Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  There were not many automobiles below us in the Bronx streets when I was a boy. It was wartime and the gasoline was rationed. Few had cars, and those who did were careful about driving aimlessly here and there just for the carefree joy of taking a spin. In early winter mornings, when I was still half asleep, I could count the handful of autos on the road by the steel rattle of their tires chained against the ice. Everywhere was ice: ice coating the tree branches; ice sheeting the black mountains; ice chilling the little stone houses dotting the frozen hills; ice in my bed, piled up with coats for blankets. My grandmother left little chunks of stale bread soaked in muscatel on the windowsill to revive the sparrows freezing in the icy winter.

  “Poor creatures,” she said of them, as they shivered on the windowsill, their beaks blue from the cold.

  “I have never left Sicily,” I said to the short man, a bit sharply. “Why would you think that?”

  Another Sicilian, in a hunter’s cap, laughed, as if he had just woken up from a good dream, through whose mist he had found a cave of hidden gold coins as thick as chestnuts. Two gutted hares hung from the staff standing beside him. A double-barrel shotgun rested on his lap like a sleeping child. I liked his fat green cap and his green hunter’s jacket, brushed to a sigh of its used-up life; I liked the way he tried to make himself seem prosperous, though his tired half boots had cords for shoelaces, and red patches spiced his dull corduroys.

  “Do you have some matches?” he asked, half loading his pipe, his tobacco a peat of leaves and shredded debts.

  “Would it not have been polite to ask us whether we minded your smoking in such confined quarters?”

  I was gentle in my question, leaving him room to answer me with his dignity intact. You must always leave a man his dignity, unless you hate him. Unless you want to take the chance of his shooting you from behind an orphan tree on a lonely dirt path under a moon stained red by the dying sun and by all the disasters, great and small, that had befallen the day. Stained by the death of a strong goat, say, or of a fierce cat who has kept the rats from bothering the grain or by an insult that burns and burns in your heart or by the departure of a hungry son who had gone to work in the factories in the North and who one day would reject all memories of home and who would not even send a threepenny postcard back there.

  “I wanted the matches for later,” he said. “For when we arrive in Palermo.”

  “Palermo, is that where you’re headed?” I asked the hunter.

  “No, why would you think that?” he said, parroting me earlier, when I asked why he thought I had left Sicily. The other Sicilian laughed, and I did too, seeing how clever he was, the hunter, as all Sicilians are. Except me, my head filled with books in weary bindings, my head stuffed with dried memories in place of quick thoughts.

  The short Sicilian stuffed more bread into his mouth, ballooning his cheeks into a wide pumpkin grin. I was happy for him.

  “Are we Sicilians still as hungry as we were fifty years ago?” I asked the bread eater, asking all of Sicily, where, when I was a child, some had much and even more than much to eat and others sipped bowls of warmed water for their dinner.

  “Because you are fed, do you think the world is fed?” he replied, licking the little shreds of bread stuck between his teeth.

  “We Sicilians are always hungry,” the hunter said. “It is in our nature to be hungry, food or no food.”

  “Is that why we eat sparrows?” I asked.

  “To consume sparrows is in our nature,” said the hunter.

  “To eat baked sparrows is much in our nature,” the short Sicilian said. “To eat even their crusty beaks.”

  “In my region, we do not eat sparrows,” I said. “In my region we feed them.”

  “The region of plenty, I suppose,” the bread eater whispered above the grinding of train wheels, whose heedless sparks set fire to towns and villages and wooden shacks along the way.

  “The region of pity,” I said, “is where we lived, the region of pity.” That remark seemed to keep them pensive for a while, leaving one to gnaw on his bread and the other to feed on his hunter’s dreams.

  Now the train was gaining speed, traveling through flaming fields, hot fires the farmers had set to burn the dead stalks of corn, their ash to enrich the depleted soil and return its honor. The train slowed into the station, empty like an abandoned factory. Tucking the paper bag under his jacket to shelter it from the cascading rain, the short man rose and, with great courtesy, said, “I leave you and I salute you.”

