I Know My Robe Gonna Fit Me Well

by Peter Rodman

In Boston’s South End, two blocks up Mass. Ave. from Washington Street, the buildings widen into an oval of five-story brick townhouses. Built in the 1800s by merchants and sea captains, these buildings fell into disrepair and were broken into offices, boarding houses, and flops. Many were burned out with busted stoops and boarded windows.

The church my mother attended was on the ground floor of one of these buildings. One Sunday in April 1970, 1 went to meet her after church. It was a rainy morning and, as the screech of the now-dismantled elevated faded, Mass. Ave. was hushed. As I I sat on the stoop outside her church, I could hear the bass notes, tambourines and singing. I'd stopped attending church, but I liked listening to the congregation sing a hymn.

I know my robe gonna fit me well

Cause I tried it on by the gates of Hell

You ought to been there when I come through

You woulda got so happy, woulda shouted too

I know my robe gonna fit me well

I tapped my foot, eyes closed. Suddenly, in front of me, I heard a voice.

"Nice music."

The reedy voice, so different from the gravelly, soaring hymn, came from a round, freckled person with floppy brown hair and big tortoise-shell glasses. A little belly poked over his carpenter pants

"S'aw right," I told him. "Old-fashioned."

."Beautiful," he said. "I come here every Sunday just to listen. No, really, I do. Live just a few houses away." There was a pause. An angel passed as my mother liked to say. "You live around here?"

"Just waiting for church to let out."

"Ah. I live right here. Bought one of these houses. We're fixing it. Doing all the contracting myself. I believe in this neighborhood."

"I grew up all around here," I said.

"Oh, no, I didn't mean..." He extended his hand. "My name's Nicholson Ballantyne. Call me Nick."

His hand was there. I shook it and muttered my name.

"I live in the neighborhood. You live in the neighborhood," he said. "We're neighbors."

In church, the singing ended. The preacher began announcements. I wanted to get rid of this guy before my mother came out.

"If you don't mind my asking," he said. "You working?"

"College student, U Mass. I work."

"Look, I need help fixing my house. I like to use people from the neighborhood. Some of it needs craftsmanship, but a lot is unskilled. Rip out junk. Clear it away. Demolition. You'd like it."

"Yeah, I could do your unskilled work. If I had the time."

"Summer break! Start in a month."

"I don't..."

"My card. Here. Give me your number."

He thrust a pen at me. Feet shuffled in church. My mother would be out any minute. I didn't want her telling me in front of him to get my butt up off them molly steps before I got all nasty. I scrawled my name.

"See you." I edged away. "Maybe."

"No, maybe about it." He grinned. "I'll be in touch."

II.

In the dark, I tore at the ribs of the house. With a black crowbar, an extension of my own arm, I clawed charred beams and studs. I pried up linoleum, smashed plaster, cracked lathing, and shattered moldings. I shoved the debris into burlap sacks, lugged the sacks to a rear window, and kicked them down a chute to a dumpster in the yard below. Behind boarded windows, I whirled in a frenzy of destruction.

Nicholson Ballantyne the Third was right. I liked demolition. Working alone, I ripped the guts out of his house. He paid me by the hour, and I worked long hours. I made good money. It was summer. I was happy.

Still, something began to seethe inside me. Maybe it was all the smashing and clawing I was doing alone in the dim insides of that house. Anger surfaced in me. I had never thought of myself as angry. Even in my teens, except for refusing church, I was quiet and submissive. That was before I worked for Nick.

Something about Nick set me off. He was genial, liberal, and well-intentioned. He spoke of putting down roots, having kids, and sending them to local public schools. It was, at first, a mystery why I got so mad at Nick. Then, day by day, as I listened, my rage took shape.

My father was an ambassador. Sent me to Choate. Got mad I didn't go to Harvard. He was reserved, but he cared. Left me enough to fix this house, to do my photography, and all.

As the weeks passed, I got more and more pissed off. What was it? Did I envy the soft way Nick had come up? It was more than that. I began to see Nick as an enemy too cowardly to declare himself. Many people were openly against me. All my life, I realized, I had been fighting. It was me against the world, me against all those others. Nick, though he refused to acknowledge it, was one of them.

Heard about that guy killed himself on the expressway? Jumped off an overpass right into traffic. Landed on one car, then three or four others hit him. Can you imagine? Those poor drivers.

That's what pissed me off about Nick, where his sympathies lay. What about the suicide? I knew him. Called Porkchop because his hair hung in matted hanks the same shape and color as porkchops, he was from the neighborhood. Everyone knew Porkchop, everyone except Nick, who sympathized with the commuters.

Nick complained about the hookers who cruised Mass. Ave. up by Columbus. He whined about the winos who puked on his stoop. He cursed the thieves who stole his car battery. He never looked behind the label: hooker, wino, thief. He said they wrecked our neighborhood. My mother said the same things about the sooty riffraff. She didn't anger me but, as the summer wore on, I grew more and more angry at Nick.

