The End (37 page)

He’d let them down. Oh, God, he’d let everybody down.

Homeward headed unhappy Eddie Assumption Night, like so many others, cassock in hand, thinking his babies would hear what had happened and would ask him, Was this the beginning of the end he’d been working so long to avoid?

But they wouldn’t hear about what had happened and wouldn’t ask him, hopefully, until tomorrow or the next day. Meantime, he would arrive at home and his babies would be there readying for bed. And the spouse. Praise be. He needed to have his Phyllis close at hand.

Like other people, he had to decide long-term what to do. Like other people’s babies, his babies would not understand and would despise him.

Maybe they would have some rain again tonight. Unlike other people, he had taken his time getting home, had paced the forsworn streets while night fell on them. Chagrin Avenue was devoid of life but for him and a skunk grazing over a sewer grate, and a wind rasped his ear. He wanted to look at this street and perceive what his babies would have perceived looking at it. He wanted to feel the significance of nightfall as children felt it.

Night, for children, was more a place than a time. For a child, to wake in the night and race downstairs toward the bed of parents was to plunge into a forest from which he might never emerge. A man could never hope to fully feel again the deep of night in childhood; he could at best recall the fact of it faintly. For a man of his age, nothing could be as vast as the nighttime of childhood except the extension of thought toward his distant past, where memory flickered, flickered, and evanesced—
My brother and I were on our knees picking the favas when a snake shot up and bit my chin; my father held me under my arms and dangled me over a well
—and the distinctness and the isolation of the flickers, the utter obscurity of what must have happened before and after, imparted to the imagined world in which they had to have taken place dimensions infinitely wider than those of the world in which he now found himself recollecting them.

And he had chosen this country, this city, this house where he was heading. And having chosen them, he might choose some other place to live. But for a child, for his children, who’d only ever lived in these six rooms, their house was nothing they’d chosen, it was a fact their father had taught them. A fact he would now tell them had never been true, had been just a useful canard. And it wasn’t useful anymore.

He turned left on Twenty-second. The wind struck his face squarely. Who was going to clear the street of snow and trash when Eddie and his brood were gone?

He’d get what for the house (that there were nectarine trees—in Ohio!—which he’d made to bloom on his property, that there was not a crooked shingle or a window needing more than the tap of a finger to open or close, that there was the brickwork recently repointed by his own hand)—he’d get what? A pittance.

You know from whom we are getting the pittance, don’t you? After today, after what he’d seen happen, what he’d seen those people do (almost seen), who else was going to be chump enough to buy here? Leave the trash in the street. Why not. Let them have the whole place the way they liked it.

Down the block, his doomed abode—the twin dormers, the stink pipe, the slow pitch of the porch roof—was utterly dark, was a silhouette of itself, betrayed no signs that his wife and children had yet returned.

But his mood didn’t have time to sink accordingly, for who was this, and what were they up to? In the street beneath the lamp ahead was a man in a plaid shirt and dungarees, still as stone, and a boy off to his right. Just standing there. Facing Mazzone’s old house that the wife had returned and was living in it now.

What was of interest that they were watching? He couldn’t see. It was beyond the far edge of the pool of lamplight where they were standing. The brilliance of the lamp made what was not beneath it all the harder to descry.

It was a fox, perhaps (he went heel-toe in under the lamp, breathing soundlessly with his mouth open), an animal they were taking pains not to spook. He was in the pool of light now, he was within arm’s reach of the man with the plaid shirt. There was too much light and in the wrong place, but his eyes were making their automatic calculations, attuning themselves. He saw the thing moving, a human figure, or two figures, perhaps, niddle-noddling toward the perimeter of the pool.

“But what’s this we’re watching?” he whispered.

The man started, not evidently having heard Eddie’s approach, and made a weak-wristed gesture of incomprehension.

Eddie said in his best English this time, “What are we watching?” as the cone of light seemed to expand, and what they were watching, the figures, assumed substance, became actual, as a needle does when it pierces the skin.

