At the Jersey Shore, the first week of October would go into the record books as one of the warmest, most pleasant in memory. The water temperature nearly matched the average 79 degrees, and a handful of vacationers with lucky timing ruled the brilliant beaches.  Rom, who hadn't been to the Shore since his father's death, rediscovered its seductive beauty.  He'd found a small beach house on the Boardwalk in Point Pleasant Beach, and for a week had swum and floated and eaten and dozed, and occasionally typed a few notes for what might become his autobiography.  The  cool evening breeze thrilled his sunburned skin as he walked back from delicious dinners of steamed clams and cold beer, and he drifted off to sleep to a whispering chorus of surf.
     But Monday morning brought a cold rain that was still coming down the next morning.  After looking at the photo in his breviary for a while, Rom went to a pay phone and called Cassandra, then gathered his notes and headed back up Highway 9.  He plodded through the thickening traffic, up boisterous Route 1 into Newark and onto McCarter Highway.  He turned onto Broad Street and continued under the Erie-Lackawanna tracks to the twin towers of the Colonnades.  He pulled into the parking area of the south building and shut off the car. In the sudden quiet the raindrops hitting the roof gave him gooseflesh.
     He remembered his nervousness about the phone call and his relief when it seemed  he would get away with just leaving a message on her machine.  But she had picked up, and a minute into the conversation, he'd felt better.  She'd made him feel comfortable despite the gulf of time and history between them.
     Rom had never felt so good and so bad at one time, back when he and Cassandra had made clumsy, passionate love that spring night in 1969.  He'd been in the Village that weekend and had felt exhausted after three days of drugs and Manhattan hijinks.  When he'd awakened in his bed to find Cassandra holding his hand, he'd felt more embarrassment than annoyance; he hadn't changed his clothes in a few days, and looked like hell.
     But the next moment, the light was out and Cassandra was in bed with him. Pretty Cassandra, for whom boys were always telephoning, who at 15 had the self- assurance and intelligence some women never have.  That night, in his lonely bed, when presented with the perfumed intimacy of her young love, he'd found himself clinging to her, kissing her, loving her.  In the drowsy intimacy that followed he'd drifted off to sleep, contented for the moment, in her arms.
     It was the very next memory of that night — of being shaken awake by an enraged Lopy; of Cassandra being dragged out of his warm bed and sent scurrying downstairs, naked; of the nasty fistfight that followed, and the curses and tears —  that had stayed with him through the next 22 years.
     The rain increased its tattoo on Rom's Lincoln, and he turned on the intermittent wipers.  He wouldn't be meeting Cassandra until that evening, but, telling himself he needed to make sure he knew the way, Rom had driven here to the Colonnades parking lot and now sat waiting to catch a glimpse of her.  She'd said she had to go to New York for a luncheon or something.  That meant, probably, a train, or perhaps a bus.
     Suddenly a taxi swerved up to the front doors, and in the few yards it took for the woman to reach the cab, Rom recognized Cassandra and felt his heart pound.  Dressed in a knee-length gray trench coat and carrying an immense purse and a newspaper, she seemed to look Rom's way as she made for the cab.  The photo Lopy had sent didn't do her justice.  She was maturely, confidently, strikingly beautiful.
 As the cab pulled away, Rom found himself leaning forward, clutching the steering wheel.  He started breathing again, then relaxed and sat back.  After a minute he looked over at the typewriter occupying the passenger seat and took a deep breath.  "Chapter One," he said.  "The Artist Finds His Garret."  He started the car and wheeled out onto Broad Street, then up Orange Street toward whatever was left of Roseville.

     The closer Rom got to his old neighborhood, the more depressed he became.  He drove past a desolate housing project, then past the old Borden milk plant, which now resembled a war ruin.  Just as he spotted the old Tung-Sol factory he caught his first glimpse of the monster that had started tearing the neighborhood apart 20 years earlier.  The ugly, elevated lanes of Route 280 crossed over Orange Street here and cut a half-mile-long swath through what was left of the once- beautiful neighborhood.
