In June 1950 Sofia Pavrach, daughter of gypsies, committed the grave sin of marrying a gajo, an outsider, and her tribe declared her marime — unclean.  She and Salvatore Soriano had met near Boston College, where the senior was studying physical education and playing varsity basketball.   She was 18 and had been living in a store-front ofisa on Causeway Street with various other members of the Pavrach tribe who had stayed one step ahead of Hitler and now were busy exploiting the New World.  She'd been telling fortunes like the other women and running  the boojo, the old sleight-of-hand money swindle, and staying out of the way of the men, who occasionally fixed a fender or pretended to re- asphalt a driveway.
     Sal's mother disliked the gypsy girl and lobbied against the romance. Why, she wanted to know, couldn't he marry a nice Italian girl?  And why a gypsy?  But Sal persevered, despite repeated assurances that his father — the late Dr. Vittorio Soriano, claimed by a heart attack three years before — was spinning in his grave.  But after Sofia agreed to raise any children in the Catholic church, the couple was married in a Saturday nuptial Mass in Sacred Heart Cathedral in Newark, with some of the groom's family and friends filling in the front pews on the bride's side.
     But when the couple emerged into the sunshine, one of those assembled outside the massive bronze doors threw grief instead of rice.  Gregor Ziko, a.k.a. Greg Miller, Greg Mills, Steve Gregory and countless other aliases, was a swarthy, foul-smelling bully who had suffered great humiliation when Sofia had run away from him the previous year —  after he had paid her father a handsome brideprice— and he'd vowed to get even.  Somehow he had tracked her down, and now there he was, with his sadistic brother Josef and their horrible mother Zora, a trio of scarecrows elbowing through the well-dressed Italians of Hudson and Essex counties.
     To the horror of the stunned assemblage, Gregor spat on the ground in front of the couple and pronounced the amria, the curse, against Sofia, Sal and the entire Soriano tribe. When Josef and Zora pushed forward and joined in the barrage, Sal's cousins Vinnie and Anthony, two off-duty Newark cops in their Sunday best, grabbed the two gypsy men and beat the shit out of them as Zora  hitched up her skirts and waddled hurriedly across the street into Branch Brook Park.  Then Vinnie called his desk sergeant at the Second Precinct and arranged for weekend accommodations for the out-of-town "guests."  The event made three paragraphs on Page 12 of the Newark Evening News.
     The next spring, when the couple brought their son home from the hospital to the little apartment on Avenue C in Bayonne, and Sal asked her what name she'd settled on for the boy, she answered answered quietly.  "Rom."
     "Rome?" asked Sal.  "As in Rome, Italy?"
     "No, Rom," she said.   "It sounds the same.  But it means gypsy."

     Sal became a physical education teacher in Jersey City and joined the Knights of Columbus.  He taught Sofia  to read and write and make lasagna.  Every summer they spent two weeks down the Jersey Shore, and every Christmas they took their boy to Manhattan to see  the display in Macy's window and go skating in Rockefeller Center.  Romy, as his mother called him, was a smart, athletic boy with a good heart and a wild imagination.  He loved Davy Crockett and Elvis and wanted to be a jet pilot when he grew up.  He had black hair and eyes the color of milk chocolate.  His complexion — and the dramatic eyebrows that met in the middle —  he inherited from his mother; his father contributed a Roman nose, a square jaw and an impulsive, generous nature.
     One night in August 1963, while the family enjoyed a vacation in Asbury Park, Sal left his wife and son on the Boardwalk to use the lavatory in the men's public changing  rooms.  He never came back.  Just after midnight, his body was found in the surf, his throat slit.
     The murder was never solved, despite the resources of several police departments.  Sofia knew it was Ziko, but he had vanished, which for a gypsy is like breathing.
     Sal's cousin Vinnie, now a police sergeant, found her a two-family house in his Newark precinct, on N. Fifth Street  near Park Avenue, and with the insurance money she made a down payment.  She rented out the first floor to a nurse at St. Michael's Hospital and got a job at the Tung-Sol factory on Orange Street packing light bulbs.
