Don DeLillo - Underworld

Bronzini had his opening, finally.

"And if I'm not willing? Are you? Or not able. If I'm not able to do it. Not equal to the job. Are you, Andy?"

The priest looked at the knot in Albert's tie.

"I thought you wanted advice."

"I do."

"Please. Do you think I'd even consider tutoring the boy? Albert, please. I have a life, such as it is."

"You're far more advanced than I, Father. You're a tournament player. You understand the psychology of the game."

Paulus sat upright in his chair, formally withdrawing, it seemed, to a more objective level of discourse.

"Theories about the psychology of the game, frankly, leave me cold. The game is location, situation and memory. And a need to win. The psychology is in the player, not the game. He must enjoy the company of danger. He must have a killer instinct. He must be prideful, arrogant, aggressive, contemptuous and dominating. Willful in the extreme. All the sins, Albert, of the noncarnal type."

Chastened and deflated. But Albert felt he had it coming. The man's remarks were directed at his own genial drift, of course, not the boy's. His complacent and easy pace.

"He shows master strength, potentially."

"Look, I'm willing to attend a match or two. Give you some guidance if I can. But I don't want to be his teacher. No no no no."

Now the grandmother appeared with an opened bottle of anisette crusted at the rim. When Bronzini asked how she was feeling she let her head rock back and forth. The liqueur was a gesture reserved for select customers and took earning over time. She poured an ashy dram into each demitasse and the priest colored slightly as he seemed to do in the close company of people who were markedly different. Their unknown lives disconcerted him, making his smile go stiff and bringing to his cheeks a formal flush of deference.

She left without a word. They watched her glide moon-slow into the dimmed inner room.

"I don't know what to tell you about the older brother," Paulus said.

"Never mind. I asked only because the mother asked. It will all straighten itself out."

"We have an idea, some of us, that's taking shape. A new sort of collegium. Closer contact, minimal structure. We may teach Latin as a spoken language. We may teach mathematics as an art form like poetry or music. We will teach subjects that people don't realize they need to know. All of this will happen somewhere in the hinterland. We'll want a special kind of boy. Special circumstances," Paulus said. "Something he is. Something he's done. But something."

When they stood to leave and the priest was gathering his books, Bronzini took his cup, the priest's, and drained it of sediment, tipping his head quickly-espresso dregs steeped in anisette.

They shook hands and made vague plans to stay in touch and Father Paulus started on the short walk back to the Fordham campus and Albert realized he'd forgotten his own suggestion about visiting the play street nearby. Too bad. They might have ended on a mellower note.

But when he walked past the street it was nearly emptied out. A few boys still playing ringolievio, haphazard and half speed, the clumsy fatboy trapped in the den, always caught, always it , the slightly epicene butterfat bulk, the boy who's always reaching down to lift a droopy sock and getting swift-kicked by the witlings and sadists.

Is that what being it means? Neutered, sexless, impersonalized.

Dark now. Another day of games all ended, or nearly all-he could hear the boys' following voices as he made his way down the avenue. And when it ends completely we find ourselves abandoned to our sodden teens. What a wound to overcome, this passage out of childhood, but a beautiful injury too, he thought, pure and unrepeatable. Only the scab remains, barely seen, the exuded substance.

Ringolievio coca-cola one two three .

A faint whiff of knishes and hot dogs from the luncheonette under the bowling alley. Then Albert crossed the street to Mussolini park, as the kids called it, where a few old men still sat on benches with their folded copies of II Progresso, the fresh-air inspectors, retired, indifferent or otherwise idle, and they smoked and talked and blew their noses in the street, leaning over the curbstone with thumb and index finger clamped to old shnozzola, discharging the stringy stuff.

Albert wanted to linger a while but didn't see anyone he knew and so he joined the small army of returning workers coming around the bend from Third Avenue, from the buses and elevated train.

Time, finally, to go home.

She sat there, Rosemary Shay, doing her beadwork. She had the frame set on two small sawhorses. She had the four bolts screwed in that held the frame together, those bolts with wing nuts at one end. She had the material pinned to the edges of the frame. She had the wood-handled needle that she used to string the beads onto the material, following the printed design-greenish beads arrayed on a flossy thread.

She heard Nick doing something at the kitchen table.

She said, "You should go get the meat."

She did her beadwork and listened to him doing whatever he was doing. Writing something, it sounded like, but not for school, she didn't think.

She said, "It's paid for. And they close soon. So you should think about going."

She did her beadwork, her piecework. Sweaters, dresses and blouses. She did whole trousseaus sometimes, working off the books just as Jimmy had.

She did her work and listened to Nick, finally, go out the door. Then she went and looked at the piece of paper he'd left on the table. Made no sense to her at all. Arrows, scrawls, numbers, circled numbers, a phone number in the Merian exchange, letters with numbers next to them, some simple additions and divisions-all scribbled frantically on the page.

She listened to the radio and did her work. She made an official salary, the money she reported, answering the phone for a local lawyer and typing wills and deeds and leases, mostly, and immigration forms, and listening to the lawyer's funny stories. He told all the new jokes and had a backlog of a thousand old ones and he liked to sing "The Darktown Strutters' Ball" in Italian, a thing he did more or less automatically, like breathing or chewing gum.

The job was good for her because it put her in contact with other people and because it had the virtue of fairly flexible hours. And the money, of course, was life and death.

Bronzini walked toward Tremont, past apartment buildings with front stoops and fire escapes, past a number of private homes, some with a rosebush or a shade tree, little frame houses beginning to show another kind of growth, spindly winged antennas.

He was wondering about being it . This was one of those questions that he tortured himself deliciously with. Another player tags you and you're it . What exactly does this mean? Beyond being neutered. You are nameless and bedeviled. It . The evil one whose name is too potent to be spoken. Or is the term just a cockney pronunciation of hit? When you tag someone, you hit her. You're it , missy. Cockney or Scots or something.

A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in to dinner.

A fearsome power in the term because it makes you separate from the others. You flee the tag, the telling touch. But once you're it , name-shorn, neither boy nor girl, you're the one who must be feared. You're the dark power in the street. And you feel a kind of demonry, chasing the players, trying to put your skelly-bone hand on them, to spread your taint, your curse. Speak the syllable slowly if you can. A whisper of death perhaps.

Half a block from his building, on a street where the Italians thinned out and the Jews began to appear. And approaching now to see his mother in the first-floor window, cranked up in her special bed, white hair shining in the soft light.