Exactly three months after Mr. Russo had returned from Christine’s home in the country—it was Monday, September 15, 1975—he was walking back across St. Mary’s Avenue from the cemetery when he noticed a light on in the house next to his.  Though the sun had risen, the morning was overcast and dark, so the light shone brightly.  While summer wasn’t completely over yet, there was a damp chill in the morning air.  Unless the sun burned through the clouds, he knew it would be a dreary day.

The low lying clouds lay heavily over the Avenue, affecting Mr. Russo’s mood, making him feel as if a heavy weight were upon him.  When he glanced at the sky, the clouds looked like swollen faces that reproached him.  He was defensive and irritable, filled with impatience.  The dampness made his joints ache, and he was beginning to think he’d made a mistake in leaving Christine’s.  Besides the stiffness of his body, his stomach had been bothering him lately.  Feeling sick, he wanted to be comforted; but living alone, there was no one to soothe away the discomforts.  He thought perhaps Christine would have cared for him in that way if he were still there.  “But I ain’t,” he said aloud, irritated with himself.

At that moment he decided to pursue the person whose hand had switched on the light that shone like a beacon through this grey morning.  Mr. Russo should have known then that he might be risking more than he was willing, but somehow he didn’t.  When he saw a shadow pass by the curtained windows of that lighted house next door, he made up his mind without really knowing what locked door he was about to open.

“Sonny’s gettin ready for work.  I better go catch him before he takes off.”  Mr. Russo walked to the side of his garden where it bordered Sonny’s driveway.  He picked up a hoe that leaned against the low wire fence that separated the yards.  With it he began to break up the soil between the mature tomato plants that hung heavy with juicy, lusciously ripe tomatoes.  The plants reminded him of cows just before milking, their bags full with milk.  Soon, maybe tomorrow, he would harvest for canning.

Suddenly the front door opened, startling Mr. Russo even though he’d been waiting for it.  A young man in his late twenties, dressed completely in white, walked out and stood on the concrete porch a moment, surveying the lowering sky over the cemetery.  Mr. Russo stared at him, thinking how much Sonny resembled Sal Sontini, Sonny’s deceased father.  They had the same broad shoulders, narrow waist, and long  face.  Yet it was more than physical, for there was a vulnerability to Sonny, despite his powerful physique, that had been in Sal, too.

Sal Sontini had seen this softness in his son, recognized it as a weakness he despised in himself.  He had tried to toughen the boy with stern discipline that always started with yelling and ended with punches.  It hadn’t worked, not because Sonny was immune to his father’s rage—he wasn’t—but because Sonny was stubborn and quick tempered, which protected him from his father’s outbursts.  Besides, that sweetness in Sonny’s spirit could not be touched except with tenderness.

“Hey, hey Sonny.  C’mere.  I wanna talk to you.”  Sonny turned towards the sound of the raspy voice and, when he saw Mr. Russo, smiled warmly. 

“Hey, good morning Mr. Russo, how you doin?  I’ll be glad to talk to you.  Anytime.  You know that.”  Sonny walked down the three brick steps, his movements smooth and graceful.  As he approached Mr. Russo, his hair was ruffled by a morning breeze that had just risen out of the west.  He wore his hair long, nearly shoulder-length, and it was beginning to be streaked with grey, prematurely.  It was his habit when he talked to tuck it behind his ears with the ring finger of either hand.  He did this now as he reached his car; then he crossed his arms over his broad chest and leaned against the Chevy Impala’s rear fender, just across the fence from Mr. Russo.

“So where ya goin, Sonny?”

Sonny looked at the old man a moment, then laughed to himself as though he knew what was coming.  “You know where I’m goin.  I’m goin to work.”

“Yeah, that’s what I want to talk to you about.  What kinda work is this you’re doin?”

“Whadda you mean?”  Sonny knew exactly what Mr. Russo had meant, but the stubbornness in him made him pretend otherwise.  “Something wrong with my work?”

“It ain’t fit for a man, that’s what’s wrong with it!  You used to be a mason like your father, makin good money.  If he was alive today your father’d be tellin you the same thing:  what you’re doin ain’t right.”

