by Don Haslett

Created on: March 04, 2009   Last Updated: May 18, 2009

Mrs. Ferranti was one of those people who became old and bitter at a very early age. She had peaked by the age of thirty and her remaining fifty years were no more than a long and ultimately pointless downward spiral.

She was the old woman in the window. Many of us have known someone like her; the neighborhood crank, the old woman who frightened the children and made the grownups shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. Morning, noon, or evening found her sitting in her chair by the window waiting and watching, with one hand impatiently tapping on the glass while the other wagged a bony finger at any child who happened to pass by her house.

Her house hadn't fallen into actual disrepair from neglect, but it loomed dark and foreboding, nothing but an ominous shadow taking up space. Her house was more an interruption to the flow of the neighborhood than it was a home. Unlike the other houses there were no flowers in Mrs. Ferranti's plain front yard. There was no candy for the goblins, ghosts and witches on Halloween, no flag on the Fourth of July, and though she had been raised a Catholic, she never had a tree or lights at Christmas time.

My family lived next door to her since I was just a toddler, but I have no recollection of there ever having been a Mr. Ferranti. Still, we knew that he had once existed as she had one son and he himself had two sons who were about my age. They would come see her on holidays as if their visits were a duty that they could not avoid. With starched white shirts and clip-on ties they would trudge up the front walk, climb the brick stairs, and they would disappear into the grim interior of Grandmother's house. If any laughter had ever existed there it never escaped her drawn window curtains. Not surprisingly, the Ferranti grandsons were nasty children who would in time grow into hateful adults, but only briefly for Mrs. Ferranti would survive them both, and in her longevity she was made painfully aware that her bloodline ended with her.

Mrs. Ferranti's older grandson Anthony, who was the same age as me, had attended the private school down the hill, so until high school I knew him only as the kid whose grandmother lived next door. His miscreant brother Alonzo was the same age as my younger brother, but Alonzo was too strange to be bothered with, even as a youngster. Both boys would become all too familiar with the local police force and judges as they cut their own delinquent swaths through adolescence.

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