     Rom  remembered all the houses that were just not there anymore.  For blocks the south side of Orange Street, once bright with small mom-and-pop stores, had been leveled. Broken glass and weeds clustered on the ugly concrete.  Garbage fluttered in chain-link fences and clogged the gutters.
     He drove on past Second Street, Third, Fourth.  Nothing that still stood looked familiar. Those buildings left housed iron-gated bodegas and closed-up storefronts.  Small groups of black children darted back and forth across Orange and congregated on the wet street corners.  One pushed a shopping cart full of crying toddlers.
     The immense Home Liquors store still stood, though, open for business.  And between Fourth and Fifth Hopp's Pharmacy sat like an orphan among the dead.  Could Mr. Hopp still be running the store?  Rom slowed down and peered through the reinforced glass.  Inside, two Arabic men were behind the counter.  No Mr. Hopp.  He'd be dead now.
     Next to Hopp's sat an empty, trashed storefront that made Rom's stomach tighten.   When Rom was 14, a tribe of gypsies had moved into the former Nason's Meat Market, and the neighborhood kids, convinced it was now a whorehouse, used to pass it in a conga line, chanting "Where do all the whores meet?  447 Orange Street!" before being chased off by the garishly dressed women or the swarthy men.   Rom, who had never told anyone but Lopez of his mother's background, had always steered clear of it.
     At Fifth Street, the old Phil & Charles' Tavern had been garishly repainted and renamed "Franco y Franco."  At Sixth, where the highway settled into a grim canyon and veered away from Orange, the old Second Precinct had been torn down and replaced by a police structure resembling a military bunker.  The stables — where the tall policemen in shiny black boots had once answered stupid questions from youngsters and let them pet their steeds — were gone.  Rom thought briefly of the big Police Athletic League gym on the top floor of the old precinct building, of the basketball games and good friends, of the portly Officer Joe who coached Little League and played Santa at the precinct Christmas party.
     He drove on past Seventh, looking up the block for the old Plaza Theater.  The building was still there, but its battered marquee read "Cornerstone Ministries."  He thought of the many Saturday afternoons he and Lopy had been tossed out for roughhousing by the meaner of the sisters who ran the theater.
     He drove on.  The deli was still there, but Tilman the stationer was gone, and there was a rubble-strewn lot where Gruning's soda fountain once stood.  On the corner of Roseville Avenue, once the site of two fine-looking banks, one had been converted to a pharmacy and the other to the New Testament Church.  Past Roseville, Bodholdt's Diner lay dead in a burnt-out, boarded-up heap.  The Irish bakery was gone, likewise Harry & Benny's Market.  Just gone.
     But Rom's heart rose when he reached Humboldt Street.  There stood St. Rose of Lima church, unchanged for all the decay around it, still a proud testament of the faith of the people of Roseville back at the turn of the century.  And beyond it, the old school, looking exactly the same.  He turned down Gray Street and noticed the old A&P had been razed.  Behind that lot, the old school playground sat chained up, strewn with broken glass and garbage.
     In the driveway between the school and the rectory, a class of uniformed children stood restlessly in double-file.  All had black faces.  It seemed a shock to Rom, who remembered years of moving from church to school to playground in such lines, and how the faces of the children had so perfectly reflected the neighborhood: Irish, Italian, Polish, black, even a few Jewish kids whose parents wanted a better education for them.
     What was it like to grow up here now, he wondered.  Did they mind the garbage and broken glass and despair?  Did they hate white people?  Did they know any?  Rom struggled to understand what had happened to this neighborhood.  He  knew similar decay had set in all over the Northeast, in Camden and Boston and The Bronx and Philly.  Where did the blame lie?  His neighborhood had been murdered.  Who had pulled the trigger?  The state, with its highway to save commuters 10 minutes on their trip to the suburbs?  The poor blacks?  The whites, who'd abandoned the area?  The 1967 race riots had only been the start; the neighborhood was still plunging in free fall.
