The End (35 page)

The rest of the band was standing—the fiddlers and the fellow with the harmonica and the old man they all called “Sir,” whose name he never learned, were all standing while they played. Only he, the youngest, sat in a chair, while he struck the saw with a ball-peen hammer.

He had never bowed it in the presence of others. The saw played with the hammer was clothed; the saw played with the bow was naked, the sound unobstructed by the clash the hammer made. And when in the woodshed in the presence of no one else he bowed it, he himself was naked. Bowing the saw was a simple thing he had that he could do, all his own; it was the pure act, of which the other, the playing of it with a hammer, the version others were allowed to witness, was an imperfect replica.

But the men knew he knew how to bow it, and they put the screws on him. And he didn’t want to. It was not for others to hear. But if he bowed it for others he might find that this was the way in, the way through, you had to expose your innermost to the outside. I address myself finally to the material world and its citizens and become part of it and one of them. So he agreed, yes, he would do it.

And the moment came, the signal, when Sir hopped into the air and brought both feet down on the stage. He slid the hammer under his chair. The others took their instruments away from their faces, and he drew the bow along the untoothed edge of the saw, knowing the audience was there but unseeing it with the glow in his eyes of the coal-oil lamps in the apron of the stage.

He was more than naked. The sound in the presence of other people ripped him up the middle, showing to the open air the wet things inside that composed him, that turned food and air into the self he was.

Then, from someplace beyond the wall of light, came the keen of somebody laughing at him.

Yet he did not stop playing or leave his seat.

When Sir clapped at last his boot on the stage, the band picked up the tune again, sewing him up somewhat, giving him some clothes to wear. They played through midnight, until the saloon closed. His cousin walked him home through the black streets. He climbed the stairs to his room.

The bishop in his miter (those two bands of cloth, hanging down the back of it like the pigtails of this pink-legged girl, are lappets) and the priests processing up the street, the young boys in cassocks, the men in long white linen albs chanting solemnly in Latin, the statue of a mulatto on a platform (a mulatto is so called because his blood is mixed as a mule’s is), and this flock of crones, in black, barefooted, murmuring over their beads (an assemblage of starlings is a murmuration), and the big, clumsy band playing so solemnly even though they are out of tune and off beat, all bring back to him the way that night in the saloon as a boy he had struggled manfully to express with the bow and the saw the solemnity he felt inside him, the solemnity of a human self, and had succeeded only in making something that was laughable. In the same way, this, the pageantry, the murmuring in a dead language, the gaudily bejeweled midget half-Negress these people are worshipping as if the icon were holy instead of standing in for something that was holy—all this is in fact solemn and in fact also mistaken, absurd, laughable.

The crowd seems to know it, as there are those among them praying, pinning money grimly to the ribbons that drag along the pavement behind the Negress’s palanquin, and those also clapping and singing and laughing full-throatedly. The men carrying the idol are almost as white as he is; they are even dressed in white, they don’t know that they’re out of place in this place, like the idol they’re carrying, like the woman whose face he is searching for in the crowd.

And it comes back to him now that, walking home through the dark streets, silently with his cousin, making his way as one used to do at night by the light of the celestial bodies, he had asked himself, Why did I keep playing, why was I, am I,
not
ashamed to have been thought mistaken, laughable, absurd?

He asked his cousin, “Did you hear that person laugh? Was it a man laughing?” And his cousin said no, he was mistaken, it wasn’t a laugh, it was a woman singing along, she was merrily singing the tune he played.

And later that night, mounting the stairs to his room and hearing the
click, click, click
of his hard-soled shoes on the wooden steps and regarding even the clicking as the solemn expression of his solitude, he was struck by how solemn, in fact, it was when regarded by his own mind, and how also the very same self-solemnness when observed by the mind of another would be laughable.

