The man at the head table who was at the mill that night was Deputy Chief Dennis Mazur. Frank Colangelo said his name quietly, and I looked across the Elks Lodge at the tall gray man with the stars on his collar, seated to the right of my son. I knew his face. I had seen it at the academy graduation, at the station barbecue, in the Christmas photograph on the mantel at the house of my son. A kind, serious face. Joey called him Dino. Frank said that in the spring of 1979 Dennis Mazur was nineteen years old, a laborer at the mill, and that he was standing at the bottom of the ladle platform when it gave way.
Frank told me, in a low voice over his Iron City, what he had seen. A bad valve, a loud warning, a foreman who shouted for the crew to keep moving. A boy who froze on the platform. A man in a gray hard hat, my Sal, who ran back across the catwalk, grabbed the boy by the collar and threw him clear a moment before the ladle tipped. Sal did not get out in time. Frank had been one of the men who carried him out. The boy was Dennis, and he had walked away from the mill that night and never gone back.
I looked at Dennis Mazur for a long time. I thought about the plate of food left in the oven for forty five years, and the radio on low, and every night my son went into a burning building. I thought about how the man who was saved by my husband had spent a career doing the same for others, and had taken my boy under his wing at Engine 8 when he was a probie. I thought of the Christmas cards with no return address. Then I stood up, in my burgundy dress, and I put the cameo of my mother straight, and I walked to the head table.
A seating chart with a cruel little note gave one retired labeler the length of a single evening to bring her son back to the truth in Pittsburgh.
I gave my terms to Joey, Denise and Dennis Mazur in front of the head table, in the full light of the hall, with a hundred and twenty firemen and wives looking on. The AUXILIARY sign would come down. I would sit in the chair of honor between my son and the man he called Dino. Denise would stand at the microphone and tell the room who paid for the evening. And Dennis, who had waited forty five years to say what he needed to say to me, would say it tonight, in his own words, before the cake. I said it gently. I had been waiting longer than any of them.
Dennis spoke first, with his hat in his hands. He said he was nineteen, and he froze, and that a good man was lost because of him. He said he had carried it every day, that he joined the fire department to try to pay it back, and that he had been afraid for forty five years to tell me. His voice cracked on the last words. Denise had gone white. She said she had set the seating herself, that she had wanted the family table to look a certain way for the pictures, and that she had not known. Joey stood up, shaking, and said, “Ma, I am so sorry.”
Denise snatched the seating chart and guest list from the head table, meaning to run to the ladies room and tear them to bits before any of the wives could read the line that said AUXILIARY BY COATS in her own handwriting, and she bolted across the dance floor in her high heels, holding the papers over her head. The DJ, seeing the commotion, thought it was a bit, and played the theme from the Pink Panther.
Outside the doors of the Lodge, the parish was holding its Blessing of the Animals, and the street was full of dogs. Spaniels, beagles, a pair of enormous mastiffs, a sleepy basset hound in a bow tie, all being sprinkled with holy water by a young priest in a green stole. When the double doors flew open and Denise ran out with a bundle of papers, the dogs, who adore paper, converged on her all at once. She was knocked gently onto the steps and licked from forehead to chin. The priest blessed her. He did it with great sincerity.
The papers were returned to me, soggy and slobbered over, and I framed the best of them. Denise gave the toast that night, standing in damp heels, and told the room the whole truth, including that Rosemarie DiNardo had paid for every dish on the table. Nobody laughed. Some of the firemen stood. Joey called me from the stage and held my hand for the length of a song. Within a month he moved my chair to the head of the table at every holiday, and Dennis Mazur brought the wine.
In the name of Sal, who passed in 1979, I started the Sal DiNardo Safety Net Fund. It pays for mortgage help, school costs and emergency rent for families who lost a parent in a workplace accident in Allegheny, Washington and Beaver counties. In the first year we helped twenty seven families. A young widow in Aliquippa used her grant for a winter coat for her son, and he wore it to the Saint Florian blessing at the firehouse and told every fireman how warm it was. I lit a candle for each of them.
On the first Sunday of the month, Dennis Mazur comes to my row house in Bloomfield for dinner, in a plain sweater, and sits at the kitchen table with a plate of gnocchi. Joey comes too. The police scanner stays on low next to the toaster. When the tones go out for Engine 8, I no longer stop breathing, because my son is at the table. Dennis lifts his fork. I lift mine. We eat with the radio murmuring, the three of us, as Sal would have wanted, and I do not need to say a rosary.
