Bruce Read Online Free

declared, didn’t have to go to school at all if he didn’t want to go. Fred hadn’t spent much time in school, and neither had Doug. So why make such a fuss getting an education Bruce wouldn’t need? Adele, whose father had insisted his daughters all finish high school, at the very least, was having none of it. “He had to go to school,” she says. “But [Fred and Alice] wouldn’t let him.” Already feeling shoved aside in her son’s life, and more than tired of playing the dutiful wife in such a topsy-turvy environment, Adele made her stand. “I said to my husband, ‘We’ve gotta get out of here,’” she says. If Doug argued about it, he didn’t win. Hearing that a pair of cousins were about to leave their rented duplex apartment at 39 1/2 Institute Street, just three and a half blocks east of Fred and Alice’s home, they took over the lease and moved in almost immediately.
    It was, Bruce says now, the only way his mother could give her familyanything like a normal life. But for Bruce, that realization was a long time in coming. As a six-year-old, he says, the abrupt change was devastating. “It was terrible for me at the time because my grandparents had become my de facto parents. So I was basically removed from my family home.” The boy’s anxiety eased a bit thanks to his daily visits to his grandparents for after-school supervision. It also didn’t hurt that the two-bedroom, two-floor apartment on Institute marked a significant step up in the family’s residential standards. “We had heat!” says Bruce, who shared the larger of the home’s two bedrooms with Ginny. Doug and Adele made do in a cramped room that seemed closer to a closet than a real bedroom. Worse, the house had no water heater, which made dishwashing, and especially bathing in the upstairs tub, complex operations. As Bruce recalls, bathing was not one of his more regular habits.
    Already shaken by the abrupt change in his family’s home and parental structure, Bruce reported for school in an especially vulnerable, and angry, frame of mind. The nuns’ strict rules and work requirements first confused, then enraged the boy. “If you grow up in a home where no one goes to work and no one is coming home, the clock is never relevant,” he says. “And suddenly when someone asks you to do something, and says you have twenty minutes to do it, that’s going to make you really angry. Because you don’t know from twenty minutes.” Just as Bruce also had no idea how to sit still in class, absorb the nuns’ lessons, or see their pinched faces and ruler-wielding hands as anything more, or less, than earthly visions of a fuming God.
    Bruce did what he could to fit in. He pulled on his uniform in the morning, then marched proudly to school with Adele clutching his hand. “He had his head held high when he walked in there, and I thought, ‘Good,’” Adele says. But what was going on during the school day? To see for herself, Adele took a break from work and stood across from the playground to check on her son during recess. “And there he is, against the fence, all by himself, not playing with anybody. It was so sad.” For Bruce, his tendency for social isolation came as naturally as his secret desire to be at the center of everything.
    “Companionship is a natural human impulse, but I didn’t make social connections easily,” he says. “I was a loner, just to myself, and I hadgotten used to it.” No matter where he was, his mind was meandering somewhere else. “I had a very vibrant internal life. I seemed to be drawn to other things, different than what the subjects were supposed to be at a given moment. Like how the light was hitting a wall. Or how the stones felt under your feet. Someone might be talking about a normal subject, but I’m sort of zeroing in on that.”
    Bruce had his small circle of friends, mostly the boys he’d tossed balls and pushed trucks with in the yards around Randolph Street. His closest pal among