T A B L E++T A L K

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BY JOAN WALSH | I love reunions. I go to all of them: family reunions on both sides, high school reunions, a reunion of the first newspaper I worked for. No doubt that one of the reasons I like them is because my parents are dead and I moved often, and consequently I lack a natural sense of belonging and continuity. I've traveled thousands of miles to reunions that people who live nearby blithely skip, just to feel like I'm part of something bigger than myself.

But there were reasons for me to be ambivalent about going to Long Island for the reunion of my Catholic grade school, which was held on the 25th anniversary of its closing in 1972, the year I graduated. I told people I only went because I had to be in New York for a business meeting, but I'm not sure that's true. I can't imagine I would have missed it and passed up the rare chance to line up my memories of grade school with everyone else's, like putting on corrective lenses to bring the past into better focus.

When I go back to Long Island -- we lived in working-class Oceanside, which was not by the ocean -- I get depressed, partly because there was a lot of death and dysfunction in my family, but also, I have to admit, because my inner snob hates to be reminded that I come from such humble origins. Having gone to Catholic school is part of my inferiority complex. The fact that today Catholic schools are among the strongest schools in urban America obscures a historic fact: For years they offered a mediocre education, mainly to immigrants unwilling to mix with the impious American mainstream. In "Beyond the Melting Pot," Daniel Patrick Moynihan blamed the failure of Irish Americans to achieve greatness in art, business, science or scholarship -- anywhere outside of politics and the police department -- on their allegiance to Catholic education, whose mediocrity reached a "crisis," Moynihan said, in the early 1960s; exactly when my school was founded. St. Anthony's closed after only 10 years partly because of lack of money, but also, according to my father, because it was never very strong academically.

I knew that weakness personally. I was the smartest girl in my class -- two boys were allegedly smarter -- and in the seventh grade the three of us went to a public school math contest, where we washed out on the second question. They were doing algebra; I think we were still on fractions. It was so humiliating we never talked about it again. When I went on to public high school, I immediately plummeted from being a straight-A student to getting Bs and Cs.

Sometimes I think my school served mainly as a refuge from Jews -- who outnumbered us in Oceanside and presided over its excellent public school system -- and a little bit from blacks and Puerto Ricans, who were making inroads on Long Island as the 1960s approached the 1970s. The racism was fierce and reflexive. The darkest-skinned Italian boy in my class was regularly called a nigger, all in good fun. In my best friend's graduation autograph book, I found this clever chestnut: "Your mother will rant, your father will rage, if you marry a boy the color of the next page," which was, of course, black. (That there were no black people in our school to focus any prejudices upon didn't seem to matter.) We had one Puerto Rican boy in our class, sweet and funny and fairly popular, as the "one" of any group must be to survive. We all liked him, though none of the girls ever admitted to crushes on him, even though he was good-looking and clever. We later learned he was beaten up by the class bully every day after school his first year there.

Most of the time at St. Anthony's, though, I didn't think about racism or the quality of my education, because I had nothing to compare it to. Going back, however, I had to take it all in and marvel at the gulf between where I began and where I wound up. Educationally I did well, and professionally I've succeeded too. Socially, I doubted I'd have much in common with anybody. Some of my Long Island cousins still tease me about marrying my Jewish ex-husband; and I haven't told any of them that I'm dating someone black.

So why did I go back? I keep asking myself that. I guess it's because, like it or not, that was my childhood. I was often miserable there, but I was often very happy. It's common today for big political thinkers to lament the loss of "community" in America, and for better and worse I grew up with a strong sense of community, of belonging. My brother and sister and 10 of my cousins attended St. Anthony's, my godmother played the organ, my father ran the parish council, my mother taught Sunday school. Everybody was Catholic, almost everybody was Irish. As a young child I felt known, loved and protected, though later I would feel the flip side of community: misunderstood, disliked, even persecuted.

Community wasn't something I tragically "lost" but something I actively worked to lose, the way you might leave a suitcase in a locker at the Port Authority and throw away the key. The reunion was like finding the key again, and getting to open the locker, and the suitcase, and sort through it all as a grownup, to see if there was anything I wanted or needed, all these years later.

What I mainly remember about grade school is that I was a chubby know-it-all who had no friends for the second half of fifth grade. I loved the first four years of school. In first grade I wanted to be a nun. I was already reading fluently, and my beloved teacher, Sister Patrick Kathleen, sent me into my cousin's third grade class to read aloud, to show up the older kids, because I read better than any of them. My cousin was mortified; I was triumphant. School was a stage for my talents -- I won spelling bees, math contests, tried to start a school paper in first grade. In those four years I had only one nun who was sadistic, and she beat me up only once. I was comparatively lucky.

Everything changed in fifth grade. That was the year big, tough Debi, expelled from the public schools, joined our class to terrorize us for much of the next three years. I was part of a clique of five girls -- me, my best friend, my cousin and two nice-enough hangers-on we added late because triangles don't work. We weren't bad, as cliques go, just sharp-tongued and self-absorbed; but Debi turned us into a little girl gang. Where once we might have teased other girls, now we were following them into dark stairwells and threatening to push them down. And it wasn't just threats. Debi beat up fat, lovable Rose Ann for the crime of being uncool. We fought each other, too: Disputes that would have involved sharp words now featured fists. Where we were starting to flirt with boys our age, Debi was having make-out parties with teenagers and forcing us, at age 10 and 11, to join in. She wore a bra; we didn't. She needed one.

We began to get into real trouble at school, but the nuns seemed almost powerless against our cruel girl energy, which was both exhilarating and scary. After a few months, my friends and I decided we'd had enough -- of fighting one another, terrorizing other girls, staying after school. We decided that I'd write a note to Debi -- I was the writer even then -- telling her we'd respectfully decided we didn't want to be her friend anymore. Looking back, I guess we hurt her feelings. She took it out on me. I gave her the note, she read it and she beat the shit out of me. And within a few days she turned all of my friends -- including my best friend and my own cousin -- against me. Now I was the one they cornered in dark stairwells and followed home after school.

I can honestly say that this was the most formative experience of my life, more crucial to my character than my mother dying when I was 17. During the first week of sixth grade, we all became friends again, without even talking about what had happened, but my identity was forged. I was the victim who, attempting heroism, winds up isolated and pathetic. That's what I thought everybody would remember about me, and I thought it was part of what I'd have to face down, going back. Of course I turned out to be completely wrong.

N E X T+P A G E: "You were mean to me!"

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