Second Skin (19 page)

The settlement had been hammered out at last, but it hadn’t gone down well with all parties. The dark-faced Frank Vizzini of Bay Ridge, known as the Importer, and the sausagelike Tony Pentangeli of the Rockaways, who controlled the truckers, both afraid of change and dissensions within their families, were adamantly opposed to the plan. Paul Vario, who took a piece of everything that went in and out of Kennedy Airport, was neutral, as was Black Paul Mattaccino from Astoria, who, like Grandfather, controlled segments of the insurance and fire protection industries, as well as the Fulton Fish Market and the humongous import-export business owned by the Venetian, don Enrico Goldoni. All of them were into the unions. That was one pie big enough to go around the table.

Grandfather’s negotiating skills, however, had won the day, along with the solid support he got from Gino Scalfa, one of the dons from East New York, who looked like a puffer fish and commanded a great deal of respect. He was one of the first dons Grandfather had gone to see when he had moved out of the Hole.

During the murderously tense session, Mick had observed how his grandfather had cleverly preyed upon the various dons’ personalities in order to manipulate their votes. Cataloging this skill more than compensated for his scurrying around the table, serving men who didn’t even know he existed. Now, at last, they were all gone.

‘Openna window,’ Grandfather Caesare said. ‘It’s close in here.’

He sighed deeply as Mick let the fresh air in. ‘Makes me kinda sad,’ he mused, almost to himself.

‘What does, Grandfather?’ Mick asked as he poured some anisette into a cordial glass and stuck it in front of the old man.

Caesare picked up the glass, watching how the light played off the crystal and the liquor. He took a deep breath. ‘That’s the smell that makes it all worthwhile.’ He downed his anisette, sighed again. ‘Fix it inna you mind, Mikey, because it’s the most important smell in life, more important even than the smell ova woman.’ He pursed his lips. ‘It’sa smell of fear and it’sa good smell.’

He looked down at the twenties spread out in front of him. ‘This money?’

Mick, relieved that he hadn’t been asked where he got the eighty bucks, said in a rush, ‘I wanna invest it.’

‘S’matta, you haven’t gotta bank account?’

‘Banks is for goofballs. I wanna invest it with you.’

Mick went to pour him more anisette, but Grandfather waved him off. He rose, stretched, then put on his hat. ‘C’mon, I wanna show you somethin’.’ Then he pointed to the four bills. ‘Take that wicha.’

Grandfather liked to drive. He had a ’59 emerald green Caddy that was kept in pristine condition for him. He had a driver, of course, but truth to tell he preferred to drive. That was one of the great things about America, he had always said. Driving. As he aged, he had taken even more pleasure in driving that Caddy, and only Mick suspected part of the reason he did was that he could still do it, and a skill like that was becoming increasingly important to him.

This evening, he took Mick west about ten miles along the Belt Parkway down to Sheepshead Bay. In those days, a couple of country clubs and a hotel, the Golden Gate Inn, were down there by the Belt Parkway right at the bay, catering to the ginzoes. They liked the water. Who knows, maybe it reminded them of Italy.

Grandfather parked the car off the service road at the verge of where it got thick with overgrown weeds and the ferocious, unlovely underbrush of the city, and they got out. The sun was just going down. Seagulls were wheeling, calling to each other from out of a sky the color of mother-of-pearl. Grandfather stared down at the water, which, in taking on the color of the sky, had disappeared.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

Mick nodded.

Grandfather pointed. ‘Know how many people I know about inna bay tied to cement blocks? Twenty. And that’s just me.’ He laughed, a dry sound like the scraping of boots against a cement sidewalk. ‘You know, that Gino Scalfa, you remember him, the fat one. He comes down here by himself every evening, stares inna water. Why? It keeps him sharp, he says, because it reminds him what happensa guys who get too greedy or too wise or too ambitious too soon. An’ he’s right. That’s our world.’ He sighed as he took the twenties out of Mick’s hand. ‘You know, whatchew asking me?’

‘I know.’