“Whadda you mean it ain’t right?”  Sonny shook his head in disbelief.  “You know why I’m doin it—it's for Jeannette.”  As soon as Sonny said her name he regretted it, for first he saw the pain in the old man’s eyes, then he felt his own.

SONNY AND JEANNETTE grew up together, side by side, right next door.  Sonny was eighteen months older than Jeannette, and she worshiped him, followed him wherever he went.  From the day she learned to walk, Jeannette was Sonny’s shadow.  When we boys were growing up, we were taught to disdain the company of girls; machismo was as much a part of our diet as macaroni.  So a boy like Sonny should have resented Jeannette following him, but he never tired of her.  Never.

One day when we were about nine or ten, I said to him, “Hey Sonny, how bout gettin rid of Jeannette so you, me, and the guys could do somethin.”  Without even thinking about it he said, “Tony, if you don’t want Jeannette, you don’t want me.  Come on, Jeannette, let’s get outta here.  We got better things to do.”  He turned on his heels and started walking away fast, pulling Jeannette along with him.  I had to call after them, “Wait, Sonny . . . wait.  Ah, . . . she can stay.”  But they just kept on walking.

Right through school it was Sonny and Jeannette all the way.  When they both were in Maxson Junior High—Sonny in ninth grade and Jeannette in seventh—they discovered romance.  They’d walk hand-in-hand through the hallways, dragging their feet over the tiled floors as if in slow motion, draining every minute they had together between classes.  To and from school they’d walk so closely together they looked like they were in a three-legged race.  Sonny was a lot taller than Jeannette, and so she fit snugly into his side as he wrapped an arm around her.  In the sunlight they cast one shadow.  Whenever they walked through the pedestrian tunnel beneath the railroad tracks separating North and South Avenues, Jeannette would sing to Sonny, the sound of her sweet voice reverberating through the tunnel:

As we stroll along together

Holding hands, walking all alone

So in love are we two

That we don’t know what to do

So in love (so in love)

In a world of our own.

Listening to Jeannette sing the Thymes’ hit song, Sonny would start to glow and pull her even closer.

“JEANETTE AIN’T GOT nothin to do with it.”  Mr Russo was angry now.  “You’re always bringin her into everything, blamin her for your mistakes.”

“I’m not blaming her.  It’s just that she’s a part of it all, especially why I chose the work I do.”

“You should go back to bein a mason.  Now that’s good work for a man.”

AS SOON AS Sonny got out of high school, he went to work as a mason’s apprentice.  All the men in his family—his father, uncles, cousins—were masons.  It was hard work, and they were proud of their labor and their skill, for they were very talented with mortar, brick, stone.  They had been involved in every major construction in the city, and there was never any question but that Sonny would take up the trade:  Sonny was a Sontini, and the Sontinis were masons.

This wasn’t unusual on St. Mary’s Avenue, which was a working-class neighborhood.  While things were starting to change when Sonny was graduated from high school in 1966, still very few of us went off to college.  Some of the girls went, like Jeannette who went to nursing school, but rarely the boys.  So by 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War, those of us who hadn’t enlisted already were being pulled off the Avenue left and right, and too many of us weren’t coming back, except in body bags.  Butch Fusco, who’d been a door-gunner in Nam, was the first we lost.  Nobody liked Butch a whole lot because he was surly and could be cruel; but he was one of us, and death breaks the heart indiscriminately.

One day Sonny said to me, “I don’t get it, Tony.  Here I am, prime draft meat, and I ain’t heard a word.”  I looked at him to see if he were serious; I couldn’t understand why he would complain.  “Don’t knock it, Sonny.  Don’t knock it.”

The next afternoon Sonny left work early because he wasn’t feeling well; so instead of heading to the YMCA to work out as usual, he went straight home.  When he walked into the house, he stopped in the hallway where he found a letter from Jeannette.  As Sonny was opening the envelope, he overheard his father in the kitchen bragging about something to Sonny’s uncle:  “Yeah, I took care of Sonny.  I called this friend of mine on the draft board and he said, ‘Don’t you worry about Sonny.’”

