Jeff Feigl Square is a good place to watch the Mount Kisco Firemen's Parade. Most of the villages and hamlets in northern Westchester have a firemen's parade, but, because there are four companies in Mount Kisco-the M utuals, the Hooks, the Independents, and the Fire Police-the parade of its firemen, in July, is particularly impressive. Having already paraded through a few villages that summer, the firemen were in top form the last time I saw them. The main streets had been closed off. Several dozen young girls belonging to the Most Holy Trinity Fife and Drum Corps of Mamaroneck, some of them playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy" on piccolos, led it off. Everybody gave them a hand. Another village's chapter of the Lions' Club followed. Paunchy, gray-haired, and unknown to most of the crowd, they received a more perfunctory kind of applause. Then there was a gap in the formal procession, filled by an assortment of kids on bicycles and a vender pushing a shopping cart decorated with gas-filled balloons. Suddenly, Mount Kisco's own Ancient Fife and Drum Corps came round the corner. Thirty eighteen-inch fifes, three bass drums, and ten snares took up "The Girl I Left Behind Me." Each child in the corps wore a scarlet vest and a black tricorne. The Ancients had already appeared twice, in May-once to march the Little League up to the park on opening day, and again on Memorial Day-but this was the moment fot which they had been practicing in the elementary-school parking lot every Wednesday evening since daylight-saving time had begun, and the crowd had withheld its greatest applause for them.

      Between firemen's parades are all the religious ceremonies: Palm Sunday, when the congregation comes out of St. Francis of Assisi late in the morning and the streets are filled with groups of two or three going home with the pleasant-smelling palm fronds; the funeral of a villager, whose casket may be carried down the church steps by six American Legionnaires; and Confirmation, when little girls in white dresses swarm around the bishop and kiss his ring as he stands in front of the church with his scepter and mitre, casting his blessing into the street. At Christmastime, each of the churches and funeral homes on Main Street usually puts out a creche. A few years ago, I counted six creches, each more imaginative and lifelike than the next. But I would have given first prize to the Nativity scene in front of the Lutheran Church, whose figures were real live people, motionless in the winter air except for the occasional plume of breath that would escape from one of them.

      Mount Kisco's largest institution is the Northern Westchester Hospital Center. Upward of a thousand babies are born and more than two hundred people die there each year. .It is a tradition with the local merchants to give presents to the first-born child each new year. One of the recent lucky babies was Michael Frank Nicolosi, who came into the world at 3: 34 A.M. on January I st, weighing seven pounds six ounces. He was welcomed with five half gallons of ice cream from Friendly's Ice Cream Shop, three cases of baby food from Pantry Pride, and a savings account from each of the village's banks. The proud mother received a twenty-pound box of no-phosphate detergent from Sears, a free shampoo and set from Thelma Hair stylists, and three free visits to Supersonic Car Wash. All told, the Nicolosis were showered with sixty-six presents.

      Around the central hospital complex, an array of doctors and dentists have set up practice in smaller professional buildings and converted residences. In back of the hospital are four parallel tree-bordered streets-Boltis, Woodland, Spring, and West. It's a quiet neighborhood, not built to any set plan and not significantly different from the architectual productions of ten thousand other American towns.  Some houses are stucco, some brick, some wood-frame with a modest amount of gingerbread trim and maybe a shed-type garage in back. Wings, porches, and other additions have been tacked on as the need arose, and every dwelling is masted with a teleyjsion aerial. The residents are Irish, Italian, and black. Families are close, but, since the arrival of television, neighbors don't visit with each other or talk over the fence as much as they used to, although their children still play together in the street. The patterns of their life could be called provincial: the majority pass their lives on these four streets and are buried in cemeteries a few hundred yards away-in Oakwood, if Protestant; in St. Francis, if Catholic, the Italians with their long Mediterranean names chiselled in the headstones below photographs of themselves.

