The End (9 page)

All he asked the lady to bring him was coffee and toast. You might have thought toast was a simple enough dish, but you’d have been mistaken. He was made to pay fifteen cents for two pale squares of baize soaked in margarine. He washed his hands and face in the café lavatory. He looked like hell. Warm water and soap were evidently too much to ask. He’d heard of a pretty meager level of civilization in the state of Pennsylvania, and so far he wasn’t disappointed.

He found a barbershop down the block from the miserable café and went inside. (How reassuring that wherever you went in the wide world a barbershop smelled of talc and ethyl alcohol.) He sat on the bench, awaiting his time, turning the pages of a lawn and garden magazine. The barber and the client in the chair were discussing white meat versus dark meat, it sounded like. Rocco wasn’t paying attention because it wasn’t his business.

When the barber tucked the collar of tissue paper around Rocco’s neck and asked what he could do for Rocco this morning, Rocco said he wanted a trim and a shave.

“Speak up.”

“Just a trim all around the sides, the ears especially, and a shave, thank you,” he expounded.

“Just a trim and an alla-something and a something else,” said the barber.

He didn’t mind repeating himself. There was an autographed photo taped to the wall of Rogers Hornsby with the barber as a younger man.

At this moment, from Leningrad to Buenos Aires, the barber was tucking the tissue paper around the client’s neck, throwing the oilcloth shroud over the clothes, and fastening it at the shoulder. All over the world—Ohio, the Pennsylvania, irregardless—this unique mode of conversation was taking place in which the barber and the client addressed not the face of the other, but the face of the other in the mirror opposite. If the client was a stranger, the barber, by rights, adopted a superior tone. But Rocco’s sense today of being right with his God, of having embarked on an enterprise that aimed to make straight what spite and cowardice had conspired to make crooked, a mystic hopefulness this morning, inspired a charity in him that exposed petty complaints—his meager breakfast, a spleeny barber—as petty complaints.

With the handle of a comb the barber artfully elevated the tip of Rocco’s nose and snipped the hair growing from his nostrils into his mustache.

“I don’t go in for the hunting of waterfowl with dogs, do you?” the barber said. “I don’t think it’s right to train a predator to put food in its mouth and not eat it. I wonder what you think.”

“I don’t follow,” Rocco tried to say without moving his lips, on which the barber pressed with a finger.

“I’ll give you a for-instance. You take a woman to a store that sells fine linen sheets and tablecloths and what have you.” He turned to rummage a drawer. “You roll up a hundred dollars in her fist and tell her to walk through the aisles for an afternoon and then to give you the money back. Why, that’s cruelty! Tell me what you think while I’m stirring this here.”

“I thought they had that type of training in the breed.”

“That’s a good point. I never thought of that. It’s an important insight.”

“Thank you.”

“And let me ask you something else. I think about this here in my store when it rains and nobody thinks of coming to be groomed. Say you could go to any city in the world for a week’s vacation. Which city would it be? My answer is Perth, Australia.”

“The boat trip would be longest,” Rocco surmised.

“Just so. I would take the eastern route, following the coast of Africa as the Portuguese traders did. Which country do you come from that you talk like that?”

“Ohio,” Rocco said.

“Where’s that, in Russia somewhere?”

“Ohio,” he said. “Next door. The mother of presidents. The land of Thomas Edison and the buckeye tree.”

“Frankly, I don’t have the first idea what you’re saying,” the barber said lightly.

Rocco’s eyes were closed; the chair reclined; the barber piled a hot towel on his face. Rocco drew the letters in the air.

“I see,” said the barber. “Condolences.”

“Warren Harding, Orville Wright, the vice president’s father, all from Ohio,” Rocco said into the towel.

The barber laughed with a snort.

“You think the invention of the airplane is trivia. It’s a circus act to you.”

“Okay. I’ll tell you what. I knew what you were saying. I’m just a frolicsome kind of a person. I like to give the foreigners a hard time. I was a foreigner once myself,” he said, removing the towel. “Gua dalcanal. I wasn’t received so kindly by the natives as you were here, I’m sure. Everywhere you stepped on the sand, a dead marine.”

