Perhaps he had known then where that hundred dollar bill had come from and where it was taking his wife. But when he called for his withered, wrinkled sister Rose to care for him and the children, had he guessed that all he would remember of his woman was the memory of her climbing into that streetcar?

There seemed to be a contemptuous purpose in the way he sat there with his eyes glued to Drexel Street and his back in opposition to the church behind him. For all he saw or cared to see, this could have been a town in Italy, not the outskirts of Philadelphia. It could have been Bari or Chieti for the way it smelled. What did it matter to him that the park at the foot of Ash Road stretched beneath elevated trains that roared from the stucco station into the city's center at half-hour intervals? Or that the tiny creek spun its silent course toward the Schuylkill? This place was hatred to him, just as hatred was his only companion in his aloneness. To him they were one and the same.

Sameness for the Old Man was framed in by a wall of ginkgo trees which divided these quarters from the city. Sameness lined the streets with two story houses the color of ash. It slashed the sloping manure scented lawns with concrete steps which climbed upward to white wooden porches. It swayed with the wicker swings and screeched with the rusted hinges of screen doors.

Even the stable garage, which housed nothing now but the scent of rot, had a lawn before it. And the coffee shop on Drexel Street, where the men spent their evenings and Sundays playing cards, had a rose hedge beneath its window. The hedge reeked of coffee dregs thrown against it.