As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

distance, the open sky above, he’d belted it out for all six sandy-haired Monroes to hear. While he did, the children’s faces were transfixed, so much so that three out of the six didn’t even notice the melted chocolate dripping onto their hands. Even when he finished his song the children’s expressions of joyful wonderment didn’t change. “Sal Baby thanks you,” he told them with a wink. They repeated the phrase, “Sal Baby,” and while doing so each had laughed. So he tried out another phrase. “Bye-bye, apple pie,” he said, and without a moment’s hesitation they repeated that too.
    Something settled over Sal that day, a sense of well-being, of knowing that this idea of his, the small business of selling treats, was the work he didn’t even know he was made for. The realization hit him first as he watched Mrs. Monroe, concerned that her children hadn’t returned home yet, come fetch them and urge them off, which did nothing to dissipate the cloud of sweetness surrounding them. The next January, 1938, while frantically fixing the pipes of a downtown apartment building after an unusually deep freeze had caused a riot of bursting, Sal, once again of Giuseppe Luccino & Sons, sat back on his heels, the bones of his arms and shoulders aching, his throat dry, his breathing shallow from bending at the waist as he worked. An image came to mind of the youngest Monroe child, Tommy, the one who’d said, “Whistle it more, please,” who, later, his mother clasping one of his messy hands, had strained to keep his head turned toward Sal long after his mother pulled him away. For a moment Sal was there, on the shoreline street, the sun blazing above, the child so impressed Sal could have told him he was the one to have invented ice cream and the kid would have believed him.
    He put his wrench down. He looked around at the dim cave of the basement where he’d spent the better part of the morning. The place was unheated. On his hands were woolen gloves, clipped so his fingers were free. Three more months, he told himself, and then he’d be back at it. Outside. Breathing deeply. Whistling whenever the spirit moved him to. And, when it did, letting it rip.
      
     
    That Friday of our family’s first week in Woodmont Sal was doing just that, letting it rip, as he drove to New Haven to restock, and that’s when he passed Davy, waiting for the mail, wearing shorts, a puppet, and a pajama shirt that in his sleepiness he didn’t realize was inside out. And, as if I were Sal that day, I can see Davy, all these years later, so very clearly. I can even hear him call “Sal Baby!”—his voice still the chirp of a child, his words a little rushed. And there we—the family members—were those early days of summer, swirling around him, each of us bathed in a light of innocence we didn’t even know was there. Davy’s innocence, the fact of his still being a child, wasn’t the light’s source. I talk of a grander innocence. Unlike my grandfather Maks during his days in Russia, in America we’d been lucky so far. Even the recent war, in all its anguish, hadn’t broken our spirit, and in fact that summer, 1948, we were particularly hopeful, given Israel and all. “I’m free!” Davy cried while jumping on his bed, the words nearly his first upon our arrival at Woodmont that summer. And as I sit here now, once again at Bec’s desk, staring for a second day in a row at that fraught note she wrote so long ago, after that innocence faded, here’s what I sense: that at the summer’s start Davy’s words were true for each of us, though not for the same reason, and that all of this—the different ways we found and grabbed at our freedom—had so much to do, ultimately, with this boy’s death.
    But when the going is good, when the day is light and sunny, how can you not grab at freedom?
    Take my mother, for example, who, in ways not so different from her nemesis-to-come, Sal Luccino, didn’t even know she