He would die. His daughter would acquire a new name. He wanted for his boy in the years to come to say their name and feel the completeness of self that Gary felt when he said it. He had cousins who agreed it was the least they could do to take their boys down here and watch what happened, participate instead of just hearing about, preserve this thing of ours that’s slipping away from us.
Their family name was Ragusa. But some of the cousins spelled it Ragosa, so nobody really knew.
He tried to make his boy eat these deep-fried artichokes he’d just bought from a street vendor and the boy gagged, but the kid had to eat, so Gary bought him some taffy, individually wrapped in six colors, manufactured in Delaware. There were people handing out prayer cards, which were, he didn’t know, in Latin probably, and the kid wanted to know what do these words mean, and Gary had to say, “I don’t know.”
There were all manner of different peoples down here for the feast these days. There were Slovaks and Serbs and Chinese, even. And he was annoyed because they didn’t belong here like he did.
The boy groused about how crowded and how hot, and Gary wanted to explain how the boy was meant to appreciate. How they were participating now in this idolatrous thing. The men were going to carry a statue through a street with music thrumming and torches alongside and manic chanted prayers, and it was going to transport them all into the deep past.
The client, sitting on the oilcloth with which Lina had covered the bottom half of the bed, bent to remove her shoes. Lina put them on the floor, the toes under the bureau, out of the way. Then the client asked her aunt to leave the room while she undressed. Outside, a man selling fruit raised his voice over the voice of the crowds. Federica asked should she and Lina leave the room, too, and the client said she didn’t know what difference that would make.
Rocco was dying in Mrs. Marini’s lavatory. Maybe they’d made him drink too much and he was on his knees before the commode. Meantime, Ciccio was carrying on about Manifest Destiny and the War of 1812. They were in her kitchen in their street shoes, waiting for Rocco to finish whatever he was doing so that they could make their passage through the feast.
The boy said, “Look, it’s not like we would have had to conquer every little town in Manitoba. There was no Manitoba. The game was all about Montreal. If you cut off their supply channels from the British, the other little cities to the west would have fallen off, and we would have picked them up. We could have been bigger than Russia.”
A spool of kitchen thread sat on the counter. She’d used it to sew up the braciole for lunch. She opened the cupboard, intending to put it away, but then she had a better idea. “Get me a scissors,” she told him.
His mouth drooped with remorse. He felt the loss of the arctic empire personally. She unwound a length of string and had him cut it off. Then she rolled it and deposited it in her pocket and put the spool in the cupboard.
The baker strode up the darkened corridor, faceless and stately in the abstracting shadows with his great shoulders and narrow hip bones. Then he came into the disillusioning light. His wavy hair was mussed. Water had splotched his coat, and his gray, uncreased trousers were roughly cuffed at the hems, as though he had shrunken since the time the trousers fit him well. He tried to grin, the little eyes blinking in the sun, his hands dripping. And they departed.
They lost him inside of two minutes. The crowd was immense. She knew they’d lose Rocco, but he was now expendable. She waited for Ciccio to get a couple of feet in front of her and then tied an end of the string around her wrist. Then she yelled at him to slow down and not to forsake her.
“Give me the paw,” she said.
“Which?”
She made a wave of indifference, the string dangling, and he offered a whole arm, looking off into the crowd, as if it were help to steady herself that she was asking him for, which she was insulted that he’d presume. She tied the loose end of the string to his wrist.
“This is a leash of some kind,” he said, looking down.
“As you wish.”
“But I wanted to—”
“What did you want to?”
“Me and Nino were—”
“Was our plan unclear to you in some way?”
“Rocco’s not with us. We lost him.”
“And then?”
“And then so I thought, to be honest, I could—”
“You thought, to be honest, you could help me find him?” She knew there was no hope of finding him now.
“Okay, but we’re not going to find him.”
“Okay, but yes, we shall.”
She should have made the string longer. Even when he put his hands in his pant pockets, all full of sullenness, he was too far from her vertically, and he had to hunch to the side to keep from dragging her after him.
The heat was such that other people would have thought to complain, could be heard complaining. She herself was unfazed.
The barbershop was not open for business, but she saw, as they passed it, Pippo in there by himself reading a newspaper, facing the window, sitting in the barber chair which he’d pumped up four feet from the floor, presumably to see the procession over the heads of the crowd outside. The flanks of his pinguid hairdo were combed up like the fins on a car.
“Ciccio will give a knock on the glass,” she told Ciccio.
The barber looked up from the paper, his face awash in gladness, and pulled a lever below the armrest, descending royally to the floor, and let them in.
“We’ll have a drink in the back room, then, Costanza,” he said. “You, me, and the puppy dog.”
“We shall, of course. Short, please. Oh, it’s nice and cool in here with the fans.”
“What happened to the mission?” Ciccio said evenly.
“Do you know he’s not back there?” she said. “Maybe he’s back there.”
Pippo led them into the back room and pulled the curtain behind him and poured the whiskey into his teacups and dealt them three cards each and laid four open-faced on the table. Ciccio said he didn’t have any money, so she fronted him a dollar sixty from her change purse. The game was inhibited to a slight degree by the string, but she wasn’t ready yet to cut him loose.
Gary and his cousins got sick of having to listen to the heat complaint of the kids, so they elbowed their way out of the big crowds, toward the carnival rides, where there was more room to breathe. The kid was so happy on the rides. The kid was missing the point. Gary stood outside the gates of the rides with his cousins, the four of them trading their disgust that the kids refused to understand this was not a playground. This was a meaningful place.
Then there was a nun, an actual nun in the clothes they wear — how great was this? — running around to the men at the controls of the rides, evidently telling them to shut the rides off. He asked one of the ticket girls what was going on, and she said that the saint was moving — what a phrase — and she said it like it was nothing special, because to her it wasn’t, she was used to this, she belonged here. They collected their kids. They couldn’t see the avenue from where they were standing, they couldn’t see the parade, which was the heart of the matter, and they tried to press into the crowd, but it was no use. Gary put the kid on his shoulders to see, but the kid started crying that he was scared to fall off, and anyway, he said he couldn’t see anything but heads.