They call me out of the rec room because I have visitors. A guard, really just an older guy who's hard and on good behavior, takes me down the green-tiled hallway, and I can hear guys shouting and a radio playing and the hum of the fluorescent lights. I keep my head down out of habit, and I can see the scuff marks on the tile and the mop tracks. The air is still and holds the smells of ammonia and sweat. I don't really look to either side of me, but I always know who is there and what's happening. I don't focus on any one thing around me but I can describe everything there. I don't walk fast or slow, I just walk with the guard, and I don't show any feelings.

It's 1971, I'm sixteen, I'm angry, and I'm in the system.

My mom is waiting in the rec room with Suzanne. They're sitting at their usual table, on the hard plastic chairs. Mom is wearing her starched white blouse and wool jacket and has her hair covered with a flower-print scarf, no makeup, no perfume. Her eyes don't quite meet mine. Suzanne is wearing some kind of green velvet thing that looks like a cape, and she's looking around the place, at the water-stained wallpaper and the stupid sea scene painted on the far concrete block wall, and kind of nodding her head and moving her fingers to a beat only she hears. All the guys are looking at her. I know right away she's stoned.

The guard tells me to sit down and backs off a few paces, and I sit and look at Mom and Suzanne, being just hard enough, I hope, and we start talking, telling our lies.

Me: “Yeah, I was talking to the counselor, and he told me they have a special program I can get into that will take me into college. I'm working hard at that, and I'm really doing okay.”

Mom: “Mr. Betters told me that you could return to school. Only the principal and a few teachers will know about this.” Mom looks sideways. “You won't have to be in gym or shop class. They want you to study more.”

Suzanne: “My stepmom says I can take those special music classes with the band director at Lincoln University.”

It goes on like this for a while. Mom and I talk nervously while Suzanne hums to herself. We make less and less eye contact until neither of us is even looking in one another's direction. I'm listening in on the conversations around me even while I'm talking. Skippy is on the table next to me, eight measured feet away, with his mom and the preacher from their church. Daryl Pugh is across the room with a girl he says he's married to and their baby. There's a kid I don't know—maybe he's new—two tables down with his parents, a weak little kid with an angry father in a suit and a sniffling mother, and I can hear the family fight starting. I know the guards are watching them and that they'll take the old man's side when he pops the kid.

I ask Suzanne how she's doing, trying to say more but not be too obvious. I'm trying to remember what it's like being high, and I'm wondering what it must be like for her stoned in this place. I see her pouting half smile and that faraway look in her eyes, and then I know that she's not as high as she wants to be, that she's probably pushing it just a little for herself and for me.

“It's all cool,” she says. “Everything is where it needs to be.”

Right then I want to smack her hard. If I could ever justify smacking a girl, it would be her at that moment. The other guys boast about doing it or they talk in Group about how their fathers smack their mothers around, but that isn't me. Not in my family, not ever. My father says that only the Irish beat their wives; “Drunks and wife beaters,” he says about the Irish with a sneer in his voice.

This shoots through me in a few seconds, and I go straight and feel my arms get tense-light, but that red vibrating light I see around people and things when I get really angry just kind of glows softly around Suzanne and the table, and I relax. Suzanne sees it come and go and looks helplessly at Mom, but Mom doesn't have a clue. The guard behind me picks up on the vibe right away and takes a half step toward us.

“What the fuck does that mean?” I want to say. Instead, I cough into my hand and say, “What are you talkin' about? ‘Everything is where it needs to be?' Am I where I need to be?”

The guard takes another half step.

“It all works out in the end. Balance and peace.” Suzanne's eyes harden just a little. I wonder if she's daring me now, and I want to cry. Her eyes stay registered on stoned hardness, and we stare at one another for a few pitiful seconds, locked into a silence we always let poison whatever there is between us.

Mom tells me Suzanne drove her out to the Center and that they're going shopping later. I know my dad wouldn't drive her out, and I know that my folks are taking care of Suzanne because her family is such a mess. The excuse is that they live too far out of town for Suzanne to get to school and marching band practice easily, and everyone except Suzanne and I say they believe this. “We can have crab cakes in Chester afterwards,” my mom offers up with an unsteady smile.

It's 1971 and I'm sixteen and I'm a scared and angry kid and I'm playing way out of my league.

Back in the rec room, and later in the dining hall, a few guys make some cracks about my mom and Suzanne, and there's a little bit of craziness when I find myself against a wall with three of them pressing up on me and one of them acting as a lookout. Something like this happens about once a week, and I either push my way out of it or talk my way out, whatever works.