“I have a boy in the marines,” Rocco said. “There are those who believe he is no longer among us. They were taken in by a mountebank writing in the newspaper.” He inhaled profoundly, and the mentholated vapor of the shaving foam beneath his nose submerged his nasal passages and soaked his brain. “But I know that my redeemer lives,” he said.

“Is that so? They bring your body back to this country, they do. Give them that. The other services have more important work, I suppose. And you’re married, then.”

“As it happens. I am married these thirty-three years. However, she has been living at a distance from me, which I regret. And tomorrow I will see her again for the first time in so long. So make me up nice. She doesn’t know it yet, but I have had my full of her desertment. And I’m putting a stop to it. When I come back through here in a few days’ time, I will have her with me, and the boys, first, middle, and last, if I have to cut them in pieces.”

In Libya and in Sweden there was the hot towel and the rasp of the stropping of the razor, a sound that sent aged men into dim boyhood afternoons sitting on the bench, swinging the feet that did not yet reach the floor, while Papa, the master of the universe, reclined and another man scraped a blade over his gullet. There was a figure of speech in dialect, a phrase his own boys wouldn’t know since they hardly spoke dialect (their mother had forbidden Rocco to teach them):
to search for the dead father,
which meant “to desire the impossible.”

Rocco said slowly, “I have never been to the Pennsylvania before, don’t you know.”

“This ain’t Pennsylvania, pally. This is New York.”

The barber’s breathing smelled of mustard.

“You’re joking.”

“You are one half hour’s motoring time south-southwest of Buffalo, New York.”

He had swerved north of his planned trajectory on account of having decided that to buy a road atlas was to betray Providence. He knew he was headed east, essentially. In the fullness of time, the Lord would lead him to his destination.

The barber had progressed to the back of Rocco’s neck. “Listen, there isn’t any natural place for me to stop here.” He swiveled the chair and positioned a hand mirror so as Rocco could see in the mirror on the wall where he was pointing his razor. “What do you say?” he asked.

Rocco pouted indifferently.

The mug in which the barber agitated the shaving brush was embossed with a swirling blue design, and a barrel, and the words
I went over Niagara Falls.

“Put your head down.”

A speck of dandruff landed on the oilcloth. The barber folded Rocco’s ear over itself and slid the warm steel over a mole on his neck.

Niagara Falls.

But wait. But he was a half hour from Buffalo. But Buffalo was, was it not, only a half hour from Niagara Falls.

He inclined his head, too quickly, feeling a gleeful stress, an elation of childhood—of climbing the lava columns in the bay at Aci Trezza, naked at night, and leaping into the sea. The razor sliced into his neck.

“Aw, hell,” the barber said, reaching for a towel. “Look what you made me do.”

It was 11:42 in the morning on the sixteenth of August, 1953. The republic, so vast and beautiful, the heir of tremendous technological and political genius and of thousands of millions of hours of the working man’s work across the centuries, had yet, as of this moment, to be destroyed. It was a tyrant killer, a vendor of grain and typewriter ribbons. Nothing could be more self-evident than that it meant well by the world, and still the world was threatening at any moment to transform us, its people, into ash and bone shards. Our belief in the justness of our cause was being tested.

In the meantime, said the Lord to Rocco, consider the gorge I have scooped out, and the steaming cliffs of falling water that I have made to fall so that you might come here and feel your heart being drawn out of your throat.

Canada was right over there, across the canyon. If he squinted, Canadians could be seen moving along a Canadian street in midday Canadian summer sunshine.

