The End (30 page)

He may have been sleeping but probably not when he heard the newspaper thump against the storm door upstairs—a thump that held out bluntly all the comforts he wished to wish to do without: routine, insulation from cold, fresh meat, people to talk to.

He got up and made the bed as he had found it and climbed the stairs in his stocking feet, his shoes in hand, dressed for a moderate trek through a winter night but having left most of his clothes hidden in the cellar. Outside her kitchen windows it was still dark. It was darker than when he’d come in. The moon must have set by now. All the lights were off inside the house.

He needed a plan. One or another of the women was going to make him account for his whereabouts the last two nights, and the truth was none of their goddamn business.

He needed a bath. There was just enough light in the kitchen that certain unidentifiable metal objects in the stove region of the room gleamed spookily. Where did the light come from? From the windows, having reflected off the snow, having shot out of stars many, many millions of lifetimes of light travel away.

It was safe to assume that if they hadn’t called Ricky’s the first night he was gone, they would probably have called there by now. The question was going to be, Where has Ciccio been? He was going to say he was at Ricky’s the whole time, both nights. Then they would say, Oh, no, you weren’t, we called, we have found you out. At which point he would say what?

He was overthinking this. They weren’t going to fight with him. They were trying to put him on the street.

To get to her front door, he was obliged to feel his way along the kitchen counter. He opened the door, and he opened the storm door. He bent over the threshold and dug out the paper and mussed up his shoes in fresh snow. He was operating in near-perfect silence. He placed the snow-covered shoes on the rug inside the door. It was a crude ruse but it would have to suffice.

Now he could invite the audience into the theater.

He squared his feet on the linoleum and slammed the door shut. He banged a skillet down on the stove. He paused to listen for signs of the audience coming and, hearing none, dropped her coffee grinder on the floor and faked a sneeze.

He listened again. There was a creaking of the floorboards.

Slowly and white Mrs. Marini materialized amid the darkness of the hallway.

“Where did you come from?” she said. She was white, he wanted to say see-through, as if gaseous. Her pajamas were white and patched in a dozen places and nearly disintegrated. She wore a look of small-animal fright that he had not before seen on her.

“At Ricky’s. I didn’t wake you up, I hope.” He had arrayed the makings of an elaborate omelet on the stove.

What strands of hair there were on her head came past her shoulders, were as thin as the fiber of a moth’s tent, did nothing at all to clothe the scalp. The scalp was yellow.

And her clothes would have fit somebody three times her weight. She might as well have wrapped a sheet around herself. He would have thought she slept in a nightgown if he’d had to guess. He had never seen her wearing white clothes before. They were some man’s old pajamas.

“What was I dreaming?” she said. “I can’t remember. I heard the door. I thought you were someone else.”

“I was at Ricky’s.” He was trying to get the tone of
Hello, this is my phony alibi
out of his voice and was failing. “And I came over to get the suit I left here after, after—”

“Put my egg down,” she said. “Go wash your hands.”

He washed his hands. She fried him some eggs and made him cut up half a grapefruit for himself and half for her. While he was cutting the grapefruit, she fixed him with a look that said, Shall I blow your cover or not, big fellow? Anyway, she didn’t blow his cover.

It was the first day of the funeral.

When he knew his mother would be at the mortuary, later that morning, he went home and took a shower and got into decent clothes. The house smelled weird. Then he went to the mortuary and ate a lot of cheese and sausage.

Yes, the usurper was there, perched like a crow in the front, by the coffins. Her hair had grayed. Maybe she would die soon. She even came up to him and shook his wretched hand, trying to act like she wasn’t cracked and wasn’t a usurper. He didn’t know who she thought she was fooling. Not him!

He fell asleep on Mrs. Marini’s sofa at four in the afternoon and didn’t wake up until an hour before sunrise. She had taken off his socks.

