Salvatore Scibona - The End

Time was, the Slovak kids knew better than to come into Elephant Park, and vice versa for the Italian kids staying out of Fort Saint Clair. If you married into another nationality (like Enzo’s sister-in-law, Antonietta, whom he’d never met; her husband was from Austria), it was understood you wanted to move, say, to Chicago or the suburbs. Now they were all concerned, white people. When this had happened, Enzo could not have told you. He himself didn’t even prevent the Croat Ricky from sleeping in his house.

With a yardstick, Eddie reached out to the fan on the radio and depressed one of its buttons, whereupon the previously fixed instrument began to turn its head imperiously from side to side, sermonizing them with its cold breath.

Eddie went on about the tizzoons.

They hadn’t planned to linger too long. It was more a visit to say, The men of Local 238 salute you and vow to carry your coffin when the day arrives.

Eddie said, “Am I right?”

“I am not political, Edward,” Enzo responded. He’d never voted. He was unsure how, physically, voting took place. He wasn’t even formally a citizen, he didn’t think. During the war, the previous war, with Europe, he wasn’t allowed to fly in an airplane, use a shortwave radio, or own a camera. It wasn’t any skin off his nose. The restrictions were lifted in 1943, he found out five years later. The boy wasn’t really political, either. He could tell you whatever you wanted to know about the Battle of Tippecanoe and how the Constitution was amended but had no interest in the local news.

Now, Enzo did follow the police action in Korea, with the anxious eye of the father of a teenaged boy. It was stalled now, but he was sure another war would start someplace in time to catch Ciccio up in it and blow him to smithereens.

Eddie asked them to stay for the supper that his Phyllis would prepare once she got home from work. The boy said sorry, but they’d already eaten. Coffee, then? Ice cream? A beer? Enzo said no, thanks, but he didn’t drink beer.

The boy began to suffer a fit of blinking, the way he did when he knew he was supposed to keep quiet but was about to make some flip comment anyway.

Enzo pointed at the boy. “He doesn’t drink beer either,” he intervened. And they all laughed. Ha, ha.

They continued toward home. Enzo suggested the width of a single wooden match by holding out his thumb and forefinger before the eyes of the boy. “You are this close,” he said. But Ciccio only boxed him on the shoulder like old chums.

They waited at the stoplight on the corner of Chagrin. The boy stood in the street and Enzo on the curb, so that they were nearly the same height and Enzo could see the pores inside the boy’s filthy ears.

Ciccio, inserting three fingers between the buttons of his jersey, flapped it to dry his sweat, and his father realized only then that all day long the boy had been flouting another one of the original house rules.

“Hold on,” Enzo said, his nostrils flaring as they sucked in the boy’s wafting scent. “The law regarding an undershirt at all times. Say it.”

“What do you care?” Ciccio said, his head bent into the breeze from below. “I should look like you, that’s all you care.”

Enzo bit his lip. He raised his hand, rotating it so that the splayed knuckles were oriented at the boy, and swung, cracking him in the face.

From Ciccio’s slanting nose a little blood splashed out, like a prize.

The boy said quietly, “Fuck.”

“Now how do you look?” Enzo said.

Fatherhood was a catalogue of threat, surveillance, legislation, prescription, prohibition, penal retribution, harassment, breaking and entering, assault and battery, cigarettes, meals, Latin, trigonometry, “Do like I say,” “Go get the tin snips,” “The square root of two divided by x, ” “I told you to use the shoe trees, but you didn’t use the shoe trees.” While driving, the left hand is free to smoke with because the boy can shift the gears. Up the highway, down the highway, he washes you dry. “Stand up so I can beat you.” “You don’t know what’s good.” “Close the mouth when chewing.” “Close the light when leaving the room.” Brilliantone. Laundry.

Boyhood was contempt for the rule and the rule giver, knowing that your every slouching step was surveilled. Lies, capricious and glib. Running flat out. “Someday soon, old man, I’ll knock you down.”

Carmelina, the boy’s mother, had left them sometime between noon and four o’clock on the afternoon of August 8, 1946, when the boy was nine years old.

When Ciccio had finished the eighth grade (this was two years ago), Patrizia had offered to take him off Enzo’s hands and put him to work full-time on the farm. Enzo had arranged for an apprenticeship with the laborer’s union — Ciccio could have passed for sixteen at the time — but unluckily the union now wanted a birth certificate proving the minimum age had been attained, and Ciccio’s career was forestalled. Why not send him to the farm, where he spent much of the summer anyhow and could be of use? Enzo didn’t like it, that was why. He had given the boy his name, Mazzone. You see? He had bought, he wasn’t renting. They would have to put him in a high school.

He preferred to send the boy to the public vocational school up the road, but Mrs. Marini said that was a half measure and he should go instead to a gymnasium downtown that had been started in the 1880s by a group of Jesuit priests from Munich, who incidentally had bought their shoes from her husband. Ciccio should learn languages and theology, not cabinetmaking. And she would pay for it.

Enzo mistrusted the school’s intentions. Specifically, would they try to turn Ciccio into a missionary? Most of the priests who taught at the school were born in Europe, which confirmed Enzo’s notion that their aim was to remove boys from their natural home and throw them to the four winds; while for Mrs. Marini it only confirmed that the instruction there would not be very stupid. Neither of them cared to ask the boy’s opinion. He would go where they told him. Except where chores were concerned, he was a suggestible person (all the more reason, in Enzo’s mind, to keep the Church away from him). They wouldn’t let him in anyway, Enzo didn’t think, nor should they. This kind of schooling was not for the likes of the sons of him, but for the middle class.

Mrs. Marini scheduled an interview. The three of them rode the trolley into the city, the boy holding a strap in the ceiling while his two elders sat on the bouncing wooden bench arguing over whether he could pass the exam, although neither of them knew on what he would be examined. Ciccio, slick and mirthful, only whistled through his teeth until she shushed him; he was bothering the other patrons.

The examination, so-called, consisted of a five-minute chat in Latin with an old French Canadian monk, who pronounced Ciccio “unacceptable,” followed by two hours of timed drills on the football field. At the end of the afternoon, they offered to let Ciccio go to the school, starting the fall term, so long as he made it through the four weeks of double-session practices in August.

“Is this a school or a stable?” Mrs. Marini demanded of the head-master, a trim and fresh-faced American priest of Irish parents, who had allowed the lime that marked the grid of the football field to color the hem of his cassock. He tried to feed her some nonsense about training the whole boy, but she was supremely uneager to hear it.

She struggled to control her distress. Her original enthusiasm for sending Ciccio to the school was like a pot of milk that had just been too abruptly boiled and in which clots had formed — however, they were only clots, she decided, and might be strained away. Therefore, while the priest intoned his response, she pretended that she suddenly heard a curious buzzing in her inner ear. She gazed vaguely at the solemn oak beams of the ceiling as though she were about to let her head fall back and go to sleep. Thus she convinced herself that she couldn’t properly hear him and avoided learning anything that would have made her change her mind.