The titanic physical dimensions of this place gave to the movement of any small thing, any merely human-life-sized thing, an illusion of supernatural slowness. The Canadian cars on the opposite lip of the canyon seemed at best to be creeping. Any splash, any arbitrarily chosen patch of water you followed into the cloud below, appeared not to fall (since what could take so long falling?) but to drift leisurely down the face of the cataract. A few clouds overhead and these other clouds, what a shock, drifting up into the sky. And down by the base of the falls the clouds were so thick as to obscure completely his view of where the falling water made impact with the river itself, giving him the impression that the water wasn’t descending into the river at all but into a befogged chasm, where it was swallowed up and annihilated. Raw senses were not to be believed in this place. And he had to ask himself if the unchanging physical rules that governed small things in fact changed radically in the face of a really big thing. As in, if he dropped a newspaper into the river up here it might turn into a flamingo by the time it got to the bottom of the falls. Next to him the river was clean, green, fat, and fast. Down there, postfall, it was blue and teemed with hills of brown scum. A knee-high sycamore sapling, very still, only one leaf ashiver, grew not six inches from a current that could have thrown a truck over the cliff ’s edge. Somehow, a little upstream of the falls, these brave, industrious people had managed to build a bridge over this arm of the river, had managed to sink the pylons into the rapids, and couples were walking hand in hand in yellow rubber rain slicks over the bridge toward Goat Island, which split the Niagara River into two arms, one falling over the Horseshoe Falls, the other over the American. A mile off to his right, downriver of the falls, another, far longer bridge spanned the gulf, hundreds of feet above the water, connecting the second- and fourth-largest nations in the world. He put a nickel in a binocular telescope and aimed it at the bridge and saw a kid throw—was it popcorn?—into the wind and hang his head over the rail to watch it fall.

Why was she not once in her rotten, betrayed life to be taken by her spouse to see Niagara Falls? Loveypants had lamented. She made the preposterous allegation, so it seemed, that you could board the six o’clock train and arrive there by lunchtime. Rocco invented a tune, a chipper five-note sort of birdsong to sing at her, the words to which—
I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you
—sent her into a fit of catlike violence. There was the spitting, and there were the fingernails attacking his eyes, and the threats to smother his children, until, sorrowfully but with no more delicate tools at his disposal, he leveled one clean, close-fisted blow at her nose to settle her down. Truth be told, he would’ve loved to have come here, he still owned at the present day several picture postcards of the place, which postcards a cousin had sent his mother when he was a boy; but how was he supposed to keep his offspring in a row if they didn’t fear him, and how were they going to learn to fear him if he demonstrated, by giving in to their mother, that persistent mutiny paid off in the long run?

This cousin, Tata (his mother’s niece and goddaughter), had been shipped away by her father to marry a corn miller in Buffalo. She sent the twice-a-year letter or postcard home to Sicily, and young, literate Rocco was made to read it aloud for the diversion of anyone who stopped in—a shameful chore, since it was clear to him even as a seven-year-old that his mother had been Tata’s confessor and that the letters were intended only for her and, out of necessity, for whomever she could find to read them to her. His mother didn’t care, she was a traitor. They had in Buffalo a house of their own with plumbing indoors, Tata reported, and meat was easy to come by. But she had many babies, eleven at the final count, three of whom died, and her husband, on whom she had not laid eyes before the men involved concluded their agreement through the mails and she was packed like a white slave, alone at sixteen, onto a steamer to Genoa and then to New York, was middle-aged and clubfooted; bathed rarely; had more than once taken their older boys with him to bordellos. The uncle or the neighbor to whom Rocco was reading shrugged and said, “Well, so it is,” and then made him reread the cheerfuller parts concerning the occasional trips to see Niagara Falls and the tulip gardens in the boulevards. When he was fourteen the letters stopped. Two years later a note arrived from one of her daughters relating that Tata had died in childbirth. It was with one of Tata’s sons who’d moved to Omaha that Rocco went to live when he was eighteen. And when, six years later, he’d moved to Ohio with a cousin’s cousin’s guarantee of a steel-mill job, which was never to materialize, he’d promised himself this single luxury, once two or three years of careful saving had passed: to go to Niagara Falls. To see this celebrated place. But he got sidetracked.

A sense like revelation here, that the worry and the useless chaos he experienced in his little coffin world, in his pomade-smearing-the-window, mildew-on-the-bathroom-tile, fungus-in-the-toenails world—that all the mess surrounding him was a delusion brought about by the accident of being a small man with small eyes in a small room, and that all he’d needed all along was to get to Niagara Falls and view an immense thing from an immense distance and the delusion would be dispelled. He would see the sublime order with which the Lord had composed his work. Up close, up here on the lip of the canyon, he saw a tree branch rush down the river and slip over the crest. But when he tried to follow it down the curtain of water, it vanished. The particular mess was lost in the grand design. A sense of significance in all things that he could feel only once he felt the insignificance of any one thing.