Viola worked in electronics, and she and her husband, Frank, had bought a house in Queens. Geraldine moved up to 147th Street, within walking distance, with her husband, a Navy veteran named Norman, and I got my own room. I had begun to sense that there was a way for people to live, and that it was our individual responsibility to find that way. I sensed this, and I didn’t see a need to think it through fully. I had already been given a set of rules to follow that assured me, at the very least, that I would somehow get into heaven. The basis of my beliefs was the conviction that there was a God in heaven who looked down on us with infinite concern. His son, Jesus, had taken us from the Old Testament’s hellfire and given us a very cool way of living best summed up by the idea of doing unto others as you would have others do unto you. Next, I believed in a certain fairness. Over the long haul things would have a way of working themselves out toward an essentially good position. I was also convinced that those values I was being offered in school were right in the truest sense of rightness, that they were what both the world and God wanted.
