DARK FACE OF BEAUTY
“Like
I said, it was a long time ago. My
parents had immigrated from southern Italy some ten years before. I was born here, or, rather, in Brooklyn, in
this country, I mean. My parents never
learned English very well. They spoke to
each other in their Sicilian dialect and to me and the rest of the world in a
halting, nearly incomprehensible gibberish made up of English words and
Sicilian grammar, with not a few words they invented themselves out of
fortunate—or unfortunate—blends of the old and the new languages.”
The
young priest was listening to his elderly parishioner not as a confessor but as
a friend. There was, however, something
on the mind of the oddly formal older man, and the priest suspected that it had
to do with some burden of guilt the man was carrying about his mother, who had
passed away long before the two had met and become friendly. They were at a local tavern, sitting
comfortably in a booth with a pitcher of beer on the table. The priest had taken only one glass and was
nursing it skillfully. More than a year
ago, the older man, whose name was Tom, had proposed a hypothetical case to the
priest, and he, young and ardent in the faith, had given a response which he
suspected had deeply troubled his friend.
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He walked up the block to Natalie’s
apartment building. Inside, he walked
the long carpeted hallway to her door and knocked. When she opened it, she stepped back to let
him in. The baby was crying, the
television was on, and the house smelled of cooking, a foul oily smell of fried
potatoes. It was too warm in the
apartment, too, and Natalie had a frayed and wild look. She didn’t say “Come in,” or “Hi, James,” or
“What’s up.” She just stepped back,
barefoot in faded black shorts and a tattered ketchup-stained white blouse, and
when he came in turned and went into the living room where the baby had begun
to scream sitting on the floor.
RAPHAEL IN BROOKLYN
The world had grown beyond him, and
he had grown apart from the world, settling into a comfortable old age among
familiar things--his potted plants in the sun porch, his beloved operas, which
he listened to on the old stereo everyday, and his cooking. He had learned to cook for himself after his
wife died, so many years ago now that he hardly ever thought of her anymore. Every day, he dressed after breakfast and
took his daily walk, stopping at the market on his way home to buy fresh
whatever he planned to cook in the evening.
He
spent his afternoons among his plants in the sun porch, where he kept a canvas
on an easel and painted-- often scenes from memory of his native Italy, but
sometimes he would stop at the library on his way home from his walk and check
out color reproductions of the Renaissance masters, and he would sketch these
and try to reproduce them in oils. He
gave them as gifts to his grandchildren, who always said they appreciated them
and did hang them proudly on the walls of their rooms.
LOVING NATALIE WOOD
“Why don’t you
open a window Nat and cool it off in here.
How can you stand it?”
“You do it,” she
shot back at him, and stooped to lift the baby.
It stopped screaming when she lifted it and, cradling it in her arms,
she sat on the sofa in front of the television.
He saw her in nervous jerking movements unbutton her blouse and drop the
padded cup of her bra. He disliked it
when she exposed herself like that, taking no care to cover herself. Turning away, he went to the windows that
overlooked the street and opened both of them.
Then he lowered the television.
BLAD ESTEVEZ
Now, a young man of twenty years,
Blad Estevez is prowling the streets of Rockville Center, where he has just
stepped off the bus. He has left his old
neighborhood in Freeport and with it his old way of life in order to find the
justice for which he thirsts or, in the last extremity, to assail the injustice
he expects.
Rockville Center
is the opposite of Freeport. Its people
are rich, Freeport’s poor. Its people
are white, Freeport’s black. Rockville
Center’s granite-hewn Episcopalian church and Jewish synagogue are airily
large, opulent, and empty six days a week; Freeport’s little wood-frame Baptist
and Methodist congregation halls are dilapidated and noisily crowded. Yet the streets of these towns merge in a
continuous, seamless whole making the demarcation between them, however,
anything but arbitrary. In all their
outward aspects, the two towns fairly ring with a Catholic penchant for
confession, announcing to the world of appearances: This Is What I Am.
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The three boys dashed along the
path, the sun mottling their pale bodies through the trees, making them flash
and fade, until they neared the bank of the pond. Then they were fully in the sun. Stark, all three leaped into the icy, clear
water, hitting knees first. They sank
and spluttered up, shouting and laughing.
