Berto's World_Stories

by R. A. Comunale M. D.

  The hospital ambulance arrived shortly afterward. Not as fast as today’s rescue squads, but in the end it made no difference.

  That night, Nikolai Alexei Putchenkov, butcher, died.

  Maria Ivanova Putchenkov became a widow.

  And Thomas?

  He went back to work.

  Snip-snip click.

  The Tick-Tock Man

  There’s always one—that kid who’s slower than, not as sharp, not as coordinated as the rest of us. He’s the kid who’s picked last, even after the fat kid or the kid wearing glasses. He’s also the one who stammers in class, his every effort to speak a constipation of mind and body.

  Today we’d call him developmentally delayed or a special-needs child.

  Kids are not as kind.

  They’d call him a sped, a retard, a spaz, or just stupid.

  The favorite name in my neighborhood was dork.

  Even now I’m ashamed to admit that I joined in such ritual childhood torture, taunting kids who couldn’t cut it, the ones at the bottom of the pecking order, something that seemed to construct magically without the aid or influence of adults.

  That’s when I met Paolo.

  I was nine—that fantasy age of unlimited energy and curiosity. School had just begun, and there was a new kid in class, a new kid to our tenement neighborhood.

  “Paolo Cherubini?”

  Sister Concordia was our teacher that year. Her voice carried a musical lilt only the Irish can convey to their words. She called the attendance roll, asking us one at a time to stand and say our names.

  Paolo stood up from the ancient, dark-oak desk with the hole in the top that once held an inkwell. He barely avoided falling over himself as he stood away from his chair, and then I felt my skin crawl as he spoke.

  My old-man’s memory recalls an olive-skinned boy, thin but with a head disproportionately large for his body. His mouth seemed set in a perpetual smile, lips a bit too large, eyes spaced not quite right, ears set slightly too far down. I had to look at him twice before the pieces of his face seemed to complete the puzzle.

  After nearly half a century of dealing with the human machine and the toss-of-the dice results of chromosomal mixing I still cannot fit a label to that boy: fetal alcohol syndrome, in-utero infection, hydrocephalus, cerebral palsy variant, or a mixture of several of the nasties Mother Nature can play when She casts the genetic dice.

  Even today the medical profession throws up its hands and just calls them “FLKs”—funny-looking kids.

  Yes, doctors can be cruel, too.

  He stood there, his arms moving back and forth. He opened his mouth and his jaw jutted forward.

  “Uhhhh … I-I-I-I am-m-m-m…”

  And then he gulped and said, “Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-puh-p-a-a-a-l-l-l-l-lo Che-che-che-che-eru-bu-bu-bu-bu-bu-bino.”

  Thank God Sister Concordia was not like some of the other nuns. They would have forced him to say his name over and over “until you get it right.” Instead, she smiled and said, “Thank you, Paolo. You may sit down.”

  I saw other smiles in the class that day, but they were malignant ones, and I knew what would happen at recess.

  “Hey, dork face, where ya from?”

  Sammy Welch was mean.

  Paolo turned toward him, that broad smile infuriating the other kid even more. Welch collected his hand into a fist to punch Paolo, when my friend Sal grabbed his arm and said “No!”

  Welch pulled away and yelled, “Yeah, one wop protecting another!”

  The next thing Sammy knew he was surrounded by my friends Angie, Tomas, Sal—and me!

  But the recess-ending bell saved his ass.

  No, we didn’t make him one of the group—not really. We were too cool for that. But we did look after Paolo in the schoolyard and sometimes even walk him home afterward. It was hard not to feel sorry for him.

  He was friendly like a puppy. He couldn’t do enough for you, even though it wasn’t what you wanted. I never saw him cry, even when kids like Sammy Welch snuck in a punch or tripped him when we weren’t looking. I think our protection made Sammy even angrier and more determined to invoke pain.

  It only stopped when Sal, the strongest of us, broke Sammy’s arm. It was an accident, but it set in motion a series of events which, years later, culminated in a tragedy.

  You see, Sammy’s father, Samuel Welch Sr., was a cop and, unlike most of the decent, hardworking police at the time, a crooked one...