“You did what?”  Sonny was stunned by the implications of his father’s words.  He stormed into the kitchen, waving the unread letter in the air, shouting, “What did you do?”

His father averted his eyes from Sonny’s glare, pursed his lips in silence, and stared into his coffee mug.

“Now Sonny,” his uncle said, trying to smooth things over, “your father’s just watchin out for you.  He did what anybody would of . . . .”

But Sonny didn’t hear it, wouldn’t even stay long enough to catch the last part of his uncle’s explanation.  He’d heard enough already.  He was enraged by his father’s actions on his behalf.  He didn’t know if what his father had done was illegal, but the lives of a half-dozen friends who were in the jungle right then told him it was wrong.  He was so angry at having received special treatment that he went downtown and enlisted that very afternoon.  Later that year he was in Vietnam.  He didn’t care about Vietnam.  He didn’t even know where it was.  None of us did.  But Sonny was not going to receive special treatment.

‘I CAN’T GO back to being a mason.  It’d be like pretending nothing has changed, nothing happened, when everything’s changed.  Everything.”  Sonny’s voice began to quaver when he said this.

Mr. Russo stared at Sonny, alarmed.  Sonny stared back, though it was hard, especially when the tears began to fill the corners of his eyes.  Such plain emotion embarrassed Mr. Russo.  He turned away, looking out across St. Mary’s Cemetery where he saw three small American flags flapping in the breeze.

Just above a whisper he said, “You shouldn’t blame yourself, Sonny.  It ain’t your fault.”

WHEN JEANNETTE GOT Sonny’s letter from boot camp, she knew immediately what she would do.  When it was done she told no one, not her parents, not Sonny.  She waited until after her graduation, then she wrote to Sonny and went home to St.Mary’s.  In the small kitchen in the rear of the green, wood-framed house whose front yard spilled over with tomato plants, she sat with her parents.  A train went by on North Avenue and everything shook a little inside the painted cupboards and on top of the yellow enamel table.  Jeannette fidgeted with the spoon in the sugar bowl, then told her parents her plans.  She told them rather bluntly in a voice that was firm yet gentle:  “When I learned about Sonny going to Vietnam, I enlisted as an Army nurse.  I’m leaving tomorrow for basic training at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.  I’ve volunteered for Vietnam.”

Carmela gasped, sucking in breath as though she’d been kicked in the womb.  This was a nightmare beyond her imagining.  After Dominic had been killed in Germany, she had worried herself nearly to madness over Carl, and in the end she had lost him, too; but her sole consolation was that her daughters were safe from soldiering.  Now that illusion of safety was being shattered by Jeannette’s announcement.  She gasped for air and gripped the metal sides of the table.

Her husband barely noticed as he yelled, “I’ve already lost two sons to war and I ain’t losing you, too!  I forbid it!  Do you hear me, you are not going to Vietnam!”

“I’m sorry, Daddy, but if Sonny’s there, I’m going, too.”

“Over my dead body!  Sonny belongs in Vietnam—he’s a man.  You’re a girl, and girls don’t go to war!  You’re not going!”  He raged on, filling the house to overflowing with his anger, his fear, his hurt.  Everyone on the Avenue could hear him yelling.  Jeannette just sat there silently, holding her mother’s shaking hands, until he could yell no more.

“I’m going, Daddy.  But I promise you, I’ll be back.“  It was the only promise she ever made to her father that she didn’t keep.

Months later, as Mr. Russo was walking down the Avenue towards home from work, he heard a woman’s wailing, rising and falling like ocean waves.  It came crashing into him, almost knocking him down on the concrete sidewalk.  He ran the last half-block, falling up the steps to his porch, tearing his pants at the right knee, which began to bleed.

When he opened the front door, the keening grew even more intense.  He found Carmela collapsed into the arms of Theresa Sontini, who was rocking her back and forth.  A half-dozen women from the neighborhood were in the room, some with rosaries in their hands, all with tears streaming down their cheeks.  As soon as they saw him, they pulled back as if afraid, until finally Theresa said, barely audible over Carmela’s wailing, “It’s Jeannette.”