The next night he retrieved his crystal-radio set and a few pairs of Skivvies from Twenty-second Street and stowed them in the chest of drawers in Mrs. Marini’s upstairs guest bedroom, where he also slept. As long as nobody said anything, he figured he could build up a body of precedent, establish squatter’s rights, and never have to have a conversation about where, in the long term, he was going to hang his hat.

In fact, that was what happened. The house on Twenty-second Street wasn’t his mother’s, it was his, but he’d let her have it, he didn’t care. She wasn’t really his mother, she was a candy wrapper blowing around on the street.

He went back to school. Months passed.

He didn’t have to iron anymore or be a slave on his father’s side jobs. He was hungry all the time. He was mad, all the time, an uninterrupted clenching of the jaws and fists. Beating up on somebody, or even getting beaten up on, was his only relief. When his “mother” came around, which she did far too often, with that jeering puss on herself, it was all he could do not to knock her teeth out of her head.

He was a man. He felt fifty-five years old. He didn’t have to socialize with head cases. He was hungry all the time. Mrs. Marini thought three square was good enough for anybody, but he needed three cubed; he was having a growth spurt again, his stomach rumbled while he was cleaning the table after dessert. He’d discovered a topic she knew nothing about, an adolescent boy’s special nutritional needs. He couldn’t ask for more because what if then she got sick of having to shove so much of her monthly fixed income into his face and she made him go live at number 123? He obeyed to the letter all regulations concerning length of shower and Where do the dirty socks go? His cigarettes, he kept in a cellophane corn-chip bag in the leaf pile behind her toolshed.

He examined his shame. He poked at it. He experimented with ways of making it flare up or cool down. Where did it come from? It came from someplace in the constellation of My Father Is Dead but I Am Still Alive.

16

H
e wanted something to happen. He read more. It did not seem quite right to him that he should lose himself in reading, but he had nowhere else in the short term to go. It gave him no pleasure, but he didn’t want to be pleased. He wanted to be displeased, to feel the displeasure of his circumstances, because it did not seem right to him, no, it did not seem right at all, that his grief had all burned off before it could produce any effect. His grandmother had made loud, pulsing screams in her bedroom, a sound from the Dark Ages, while Ciccio kneaded the dough for their bread.

The Jesuits and his lay teachers forced him to read more, and he obeyed, stupid as a mill horse, hoping that if he got lost far enough then something would happen. He didn’t even care to be the agent of this thing. It was an accident that he found himself casting around in philosophy and religion for the thing that would happen. Those were the oats they were feeding him. If he had gotten into the union a few years ago, as planned, he would have lost himself in a hod or a wheelbarrow instead of in Thomas Aquinas.

During his winter oral exam that February, Father Manfred asked him, “If I told you I was both free and unfree at the same time, what would my rationale be?”

Well, said young Mazzone, we were made in God’s image, and you could make the case that God was for the most part free but not entirely so, since the list of things he couldn’t do was long. He could not come into being or pass out of being. He could not
not
be good. God was both free and unfree; we were made in God’s image; et cetera. How about that?

But, no, Father Manfred said, God could be and not be at once if he wanted. God didn’t mind contradicting himself. Try again.

All he could think of was to say: God is great. God is a mystery. God is like us and not like us.

“Yes, good, more,” the priest said.

“And if you’re a slave in your head? I mean, obviously you’re not free to fly to Mars on your own wings. It’s easy to say how you’re unfree outside your head. But what if you were unfree inside your head?”

“That’s it, play with that.”

“If you’re not free in your head—”

“Hit that. Slam away at it.”

“I am working a little harder, Father, because I am afraid.”

“Boom boom.”

“—then you never see how little sense it makes.”

“Nice. Go. Yes. Hit him. A left and a right.”

“Because it’s impossible that God exists, but he does. And unless you’re free in your head, you can’t see why it’s impossible.”

“And therefore look how much greater is God that he smashes even reason underfoot.”

Which, okay—there was the absurdly luminous shadow of paradox, believing because it was nonsense to believe. He knew they liked that sort of thing. So did he, to be honest. It made sense to him, ha ha.

