mob that, yes, the nun, God bless her, seems a tad severe at first, heh heh, but that, ah, having gotten to know Sister in the last few weeks, the principal could assure them that she’s quite an angel.  Wiping his or her brow, the principal would tell how Sister only carries the ruler because, since her stroke, from which her mind is fully recovered, thanks be to God, that hand clenches in a way that frightens children when it is left empty, you see… always leaving unspoken the obvious: that the hand’s no less frightening clutching a potential weapon. 

It was all merely a show.  Franciscan nuns owned the school.  Which was why the last nun never was dismissed, why she never even needed to speak at the meetings.  While university-educated professional educators had replaced all the nuns except her in the classrooms, the nuns still held final say on anything they felt moved to speak on.  And they felt moved to speak on all things from the necessity of daily mass to the superfluity of daily Spanish class.  In their absence, the school took on a façade of normalcy—producing a world that, even if it was a different one, was at least parallel to what my friends at the public schools described—but every month or so the nuns would hear of heresy, and they would shatter our fragile world and reassert their arcane order.  They would hear of a young teacher including “world religions” in her curriculum or of junior-high girls wearing skirts too short (the parents’ organization had battled to rid their children of uniforms; when the nuns relented, the members of the organization thought they had scored a major victory that would one day be looked back upon as the moment they wrested power away from the nuns, but it soon became clear that the nuns had only conceded uniforms to allow themselves a fifth ace in the future: after that, every time the organization brought up something the nuns didn’t like, they retaliated with threats of reintroducing uniforms), and the nuns would march on Queen of Peace School.  They advanced down the hallways in formation, shoulder to shoulder, their shoes clacking in unison like the soundtrack to a black-and-white World War II documentary.  My friends and I scurried out of sight, hiding in our lockers or in the boys’ room or anywhere but in the nuns’ path, marveling at how each nun looked alike, as if decades of piety produced only one possible final form.  For Christ’s sake, they were all even the same height—at least if the term height can be used for the four-foot ten. 

The nuns would say nothing and express nothing.  They just conducted their sweep and proceeded to the principal’s office.  Filing into the makeshift office (the principal worked out of an old storage closet after the monsignor, an old Irish priest whom the nuns adored, appropriated the principal’s office) made for comedy, much like the circus act wherein a small village of clowns crowd into a Volkswagon.  But somehow the nuns all fit, the last one squeezing past the door before shutting it, usually as the mother shared a preemptive thought with the principal, “We have been thinking about uniforms . . . .”  An hour later, the nuns would emerge, leaving the principal slumped over his or her desk, more tired than before.  Their concerns were different each time and always voiced with parliamentary politeness, but the message was always the same: we run this shit. 

The last nun knew this.  If she did not delight in this power—delight being a cipher to her existence—she at least took faith from it, as if it were a proof of God’s moral justification.

My father, though, was more at home in the realm of delight, and he found great joy in the nun’s perennial victories, celebrating them as if she were the Pope’s army smiting apostates.  “Pyah!” my father half-laughed, half-snorted.  “That’s showing those related-to-the-goddamn-Winthrops Puritan country clubbers. Thpyah!”  My father’s brain could not conceive Catholics who were neither working class nor simply dirt poor.  As such, my school made little sense to him.  He also, inexplicably, believed with every ounce of his body that every single wealthy person in America was related to John Winthrop.  To explain to him that the families were all Catholic and that none was descended from Governor Winthrop would have been about as productive as one of those parent-teacher meetings and so I never did; I just let him savor his vicarious delight.

He was equally delighted when I reached the fourth grade (there had been some moments the previous year when advancement seemed in doubt).  I can remember few times when he was more optimistic than driving me to the school to begin the fourth grade.  “Now you’re going to get some education, boy,” he shouted, slapping the steering wheel hard enough that the horn tooted without his notice.  “Nobody teaches like those nuns.”  At this point, he became lost in his mind, mumbling fragments here and chuckling incoherencies there, shaking his head, his eyes lit with a torch of memories.

