The End (6 page)

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.

“So I’m mistaken?”

“It’s a trick I do. Do you want to know what it is?”

“Yeah, I would.”

“It’s a device I’ve devised,” Rocco said. He inquired of himself why he had presumed to dispose of his own waste on the boy’s plate. His self responded, This is one of the gestures of which a man may avail himself to say to a boy or a younger man, I am the boss, but I like you.

“Here we go. Let me have it.”

“If you want to know, I’ll tell you.”

“Faster, please,” the old lady said, stabbing a knife in the cheese.

“The man fills my tank with gasoline. I keep the change in my pocket. When I get home I slip the silver down there into the tank. When eventually the car is defunct, I drop the tank, I cut a hole, I collect my change. Here is the money for the next car.”

“You sit down,” Mrs. Marini said, unscrewing the pit from her peach, “you take a nap, you go to the dining car and you buy a sandwich. Isn’t that a good time?”

Rocco begged leave to smoke. The boy was dispatched in search of an ashtray.

The conversation turned to the war and the recent cease-fire and then to a curious story that he was surprised to find she had failed to notice in the
Voice of the People
and the
Reserve Gazette:
Immediately after the armistice, the North Koreans had agreed to release a number of United Nations captives in advance of the general prisoner exchange. (Rocco had had no way of knowing if Mimmo would be among them.) But once the initial exchange was actually carried out, about a dozen prisoners of the promised number were unaccounted for—

The boy, having delivered the ashtray and a box of matches, pulled out his chair, whereupon he was regarded by the old lady, who adjusted her eyeglasses.

“What? I’m interested,” he said.

She lifted a hand.

“I have something to add.”

She lifted the hand another inch, and the big boy plodded to the kitchen, from where Rocco then heard the washing of the dishes.

A week had followed with no further news. Then recently they’d published interviews with the first round of released prisoners, who described the conditions in the camps: to eat, cracked corn, one cup daily; men kept for weeks in underground cells too small to stand up or lie down in; death from untreated wounds, malnutrition, dysentery. The North Koreans and Chinese had forced them to smoke marijuana and tried to brainwash them with respect to thieving imperialists, glorious revolution, inevitable victory of the proletariat. There were colored and white soldiers together in the same huts in subzero temperatures without firewood, but it was with the colored prisoners that they had made a special reeducational effort. For example, the colored soldiers had been made to watch news footage that depicted how the police at home were handling certain crowds of colored people involved in political demonstrations.

Some of the colored prisoners finally capitulated. They were offered houses, young wives, and jobs in Red China, where they could live out their lives in a workers’ paradise, and they accepted. And this handful of individuals represented, it would appear, the prisoners missing from the original exchange. Wasn’t that something.

The funk of August midafternoon now permeated the dining room. From outside, the beginnings of the feast crowd in the avenue rumbled.

How sad, Rocco concluded, and it just went to show that, unfortunately, it was true what one heard so often repeated, that a Negro did not have the patriotic feelings of a white person.

“You or I,” she said, “would never think of leaving our native soil for a home, a spouse, an occupation on the other side of the world. The idea would never enter our heads.”

“Well, now.”

“Not on pain of death.”

“Wait, wait. You misunderstand me. I have two points. My first point is that there is moving away, and then there is to defect, to make treason against the home country, and so on and so forth.”

“I contributed cheerfully with my tax dollars to the destruction of Cassino not ten years ago, which is in my home province.”

“That’s different. That’s not the same, and that’s different.”

“Two points you said you had.”

“It’s not the same, and I move on in any event to my second point, which is that these people were brought, but you and I came. Which there’s a difference. If I’m a colored person, do I salute the flag? Who knows.”

“In fact, the importation of slaves to this country was outlawed in 1808,” she said, sucking her teeth.