  Well, maybe I’ll tell that part of the story later.

  On some Saturdays, when Angie, Tomas, and Sal had to “do things” instead of playing, I would contain my disappointment and meander around the neighborhood, shuffling my feet and trying to decide whether to hide out in Andrew Carnegie’s library or keep going until I reached the end of the world.

  Sometimes when he saw me Paolo would appear out of the shadows of his building and tag along, puppy-like. I would talk to him—but not with him—and he would smile and smile, until I had to fight the urge to punch him myself.

  One day he followed me for six blocks, away from our rat-infested enclave and into what everyone called the business district. That’s where Harold Ruddy ran his shoe shop and George Huff owned his motor and electrical repair business.

  More about them later, too.

  And there was an establishment that, even now, seemed incongruous to the neighborhood. It was a watch and clock shop.

  No, it wasn’t one of those fancy boutiques you see today, selling high-priced Swiss wristwatches and antique ormolu clocks. This one was a hole-in-the-wall. It was a run-down flea trap packed floor to ceiling with clocks and machinery and shelves holding boxes of parts and just plain stuff.

  Inside that shop lived a hunchback gnome who also smiled all the time.

  His name was Raphaele Buccinelli, but everyone called him Mr. Buck.

  He was almost eighty when I first met him, and though it was quite a few decades ago, I still can hear his gravelly voice casting out bits of wisdom that have stuck with me like glue.

  Walking past his storefront, door wide open to whatever insects hadn’t deserted the neighborhood for better lodgings, I would yell, “Hey, Mr. Buck, come on outside. It’s a beautiful day.”

  From inside the smiling ogre would call back.

  “Berto, if I do that people will see me sitting in the sun, half-asleep. They will say ‘poor old man’ and think there is nothing to be had here, and they will continue on down the street. No, Berto, I stay inside. Then people will think I’m busy, and they will think I am good.”

  He was right.

  I found that out when I opened my practice many years later.

  On this particular day, accompanied as I was by Paolo the human puppy, I called out, “Can we come in, Mr. Buck?”

  Above the whir of motors and grinding wheels, I heard, “Yes, come in, come in.”

  I turned to Paolo.

  “Mr. Buck is the man who makes clocks. Do your mama and papa have a clock?”

  By this time we had worked out a system of headshakes and body motions on his part to eliminate the agony of his speech. He quickly nodded, and we walked in.

  Mr. Buck was in his workshop in the back.

  We walked through the poorly lit room containing clocks on shelves, clocks hanging on the walls, and more clocks standing up against the walls.

  We reached the cramped workroom, where tools of all shapes and sizes hung neatly from hooks on pegboard. I also recognized small lathes, pliers of all descriptions, inscribers, and more. Permeating the air was the mixed scent of machine oil and the distinct aroma of sweat and body odor that only the old exude.

  I know that scent well now.

  “Ciao, Berto! Who is your friend?”

  When he spoke at length his Italian was different, an accent Papa later told me was Neapolitan. And there was something else I did not then perceive.

  Before I knew it, Paolo had walked over to the old man, who was not much taller than he.

 
“Pup-puh-puh-paaaolo.”

  The watchmaker looked long and hard at the boy. Then he bent down and effortlessly picked up Paolo and sat him on a stool.

  “Hello, Paolo. Listen, listen to the measure of life.”

  Tick-tock. Tick-tock. Tick-tock.

  Oh yes, how could I have forgotten? The store literally vibrated from the army of escape mechanisms releasing gears powered by springs and pendulums, all tapping out in crazy-quilt cacophony the rhythm of existence.

  Mr. Buck took the innards of a mantle clock from his workbench, set it in a brace, and put its pendulum in motion. We watched as each swing moved levers that in turn moved gears moving other gears moving more gears and finally the hands.

  Paolo’s eyes gleamed with an excitement I’d never seen before. He turned to the old clockmaker.

  “T-t-t-t-tick-t-tock?”

  “Yes, Paolo,” he nodded.

  The boy seemed hypnotized by the innards, but they were not the type of innards that interested me. I had already embarked by then on the path that would take me to medical school. Still, I was curious, too.

