If talking to Sonny that September morning was a painful journey into the past, talking with Susan became a bridge to the future, a future she predicted would be graced with a gift-bearing visitor. But before he would allow himself to consider what, if anything, that meant, Mr. Russo had work to do.

He hoed his way toward the front of his garden where it bordered the sidewalk along St. Mary's Avenue. From there he could see how the garden was cut in half by his own walkway that led from the porch steps to a small wooden gate by the sidewalk. In the nearly fifty years he had lived in that house, he'd had to replace that gate several times.

He had built it the first time when Dominic had been a boy, only three or four years old. With both his small hands Dominic had gripped tightly the end of each board jutting off the sawhorse as Mr. Russo carefully cut through it. Then they had hammered the pieces together using old nails Mr. Russo saved in a rusty bucket. Often they first had had to straighten a bent nail before they could use it, but occasionally they had found one straight enough to use right away. Mr. Russo would start the nail into the wood. Then Dominic would hit at it fiercely, sometimes moving the nail deeper into the board, other times managing only to bend it again. When his son, huffing and puffing from the exertion, had heaved the heavy hammer back over to him, Mr. Russo would finish the nail off with a couple of quick blows. This always astounded Dominic, who'd found his father's strength and accuracy with a hammer awe-inspiring. Dominic had said as much with his eyes, which grew round, and his smile, which appeared each time his father had buried another nail into the soft wood.

When the gate had been assembled, they had gotten ready to put on the hinges, using an awl to create indentations in the wood to set the screws. The sharpness of the awl's piercing point had scared Dominic, who could imagine how easily it would puncture his own soft flesh; so when his father had warned him, "Don't you ever play with this, Dominic," he hadn't needed to be told why. Just before his father had gotten ready to screw on the hinges, he had taken a tiny bar of soap from his pocket and rolled each screw back and forth over it. Perplexed and intrigued, Dominic had looked up at his father and asked sincerely, "Is the screw going to take a bath?" Mr. Russo had smiled and said, "No, the soap is slippery and makes the screw turn easier into the wood. Work don't have to be hard to be good." Dominic had nodded his head solemnly to show that he had understood his father's meaning.

Once the hinges had been fastened onto the gate, they had attached it to the post and then painted it. Mr. Russo had guided his young son's hand as Dominic gingerly dipped the wide brush into the bucket of white paint and then slowly wiped it over the unprimed wood. "You gotta put some pressure on that brush. Stain, tung oil, things like that can be wiped on, but this is paint. It gotta be brushed into the wood. See, look how it soaks it up. Don't be stingy now! Give it a good drink!" Dominic had laughed at the funny idea of wood taking a drink, and Mr. Russo had laughed back, having seen in his mind what his son might be imagining: a flat board with skinny, rubbery arms whose white-gloved hands were hefting a huge glass of frothy milk to its round, knothole mouth. Father and son had stood this way a while, each laughing at the comical image the other had created. So complete had been their joy that they had been unaware of anything, even the precious moment itself.

Hearing his son's laughter always had produced a profound effect on Mr. Russo, for it had affected different parts of him simultaneously. What he'd heard with his ears had been a sound like music. It had been a simple tune made by a flute, perhaps, or a xylophone running quickly up and down the scale of a light-hearted key. What he had felt, however, had come from somewhere deep inside him. He couldn't have said where exactly, but the feeling had seemed to spring from an ancient well of uncomplicated emotion. It had tickled his insides and turned him giddy, like a choice champagne of the spirit. And what he'd thought, over and over again, was simply, "This is my child! This is my child!"

When they'd finished with their laughter and their painting, Mr. Russo had told Dominic, "Now don't touch that gate. That paint's wet and it ain't gonna dry till tomorrow. Okay?"

"Okay, Papa," Dominic had answered, his eyes wide with the seriousness of his promise.

The boy's face had been round like his mother's, and, like her, he'd had no guile in him. He had been an open book that Mr. Russo had never tired of reading. "Okay, Jackson, we're done for now." He had called Dominic by many nicknames: Jackson, Butler, Angel. Some he had gotten from the radio, like Amos from "The Amos and Andy Show." Others had come from the comics (Abner, Mutt) or the sports pages (Satchel, PeeWee). Still others he had made up (Amokin from Hoboken) or borrowed from stranger's names he had overheard while standing in line at the movies (Clinton, Stavros). He had used them indiscriminately, keeping some for weeks or discarding them after a single use.