The white guys either think I'm too crazy or too much trouble to take off. They come mostly from the South or have a parent or two that did. Some of them have kids and say they have places of their own on the outside. For the white guys, it's hillbillies versus hippies and everyone but me against the blacks, and this gets me called “jigaboo boy” or “nigger lover.” It bounces off of me most of the time, because I'm already used to hearing “wop” and “dago” at school. Most of the black guys are into their own thing. One of them says he's a Black Panther, and I try to talk to him about Soul On Ice and Huey Newton -- and we almost get along, or at least casually agree to not be in one another's way. He passes the word to his brothers to just ignore me. I end up by myself most of the time. At Canteen I sit uneasily between the blacks and the whites with two other rejects, both black and one of them gay, and if we talk to one another at all it's just to tell some lies and hear a voice that isn't completely hostile. I hear two other good voices these days, one a middle-aged black preacher who visits the Center and the other an intense young English teacher who wears wire rims and a mustache and drives a VW. The teacher wanted to give me a book by Herman Hesse, but the Center wouldn't allow it.

The guards intervened once when I was about to get pounded, and the next day one of the teachers set up a match in the gym without telling me. They called me out of class, and I had to face off against this hillbilly named Cabeen Slaymaker. He isn't much bigger than I am but he's mean and I know from Group that he lost all of his teeth fighting with his old man. Cabeen got a hook into me, but I took him down twice. That red vibrating light clicked on, and I laid him out. He wanted to go a third round, but the guard, obviously disappointed in the outcome, sent me back to class bloody and dirty and shaking. After that, Cabeen and his two friends started jumping me, so I had to watch out for them and some other guys too.

I do the time and get out just before Christmas. My mom and dad have a kind of party for me. We go out for clams and hamburgers and ice cream with Suzanne. My grandparents give me sweaters and ties and cuff links. Suzanne is staying down the street with a cousin of hers. Twenty-two years later I look at the photographs my dad took that evening and recognize my stoned smile and wonder if Suzanne is still alive and where she might be if she is.

*****

School starts back the second week of January. No one is supposed to know where I've been, but everyone does. I didn't have any friends before going into the Center, and I don't have any when I come out, except Suzanne, but a few kids are a little nicer to me and Daryl Pugh's brother and his friends don't try pushing me around in the hallways or taking my lunch away anymore. During gym and shop class I go to the library, and Miss Calucci, a former nun, lets me shelve books and read through the World Book Encyclopedia. I have a crush on her. I think I could marry Suzanne and be a hippie and stay stoned and just have everything so cool, all the records and friends I want in a commune or something, but when I think of Miss Calucci I see us reading together and going to art galleries in Philadelphia and eating seafood and drinking good wine and riding in a new car with the windows down and the wind blowing through her hair—somewhere out west or maybe up in New England.

Pictures from Vietnam and Southeast Asia are everywhere, and Nixon is either loved or hated, and I instinctively hate the president because, well, because he's the president, and I don't even stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance anymore. Guys who might have been sent to the Center or jail a year ago are being sent to the Army instead, and the school principal tells me and my parents that I should go into the Army myself. At least my old man stands up for me then, having done his own hard service during the world war. I figure that I'll go to Canada or back into the system, but I'm not going into the Army, and I start watching the news and reading the papers because I know I need to figure this out. When I start telling people this I get in more fights, and Billy Heron's mother, who owns Heron's Soda Shop, won't sell me soda or ice cream anymore. Every chance I get, I get stoned and listen to the MC5 or Janis Joplin or the Rolling Stones, and I hope it all just works out somehow.

They send my class to Lukens Steel and to the Wilmington GM factory for plant tours disguised as school trips and the guys leading the tours are saying things like, “When you work here…” and “You girls in the back—oh, excuse me, you're boys—will have to get haircuts before working here, of course.” Skippy is out of the Center, and he sees his dad working at the auto plant and I watch them make eye contact and turn away from one another. I understand this, even though he's black and I'm white. I know better than to say anything, but I do steal a rubber hood latch and we throw it at a teacher later and run away laughing together.

Guys are coming back from Vietnam, and a few guys in school are really wanting to go -- just to get out of the house and be tough and independent like the returning soldiers -- and they're getting these brochures from the recruiting stations and bringing them in to school. One guy even decks a teacher so he can be expelled and then join the Army. The boys say they're toughening up for the Army by burning themselves with cigarettes and sleeping outside, but they would be doing that anyway — war or no war. Most Friday nights we're getting stoned and jumping into cars and drag racing and fighting or going to basketball games and throwing rocks at the buses from the other schools. I let my learner's permit lapse because my old man is using driving lessons to scare the hell out of me and because I don't want to carry ID around with me.

