Salvatore Scibona: The End

The whole place was emptying. A little current formed, heading back upward on Eleventh, and he yanked the boy by his hand and dove in, and they made it to Twenty-second and turned right.

East Twenty-second Street was devoid of other pedestrians, quiet under the yellow lamplight in the gloaming.

The kid, in his corduroy short pants and no front teeth, had a chance finally to ask him what had happened; what about the fireworks? And Gary had to say he didn’t know — although he did know, or almost knew — because he was embarrassed to explain.

They were still in the thick of the neighborhood. There were grape arbors in the yards, and meticulously shaped fruit trees, and little devotional statues among the shrubs. Everything so tidy except for tremendous quantities of garbage in the street. The kid was unwilling to hold his hand as they made their way down the street because now there was room enough to walk separately.

A door opened. The number on the house was 123. And a gray-haired colored woman walked onto the porch and turned around and faced the doorway. Another colored woman, younger, came out, too. The younger one was unsteady on her legs. The old one took a step down and held the arm of the younger, guiding her. They descended likewise the two more steps slowly, to the lawn.

He had stopped to watch this and the kid had stopped and was watching also.

They were here, they were even here, already. They were living here. What hadn’t they been given, and now they wanted this, here, too? How was he supposed to bear this? The kid was going to ask him, What are they doing here? Eventually, he would be dead. The kid would grow up and ask himself someday, Who am I?

Awhile later, Ciccio was soundly beating Mrs. Marini and the barber both and had paid her back the money she’d lent him with money he’d won from her. Certainly he was cheating. She put on a shawl from her purse so as to have a means of enshrouding her hand. It was more a tea towel, actually. She couldn’t remember how it had gotten in there.

Pippo, noticing the shawl, leaned back in his chair and flipped a switch in the circuit box, whereupon the whir of the fans there in the back room and (she could hear on the other side of the curtain) in the front room faded gradually.

“Jeez, it’s quiet,” Ciccio said. “You can’t even hear them in here.”

“Who them?” she said.

“The people, he means — the masses, the craziness,” said Pippo.

Ciccio smacked a card on the table. “Scopa,” he said again. In dialect this time— shcoopa —to antagonize her.

Pippo got up and pulled the curtain, exposing the front room of the shop and the broad wall of windows that looked out on the avenue. Night had fallen.

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.