     By that time,  Roseville had passed its peak and begun a painful descent.  The busy, handsome area of western Newark long had been a prosperous community of Irish and Italians and Polish and Jews.  But to the west and south, "the coloreds" were creeping in, gravitating to the sort of cheap housing they could afford.  These properties, mostly tenements, were owned  by scheming whites who'd scooped up the buildings abandoned by owners tired of the property taxes.  Those hadn't stopped rising since the city gave obscene tax breaks to Prudential and other big companies to stay in Newark.  Then, when the state announced plans for a six-lane highway right through the heart of the district, "white flight" took off, sealing the neighborhood's fate.  School enrollments dropped, small businesses closed. Every month more families packed up and moved to Belleville or Morristown or Linden or Keansburg.
     Sofia didn't care; she was glad to be a county away from her mother-in-law, who never had grown to like her, and who now blamed her for the death of her son.

    Fabio and Evalina Lopez had moved to Roseville ten years before.  They'd started out  in  Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico, where Fabio had learned English and developed a passion for Shakespeare.  They moved to New Jersey, and after living with relatives in nearby Elizabeth for five years and working three jobs between them they managed to make a down payment on a three-story fixer-upper in Newark, on Roseville Avenue, just south of Park Avenue.  Their first addition was a wooden plaque hung near the front door that read "Casa Lopez."  They enrolled their son Hector and daughter Cassandra in St. Rose of Lima School, joined the parish, paid their taxes and led the good life. Fabio became a foreman at the Wiss scissor factory near Central Avenue; Evalina passed her beautician exam and embarked on her quest to give every woman she knew flaming red hair.

     Hector and Rom met the first day of the seventh grade at St. Rose as the uniformed students double-filed from the schoolyard into the church — a large, late-Gothic church with a sea of stone steps, a single imposing square tower and an immense and intricate rose window — for the traditional Mass.
     The two boys were kneeling directly behind the stout, red-faced Sister Marie Joseph when, during the consecration, the holiest part of the Mass, the nun squirmed briefly and farted.  It was one short blast that echoed for a second in the stillness of the church. Rom and Hector made the mistake of looking at one another. They erupted into laughter, and in a flash Sister Francis Monica, a stern, athletic woman, stepped across the aisle and yanked the two up by their collars and marched them out of the church.  Sister Marie never moved during the episode, it would be long remembered; she just knelt there and smelled bad for a while.
     Their friendship forged in the crucible of happy disgrace, Rom and Hector became inseparable.  They shared that shocking moment one Friday that November when the principal interrupted choir practice to deliver bad news from Dallas.  And Rom stood by his friend the next month, when Mrs. Lopez, in an expression of the grief that rocked the nation after JFK's murder, had Hector's name legally changed to John Fitzgerald Lopez.  (The seventh grader's father hadn't liked the idea, having put great thought into naming his children after King Priam's son and daughter in Troilus and Cressida, but then again, there were a lot of things he didn't like, and it was better than his wife's stated option of having another kid.  Hector went along because he hated the name Hector.)
     The boys sat together mesmerized in the overdecorated Lopez living room one Sunday night as Ed Sullivan introduced the Beatles.  Cassandra, a precocious 11 year old, flipped for them. Mr. Lopez declared the performance "sound and fury, signifying nothing."  Mrs. Lopez, bleaching a neighbor's hair in the kitchen and gossiping in Spanish, barely noticed.