*****

One of the guys just back from Vietnam tells Suzanne he wants to marry her, and she doesn't say no. I can't even look at her now. When she comes into English class and sits next to me, I turn and look out the windows. I show up after her big-deal flute recital, and we walk home without speaking, my stomach twisting inside of me. It isn't the first time I wish I were dead, but it is the first time I feel like dying because I'm losing a woman.

Suicide does take a few kids, car crashes a few more, and a few girls get pregnant and drop out, followed by their boyfriends. These couples get married and live with the girl's parents or move into the cheap apartments out by the cemetery. Darlene Simmons — a flirtatious white girl rumored to be pregnant with the child of a black guy from Baltimore — shoots herself in the stomach and bleeds to death in her bedroom. Mole — a black girl from a tenant-farming family out in Homeville — disappears one day, but no one tells the police. Darlene's cousin is one of the few kids who talks to me, but we never talk about Darlene. Mole was the first girl I danced with. It was a summer night, and we were on her porch roof, maybe ten kids, black and white, and her brother kept playing “Sock It To Me, Baby” by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, and it just ended up that we danced together.

While all of this is happening, kids with names like Edward Gillingham and Tippy Herrington are pulling in straight A's and leading school assemblies with the principal and getting football trophies and talking to the Army recruiters about advancement in the military and visiting colleges. These are the children of the dentists and the lawyers, and they all live out by the Episcopal church and have new cars and date the cheerleaders. They're pretty much hated and envied by us at the same time, but no one ever picks a fight with them or steals their lunch or anything. A few of them drink and smoke dope, but not with us, and none of them seem to listen to music. In the summer they go to Wildwood Crest. My folks tell me that Wildwood Crest is off-limits to blacks and Jews, and probably Italians and Greeks also, so we don't go there, and we don't have the money to go anyway.

I get in another fight with my old man and get pulled out of school and get three weeks of labor work on a construction job as punishment, but I also get a union card under-the-table, and I carry it in my wallet next to my picture of Suzanne. This ID seems okay to me, like it's some kind of key to something and proves I'm normal and something more than an angry kid. My uncle Amadeo gives me a miner's lunch bucket, and my mom decorates it with coal company stickers and sends me to work with Bible verses and apple turnovers inside. I make enough money to stay high. When Amadeo says, “Well, I guess you got labor work in your blood,” I get almost deliriously happy.

I hear about some priests and nuns down in Maryland who are against the war and Nixon, and I start slipping into the Catholic church before school. The church is always empty that early in the morning. I don't know what to do there, but it feels right. You know, I won't go to church with my parents because it's too depressing and scary to be around those mannequins, like I could become one of them or something, but church on my own, with no one around and those statues looking down me, is all right. I feel like there is a poem inside of me when I'm there, maybe a poem from me to Miss Calucci, and I want her there with me.

Late one night I clip a coupon out of a newspaper and send it in, asking for information on joining the Paulist Fathers. I include a letter telling them everything about myself. The priest who answers sends me the requested information but tells me politely that I need to experience more of life before considering a priestly vocation. I tell Miss Calucci about this, and her eyes turn gray-sad and it's the first time I've ever seen her be anything but cheerful.

Late at night I listen to CKLW from Windsor and WCFL from Chicago on my grandfather's AM radio and to an FM station from Philadelphia that plays progressive rock. I like the talk shows mainly, but one night I hear Bessie Smith and some jazz poets on a free-form radio show, and I suddenly feel older and sadder about everyone around me than I ever have before. To make up for the last fight we had, my father buys me a two-album set of Bessie Smith's music and a used peacoat, and I lock myself away with the records on Saturday afternoons, lying there on my bedroom floor with the peacoat as a pillow, stoned or straight, and trying to find what I really do feel as the records play over and over again. He also gives me a copy of On the Road, which I take as a hint, and I try to memorize passages from it. A teacher takes the book from me in school. I tape Bessie Smith onto a two track for Suzanne, but she throws it away without listening to it.

My school career skills test comes back in the negatives, so I end up talking to the guidance counselor. He's convinced I deliberately sabotaged the test. The truth is that I want to do everything and nothing. Ballet dancers get to go to New York, so why not do that? Bricklaying is a good union job—my grandfather did it when he came to America—and you can build your own house with bricks, so why not? Teachers only work nine months out of the year, so why not? But going to work is work, and I don't want to turn into my old man or be anything like anyone I know—so why work at all?

