Shepherd Avenue. Charlie Carillo

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      SHEPHERD AVENUE

      Charlie Carillo

      For

      CISSY, DUDY, and MILLIE

      COPYRIGHT © 1986 BY CHARLES CARILLO

      ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS BOOK MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL MEANS INCLUDING INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEMS WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCEPT BY A REVIEWER WHO MAY QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN A REVIEW.

      FIRST EDITION

      LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

      Carillo, Charles.

      Shepherd Avenue.

      Summary: After his mother’s death, a shy ten-year-old boy must find a place for himself in his grandparents’ boisterous Italian family in New York City.

      [1. Family life–Fiction. 2. New York (N.Y.)–Fiction] 1. Title.

      PS3553.A685S4 1986 813’.54 [Fic] 85-20066

      ISBN 0-87113-043-2

      e-ISBN 978-1-516-10254-9

      CONTENTS

      TITLE PAGE

      DEDICATION

      COPYRIGHT

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      CHAPTER NINETEEN

      CHAPTER TWENTY

      CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

      CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

      CHAPTER ONE

      I NEVER saw my father with a newspaper in his hands.

      You hear about people in aboriginal tribes who live without ever seeing a written word or hearing the story of Jesus Christ’s life, but Salvatore Ambrosio traveled from Roslyn, Long Island, to midtown Manhattan each weekday to earn his living as an advertising copywriter. It was a long ride, more than an hour each way. I guess he looked out the window. It’s not likely that he talked to anyone.

      When he got home from work his dress pants, jacket, and tie came off and were replaced by frayed work shirts and pants. He was never casually dressed, my father. His clothing was either impeccable or absolutely shabby.

      My father’s aloofness toward the outside world didn’t do me much good when I’d ask him to help me with current-events homework. Without batting an eye he’d say, “Just tell your teacher that people are worse than ever, and do as many terrible things to each other as they can get away with.”

      “Nice thing to say,” my mother would comment. Then she’d trim an article out of Newsday and read it aloud to make sure I understood it, while my father watched with amusement as the two of us “swallowed that bilge they print in the paper.”

      My mother read the paper front to back. “Somebody in this house should know what’s going on,” she used to say. She knew in her heart that my father cared about people, but that he couldn’t hide his disappointment in most of them.

      One thing that never disappointed my father was his garden. He loved to spend hours tending it slowly, treating our plot of land as if it were a giant jewel that needed daily polishing.

      I got to know him best working beside him in silence. The big rectangles of lawns all around ours were tended by professional landscapers, men who jumped off trucks, unloaded machines, and, in furious clouds of noise and gasoline, cut lawns so fast it was like rape. My father used a four-bladed push mower. The neighbors mocked him behind his back, I’m sure.

      I got an important glimpse into a secret chamber of my father’s heart when I was nine years old. It was an October afternoon. We had just raked the lawn and put down fertilizer. The job done, I lay on the browning grass and fell asleep. When I awoke he was standing by our hedge, leaning against his rake just hard enough to bend the tines. A honking flock of geese flew overhead. He let the rake drop and did a perfect slow motion pantomime of their wings, flapping his arms and walking in their direction on tiptoes, backlit by the dull orange sunset. It was a startling imitation. I was sort of surprised when he didn’t get airborne.

      And I knew he wasn’t just a nut. Something was bugging him, urging him to tear away from the circumstances of his life — something he fought internally all the time. I didn’t know what it was, but I sensed that somehow I stood in his way more than my mother did. I pushed the lima beans around my plate and hardly touched the meat loaf that night.

      It all came down when my mother became sick with cancer the following year. We used to visit her at the hospital early in the evenings. She would make us feel better, believe it or not.

      “You guys got it backwards,” she explained. “The visitors are supposed to cheer up the patient. See?” After about an hour she’d chase us out of there.

      “Go feed the dog,” she’d say.

      “We don’t have a dog, Mommy.”

      “Go feed the cat.”

      “We don’t have a cat,” I’d giggle.

      “Go feed the ostrich.”

      We’d leave in laughter, then eat our dinners in Northern Boulevard diners, watching cars whiz past as we forked down cheeseburgers, french fries, and cole slaw. My father knew the rudiments of cooking, but I don’t think he was able to bear the thought of a meal at our home without his wife.

      She stayed at the hospital for all of April and half of May 1961. In the second week of May, he stopped taking me with him to visit. I was just ten years old but he left me alone in the house those nights and came home with take-out food in foil-lined bags.

      It occurs to me that I never had a baby-sitter. Wherever my parents went — to restaurants, the movies — I came along, a son treated like a miniature adult.

      Elizabeth McCullough Ambrosio died in the hospital on May 13. That night my father came home and filled a big aluminum pot with water, shook salt into it, and put the flame on full blast under it. He began opening a can of tomato paste.

      “We’re having spaghetti,” he said as he cranked the can opener. I started to cry because I knew she was dead.

      They buried my mother without a wake the day after she died. The only ones present at the cemetery were my father and me and a priest from a nearby Catholic church we’d never attended. My father was alternately sharp and polite with the priest, who didn’t dare to ask my father why he’d never seen us in church.

      We lived an awkward month in the house before my father put it on the market. He hired a stranger to run a garage sale and sell every stick of furniture we had.

      All my mother’s clothing and all his dress clothes went into a big Salvation Army hopper at a nearby shopping center. My father held me by the hips as I dropped three big bundles down the dark chute. For an instant I had a vision of him pushing me in after them.

      Everything that could possibly tie him down was now gone. We lived those final June