     Rom parked and looked back toward the grand old Tivoli Theater.  It was gone, replaced by a big brown apartment house.  He got out and walked around the corner to the church and up the broad stone steps.  As he started the climb, an old black woman passing by called out to him.  "It's locked," she said.  "They don' use that upstairs no more.  Jus' the downstairs, what they can heat."
     Rom stood on the steps, remembering the spacious grandeur of the main church, with its warm wooden pews, its beautiful mosaic stations of the cross, the splendid marble main altar, the gold candle stands and gleaming crucifix, the mysterious tabernacle behind the silken curtain.
     Was it really too much to afford to heat the church now?  Were they really using the lower level for Mass?  Where were the parishioners?  Was there so little left of the parish?  Rom peered down the street toward the convent.  It was gone.  In its place Rom could hear the bustle of traffic below on Route 280.  He jammed his hands into his pockets and headed back to his car.
     He drove a block north to Seventh Avenue and let out a gasp. The beautiful old railroad station was gone.  The switching tower a block away was an untidy pile of burned debris.  The once-stately McAvoy apartment house was a sagging relic, several apartments blackened by fire, the walls covered with graffiti.
     He continued down Seventh Avenue, and his jaw dropped when he saw blocks and blocks of homes gone, in their place a rubble-strewn lot with a building in the middle, like a terrible island. Its letters read, "E. Alma Flagg School," but with its narrow windows and concrete construction it looked more like a fortress.
     Rom turned up N. Fifth Street, past garbage-filled fields where homes of friends had once stood.  Double-parked cars, many badly dented and with dangling mufflers, clogged the rough street.  When he reached the stop sign on Sixth Avenue, several black kids — none older than about 15 —  raced up to the car, holding out small cellophane bags.  They cursed each other and jostled for position.  On the passenger side, one boy tried to open the door.  Rom quickly flicked the power lock down, checked the traffic and bolted through the intersection.
     He saw more of the same as he approached Park Avenue.  He reached his old house, where he'd lived from the summer of  '63 until the September night five years later when he found his mother murdered in the kitchen.  A small group of what he now recognized as drug dealers congregated on the porch where he'd spent so many summer evenings listening to the radio, flirting with the neighborhood girls.  Now the young men on the porch were eying the Lincoln hopefully.  One put his fingers to his lips in a smoking gesture, eyebrows raised.
     Rom crossed Park and traveled another block north — past the chocolate factory that, Rom noted gratefully, still blessed the neighborhood with a heavenly aroma — before stopping in front of a long three-story red brick apartment house.  He shut the engine off and sat a moment reveling in memory.  This was Frankie Giordano's place.  Rom remembered palling around with the precocious boy through high school, sometimes coming back here, to the building where Mr. Giordano was the superintendent, for a lasagne or ziti dinner with the large, loud clan in their basement quarters.
     Now Rom remembered the summer of 1967, when Frankie took over one of the apartments, a small two-room unit that needed a stove and sink.  It was being held for his Uncle Dominic, who wouldn't be needing it until September, with time off for good behavior, and was furnished only with two old couches, a refrigerator and a sturdy old TV/radio console.
     Rom sat in his car, immobilized by memories of warm summer nights here, of Sgt. Pepper and a corncob pipe filled — seeds, stems, and all — with pot.  He remembered walking in front of the dartboard and Lopez landing a dart right in his neck, and the fight that followed.  He remembered the many nights he stayed over, some spent drowsing through the wee hours with the radio playing softly, the summer smells of the park drifting through the open window, some spent watching old movies all night.  One stood out in memory — "The Mark of Zorro," with the terrific swordfight between Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone.  That night, after too much beer, Rom had taken a tire iron and started "dueling" with Eddie Salvano and carved a big "Z" into the ceiling of the small bedroom, declaring it the "Mark of Zoriano."  The stunt earned him banishment for a few days.
     Now, 24 years later, he sat outside in a Lincoln Town Car, measuring the toll the years had taken on the building, and on his life.  He hit the wipers to clear the windshield.  The sign in the front door read "Apartment For Rent."