They make me take the test again, and once again the numbers are all negative. Mom says I'm too smart for it. Another school conference. I walk out of the meeting with Mom, the guidance counselor, and Mr. Betters after I hear for the millionth time, “You could do anything you want if you would just work harder.” I go home, smoke a joint, and put the MC5 on. Mom comes home an hour later, and I hear her crying in the bathroom.

Yeah, I hear about the striking miners from Amadeo, who worked in the mines for forty-some years, and one day he takes me to meet an old Italian anarchist named Paolo, and I start visiting him and his wife after school. I sneak in and out of church in the mornings on my way to school. I stay to myself and get high and listen to Janis Joplin and Bessie Smith and the MC5 and then I cry a little over Suzanne, and over all of us, I guess. Most of the teachers pass me on with C's and D's just to get me out of school, but I pull in A's in history and current events, and Daryl Pugh's brother gives me pot in exchange for distracting the history teacher on test days with questions about foreign policy. I get to the Spectrum in Philadelphia once in a while for rock concerts and drugs, but what I mainly like is being able to find the Guardian and the Militant and some underground papers, and I buy them all, even if it means less pot. I start wearing a peace button, and I put a poster of Huey Newton up in my bedroom.

It's 1971, I turn seventeen, I'm angry, and I'm scared.

Two

Poverty carried along the smell of rotting timber and coal oil in its clothes wherever it went. It went about with a runny nose, a bend in its back, a floppy-brimmed hat. I heard the fear and weight of poverty as a child, a hoarse but hopeful wheezing as it climbed the stairs or washed the floors. Old immigrant eyes smiled or were hard as stoneware dishes, were blue like the sky or as dark as espresso, but poor even when they counted their wrinkled dollar bills, even when they drew a pension or got Social Security. Old immigrant hands were clumps of clay, lumps of coal or raw meat; whether they sold candy or shoveled coal or sewed dresses they remained immigrant hands. Immigrant hands took baths with poverty in the kitchen four times a week, smoothed the creases of a blue polka-dot dress or brown suit, checked the time, and shuffled to Mass or Liturgy. Immigrant hands fed a poor dog table scraps, washed an icon with rose water, took their medicine.

Zia Celeste and Zia Emma had both lost their husbands in the mines. My father, a boy at the time, barely remembered back that far, but Zia Emma and Zia Celeste went to their churches for daily prayers and wore black from the day of the funerals to their own deaths almost sixty years later. Statues of the Holy Family, Christ on 3-D postcards, crucifixes, calendars from their churches, and photographs of the dead made their homes into museums or chapels, their sitting rooms and kitchens washed with a yellow light held in the tight fist of ever-still air. It was a light held prisoner in their homes from years past, the one thing dear to them from times that had been bearable but almost impossibly difficult.

Zia Celeste had indoor plumbing but made her visitors use the outhouse by the creek that ran through her patch. She made soap from lye and grease, gathered her coal from beside the railroad tracks, and attended funerals for the gossip and the luncheons. She played checkers and pokeno for pennies, playing aggressively against her grandchildren and sisters for their spare pennies.

Zia Emma lived in America for nearly seventy years but never learned more than a few words of English. She bought hard salami from the butcher, bargaining with the old German even over his greasy scraps and ends, and mixed it with stale bread or saltine crackers and past-dated eggs to make canadels, which floated in a thin, salty broth. She traded the appliances her children bought her—two-slice toasters, a hand-cranked washing machine, an AM radio—for wool yarn, venison, and sauerkraut. Each purchase and trade came with a complicated negotiation she carried on in her native Italian dialect or with a distrusting stubborness that transcended language and time; everyone understands an old lady determined to get what she wants.

Amadeo and Max, two of their four brothers, remained single and shared a one-room shack in the patch by the mine they worked in. Their shack had a poorly vented coal stove in the middle of their room, two Army cots set on opposite sides of the stove, two broken bar chairs, two windows covered with butcher paper, and two rocking chairs on their stoop. A family fight in the late thirties, its cause long forgotten but smoldering nonetheless, set Amadeo and Max against their brothers Anthony and Louis, with the women in the family neutral in their allegiances. For at least thirty years the community of forty-odd company houses seemed to hold our family's quarrel and anger in its bosom, and during these years Amadeo and Max maintained a shared meditative silence. They played checkers and scopa on their cots, the light from their pipes and the coal stove outlining their silent movements. Silent Max took me deep into an abandoned mine when I was five and, later that summer, we went to the home viewing of another five-year-old boy who had died from polio and a mysterious flu. The boy's body was laid out in a small casket on a kitchen table. Max gave me several luridly colored prayer cards, and I forced myself to see the boy's soul leave his body and ascend to heaven.