The water was so cold they scrambled onto the bank again almost
immediately, rolling over the tall grass, laughing and shouting. Then one of them got up and ran back along
the path to where they left their clothes and gear. The others creeped to their feet and
followed, running, still laughing, their teeth chattering, pushing one
another. When they were dressed again,
they trod the path back to the pond and then got serious, walking its
perimeter, looking for a place to set up camp.
COMING AS THE SOUND
OF WORDS
They
were the three Js, as their parents called them—Joel, James, and John—carefree,
bone skinny, and recently released from school.
What made them inseparable was their shared ambitionlessness and social
inferiority. Each reinforced the other
in laziness, however, and each came to the others’ defense against their
parents’ accusations of good-for-nothingness.
In their boniness they were awkward and shy, and when they were separated,
they suffered more than usual from the jeers of the unkind, especially in
school.
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OF BONDAGE AND THE BREAK
Aaron leaned on the stone wall and looked
across the Arno to where the Ponte Santa
Trinita met the Lungarno on the
other side. On the corner there was
Henry’s, a tavern in the British style, one of the very few taverns of any size
in the old City. Its green Venetian
blinds were always drawn half way up so passers by could look in. It was their favorite place to go in the old
city. But after a month, it came to be
more than a place to go in the late afternoon.
It came to be a problem.
He pitched his cigarette. Looking across the river, he could see the
heads and shoulders of pedestrians bobbing over the wall on that side, the
heads of motorcyclists in the street smoothly zipping along, and the tops of
cars in the usual jerking motion of rush and stop that characterizes traffic in
the city. The day was bright and
cold. The old people wore coats, the old
ladies especially wore furs or cloth coats with fur stoles. But the young people wore slick sport coats
with sweaters under them and silk ascots, tailored trousers, and expensive
shoes, and the women glided along with that seductive Italian femaleness that
suggested the air about them should be grateful they deign to walk in it, so
that one felt, sitting outside in the
Piazza della Reppublica, sipping
espresso, like one was living within a glossy photo meant for travel
magazines.
MADISON BLUES
“You would never see an animal—you
name it, dog or cat or porpoise, I don’t care—you’d never see an animal
ridicule one of its own. That’s where
people differ from animals, I tell you.
People are the only creatures ever to come to live on this earth who
hold up their own kind to ridicule. Once
you know that about a man, you’ve got him pretty well pegged. Stay away.
He’s human. Nothing good can come
of it. Go join the ants.”
They
had all gone still and become wrinkle-browed contemplators of their beer,
though the air around grew stifling with choked up laughter.
John
Fletcher was called “Fletch” by his co-workers.
He was a generous and gentle sort, but when anyone made fun of him, he
could become sour real fast. Poor Fletch
had just lost his job again and was afraid to go home. Someone had remarked about the pending black
eye, for his wife was a two-hundred pounder who ruled over him with such
authority he was always the first to leave the tavern and “do his duty on the
home front.” Laughter had erupted up and
down the long mahogany bar. He didn’t
take to being made fun of, and when he fell into this mood, which happened
often enough, the others would get real serious, until he was gone, whereupon
they'd laugh till they had to pee.
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HOUR BEFORE THE DARK
It was a warm summer day and he was
getting ready to go crabbing. His
younger sister had put on boots and he told her to take them off and put on sneakers. “You can’t pedal your bike in those things,”
he said, “besides, once we get there, you’ll probably kick off whatever you’re
wearing and go barefoot. Why do you want
to wear those clompers, anyway? It’s
going to be hot today.”
“I
thought we’d get wet,” she said.
“Yea,
that’s the point, dummy.”
“But
we’re not going swimming, are we?” she asked.
“No,
not this time, not where we’re going.”
And he went out into the garage to collect the gear they would be toting
on their bikes.
She
was four years younger than him and the second in a row of six children. He was sixteen now and she was twelve. All the others were close in age, shading
back to the youngest of two. But Peter
was oldest, and he was so much older than the rest of them that they often
didn’t think of him as a brother so much as another elder in the family. But he and Celeste had the closest
relationship of all the brothers and sisters.
She idolized him and was, in her childish dreaminess, almost in love
with him.
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