For a moment they both had stood in front of their new gate, lingering to admire what they had created together. Then Mr. Russo had taken his son's small hand in his and started to walk towards the house. But the boy had pulled away, saying, "Wait, Papa, there's a nail we dropped." As he had bent over to pick it up from the ground, he'd backed into the newly painted gate, lightly brushing his rear against its gleaming white slats. As a result three white stripes had been emblazoned onto the seat of the boy's pants; but Dominic, so proud of having retrieved the dropped nail, hadn't noticed. "Here, Papa!" He'd held the nail up to his father, who had suppressed his laughter at the boy's mishap and said only, "Grazie. You have a good eye, Tonto." Dominic had beamed, taken his father's hand and hurried him up the stairs and into the house, eager to tell his mother his newest nickname. "Mama, Mama, guess what my name is?"

ALL THE LONG years later, Mr. Russo stood at that same gate, which he had mended and re-mended, made and re-made. He stood there in the sunlight leaning on his hoe, looking up the Avenue at the group of children who were beginning to walk down it on their way to school. Every morning at this time Mr. Russo walked to his gate and stood there, waiting for the children. It was the same gate, but he was not the same man that had built it with a little boy whose names he had uncovered as eagerly as a child uncovers the windows on an Advent calendar. Now most children were nameless to him, and that's how he preferred it. Their presence was a threat, not a promise; their laughter was a bane, not a boon.

So each morning he stood at his gate, leaning on his hoe or his cane, and waited for them to come. He had something he wanted to say to them. He didn't say it with words. He said it with his body. That bent and stooped body became, for a time, capable of conveying the subtlest of messages in an arch of an eyebrow, the curl of a lip.

He scowled at them. He narrowed his eyes to mere slits that spewed venom. He stood motionless and stayed defiantly, arrogantly, aggressively still as though he were not human at all, but a mythical hunting beast that waited patiently for the precise moment to pounce upon its prey.

Despite his silence, or perhaps because of it, his message rang out across the gate with a ferocity that cowed the smaller children whose daily trek to school took them directly past the Russo house. If they could, they gladly would have walked on a sidewalk opposite, but there was none because of the graveyard, whose grasses gently sloped onto the road itself.

And what was his message?

"Don't touch my tomatoes! Don't even look at my tomatoes! You enter this garden and you will never leave it again! I will feed you into the soil in small pieces of ripening compost! Don't touch my tomatoes!"

Those kids didn't care about his tomatoes. In fact some of them, particularly the older ones who'd recently moved to the neighborhood, paid no attention to him at all. They ignored him, walking by as though he weren't glaring at them two feet away. Most of the kids, however, knew who he was; after all, Mr. Russo had been the janitor at the school for thirty-eight years. If he hadn't cleaned up their particular messes, he had picked up after their parents and, in some cases, their grandparents. Thus many of the children greeted him by name as they walked by:

"Good morning, Mr. Russo."

"Hey, Mr. Russo, what's happenin?"

"My mother said to say 'hi.'"

It didn't matter to them that he responded, if at all, with merely a slight nod of his head. Mr. Russo was a part of their daily walk to and from school, and most of them simply accepted his fierce presence.

In return he saw them only as a potential nuisance that must be guarded against relentlessly. So he stood there by his gate each morning and again in the afternoon.

That morning, after the last straggler has passed by, Mr. Russo put away the hoe and climbed the steps to the front porch to sit in his rocking chair. He did this each morning as the sun traversed the open sky over the graveyard, warming the porch and the old man who sat rocking on it. Mr. Russo didn't care for daytime television and he rarely read, so he was content to sit and rock, quietly passing away the day watching cars and the occasional pedestrian go by on St. Mary's Avenue. He received few visitors and almost no phone calls, so it was a quiet six hours until the children returned from school.