Zia Celeste worked in the garment and textile factories after her husband was killed, and she drew a union pension and Social Security. Her sons stopped by for lunch every day and made sure her refrigerator—they still called it an ice box then—stayed full and her coal stove was clean. My grandfather and Zia Emma's daughters took care of her. Eventually both women also got money from the black lung fund and access to the miner's hospital, a benign form of political bribery no one in the patch begrudged the miner's widows. Amadeo, Anthony, Max, and Louis deposited their earnings, pension checks, and black lung money into bank accounts, Italian Workers' Aid lodge accounts, and locked tackle boxes hidden under their beds. None of them trusted the neatly typed bank and lodge statements that arrived monthly, and they each separately set to work with broken pencils and butcher paper on check days, figuring their interest and expenses and licking their pencil points with every new calculation and hiding their math from anyone who might be too curious.

*****

My grandfather's intrusively silent shadow preceded him wherever he went. He was never the center of attention at social or family gatherings, never the one who gave the speech or cut the cake, but a group of men slowly formed around him, seeking his advice or a loan or speaking in something just above a whisper, their dialect hissed or hummed between cigar-stained teeth and their thick gesturing arms restrained by cheap suits. After a wedding or picnic they would bring farm-fresh eggs, sausages, homemade wine and schnapps to my nonna, each item sloppily twine bound in greasy butcher paper and left on her wobbly kitchen table.

The city put a no-parking zone in front of Nonno's house, and he kept his modified gray Packard parked there, certain that this was a gift of respect from the mayor. He went on long, lonely walks with his small black dog, a gift smuggled in from distant cousins in the old country, smoking his Di Nobilis as he walked. Nonna cleaned and cooked, cooked and cleaned, cleaned and cooked, and visited with her sisters and the widows who ran the corner grocery stores. She went to Mass and sent me to collect Zia Emma from the church at suppertime. She read what she could of the funnies, rested in her rocking chair, and fell asleep saying the Rosary. Nonno was short and muscular, Nonna large and heavy. They lived together in a silently awkward ballet, or so it seemed to me as a child, bearing a cold inner sadness between themselves, which melted only for me.

Beyond the confines of his community, Nonno's shadow stayed closer to him but still preceded him wherever he went. He smiled less, said less, hurried along just a bit more quickly. When he visited the new supermarkets and auto parts stores, amazed at the prices and dismissive of the clerks and endless shelves of items, people waiting in line felt his stare behind them and let him pass, the cashiers nervously glad to see him go. The cashier and ticket taker at the old Majestic movie theatre let us in for free. My mother hissed, “Mafia! Camorra!” when I told her this, but my father said, “No, Mano Nera.”

But there were also stores we could not go into, my Nonno and I, a candy store where the owner raised his voice and sounded every syllable out as if we were deaf and had to read lips like Zio Guido did, a five-and-ten where the manager watched us too carefully, a hot dog stand Nonno avoided. At Deisroth's Department Store, the salesmen hurried to help my father, “Old Joe's Son,” but at The Main Line Store they ignored us.

“Listen, why they gotta yell at me? I ain't deaf,” Nonno growled. “I been here fifty years, more! I speak English, understand. Before they was born, sons a bitches! Or why they pretend I'm not there? My money's green like what everyone else got! Bastards!”

At Moy's Market, Nonno gave Mrs. Moy a quarter every day and said, “Seven two six,” and I got some root beer barrels and licorice. At Rita Dunnigan's, he picked up bread and bacon and asked her about her kids. At the Coney Island hot dog place, my dad and I had contests to see who could eat more hot dogs and at Carmine's, the rice pudding was free for us. Standing outside St. Gabriel's, waiting for Zia Emma and me, Nonno talked to the younger men about their cars, coming into the church only at Easter for Confession. Nonno and my father visited and left these places smiling, an extra bounce in their walk even after Confession.

Nonna and Zia Catherine had a store of their own to visit and did so secretly, telling no one where they were headed. It was a tiny, dark candy store in the Heights owned by a woman named Mary. She kept a donkey in her yard, and on Christmas Eve she would stop at certain houses, her and her donkey, and leave coal and a stick or a handful of candy in the children's shoes left on the stoops.