‘Well.’ The old man made quite a show of folding the bills and pocketing them. ‘Let ’em grow, just like seeds, right?’ He touched the brim of his fedora. ‘Not only enemies out there inna water, you know. Friends, too. Some of ’em I even miss.’ He turned to Mick and quite suddenly in a very low voice said in Italian, ‘Mikey, I’m gonna tell you the secret of life. Not
my
life, but
yours.
Don’t wind up sounding like a mick. Educate yourself. Education is the key to knowing yourself, and without that you’ll be lost like all these penny-ante hoodlums looking to make a name for themselves. Education is history and history can teach us everything we need to know because in history all the serious mistakes have already been made. A student of history is bound never to repeat them, and let me tell you,
not
making mistakes is what it’s all about.’

Grandfather Caesare’s enormous hands pumped up and down. ‘This is America and it’s a mistake to think of it like it’s Sicily. It isn’t, not even the Hole, much as we wanted it to be. Now I see even the wanting was wrong.’

He pushed his hands apart, palms up, and switched back to English. ‘I mean, why’d we come here, anyway, to do the same things we were doing inna old country? No. We came for opportunity, yeah. But we also came to change.’ He winked at Mick. ‘Not too many
paisans
understand this, and inna end they’re the ones’ll die like dogs with their faces inna pavement.’

Looking at the milky stars through the lens of his telescope, Mick heard his grandfather’s voice.
Educate yourself.
They were the Big Dipper and Orion, the weaker stars made smudgy by the city’s glow. He wished his brother had heard Grandfather.
We came for opportunity, yeah. But we also came to change.
Maybe then Caesare wouldn’t think Grandfather was over the hill. Then, again, maybe not. Caesare had his own way of looking at the world – his own kind of philosophy – that, like it or not, Mick had to admire. He didn’t agree with it, and he certainly didn’t like his brother any more for it, but he was already three steps ahead of the wiseguys and would-be wiseguys all around him. Caesare was destined for great things, Mick knew, if he didn’t die like a dog with his face in the pavement.

One night, a month or so after Grandfather had taken him down to Sheepshead Bay, Mick was up on the roof of his building staring at the stars. His eye ached with the strain of peering through the city’s light at the pristine sky above.

He heard the door open behind him and took his eye away from the telescope. Rubbing it to get some circulation back into it, he saw a small figure emerge onto the tarred roof.

‘Jaqui?’

‘Hi, Michael,’ she said.

It was the beginning of June, had been one of those quintessential New York days that was as scorching as midsummer. Night had brought only minimal respite. Mick stared at his sister, who was dressed in a thin white cotton halter dress and sandals. Her shoulders and legs already glowed with the inner light of summer.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Okay,’ he said, choking off the specter of his recurring dream. He pointed upward. ‘Just stargazing.’

‘I think it’s great that you do that.’

‘You do?’

‘Sure. You’re not on the streets with those bums.’

‘I have no interest in bums,’ Mick said brazenly.

‘Good for you.’

Jaqui, who had been named by her mother in atypical Italian fashion after someone she had read about in
Life
magazine, did not speak like anyone else in Ozone Park. She was studious and conscientious and, in her quiet way, proud of both traits. It was rumored in the family – though Mick had never heard it spoken of – that she might become a nun. Certainly, she was a regular Mass-goer and often disappeared into the Sacred Heart of Santa Maria Convent in Astoria.

She was beautiful, it was true, with her wide-apart green eyes and luscious lips, but what Mick loved most about her was that she moved through Ozone Park as if it did not exist. She was immune to the daily violent altercations, the gangland turf wars, the guns and cigars in the house, even – and perhaps most importantly – the closed doors behind which the men met to discuss the biziness.

At nineteen, she was absolutely untouched by the savage world of the uneducated men, so different from their mother, who, after all, cooked for Grandfather Caesare and his cronies. In living by their rules, their mother had in some way become like them. But Jaqui was as isolated from them as the twinkling stars were from the streetlights of Ozone Park. In a way, she was already in that place where Mick longed to be, on another continent, unknown and far away.

Somewhere, from some other rooftop or perhaps an open window, Doris Day was singing ‘Love Me or Leave Me.’
Never deceive me,
Mick thought. There was a sentiment not well known in Ozone Park.

When Jaqui walked, it seemed to Mick as if she were dancing, and as she moved dreamily toward him, he could not help picturing a cantilevered terrace, a tuxedoed band, a string of Chinese lanterns, elements resurrected from the dream he’d had so many times it had the substance of reality.

‘Can I look?’ she asked.

‘Sure.’

