I Married a Communist by Philip Roth

when they would set the doves free and that's when the fireworks would explode and somebody would wind up in the hospital with a couple of fingers blown off.
    "So, lively spectacle was nothing new to the Italians in the First Ward. Funny characters, old-country carrying on, noise and fights, colorful stunts—nothing new. Funerals certainly weren't new. During the flu epidemic, so many people died that the coffins had to be lined up on the street. Nineteen eighteen. The funeral parlors couldn't handle the business. Behind the coffins, processions from St. Lucy's wended the couple miles to Holy Sepulcher Cemetery all day long. There were tiny coffins for the babies. You had to wait your turn to bury your baby—you had to wait for your neighbors to bury theirs first. Unforgettable terror for a kid. And yet two years after the flu epidemic, that funeral for Jimmy the canary ... well, that topped 'em all.
    "Everybody there that day was in stitches. Except for one person. Ira was the only one in Newark who wasn't in on the joke. I couldn't explain it to him. I tried, but he couldn't understand. Why? Maybe because he was stupid, or maybe because he wasn't stupid. Maybe he simply was not born with the mentality of the carnival—maybe utopianists aren't. Or maybe it was because our mother had died a few months earlier and we'd had our own funeral that Ira had wanted no part of. He wanted to be out on the street instead, kicking a ball around. He begged me not to make him change out of his overalls and go to the cemetery. He tried hiding in a closet. But he came along with us anyway. My father saw to that. At the cemetery he stood there watching us bury her, but he refused to take my hand or let me put my arm around him. He just scowled at the rabbi. Glowered at him. Refused to be touched or comforted by anyone. Didn't cry either, not a tear. He was too angry for tears.
    "But when the canary died, everybody at the funeral was laughing away except Ira. Ira knew Jimmy only from walking by the cobbler's shop on the way to school and looking in the window at his cage. I don't believe he'd ever stepped inside the shop, and yet, aside from Russomanno, he was the only one around who was in tears.
    "When
I
started to laugh—because it
was
funny, Nathan,
very
funny—Ira lost control completely. That was the first time I saw that happen to Ira. He started swinging his fists and screaming at me. He was a big kid even then, and I couldn't rein him in, and suddenly he was swinging at a couple of kids next to us who were also laughing themselves sick, and when I reached down to try to pluck him up and save him from being slaughtered by a whole slew of kids, one of his fists caught me on the nose. He broke my nose at the bridge, a seven-year-old. I was bleeding, the damn thing was obviously broken, and so Ira ran away.
    "We didn't find him till the next day. He'd slept back of the brewery on Clifton Avenue. It wasn't the first time. In the yard, under the loading dock. My father found him there in the morning. He dragged him by the scruff of the neck all the way to school and into the room where Ira's class was already in session. When the kids saw Ira, wearing those filthy overalls he'd slept in all night and being flung into the room by his old man, they began to go 'Boo-hoo,' and that was Ira's nickname for months afterward. Boo-hoo Ringold. The fewboy who cried at the canary funeral.
    "Luckily, Ira was always bigger than the others his age, and he was strong, and he could play ball. Ira would have been a star athlete if it hadn't been for his eyes. What respect he got in that neighborhood he got from playing ball. But the fights? From then on he was in fights all the time. That's when his extremism began.
    "It was a blessing, you know, that we didn't grow up in the Third Ward with the poor Jews. Growing up in the First Ward, Ira was always a loudmouth kike outsider to the Italians, and so, however big and strong and belligerent