Normally he was satisfied with the quiet, but today he held within him a growing expectation that something was going to be different. Though he had feigned disinterest at the time, the seed that Susan James had planted with her prediction of change had taken root quickly and already had sprouted in his heart. For the first time in years Mr. Russo looked forward to the day. He wondered who it might be that would arrive unexpectedly. He eagerly decided to make a mental list of possible candidates: his daughter, Christine (Naw, she always calls first); his friend, Joe (He came yesterday; besides, he plays bocce today at Asunta Hall); his neighbor who lived two doors down, Mrs. Nitoli (She never leaves her front porch, afraid she'll miss Michael Anthony); Mogwa and Ogwa (Oh, I forgot, they're livin at that institution since their mother died). Though he tried, he couldn't think of anyone else. So he just waited.

At first the waiting was exciting, almost intoxicating. This feeling of excitement reminded him of his son, Carl, who had thrilled in anticipation of Christmas morning. Whereas Dominic had placidly accepted the promise of Christmas, Carl had been filled with such excitement that he seemed to vibrate. On Christmas Eve it had taken the boy hours to fall asleep. He would lay in his bed flat on his back, stiff as a board, tightly clutching his blanket with the fingers of both hands. Each time Mr. Russo would check on Carl, the boy would be trying so hard to force himself into sleep that his face would be scrunched up from tightly squeezing his eyes shut. Eventually Carl would simply wear himself out with the effort and fall asleep, but he rarely made it all the way through the night and had been known to sneak downstairs for a preview.

The Christmas that Carl had been nine years old the Russos had bought him a watch. As Carmela was wrapping it on Christmas Eve, she had noticed that the time was incorrect. "Gaetano, can you set this watch while I wrap Dominic's gift?"

"Maybe we should let Carl do it himself tomorrow. It'd be fun for him."

So they had wrapped the watch as it was.

Only the next morning when Carl had unwrapped the gift, appropriately wide-eyed with surprise, Mr. Russo had noticed that the watch read the correct time. "Hey, Santa knows the right time after all." He had looked at Carmela, but she had shaken her head "not me." Simultaneously they had turned to Carl who had smiled innocently enough and then, very slyly, had winked at them with a wry grin on his cherubic face. Immediately they had broken into knowing laughter, Carl's the loudest of all, making the best kind of Christmas morning song.

Mr. Russo thought now that this single moment of shared laughter was more precious than anything he could imagine. Why don't we know these things to start out with? he asked himself. It's taken me almost thirty years to really hear us laugh that morning, to know what it's worth. Life ain't set up right. It's all backwards. Here I am, an old man sittin on a porch all day with nothin to do but hear the sound of my family's laughter when it's too late. If I was designin this thing, I'd have people hear it the first time around. Mr. Russo shook his head from side to side at the stupidity of it all. His face looked tighter after that, more fierce and bitter.

Then he thought he heard someone at the gate, but when he looked, a small smile beginning to form on his face, it was only the Fusco dog raising one leg to spray the post. "G'won, get outta here!" Mr. Russo shouted, startling the dog who had thought it was alone. The dog looked up at Mr. Russo, then shook its rear and wandered down the Avenue.

"So when they comin?" Mr. Russo asked aloud, beginning to tire of the wait. He started to rock impatiently, as though by rocking faster time would pass more quickly. It didn't. The morning dragged on. Even the traffic on St. Mary's Avenue, which normally was light, disappeared completely. Except for the Fusco's dog, not one living creature walked along the sidewalk. The birds, some robins and a few jays along with a cardinal and an oriole, which earlier had been singing and flitting about in the bright sunshine, now had settled quietly into the shade of the chestnut tree to escape the growing heat of midday.

The sun beat down steadfastly onto the porch. Where yesterday it had been the softer, more friendly sun of early autumn, now it was more like the piercing, burning sun of summer. Beads of sweat formed on Mr. Russo's brow then trickled down the side of his face, making dark traces through his grey stubble. Normally at this time of day he went inside to fix his lunch, but today he was afraid to leave the porch, afraid that he might miss the expected visitor. So he just sat there in the hot sun, growing ever more impatient. By one o'clock he swore he'd wait no longer. "It's all stupid," he said out loud. By two he was furious with himself for believing that anything would change. Life never changes, he thought. Never has. Never will. It's always the same. Hope is what kills us cause it keeps us waitin, waitin all day, waitin our whole lives for nothin at all. Just like Mrs. Nitoli. Yeah, that's who I've turned into-Mrs. Nitoli. I'm waitin for my own Michael Anthony. God, I'm gettin old and stupid.

