Salvatore Scibona - The End

He liked to go up onto his roof in the summer and look at the city. He would straddle the peak and use the chimney crown as a table for his gin glass and his ashtray. Up there you could count on a breeze in the summertime, and when you are the baker and it’s summertime you will pay dearly for a cooling breeze. The house was on the tippy top of Elephant Park, and from there he could see the thousand glittering lamps above the highway, the spires of the many churches, the mills expiring their sulfurous clouds, the rim of the lake to his right. The city was a mammoth trash heap — even the lake was brown — but it was an honorable place. It put pretty to one side. Nobody ever came here to have a good time. It was a place for people who had quit being children. It was a place to be employed for a period of a half century and thence to pass out of this life. That nobody regarded it as anything else made it unique in his limited experience and sacred.

At home, he put on raggedy clothes. He drained and refilled the oil in the crankcase of his car, rubbed his hands with turpentine, washed them with soap, got back into his good duds, and walked to his luncheon appointment.

The woman Marini’s house stood directly behind his store and shared his alley, but he had never been inside. She was not of his class. Her husband had been a small-scale manufacturer of women’s shoes and evidently had left her with enough to live in a certain elegance as long as she pleased. There was a rumor that she earned other income from an illicit source, but Rocco didn’t need to believe it. Wasn’t the magic of compound interest illicit enough? Her own shoes, as it happened, were strictly plain Jane. She had been living in this very house for at least ten years by the time Rocco himself was born. She was ninety-three years old.

She came from Lazio; however, her enunciation of the Italian language was barren of regional influence and pitiless, as though each word were a butterfly she was shooting out of the air with a pistol. One could hear that she had learned her English from the German people who had lived here years ago. Today it was the Sicilians, such as Rocco himself, who prevailed. Then it would be somebody else. God is great.

On one occasion, in his store, while searching her change purse for pennies, Mrs. Marini had asked him, “Why don’t you close up for Easter or Flag Day or whatever the occasion?” He was used to questions like these, but not from her, and he blurted something he regretted. “What in the world would I do all day?” he said. She responded, counting off each word on her fingers, “Entertain, read, garden, pray, converse.”

He knocked at the door. A boy showed him in. The boy was more than a foot taller than he was, and while they spoke, Rocco found himself looking up into the dark cavities of the boy’s long and listing nose. The lips were fat, contorted, the eyes far too big, the ears too pointed; the gaze — which never fails to reveal too much — was suspicious, ashamed, exalted, pious, self-consumed, attractive, and mean. The boy was a picture of becoming that had gone awry. Rocco had met his like at the yards, where he had been paid to chase the vainglorious transients from the boxcars.

I know your fate, but I won’t tell it to you, he thought, shaking the boy’s hand, although he knew nothing of his past.

There were too many kids around here. He could never place which mother and father with which kid, or which name with which kid, regardless of how many times they were introduced, but this boy was no relation of Mrs. Marini’s, as she had no relations in this country. Her one child, said the legend, had died in infancy. Recently the woman Testaquadra had started to tell him the whole tangle of events that had led to a boy of sixteen living with the old lady, but Rocco held up a hand and said solemnly, “I am disconcerned with this information.”

The dining room lacked fancy woodwork and porcelain figurines, but the walls were hung with silk paper that showed a pattern of white and yellow flowers, and the exposed floorboards were waxed, the furniture was upholstered tightly. There was only one decorative item on the wall: It was a china dish painted with the face of Bess Truman, and it was upside down. Plainly she was a witch, as were all women of a certain age. The boy took his derby and asked after his health and led Rocco to a chair, which he pulled out for him. When, during the uncommon visits of his boys during their adolescent years, had he witnessed the slightest evidence that Loveypants had instilled in them any basic training in class, such as pulling out the chair for a guest? Not once, never.

Mrs. Marini appeared in the kitchen doorway. “How do?” she said, and, paying no mind to his response, served the first course.

Once she was seated, it was evident that her spine was straighter than his own. Her hair was not genuine but her teeth appeared to be. She asked perfunctorily after his comfort before the boy said the blessing and they fell to.

The table would have sat fifteen but their places were set compan ionably together at one corner. All the windows were open, and an orchestra played on the radio from the parlor. He perceived that the boy was on orders to keep up his share of the conversation, which was informal and was concerned at first with the gardening of wax beans. The boy took the dishes to the kitchen and returned with the meat course. While chewing and listening to Rocco, Mrs. Marini periodically extended her hand toward the boy and tapped the tablecloth twice with her fingertips, whereupon the boy put down his knife and fork and refilled Rocco’s wineglass. The boy did none of the things you are not supposed to do with regard to eating at a table except that at one point he inclined his head very slightly toward his fork as it approached his mouth; she observed this and, without taking her eyes from Rocco, said, “Ciccio will kindly remove his snout from the trough.”

“Beg your pardon,” he said, straightening. Like a dog, it pleased him to obey — but why expend judgment? A boy needs someone to obey. Ciccio was the name; Rocco made a note.

The boy took the plates away again and came back with the salad. The meal was progressing with extreme slowness. Rocco couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat down to eat with other people, with a tablecloth and gravy boat and the whole shebang. Ciccio took the plates away and came back with cheese and some peaches. A breeze came through the window. Gratitude was expressed for the last night’s thunderstorm, which had broken four days of stupor, although more storms were predicted for that night.

“But it’s such a long way, Mr. LaGrassa, and all by your lonesome,” she said. “Take the train.”

“I want to see the big happy country as I go.”

“The obvious thing that I have to tell you is, Buy a window seat.”

“I want to look at the pretty flowers and then stop my car and pick the flowers.”

“But you’ve never driven such a distance, I expect.”

“I meant to tell you,” Ciccio said, “the other day you were turning by the bridge—”

“I saw you,” said Rocco. The boy had been among the usual miscreants throwing junked auto parts and rubble into the river.

“Yeah, you were turning, and I heard a sort of jingle-jangle from the car.”

“The car will break in the wilderness, and then where are you with your flowers?” she said.

“Yeah, my thought was one of your motor mounts broke,” Ciccio said. “And you were making a turn, and maybe the engine torqued up to the other side, and the fan pooched forward, and it was maybe grinding on the shroud and the radiator.”

Rocco chewed a peach, his hands folded on the table, and looked at the boy. Finally he swallowed. “A fair guess, but no,” he said. He extended his hand and deposited the pit on the boy’s plate.