The crowd had vanished utterly.
It was an ordinary summer night on Eleventh Avenue, only less so. He unlocked the door and held it open for her and the boy. They went out to the sidewalk, looking around at the nobody, at the no trace of the thousands in the street that had been there not two hours before, no trace except that the street was white and aglow from trash, on the sidewalk asking one another murmuringly what had happened.
Others knew him as Eddie that bore the standard, Eddie that defended the faith and the hearth. Others, he knew, relied on him to speak in the voice of us, to tell us what do we do to protect ourselves. But he was also a private man with sweet feelings for private things, feelings which his position required that he keep to himself, the better to bear the concerns of others. Like anyone else he experienced uncertainty, even fear, in his heart, and Phyllis understood, and his babies napped atop him on the sofa after supper.
Oh, but he’d let everybody down, Eddie had.
He’d been so hot all day, from the minute he woke up — all day with the gastric acids scalding the holes in his stomach lining (oxtails for breakfast: a mistake). That and the heat. And the crowd! Holy Mother, the heat and crowd.
When at midday he heard on the street that the baker Rocco had closed up shop, for a few days, at least, the most exquisite notion struck him. There was an ice room in the back of the bakery. Eddie had seen it before from the counter in front. The baker had to have it for the slow rising of the pastries and the hardening of butter. So early that afternoon, Eddie crept up the alley and tried the back bakery door. Lo, it opened. The saints were with him. And he went on in and found in the ice room the bleakest, most peaceful peace of mind a man could hope to know. He took off his shirt and pants. Perfect darkness. He draped his linen cassock over a box, and sat on it, and leaned his naked back on the cold wall, and closed his eyes. Think of a sunbather in reverse. And at length, the cool and the darkness led reckless Eddie into the deep sleep of a little child.
To be discovered, and awoken, in the same moment, in such a state — this was one of the ignominies the Lord sends to a man in later middle age that seems to say, Edward, prepare thyself. Worse is in store. Thy babies shall empty thy bedpan, and thy spouse shall wipe the shit from thine ass as thou sleepest.
He was attacked by the small deranged man, the baker Rocco, and Eddie counted himself blessed to have escaped with his life and name, if not his honor, intact.
Meanwhile, having earlier that day slept through the garden-watering hours, he now had slept through the blessing of the sweepers, and the procession proceeded without him, so that he watched it among the masses like everybody else, unable to make it to his rightful place among the elect in front of the parade, and, rather than doing the pushing, was pushed himself. And the whole procession had gone terribly wrong.
He’d let them down. Oh, God, he’d let everybody down.
Homeward headed unhappy Eddie Assumption Night, like so many others, cassock in hand, thinking his babies would hear what had happened and would ask him, Was this the beginning of the end he’d been working so long to avoid?
But they wouldn’t hear about what had happened and wouldn’t ask him, hopefully, until tomorrow or the next day. Meantime, he would arrive at home and his babies would be there readying for bed. And the spouse. Praise be. He needed to have his Phyllis close at hand.
Like other people, he had to decide long-term what to do. Like other people’s babies, his babies would not understand and would despise him.
Maybe they would have some rain again tonight. Unlike other people, he had taken his time getting home, had paced the forsworn streets while night fell on them. Chagrin Avenue was devoid of life but for him and a skunk grazing over a sewer grate, and a wind rasped his ear. He wanted to look at this street and perceive what his babies would have perceived looking at it. He wanted to feel the significance of nightfall as children felt it.
Night, for children, was more a place than a time. For a child, to wake in the night and race downstairs toward the bed of parents was to plunge into a forest from which he might never emerge. A man could never hope to fully feel again the deep of night in childhood; he could at best recall the fact of it faintly. For a man of his age, nothing could be as vast as the nighttime of childhood except the extension of thought toward his distant past, where memory flickered, flickered, and evanesced—My brother and I were on our knees picking the favas when a snake shot up and bit my chin; my father held me under my arms and dangled me over a well—and the distinctness and the isolation of the flickers, the utter obscurity of what must have happened before and after, imparted to the imagined world in which they had to have taken place dimensions infinitely wider than those of the world in which he now found himself recollecting them.
And he had chosen this country, this city, this house where he was heading. And having chosen them, he might choose some other place to live. But for a child, for his children, who’d only ever lived in these six rooms, their house was nothing they’d chosen, it was a fact their father had taught them. A fact he would now tell them had never been true, had been just a useful canard. And it wasn’t useful anymore.
He turned left on Twenty-second. The wind struck his face squarely. Who was going to clear the street of snow and trash when Eddie and his brood were gone?
He’d get what for the house (that there were nectarine trees — in Ohio! — which he’d made to bloom on his property, that there was not a crooked shingle or a window needing more than the tap of a finger to open or close, that there was the brickwork recently repointed by his own hand) — he’d get what? A pittance.
You know from whom we are getting the pittance, don’t you? After today, after what he’d seen happen, what he’d seen those people do (almost seen), who else was going to be chump enough to buy here? Leave the trash in the street. Why not. Let them have the whole place the way they liked it.
Down the block, his doomed abode — the twin dormers, the stink pipe, the slow pitch of the porch roof — was utterly dark, was a silhouette of itself, betrayed no signs that his wife and children had yet returned.
But his mood didn’t have time to sink accordingly, for who was this, and what were they up to? In the street beneath the lamp ahead was a man in a plaid shirt and dungarees, still as stone, and a boy off to his right. Just standing there. Facing Mazzone’s old house that the wife had returned and was living in it now.
What was of interest that they were watching? He couldn’t see. It was beyond the far edge of the pool of lamplight where they were standing. The brilliance of the lamp made what was not beneath it all the harder to descry.
It was a fox, perhaps (he went heel-toe in under the lamp, breathing soundlessly with his mouth open), an animal they were taking pains not to spook. He was in the pool of light now, he was within arm’s reach of the man with the plaid shirt. There was too much light and in the wrong place, but his eyes were making their automatic calculations, attuning themselves. He saw the thing moving, a human figure, or two figures, perhaps, niddle-noddling toward the perimeter of the pool.
“But what’s this we’re watching?” he whispered.
The man started, not evidently having heard Eddie’s approach, and made a weak-wristed gesture of incomprehension.
Eddie said in his best English this time, “What are we watching?” as the cone of light seemed to expand, and what they were watching, the figures, assumed substance, became actual, as a needle does when it pierces the skin.
“Sorry, what?”
And the man, grizzle-faced and fat, repeated it yet again, his stertorous voice lowering, an edge of impatience in it, pointing with each syllable back over Gary’s shoulder at the colored women, but it was all still less penetrable than the first time.