WHETHER FROM THE anxious waiting or from sitting in the hot sun all day or from going without lunch, Mr. Russo began to feel ill. He felt lightheaded and woozy, and his stomach hurt. He thought of moving inside where it would be cooler, but he felt too weak to move. I'll just sit here awhile longer and I'll be okay. I'll be fine.

He closed his eyes and began to drift between his waking and dreaming worlds. He felt himself shifting back and forth, much like the shifting on his rocker, except that he moved ever deeper into the dream place. He often tried to follow his thoughts into his dreams because he was curious about where the two worlds met. He was fascinated by how a simple thought would stretch into an image he could feel, smell, touch, taste-all at once without even realizing the change had happened. Occasionally something would rouse him at that precise moment, perhaps the sound of his own snoring or a car door slamming. Then he'd realize that his thinking had stopped being voluntary, that he'd been dragged along unawares by a hidden current into this other world that Carmela had said was holy.

They always had shared their dreams with each other. They never told anyone, not even their closest friends, the Sontinis, that they did this. It had been their secret, a sharing as private as sex to them. In fact often upon waking they would make love, then tell their dreams.

On those many mornings when I had spent the night in their home before an early departure for the shore, I'd sometimes been awakened by a soft murmuring that floated from the open doorway of their bedroom. Then snatches of exotic scenes would form in my half-asleep mind to the gravelly sound of Mr. Russo's voice: " . . . and the rock I carried dropped from my hands and cracked like an egg, its yellow blood runnin down the path, makin it slippery until I fell, then slid into the legs of my brother Masimo who cursed me and swore we'd never get to America." Or I'd hear Carmela weeping, saying, "He was alive again! I held him in my arms and tried to soothe him but he kept crying and I couldn't help, couldn't calm him . . . ." Until at last I came to understand that it was their dreams that filled the grey, pointillist air of morning.

Because they had shared them so regularly, recounting their dreams in great detail had been easy for them, something they'd taken for granted. Carmela, who had read the Bible nearly every day, had believed in the symbolic power of dreams and saw them as divine messages requiring contemplation and thoughtful interpretation. She often would retell Biblical dreams, like those of Joseph of the Coat of Many Colors, and recount the interpretations, like those of Daniel for King Nebuchadnezzar. Mr. Russo loved to hear these stories, in part because he thrilled to the sound of her storytelling voice. More than that, he believed in her ability to interpret their own dreams correctly. He had tended not to interpret them himself but merely to recount them as though he'd been away physically from Carmela and wanted her to know what had transpired during his absence.

As he rocked now on the porch, trying to recover his equilibrium, he thought about telling his dreams to Carmela, of the quiet whisperings in the semi-dark of early morning, of the intensity of her listening as she would try to understand the message of his dream. No one listened to me the way Carmela did. No one ever understood the way she could. She was like a priest to me, the way they're supposed to be. He started thinking of the priests he had known, both those in Italy and those in America: Father Toresco, Father Marcantonio, Father Barrese, Father Malgeri, Father Troiano . . . .

His skin sensed the suffocating stillness of the confessional as he heard the thick curtain sway close behind him, cloistering him inside the booth. The air in the church had been redolent with incense, thick and sweet-smelling. But in here it was stale and too thin, as if used up by those who'd preceded him. He felt his shoe kick the kneeler, so he knelt in the dark and was startled by the sudden sliding of the tiny door in the window that separated him from the priest. A yellow, smoky light filtered through as the priest chanted the opening prayers and made the sign of the cross. The priest's voice was familiar and intimate, sultry even. It was a voice he'd known. A woman's voice. His mother's voice? No, even more intimate than that. A lover's voice? Of course, Carmela's voice, now vibrating deep inside him. She turned to face him, looking radiant in her priest's garb, then she laughed and grabbed his hand right through the screen as he'd begun to make the sign of the cross. 