Nonna, Zia Catherine, Mary, and I gathered around a card table in the back room of her candy store one evening. Mary made me look up and into her eyes and sighed. She felt my head with her thick, tobacco-stained fingers and looked intently at my hands and then walked around me to get Nonna and Zia Catherine coffee from a hot plate burner.

“He's gonna be I don' know, a politician or a lawyer maybe, but he ain't gonna be happy with women, an' he'll always love the foreign ones,” Mary wheezed.

Zia Catherine slapped the table.

“Don't tell your mother we came here,” Nonna warned me. “Now go out front and have some candy.”

It was 1960, I was seven years old, and I thought my life would work out.

Three

No one had to tell me how hard life was for my grandfather's generation, the ones who came over on the boats, who worked in the mines and mills, who negotiated even with God. I could see just a little behind their hearts, knew just a little of what their tongues hid, and I knew that a veil covered what I should never ask about. I knew, also, that they had long ago wrapped their poverty and pain in a silence, which the stronger ones washed with faith, and the weaker ones rubbed away with whiskey. They wrapped it up like those sausages sitting in a twine-tied sack on Nonna's old kitchen table and gave some portion of it to their children, an unwelcome and unappreciated gift. No one had to tell me any of this, but all of them tried to tell me — over and over again and in their own ways.

My old man had stood up to Nonno and joined the Army and gone off to the war. He returned to the family with a Purple Heart and screaming nightmares, and the arguments resumed as if the war had never happened. He left the house one winter night in a rage, even the white snow outlined in red in his aching eyes and his sister screaming behind him in her pajamas, and drove though an ice storm to Philadelphia. There he got a job in a printing plant and used his G.I. Bill rights to enter college. A born performer, suave and quick with poems and fists, he charmed my mother, a naive girl living with her parents and working her way through college by selling full-fashioned hosiery at Wanamaker's. They finished school and married “outside of the Church,” as the old people whispered. Once safely in her own home, with her own job and her own money, my mother negotiated the ever-doubtful truce which got Nonno and my old man talking to one another again.

*****

At the root of it all was that fire-red fury the men I grew up around shared but never spoke of — recognized in one another, measured and calculated, paced off. It gave Nonno's shadow its shape and presence, made my old man a war hero, blasted the coal in the mines, shoveled the snow, repaired the twelve-cylinder Packards, dug the graves. For Nonno and his generation, the calculation was simple: subtract my honor from what I can bear and add that to my responsibilities, and that tells me how far and how hard I can push or fight. For my dad and his generation, there was an additional calculation: divide into that amount what I might lose if I push too hard and subtract from that everything I've worked so hard for.

I had not learned then that the flaming temper I inherited was something beyond the ordinary, something that not everyone had. I did not know — until it was almost too late — that a bitter wash of self-preserving good sense was needed to douse those flames. A calculation had to be made, but the algebra of life had escaped me. A casually hateful “Wop!” and “Dago!” had been thrown my way one day, as they had been thrown my way so many times before, but the first punch I threw shot forward too quickly and with too much force and everything turned stove-burner red as my hands and arms rhythmically beat my tormentor down. Only when I fought did I have a sense of rhythm and, later, only the surprising memory of that rhythm stayed with me. The police took me to jail, and a judge sent me to the Center, but I could not recognize the delinquent thug I was being described as.

Eleven years after Nonna, Zia Catherine, and I visited old Mary at her candy store, Paolo and Esther Magliocco started removing the veil for me. It had hidden from me the matters I knew the old people could not or would not talk about. It had also hidden from me the sources of my own rage.

Four

Paolo is around my grandfather's age, and they know of one another. Like all of the old Italians I know, Paolo works in his garden and works on cars and knows every penny and dollar he owns personally. He 's stocky and bald, his shoulders bending just a bit with the years.

Esther is Jewish, not Italian, and my mother remembers when she was the educational director for the union at the factory. She remembers how Esther took the girls to the union's summer camp and how they heard a professor from Bryn Mawr College speak about Lord Byron and poems about work. Esther is at least a few years younger than Paolo, and I feel guilty for noticing how her eyes shine and how graceful she is when Amadeo introduces us.

Their house is full of books and newspapers, there are some paintings on the walls instead of crucifixes, and Paolo and Esther spend their days working and talking side by side. In the evening they listen to operas on their record player or read or play their guitar and piano. They eat tasteless boiled chicken, boiled potatoes, and stewed fruit almost every night.

