No, no. Wait. Something had happened, and nobody had seen it but him — and the children. There were some Negroes; they heard music and saw a band; they started to dance. But the men up front, the priests and the sweepers and the men carrying the platform, and all the many thousands in the crowd who did not see what Rocco saw must have heard a thousand differently contorted versions of what had happened — like, Some Negroes are smoking dope in the parade; Some sacrilegious niggers have mistaken the holy procession for a roadhouse. And the only part that all the versions had in common was the end — off with the lights, everybody get out, everybody go home.
The girls were crying on the roof, and the boy stood apart from them at a corner looking down at the street and looking back at them in spasms, and Rocco could see the boy was crying, too — the welched-on promise of a fireworks display was to them the height of betrayal. The Eleventh Avenue bled people into all its tributary streets. This terrible quiet everywhere, even the smoke having cleared out, the avenue open enough that cars might pass, only no cars were passing. The people made their way on foot, murmuring or dumb.
The children were gasping. He was wrong. It wasn’t that they’d been cheated. They were frightened.
“Now, listen, my little ones,” he began, but he couldn’t think of anything to say.
It was the quiet that frightened them, he knew this emphatically, and he wanted to reassure them but didn’t know how he could do this, could not invent a single lighthearted word to distract them. If only he could put together a few words that could help them.
He made one backward step on the tacky tar of the roof. Then paused. Not one of them so much as glanced in his direction. The children had forgotten he was there.
4
Rocco crossed into the Pennsylvania at one a.m. and spent the night in his car in a wayside. Half a dozen times he awoke as cargo trains screeched across the bridge overhead.
When the sun rose, his arm was wrapped around the gearshift and was numb, his undershirt was pasted to his back with sweat, and his ribs were squeezing his kidneys. His glasses had migrated to the backseat in the night. He shook out his dead arm. Having located at last his cigarettes under the brake pedal, he walked into the slag-littered field under the railroad bridge and pissed and smoked a cigarette and blew his nose. Between the piles of the bridge, a stream dribbled, and on its surface many-colored swirls of oil glinted in the sunlight. He got to his knees on the sandy bank to say his rosary. Afterward, he asked the Lord to grant him safe passage to the New Jersey and to restore to Loveypants her long-lost sense of reason and decency. Again, overhead, a train passed, but in the other direction. He climbed the bluff toward the highway and drove into the next town for breakfast.
All he asked the lady to bring him was coffee and toast. You might have thought toast was a simple enough dish, but you’d have been mistaken. He was made to pay fifteen cents for two pale squares of baize soaked in margarine. He washed his hands and face in the café lavatory. He looked like hell. Warm water and soap were evidently too much to ask. He’d heard of a pretty meager level of civilization in the state of Pennsylvania, and so far he wasn’t disappointed.
He found a barbershop down the block from the miserable café and went inside. (How reassuring that wherever you went in the wide world a barbershop smelled of talc and ethyl alcohol.) He sat on the bench, awaiting his time, turning the pages of a lawn and garden magazine. The barber and the client in the chair were discussing white meat versus dark meat, it sounded like. Rocco wasn’t paying attention because it wasn’t his business.
When the barber tucked the collar of tissue paper around Rocco’s neck and asked what he could do for Rocco this morning, Rocco said he wanted a trim and a shave.
“Speak up.”
“Just a trim all around the sides, the ears especially, and a shave, thank you,” he expounded.
“Just a trim and an alla-something and a something else,” said the barber.
He didn’t mind repeating himself. There was an autographed photo taped to the wall of Rogers Hornsby with the barber as a younger man.
At this moment, from Leningrad to Buenos Aires, the barber was tucking the tissue paper around the client’s neck, throwing the oilcloth shroud over the clothes, and fastening it at the shoulder. All over the world — Ohio, the Pennsylvania, irregardless — this unique mode of conversation was taking place in which the barber and the client addressed not the face of the other, but the face of the other in the mirror opposite. If the client was a stranger, the barber, by rights, adopted a superior tone. But Rocco’s sense today of being right with his God, of having embarked on an enterprise that aimed to make straight what spite and cowardice had conspired to make crooked, a mystic hopefulness this morning, inspired a charity in him that exposed petty complaints — his meager breakfast, a spleeny barber — as petty complaints.
With the handle of a comb the barber artfully elevated the tip of Rocco’s nose and snipped the hair growing from his nostrils into his mustache.
“I don’t go in for the hunting of waterfowl with dogs, do you?” the barber said. “I don’t think it’s right to train a predator to put food in its mouth and not eat it. I wonder what you think.”
“I don’t follow,” Rocco tried to say without moving his lips, on which the barber pressed with a finger.
“I’ll give you a for-instance. You take a woman to a store that sells fine linen sheets and tablecloths and what have you.” He turned to rummage a drawer. “You roll up a hundred dollars in her fist and tell her to walk through the aisles for an afternoon and then to give you the money back. Why, that’s cruelty! Tell me what you think while I’m stirring this here.”
“I thought they had that type of training in the breed.”
“That’s a good point. I never thought of that. It’s an important insight.”
“Thank you.”
“And let me ask you something else. I think about this here in my store when it rains and nobody thinks of coming to be groomed. Say you could go to any city in the world for a week’s vacation. Which city would it be? My answer is Perth, Australia.”
“The boat trip would be longest,” Rocco surmised.
“Just so. I would take the eastern route, following the coast of Africa as the Portuguese traders did. Which country do you come from that you talk like that?”
“Ohio,” Rocco said.
“Where’s that, in Russia somewhere?”
“Ohio,” he said. “Next door. The mother of presidents. The land of Thomas Edison and the buckeye tree.”
“Frankly, I don’t have the first idea what you’re saying,” the barber said lightly.
Rocco’s eyes were closed; the chair reclined; the barber piled a hot towel on his face. Rocco drew the letters in the air.
“I see,” said the barber. “Condolences.”
“Warren Harding, Orville Wright, the vice president’s father, all from Ohio,” Rocco said into the towel.
The barber laughed with a snort.
“You think the invention of the airplane is trivia. It’s a circus act to you.”
“Okay. I’ll tell you what. I knew what you were saying. I’m just a frolicsome kind of a person. I like to give the foreigners a hard time. I was a foreigner once myself,” he said, removing the towel. “Gua dalcanal. I wasn’t received so kindly by the natives as you were here, I’m sure. Everywhere you stepped on the sand, a dead marine.”