At that moment he felt two things, almost simultaneously:  first he felt something like his heart tear itself into pieces, then he felt a numbness pour over him.  He knew a door had closed between him and the world.  He heard the door bang shut, then heard the sound of breaking glass falling to the floor.  When he came back to himself, his fist was bleeding and the glass over Carl’s framed medals was in shards.

Carmela never stopped wailing.  Finally Dr. Raymond came and gave her an injection that put her out until the following morning.  It seemed like the right thing to do, but when she awoke she had to be told all over again.

“I DID BLAME myself when it happened,” Sonny said.  The tenderness in Mr. Russo’s voice had encouraged him to speak openly.  “And you know what?  I still do.  It was my fault.”

“Don’t say that, Sonny.  That’s stupid.”

“But it was my fault.  Jeannette never woulda gone there if it hadn’t been for me, and I went there out of some kinda perverse pride.  Oh it was my fault, alright.  I know that.  I knew it then, but I couldn’t face it.  When I first heard about Jeannette I was on R&R in Nha Trang.  I couldn’t deal with it.  I stuffed the pain as far down as it would go and hit the streets.  When the MPs finally caught up with me six weeks later, I was in an alley in Saigon, a needle hangin out of my arm, half-dead.  I didn’t even know what my name was.  They cleaned me up a little and shipped me home on a medical discharge.  They acted like I was fixed or something.  I wasn’t.  You saw me.”

WE ALL SAW him.

One day I was downtown, hanging out by the Frontier Diner with Anthony Fusco and Vinnie DeMatteo.  The bus from New York City pulled up across the street, and we saw this emaciated human being get off.

Anthony pointed his chin toward the guy and said, “Hey, who’s that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but in the back of my mind I thought I should.

We stared at him and he stared back, an olive duffel bag on the sidewalk next to him.

“Oh my god,” Vinnie said, “that’s Sonny!”

“No,” I said, “no way.”  Sonny always had been big, even as a boy.  He had lifted weights his whole life.  He was a mason.  This guy standing before us, looking across Front Street at us through protruding eyeballs in bony sockets, he was a man so thin he wouldn’t cast a shadow.  It’s true:  he was a man without a shadow.  Then I thought of Jeannette being dead and I knew Vinnie was right—Sonny, what was left of him, had come home.

I’ve seen lots of junkies in my life, but I’ve never seen a junkie like Sonny.  He started coming over to my house three, four times a week.  His hands shook, his nose constantly ran.  He’d walk right up to me, stand too close, and say too softly, “Hey, Tony, man, can you loan me five dollars?”

“Sonny, whadda you talkin about?  You was here just last night.  Whadda you think I am, a bank?”

“Come on, man.  Jus give me the five dollars.  I need it bad, Tony.  It’s gonna get me through the night.”  His eyes darted every which way.  He kept wiping his nose with the back of his hand and sucking mucous back up into his head.

“Sonny, you gotta get yourself straightened out.  I can’t keep giving you money all the time.  I got my own habits, ya know.  You oughta go over to North Avenue.  There’s a methadone clinic there.  Sign yourself up.  Get some help.”

“Sure, Tony, I’ll do it tomorrow.  First thing.  Now can you give me the five?  I really need it, Tony.”  Sonny’s voice started to waver, as if he were going to cry.  I couldn’t tell if it were the need for the drug, the humiliation of having to beg, or the frustration of not getting immediately what he wanted.  Maybe it was all three, or maybe it was just a con.

Either way, he obviously hadn’t heard what I’d said about the rehab clinic.  “What is it, Sonny?  Why you living like this?  Is it Jeannette?”

As soon as I said her name, Sonny exploded on me.  He grabbed my shirt in both hands and shook me.  I don’t know where the strength came from, but he was a madman.  He started shouting at me, tiny balls of spit flying in my face, his breath sour and sickening, his eyes wide open in rage:  “Don’t you ever say her name again, Tony!  You do, and I’ll kill you!  You hear me!  I’ll kill you, Tony!”

“Calm down, Sonny, calm down!”

