D’Agostino, the usurer that owned the consignment store, one of his clientele, told him it was the superstition that you couldn’t spend what you didn’t yet have that had kept the serfs in the fields. “You can’t even afford a spinster to punch the till buttons and shell your almonds, which goes to show,” he argued.
No, but it went to show instead the limit of what the baker should hope to own. He understood that America had become great by extending the right to earn money even to money itself, but this was to his mind a practice of the uttermost corruption, since out of whose hands was the first money taking the second money but those of the man who had made it in the sweat of his brow? And therefore no account at any bank bore his name, since where would the interest have come from? Usury! Although he otherwise felt toward his chosen country a tenderness only such as he had seen young girls struggle to conceal for their fathers.
His hopes instead were unpurchasable and plain. He knew what they were — well, he knew what one of them was, he could describe it in words but wouldn’t tell you if you asked because it was not for your ears. He was only a modest person, was not eminent in any way, and his clientele, even the children among them, did not use his family name but called him Rocco, as though he were their servant or cousin.
He was susceptible to dread.
At the least expected time of sweet lonesomeness, in the earliest of morning hours, while he bumbled down the bepuddled alleys beneath the tenement balconettes, where in summer months the caged-in children snored beneath the washing, under the yellow-dark clouds of coal smoke, dread leapt from the shadows and pounded him in his face. Or later, at four in the a.m., while he filled the proofing shelves with the day’s 180 oblong loaves, slowly but slowly rising all around him, all white (picture a colossus in a mausoleum of innocents); or while he was coaling the oven, the dread descended and clocked him. At such times, what could he do to protect himself but name the dread and hope that that would sap its force? So he spoke inwardly the Biblical warning that described it so much better than he could on his own and described as well what his role was in the universal scheme and the consequences of failing in that role. The first time he heard it was at the mass for the last one’s baptism. Monsignor read it in Latin, and he didn’t follow; then in Italian, and he wasn’t paying any attention; then in English, and it did its terrible work: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”
He was the father of three sons. He loved them so, as the Lord required. Mrs. Loveypants, their mother, also called Luigina, was beloved of him, too, but collaterally, as the vessel by which his boys had blessed him.
They were boys, and therefore their souls were unfinished and their habits impressible. The first discovered the eating of salt with watermelon, and the middle and last took the habit up shamelessly, imitating also the first’s wincing and puckering, and shot the seeds off their tongues like savages at passing dogs. They ran away from home and yet came back. They were innocent of resolve. They were as vulnerable to their surroundings as mold. For this he might have congratulated them: They were Americans after all, who felt nerves where older nations felt fear, and a million possible nervous selves crowded around them, clamoring to be chosen, and his eager boys looked perpetually in all directions for the one they most desired to be, always in a state of becoming. He himself, on the other hand, had long since finished becoming and therefore faced fewer, more concentrated, and infinitely more terrifying uncertainties — the hour of his death, the resilience of his faith in the Lord. He might have congratulated them if only he could have assured himself that all of their becoming would at some point in early adulthood conclude and they would experience the benefits of having become: the ease of physical comportment, the directness of gaze and speech, the freedom from the desire to seem, also the ability to pray without requesting something for oneself. His own father had a word that described this, and here was Rocco’s hope, the thing he wouldn’t have told you because it wasn’t yours and he didn’t want to dishonor it by explaining. It was something he wanted for his boys, whom he loved as himself — he hoped that the boys, once men, would harden. Think of a brick in a kiln. His father had achieved this, his grandfather more so, and it was evinced by the rain-cloud pouches about their eyes. “Don’t associate with people who touch their faces while they talk to you,” said his father. “That’s not what the hands are for.”
Now, take his boys. He did not understand why they must always be smiling! They were taught in the schools to shake hands with strangers while widely showing the teeth, as if they were horses offered for inspection. They were not horses! They were Christian persons, but they laughed at what wasn’t funny because they desired above all things not to become hard but to become liked, and it made Rocco’s blood boil because they were putting themselves up for sale. And in his eyes, as in the eyes of the Lord, they were beyond price.
Three boys, one two three, and him their father, and Loveypants.
One of his cousins had had a cousin he wanted Rocco to meet, and that was Loveypants (although yet to acquire the name), and they had gotten married. All right, it was marginally more complicated than that. This was in the city of Omaha, in the Nebraska, where he had immigrated at first and found work goading steers onto and off the trains. Woodrow Wilson had just had his stroke, and Rocco was in grief on account of Edith, the young bride who had rescued Wilson from his widowerhood. Furthermore, as the Spanish flu plagued the wider world, where was Rocco’s place of work but a rail yard, among trains that had come from far-off infected ports in the east, south, and west. It was like the heat of a furnace, this dread, like the hot breath of the Lord blowing on him, saying, Harden. So he said to Loveypants, with whom he’d been sharing insufficiently reserved boxcar liaisons, “I guess we’d better get married.” To which she responded, “We agree.” And due to his already having shamed her, he received no dowry, which was not unjust.
Loveypants, Luigina, drove a spear through the heart of the Rocco of becoming and watched it beat its last. Once he was hardened, his father had prophesied, the things of his softness would look shameful to him, and so they did. And he abandoned saloon ing, urinating from high windows, weekly letters home to Mother in Catania, and finally the Nebraska itself, and bought two train tickets eastward and two sets of new underclothes. What remained of the life of the Rocco of becoming was little else but Loveypants, who herself had hardened admirably, and to whom the name Loveypants (her boxcar name, her own invention, which she preferred) did not apply anymore in the same degree, but a word is a harder thing to spear and kill than a person.
In December 1919, Loveypants and Rocco reached their destination and disembarked from the train. Her hair was in tangles. Snow caught in the fuzz of her limp cloth coat. The tin reinforcing cups on the corners of her trunk hissed on the ice as she dragged it by a belt tied to its handle, while the other baggage she carried in a tarpaulin bundle on her back. Down the Ohio road she pulled her things, pregnant, singing to him.
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