Not long after Mr. Russo had come back home, I was walking down the Avenue late one Saturday night.   It was a warm spring night with a soft breeze blowing a sweet scent.  I had been at a party where I had stayed late, the last one to leave.  Now I was all alone and the Avenue was deserted, not a soul around, not even a car cruising.  There was a sliver of a moon lying low in the west, emitting just enough light to make the world look frosty and silhouetted with a silver edge.

As I headed down the Avenue, I felt intoxicated with the good feeling of the party I’d just left.  When mixed with the solitary nature of late night, it made me feel somehow invincible, as though I could take off and fly down that street, fly right up to the moon.  I’d blow that sweet horn of the moon just right, blow it till I hit a bluesy note so cool and so hot the whole of St. Mary’s would wake to my wailing song and come trance-like out of their sleepy houses into the wildest street dance this old neighborhood’s ever seen.

That scene in my mind unfolded in surreal perfection as I approached the Russo house, where suddenly I was jerked back to reality when I saw a shadow lurking stealthily about in the front yard.  Oh my god, someone’s breaking into the Russo place!  I’ve got to do something!

I crouched down without making a sound and started slithering like a snake through the bushy tomato plants that Mr. Russo had tied up on stakes.  I wasn’t making a single sound but getting closer all the time to that thief.  He was facing the house with his back to me, scoping the place out, and I was about to make my move when suddenly I heard this raspy voice say, “It’s not nice to sneak up on old people, Tony.”

“Mr. Russo, is that you?”  I asked, dumbfounded.

“Who you think it is, Marlon Brando?”  This was a little joke of his.  When the movie The Godfather first came out, everyone on the Avenue was indignant that Brando had so blatantly copped Mr. Russo’s act.

“But Mr. Russo, what are you doin out here?”

“Waterin my tomato plants, what’s it look like?”  He was more than a little irritated with me, as if I were being stupid, and when he jerked his hand slightly I noticed that he was holding a running hose.  I noticed even better when the cold spray hit my face.  As I got up off the damp ground, feeling more than a little foolish, I said, “But it’s the middle of the night, Mr. Russo.”

“Tony, look,” he said annoyed as he pointed with the hose across the street.

I looked over and saw St. Mary’s Cemetery, all quiet and cold as stone.  “Yeah, so, it’s the cemetery,” I said back to him, a little annoyed with his annoyance.  “So what?”

“Look up, Tony, look up!”  His voice was impatient and even urgent.

When I looked up I noticed how the moon had disappeared completely now and the sky was all black in the west.  But as I slowly looked over to the east, the sky turned from deep black to indigo to azure to ever lighter shades of blue.  I’d never seen the night sky look like this before.  As I swung my head back through the blues into black night, I suddenly saw this flash of white light streak across the sky to disappear into the palest blue.  It was like a nighttime star shooting into morning.  It must have been a shooting star, but I wasn’t sure because I’d never seen one before, never.

I turned back to the old man for confirmation that I’d actually seen it, but his face was as impassive as stone.  For reasons I didn’t understand, it was important to me that he acknowledge this wonder I’d just witnessed for the very first time in my whole life.  But he just stared at me, looking inside me to a place where I felt he had no right to be if he wasn’t going to share this moment with me.  Then I looked into his eyes and saw that they were smiling at me as he nodded his head, almost imperceptibly, as if to say, “Yes!  What you saw, that gift of the night, it’s real and true and always will be so!”  Without saying a single word he said all that.

I stared at him then, a little embarrassed by this intimate moment, but reluctant to let it go.  Then once more he pointed with the hose back across the street.

When I turned, I was captivated again by the rich colors transforming late night into early day.  Mr. Russo watered his garden as I stood staring.  I could hear him humming softly to himself.  It sounded something like a prayer.

Then, after a long period of silent gazing, I was drawn to the houses that face the eastern entrance to the cemetery.  Their roofs and chimneys and TV antennas were all turning a brilliant red-gold from the sun’s first rays.  As I watched, the sun moved slightly higher until it peaked over the rooftops and spread its red light in a crimson fan across the entire cemetery.  Every piece of metal and glass lit up and started glowing until the whole graveyard looked like Christmas Eve.

Just then I heard this glorious singing, a whole chorus of angels belting out a hallelujah like I’d never heard before and haven’t heard since.  I started to think I’d died and gone to heaven right there on St. Mary’s Avenue when all of a sudden I realized it was just Mrs. Nitoli’s alarm clock radio going off for Sunday morning sunrise service.  I laughed right out loud and turned back to the old man who was smiling at me, this time with his whole face.

“Go home, Tony,” he said to me almost tenderly.  “Go home and sleep.  You’re young and the young need to sleep and to dream.  It’s your job to dream, then make the world new again.  Capisci?”