     The young friends found nothing wrong with Roseville, with its tree- shrouded streets, big, neat homes and gray slate sidewalks.  Usually they managed to avoid the racial skirmishes that increasingly plagued the area, and hung out with a loose association of other nonconformist types in the neighborhood.  They revered the city subway, whose massive, 1940s-style cars hugged the west side of Branch Brook Park and then dove underground, following the route of the old Morris Canal, under Raymond Boulevard to Pennsylvania Station.  The young friends played ball in Boys' Park and smoked cigarets and fought and rode their bikes and shared all the things that best friends share.  They made regular forays to the Pabst brewery on South Orange Avenue and liberated cases of Blue Ribbon beer.  They made prank phone calls and looked at girlie magazines.  Sometimes  they skipped school and hopped the No.118 bus to Manhattan, where they attended game shows, explored Central Park, visited amusement arcades, ate at the Automats and bluffed their way into the cheesy theaters that showed "adult" films.
     The two saw the Knicks and Rangers at  the Garden, the Yankees at the Stadium and the Mets at Shea, where in 1966 they saw -- and barely heard -- the Beatles.  The Fab Four provided a good deal of the soundtrack of their young lives, along with rhythm and blues tunes blasted from the speaker over the door of Sussex Avenue Hi-Fi next to Victor's Italian Cafe, music to eat slices of pizza by on warm nights.  The streets of Roseville buzzed with pop songs from cheap transistor radios tuned to WABC or WMCA or WINS. Greasers doing bad renditions of Four Seasons songs could always find an alley or an acoustically lively hallway for impromptu concerts.  In the book of streets that was Roseville, every page came with a song.
     Lopez went on to Essex Catholic after St. Rose; he excelled in most subjects and seemed destined for a top college.  He developed a taste for Continental clothes and, it appeared, couldn't be bothered with girls.  Cassandra, a pretty, raven-haired cutup with slightly crossed eyes,  got good grades, ran the local chapter of the Beatles Fan Club and cultivated a crush on her brother's friend.  Rom opted for Barringer, a public high school.  He proved a fair student but stood out as an athlete, first at track and basketball and then at fencing, in which he won a letter in his sophomore year.  He wanted to study film at college and play pro basketball. He favored dungarees and sweatshirts, and his hair hung in unruly bangs over his forehead.  Girls liked his dark good looks and quiet confidence.

     Sofia become a supervisor at Tung-Sol.  She socialized with friends from the factory now and then but had not dated, even though she still turned heads.  Her life centered on her boy and the sturdy brown house on N. Fifth Street.  From time to time, as she shopped or rode the No.22 bus down Orange Street, she'd catch a glimpse of a gypsy face, and a sliver of fear would scratch her heart.  She'd remember her last couple years with the gypsies: the vagabond treks from storefront to campsite to storefront; the hateful glare of "respectable" people on the street; the taunts of children; the leers of men, young and old, who equated gypsy women with whores; the miserable months spent with the demonic Gregor, with his stupid expression and fat nose, who shared her with his brothers.  She could still see his dark figure in the doorway, the dreaded leather whip in hand, ready — anxious — to use it on her at the first sign of protest.  She could still feel its crack on her legs, on her breasts.  And then the terrible, foul weight of him atop her.  She would never forget running away from him, in the middle of the night, from Mystic, Connecticut, back to Boston, crazy with fear and pregnant with someone's child.  She shook whenever she remembered the awful night in the emergency room of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where she miscarried.
     No, it was difficult to remember being happy before she met Sal at a bakery one Sunday morning near Boston College.  They had 13 good years.  And she had Romy.  He was a good boy.  He was smart; he had friends.  He helped her, listened to her.  He would go to college, get a good job, give her grandchildren, take care of her when she was old.
     On Labor Day weekend 1968 Sofia at first forbade Rom from driving down to the Shore with Lopez and some other boys, but as usual, she relented.   They returned safe but sunburned, and Rom climbed out of his friend's car into one of the last warm nights of summer on the eve of his senior year.  He'd half expected to see his mother on the porch, rocking and drinking iced tea with her tenant, Mrs. Rees, as was their Sunday custom, but there was no sign of them tonight.  Rom went through the alley into the side door and up the stairs to his kitchen door.   He opened it and turned on the light.  There on the floor, in a pool of blood, was his mother.  She was dead, her throat slit.