  “I will miss you,” I said. As I would, missing the sparrow from the windowsill, missing a cloud as it sailed away beyond my view, missing those who had left me even before they had died, missing my life as it sped faster and faster away from me.

  Now we were again out of the station and into the countryside, where the sky was sending down a torrent, flooding everywhere lands high and low, engorging the newly planted corn and drowning everywhere the chickens in their coops and snails in their shells. In Sicily, the sun either burns the earth down to powder or the rain turns it into lakes where families of vipers enjoy their swim on Sundays, when Sicilians at mass pray for a fat roast chicken and potatoes for dinner.

  No sooner had the short man left and the train made its way again than a young man with a mandolin under his arm entered and, sizing us up as men who did not have the coins to pay for a tune and a song, went into another compartment. Two plainclothes policemen in black silk suits came into our compartment as if they owned it; they looked about and one, with nails for eyes, gave us stern, school-masterish looks, as if we had been caught passing smutty notes to each other under our desks.

  The hunter doffed his cap to them, to show them he knew his place. I wore no hat but made a little salute and a bow of the head, letting them know that I also knew mine.

  “Have you seen here a man with a bag of bread?” the tall one, with grilled-mutton hands, asked.

  The hunter and I looked at one another. He shrugged. I shrugged. Then I said in a respectful voice, “Not me, sir.”

  Then the other man, with nail eyes, said to the hunter, “I did not hear you speak.”

  “I saw no such man, Captain,” the hunter said, doffing his cap again, deferentially.

  Then mutton hands says, very softly, so as almost not to be heard, so as to make us strain to understand his words, “You’re too slow to answer when addressed by significant people.”

  “It could be taken for an insult,” nail eyes adds, with a smile to kill a subtle eel.

  Then he goes, “What fine hares you have there. Very fat and filled with honey, very ripe for a stew.”

  “I’m sure,” the hunter says, with measured dignity, “my wife would be as happy as I knowing that these hares will grace your table tonight.”

  The men did not smile.

  “Your excellencies,” he added, offering them his staff and hares.

  The train slowed into the station. “Keep your dinner,” nail eyes said, “with respects from us to your famous wife, if you find her still at home when you return.”

  They disembarked at the next station, scurrying down the platform, to apprehend one or another poor man who came into their suspicious view.

  “They always have an insult to humiliate you or to provoke you into regrettable foolishness,” the hunter said. “Why is it always like that?” he asked the hares.

  “Power,” I said, as if that explained the world. Then I added without thinking, “Sicily.”

  “But we are in the Bronx,” the hunter said.

  “It’s the same thing,” I said.

  He studied me for a moment, then asked, “Would you like them?” indicating the hares.

  For a moment, I thought of what a fine stew they would make, cooked in red wine, with some carrots, for color. But I remembered that I now had no place to cook them, no home and no stove. I thanked him for his offer, saying that I had a long journey ahead and thought it best to make it unencumbered. It was a reasonable excuse and he ac
cepted it with a dignified bow. It seemed that all the police unpleasantness that had threatened to sour our way had been settled and we were now ready to continue our journey along the neutral grounds on which it had begun.

  But when the train was some minutes from the station, he rose, lowered the window, and, as we were climbing over the Bronx River, he let fall the staff and dangling hares into the muddy water below. He grinned at me, pleased with his costly triumph, and rubbed his hands on his pants, as if to wipe away the grimy memory of the policeman’s insult.

  “Well, that’s finished,” he said, with the finality of a newly dug grave.

  There will be other hares, I wanted to assure him, even bigger and ones with more honey than those you have just shot. You are still a young man after all, I wanted to say. But that was not true. He was not young. But not old either, having the age of a man who has come to know who he is without falsifications. He must have been fifty, the age, I supposed, when a man has attained wisdom, which, I imagined, would one day also be mine, like a great inheritance, like a vineyard on a hill taller than the rain and clouded from the scorching sun.