When the demolition was done, Nick got tight with my hours, and that's what led to our confrontation. The craftsmen came in with higher fees than Nick estimated. To economize, he cut my hours. He told me to show up every day. Then, he'd tell me to go home. He knew it was unfair, but it didn't change his actions. I was boiling.

One day, it came to a head. The roofers were putting up a complex pattern of beams. Scurrying below, Nick darted his eyes at me.

"You're just hanging around. Maybe you should go home."

"Nick, I can -- "

"I don't need you. Take the day off."

Turning toward the stairs, I felt my neck flush. Halfway down the stairs, I saw Nick's glasses resting against the rail next to a bottle of Elmer's glue. I grabbed the glasses, squeezed out a gob of glue, and smeared the lenses inside and out. Then, I rubbed the glasses in sawdust and left them for him to find.

For a few days, nothing happened. I went to work, and Nick gave me plenty of hours. He didn't wear the glasses or say anything about them. Then, one day after work, he sat beside me on the church steps.

"Listen," he began, "I got these boils coming up on my behind." I raised my eyebrows but said nothing. "My wife says whenever something bothers me and I don't say anything, I get boils on my behind. You're mad about something, but it beats me what. Anyway, your work here is pretty much done. I have to let you go."

I stood up. I felt buoyant. Nick extended his hand, but I only shook my head. I smiled. The battle had been joined.

III.

If I had to sum up what I learned over the next ten years, it would be this: any violence, even a small violence, is vain, and all battles, except battles of the spirit, are dubious. When I committed a small violence against Nick and conceived of myself joining in battle against my enemies, I was deaf, dumb, and blind. Deaf, I could not hear the music playing through life, binding all into one great, vibrant song. Dumb, I could babble only ignorant noise. Blind, I could see nothing but divisions between people, the otherness. I was, as my mother might have said, riding a trolley car to hell.

We rarely get a chance to redress past mistakes, even little ones. I did, however, have the chance with Nick when I met him years later, once again. I was on the train, lost in my usual subway meditations, glancing at my fellow travelers, probing for our common spark. Suddenly, Nick's face floated up before me.

"Nick! Remember me?"

"Why ... Yes... You ... You helped me with my house in the South End."

"Right! How did it turn out? You must love living there?"

"Well... I… " He looked from side to side. "It turned out quite nicely. A bit more expensive than I ... See, we had a little girl... Cars, the schools, the neighborhood... Anyway, we moved a year after she was born. Sold at a profit and bought a house near Harvard Square."

He stared at my hands as if he saw a glue pot, and I had to laugh. I touched my glasses.

"Remember? Glue, sawdust, boils on your...?"

"I'm not ... I don't... " Then he started laughing too.

When he asked how I was doing, I hesitated. My mother's death, a marriage, a divorce, a happier marriage... What seemed at first a torrent of sorrows -- in truth, a shower of blessings -- had cascaded over my life and washed the gluey lenses of my vision clear. How could I tell it? I talked instead of the work I did at the community college, trying to help my students transform their lives.

"I like my work, too," he replied. "I own an art prints loft in the Square. We have a list of private collectors. I often fly to Europe. The kid's away at school, so the wife and I..."

As I listened, I recalled the job I had after I worked for Nick. The unemployment office on Huntington sent me to a place called Term Papers Unlimited located across from Northeastern University.

"Our experts write reports in a timely, professional manner. What a client does with the report is not our concern. Twenty dollars a page. Ten for you, the expert. Ten for us, management. That's the deal."

For me, it was a good deal. I could make a hundred bucks in a day, but it seemed a stiff price for a college kid to fork out.

"Some dumb kid got into B.U. or Harvard," a fellow expert explained, "cause his father's an alum or has, uh, influence. The kid flunks out if we don't write his papers. Tuition's tens of thousands. Relatively, what we get to keep him in is peanuts."

So, while I finished college, I wrote unlimited term papers. I had a routine. I'd call for my assignment from a row of phones along Symphony Hall - my office. I'd spend the morning researching in an oak-paneled room at the Northeastern library - my study. At noon, I'd sneak into the athletic center for a workout - my club. Typing in my mother's cramped apartment on Abbotsford Street, I'd snicker at my enemies. I saw through the stately rectitude of those ivied halls. I was the brains behind some rich alum's dumb son.

I might have gone on in this way, fighting self-defeating battles with a burgeoning sea of enemies, had not that torrent of sorrows cleared my vision and changed my path. I had come so close to losing myself. Now, listening to Nick, I felt as I did at our last meeting, buoyant, but this time released from anger. I hoped that he had forgiven me, too. I wanted to laugh, and I wanted him to laugh with me. Yes, I wanted to say, yes, you ought to been there when I come through. You woulda got so happy, you woulda shouted too!

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