He was shocked and confused that she was the priest, but before he could say anything to her, she was standing close behind him in the darkness, leaning against him. He could feel her breasts touching his shoulders, and he understood now that she expected to make love there in the confessional. He was terrified that they would be discovered, that the shadowy priest's figure-now faceless but still there, backlit on the other side of the opaque screen-would hear them and know. "Not here, Carmela," he whispered, "not now." She smiled and said, "It's okay, Gaetano, we're married," but she didn't insist. Instead she took him by the hand and instantly they were walking down St. Mary's Avenue, approaching their home where their children played in the driveway. Dominic, Carl, Jeannette.

"Where's Christine?" he demanded of Dominic. "She ain't here yet, Papa." He knew that Dominic's reply was profound, though he didn't know why. Then he realized that Jeannette shouldn't be there; she hadn't even been born when Dominic and Carl were boys. Jeannette started to sing to him while the boys took turns swinging on the gate. Carmela tugged lightly at his hand, urging him to go indoors, but he couldn't figure out this contradiction in time: Jeannette just shouldn't be here, couldn't be here, it makes no sense, "Wait, Carmela, somethins not right here and I gotta . . . ."

He fell out of the dream and back into his rocking chair. He shifted back and forth in the hot sun, unsure and uncertain, his mouth hanging open and very dry from labored breathing.

He wanted to return into the dream, to walk with Carmela into the cool shade of their home, to lie on their bed while the safe sound of their children's playing came in through the open window. He wanted to hear again her voice resonating deep inside him, to feel her warm flesh against his, to re-enter the dream so he could tell her the dream and hear her interpretation in order to comprehend its deeper meaning. But the seething sun burned his eyelids open and the burning in his stomach grew worse. The dream eluded him, slipping further and further away, taking with it Carmela and the children, leaving him alone, too much alone, more alone than he could bear. Despair rose up and consumed him.

"Oh, God," he moaned aloud, and in that moment all alone on an empty porch on a deserted Avenue Mr. Russo gave up and began to die. He folded into himself and stared unseeing at the front gate. Now he knew who would be coming through it and how his life would change. It was Death who was his long awaited visitor, his Michael Anthony, and Mr. Russo knew he hadn't much longer to wait.

HE NEVER HEARD the kids coming back down the Avenue from school at three o'clock. All he heard was a loud, incessant ringing in his ears, so he didn't see the gang of kids hurrying to catch up with the lone figure out in front.

It was Alfred Foster they were trying to overtake, but he was nearly a half-block ahead of them, running at top speed, fleeing in anger from his day at school.

Every teacher in that school despised Alfred Foster. They told each other he drove them to it with his willful and uncontrollable and arrogant ways. But where the teachers saw eleven-year-old Alfred as a threat to their authority and an ever constant irritation, to the kids he was heroic, a leader whose clever disruptions were brilliant tactics in a war of liberation against meaningless rules and tedious order. In truth Alfred was both a natural leader and an insolent, disrespectful child; but mostly he was just an angry kid who had good reason to be that way.

The night before, for example, he had been sitting at the kitchen table doing his homework, which he rarely did, when his mother's boyfriend walked through the back door into their tiny apartment. He'd been drinking and had a sullen look on his face. Within minutes the two adults were arguing, and before Alfred could leave as he usually did, they were fighting. They began with shouts then moved to shoves then started punching and kicking with such ferocity that the room resounded with the sickening thuds of bone against flesh. Alfred jumped up from his seat and forced his way between them. He tried to shove them apart, but in the struggle he got pushed, pushed hard. As he fell face-first his mouth smashed against the hard corner of the table, chipping a front tooth. He screamed in pain, then ran to the bathroom to look in the mirror. What he saw was more painful than the impact itself. He swore then slumped to the tiled floor, rocking back and forth with his hand tightly over his mouth. Alfred already felt badly enough about how he looked, now he was going to have a chipped tooth. He knew there was no money to fix it.

The next morning as he walked to school he kept one hand over his mouth. If anyone came too close, he'd angrily elbow them away. When he reached the school, he sat with his head buried in his folded arms on the desktop. At first, because Alfred was quiet, the teacher left him alone; but towards the end of the day during geography she went one-by-one through the class asking for answers to the homework questions.