  Finally, I understood who he was, the hunter, and I said, “Are you not my uncle, Umberto? The one who owned seven mulberry trees and left for America after the Great World War? Are you not the one who gave me five dimes in secret after Sunday mass, a secret between us lest your son be jealous of your gift to me?”

  As we Sicilians are jealous of gifts given to others and worried by the intent of presents given to us, as we Sicilians are worried by everything—a life of worries that not even death has the power to end. We worry in the grave and worry in the few cents’ worth of our ashes. I wanted to say all this but thought it unnecessary for the occasion, thinking also that he had known all this, as he was clearly a wise man without falsifications.

  “You are that uncle,” I continued, “whose quince tree I climbed one day and shook the crows from their strong roost in the clouds.”

  “You were a good boy, you and that girl too,” he said, at last, “saving my quinces from their beaks. Those crows,” he said, as if he wished to break their wings and bake them in a pie.

  “But they were hungry, those crows,” I said, “like most of us in Sicily. Like all of the world who labor and from whose labor others summer in mansions by the sea.” My voice trailed off, ashamed at the obviousness of my remarks.

  “Your grandmother,” he said, changing the subject and gracefully saving me from further embarrassment, “liked to drink a glass of muscatel with a raw egg when she was feeling sick. She was always sick,” he said. “She drank the muscatel that I made myself, from my own grapes,” he said proudly.

  “She was infrequently sick,” I said, not liking his speaking of my Norma in that way, as if she had been an invalid. She was, of course, but who wants to review all that. I also did not like that he was so boastful of his insignificant vineyard, the size of a pale sneeze.

  The train was coming to the station where my grandmother was to wait for me, and there she was, on the platform, standing exactly at the spot where my door opened. My uncle gave her a polite smile and she to him. I stepped onto the platform, turning to say goodbye respectfully, and he saluted me. Imagine that, I wanted to say to my grandmother, imagine that I would meet my uncle in a train after not seeing him all these hundreds of years, or so it seemed. “But nothing is unusual in Sicily,” my grandmother said, reading my thoughts, as she always had, even from miles away.

  She took my hand, as she always had when I was a boy, leading me through the marketplace, barrels and bushels and baskets of snails and olives and salted cod, dirty white like leftover snow, fronting the shops. To my surprise, because it was our usual marketing day, we stopped at none of the stalls but walked out of the district and followed a path through a wood, stands of cypresses flanking our way like blackened arches of a burnt-down church.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “A surprise,” she said.

  I became worried that it might be like the surprise she had given me when I was a boy in short pants. One cloudless, burning summer day we took a similar path through similar woods to come upon a smallish Greek temple dedicated to the goddess of plenitude standing in the cypress groves on a cliff above the sea. My grandmother, mixing a bowl of honey and wine for the goddess, ordered me to pray.

  Pray, she said, that we can pay the rent, pray that we can pay the electricity to light us through the coming winter. Her offering and our prayers were soon rewarded with a soaking rainstorm, the goddess imagining, perhaps, that we were farmers praying for water in a land of drought. My grandmother was never clear in her prayer, I suppose. Or perhaps over time, the goddess had become less Greek and more Sicilian, a trickster, granting favors but not the ones prayed for.

  “I don’t want a surprise, Nonna,” I said. “I don’t like it here anyway; this place is filled with memories of nothing alive.”

  I need not have worried because we soon left the temple and the cypress grove and walked into a field of frozen lava, pocked here and there with little caves leading down into the underworld of shades.

  “There is someone here who has been in my dreams these last three nights, and who has been asking for you,” my grandmother said. “It would be disrespectful not to make the visit.”

  She was right, of course. The dead—lest they sour in their loneliness—must always be visited when they inquire after you.