“Sorry, what?”

And the man, grizzle-faced and fat, repeated it yet again, his stertorous voice lowering, an edge of impatience in it, pointing with each syllable back over Gary’s shoulder at the colored women, but it was all still less penetrable than the first time.

“I don’t understand you. Could you repeat? English?” Gary said.

And the fat man said it again, this time pointing at him, and then at his kid, and then at himself.

Gary pressed on the top of his hair with his sweaty hand and squinted. “One more time? Okay?”

And whatever it was, the angry fat man said it again, pointing at Gary’s eyes and then pointing at his own eyes.

Possibly it
was
in English and that was why he wasn’t getting it.

The niggers were getting away.

“I, my kid, here, visit,” Gary said.

But the fat man loosed a long string of strident words, loud, and poked him in the chest with a finger, and said the original thing yet another time.

Gary heard a whimpering sound. There was also an odor, faintly ammoniac. He turned and looked down. The kid was crying. The eyes brimmed, and the kid blinked, and the tears popped out.

The kid had pissed his pants.

Lina looked with pride and disgust at the night’s wage on her telephone table. The bills were crisp, although the dates printed on them were all from before the war. There were also three rolls of dimes bound with a shoelace.

She was standing alone under the balustrade, looking at the money, when Mrs. Marini telephoned from the barbershop. Pippo the Barber was in the room with her, evidently.

“How did your tart turn out, my treasure?” the old woman asked.

“Federica said it was fine.”

“And you’ve washed the dishes by now?”

“The woman was resting and then she left a couple of minutes ago, and we’re all cleaned up,” Lina said. “Freddie’s already gone home.”

“Did you eat it?”

Lina thought a minute. “Yes,” she said.

After she hung up the phone, she looked at the money some more. She was unsure what to do with it. She stood thinking, her fingernail in her teeth. Then, in a wicked stroke, like a knife jabbed into the hinge of an oyster and briskly twisted so that the hidden creature is exposed to the open air, she made up her mind:

She was going to stay here. She was going to live in this house for many years to come. She was going to learn this trade and make her living from it. And she was going to take this money downtown and spend it.

She needed a coat for the winter.

Donna Costanza severed Ciccio’s leash with a house key. They were on the sidewalk in front of the barbershop. Mr. Pippo the Barber said, “The Russians are coming, but where are the sirens for air raid?” The heat had broken. There was a steady wind coming from the direction of downtown, from west-northwest, and Ciccio was thinking, No, it wasn’t atomical conflict coming, it was a cyclone. Wax paper and tinfoil climbed the wire fence enclosing the courtyard of the convent, and fell down, and climbed back up in the wind. North of the equator the direction of the spiral of a cyclone is unfailingly counterclockwise.

She asked Mr. Pippo if she could use his phone, and the two of them went inside, and Ciccio stayed out.

Unless he was just experiencing the humdrum cool of night having fallen. How to save the appearances? How to account for Everybody had been here and now nobody was here?

Ciccio sat down on the curb, feeling this was a brave thing to do, to settle himself, to be still and quiet in the midst of this place so many had just fled, aware of a peril on its way of which he himself was ignorant. Thinking there was a power he could have by virtue of what he didn’t understand.

He was on the curb in this place of stupefying sameness that now had become an entirely other place, phantasmal, resembling in certain particulars—the shapes of buildings, the angles of streetlamp light—the place he had spent his life unconsciously memorizing, while at the same time it was nowhere he’d ever seen before. Like in a nightmare of which you say afterward, I was at the farm but it wasn’t the farm.

Unless it was far simpler than that. Like, what if what he was now feeling was an impression of the place itself—what the clearing of a forest and the building of shacks and then houses and a church and the digging of sewers and the packing-in of so many people, him included, had served only to disguise? A blast might come, a firestorm. Everything alive or dead here might be burned up at any moment, and what would be left after that but a place?