So he was all the more heart-broken when I came home from the first day of fourth grade and told him the nun had dropped dead.

She had been done in by her old bane, unbroken schoolboys.  It being the first day of school, the classrooms’ carts of Bibles had just been taken out of storage.  The janitors had left each cart outside of its classroom.  Where the nun saw the bulk of her curriculum on a cart, two boys (excused from the room next door to use the boys’ room) saw a conveyance—conveniently located at one end of a clear, freshly-waxed runway.  One boy hopped on top of the Bibles while the other got a running start and gave a big push.

The nun, meanwhile, stood in front of a room of children, most weeping in soundless fear.  Her mouth had not yet moved this morning.  As was her well-known custom, she began the first day of classes in silence.  It was just as well known that we were supposed to walk in, find our seat, and begin to pray.  When we all had filed in, she repositioned herself—just as she had no apparent arms, she moved snail-like without any appearance of legs stepping beneath the robes—at the door, cutting off any thought of escape.  Then she waited.  For someone to need to use the restroom.  For someone to get bored.  Or tired.  For a nose to run without permission.  Anything.  Having trapped her prey, she teased it joylessly, out of hereditary impulse rather than pleasure.  Her moral code forbade her from striking us without cause, but nonetheless she seemed unable to begin the school year any way but with punishment, ostensibly for misbehavior but more so for our wretched nature, for our complicity in the original sin.

We all knew the drill and were holding out rather well.  We had survived over ten minutes of utter silence, dreadful but violence-free silence, when we heard a horrid cry of demonic joy coming from the nun’s direction.  It took a moment, but I was able to deduce that this noise, this laughter, probably came not from the nun but from behind her.  This was born out when she turned just in time to see what we all saw, a boy lying on his belly, his belly on a bunch of Bibles, his arms spread like wings, rolling down the hallway at an impressive clip.  His eyes bugged out and he giggled, oblivious to the danger he was in.  The boy hollered as he flew by our door, introducing a sound entirely alien to the world inside that doorway, “wheeeeeeeEEEEEEeeeeeeeee.”

The nun staggered as if confused—she had been focusing on us and did not expect action from her flank.  After a moment, recovered, she snorted and began to move, ready to crush the outside agitators.

But by now, we had comprehended what had happened and were infected by a sense of joy that we remembered from when we were a part of that world, back before we had walked into the last nun’s class those distant ten minutes ago.  Some kids’ eyes sparkled with remembrance of better days, a few even smiled at the thought that they once lived in that carefree place where such shenanigans existed.

In the midst of all this, I felt something in my chest.  It tickled, kicked, and then took off toward my throat.  No!  For Christ’s sake, no!  My brain panicked inside my head.  Quick, it screamed. Grab the laughter before it’s too late!  My thoughts lunged for my tonsils, hoping to block off the laughter at the bend between my throat and my mouth, to silence it or at least choke it into a muffled snort, but they were well too late.

I laughed.

The nun went two ways at once, running into herself on the way.  The root of this infection lay at the end of the hall.  On the other hand, her classroom—her sacred charge—was now contaminated.  Deciding that she would have all day, all year, to dole out my punishment, she crippled me with a glare and turned to the hallway.  But her face had turned pasty and she now gasped as if drowning.

She wobbled and fell face first into the thick, wooden door.  Her head drummed the door, and then she dropped to the ground with a force stronger than the simple pull of gravity.  She died before she hit the floor, her face constricted, as if rigor mortis had already set in, her eyes—quite visible now—were globes of moral rage.  An unspoken condemnation stood halted on her lips.  She made an impressive mass, lying flat on her back, ruler sticking into the air from the black-robed body as if it were a barren flagpole atop a scorched hilltop fort, annihilated by barbarians.

The body blocked the doorway, leaving us in the unenviable position of choosing between sitting in a room with a spirit that shook the air with cries for divine retribution and actually climbing over the corpse to escape.  But our young lives had been far too light to understand the weight of what had happened, and so we dealt with the situation without much trauma.

We turned on the T.V.

