The bell on the door of the bakery tinkled, and the curtain flag of Ohio was pulled aside as the baker Rocco emerged, rattling a piece of candy across his molars.
“Tell me,” he said roughly, snapping open a wax-paper bag.
“Two crescents, please. Marmalade.” She opened her change purse, but there were only dimes and pennies.
Below the chalkboard where the prices were listed hung a photograph of a handsome boy, clean shaven and dreary-eyed, wearing a white military hat and smiling coldly. The photograph had been ardently colorized — the American flag in the background painted in, the lips purpled; the flush of the cheeks was girlish.
A note above it on the chalkboard read: Prisoner of Our Enemy 832 Days Consecutive So Far.
“Otherwise?” the baker said.
“Nothing, thank you.”
“Forty-six cents, if you can find it in there.”
But she couldn’t, and had to ask him to put one of the crescents back.
“This is Montanero, if I’m not mistaken. I heard you had gone off to the Wyoming,” he said. “Sorry that I forget your other name.”
“Charlotte,” she said automatically. It was her alias. She never used it again.
15
Ciccio finally spoke the word he had seen typed all over the vineyard. “I’ll have to absquatulate,” he said.
Exactly when he made up his mind to let his mother have the house on Twenty-second Street, he couldn’t say.
Everything had gone to hell. Everything had gone to hell in a flash. Since it was everything that had gone to hell, you’d think nothing new could go there, and since it was to hell that everything had gone, you’d think it couldn’t sink any farther, but not so.
Regarding the three days after the crash, he suffered from a selective kind of amnesia: He had no sensory record of that time, but he remembered ideas and emotions perfectly. He could remember feeling liberated, and not jubilant but, he had to say, happy; the calamity was a meal for the mind. But he couldn’t remember what he had been physically doing, in what physical place, while he was thinking. He knew he had been on the farm; it wouldn’t have been too exciting, whatever he was up to. Eventually he asked his grandmother, who told him he’d been in the vineyard, on snowshoes, tying vines sunup to sundown. He wouldn’t come inside for lunch, which she had had to drive out to him on the tractor.
To be delirious from Latin was to have turned out of the furrow, as a plow.
When the record of his physical memory picked up again, he was standing in the snow in the vineyard sharpening his spring shears with a rattail file. He heard a clitterclatter in the distance; he looked up and saw his grandmother’s salt-encrusted AMC truck hugging the shoulder of the highway, heading north into town. Where was she off to? Then, at dinner — dinner was bread and boiled winter squash (the physical world had returned to him, with its yellows and slimies) — he asked her what she’d gone to town for. She told him she was sending a wire to his mother. This was on the twenty-ninth of December, 1952, a date that would live in infamy. Everything had already gone to hell, and then the next morning they got a telegram at the farm from his mother saying that she was going to come to the funeral.
How amusing. Well, no, frankly, it wasn’t amusing. His grandmother understood the gist of the telegram, but she made him read it out loud anyway. How was he to interpret that other than as his grandmother saying, “You’re welcome to visit here, kid, but I won’t take you in”?
He was a boy standing on a trapdoor.
His mother wasn’t planning to rent a bed at the YWCA, like any courteous vagrant would do; instead they’d decided without consulting him that she would stay — guess where — in his house, as though it were her house. Hell was getting crowded.
No way his mother thought he’d stay in the house if she was living in it.
They were trying to put him on the street, was what they were trying to do.
There was no will. He was a minor still. His mother would get everything.
He cleaned the house on New Year’s Eve while the old ladies were at the station (Ricky was with him, but Ricky was no help), stopping to touch in parting tribute the brocaded buttons of the seat cushions and the newel where he hung his shoulder pads to air them out after practice. Good-bye, number 123 Twenty-second Street. Hello, the rails.
Ricky went home.
Ciccio was alone in the house, and they were due back any minute, the women. He had to get out. He left a note saying he was at Ricky’s for the night. Assuming they didn’t call to verify, he had a head start of at least twelve hours before whomever they sent looking for him was sent looking (unless their plan had always been to gently suggest he make himself scarce and to send no one after him when he did).
He had nowhere to go. He had aspired to this. He was fifteen and broke and homeless. It felt like he was borrowing a bum’s rags to say he was broke. A kid can’t be broke because a kid isn’t supposed to have any money of his own. You wouldn’t say your dog was broke. But he was going to need to buy food and pay rent and he had no money for these things, so he was legitimately broke.
He had nowhere to go.
How to say: I mean this, this is a fact, this is more than what it feels like? I’ve packed a bag with spare socks and only one set of extra shoes because I don’t know how far I’ll have to carry the bag. But I have nowhere to go with this bag on my back.
There was an invisible membrane between a child’s world and the world of grown people. The child’s was hypothetical; the adult’s was actual. The child’s world was only an image. It had none of the actual machinery that made the actual world go. You didn’t have to have any money. Nobody would put you in jail. Your work was school. You didn’t produce anything real. You produced term papers, the graph of a hyperbola, which were pretend. Therefore the sometimes happiness of work on the farm, in which he felt the pleasing tension of labor that authentically needed to happen. The republic needed grapes for its jelly sandwiches. But he was at the farm only on weekends and school vacations. The farm was ancillary. He was somebody other than himself there. If somebody should ask him what his occupation was, he couldn’t say “farmer.” He was a kid, he was potential, like an egg. When the make-believe-ness of his existence dawned on him, he wanted out. But they wouldn’t let him out until he’d become a nuisance to them, and then they’d forced him out.
It was late and snowing and New Year’s Eve, so there was no hope of a trolley. He set out on foot. He didn’t turn around to see if the house he was walking away from was lost to him yet, behind the snowfall.
How to say: I am out, I have taken on substance, I am not made of mist, I have — in fact — no place to go? Why, now that he was in the actual world, couldn’t he perceive the weight he knew it had? Why did everything feel as hypothetical as before?
A teacher, Father Delano, had accused him of having a Manichean head, which coming from him was a slur, but it was true. Ciccio did his mental business as if the world was composed of two factions warring with each other. He felt them in his heart all the time. Present experience bore this out. The forces of Darkness were galloping over this town, and therefore get out, right? Here he was now, on the corner of Twenty-second and Eleventh Avenue, facing the blank-eyed concrete statue of Columbus that the K of C had erected in front of the basketball court, and there were two ways only to go — up the hill or down the hill. He chose down.