Snow in August by Pete Hamill Page A

won’t have to pay any rent,” she said, her face happier than he’d ever seen it. “We’ll have to sweep and wash the
     halls once a week, and make sure the garbage cans are set out,and change the lightbulbs. And put coal in the furnace in the cellar for the hot water. It’ll be hard work, but with your
     help, Michael, we can do it.”
    Michael felt a surge of emotion that he could not name. For the first time he was being called upon to do a man’s work. He
     would be able to help his mother in a way that he could never do when she worked at the hospital. Then she gave him the rest
     of the news.
    “I’ll be leaving the hospital on the first of February,” she said, her face telling him this was good news, not bad. “And
     I’ll start work as a cashier at the RKO on Grandview Avenue. It’s a bit more money, and with us not having to pay rent, we’ll
     be in the chips.” She smiled broadly. “Well, not really. But 1947 will be a lot better than 1946.”
    She seemed abruptly close to tears, and for a moment, Michael wanted to hug her. He wanted to tell her that as far as he was
     concerned 1946 wasn’t so bad. They hadn’t gone hungry. They didn’t go on relief, like the Kanes or the Morans. He’d done well
     in school. And right at the end, he’d met Rabbi Hirsch. That was a good year.
    But he said nothing and realized how proud he was of the changes in their lives. The RKO Grandview, after all, was one of
     the big movie houses. It wasn’t like the Venus, where the same movies returned year after year,
Four Feathers
and
Gunga Din, Frankenstein
and
Bride of Frankenstein
, along with the serials and cartoons and coming attractions. The Venus was a small, rowdy place that wasn’t very clean. In
     fact, most people in the parish called it The Itch, implying that you could get fleas just by sitting in its hard seats.
    But the RKO Grandview was like a palace. The lobby alone was bigger than their flat, with paintings of old Romans rising along
     the side walls, the men playing flutes while women withbare shoulders gazed at them like they were heroes. Some of the women resembled Judith from the encyclopedia, or at least
     Hedy Lamarr. There were hundreds of seats in the orchestra, sloping toward the stage and the movie screen, and when you walked
     in, the first twenty rows had a mezzanine above them, with boxes like the ones where Lincoln was shot by that actor, and above
     the mezzanine was the balcony. Michael had no idea how many seats there were in the balcony. It just climbed and climbed into
     the darkness, with cigarettes burning like dozens of fireflies, and the distant ceiling farther away than the roof of Sacred
     Heart.
    To be sure, Michael had been there only three times. Once, on his fifth birthday, when his mother took him to see
The Wizard of Oz
. That was long ago. Before the war. They came home after the movie, his mother skipping and singing one of the songs about
     going off to see the wizard, and then in the kitchen he sat on his father’s knee and felt his rough chin and breathed the
     tobacco odor and tried to tell him about the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow who talked. His father laughed,
     and then turned serious, and told him about the time Sticky the dog swam to Africa and enlisted the lions and elephants to
     fight for Ireland.
    “The monkeys built a boat, bigger than Noah’s Ark,” he said, “and they’d have eaten the king of England if it weren’t for
     the bloody bad weather. It was so cold, the lions and the elephants jumped in the water and swam back to lovely Africa, and
     Sticky had to sail home alone….”
    His father took him to the dark movie palace the second time, after the war had started, and they sat in the vast balcony
     so Tommy Devlin could smoke, and together they watched
They Died With Their Boots On
. Errol Flynn played a soldier named Custer and the end was very sad. Michael had never beforeseen a movie where the hero died. He