Whenever I was up on a gravestone looking out at St. Mary’s Avenue, staring at all the houses staring back at me, there was one house that stood out in particular.  It was green, but that isn’t why it stood out.  Many of the houses were green, for this was an Italian neighborhood.  What made this one house unique was its front yard.  The rest of the small yards were merely grass-covered, at best embellished with a shrine to the Virgin Mary.  This yard, however, had been transformed into a lush garden full of plump, red, juicy tomatoes.  They hung lusciously in heavy clusters from staked vines that stood in perfect rows.

This was the Russo house and these were the Russo tomatoes.

Those tomatoes made Mr. Russo famous on St. Mary’s.  Of course he would have been known anyway because for thirty-eight years he had been the janitor at the school.  Every kid for nearly three generations knew Mr. Russo well:  knew the raspy sound of his gravelly speaking voice that could strike fear in your heart; knew the powerful, hairy hands that would grab like vise-grips if you had been demented enough to soil his spotless school; knew even the soft echo of his low voice singing in Italian as he dust-mopped the empty halls day after day.

To us kids Mr. Russo was a big presence, which of course we associated with physical size.  But around the sixth grade some of us began to notice something strange:  first, that we were looking directly into his somber brown eyes, level-like; then, that we were looking right over his head.  He was a short man, not more than five feet tall even with his steel-tipped workboots on, even with his thick hair brushed back high on his head.  Yet it didn’t matter if we towered over Mr. Russo, for there was a power to him that had nothing to do with size.

For one thing, he had more freedom than anyone, even the teachers.  In the spring when we all yearned to be outside, only Mr. Russo could spend his days in the golden sunshine riding the small tractor that pulled the gang mowers or standing outside the open classroom windows clipping the hedges.  That kind of power intrigued and fascinated us because we didn’t understand its source.  We’d look longingly out the windows at him and decide to grow up to be custodians.

To us kids Mr. Russo never had a first name.  Even those of us who lived near him on the Avenue always called him Mr. Russo.  But no one, not even the most timid kid, called his wife anything but Carmela.  Gentle-hearted and full of laughter, she was the kind of person who welcomed you into her life on a first-name basis.  Her face was round with a softness that was almost childlike, so as a woman she appeared to be younger than her actual age.  Her hair was black, not just dark brown, but as black and shiny as polished ebony.  She wore it in a braid that reached all the way down her back.

Next to the sidewalk in front of the Russo house grew a towering chestnut tree.  Every spring it would blossom and by fall we’d find round, spiky, green pods covering the sidewalk.  Inside a pod, if we could get to it, was a dull, dusty chestnut, very ordinary and plain.  But with a bit of polishing this sidewalk refuse would turn as if by magic into a gleaming, red-brown jewel.

Because it could be hard and painful work to break the nut from its sharp-pronged pod, the younger kids took them to Carmela.  Like the princess in a fairy-tale forest, she’d free the jewel from its stinging enchantment, quickly polish it to high luster, then royally present it.  Oftentimes as she held out the gleaming chestnut on her open palm she would softly sing, “Fairy tales can come true, they can happen to you, if you’re young at heart . . . .”  Her warm breath would lightly brush against the cheek of the mesmerized child, who’d then shyly take the nut from the princess’ palm and skip away, looking back from time to time to see if she were still watching.  She always was, smiling and nodding her royal approval.

Carmela and Mr. Russo lived in that green house whose lush garden spilled over with ripe tomatoes.  They lived there their whole married life and raised their family.  They’d had four kids, but it was as if they’d had two separate families, so far apart were the two sets of children.

First there were boys, Dominic and Carl.  Dominic was someone I never knew personally.  After he had been born seven years passed before the birth of Carl.  I have only a slight memory of him because he was already a young man when I was a very young boy.

Physically, Carmela had been small, tiny almost, which some of the grandmothers said caused so many of her babies to die before being born.  I don’t know if that was true or just talk.  The old women, dressed all in black with their black rosary beads and their black mustaches, said many true things, but not always.

After Carl it took fourteen years before the last set of babies, who were girls named Christine and Jeannette.  Christine was exactly my age; we were born in the same month, same year.  Beautiful like her mother, she was small and very thin.  Christine had these deep brown eyes and full lips that held a promise I’ll never forget.  We grew up together and were graduated in 1966 in the same class from Plainfield High School.

In fact I last saw Christine at a high school reunion.  She was still beautiful and obviously content with her adult life.  She’d had two children and was apparently very prosperous, having married an orthodontist from upstate.  When I saw her the first thing I asked was, “How’re things going with your father?”  I was worried about him because he had started to have a faded, ghostly look about him as though he were seriously ill or suffering deeply.

“Oh you know my father, he’ll never change.”  Christine laughed a little and smiled at me as though we shared some special knowledge, which we did—we both had intimate knowledge of her father, a man whose dimensions we saw as vast yet fixed and immutable.  Then she told me a story about him, one that I already knew something about.