  “Mr. Buck, how did you become a watchmaker?”

  He leaned against the workbench, as Paolo kept tracing his fingers gently over the gears.

  “Ahhh,” he sighed. “I was never really good at anything back in the old country. I just missed the great wars with Mazzini and Garibaldi. I worked in the fields and knew that I would grow old, a hunchback good for nothing. So I ran away. I came to America in 1890.”

  He saw my jaw drop and laughed.

  “Yes, Berto, I sailed across the Atlantic as a deckhand—on a boat with sails! When we landed in New York, I jumped ship.”

  He regaled me with his tale of standing in the middle of a street in the city, a horse carriage nearly running him over. Jumping out of the way, he spotted a sign attached to a lamppost. He said he had learned some English from books the captain had lent him out of pity.

  “It took a while for me to translate it but it was an advertisement for a school teaching the art of clock-making. I knew nothing about clocks, but it certainly beat hauling sails.”

  He said he walked twelve blocks to save the cost of a streetcar ride and arrived in front of a brownstone building. He climbed four flights of stairs and knocked on the door of the Black Forest Watch Repair Company. A heavy, German-accented voice answered and bid him to enter.

  “Herr Vogelsong stood there,” he said, “peering at me over iron-framed, pince-nez glasses. He picked up a piece of brass, put it in front of me, and handed me an engraving tool—a scriber. Then he uttered four words:

  “‘Draw a straight line.’”

  Mr. Buck said he spied a straight edge lying on a nearby desk and reached for it. Almost instantly Vogelsong had grabbed it and smacked him across the knuckles.

  “‘Draw a straight line.’”

  He said he felt stupid but finally realized what the man wanted. He held the brass block steady, took the scriber, and bore down. As he moved it across the soft metal, he could tell the line was far from straight, and soon he felt the sting of the straight edge again on his hand.

  “I sat back and looked at him,” he said. “He was smiling through his goatee and mustache. I stared at that block of brass, closed my eyes, and tried something I had never done before. I tried to focus myself.

  “My right hand seemed to move of its own volition and when I looked down, there was a straight line!”

  As Mr. Buck spoke those words, I saw Paolo’s face lose its smile. He stared at the old man. Then he got off the stool, shook Mr. Buck’s hand, and walked out of the shop without me.

  I didn’t see much of Paolo except in class after that day. He seemed quieter and didn’t fidget as much. Angie joked that he must have found a girlfriend. This from a nine year old!

  I had another one of those alone Saturdays toward the end of the school year, and once again I walked past the business district, waving at Mr. Ruddy, as he cut and shaped a new heel for a shoe. I smiled at Mr. Huff, as he turned the large lathe holding the rotor of an industrial motor to repair its coils.

  It was still early—about seven-thirty in the morning—but plenty was already going on. Mornings served proprietors and customers well. This early in the day, the heat hadn’t yet set off the odors of the tenements. And the doors stood open to the evanescent breezes that served as the only source of air conditioning back then.

  When I came to Mr. Buck’s shop, I had to blink as if to confirm what I saw: Now there were two gnomes sitting side by side at the workbench. Mr. Buck was one—and Paolo was the other.

  I watched and listened, as the old clockmaker first pointed out different things and then observed, and the boy followed his directions. He smiled approval and Paolo smiled back.

  I didn’t understand, until a customer walked in and called, “Is this Raphaele Bachanale’s place?”

  Mr. Buck rose from his stool, came forward, and looked at the man.

  “I am Raphael Buh-buh-buh-buccinelli.”

  Tick-tock.

  The Coal Man

  The coal man arrived one peppermint November day.

  I awoke in the chill of a Saturday morning, the cast-iron radiator in my bedroom colder even than the air creeping through the cracks in the rotting window frame—nothing unusual for the decaying buildings in our neighborhood. Today one would call the city’s housing office, and the bureaucrats would drag the absentee landlord downtown and threaten him with fines and court orders, unless he turned the heat on. But in those days the landlord stayed warm in his distant, well-kept neighborhood, fearing only the wrath of his demanding, overweight wife.