"Alfred Foster, what are the principal exports of Scotland?"

He looked up with one hand cupped over his mouth and mumbled an answer.

"Take your hand off your mouth, please. We cannot understand you."

His reply was garbled but the message was clear: "I ain't takin my hand off my mouf."

"Alfred Foster, take your hand off your mouth immediately." She had not lost control yet, but she could sense most of the class taking sides against her in this latest battle of wills with Alfred, and their disloyalty infuriated her more than his stubbornness.

"I ain't takin my hand off my mouf." He said this more distinctly, spreading apart his fingers ever so slightly to let out the words.

"Either you remove your hand or you're going to the principal's office."

"I ain't takin my-"

"Go to the office!" she screamed and pointed out the door with an index finger that she wished were not shaking.

In the office the principal was firm and direct: "This is the third time this month you've been sent out of class. You are suspended for three days and you will not be re-admitted unless your mother accompanies you to a conference with me, the guidance counselor, and your classroom teacher. Do you understand?"

The bell rang just then, and Alfred walked out without answering, leaving the suspension notice on the hardwood chair where he'd been sitting. He walked out the front doors, which students were prohibited from using. The other kids were just emerging from the other doorways. When they spotted him they called out to Alfred to wait, but he raced ahead as though he hadn't heard. He was infuriated with the way things had turned out and blamed the adults in his life. He also dreaded going home. The last time his mother had been required to bring him to school after a suspension, her boyfriend had grabbed him by the shirt and said, so close to Alfred's face that he could smell the sour, stale odor of alcohol and cigarettes on his breath, "This happens again, you and me, we're gonna deal. You know what I'm sayin?" His tone was even and detached, and he had a tiny, menacing smile on his face. Alfred nodded his head. He knew exactly what was meant.

So today he was heading down the Avenue caught and trembling in a vicious web between the lines of rage and fear. When he reached the Russo house he momentarily slowed down and, out of habit, looked for the funny old Italian man who always stood at his gate as if he were guarding a vast treasure within. Alfred had never said anything to Mr. Russo, never greeted him in any way, but he liked the old man, even identified with him. He thought Mr. Russo was courageous for defying all those kids every day, twice a day. He respected Mr. Russo's unveiled hostility because he was honest about it, unlike the teachers at school. But today Mr. Russo wasn't at his gate. That troubled Alfred, and when he looked up on the porch and saw a weak, shriveled up old man folded into himself, Alfred wailed, "Oh no, not you, too! They didn't get to you, too!"

If he had known how to do it, he would have rushed up on that porch to embrace this shrunken sentinel. But he didn't know how to do that. The only thing Alfred Foster knew how to do was make people angry.

So that's what he did.

He flung open the gate, banging it loudly against the post, and strode halfway up the sidewalk where he stopped and waited until Mr. Russo's eyes had focused on him. Alfred was stunned by the sorrow that filled those old eyes, and it infuriated him all the more. He reached over the nearest tomato plant and ripped off the fattest, juiciest tomato hanging on the vine. Alfred stared into Mr. Russo's startled gaze for a moment before he smashed the tomato with all his might on the sidewalk in front of him.

When the other kids saw what he had done they rushed in after him, yelling and screaming. They each grabbed tomatoes and started throwing them against the house, on the ground, in the street at parked cars, even up at the porch where Mr. Russo sat.

Mr. Russo couldn't believe what he saw. He shook his head to wake himself from this nightmarish scene. I'm bein attacked in my own yard! He grabbed his cane and rose unsteadily from the rocking chair, pushing himself up and out of it. He began to swear at the kids in Italian and English, swinging his cane in a circle over his head as if he were about to descend and lash them with this stinging baton. But as he took a step forward, the vertigo hit him again. He lost his balance and started to fall, letting go of the cane in mid-air. It flew out of his hand and up over the yard, flipping end over end to land with a clatter on the street. All the kids went running after it, trying to be the first to grab this unexpected prize.

As the cane had flown from his hand Mr. Russo had lost his balance completely and tumbled down the stairs. He landed on his left shoulder as his cheek plowed into the soft soil of his garden. He was stunned senseless for a moment while the excited cries of the children fighting for his cane washed over him unawares.