cemetery

AND SO WE RETURNED to Huntington on Long Island, which is one of the few settlements that could be called a real town on the North Shore and not on overgrown coastal meadow village or a sprawled out ship-building port, but a real micro-city with its own library and its ways and boulevards with names like New York Avenue and Prospect Street. There used to be trolleys running the length of Main Street, gliding along metallic grooves, bells ringing, in the old days, the Model T and Model A days, when the automobile was a luxury and the straw hat ruled. The trolleys inevitably circled around the grand town hall at the end of Main Street.

This vast brick structure, constructed by some post-war — here meaning post-Civil War — architect was still in use when I returned there with an Estonian woman, whose name I could never remember, but who was so keen to see my childhood places, such as the swimming pool at the YMCA, and we walked up the granite steps, where there were long lines of townspeople, waiting to see some clerk or process some paperwork. What was her name anyway? Annikki? Tuulikki? In the long lawns, that stretched down toward the center of town, some women were at work gardening. One poked her head up from between the bushes and I noticed the embroidered white linen bonnet of an Estonian folk costume. Then I heard lines of Estonian dialogue passed between the women, who were planting the gardens with yellow flowers.

Annikki and I came down the steps and there was a friendly encounter with the Estonian gardeners. “What on earth are you doing here?” She asked. “We came over for the summer,” the woman said. She was dressed in a white, traditional folk costume. It was strange that she would wear such beautiful clothes for such hard work, and yet there wasn’t a spot of dirt on it.

The cemetery was next to the town hall, on the other side of a grove of dark trees. There was a long stone wall now erected between these properties, but there were many doors in this wall, which stretched for quite some ways, but most of the doors were sealed, and even looking in between the cracks, I could only hear the sounds of young town hall civil servants talking.

We found our way around to the cemetery, which was where my grandfather was entombed, and his father Salvatore and mother Rosaria, and their fathers and mothers and many cousins.

“This is where they sleep, the old Italians,” I told Annikki. She was a slender girl, with tufts of red hair and freckles. Her hair seemed to be in constant windblown animation. I put an arm around her. Annikki was compulsively curious about the world. But something about this world was off. For when I peered down in the cemetery, I saw the ruins of Rome, the tombs of Pompeii. Crumbling columns, nude statues missing arms and noses, all covered with moss.

“This must be the older part of the cemetery,” I told Annikki. “Where the very old Italians sleep. My relatives are buried in the newer part.” There was a small stone house at the gate, with statues of Apollo and Venus out in front. Out of this house stepped an Italian woman, dark-haired and olive-eyed, some years older than me, her skin a perpetual sun-kissed brown.

She began to speak to me, but in Italian, and I expressed myself to the best of my abilities. Some words fell out. Cimitero, parenti. “Your Italian is just awful,” she said in a turn. “Bruto. Who even taught you to speak our language?” “That’s the thing,” I said, sadly. “Nobody did.”