One night Mr. Russo couldn’t sleep, so he was watching late-night TV.  He was flipping through the cable service Christine had given him that Christmas when suddenly he saw his orthodontist son-in-law on the screen.  Apparently Christine’s husband is on a cable channel every night after midnight.  Every ten minutes for ten seconds the screen fills up with a close-up of a ruggedly handsome, very Italian-looking man in a pale blue dentist’s smock unbuttoned at the collar where there’s a gold chain showing.  He smiles, a long, drawn-out, sexy kind of smile, and his perfect white teeth sparkle and gleam.  Then he speaks in a deep, modulated voice that resonates richly, almost crooning as if he’s seducing an uncertain lover:  “Good evening, I’m Dr. D.  Have you looked at your children’s teeth lately?  Are they crooked or protruding?  Do you know what crooked teeth can do to a child‘s sense of self-esteem?  Do you want your child to turn into a drug addict?  If not, call me, Dr. D., in the morning, and I will straighten you out!  Good night, sweet dreams, I luv ya!”

When Mr. Russo saw this ad the first time, he got right on the phone to Christine at two in the morning.  “Hello,” she said, more asleep than awake.

“Whadda you stupid?” her father hissed into the mouthpiece, his gravelly voice vibrating in anger.

“Dad, is that you?” Christine asked, coming instantly awake.

“Who do ya think it is, Frank Sinatra this time of night?”  His sarcasm was lost on Christine, who now was worried.  Her father called rarely and never at two o’clock in the morning.  “Dad, what’s wrong?”

“What’s wrong?  How can you even ask?  I just seen your husband on television.  What’s he tryin to do, ruin his practice?”  The gravelly voice was getting louder.

“But Dad, the people love it.”

“The people love it?  I hated it!  It gave me acido.  I couldn’t even finish my sandwich.”

“No, really, Dad, the people love it.” Christine was starting to feel defensive.  She often felt that way around her father.  He could, merely by being himself, cause her more distress over absolutely nothing than any other person she knew.  “Every week we get bagsful of mail.  The viewers think he looks like Sylvester Stallone.”

“Sylvester Stallone!”  Mr. Russo was shouting now.  “Oh god, just what America needs—Rambo the Orthodontist!”  In exasperation he slammed down the phone.

Christine told me that she and her husband had been trying to get the old man to move off the Avenue.  He was seventy-five years old, and ever since Carmela had died five years before he’d had less and less to do with people, cutting himself off from others in his grief and loneliness.  “He even stopped going to Asunta Hall to play bocce with his cronies,” Christine told me.  “Plus we were worried about him living alone and all.  You know, Tony, the neighborhood’s changing, it isn’t safe like it once was.”

When pressed, however, all Mr. Russo would say to Christine was, “I ain’t leavin my home.  I’m not runnin away and turnin it over to the bums and scum.”  Christine kept trying, but her father was adamant.

It was that phone call at 2 A.M. that finally gave Christine the idea she’d been praying for.  “After he hung up, I was very upset.  By that time Don, my husband, was awake and wanted to know what it was all about.  We ended up laughing over it, particularly the part about not being able to finish his sandwich.  You know how my father loves to eat, especially his tomato sandwiches with gobs of mayonnaise on them.  That’s when it hit me, and I picked up the phone and called him right back.  ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘you know we have sixty-five acres here.  If you come live with us, you can put ten of them into tomatoes.’  He was silent for a full minute, but I could hear his breathing, so I knew he was thinking about it.  Then he said, ‘I‘ll be up in the mornin.’”

The next day he packed a bag and left.  I remember seeing him slowly walk down the Avenue with one small suitcase, looking directly in front of him, not saying anything to anyone.  Mrs. Nitoli nearly called out to him from her porch, but when she saw the determined and pained look on his face she drew back into the safety of her silent vigil for Michael Anthony.  When he’d climbed up the steps of the bus and it had pulled off with him inside, no one could believe it—Mr. Russo had left the Avenue.

Two weeks later he was back.  My father, who’s been a friend of his for years, went over to find out why.  They were sitting in the small kitchen in the back of the house, drinking black coffee and eating biscotti from Gold Star Bakery on Garfield Avenue.  Mr. Russo was smiling a lot, even laughing at my father’s stories about how no one at Asunta Hall believed he’d really left the Avenue of his own free will.  “There was even a betting pool on how long you’d last in the country at Christine’s.  By the way, I won.”  There was a long silence as each man sipped his coffee, and then my father asked him point blank, “So what happened, Gaetano?  Didn’t they treat you right up there?”

“Sure, they treated me good, Joe.”  The older man seemed eager to talk about it with his compa.  “You should see this place, Joe—$750,000 for the house and that don’t even include the land!  The place is amazin.  Everything’s brand new.  Hey, I was afraid to sit down, afraid I might get somethin dirty, you know what I mean?  It’s crazy the way these people live:  They got push-button this and push-button that.  And next to every button there’s a digital clock.  Every time there’s a power surge, all the clocks go nuts and tell a different time.  One night I couldn’t sleep so I went around and counted the clocks.  Thirty-seven clocks they got in that house!”