And if he were somehow to survive and come back here, he would recognize it, he was sure. The eyes would have no evidence with which to confirm, but there would be no question of confirmation. He would feel in his every cell where he was.

20

T
he jeweler was on the bridge, at a remove of several hundred feet from the throng surrounding the parade, eating an elephant ear, wishing to talk to his sister again, examining his heart, when the throng came rushing toward the narrow bridge as though a pipe had burst. The people began to fill the streetcars awaiting them on the boulevard, clamorous to get out, now, for reasons that remained unclear to him. Night was falling. He sucked the confectioner’s sugar from his fingers. He had gone to the bridge to look at the water and to get out of the crowd so that he could turn back and see it as a whole. Now the crowd was coming as though it wanted to get a last look at him up close. He stood in the bottleneck, obstructing the current of bodies. He wanted one last glimpse of the girl in the pinafore, this parting sweetness. He was summoning the concentration of hope he would need, and the concentration of mind, on this specific moment. But he was failing to do this, he was caught in two distinct present moments, as though he were wearing a pair of eyeglasses from which one of the lenses had fallen out.

For here he was on the bridge, sixteen and one half years after the fact, chewing; and also here he was gripping the rail of the bridge ten minutes before the fact, having ridden the streetcar to the end of the line, into this neighborhood he hadn’t happened upon since it was the Germans who had lived here, and soon an unlucky woman with a burlap onion sack on her shoulder would pass behind him and ascend the slow rise of the hill. He wore a tawny ill-pressed linen suit, a knit tie, and bifocals; also, he wore black trousers, a lintless black double-breasted coat, sealskin sleek, on which snow fell. The day was both dates because he could not refrain from calling it both, and if only, for once, he could control the language at his disposal, then the way toward the consummation of his hope would be made plain. The August crowd might sweep him away to the boulevard. But it was also December, an arctic somnolence, the bridge empty but for him and the woman—here she was—trudging behind him, skillfully whistling a Christmas song. The creek purred, deep and black, unfrozen only up its middle. The people one after another collided with him, trying to push him across the bridge—but he gripped the rail and would not succumb, and a vigorous prestorm wind was pressing him the other way, and soon he would be blown apart by the contradiction. The leaves swam in the gale, and the branches twisted. He turned back to the crowd wanting somebody to look at him.

They were all so afraid, the crowd (as he was afraid), unknowing what they were afraid of (as he was unknowing). If he could actually touch the object of his fear he wouldn’t feel fear anymore, he’d feel a fulfillment of knowing. But the fearful could never touch the thing feared. Fear was an arrow pointing at nothing. He rubbed his tongue on the wax paper, collecting the dust of the sugar and the cinnamon.

There was a dream from early youth of being pushed from a high place and falling.

He loitered on the bridge, putting some distance between himself and the woman with the onion sack, letting her pass unlucky and unsuspecting.

He turned and gripped the rail fiercely and looked down at the glittering, summer-green current forty feet below. It was from this waterway here, Elephant Creek, that the neighborhood had taken its name, although physically it was not a creek anymore but a river. Long after it had gotten its name, two other creeks had been diverted into it upstream to drain a swamp that was to become a rail yard, but still you called it a creek and not a river because the name is the soul of the thing and persists long after the thing named has passed away. He considered the name of the fried snack he’d just eaten and the name of the creek, and the coincidence here. Yet there were no elephants to be seen. The word did not need the thing it stood for. The word, being alive, had an instinct for perpetuating itself.

Below him, at the water’s edge, three boys in short pants threw their shoes and socks to the farther bank, waded knee-deep, but then stopped, indecisive, seeing that the water was too deep to wade and the current far too fast for swimming. They were indecisive because they were jealous of their desire to reach the other side, unknowing that the idea was not to cross or to walk over on a bridge, but to descend into and drown.

Only, the descent was sacred, and therefore private, and so he would have to wait for the crowd and its living stink—smoky and sweat sour—to take its leave. You had to approach the house of the woman with the onion sack slowly and alone.