He was at an impressionable junction and knew it. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas were beyond the edge of his understanding. Much of his thinking these days was only ingesting what the priests said and then vomiting it back up on his shirt and looking at the vomit and saying, Gee, look what I made.

His father had always told him to disregard every third word the Jesuits said. They were famous for twisting people’s heads. They made vice look like virtue. They had, as an order, been kicked out of the Church for a few decades a couple hundred years ago. And yet his father’s position was ambiguous, had been ambiguous. After all, he’d paid a lot of dough to send Ciccio to the school.

There was civics and there was trig, okay. You were discouraged from getting too excited about them, probably because they were relevant to the twentieth century. There was Latin, of course. There was Latin, Latin everywhere, from
incunabulum
to
extremis.
And this year there was Greek, too. They had Ciccio trudgingly translating Aristotle in one class; reading him at length in English in another; and reading Aquinas, talking about him, in another. It was the junior-year Aristo-blitzkrieg. His defenses were weakening, but defenses against what?

“Don’t let them turn you into something you’re not.” That was his homespun father again. Ciccio would have been far more comfortable with himself if they had just made him keep memorizing tidbits from the Baltimore Catechism—that was the method of the nuns in junior high, and he had remained mostly immune. (He had not been turned into a papist knucklehead, like so many Irish and Poles. He had maintained the cynicism of his people respecting the double-dealings of the Church.) Instead, in the high school, the priests were on a crusade to grind him into the earth with work.

It must be understood that he was a boy on a trapdoor, and the latch of the trap had been pulled, and he had fallen, and he had somehow landed in a place where old European gentlemen were razing him in order to rebuild to their specs.

The catechism was, implicitly, out. Understanding, feeling competent to discuss the assignment, were out. Clarity was out. Usefulness was out, but that was old news. Declaratives were out. Interrogatives were in. Confusion and fear. The subjunctive and the conditional were certainly in. They were the beating heart of in.

He was made to memorize what Aristotle had said about something, and then what Saint Paul had said about it, and then what Thomas Aquinas had to say by way of fitting them together. But on the exam he had to disagree with Aquinas and make a point-by-point case for the disagreement. It was another one of their dissembling SJ tricks. They knew that as a teenager he was engineered to disagree, so they commanded him to disagree, for which he had to resent them, he wanted to resist them; and where was the most obvious outlet for his resistance? Why, agreement, of course, with Aquinas. In this way they were making a Thomist out of him despite himself. Or some of them were; the others, the paradox crowd, were trying to turn him into a Lutheran, maybe.

Not that he had the first idea of what that would mean, to be a Thomist, what credo he would be following.

Is it clear why he was looking for a credo to follow? Could you maybe cut him a break for taking it all so seriously?

An untranslated eighteenth-century copy of the
Summa Theolgiae,
all dolled up in still-green lambskin, occupied seven
feet
of shelf space over the chalkboard behind Father Manfred’s lectern. Now, there was no question of reading, much less of getting, this seven-foot-long idea, but there was the promise in it of a universe to get lost in. Short of joining the monastery, he was not going to read even 10 percent of Aquinas. But he’d read enough to have gotten lost in the thicket; he could say he’d read enough to have forgotten what was supposed to be the inspiring genius of the man’s thought, and to be lost made him afraid, which felt righter than nothing did.

He read in the afternoons, on the hallway floor between Mrs. Marini’s spare bedrooms upstairs, lying on a bath towel. It was the only place in the house free of the distraction of sunlight. Once, having fallen asleep, he woke up to her softly jabbing his ear with the toe of her shoe. The pages of his
Selected Aquinas
were folded irregularly under his head.

“This is not Ciccio who reads, this is Ciccio who lays about,” she said. She pointed an accusing finger, not at him, but at the book. She said, “It escapes you whole hog, I bet.”

He said, “I’ll tell you what, I understand this just well enough to miss the point.”

He asked Father Manfred what it would mean to be a Thomist. Would he take another name, like the nuns did? But that was a joke. Manfred said the best illustration he could think of was something he’d read in the seminary: