Junior switched to a singsong voice:
The boy flew at Junior, frantically throwing small punches, crazy with rage and grief, and Junior shoved him toward Cheech, and Cheech kicked him, and then Junior knocked him down. They were in a snarling fury now, and they pulled over the taboret, spilling poster colors and water over the floor and onto the ruined comics. They sprayed the signs one final time with beer, and went laughing into the evening.
The boy sat there crying harder than he ever had before.
He was still there when Grady came in, and he tried to explain, but Grady exploded in injured anger: “Why’d you leave the
The boy ran out to the darkening street. He never went back. That winter, he took another route to school because he couldn’t look at the sign shop ever again without thinking of that terrible summer evening when he’d opened the door to blasphemy. He didn’t become a cartoonist, either, but he had learned things in that shop that he carried with him for the rest of his life. In that place in the gardens of Brooklyn, a one-armed man had given him art.
LATER, AFTER THE TERRIBLE thing had happened, people in the neighborhood remembered the day that Andreas Vlastopoulos had arrived among them. Marie from the dry cleaner’s remembered that he wore faded jeans and a crisp white shirt, and that it was early summer and the sun gleamed on his yellow hair. Mrs. Caputo remembered that he asked her for directions to the Griffin house, and that his accent was thick and strange, because it wasn’t a German or a squarehead accent and he was so blond. George, the bartender at Rattigan’s, remembered seeing the young man staring up at buildings and street signs as if he were lost. Some remembered his blue eyes, others his battered brown canvas suitcase, tied shut with a rope. They all remembered the blue guitar.
“He finally went into Mary Griffin’s,” George said later. “I remember thinkin’ there was somethin’ wrong with the way he looked. It wasn’t just he was a big handsome guy; hell, there’s lots of big handsome guys in this neighborhood. No, this guy was, I don’t know how to say it. Beautiful?”
The young man — he was nineteen that summer — took a room in the back of Mary Griffin’s house, which was the first building on the street below the avenue, one of two wedged between the tenements and a large garage. Since the tenements along the avenue had no backyards, their clotheslines stretched across the space above Mary Griffin’s yard, and that of the Chinese house beside hers, to hooks drilled into the wall of the garage. The clotheslines were always full, blocking the sun.And on the top floor of one of the tenements, living alone with her six-year-old son, was the Widow Musmanno.
“She shouldn’t live like that, alone,” Mrs. Caputo used to say. “It ain’t right. She married a bum and the bum got killed. But why should she pay the rest of her life? His family says she can’t go out, she gotta wear black like an old lady. Hey, this ain’t the old country. This is America. It ain’t right. A young woman like that. A pretty girl like that…”
But for two years, Widow Musmanno had lived her sentence of solitude, worrying about her son as he played in the street, scrubbing the apartment, mumbling prayers in church each morning for her husband, and washing clothes. She ate too much. She added pounds. And then one day, that first week after the young man’s arrival, she was hanging clothes on the line and glanced down into the yard and saw Andreas Vlastopoulos.