He beckoned and she put her eye to the lens. ‘What you’re looking at is Orion. It’s a constellation.’

Jaqui looked at him with her cool green eyes and laughed. ‘I know that, dummy.’ But it was a gentle laugh, not anything like Caesare’s, which was like a cattle prod in his ribs. Then she put her eye back at the telescope.

‘How many stars in Orion?’

‘Seven,’ he said. ‘Two shoulders, see ’em? And then three dimmer ones, those’re his belt. And then, lower down, two more are his knees.’

‘I can’t find the belt.’

As he bent over her, he smelled the clean citrusy odor of her hair, and he felt his knees grow weak. Immediately, his cheeks burned with shame. How could he feel this way about his sister? But it wasn’t just a physical thing, it was more. He knew that, and somehow the knowledge calmed him somewhat. She was like a part of him that had broken off, a piece he had been searching for.

He put his hands on her soft shoulders, moved her just slightly. ‘There.’

‘Yes. I see them now. Oh, Michael, how beautiful.’

Of course it was so. Beautiful stars as opposed to ugly Ozone Park. How he longed to be with her on that cantilevered terrace on a continent far, far away. His fingers moving over her shoulders felt her skin raised in goose bumps, and her hair drifted onto his knuckle.

‘Jaqui?’

She took her eyes from the lens. ‘Yes, Michael.’

‘Nothing.’ He looked away and swallowed hard. What was he going to say to her? What madness had been about to escape his mouth? He put his hand up to his forehead to see if it was still burning with blood.

She clasped her hands behind her back and smiled. ‘You know what I also think is great?’

‘What?’

‘That you’re sticking it out in school.’ She pursed her lips and shook her head. That brother of ours is going to flunk out. I just know it. He’s more interested in using a gun than in using his brain.’

‘What brain?’ It was easy to make a joke at Caesare’s expense when he wasn’t around.

Jaqui frowned. ‘He isn’t stupid, you know, not like the rest of those
gavonnes
he runs with. They’re like the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. If they had half a brain between them, they’d be dangerous.’

Mick laughed, delighting in her insight. ‘Yeah, well, you know how Caesare is.’

‘I sure do. Tough as a bull and twice as stubborn. But inside that big bark of his lies a first-rate mind.’ She sighed. ‘If only he’d take your lead for once and apply himself to learning.’

‘Caesare? Not a chance. He’s too busy lapping up all the street has to give him.’

Jaqui stood very close to him. Her breath smelled like the roses in his dream, and for a dizzying moment it seemed to him as if they had been magically transported inside his dream, that it was real and the rooftop in Ozone Park was, in fact, the dream. Someone else’s nightmare.

‘Michael, this life makes me afraid. I’m not like Mom, just sitting still while all the wildness, the death, swirls around me. I can’t imagine myself waiting patiently for a man to return home from that war. The fear, it’s like something sleeping in my bones, you know? – like a disease that I’m fated to have but hasn’t yet come to life.’ She shuddered and Mick could do nothing else but hold her. Her head on his shoulder was almost more than he could bear.

‘I want out, Michael,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘so badly it’s a taste in my mouth.’ She pushed away from him so her beautiful green eyes could meet his. ‘It’s crazy, isn’t it, what I just said?’

Tell her, stupid,
a terrifying voice inside him begged.
If
there ever was a time, this is it. Tell her everything.
But all he said was, ‘Not at all. I understand.’

‘You do? Really and truly?’

It was one of her favorite phrases. Where she had picked it up, he had no idea. ‘Really and truly.’

Her smile was radiant as she hugged him to her. ‘Oh, Michael, thank God there’s someone in the family I can talk to.’

Now he understood the dilemma that bound them together as closely as did his recurring dream.
I’m not like Mom.
The men were off limits to her, and their mother was too traditional to understand the radical thoughts in Jaqui’s head. But he understood, better than she would ever know.

‘You can always talk to me,’ he said, ‘about anything.’

‘You’re not like any of them.’ She sat on the parapet, ran a hand through her hair, and the lights of the city were reflected in her eyes. ‘No wonder you come up here every night. It’s so far away from everything
down there.
All the evil energy, the stupid violence.’ She looked up at him, the naked, innocent look in her eyes stabbing at his stomach. ‘Why are men so violent, Michael? It’s a question I ask myself over and over.’