The next day, when Dad came home and we told him what had happened,
he said he was going to kill that lowlife sonofabitch. He and Brian and I
went out on a serious Pervert Hunt. Our blood up, we searched the streets
for hours, but we never did find the guy. I asked Mom and Dad if we
should close the doors and windows when we went to sleep. They
wouldn't consider it. We needed the fresh air, they said, and it was
essential that we refuse to surrender to fear.
So the windows stayed open. Maureen kept having nightmares of men in
Halloween masks. And every now and then, when Brian and I were
feeling revved up, he'd get a machete and I'd get a baseball bat and we'd
go Pervert Hunting, clearing the streets of the creeps who preyed on kids.
Mom and Dad liked to make a big point about never surrendering to fear
or to prejudice or to the narrow-minded conformist sticks-in-the-mud
who tried to tell everyone else what was proper. We were supposed to
ignore those benighted sheep, as Dad called them. One day Mom went
with us kids to the library at the Civic Center. Since the weather was
sweltering, she suggested we cool off by jumping into the fountain in
front of the building. The water was too shallow to swim in, but we
paddled around pretending to be crocodiles until we attracted a small
crowd of people who kept insisting to Mom that swimming was
forbidden in the fountain.
"Mind your own beeswax," Mom replied. I was feeling kind of
embarrassed and started to climb out. "Ignore the fuddy-duddies!" Mom
told me, and to make it clear she paid no nevermind to such people or
their opinions, she clambered into the fountain and plopped down beside
us, sending gallons of water sloshing over the sides.
It never bothered Mom if people turned and stared at her, even in church.
Although she thought nuns were killjoys and she didn't follow all the
Church's rules word for word—she treated the Ten Commandments more
like the Ten Suggestions—Mom considered herself a devout Catholic
and took us to mass most Sundays. St. Mary's was the biggest, most