“I’m having a day today where I can see the big picture,” he said. He was not in control of his mouth in the usual way. The uncooked contents of his brain were transported so quickly out of his mouth that he had to listen to himself to find out what he was saying. There was one Rocco outside, in the world, holding forth. And there was another one down in here, observing the proceedings, feeling awake and asleep at once, and feeling—what was the word, how could you say it?—joy. However, he did not feel it at this precise moment. He’d been feeling it a couple of seconds ago, before he’d noticed. And he wanted to not notice it again, the joy, if that could be done, to not know it, to lose it and thus to get it back again, like a Christian does with his dignity when he puts his faith in the Lord.

“Let me say politely that you are seeing the little picture,” he said, “such as picking nits over somebody that was brought versus somebody that his grandfather was brought. In the big picture, let me say politely that you are just talking like certain people.”

“Which people?”

“The people who say, Let the sparrow mate with the crow, and so forth.”

Ciccio came back into the dining room with a dish towel around his neck like a scarf.

“Ciccio has been listening?” she said.

“More or less,” said the boy.

“Ciccio may now describe his opinion.”

“Yesterday,” he said, “in the early paper I saw an update, like, how that most of the ones that defected were white guys. One of them who got out said the ones who stayed were sure there was going to be a Communistical revolution worldwide, even right here in our own country, like, in a few months. So they figured they’d just cool their heels in China and wait for America to go socialist.”

“Your conclusions?” she said.

“They want to betray the government of the USA but not the place of the USA.”

“Very good. Now then”—she turned to Rocco—“my reading tells me that the sparrow and the crow cannot mate, as they are different species. However, mulattos, such as in the Caribbean they have many, demonstrate that black can mate with white and produce offspring. Therefore black and white are the same species and your metaphor has collapsed.” When the boy had come in she’d stopped speaking in English, but now she was switching from Italian to English and back again from one sentence to the next. “You are confusing
physically impossible
with
morally repugnant.
What you really meant to say when you said ‘mate’ was ‘live side by side with,’ which is distasteful enough.” A corner of the tablecloth was pulled taut by her twisted fingers.

“All this time, you know, I’ve never been inside your house,” Rocco said abruptly.

“Oh, that can’t be!” she said. “Oh, Mr. LaGrassa, I’m so ashamed. I thought at least—it can’t be!”

“On the porch and in the garden a few times but not inside.”

“I’m full to my eyes with regret,” she said. “I’ve never been in your house either.”

The only untidiness about this room was that the window looked out on the peeling, mud-splattered eyesore that was the rear of his bakery. He had looked at his own reflection in the other side of these windows—while he had the day’s first smoke, early in the morning, when all her lights were out and the blinds were pulled—maybe each day for the last thirty years.

“So what’s all this about, just curiously? What’s the occasion that today I am asked to come in?”

There was a silence while she probably tried to put together the words of an apology for having believed at first what the newspaper had said about Mimmo. Rocco wanted to say it was a case of no harm, no foul.

“The occasion?” she said, brightening. “Why, it’s your day off, naturally!”

His streak was over. His secondhand suit was forty years old. He wore it carefully so that he could be buried in it.

She refilled the glasses. “You’re in a position to judge, Rocco. Which is better, work or play?”

He had assumed his visit was concluding, but now his glass was full again. His back eased into his chair. A band in the street could be heard amassing. Horns blared. Somebody was banging cymbals. Ciccio started playing a game with them before they knew what he was doing, and before they knew it they were playing along. Rocco recollected from his bottommost depths the pleasure of company, of talking when it didn’t matter what the topic was. Behind how many windows for how many years had others laughed and talked of nothing while he had organized his life to avoid them? He had been wasteful of himself—he had drained himself down the drain.

“Hail,” Ciccio said, “bombs, volcanic ash.”

“What is this?” Mrs. Marini said.

“Birds that have heart attacks.”

“Objects descending from the clouds!” Rocco said.

“Oh, good, a game. My turn now,” she said. “The sun. A pumpkin. A twenty-dollar gold coin.”

“Things that are orange,” Ciccio said.

“You can do better than that, Costanza,” she said, slapping the back of her hand.

“Gather pennies and nickels,” Ciccio said. “Look up from a place of darkness to a tiny circle of light.”

She said, “Things that little underprivileged children do.”