The End (5 page)

Rocco was almost part of them now.

The boy hit Lenny from behind and fell backward onto the black-top. Lenny kicked him a few times, tappingly, sort of motheringly, in his ribs, but the crowd paid no notice. Rocco was among them, but they didn’t know it. He heard himself humming “Bye Bye Blackbird” as he sauntered through their midst. On their knees on the sidewalk, two girls in pinafores played jacks with a yellow rubber ball. Next to them twin boys worked a jigsaw puzzle on the concrete. Radios chirped from shops with their doors propped open. Nobody, maybe, recognized him with the nice duds and no flour in the mustache and no paper hat over the hair. He heard his name spoken but not in such a way that anyone was calling out for him.

Somebody said, “I only let them stay because the girl got bit by rats, plural, at the other place.” Somebody said, “I can tell you this, I can tell you this, he begged me. And I can tell you also the words which I used when I gave him his answer.” Somebody said, “We saw there was a line, so we got in.” Somebody said, “It says
Continued on B-twenty-four,
but you didn’t bring B-twenty-four, did you?” From light post to light post across the narrow avenue, banners flapped with red lettering that wished long life to the Holy Mother. It was Assumption Day. He’d forgotten. The feast would start in a few hours, and how many of them would go crustless and crumbless at this feast because Rocco hadn’t opened the store?

The bell in the belfry of the church began to toll.

Somebody said, “She has that sunglasses that she rips them off her face, like now I’m supposed to be scared.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” somebody said. “Here he is!” A woman with tightly bobbed red hair—her name was Testaquadra—pointed at Rocco like he was a criminal, and two by two the eyes began to seek him out and fix their gaze.

It was eight o’clock in the morning.

The woman Testaquadra approached him, kissed the sides of his face, muttered something he failed to hear amid the chatter of the others, and walked off down the hill.

“The store is closed,” he softly told a buxom young lady with maybe sympathetic eyes, but she chose to look away from him, pretending it wasn’t her he meant to address. She was one of the many, faithful to the host that desired a leader who would speak to them collectively and explain why no bread today. He himself was not such a person; there are those whose greatness of spirit only the Lord sees; he could not speak in a loud voice to the all. He was a simple believer. He turned and went in under the tattered canvas awning of his store and sat on the steps.

The others were still talking among themselves, watching him closely but averting their eyes whenever he looked back, and awaiting his address.

Near him in the crowd stood a very young girl, towheaded, slit-eyed, with sharp teeth (her name was Chiara), and he beckoned her with his finger, and she approached him bravely.

He made a sandwich of her little hand between his hands and said, “Rocco doesn’t work at the moment. He’s taking a holiday. A week, perhaps. Tell them. Afterward, things will rearrange themselves nicely.” He picked up his cup and saucer from the concrete step, and sipped, and flapped his hand toward the others that she might run off now and explain for him.

Instead she sat on the step. She petted his biceps, scanning the crowd, vigorous, wrathful.

When D’Agostino poked through the front of the crowd, Chiara leapt in front of him, folding her arms as if to forbid his approach, and clicked her heels.

Sidestepping the girl and bending himself double, D’Agostino kissed the air on either side of Rocco’s ears. “You suffer, and so I bless you,” he said.

“There’s something maybe you can explain to them for me, and then they’ll shove off,” Rocco said.

“Yesterday evening I came and knocked, but there was no answer,” D’Agostino said. “So unlike you. But now it’s already understood.” He added, “Most likely you’ve already seen this,” and unfolded the newspaper he had stowed in his vest.

In order to hold the paper and still leave one hand in the care of Chiara, who had resumed her seated position beside him, Rocco was obliged to balance his saucer in his lap.

The main headline, with a gruesome photo, read QUADRUPLE AMPUTEE HEADED HOME, PLANS TO RELAX
.
D’Agostino stooped, seizing the paper, and flipped it upside down. Under the fold, next to an ad for a carpet-cleaning service, five inches of a single column began with the heading REMAINS OF ELEPHANT PARK NATIVE INCLUDED IN OPERATION BIG SWITCH
.

