Chapter 11

Rigby served his first Mass during the last week of January 1944 at seven o’clock in the morning. He worked alone because the other scheduled boy had called in sick. He knelt and said the responses he knew by heart quickly and loudly and then sort of mumbled through the longer ones that he read from the card. Father Sweeny had to prod him to move the heavy book to the gospel side of the altar and to put the wine in his other hand, but he rang the bells on time and when they finished the priest smiled at him and shook his hand.

His mother said she was proud of him as they walked home together. He ate quickly and hurried off to school

The first semester report cards were issued on the first Friday in February. Rigby looked his and took a deep breath. He knew had had messed up on the exam in math, but he had hoped for a B. It was another C, mainly because of word problems, but he got an A in social studies and his big birdhouse project had earned him a final A in shop. He felt pretty good about his report card, especially the B in English.

His mother didn’t.

The next Saturday morning Rigby and his parents rode the bus and then the streetcar down to the Mall in D.C. and while his mother went to the National Gallery to look at some impressionists’ work, the boy and his father joined a large crowd and walked through a sprawling exhibition of military hardware and captured ordinance on the grassy Mall.

There was a Japanese fighter called a Zero and a captured German Messerschmitt, a BF109 in desert camouflage paint, and a Focke-Wulf 190 with a bright red spinner that looked brand new. They saw a gull-winged Stuka and a twin-engined Japanese light bomber called a Betty. There were dozens of American aircraft on display including the odd P-82 Twin Mustang, and an old Bell Aircobra, the odd plane with its engine behind the pilot and a cannon in its nose. There were ladders up beside the cockpit of the B-25, like the ones used in the Doolittle raid, and the sleek Martin B-26. There were also some tanks on display including British ones as well as a big German Tiger and the new American Sherman with the hatch open so you could look inside and see the breech of the cannon. Machine guns and artillery, including a German 88, were in the show and, of course, there was a busy booth where war bonds were being sold.

The family ate lunch in the gallery’s cafeteria and then boarded the Friendship Heights streetcar for the ride home. Rigby was eager to get back to the P-51 Mustang model he had been working on after seeing the real thing. It was a rubber-band powered flying model made of balsa wood and covered with rice paper and dope. He had bought an X-acto knife at the hobby store which made it a lot easier to cut out the ribs and formers.

On Sunday they rode out to Cabin John to visit Uncle Tommy’s new home, a shingle-style Cape Cod with a deep back yard. Gloria said they were planning a huge Victory Garden in the spring. After a while Gloria went out to visit some friends and Rigby found an Esquire magazine with a story by John Tunis. He had borrowed a couple of books with baseball stories from the public library and one of them was by that author.

Rigby paged through the magazine, looked at some of the cartoons and then found a big, fold-out page with a picture of a long-legged, red-headed girl. As the family got ready to leave, his uncle told he could have the magazine he had been reading. Rigby smiled since he had been ready to ask for it.

When they got home Rigby took his X-acto knife and cut the big pin-up picture out of the magazine and taped it to the wall above his dresser, right behind the photo of the Lone Ranger. Looking at it excited him but he wasn’t sure why. She really did look like the long-legged girl that used to toss out his bundles of newspapers.

The semester grades had cost the varsity basketball team three players and the JV one. The coach moved the best three eighth graders up to the varsity and decided the make it through the season with only nine on the JV. That meant a lot more playing time for both Jimmy Mason and Rigby.

Rigby found a new friend in his altar boy service. Alan Simmons was a fourteen-year-old freshman at a D.C. Catholic high school. His father, who worked at the State Department, took him to school on his way to work and the boy came home on the streetcar and bus using the school tickets that only cost three cents each. Or as he told Rigby, saying it was a secret, he sometimes hitchhiked. They lived in a red brick home out near the big naval hospital and like Rigby, Alan was an only child.

Alan showed Rigby how to dress quickly and properly for Mass and some ways to do the various jobs, especially the bell ringing and candle lighting, more easily. Rigby watched him prepare the charcoal in the censer and refill the wine and water cruets. Once in a while, especially on rainy days, the boys got together at each other’s home to work on models or play board games. Alan had an All-Star baseball game they both enjoyed.

At school Rigby’s shop course had been replaced by art in the second semester, and he had a new social studies teacher, a tall woman who had often substituted at the school. She stuck closely to the book and handed out worksheets that came from a printed workbook designed by the textbook’s publisher. It was hard not to get a good grade, and the kids shared the worksheets with each other almost every day. Most class periods were just silent reading. The teacher sometimes nodded at her desk, her eyes closed.

Both basketball teams struggled through their seasons, but the varsity ended up winning the County title despite one strange game that ended 7-4. Since eighth graders were playing, they let the eighth grade cheerleaders attend varsity games much to the disgust of the ninth grade girls.

Rigby celebrated his 13th birthday in February and both Bucky and Alan came to the party his mother organized on a Sunday afternoon. They had an ice cream cake from Giffords with one big candle on it. His frail grandmother was there and kissed him and gave him a hundred-dollar war bond. Both of his friends gave him Strombecker airplane models and Gloria arrived with a Louisville Slugger baseball bat, a Mickey Vernon model ... He also got a new pair of corduroy slacks from his mother plus a Parker fountain pen and a book about the Ford’s Model A from his father.

The next Saturday Bucky, Alan and Rigby went to the movies after a visit to the drugstore to buy some candy. On their way out, Rigby stopped, dug in his pocket and put a dime up on the glass counter. “I owe you,” the said to the puzzled clerk.

The boys saw a Tom and Jerry cartoon, a newsreel of the celebrations in Rome and the Marine’s invasion of Tarawa, a short of Bugs Bunny singing “Any Bonds Today,” a few trailers of “coming attractions,” and then two full-length black and white Westerns including one featuring John Wayne that Rigby had seen before.

After the movies the boys went down to the old alleys under the theater and taught Alan how to set pins. They each bowled four games and Alan ended up as the high man with a score of 122. Then they went back to the drugstore, sat at the fountain and got drinks; a rootbeer float for Bucky, a cherry Coke for Alan and a lemon phosphate for Rigby. There was a lot of competitive straw sucking.

Easter 1944 came early, on the 9th of April, and was celebrated with the first High Mass at which Rigby served. Alan was in charge of the incense for the ceremony, and Rigby was one of the acolytes who carried tall candles during the processions. He also carried a paten at communion and was very careful to shuffle backwards and not get into the pastor’s way as he distributed the wafers to all those protruding tongues of people kneeling at the altar rail, most with the eyes closed

It was a long Mass, almost an hour and a half, with three priests including the old pastor. When it was over he, who seldom said anything to the altar boys, praised them and thanked them and gave each boy a small, silver medal.

.----.

“Mom,” Rigby asked on Monday night when supper was over, “can you do me a favor?”

“Maybe,” she said, arching an eyebrow.

“Can you teach me how to dance?”

“Beg pardon.” She blinked at him.