“So you're Joe's son, eh?” Paolo starts in. “I knew him long time, since before the war. He come around selling raffle tickets for the church, but I don't buy nothing for the church. Just a little kid. So I try to talk to him, and he tries to sell me the tickets. I hope you ain't selling nothing.”

I look helplessly at Amadeo, aware once more that I never know when someone is serious or just kidding around. Amadeo laughs a little. “This one goes to church, but he's not so much like the other ones.”

Esther asks me about school and what I like to study, which isn't much, and I end up telling them about the Center and the factory tours and the skills tests and the fights. I think that this must be scaring them, but I go on anyway until I run out of words. Amadeo listens without speaking.

“Don't worry so much,” Esther says. “Stay out of the fights and read. Just read the good books, and don't be in such a hurry.”

“Yeah, read the good books, and get some skills,” Paolo adds. “Some things you can take with you into the world, trades, but don't take no one's word for anything. They tell me many times I got no choice, I got to work in the mines, but I say no and I do other things. Carpenter. Mason. Even a farmer. I bake bread, work as a cook. You see how it is.” He waves his hands in the air. “I build this house. Esther an' me, we build this place. Pretty nice, and we don't owe nobody nothing for it.”

“It wasn't so easy,” Amadeo says as he shakes his head. “You don't remember how hard it was, old man.”

“Eh, I remember them days pretty good.” Paolo and Amadeo smile at one another, their eyes sparkling with some shared memories they cannot divulge to others.

“What do your parents say?” Esther smiles and speaks with Yiddish words like my grandparents do Italian.

I don't want to think about my folks or answer Esther's question. I don't know what they say or think. Without warning, my father had started crying over breakfast that morning and said, “My only son is going to end up in prison! You're going to get the death penalty some day!” I couldn't argue with that, so I left for school. I feel as okay with prison as I do about everything else facing me, but I know that you're not supposed to go around telling people this. They told us in Group at the Center that talk like that scares people. “Keep it to your own self, and take it to the Lord in prayer,” the black preacher told me in counseling.

I make up something for Amadeo, Esther, and Paolo and jump to what interests me most.

“What good books? Which ones?”

It's 1971, and I leave the Magliocco's house with a book by Errico Malatesta and a pamphlet by Peter Kropotkin entitled “An Appeal to the Young.” Both were published in the 1930s but smell as if they just came off the press. I start reading Malatesta in study hall and get through all of Kropotkin in detention. When I finish with those, I return to the Magliocco's alone, and Esther gives me a book by Emma Goldman.

My folks look at the books but don't say much. “It must be all right if that lady from the union gave it to you. Jewish people just seem to know so much. They taught us to clap politely, just like the girls from Bryn Mawr,” my mother says.

I'm seventeen, and I'm feeling like someone understands.

Five

Paolo and I are pulling weeds in his garden, a job I wouldn't do for my parents or grandparents.

“They ever teach you about Sacco and Vanzetti in school? Anybody in your family mention them?”

“In school? Nah. But Nonno told me something about them once. Or maybe it was Amadeo.”

“They were innocents. Good men, not so good maybe, just like all men, but they was innocent.”

“Did you know them?”

Paolo pulls up a weed and tosses it into a bucket.

“Did you know them?”

“Answer his question, Paolo! If you're going to bring up the subject, you have to answer his questions. Otherwise you have to be quiet.” Esther is sitting in the shade of a birch tree and reading a play by Errico Arrigoni.

“Yeah, I knew them all right. Big picnics we had in them days. Maybe two thousand people come. Lotsa people.”

“What were the picnics for?”

Paolo bends lower, takes a deep breath and examines a strawberry plant too carefully. “Like today, they make a war, the rich people. And only the poor fight. Fools. Poor fools. But some say no, they are not barbarians. And we make picnics to raise money, make protests, and send some guys to Mexico, Argentina, someplace. To make propaganda.”

“World War One?”

“Yeah, World War One. But what's it matter? One, Two, and now this in Vietnam. Poor guys go and fight, kill or get killed. Fools.”

“My dad fought in World War Two.” I say this with pride, suddenly wanting to defend my old man..

“And he come back a hero, but still he works like a slave.” Paolo looks up at me, measures me for a moment, and then looks down at the fragile plant between his feet. “Your grandfather, he came over to avoid the war. Smart man. He doesn't fight.”

“Nonno?”

