Berto’s World
STORIES
R.A. Comunale, M.D.
MOUNTAIN LAKE PRESS
MOUNTAIN LAKE PARK, MARYLAND
BERTO’S WORLD
COPYRIGHT © 2011 R.A.COMUNALE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PUBLISHED IN EBOOK FORMAT BY
MOUNTAIN LAKE PRESS
http://www.mountainlakepress.com
CONVERTED BY
ISBN:13: 978-0-9846512-7-6
COVER DESIGN BY MICHAEL HENTGES
ALSO BY R.A. COMUNALE
Requiem for the Bone Man
The Legend of Safehaven
Dr. Galen’s Little Black Bag
Clover
To the Dr. Agnellis of the world
PREFACE
I am now more than three-score-and-ten years old—but once I was a boy.
My name is Robert Anthony Galen, M.D., retired.
I was born Roberto Antonio Galen. Save for the whimsical stroke of an immigration official’s pen on Ellis Island, it would have been Gallini, my father’s given name in the old country.
I live now with my friends at the Pennsylvania mountaintop retreat called Safehaven. The three of us—Bob Edison, his wife Nancy, and I—await the winding down of our lives on a mountain blessed with the magic of love and the vagaries of memory. We feel the sere chill of the one visitor we cannot turn away. The Bone Man will come to each of us at his whim and in due time.
But for now I sit in my room and stare out the window overlooking the mountain vista, and I remember. I remember the boy I once was and the people I loved. In that distant past I roamed my world as a child—a child named Berto.
I am an old man now. I easily fall asleep at my little desk and I dream. I dream of being that young boy once more. I dream of Berto’s world.
The Flower
I was eight years old when I had my first date.
No, I wasn’t strange or precocious, at least not that way.
But she was dead.
It was one of those Indian-summer late-September Saturdays: no school, breezes warm yet crisp, with the feel of impending seasonal change lurking behind each gust. Angie and I—my best friend Angelo—as all normal, eight-year-old boys are wont to do, hung out and tried to stay out of trouble at the same time.
Fat chance.
We often wandered away from our tenement neighborhood. That weekend we were explorers seeking the mysteries beyond our little, multiethnic, low-income ghetto. It really wasn’t that far—two blocks past the grammar school run by nuns who dressed like penguins, turn left at the cemetery, then go another six blocks past the central business district. And there we were.
It might as well have been another planet, another universe.
There were houses, big houses. Almost as big as the multifamily buildings we were crowded into in numbers too large to count. But, wonder of wonders, these houses held only one family, and often that family was just two people.
We stared up from our eight-year-old vantages at the brick and wood-sided edifices with their expanses of green grass and shrub-filled lawns, and their semicircular, concrete driveways leading up to side attachments that were larger than the little apartment Mama, Papa, and I lived in. They held no people; they were garages, homes for the automobiles that the teeming masses we belonged to could only dream of obtaining.
It’s funny, the bittersweet memories of that walk on the bright side. We were children who would easily have fit into Dickens’s London as chimney sweeps: runny noses, uncombed hair, torn corduroy pants our mamas had found at the church’s basement thrift shop, worn brown shoes and pullover sweaters that had served former owners until they no longer filled their fashion needs. In another time and place we would have been called ragamuffins.
Even in the early fall weather there were things that attracted us just as they did the bees and colorful birds smart enough to survive there. We saw the multihued heads of summer- and fall-blooming flowers.
The frost would not carry them off for weeks.
It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned their names: marigolds, geraniums, impatiens, and pansies. Climbing roses filled out trellises along the front windows. In our own little tenement world, the nearest thing we had were the ever-present weeds and unstoppable dandelions that the old nannas would pluck and turn into ethnic salads—unless the men decided to ferment them. It wasn’t just grapes or potato skins that could produce Lethean drinks, imbibed to forget what one did or where one lived.
I was eight years old, and I was bold. I dared tempt the Fates by taking off my shoes and patched socks. I wanted to feel the tingle of grass under my feet.
Angelo laughed as he flipped off his shoes and socks, too
Berto, siete pazzesch!
“You’re crazy, Berto!”
In modo da siete voi, Angie!
“So are you, Angie!”
Yes, we were both crazy. We ran back and forth across that lawn and the ones next to it, the green blades tickling the bottoms of our feet, our toes taking on the hue of string beans. I bent over and picked a golden marigold. The curiosity that in later life brought me pleasure and grief made me start to chew on it. It was like the spinach Mama would make, a mixture of bitter and sweet.
“Hey, you two, get outta here! You don’t belong here! Go back to your own place!”
We stopped in mid-step and turned to see two ladies, one older and one younger, standing at the front door of the big brick house. The girl couldn’t have been more than a teenager. She seemed strangely out of proportion with her long, slender legs and arms. Her dress, a walking kaleidoscope of floral print, seemed ill-fitting around her waist. Her head bent forward, and the occasional wisp of wind stirred the long blonde hair about her face.
We were only eight, but even then we could tell she was pretty. I liked her in an innocent, youthful way. She was crying. She looked up at me and our eyes locked, her grass-green irises a counterpoint to her marigold hair.
“I’ll call the police if you don’t leave!”
The older woman’s voice was shrill and penetrating.
I looked at Angie. He shrugged and picked up his shoes and socks, and I did the same. We walked barefoot down the slate sidewalk, our heads half-turned toward that house of flowers, where we saw a man come out and raise the garage door. We stopped and watched as a big black car pulled out, and the two women got into the back seat. It drove off in the opposite direction.
I looked at Angie and he looked at me. We grinned and ran back to that forbidden lawn and let it tickle our feet and our fancy once more. We sat on it, rolled on it, then lay down and stared at the sky. I can understand why Eve ate the apple.
Strange, even now I can see that cloudless blue sky, a clear blue I have beheld only in the eyes of girls I dated at university. I can also recall the fear in that young girl’s green eyes, as she climbed awkwardly into that big black car.
We must have dozed off. Suddenly the growl of an engine brought us back to reality, before the car rolled into view. We jumped up and ran behind