An hour later the music teacher came to see why we were late for her class and screamed, interrupting our cartoon.  The principal came, tired already on his first day, and tried to figure out how to get us out, but the nun’s body had bloated since her demise and was quite impassable.  Paramedics came soon enough but couldn’t lift her and had to call in the fire department, making for better fare than even that on the television.  But even the firefighters couldn’t lift her.  When they lifted one unwieldy body part, another just rolled out of their grasp back to the floor.

The principal made a few half-hearted efforts to either make his way into the classroom to conduct class or to lift children over the body.  But as soon as he would delicately try half-stepping around, half-climbing over it, the body would gurgle.  When he tried to lift a particularly sensitive boy nicknamed Pooper over the corpse, Pooper screamed and cried.  Soon enough, the impropriety of it all became clear.  We just had to wait.  Finally three firefighters and two police officers pushed the body onto its side and slid a carjack underneath.  Holding body parts steady, a third cop pumped the jack and they lifted her onto a stretcher.  Wiping sweat from their foreheads, they all exhaled when the paramedics succeeded in strapping the body in place.

“Murderers!” My father cursed that evening.  “Who were these boys?”  I had left vague some of the story’s particulars and obfuscated in response to him here.  I left the identity of the laugher mercifully unmentioned.  And while I usually thought of the boys in the hallway as friends, I found it appropriate to distance myself from them that evening as my father cried in melodramatic, sincere despair over the death of the last nun.

So my father was fated to endure another special meeting.  For half of a week, one of the nuns came out of her retirement to teach us, but she could not make it through the day, often falling asleep as she read the Catechism to us.  Conceding on the third day, she rose from her nap and hobbled out the door without a word.  We all watched out the window as she left the building and plodded across the parking lot.  At the far end of the lot, past the teachers’ parked cars, she hitched up her skirt a bit to climb the hill to the convent, which looked over the school from the woods atop the hill.  A lone orange leaf released itself from a tree at the edge of the woods and performed an elegiac dance across the wind, then rested on the forest floor.  The nun hesitated as if she was going to look back at us, but then, perhaps recalling the fate of Lot’s wife who looked back upon the cities of the plain, she simply buried her face in her habit and climbed the hill.  The mother was waiting for her at the doorway.  She helped her in and pushed shut the oak door. 

The replacement, then, would be a layperson.  She dressed in bright, business-like outfits and kept organized files on even the most domesticated of the children, yet I did notice that my folder thickened quite early on in the year.  Straight out of the University—its school of education was among the nation’s highest ranked—she understood mental and learning disabilities in a way that had not existed for the last nun.  Overjoyed by having been saved from a year of substitute teaching, she approached the job with a sort of secular zeal that would have been as foreign to the nun as delight had been. 

It did not take long before she called a meeting.  Thanking my father so much for coming in, she made sure to call him Frank several times to assert her capable adult status to a man more than twice her age.  She told him about my conversations with my shadow and suggested I be evaluated by “a specialist.”  My father gave an indignant squawk as he pried himself away from my plastic desk and walked out without a word to the teacher; instead, he looked over his shoulder and found his shadow on the floor.  With a mischievous smirk, he sneered, “C’mon, Franek, let’s get the hell outta here.”

A difficult year followed.  While other children’s conversations with stuffed animals constituted healthy exercises in imagination, the teacher caringly explained to me that my “silly talk” would eventually alienate me from my peers, who would soon mature and resent my refusal to assimilate socially acceptable behavior.  I didn’t know what “assimilate” meant, and neither did my shadow. 

So I just stared at her, unable to understand this person in front of me.  I could tell that she recognized a mental sluggishness in my stare, a particular kind of dumbness that she had seen when she met my father, a dumbness that, deep down, she knew she could not change, no more than one can change the past.
 

Joseph Fronczak grew up in Madison, Wisconsin.  After graduating from UW-Madison in 2002, he taught grade school and high school for a few years, including a year teaching at a Catholic school quite unlike the one detailed in this story.  These days, he is fulfilling his destiny and paying his bills as a taxi driver.  In the fall, he will begin graduate study at Yale University.