They found him the next morning on his back in the yard, as broken as the blue guitar beneath him. The police decided that he must have fallen from the roof of the tenement, and nobody in the neighborhood offered any other theory. But when the ambulance came from Kings County to take him to the morgue, Mrs. Caputo began to cry and so did Marie from the dry cleaner’s and Mary Griffin, too. They waited around and after a while a short mustachioed man came to Mary Griffin’s and said he was the uncle of Vlastopoulos and would pick up the young man’s belongings. He was inside for about an hour, and came out with the brown canvas suitcase, and the broken pieces of the guitar. He put the broken pieces in a garbage can on the corner, sighed, and started trudging heavily toward the subway.
Late that night, when the bars had closed and the last buses had gone to the terminals and everybody in the neighborhood was asleep, Widow Musmanno came down to the street. She was dressed in black. She wore no makeup and her hair was blowsy. She pulled a shawl tightly over her shoulders, and then began to shuffle to the corner. The pieces of the blue guitar jutted from the wire garbage can. She looked at them for a long moment, and then removed them, all fractured wood and twisted wire strings. She held them to her breasts, the way a mother hugs a child, and then with a dry sob, she entered the country of the old.
AT FORTY-EIGHT, SONNY MARINO lived with his wife and three daughters in a small brick house up the block from the Store. He wanted to live there until the end of his life. In a way, the Store
So at nineteen, Sonny moved into the world of men. This was no easy matter, for Sonny was a leader of the Cavaliers. With Nit-Nat, Wimpy, Stark, and Midnight, he was one of the toughest street fighters in that part of Brooklyn, a defender of the holy neighborhood turf against the incursions of marauding vandals. When he was in what he called the hitter bag, he could beat you with his hands, cripple you in a wrestling match, or confront your ball bats with an iron pipe. In that neighborhood, his ferocity was legendary; so was his ability to absorb punishment.
“That’s it, guys,” he announced at his father’s wake when the other Cavaliers came to console him. “I’m giving up the hitter bag. I got a business to run.”
The Cavaliers did not long survive his retirement. Some went into the army, a few joined the police department, five fell to heroin. Most of the others married and moved away. And after a decade, Sonny Marino realized he was the last Cavalier left in the neighborhood. When he showed pictures of himself and the others to his daughters, they giggled at his “Duck’s Ass” hairdo, his tight, pegged pants, his T-shirts rolled high on the shoulders with a cigarette pack tucked in the roll. They didn’t understand how people could dress that way or do the things Sonny said they used to do when they were young and tough, feared and respected.
“Things aren’t like that anymore, Dad,” the oldest one, Rose, said to him. “The world is different now.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “Go to college. Get a career. Maybe you’re right. I hope so.”
Occasionally, one of the old Cavaliers would show up in the neighborhood and Sonny Marino would be joyful. Nit-Nat saw his mother once a year, on her birthday. Stark drove in from Sayville with his kids to eat pasta at Monte’s on Fifth Avenue. Midnight would come up out of the subway alone and pop a beer at the Store on his way to his sister’s house. They always talked about old times, of course, the way soldiers do who once have shared danger and have survived. Sonny’s wife, Maria, who was much younger than the Cavaliers, was amused; the girls always giggled. Sonny would turn to Nit-Nat or Stark and laugh at himself and say, “Hey, whatta they know?”
The neighborhood gradually changed, and so did Sonny. He had less hair and more paunch. He hired a Puerto Rican kid who could speak to some of the new customers. He learned a little Spanish himself. He added fresh
