I finally hit a Greek minister who was standing around the corner.
He gave me the quarter with a nervous lookaway.
I rushed immediately to the bus.
When I got home I ate everything in the icebox.
My aunt got up and looked at me.
"Poor little Salvatore," she said in Italian.
"You're thin, you're thin.
Where have you been all this time?"
I had on two shirts and two sweaters; my canvas bag had torn cottonfield pants and the tattered remnants of my huarache shoes in it.
My aunt and I decided to buy a new electric refrigerator with the money I had sent her from California; it was to be the first one in the family.
She went to bed, and late at night I couldn't sleep and just smoked in bed.
My half-finished manuscript was on the desk.
It was October, home, and work again.
The first cold winds rattled the windowpane, and I had made it just in time.
Dean had come to my house, slept several nights there, waiting for me; spent afternoons talking to my aunt as she worked on a great rag rug woven of all the clothes in my family for years, which was now finished and spread on my bedroom floor, as complex and as rich as the passage of time itself; and then he had left, two days before I arrived, crossing my path probably somewhere in Pennsylvania or Ohio, to go to San Francisco.
He had his own life there; Camille had just gotten an apartment.
It had never occurred to me to look her up while I was in Mill City.
Now it was too late and I had also missed Dean.
PART TWO
1
It was over a year before I saw Dean again.
I stayed home all that time, finished my book and began going to school on the GI Bill of Rights.
At Christmas 1948 my aunt and I went down to visit my brother in Virginia, laden with presents.
I had been writing to Dean and he said he was coming East again; and I told him if so he would find me in Testament, Virginia, between Christmas and New Year's.
One day when all our Southern relatives were sitting around the parlor in Testament, gaunt men and women with the old Southern soil in their eyes, talking in low, whining voices about the weather, the crops, and the general weary recapitulation of who had a baby, who got a new house, and so on, a mud-spattered '49 Hudson drew up in front of the house on the dirt road.
I had no idea who it was.
A weary young fellow, muscular and ragged in a T-shirt, unshaven, red-eyed, came to the porch and rang the bell.
I opened the door and suddenly realized it was Dean.
He had come all the way from San Francisco to my brother Rocco's door in Virginia, and in an amazingly short time, because I had just written my last letter, telling where I was.
In the car I could see two figures sleeping.
"I'll be goddamned!
Dean!
Who's in the car?"
"Hello, hello, man, it's Marylou.
And Ed Dunkel.
We gotta have place to wash up immediately, we're dog-tired."
"But how did you get here so fast?"
"Ah, man, that Hudson goes!"
"Where did you get it?"
"I bought it with my savings.
I've been working on the railroad, making four hundred dollars a month."
There was utter confusion in the following hour.
My Southern relatives had no idea what was going on, or who or what Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel were; they dumbly stared.
My aunt and my brother Rocky went in the kitchen to consult.
There were, in all, eleven people in the little Southern house.
Not only that, but my brother had just decided to move from that house, and half his furniture was gone; he and his wife and baby were moving closer to the town of Testament.
They had bought a new parlor set and their old one was going to my aunt's house in Paterson, though we hadn't yet decided how.
When Dean heard this he at once offered his services with the Hudson.
He and I would carry the furniture to Paterson in two fast trips and bring my aunt back at the end of the second trip.
This was going to save us a lot of money and trouble.