Mr. Russo dipped the hard biscotto into his coffee, then went on:  “You know they hired this girl from France.  Looks just like Bridgette Bardot.”  Here the old man brought his thumb and first two fingers up to his pursed lips and made a kissing sound in the old gesture that meant, “Beautiful!”  Then he looked a bit puzzled as he said, “I thought she was a twin cause they said she was a pair.  I kept lookin for the other one but I never found her.”

My father chuckled to himself, then said out loud, “No, Gaetano, they weren’t sayin ‘a pair,’ they were sayin ‘au pair.’  It’s French for nanny.”  My father knew this because when he retired from the plumbing business he started watching daytime television, especially the soaps.  He and my mother and grandmother wouldn’t miss Search for Tomorrow for even the Pope.

“Well whatever you call her,” Mr. Russo said, “they hired her to take care of my grandsons.  You know what she does?  She spends all her time fixin the clocks!  It’s crazy the way these people live.

“But you should see my bedroom there, Joe.  It’s beautiful, all red and green, my favorite colors.  The first day I got there I was takin a little nap before dinner.  Suddenly I heard someone callin my name.  It woke me up, but when I looked around, there’s nobody there.  I went back to sleep, thought I musta been dreamin.  Then I heard it again.  I started gettin a little nervous, scared even, so I whisper, ‘Who’s there?  Who’s callin my name?’  Turns out it was Christine talkin through one of them intercom things.  They got em all over the whole house.  She could even hear me whispering back, and she was down in the kitchen.  She wanted me to come down to dinner.  I says, ‘I’ll be right there.  I just wanna wash up a little.  Next time please tell me in person because this here ain’t no airport and at my age I deserve a little respect.’  You know what I mean, Joe?”

My father nodded his head and smiled, and as he reached for another biscotto, Mr. Russo continued:  “So I got up and walked into the bathroom.  You should see it, Joe.  It’s bigger than my whole living room here on St. Mary’s Avenue.  They got everything in there:  heatlamp, sunlamp, sauna.  The bathtub is sunken into the floor, and when you turn on the water it all goes in different directions at once, just like the surf down at Point Pleasant Beach on a rough day.  That tub’s so big and the water so rough I told my daughter, ‘I’m not gettin in there without a life jacket on.’  She thought I was kiddin.  I wasn’t.”

My father laughed out loud at this, and Mr. Russo smiled.

“Anyway, that first night I went to wash before dinner.  I put my hands under the faucet and it turned itself on!  The water come on by itself, I’m tellin you!  I never touched anything.  I screamed, ‘Christine, Christine!  Call the priest, your house is possessed!’

“She didn’t need that intercom to hear me.  She come runnin.  All out of breath she says, ‘Dad, Dad, what’s wrong?’

“‘What’s wrong?  What’s wrong?  Your house is possessed!  The water turns itself on!’  My heart was poundin in my chest, I was so scared.  Then she says, cool as a cucumber, ‘Oh Dad, it’s alright.  It’s supposed to do that.  It’s an automatic system.  When you put your hands under the faucet, you break a light beam and the water comes on at a controlled temperature.  Dr. D. has them in all the bathrooms.  You know how he is about washing his hands.’

“Christine!  You should have told me!  You nearly scared me to death!  I thought your house was possessed!’

“‘I’m sorry, Dad.  I didn’t mean to upset you, especially on your first day here.  Now we’ll have to be sure that nothing else hap . . . .Uh, Dad?’  She looked very nervous and a little embarrassed.

“‘Yeah?’ I said, gettin a little nervous myself.

“‘Maybe I’d better tell you about the toilet . . .’

“‘The toilet?’  Now I was really gettin agitated.

“‘Yes, Dad, . . . it . . . it flushes itself.’  She turned all red in the face.

“‘The toilet flushes itself?’  I couldn’t believe it, Joe.  Imagine that, a toilet that flushes itself.  Then I asked her, ‘But Christine, how does it know when I’m done?’  She started to explain, but by that time I had to go, so I figured I’d find out for myself and told her to leave a man to his peace.”

My father laughed again, and Mr. Russo chuckled along with him while sipping at his coffee that now was cold.  He never really told my father why he had left Christine’s, but that’s the story I heard my father tell my mother when he got home that day.

I thought about it a lot and realized certain things, realized that he’d come back because he couldn’t hide from people there, couldn’t avoid the feelings or the tension of being with others day-in, day-out.  Oddly enough, he could have been happy there, or at least content, and perhaps he even knew that.  He had all that land for his garden, for one thing.  For another, he had his grandchildren, and those kids loved him.  They had been excited about “Pop-pop” coming to stay with them.  Oh they knew he was cranky, but they didn’t care—he was their grandfather and they loved him.  But if he were sitting in a room reading the paper, and the kids came in, he’d say, “Sta’ zitto!  You make too much noise!”  Or if they were playing inside and he came into the same room, he’d yell, “Go outside!  You need some fresh air!”