But he felt a solace in this: that what is solemn to me can be laughable to you and still be no less solemn. Because the person he believed had laughed at him, or else had sung merrily along with him, was still, of necessity—he promised himself not to forget, but he did forget—
looking right into him,
apprehending the self that he felt, that his name failed adequately to name. As misery and mercy are the same, the first being what God wishes you to feel and the second the version of empathy he feels for you when you are miserable.

If she wasn’t dead, she would be nearly middle-aged by now. Her face could be among the faces of the white women murmuring in their black clothes, whom he is studying one by one as they pass. The crowd is so dense, the street so narrow, that children have climbed the curbside ginkgoes and sweet gums, the telephone poles, the gutters, up there where it must be cooler and the air must be moving instead of stagnating sickeningly in the heat, as it does down here with him among the crowd. There is a bakery with little girls on the roof and a boy and a miserable-looking man in a full suit staring at the backs of the legs of one of the girls as the jeweler was doing before.

If she wasn’t dead, she could call him by his name—will no one ever call him by his name again, sweetly?—but there is a crucial and mundane obstacle in the way of the fulfillment of this hope:

Sixteen and one half years ago, he had climbed up off the parlor floor, poured himself a glass of water, sat down again on the sofa, introduced himself, and asked her what her name was. But she didn’t answer. And he introduced himself again, courteously, asking if she might do him the favor of repeating his name back to him—hoping this way he could be fixed, at least in the universe of words, completely, could be turned into a word so that at least, if he couldn’t be real, he could be not alone. But her eyes were closed, her face was a slack red mask. And he doesn’t know if she didn’t repeat his name for him because she had heard but refused, or because she was already dead or unconscious from the knock of her head on the marble edge of the coffee table, in the parlor there, with an ashtray on it, and an unfinished hand of solitaire.

Night was falling, amid the mass of people and the merrily singing horns.

Solemnity is comical and comedy is solemn. As is evident from these whitish people praying to a Negress, as if she were in fact the thing she only symbolized, and from these Negroes who are, look at them, taking one another’s hands to dance now in the solemnly empty space behind the band that forms the end of the procession up the avenue.

As was evident also when laughing David, dressed only in a linen ephod, danced before the solemn Ark of the Lord to the sound of the singing of the Israelites and the sound of lyres, lutes, tambourines, cymbals, and castanets. And also when Ham, the son of Noah and the father of Canaan, saw his father passed out from drinking and naked in his tent, and went out and told his brothers, thinking it was funny, but they did not see that the nakedness of their father could be laughable, too, and went into the tent backward, a cloak on their shoulders, and covered him, with their eyes averted.

The Negroes are dancing, eight of them, and there is also an old Negro man with close-cropped white hair pointing vehemently at his shoes, and at them, and at his shoes, growling, “You all stop it! You all stop it, now! Get back here, stop it!” Unseeing—the old Negro man unseeing—that the crowd was laughing and clapping its hands to the clamorous, brassy music.

Where has she gone, the girl with the pink legs and the pinafore? You call it a
pinafore,
a “pinned-in-front,” although the garment, the thing, is buttoned up the back. Which is to say, the name doesn’t need the thing. As the Lord God
said
there would be light; and a vault between the waters; and on the earth trees bearing fruit, each with its own kind of seed; before the things took form. So that at last, this evening if she were only to see him and accuse him by his name, he would return to the unalloyed natural state that precedes being a thing: being a word. His father was called the same name, and his father, too. His name doesn’t need him.

So that at last, the jeweler having lost track of the girl, night having begun to fall, and he standing at the perimeter of the gap in the crowd in which the Negroes are dancing, a merry-solemn hope emerges from the bottom of his mind: that his name, having preceded him, will succeed him. He wants to laugh out loud in front of all these people—that should a final separation between the thing he is and the name of the thing be at last effected, then his name (the only part of him that can truly be said to be alive) will keep being alive because people, these people here, will want to know who he was, what was his name, and will discover it, and say it out loud.

PART FOUR

Cleveland 1953

19

G
ary didn’t come from here. He was born in a suburban hospital on the South Side. But he loved the feast. It gave him a warm feeling. He used to come down here with his mother and dad when he was a boy. Richer people had the summer cottage on Kelleys Island; he had this, these streets, the carnival crowd.