His hands loosened on my shirt for a moment as his eyes closed, then they tightened again as he started to collapse.  I thought I’d have to catch him, but he didn’t fall.  He just stood there a minute, holding onto my shirt and swaying slightly.  Then his neck muscles seemed to give out, and his forehead dropped hard against my collar bone.  I could feel him shaking and I realized he was sobbing.  I held onto him then, and I nearly started crying, too.

“It’s okay, Sonny.  I’ll give you the five dollars.”  I took the money out of my pocket and handed him a five dollar bill.  I had to give it to him.  I’d have given him whatever he needed to get through the night.  We used to play hide-and-seek in the graveyard at night.  How could I say no to Sonny?

That night Sonny was arrested for possession of heroin.  He never got the chance to shoot up, so he was a sick man when they busted him.  When I heard about it I assumed the narcs had taken him to the methadone clinic on North Avenue.

But they hadn’t.

Or that they had taken him to the VA Hospital for treatment.

But they hadn’t.

Or at the very least they had taken him to Muhlenberg Hospital for an examination.

But they hadn’t.

Six months earlier Sonny had been risking his life in Vietnam.  What was his reward?

They threw him in solitary to shake and sweat it out alone.

Sonny told me later that after an hour in that bleak cell he couldn’t stand it anymore.  For some people going through withdrawal is no worse than getting sick with a bad virus; but Sonny wasn’t one of them.  He stood at his cell door, shaking it and screaming, banging his head against the bars.  But no one responded.  Then during a lull in the sickening waves of withdrawal, he noticed a pack of book matches lying on one of the flat, iron crosspieces between the bars.  Those matches were just sitting there as if they were waiting for him.  The cover was glossy black with embossed, gold letters that advertised the Halfway House Restaurant on Route 22.  Sonny was intrigued by the appearance of those particular matches.  He knew that the Halfway House was where Mr. B. gave his free dinners on Friday nights.  Had Mr. B. arranged for the matches to be placed here?  What could it mean that fire was available at his fingertips?

He picked them up, opened the cover, and broke off a single match.  The head was white, and the paper stick of the match was wide and thick.  He flicked it against the striker, and, his fingers shaking as he held it up, it sputtered into flame.  Sonny watched in fascination as it slowly burned down the match until the flame was nearly at his fingertips.  Then he held it to the unbuttoned sleeve on his left arm.  The shirt caught fire almost immediately.  Flames started shooting up his arm.  He could smell the thick hair on his forearm burning.  The whole scene captivated him.  It became a scientific experiment in combustion, and he was both the observer and the observed.  He was dispassionate and curious, unafraid of hell’s hot pain.

Perhaps it was the silence that made the guard check on him, or maybe it was the odor of something burning, but suddenly a man was yelling, “He’s on fire!”

Three guards burst through the cell door and tore the burning shirt from him.

Then they stripped him of his other clothing.

Then they beat him.

Two men held his limbs apart while a third stood on the single bunk and choked him in a vise-like grip.  Sonny felt his body seize and lurch.  He couldn’t breathe and thought he was dying when he felt his bladder give way.  He wasn’t thinking about anything except that his life was ending right at that precise moment.  So this is how it happens, he thought.  Then he heard one of the men who restrained him say in a voice that sounded far away and dim, “You’d better stop now, you’re killing him.”

One final squeeze of his neck, and Sonny was let go.  He dropped to the floor where he was handcuffed to the lowest rung on the bars.  The guards left without saying a word.  They took the matches and the clothes with them.  Sonny lay naked on the concrete floor all night.  He lay on top of his own urine, sick and trembling, unable to speak a word, the pain searing his choked throat, but alive.

“YEAH, I SAW  you when you come home, Sonny.  You was a sick boy.  But you ain’t sick now.  You’re strong, you’re young, you’re healthy.  You got your whole life in front of you, and you oughta be doin the kind of work a man can do.”

“What are you talkin about?”  Sonny was exasperated that the conversation had returned to his work.  That exasperation came out as anger as he said, “You know what I think?  I think a man can do whatever a man wants to do.  There’s nothing wrong with my work.  There’s nothing wrong with a man being a nurse.”

