Nancy Ruhling's Astoria Characters

He doesn’t take the subway. He doesn’t take the bus. When Matthew Nicholas Mastrorocco wants to go someplace, he jumps on his bike and rides like the wind. To go to his job at Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. To go to Coney Island for the day. To visit his parents in West Hempstead. To go to Montauk for an adventure. “I’ve always had a bike,” says Matthew, whose friends call him Matt. “I don’t remember how old I was when I got my…

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She starts by saying that she doesn’t have a lot to say. In the 79 years God has allowed her to do good on his earth, Eileen P. Cuhaj has always been the quiet one. It’s hard to break old habits. Her reticence stems from her childhood; she had four older brothers, and it was hard to be heard over them. In a sense, she and silence grew up together. She came in when the Great Depression was in diapers, and she learned to make do. She didn’t know any better. “I had one doll…

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Leaning on her black-handled cane, Pearl Gould walks carefully until she finds herself safely behind the counter of Broadway Silk Store. Bushy, a cat whose ginger fur is the same color as Pearl’s hair, says hello to her, swishing his tail within inches of a red-and-white-striped hatbox full of vintage buttons. When she was young, Pearl used to be taller, but now she’s barely as big as the bolts of fabric she sells, and sometimes customers spot Bushy before they notice her. A woman comes…

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Berch. That’s the way the painted windows are signed. Berch? Who is Berch? Berch is Berch Augustine, but nobody in the neighborhood calls him that. He’s Picasso. He’s Michelangelo. He’s painting palm trees on the glass doors at Tasty’s. “A window without a painting looks naked to my naked eye,” says Berch, a lanky man wearing camouflage cargo pants and combat boots defined by Jackson Pollock drips. There’s a handful of sterling silver rings on his…

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When Jenny Searles says hello, it sounds like a powder puff patting a pillow. Her voice is small. And that’s what’s so shocking — it’s extraordinarily ordinary. Ah, but when she sings! That’s when her voice box becomes a 3-D boom box, opening full throttle to soar up the scales like an American eagle in flight. In opera, you need a voice that’s bigger than life; nobody uses a microphone. Jenny’s a soprano; her high notes sound as though they should shatter…

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