“In the old country he saw it coming. Smart man. So he leaves. We were just kids, you know. We go to Milan, work. Go to Munich, work. We sleep in the streets with the others. Factories, selling ice cream, anything we can do to eat. I stay there then, and he comes here. In the boat they put a sign on him in Italian and German, the people. The immigranti, the people, they know our people will help a kid. And they know our people work on the railroads, on the docks, not the good jobs. ‘Send me to Hazleton, to such-and-such address' the sign says. Twelve years old, like a package. He didn't speak any English. Just kids we were. But we made it. Most of us made it, anyway.” Paolo spits on his fingers and gently rubs the plant leaves. “Two days in this country, and he goes to the coal mine. Me, when I come here I work in the factory for a while.”

“Get back to your story, Paolo!” Esther gently chides. She can feel her husband's memories — has so many of her own as well. And she can read in my face a surprised sorrow at what I am hearing for the first time.

Paolo moves to the next plant, still not looking up at me. “Yeah. Anyway, it's just like Sacco and Vanzetti, lots of us. They didn't speak so much, they didn't do more than anyone else. They work like us, and they write a little propaganda. They just got caught. Some make the bombs because they're so angry. But because they was like us all, for us, you understand, so we helped. Your grandfather, too. All of us.” Paolo stands, wipes his hands on his shirt. “We all helped. And we lost. Then we go different ways.”

I do understand. In just a few minutes I understand. “They work like us…they're so angry…they was like us…for us…so we helped…”

Paolo finishes his account of Sacco and Vanzetti, and I go home looking at the world a little differently. I have in my pocket a copy of the leaflet Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested with, written out in Paolo's quivering scrawl. It says, “Workers, you have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the bosses. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruit of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being?” I still have it with me, recopied dozens of times. Its meaning and import grow clearer to me as life takes its certain toll.

My old man shrugs it off when I try to talk to him about the two anarchists, but Mom leaves a copy of a poem about them by Edna St. Vincent Millay on my bed. It's copied in her perfect handwriting on a small piece of notebook paper. “I memorized it at the union camp,” she explains.

Years will pass before I can talk about Sacco and Vanzetti without tears coming to my eyes, before the catch in my voice at the mention of their names becomes a cough or a growl. By the time I learn to control these emotions and understand what the old people were trying to give me and what they hoped they saw in me, Paolo and my grandfather are long dead and Sacco and Vanzetti forgotten. My mother dies at her machine at work a few years after Esther, and my father passes on six years after her, a bitter pain in his eyes when I last visit him in the hospital. I begin to feel old then, not in years but in memories, tired from carrying the weight they passed on to me, but I can follow the thread of my aging to that day with Paolo and Esther in their garden.

But in 1973 I'm eighteen, and everyone who means something to me is still alive. Back in the world I know there is a prom, which I know I can't get a date to. On prom night I find myself in a car with five black guys, all of us tripping on LSD and listening to Sly and the Family Stone, and I feel that familiar tension in the air between blacks and whites and it kills my high. One of the guys in the car was in the Center with me, but that doesn't give us much to talk about.

Most of the good kids who do get dates and get to the prom get busted for alcohol there, but this is kept quiet and nothing happens to them that will interfere with their bright futures. The news of this vindicates my mother's instinctive and twin beliefs that her son is not the worst of delinquents and that justice is fragile and elusive.

And there is graduation, which I make only because the science teacher slides me through with a D minus. They throw Tommy Sparks and me out of rehearsal because he shows up drunk, and I'm standing next to him. Tommy is a big hillbilly with plans to work with his old man at Conowingo Dam. Tommy's dad is parked outside school in a souped-up Chevy, hitting the moonshine pretty hard himself, and he and Tommy try to get me down to the Redman's Hall to see a stripper. I pass on it but spend years wondering what that would have been like. Four years later Tommy's family is killed in a car crash.

They send me my final report card and diploma in the mail. Everyone is so relieved that I graduated that they don't ask about my grades, and the school never asks about the unexcused absences I ran up.

Two weeks after graduation Esther gets me a job as a bundle boy at my mother's factory, and I get a legitimate union card. My old man loans me the money for work clothes, and for a few months there is a kind of equality and peace between us.

“Where you been?” my father asks when I come home late on a weeknight.

“Down at the union hall with a couple a guys from the factory,” I answer.

In the question and in the answer we make our peace.

I miss getting my draft card and I drive without a license and the factory cashes my checks for me; besides that union card, there isn't much proof that I'm alive. I feel an early fall coming, and without much planning or preparation, I make a cardboard sign at the factory that says “West” and get a ride to the interstate after work. My first ride takes me to Youngstown, the second to Chicago.

It's August 23, 1973, forty-six years to the day Sacco and Vanzetti died.