  “Who was in your dreams?” I asked, hoping it was not my mother, whose grave I failed to visit on the last anniversary of her death. And a few before that as well, I remembered guiltily.

  “No, not she, but another who still thinks of you.”

  “My wife?” I said, a bit annoyed.

  “No, not she, though I’m sure she remembers you all the time, now that the ninny has time for reflection on her life.”

  My wife had once gone to America to visit her married sister in New York, and when she returned, after only four weeks, she refused to wash the dishes after dinner, saying that she and I should share the job, as the equals that we were. She came back with other such modern ideas, which my grandmother found unnatural to life and demeaning of me, the man of the house, who should never wash the dishes lest he become a woman. I never cared who washed the dishes or who swept the floor, having always done my share of both.

  But my grandmother rarely spoke to my wife after she made her declaration of domestic liberation. Grandmothers are even less forgiving than mothers, who themselves also never forgive wrongs done to their sons, I reckoned. The truth is that I never loved my wife, dishes or no dishes. I never loved her in bed, where all life’s opera starts and ends. Let’s say that she and I were all recitatives and no duets, no grand soaring to the heavens, no ecstasy. Let’s say that one does one’s duty when called upon to save one’s honor and the honor of the other. But duty does not ignite fires.

  “Let it go, Nonna,” I said. “All that is long ago and no one is pure.”

  That was true, of course, no one is pure, or half pure, but I wished it were not so, and that we could all live as we did when we were children. But then I recalled how children are mixtures of sweetness and guile, how children can be murderous and jealous, how children are midget versions of ourselves, the grownups, who betray with every breath the purity of each clean dawn.

  “Yes,” I added, “only the olive oil is pure in these days.”

  “Figlio mio,” she said. “Today the olive oil is often mixed, the good with the inferior.”

  “Even here in Sicily?” I said.

  She tilted her head to give me her knowing look, the one she used to stare down the butcher when he tried to switch rabbit for veal, the look she used to show the world she knew what was what.

  We soon came to a declivity, a pocket in the earth the size of a wheelbarrow, from which rose a cold mist that chilled me on the spot. A voice came through the mist or was centered in it, a voice drifting in and out like from an old-fashioned radio w
ith weak reception. I knew that voice. Marie’s voice.

  How happy I was to hear her! Missing her as I had all these years. Missing her so that nothing else but she filled my bed at night, even when I was not alone in it.

  We were in our teen years when we first made love. In the Bronx Botanical Gardens, that was, behind some thick bushes ripe with clover and on a bed of daisies and dandelions still moist with spring rain.

  “Will you love me forever?” she asked, without flourish.

  “Yes,” I said. As I have, even after she married a schoolteacher who had gone to a university, and even after she died at nineteen in childbirth. The child went with her. In Sicily, we die young. The measles, the smallpox, the heartbreak of unrequited love. She had married the wrong man, she confessed to me one day, a case of mistaken identity, she said, thinking he was me, just older and more settled in life with a classroom and a pension.

  “Marie,” I said, “how are you?” It was banal, that, a commonplace and hollow greeting of the living to the living, but I had meant it, wanting to know how she had fared all these years of being dead and what, so to speak, was her present state of mind.

  “It’s cold here,” she said, as she used to say at the movie house when the air-conditioning had been turned up too high and the film started to lose significant interest because it was only the cold you were thinking about and not the lovers kissing on the screen.

  “I wish I had a sweater to give you,” I said, knowing it was a foolish idea even as I said it. But one never knows how it is with them or how to treat them, there in their caves of shadows or in the cold mist that embodies them when they come to visit us briefly on earth.

  “Don’t worry yourself,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello, to remind you to cover your uncle’s quince trees so that they will not die in the frost.”

  Sometimes I did forget. I had lost seven trees through my negligence one year, when fall had sprinted to a sudden, unannounced killing winter.

  “That is thoughtful of you, Marie, to be thinking of me and my uncle’s quince trees.”