Chiara’s stockings were powder blue and stitched higgledy piggledy with little fishes. He wondered what he had done to deserve her at this time.

Then, with alarming conviction, a reckless laugh sprung from Rocco’s stomach. He held the newspaper aloft. “You have misunderstood, Joseph. All of youse have misunderstood. This isn’t Mimmo. There was an error at the highest levels.”

He laughed again, wickedly.

“There has been a
misidentification.
”

D’Agostino, the side of his nose twitching as he spoke, asked him what did he mean; what was going to happen?

What was going to happen was that Rocco and his wife were going to have to go to the government and look at the face of the body of this unlucky person and explain that it wasn’t Mimmo.

A cement truck tooted its horn, and the crowd, which now occupied the breadth of the street, contracted toward the sidewalk. Some version of what he was saying to D’Agostino spread among them. The general volume ebbed. He felt, like a swollen sinus, the pressure of their attention on the workings of his private mind.

D’Agostino said, So he would have to inconvenience himself, that was to say, he would have to keep the bakery closed while he traveled all the way to New Jersey and then back, only because they had failed to keep their records in order?

“Exactly that,” Rocco said.

Chiara looked at him, compressing her lips so that the blood left them. “Thou hast borne false witness,” said the resolute expression of her arch, white mouth.

He mustered all the charity and patience within himself and whispered, “You must understand, my dear. They’re trying to stick their filthy fingers in my mouth and look inside.”

D’Agostino leaned back on his heels, out of the shadow of the awning, raised his face to the sky, then glanced behind himself, then turned again to Rocco. You would think, he said, that the government could at least read the identification tags that, like everybody knows, you wear in the service at all times, wouldn’t you?

In a sense, Rocco had to acknowledge, he could understand where the government was coming from, seeing as this boy they’d found was, according to the gentlemen from yesterday, in fact wearing the god tags of a Mimmo LaGrassa, and the serial number matched the one Rocco’d kept in his wallet since Mimmo had enlisted, which he kept the number for just such an occasion—rather
dog tags
he meant to say—and the height was the same.

He turned to the girl and said, “Satisfied?”

“I would very much enjoy an apple fritter,” she entreated.

He looked at the newspaper. He was full of rage and shame. He was saddened that Chiara should see him this way.

So the gentlemen from the Marine Corps, D’Agostino pursued, just to make clear, had said to him, “We need you to come identify”—like they were confused and they didn’t know—and here the paper made it out like this information was
confirmed?

Why ask him about the newspaper? He didn’t write it.

D’Agostino looked up again, and back again, and forward. And how tragic, really, because the gentlemen from the Marine Corps had never used any words like, for example,
We are sure
or
We confirm?

“Or a marmalade crescent?” said the girl.

Well, you might say, “I confirm that the moon is made of green cheese,” said Rocco, but if the moon isn’t in fact made of green cheese then you haven’t confirmed anything, because how could you be sure of a statement that was false? And so on and so forth.

Chiara flitted off on tiptoes, as little girls will do, or else she could not abide his sin.

Somewhere a bicycle bell was rung.

Or else it was a desk bell somebody was beating to demand service. A version of what he’d said to D’Agostino, mangled, doubtless, had permeated the host, and they didn’t like it. They maybe disbelieved him.

D’Agostino excused himself and peeled off in the direction of the bell. Others followed. Soon there was a wholesale dispersal of the verminous crowd. A few wished him courage, told him to keep his eye alive, and disappeared. Probably they were ashamed at having been so mistaken—probably.

In short order, all of the faces were facing away from him but one. They scattered into the side streets and the places of business along the Eleventh Avenue, but for one old woman who was making her way through the tangle of bodies in his direction. She was in the widow’s uniform—the black shoes, the black dress, the black purse. She came closer.

She said, “Mr. LaGrassa, you will come please to my house for lunch at one o’clock.” She held a clothespin, which she methodically snapped.

“I have to go to—”

“They told me where you have to go.” She held up a hand. Her name was Marini.

“I have to change my oil.”

“Change your oil. Wash your hands thoroughly. Climb onto my front porch. Knock on my door. Et cetera.”

In truth, he was starving. He said, “I guess I’ll come, then.”

