"THE LIGHT OF BROOKLYN"
by
Chuck Cascio
At first the only light would be the final ivory beams of
moonlight, blurred by my still sleepy eyes, and then came the traffic lights of
Washington, DC, flashing yellow because it was too early for traffic. Maybe
dawn's first light or the roar of a truck or my parents' whispers in the front
seat of the car would eventually fully awaken me, and then I’d remember with a
rush of excitement that we were headed for New York—Brooklyn to be precise.
Brooklyn, where
the talk was tough and the hearts were tender, where bagels were soft and pretzels were hot, where porches
were "stoops" and baseball was "stickball'' and where the
"yard" was no half acre—Hey, what half acre? Who you kiddin’?—it was
a fenced lot behind an apartment building, just a short drop off the fire
escape steps.
Trips to Brooklyn,
where I was born, were filled with so much. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, and
the cousins who taught me the games of the street like stoopball, stickball, and
fire escape jumping, and, when I was a little older, dance steps that were
almost suggestive enough to get me expelled from school back home in
Virginia.
I could always
find a cousin to ride with on the subway to Ebbets Field or Yankee Stadium, or
to rate lemon-ice shops, or to pick up a “slice” on almost any corner. The
reunions with relatives, all of whom spoke at the same time at staggering
volumes in a combination of Italian and Brooklynese, were festivals of
laughter, lasagna, cannoli, chianti (which you took at least a sip of no matter
how old—or young—you were), and stories of questionable origin and veracity. But I ate and I sipped and I played and I
listened…and I believed it all.
We'd arrive in
Brooklyn at mid-morning. Daylight always exposed the city's scars—overflowing
trashcans, multi-lingual graffiti, and odors so distinct you could taste them. But
none of that bothered me, because I chose to delight in Brooklyn’s charms—the
gesturing people, the corner candy stores, and the sense that every resident of
every block was part of a family.
The corridor to
the old first-floor apartment where my mother's parents lived on Noll Street was
always dark. I'd knock on the door and listen for the comforting sound of
Grampa's slippers scuffing across the floor, and then I'd hear his asthmatic
cough and his familiar wheeze grow closer.
Grampa unlocked the door, and the apartment light cut through the
hallway's darkness.
The thin little
man with the sleeveless undershirt smiled. He spoke sparingly because his
English was still awkward despite his years away from Italy, and the effort to
speak was especially great on days when the asthma was bad. But the smile on
the well-creased face was genuine, and so was the surprising strength of the
hug. Then he would return to his seat at the table next to the window where he
would smoke, sip vermouth, cough, and call out in an Italian
rasp to friends who walked by. If the asthma was bad, he
would just wave. But everyone stopped at the screened-in window to say, “Buongiorno” or “Buona sera,” or just to tip their hat.
I would stare at
Grampa—his little chest heaved as he sat there. I knew of no one else like him,
no one so frail yet so essential to everyone and everything. There were never any easy, involuntary
breaths, only what seemed like conscious efforts to suck in air. Often, his Italian words would come
in barely audible snatches, but no matter how noisy the room, when Grampa
spoke, people listened. He could start my parents and aunts and uncles talking
by uttering just one throaty syllable. But then he could stop an argument with
one gesture and a stare.
Despite the
visible strain of every breath, Grampa was steady with his hands. He would take
a pencil and make strong delicate lines freehand on any nearby piece of paper—a
napkin, shopping bag, or the back of an envelope would do. I would watch him as
he looked upward at the cracked ceiling, his mind creating a distant picture,
and then his pencil would duplicate that private vision. Sometimes it took a
few minutes, sometimes many, but he would eventually motion for me to come
closer to him. He would then give me the drawing—a clown or a cathedral from
his beloved Italy or a young boy on a bicycle—and he would smile, his face a
roadmap of lines, hug me, and dismiss me with a kind look or a squeeze on the
shoulder.
When the asthma
wasn't bad and his stamina was good, he would make paper puppets for me, clever
ones with sharp faces and clothing drawn in detail. He would cut out the arms and
legs and magically arrange threads so the puppet parts would
move. Sometimes he'd play with me by being the puppet's voice in Italian. I
couldn't understand the words, but I understood the affection.
Grampa combed his
straight, thin hair with a tortoise-shell comb about three-inches wide and
three-inches long. His clothing hung in an old wooden wardrobe where he also
kept mints that he shared with me. Sometimes before he went to bed at night he
would leave a stack of coins on top of a piece of paper with my name on it so I
would find them in the morning when I awoke. They were mine to keep and to take
and to spend at the corner candy store.
Grampa was the first of the Brooklyn family
to die. I was eight. We had been to Brooklyn for Christmas, and a few days
after returning to our home in Virginia, we received the phone call. We
traveled back to Brooklyn by train instead of car. The train smelled musty, and
the frost on the windows allowed me only a few glimpses of the water,
tenements, and towering buildings that comprised the East Coast landscape. My mother, whose name was Bianca, didn’t
speak or cry during the entire trip, staring straight ahead, saying a rosary
quietly. My father sat with his arm around her the whole way.
When we entered the
little Brooklyn apartment, my beautiful Aunt Anna stood in the doorway, and my
mother, the youngest of her family, wept openly in her sister’s arms. Aunt Anna
kept repeating through her own tears, “What will we do, Bianca, what will we do
without Papa?” Their brothers, my Uncle
Joe (actually “Giuseppe”) and Uncle Gig (actually “Luigi”), discretely dabbed
at their own red eyes as they attempted to console their mother, my wailing Nana
Emma.
Years later, Nana
described Grampa’s death to me, struggling with her English:
"You Grampa,
he’s a-sitting on his chair by his window, and he say to me, ‘Emma, where are
you?’ I say, 'I’m-a right here, Michael. But why? Can you no see me?' He say, 'But where? Everything is dark, Emma,
I no see nothing.' You Grampa, he’s
breathing so hard, so I run out of the house; I looking for help; when I coming
back inside in one minute…he's-a dead."
Confusion and loss
and the resignation that life somehow moves on through death flashed across her
kind, round face as she reached for my hand.
I continued to go
to Brooklyn until almost everyone else had either moved or died. But I was growing
up a child of the suburbs, and for a time over the years, Brooklyn became a
world apart, a world where apartments shrank, sky disappeared, and some family
stories became too awful to believe…even though they were true. Then there was
the car ride—it grew longer as I grew older and there was definitely no more
thrill in starting the trip in darkness. Especially when I knew it would end
that way too.
But today, when I
walk those wonderful streets, despite the changing scenery, I can see him and
all the people of those early Brooklyn years…the people and places who still
bring light to
life.
THE END
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