      If there is anything exceptional about West Street, it is that it has a lingering Italian flavor, though not as pronounced as it used to be. A few of the houses have grape arbors over their back doors, and the back yards have been terraced with plain or whitepainted boulders. Some of the trees in the neighborhood-even Norway maples, which were planted for shade -have been severely pollarded, as if they were expected to bear fruit. Come springtime, almost everyone prepares a small plot for tomatoes, peppers, egg plants, zucchini squash, romaine lettuce. Later, in the fall, people put in escarole, which can stand the cold. Before the first frost, they wrap their small fig trees in old carpets or blankets and cover them for the winter with garbage cans.

      Recently, the Bernsteins-Stan and Marcia and their children, Judy, Cyrus, and Hilary-moved into a forty year-old stucco Tudor house with an underhouse garage, on Parkview Place, on the other side of town from West Street. It is the Bernsteins' first house; they have always lived in apartments. The move ended a process of extrication from the Bronx,  up through the crowded residential rings of lower Westchester, and finally to the relative country of Mount Kisco. Parkview Place is in a solidly white, middle-class neighborhood. The individual homeowner takes a great deal of pride in the appearance of his yard. Schneider, the Bernsteins' neighbor, is an ingenious man who builds grandfather clocks in his basement and has a vegetable and flower garden that is the envy of the street. The other neighbors, who object to Max (short fo Maxima), the Bernsteins' Great Dane, are not particularly friendly.

      Stan Bernstein, who is about forty, commutes to the Bronx, where he designs ventilator systems for high-rise buildings. He was born in the Bronx and grew up there. "My ideal was to live on the East Side of Manhattan, but when we got married, in 1956, we couldn't afford to live there, so we lived in the Bronx in a fifth-floor walkup right near the zoo," he told me. "After a while, we became disenchanted with the Bronx. Although we wanted the urban life, we also wanted a little nature. There was an ideal location in Fleetwood. We didn't ha ve a car, so we used the trains, and were less than half an hour from downtown Manhattan. Out back, there was a beautiful park with huge tulip trees, which they have since blasted out to make the interchange between the Bronx River Parkway and the Cross County Parkway. I would walk in the park every night, rain or shine. I had a bird feeder on every windowsill. We got them by the thousands. I grew orchids in a jerry-built greenhouse in the window. Finally, we were kicked out because we got a dog. There were other dogs in the building, but the management didn't want any new ones. We could have taken them to court, but we decided it was time to move anyway, so we moved into the Cadillac Apartments, in Mount Vernon. Every Saturday or Sunday, we would make safaris to northern Westchester, exploring the area. We drove past Fox Lane High School, in Bedford, and said, 'This is where we'd like to send our kids.' We saw them building Diplomat Towers, in Mount Kisco, and said, 'Here is an apartment house with a pool in the middle of the lovely country.' From the apartment they showed us, we could look across the tracks to this magnificent marsh, which was beautiful in the summer with all the purple loosestrife. So we took it. The first day we got there, we left all the furniture in the middle of the room and went camping."

      Diplomat Towers, however, did not live up to the Bernsteins' expectations. "The place began to deteriorate," Stan went on. "The management made deals for rent abatement with many of the people who lived there. Light bulbs burned out in stairwells and were not replaced, the elevator broke down almost daily, and we were constantly having to walk the six floors. The incinerator caught fire on several occasions and gave off noxious fumes.  The management started renting to They took in a known pusher and several women of questionable morals. There were an awful lot of divorced families-just a mother or father and kids who went wild. There were people who started out straight at Diplomat Towers and ended messed up."

      "Things are better there now-the management has changed-but we used to go over to Diplomat all the time," William J. Nelligan, Mount Kisco's Chief of Police, told me. "Mostly for family fights, complaints of malicious mischief, or on narcotics raids. Several years ago, we intercepted a twenty-five-pound box of marijuana that was being delivered to two characters in one of the towers. They were living in a two-bedroom apartment, and their only furniture consisted of two mattresses, two Early Salvation Army dressers, and a hi-fi set. Their only employment was dealing in marijuana."
 

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