At last the snowfall broke, the moon emerged, and stars. There was no suggestion of wind in the tops of the pines, and he was footsore and starved and numb of face. He gave in. There was a miserably reasonable and boy-souled answer to the question of where he could go in the short run, and he had no choice at this point. He was too cold. He was in retreat. He descended the slope of the woods, out of the frontier, down to Chagrin Avenue, and made a right on Twenty-sixth and stole through Mrs. Marini’s cyclone-cellar doors.
He tiptoed into the cellar guest bedroom, the one no one ever used, with the locked cabinets and the sink. It took him fifteen minutes to undress and hide his clothes under the adjustable hospital bed down there. Then he lay in the bed an hour or two, somehow unsleeping, composing in his thoughts the list of grievances that made it impossible for him to stay there, while his shivering slowly subsided, sensation returned to his toes, and his will to leave took leave of him.
He may have been sleeping but probably not when he heard the newspaper thump against the storm door upstairs — a thump that held out bluntly all the comforts he wished to wish to do without: routine, insulation from cold, fresh meat, people to talk to.
He got up and made the bed as he had found it and climbed the stairs in his stocking feet, his shoes in hand, dressed for a moderate trek through a winter night but having left most of his clothes hidden in the cellar. Outside her kitchen windows it was still dark. It was darker than when he’d come in. The moon must have set by now. All the lights were off inside the house.
He needed a plan. One or another of the women was going to make him account for his whereabouts the last two nights, and the truth was none of their goddamn business.
He needed a bath. There was just enough light in the kitchen that certain unidentifiable metal objects in the stove region of the room gleamed spookily. Where did the light come from? From the windows, having reflected off the snow, having shot out of stars many, many millions of lifetimes of light travel away.
It was safe to assume that if they hadn’t called Ricky’s the first night he was gone, they would probably have called there by now. The question was going to be, Where has Ciccio been? He was going to say he was at Ricky’s the whole time, both nights. Then they would say, Oh, no, you weren’t, we called, we have found you out. At which point he would say what?
He was overthinking this. They weren’t going to fight with him. They were trying to put him on the street.
To get to her front door, he was obliged to feel his way along the kitchen counter. He opened the door, and he opened the storm door. He bent over the threshold and dug out the paper and mussed up his shoes in fresh snow. He was operating in near-perfect silence. He placed the snow-covered shoes on the rug inside the door. It was a crude ruse but it would have to suffice.
Now he could invite the audience into the theater.
He squared his feet on the linoleum and slammed the door shut. He banged a skillet down on the stove. He paused to listen for signs of the audience coming and, hearing none, dropped her coffee grinder on the floor and faked a sneeze.
He listened again. There was a creaking of the floorboards.
Slowly and white Mrs. Marini materialized amid the darkness of the hallway.
“Where did you come from?” she said. She was white, he wanted to say see-through, as if gaseous. Her pajamas were white and patched in a dozen places and nearly disintegrated. She wore a look of small-animal fright that he had not before seen on her.
“At Ricky’s. I didn’t wake you up, I hope.” He had arrayed the makings of an elaborate omelet on the stove.
What strands of hair there were on her head came past her shoulders, were as thin as the fiber of a moth’s tent, did nothing at all to clothe the scalp. The scalp was yellow.
And her clothes would have fit somebody three times her weight. She might as well have wrapped a sheet around herself. He would have thought she slept in a nightgown if he’d had to guess. He had never seen her wearing white clothes before. They were some man’s old pajamas.
“What was I dreaming?” she said. “I can’t remember. I heard the door. I thought you were someone else.”
“I was at Ricky’s.” He was trying to get the tone of Hello, this is my phony alibi out of his voice and was failing. “And I came over to get the suit I left here after, after—”
“Put my egg down,” she said. “Go wash your hands.”
He washed his hands. She fried him some eggs and made him cut up half a grapefruit for himself and half for her. While he was cutting the grapefruit, she fixed him with a look that said, Shall I blow your cover or not, big fellow? Anyway, she didn’t blow his cover.
It was the first day of the funeral.
When he knew his mother would be at the mortuary, later that morning, he went home and took a shower and got into decent clothes. The house smelled weird. Then he went to the mortuary and ate a lot of cheese and sausage.
Yes, the usurper was there, perched like a crow in the front, by the coffins. Her hair had grayed. Maybe she would die soon. She even came up to him and shook his wretched hand, trying to act like she wasn’t cracked and wasn’t a usurper. He didn’t know who she thought she was fooling. Not him!
He fell asleep on Mrs. Marini’s sofa at four in the afternoon and didn’t wake up until an hour before sunrise. She had taken off his socks.
The next night he retrieved his crystal-radio set and a few pairs of Skivvies from Twenty-second Street and stowed them in the chest of drawers in Mrs. Marini’s upstairs guest bedroom, where he also slept. As long as nobody said anything, he figured he could build up a body of precedent, establish squatter’s rights, and never have to have a conversation about where, in the long term, he was going to hang his hat.
In fact, that was what happened. The house on Twenty-second Street wasn’t his mother’s, it was his, but he’d let her have it, he didn’t care. She wasn’t really his mother, she was a candy wrapper blowing around on the street.
He went back to school. Months passed.
He didn’t have to iron anymore or be a slave on his father’s side jobs. He was hungry all the time. He was mad, all the time, an uninterrupted clenching of the jaws and fists. Beating up on somebody, or even getting beaten up on, was his only relief. When his “mother” came around, which she did far too often, with that jeering puss on herself, it was all he could do not to knock her teeth out of her head.
He was a man. He felt fifty-five years old. He didn’t have to socialize with head cases. He was hungry all the time. Mrs. Marini thought three square was good enough for anybody, but he needed three cubed; he was having a growth spurt again, his stomach rumbled while he was cleaning the table after dessert. He’d discovered a topic she knew nothing about, an adolescent boy’s special nutritional needs. He couldn’t ask for more because what if then she got sick of having to shove so much of her monthly fixed income into his face and she made him go live at number 123? He obeyed to the letter all regulations concerning length of shower and Where do the dirty socks go? His cigarettes, he kept in a cellophane corn-chip bag in the leaf pile behind her toolshed.