Yes, I understood.  I knew exactly what he meant, though I’d never thought about it before that moment.  We looked at each other then, and I think I saw him for the first time, really saw him—not the janitor, not Mr. Russo my neighbor, not my father’s friend or Christine’s father, but a gentle man who gave gifts in the night when no one else was watching.  I smiled and said, “Yeah, thanks Mr. Russo, thanks a lot.  Good night now.”

“Sweet dreams, Tony,” he said and turned back to his garden.

AFTER THAT I frequently saw Mr. Russo in the early morning because I started working at Natale’s Bakery on South Avenue.  We never spoke when I passed by but just nodded our heads at each other in that knowing way.  He’d be out there every morning, long before the sun, watering his tomatoes.  I came to understand that it is his favorite time of day, that he cherishes those long moments between night and day when the whole world sleeps and quiet is his only companion.  He loves to witness the miracle of early morning, that slow shifting of night into day.  It’s holy to him, though I doubt he’d use that word to describe it.

Just before the sun rises, he stops watering the tomatoes, goes into the house for his cane, then makes his way slowly across the Avenue to the gates of the cemetery.  He stands there in front of those huge, wrought-iron gates and waits in the growing light.  When finally the sun peaks over the rooftops to light up the cemetery, then, and only then, does he enter through its gates.

He walks straight to the middle of the cemetery where the Russo plot is located.  There are four headstones set there.  The face of the huge double-stone has been filled in on one side.  That is Carmela.  Every morning he comes to Carmela to share his dreams from the night before, just as they had done their whole married life.

As he speaks to her, sometimes aloud, sometimes inside himself, he sees her and feels her at every stage of their life together:  as a young woman, when she was so vibrant and full of hope, eager for each day; at middle age, when the lines of living etched into her soft, round face; as an older woman, when the losses of too many of her children made her eyes appear as though they perpetually wept.  All these faces of Carmela—each one lovely to him—appear and reappear before him as though there are not one but dozens of her holding hands and dancing together in the golden light of early morning, dancing round and round him in a circle as he details his dreams to her, to them.

When he is done, he tells her how much he misses her and longs to be with her, that life isn’t so good anymore without her.  Then he embraces his vision, unaware of anything but his Carmela as the smell, taste, feel of her warm, eager flesh comes back to him in one agonizing and eternally sweet moment.  When once more he stands alone, a seventy-five-year-old man hunched before a cold piece of polished granite, he sighs and turns to the other stones.

The three smaller stones each have an American flag in front to signify that here are veterans of wars.  Three stones, three soldiers, three flags furling and unfurling in the early morning breeze.

The first of these three stones, that is Dominic.  He had been their first-born, a healthy, hefty baby who’d arrived with such ease that everyone had marveled at tiny Carmela’s ability to give birth so effortlessly. On the morning of his son’s birth in 1927, Mr. Russo had stood outside on the porch of his new home on St. Mary’s Avenue and sung “America” at the top of his voice, a tiny flag in one hand, a fistful of black cigars in the other, waving both proudly at his neighbors going past on their way to work.

It had been the greatest moment of his life, greater even than seeing the Statue of Liberty that first time when he’d arrived at Ellis Island in 1911.  Then he’d been a scared immigrant kid, ignorant of not only the language but even the most common conventions of his new country.  So he’d been ridiculed, called names like “wop” and “nigger,” laughed at and made to work long hours for little pay when he could find work at all.  But on that morning in 1927 he, Gaetano Nicola Russo, had fathered not just a son but an American son whose chances at life were, if not exactly guaranteed, at least open and not barred.  He had believed that this child Dominic would be starting at a place in life that he himself had not even dreamed possible as a boy.  He had been eleven when he had arrived at Ellis Island with his older brother Masimo.  They had come from Caserta in the hill country of southern Italy where the only money to be made had been from carrying rocks down from the mountain quarries.  It had been work fit for beasts of burden, not children, and the memory of it stung Mr. Russo his whole life.  But in 1927 he’d had an American son who would never know such indignity.

So he had sung the only American song he knew, the one he heard the children sing every morning at the school where he worked.  He sang it in English, good English, too, sang it out loud on the porch of his new home.  As he had done so, he had smiled from a place so deep inside him that he’d thought he might burst with the joy of it.

Dominic, the first-born hope, was killed fighting the Nazis in Germany at the very end of World War II.  He had been eighteen years old at the time.

Now each morning Mr. Russo wants to talk to Dominic.  But he’s already told his dreams to his wife, so to Dominic he talks about the news of the world.  Every night at six o’clock Mr. Russo watches the news on TV because he’s very concerned about the world.  It disturbs him that there are so many wars and so much corruption in high places.  He doesn’t understand the greed, the hate, and in some small way it helps him to talk about it to his baby son, Dominic, who is now a small flag and a granite slab on a green, grassy plot of earth in America.

When he is done talking to Dominic, he sighs and turns to the next stone.  That is Carl.

