“Let me say politely that you are seeing the little picture,” he said, “such as picking nits over somebody that was brought versus somebody that his grandfather was brought. In the big picture, let me say politely that you are just talking like certain people.”
“Which people?”
“The people who say, Let the sparrow mate with the crow, and so forth.”
Ciccio came back into the dining room with a dish towel around his neck like a scarf.
“Ciccio has been listening?” she said.
“More or less,” said the boy.
“Ciccio may now describe his opinion.”
“Yesterday,” he said, “in the early paper I saw an update, like, how that most of the ones that defected were white guys. One of them who got out said the ones who stayed were sure there was going to be a Communistical revolution worldwide, even right here in our own country, like, in a few months. So they figured they’d just cool their heels in China and wait for America to go socialist.”
“Your conclusions?” she said.
“They want to betray the government of the USA but not the place of the USA.”
“Very good. Now then”—she turned to Rocco—“my reading tells me that the sparrow and the crow cannot mate, as they are different species. However, mulattos, such as in the Caribbean they have many, demonstrate that black can mate with white and produce offspring. Therefore black and white are the same species and your metaphor has collapsed.” When the boy had come in she’d stopped speaking in English, but now she was switching from Italian to English and back again from one sentence to the next. “You are confusing physically impossible with morally repugnant. What you really meant to say when you said ‘mate’ was ‘live side by side with,’ which is distasteful enough.” A corner of the tablecloth was pulled taut by her twisted fingers.
“All this time, you know, I’ve never been inside your house,” Rocco said abruptly.
“Oh, that can’t be!” she said. “Oh, Mr. LaGrassa, I’m so ashamed. I thought at least — it can’t be!”
“On the porch and in the garden a few times but not inside.”
“I’m full to my eyes with regret,” she said. “I’ve never been in your house either.”
The only untidiness about this room was that the window looked out on the peeling, mud-splattered eyesore that was the rear of his bakery. He had looked at his own reflection in the other side of these windows — while he had the day’s first smoke, early in the morning, when all her lights were out and the blinds were pulled — maybe each day for the last thirty years.
“So what’s all this about, just curiously? What’s the occasion that today I am asked to come in?”
There was a silence while she probably tried to put together the words of an apology for having believed at first what the newspaper had said about Mimmo. Rocco wanted to say it was a case of no harm, no foul.
“The occasion?” she said, brightening. “Why, it’s your day off, naturally!”
His streak was over. His secondhand suit was forty years old. He wore it carefully so that he could be buried in it.
She refilled the glasses. “You’re in a position to judge, Rocco. Which is better, work or play?”
He had assumed his visit was concluding, but now his glass was full again. His back eased into his chair. A band in the street could be heard amassing. Horns blared. Somebody was banging cymbals. Ciccio started playing a game with them before they knew what he was doing, and before they knew it they were playing along. Rocco recollected from his bottommost depths the pleasure of company, of talking when it didn’t matter what the topic was. Behind how many windows for how many years had others laughed and talked of nothing while he had organized his life to avoid them? He had been wasteful of himself — he had drained himself down the drain.
“Hail,” Ciccio said, “bombs, volcanic ash.”
“What is this?” Mrs. Marini said.
“Birds that have heart attacks.”
“Objects descending from the clouds!” Rocco said.
“Oh, good, a game. My turn now,” she said. “The sun. A pumpkin. A twenty-dollar gold coin.”
“Things that are orange,” Ciccio said.
“You can do better than that, Costanza,” she said, slapping the back of her hand.
“Gather pennies and nickels,” Ciccio said. “Look up from a place of darkness to a tiny circle of light.”
She said, “Things that little underprivileged children do.”
“Wrong,” Ciccio said. “Cry for help. Play with the rope and the bucket.”
Rocco said, “Things to do in a well.”
3
The opposite of to die is to have a family. Therefore to have no family is to be dead.
Rocco detected a stink of turpentine and excused himself to Mrs. Marini’s lavatory, where, with her cold cream and nailbrush, he scoured his hands. He had awoken this morning convinced that his death was upon him; he’d impressed himself by being unafraid; but had he been unafraid only because, having no family, he was already dead?
No. The name of Loveypants was Luigina. The names of his boys were Bobo, Mimmo, and Jimmy. He had a cousin Benedict still in Omaha.
At home, he kept the door of the medicine cabinet open while he washed his hands so as not to see his image in the mirror, but Mrs. Marini’s mirror was affixed to the wall. He turned his back to it while he abraded his fingers. Then, lest he splatter cold cream on the tile, he knelt and continued his work over the commode. The three of them had carried on the whole of the afternoon, and now it was the supper hour, and the racket outside was beckoning them toward the bedlam of the feast.
He flushed. While turning to face the sink, he regarded a grommet on his right shoe, and then, while rinsing his hands, he watched the chrome flange of the drain. But this did not keep him from seeing his arms and stomach at the edge of his vision in the mirror. What did it matter if his hands weren’t clean? It would be four days at least before he touched anybody else’s food. (Oh, but there was all that bread and the onion pastries that were rising in the walk-in at his store; the whole place would smell like a brewery by the time he got back in town; he’d have to go back and throw them out; labor, treasure, purpose — wasted; gloom.) He touched the bathroom doorknob and then turned it courageously. A firecracker exploded in the alley.
Who was this man he became when he emerged from solitude into the company of other people? The hallway smelled of mothballs and was dark, and he felt his private self recede as he approached the bickering in the kitchen.
Ciccio said, “Fine, but if we’d only focused the whole invasion on Montreal in 1812 the continent would have been ours.”
Rocco wanted to turn around, to turn in. He paused in the hallway, solitude at his back, society ahead, feeling ensnared in this middle place, feeling he’d spent his whole life in this hallway and wishing at least for the next couple of hours to be all in the bathroom or all in the street wholeheartedly. I can’t go into the one place, I can’t go into the other, he said to his heart. A sneeze began to overtake him, and he succumbed to it.