They both stood silent then, eying each other warily.  Finally Sonny took a deep breath to calm himself and went on:  “And it’s true that I’m doing it for Jeannette.  Or at least that’s the way it started out.  After I got out of jail I had to go to that halfway house for drug rehab.  That’s where I met Clarence.  He hipped me to what I was doing, how I was destroying myself over Jeannette, and how I could turn things around by dedicating my life to her.  That’s when I got the idea of becoming a nurse.  And you know what?  I like it.  I really like it.  I like serving other people in that way.  It makes my life rich, like I have gifts to give away every day to people who appreciate it.  And that makes me grateful for my life, for Jeannette, too, and for Clarence, who helped me see all this.”

“Who is this guy Clarence, anyway?  And what’s he doin livin in your house?  If your parents was alive I don think they’d like some stranger takin over their home.”

“Clarence is definitely not a stranger.  And his living with me isn’t any different than if I’d gotten married.”

“I’m glad you brought that up, Sonny, because I wanted to talk to you about that.”  Mr. Russo looked directly at Sonny to make sure he had his attention.  Then he spoke as if he were making an announcement.  “You need a wife, Sonny.”

Sonny laughed out loud.

Mr. Russo was miffed at Sonny’s response, which he thought was disrespectful, even irreverent.  “What you laughin at?  It’s true—you need a wife.”

“I don’t need a wife.  I’m doing fine, really.  Besides, I got Clarence.”

Mr. Russo eyed Sonny suspiciously.  “What’s a matter?  You don like women anymore?”

“Naw, that’s not it, I like women fine.  I always have.  In fact I like women better today than I ever did.  I don’t know whether it’s me or what, but women seem different.  Stronger, maybe, or not so afraid.  Or maybe both.  I work with women all day long.  Nearly all the nurses are women and there’s a lot of women doctors now.  Plus over half the patients are women.  Maybe that’s why I appreciate them so much more—I’m always with them.”

“So you oughta find a good one and raise a family, Sonny.  Huh?”

“Naw, that’s not for me, Mr. Russo.  I know you don’t understand this, but me and Clarence, we’re partners.  We take care of each other.  When I went to that halfway house, I was bitter and very angry.  In the years since I had enlisted, I had lost everything:  I’d lost Jeannette, my parents had both died, I was strung out on drugs and couldn’t work, I had no dignity or self-respect.  Then the first night in jail I almost lost my life.  Yeah, I was very bitter.  Jail makes you that way.  Everyone’s always playin head games with you.  You gotta watch your back all the time.  You can’t trust anyone.  It gets to be a way of life, and so I was full of hate and I trusted no one.  That first day in the halfway house, all these people are talkin to me like they care or something.  I didn’t believe it.  Not for a minute.  I was cold and hostile, would hardly even talk.

“But Clarence, he saved my life.  You know how?  He wouldn’t let me hide.  He’d look right at me and say, ‘Sonny, I know you’re in there.  Come on out, man.  It’s time to rejoin the race.’  Then he’d smile at me, that big, toothy grin of his.  I was afraid, deathly afraid, but he taught me how to love again.”

“Love,” Mr. Russo said with disdain.  “That’s just a four-letter word, and words are cheap, Sonny.”

“No, you’re wrong, Mr. Russo.  Words are the most expensive thing we have.  Words make or break our lives!  You know, when my father was alive I never told him I loved him.  Not once.  And you know why?  Because he never told me. Now he’s dead and it’s too late.”  Sonny grew very still, struggling to control his sorrow.  Then he looked at Mr. Russo and smiled, “And you know what?  I love you, old man!”

Mr. Russo’s eyes widened, then he flushed and waved him off.  “Aw go on, you’re gonna be late for work.”

Sonny laughed joyously.  “If I was 10,000 years late, I’d stay one more minute to let you know I love you.  But you’re right, I do have to get to work.  So look, take care of yourself, okay?  I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“No, really, I am.  I had this dream about you.  I never really remember my dreams, but this one stuck with me.  I dreamed you were hurt.  Something happened and you got hurt.”

“Nothin’s gonna hurt me.  I’m too old to be hurt.”

“No one’s ever that old.  Just take care of yourself, okay?”

“Sure, Sonny.  You, too. Ciao.”

“Ciao, Mr. Russo.”