Chapter 4 Little Roccalba

Salvatore Marzullo learned the trade the way a boy learns the language of a house, by being in the rooms where it was spoken, so that he could not afterward say when he had begun to know it, only that there had never been a time when he did not. The street where they lived was four blocks long and every door on it had a name over it from the old country, and the whole city had given the four blocks a single name, which was Little Roccalba, after the hill town so many of them had come down from. Groceries, a barber, a shoemaker, a man who mended chairs, a woman who took in lace and gave it back a month later looking like a spider's argument. Above the doors the names ran in gold and in paint and in chalk, and in the summer the street stayed out on the stoops until the light went because the apartments were ovens, and the whole four blocks talked to itself across the railings, and everyone knew the health of everyone and said so. Salvatore was twelve in the year I am speaking of, and he was already useful. His chores began at six on the mornings there was a call: empty the water from the flower vases in the front room, polish the brass of the horse-drawn carriage their father had bought secondhand from a livery that was going under, and walk the horse, which was called Bell, out to the yard and back, and after the carriage had been retired for a motor hearse bought even more secondhand, there was the motor to be warmed and the glass to be wiped and the back doors to be pinned open so the air could go through. He did not mind the work. He had discovered early that a house with a body in it is quieter than other houses, and that a quiet house will let a boy think, and that on the whole he liked to think. His real education was the book. Nunzia kept the account in the school copybook ruled by hand, and when the entries outgrew the first book she bought a second and a third, and the third was bound in black oilcloth with a strip of red down the spine, and she called it, by then, only the keeping book, as though there had been no other and would be no other. The boy was allowed to look at it and not to touch it, and the looking was the whole of his schooling in the new language, because the names in that book came to the house written and spoken, and his mother wrote them down, and he copied them. So Salvatore learned to write English by copying the names of the dead, and by the time he was ten he could spell a great many surnames that a child of ten has no business knowing, and he could not spell his own first name in English without checking, which his sister found funny for the rest of her life. The front room had two purposes and one window. When the lamp was dark, the room was a sitting room, with a horsehair sofa and a clock with a chipped face and a photograph of the old country over the mantel, and any neighbor who came in sat on the sofa and was given coffee. When there was a body, the sofa was carried to the back and the room became the lying-in room, and the lamp was lit behind the red shade, and the chair was set by the door for the ones who came to sit. The chair was not for the dead. His mother had ruled on that, in the early days, when his father had put the chair at the head of the table on a blanket because that is how it is done at home, and Nunzia had taken the blanket away and carried the chair to the door and stood it there and said that a family in grief does not want to be shown a coffin first, they want to be met at the door, and the dead would keep another hour. Gaetano had let it stand, and afterward had never moved the chair again. So the boy grew up understanding that in this trade the important door was the street door and the important hour was the one before the burial and the important thing in the room was not the box but the person who came to sit by it. The funerals of children were the worst and the most frequent, in those years, and they made his father quiet for a week. The one Salvatore remembered best was a girl of nine who lived two doors down, the daughter of a family named Puleo, who kept a fish stall and a handcart and a loud kitchen. The girl had a fever in the spring, and it took her in three days, and the whole street closed its shutters the morning she died, and Gaetano did the work himself and would not let Orazio or the new man help him, because he had carried that child on his shoulders up Verri Street in the feast-day procession not two summers before, and he would not hand her to a stranger. They buried her on the hill at ten in the morning with the whole four blocks walking behind the carriage, and Father Ilario, who was very old by then and had buried more of that street than he had married, said the prayers in the language of the old country and then in English, both, because he had learned that the dead in this place needed to be asked in two tongues, and some of the older ones to this day will tell you that he was the last man in Brackwater who could do it properly. Afterward, when the street had gone back to its railings and its talk, Salvatore sat on the steps of 114 and watched the men from the Puleo fish stall load their cart for the evening market as though the day had not happened, and he understood something about his neighbors he would spend the rest of his life trying and failing to say simply, which was that a people who have lost their land will carry grief the way they carry money, close to the body and not for the neighbors to see, and that the ones who scream loudest at a grave are the ones who have never had to leave anything behind. He was twelve and he was wrong about this in detail and would be wrong about it for years. But sitting on the step with his hands on his knees he had begun to make the mistake of thinking about the people around him, which is how a boy who is going to be a businessman starts, and it was the beginning of the long argument between him and his father, though neither of them knew it, and the street did not know it, and the red lamp went on again the next week for a man from the mill, and the work went on, and the rue-and-sorrow of the four blocks continued to be, for the Marzullo family, a body of water that kept a small boat afloat. ---