He didn’t speak the language. He knew a handful of dialect words for garden vegetables, kitchen tools, colored people; heirloom words you couldn’t learn from any dictionary. His father was born in a bedroom in one of these tenements. He didn’t know which, and he was never going to know because his father was dead.

Gary was a member of five formal associations: the United Auto Workers, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, his softball league, and the Democratic Party. He had two kids, a boy and a girl. His wife took dictation downtown. Maybe six associations if you counted the Methodist Church, but he went only on Christmas and Easter. He felt he belonged here. In Elephant Park. He felt his boy especially belonged here and needed to be taken to the Feast of the Assumption on an annual basis because they lived in an itty-bitty world of cereal and carpeting and because the boy had two names, a first and a last, one for the little self, one for the big self, the shared identity across centuries and an ocean, a name that, when you spoke it, others connected you with a clan and a place. And in this part of town, when they introduced themselves, they said the last name first and the first name last, and the priority here was unmistakable.

He would die. His daughter would acquire a new name. He wanted for his boy in the years to come to say their name and feel the completeness of self that Gary felt when he said it. He had cousins who agreed it was the least they could do to take their boys down here and watch what happened, participate instead of just hearing about, preserve this thing of ours that’s slipping away from us.

Their family name was Ragusa. But some of the cousins spelled it Ragosa, so nobody really knew.

He tried to make his boy eat these deep-fried artichokes he’d just bought from a street vendor and the boy gagged, but the kid had to eat, so Gary bought him some taffy, individually wrapped in six colors, manufactured in Delaware. There were people handing out prayer cards, which were, he didn’t know, in Latin probably, and the kid wanted to know what do these words mean, and Gary had to say, “I don’t know.”

There were all manner of different peoples down here for the feast these days. There were Slovaks and Serbs and Chinese, even. And he was annoyed because they didn’t belong here like he did.

The boy groused about how crowded and how hot, and Gary wanted to explain how the boy was meant to appreciate. How they were participating now in this idolatrous thing. The men were going to carry a statue through a street with music thrumming and torches alongside and manic chanted prayers, and it was going to transport them all into the deep past.

The client, sitting on the oilcloth with which Lina had covered the bottom half of the bed, bent to remove her shoes. Lina put them on the floor, the toes under the bureau, out of the way. Then the client asked her aunt to leave the room while she undressed. Outside, a man selling fruit raised his voice over the voice of the crowds. Federica asked should she and Lina leave the room, too, and the client said she didn’t know what difference that would make.

Rocco was dying in Mrs. Marini’s lavatory. Maybe they’d made him drink too much and he was on his knees before the commode. Meantime, Ciccio was carrying on about Manifest Destiny and the War of 1812. They were in her kitchen in their street shoes, waiting for Rocco to finish whatever he was doing so that they could make their passage through the feast.

The boy said, “Look, it’s not like we would have had to conquer every little town in Manitoba. There was no Manitoba. The game was all about Montreal. If you cut off their supply channels from the British, the other little cities to the west would have fallen off, and we would have picked them up. We could have been bigger than Russia.”

A spool of kitchen thread sat on the counter. She’d used it to sew up the braciole for lunch. She opened the cupboard, intending to put it away, but then she had a better idea. “Get me a scissors,” she told him.

His mouth drooped with remorse. He felt the loss of the arctic empire personally. She unwound a length of string and had him cut it off. Then she rolled it and deposited it in her pocket and put the spool in the cupboard.

The baker strode up the darkened corridor, faceless and stately in the abstracting shadows with his great shoulders and narrow hip bones. Then he came into the disillusioning light. His wavy hair was mussed. Water had splotched his coat, and his gray, uncreased trousers were roughly cuffed at the hems, as though he had shrunken since the time the trousers fit him well. He tried to grin, the little eyes blinking in the sun, his hands dripping. And they departed.