“What is that, ‘I guess I’ll come’? What is that?”

He was standing now, in the sunlight. He looked up. He saw what it was that had snagged D’Agostino’s eye when he had looked up. A girl in a ratty yellow sun hat had ascended, by means not readily discernible, to the top of a telephone pole, where on a small plank she sat reading.

How long do you have to live in a place before you notice it? The whole morning was a dream. Around every corner was a view that should have been same old, same old, but today impressed itself on his mind as if for the first time and for all time. As in, Look, there’s a kid licking the streetcar tracks, wearing short pants—only it seemed to Rocco that he’d never seen the tracks or a child in short pants before and he was never going to forget this. As on a day when the ruler dies and everybody, without even trying, holds on to the slightest speck of mental lint from that day for years. As in, I was squirting blue sugar roses on a wedding cake when Loveypants popped the alley-oop door and whispered, “Harding went to Alaska, and now he’s dead.” And she had a tiny bit of snot dangling from her one nostril. And right away he knew it was going to be that dangling bit of snot he would remember. Today, with no apparent excuse, the neighborhood was full of these bits of snot, so to speak. A boy alone, eating a banana on the steps of the church. It must have been not going to work that did this. He had a bird’s-eye view of the forest for the trees. He went to Bastianazzo’s and got his cup refilled with the watery coffee available at that establishment. Bastianazzo himself pretended to be too busy ironing his aprons behind the counter to talk to him. He drifted about the streets awhile, noticing so much and considering the city itself, which he was about to depart for the first time in so many decades.

He liked to go up onto his roof in the summer and look at the city. He would straddle the peak and use the chimney crown as a table for his gin glass and his ashtray. Up there you could count on a breeze in the summertime, and when you are the baker and it’s summertime you will pay dearly for a cooling breeze. The house was on the tippy top of Elephant Park, and from there he could see the thousand glittering lamps above the highway, the spires of the many churches, the mills expiring their sulfurous clouds, the rim of the lake to his right. The city was a mammoth trash heap—even the lake was brown—but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side. Nobody ever came here to have a good time. It was a place for people who had quit being children. It was a place to be employed for a period of a half century and thence to pass out of this life. That nobody regarded it as anything else made it unique in his limited experience and sacred.

At home, he put on raggedy clothes. He drained and refilled the oil in the crankcase of his car, rubbed his hands with turpentine, washed them with soap, got back into his good duds, and walked to his luncheon appointment.

The woman Marini’s house stood directly behind his store and shared his alley, but he had never been inside. She was not of his class. Her husband had been a small-scale manufacturer of women’s shoes and evidently had left her with enough to live in a certain elegance as long as she pleased. There was a rumor that she earned other income from an illicit source, but Rocco didn’t need to believe it. Wasn’t the magic of compound interest illicit enough? Her own shoes, as it happened, were strictly plain Jane. She had been living in this very house for at least ten years by the time Rocco himself was born. She was ninety-three years old.

She came from Lazio; however, her enunciation of the Italian language was barren of regional influence and pitiless, as though each word were a butterfly she was shooting out of the air with a pistol. One could hear that she had learned her English from the German people who had lived here years ago. Today it was the Sicilians, such as Rocco himself, who prevailed. Then it would be somebody else. God is great.

On one occasion, in his store, while searching her change purse for pennies, Mrs. Marini had asked him, “Why don’t you close up for Easter or Flag Day or whatever the occasion?” He was used to questions like these, but not from her, and he blurted something he regretted. “What in the world would I do all day?” he said. She responded, counting off each word on her fingers, “Entertain, read, garden, pray, converse.”

He knocked at the door. A boy showed him in. The boy was more than a foot taller than he was, and while they spoke, Rocco found himself looking up into the dark cavities of the boy’s long and listing nose. The lips were fat, contorted, the eyes far too big, the ears too pointed; the gaze—which never fails to reveal too much—was suspicious, ashamed, exalted, pious, self-consumed, attractive, and mean. The boy was a picture of becoming that had gone awry. Rocco had met his like at the yards, where he had been paid to chase the vainglorious transients from the boxcars.