Carl had been their miracle child, Carmela had always said.  After the ease of her first pregnancy and delivery, she had expected many babies and a house full of children’s laughter.  But after that first birth something had gone wrong; what it was, she never knew.  Despite the long hours on her knees praying in St. Bernard’s Church, for years each new pregnancy had ended too soon.  If her prayers hadn’t revealed why, she knew they ultimately had kept Carl—who had been born two months early—alive and growing.

Carmela always had kept her Carl close.  When Dominic had been killed in Germany, she had kept eleven-year-old Carl even closer.  “You are ruinin that boy,” her husband would complain, but Carmela would only smile in a sad kind of way and draw him still closer.  In the end the boy had run off to war, enlisting at eighteen and dead at nineteen from fighting the Communists in Korea.  He had died a hero, having sacrificed his life to save nine other men during the Inchon invasion on the Yellow Sea.  Carl had been awarded distinguished medals that Mr. Russo had been flown to Washington to receive.  Carmela had refused to go and never looked at or touched her son’s framed awards, which her husband had displayed proudly on the walls of their living room.

Now each morning as color creeps into the day, Mr. Russo wants to talk to his second son, Carl.  But he’s already told his dreams to his wife and the news of the world to Dominic, so to Carl he tells the news of the neighborhood:  who has died, moved away, which of Carl’s friends have changed jobs, gotten married, then divorced.  And Mr. Russo complains bitterly about the neighborhood, how it’s changing, about all the drugs and the violence, and about how he doesn’t feel comfortable there anymore.  “These new people, they’re movin in from Newark by the busload.  Soon as they get here they head straight for the welfare office.  Bums, that’s all they are.  Bums.  The kids run wild on the street.  You should see what they done to the school last week . . . .”

When he is done talking to Carl, Mr. Russo turns to the last stone.

THE RUSSOS HAD had four children:  Dominic, Carl, Christine, and Jeannette.  If to me Christine was beautiful, Jeannette was unforgettable.  In a group of kids walking down the Avenue, Jeannette was the one who stood out.  She was so full of life she could barely contain it in her body.  Jeannette didn’t just walk down that Avenue, she danced down it.  She was a giggler, too, but not the kind that got on my nerves; no, Jeannette’s giggling was infectious.  She’d start giggling and the next thing I knew, we were all doing it.  And she had these big, round, brown eyes.  When you looked at Jeannette that’s what you saw—these soft, lovely eyes looking back at you, welcoming you in.  Because when you looked into her eyes, you could see all the way to her soul, which was full of joy and a little bit of sorrow, too.

Carmela was thirty-nine the year Jeannette was born in 1949, and Mr. Russo was forty-nine, so they knew she would be their last miracle.  Everything she did delighted him, and oh how he loved her!  For one thing she could make him laugh.  All the rest of us kids were afraid of him, but not Jeannette.  Never Jeannette.  If he should scold her, she’d look right back at him with her hands on her hips, her huge brown eyes flashing, ready to scold him in return.  They would get into the most ferocious arguments that somehow would bring them closer together.  When she had been a little girl he would set her down in the freshly turned soil of his tomato garden.  None of the rest of us had better go anywhere near that garden, but for Jeannette he had a little shovel and pail.  She’d sit there in the dirt and play all day long.  Mr. Russo would sit on the rocking chair on the front porch and watch her.  He’d rock back and forth while she sang to him in her sweet, little girl voice.  She was too young to know any real lyrics of songs, so she made them up from the pieces of her young life.  She sang to her father simple songs without rhyme.

THAT LAST STONE is Jeannette.  She had gone to Vietnam as an Army nurse, one of eight who never came back.  She was killed in a rocket attack while working on a POW ward trying to save the life of a Vietnamese guerrilla who had been wounded the night before in a raid on the camp.  She had recognized him, for he had worked at the camp during the day.  Although the hospital was clearly marked on its roof with a red cross, it had been targeted anyway.  That was the nature of a war where there were no front lines, where everyone was a potential victim of battle.  Her name is engraved in black granite on the Wall in Washington.  When I heard about her death, I couldn’t believe it.  I still can’t.  I can’t believe a person so full of life can be reduced to a name on a wall.

And every morning Mr. Russo wants to talk to Jeannette.  He gets down on his hands and knees, which is hard for him to do because he's seventy-five years old and very stiff.  Then he’s ready to talk, but he’s already told his dreams to his wife and the news of the world to his first son and the news of the neighborhood to his second son, so he doesn’t have anything left to say.

It’s okay, because he doesn’t really come to talk.  He comes to listen.  Over the sound of the machinery starting up in the factories on North Avenue, over the roar of the jets coming out of Newark Airport, over the rumble of his neighbors’ cars heading off to work, Mr. Russo is on his knees listening, listening for the sound of a little girl singing simple songs without rhyme.

And on days that feel full of grace to him, he hears her.  He hears her songs in the soft breezes that waft across the cold stones of that open field.  Those sweet songs enchant and mystify him, a father in search of his lost child.