  Mama and Papa remained in bed, enjoying the respite from work and the luxury of two bodies lying warm together under a patchwork, homemade quilt. But ten-year-old boys were driven by different instincts, and I was no different.

  I had slept in my long underwear, having learned that my room would grow icebox cold. Then, in the morning, it was relatively easy to grab my worn, corduroy pants from the floor, slip them under the blankets, and slide my legs inside. A few minutes of shivering to warm both them and me, and I would proceed to the secondhand, argyle socks Mama had gotten for pennies at the charity outlet in the church basement. Quickly checking my brown brogans to shake out any roaches wanting to set up housekeeping, I would shove my head into an outsized, pullover wool sweater. Now fully dressed, I was ready to face my world.

  Most kids in my neighborhood, if they made it to adulthood, would remember the wonders of Saturday morning cartoons and serials at the neighborhood movie house. I never had the twenty-five-cent admission fee to the all-cartoon, all-morning shows at the Empire Theatre, so my weekend entertainment was self-made. I knew that Angie and Tomas, my best friends, faced the same predicament, and my first job was to hunt them down.

  I savored the crisp air. My pre-pubertal body easily warded off temperatures that would send older folks shivering to the nearest heated building. But I was a kid, invulnerable and immortal. I never worried about the weather. So when I saw the steel-gray sky signaling the impending snow season, my only thought was that it would be a white Thanksgiving.

  The marquee at the Empire touted the Saturday cartoon show. In less than an hour hundreds of kids would be lined up, pennies, nickels, dimes, and sometimes quarters at the ready, pushing and shoving to be the first to enter the maroon, velvet-lined movie house with its prized balcony seats. Where else could you watch a movie, chew gum, and throw spit balls, all for a quarter?

  But for me this particular heaven was off-limits. So I whistled as I walked past, catching a glimpse of the name of that week’s attraction emblazoned on a poster in the display window: “Sergeant York,” starring Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan.

  That was it! My mind raced and I began to run. Angie and Tomas also lived in tenements, four-story, sooty-gray, stone fronts that must have been nice a hundred years ago. Now they held the overflow of the refugees escaping war-torn Europe.

  They
saw me first and met me halfway down the block. We were twins … no, triplets in appearance, our couture direct from church rummage sales and giveaways, the conscience-salving gifts of the well-to-do.

  “Whadda we gonna do, Berto, hmmm?”

  I grinned. Angie often tried to imitate Jimmy Cagney when he talked.

  Tomas remained quiet. He was an overly thin kid, a follower who later got himself killed by following the wrong crowd. Come to think of it, so did Angie—but that’s another story. He just found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time, when another kid’s knife slashed his throat.

  “The Old Guys are probably already putting away Rheingolds at Mr. Ruddy’s. Bet their stuff beats anything at the Empire.”

  That was our name for the three elders who had fought in the Great War, friends who had left the confines of our neighborhood and enlisted in 1917 to fight the Huns: Harold Ruddy, George Huff, and Tim Brown.

  Twice a week, they would meet in Mr. Ruddy’s shoe-repair shop and relive old memories, killing off as many Rheingold soldiers as they could. And on the days when we had no school, chores, or other things like baseball to distract us, we would sit, wigwam style, on the floor and listen to the three recount their days of glory. Like most boys of the era, sometimes we picked up the empty brown bottles and let any remaining drops drain out onto our tongues.

  Mr. Ruddy kept photos of himself on the walls—faded photos of him running for touchdowns in high school. He had been a tall, muscular boy, very handsome and no doubt a lady’s man, with wide shoulders suitable even for a lineman topping a triangular torso and tree-trunk-sized thighs.

  Now his thick biceps and powerful forearms propelled him around his machine-filled shop, and the first time I saw him my mind refused to accept the fact that there was nothing below his waist. His legs and most of his pelvis had become trophies of a German artillery shell. He used a specially cushioned, swivel stool and hand bars strategically placed in his shop and bedroom in the back to help him move—as well as a keen mind, a strong sense of ironic humor, and flashing blue eyes highlighting an always-smiling face.