Streets of Gold (16 page)

He creeps out of bed, oh, this is a good idea.

He steals through the empty dormitory, past the beds lined up in a row, the washstand and basin beside each bed, the toothbrushes in glasses, the night light burning in the corridor outside. There is a nun sitting on a straight-backed chair at the end of the hall, engrossed in saying her beads, why are they always fingering their beads and mumbling to themselves? She does not notice him as he stealthily opens the screen door at the end of the hall and slips outside. The air is clean and fresh, he knows he is in the country someplace, but he does not know where, maybe as far away as the Bronx, maybe that is where they’ve sent him. He can hear crickets in the bushes, and can see fireflies flitting through the trees. He once caught a firefly and pulled off the part that glowed and stuck it to his finger like a ring, and Sister Giustina limped over to him and said that he would be punished for hurting one of God’s creatures, and she took him to the room she shared with Sister Rosalinda, and they beat him again that afternoon, even though he had not wet the bed the night before, and of course he wet the bed again after the beating. Why had God made such tempting creatures as fireflies, whose lights could be pulled off and made into rings? He had never seen a firefly before he came to this place, and no one had warned him that it was one of God’s creatures. Didn’t Sister Giustina slap mosquitoes dead, and were they not also God’s creatures? Or did Sister Rosalinda later punish her in the small white room they shared? He had once spied Sister Rosalinda whipping herself with the same cat-o’-nine-tails she used on him, her habit lowered to her waist, flailing the leather thongs of the whip over her left shoulder, her bare white back covered with welts. Had Sister Rosalinda wet the bed the night before? He did not understand nuns.

He can hear her voice in the darkness as he crawls across the lawn, still wet from the day’s rain. She is telling the children that in Hell there is no recourse, there is no one to turn to because the Devil presides and he is thoroughly evil and without mercy, and his assistants are as fiendish as he, and the people suffering in Hell are evil, too, which is why they were sent there in the first place, and wherever one turns there is only evil to be encountered in the flames, and one can expect no succor from those who have fallen from God’s grace and who fear not the Lord and who have in their hearts no remorse for their evil deeds; he creeps closer.

The summerhouse is an octagonal-shaped building constructed entirely of wood, latticework covering the base, a screened wooden platform lined on all eight sides with benches upon which the children sit, columns supporting the roof. Giacomo crawls under the lattice and under the platform and covers his mouth with his hand to suppress a giggle. His initial idea has been to let out a moan from the depths of Hell, frightening and delighting the other children. But now that he is actually under the platform, he notices that there is a space between two of the boards, and he can see one of Sister Rosalinda’s black shoes and the hem of her habit, and he has a better idea that suddenly comes to him from the text of her story and almost causes him to wet his pants with glee right there under the summerhouse. Sister Rosalinda is expanding upon her theme by telling the children that just as there is no recourse in Hell for those who are evil, so it is on earth for those who will not follow the teachings of the Lord Jesus. The Devil will seek out the sinners, he will reach up from the subterranean depths (oh, this is
such
a good idea, much better than the first), will reach out with his hairy hand to claim them as his own, seize them in his powerful taloned fingers...

It is here that Giacomo reaches up through the space in the boards, reaches up from the subterranean depths beneath the summerhouse, and clutches Sister Rosalinda’s ankle in his powerful taloned fingers.

My father was, and still is, an inveterate joker.

He tells the story with enormous relish, even though he insists Sister Rosalinda almost had a heart attack, and even though he was to regret his prank for the remainder of his stay at the orphanage — eighteen months and four days of a living Hell without mercy or recourse, just as the good sister had promised. She steadfastly maintained, incidentally, that after the hand reached up to grab her from below — and she let out a yell that must have alerted even Saint Peter up there at the pearlies, screaming, “
Il Diavolo, il Diavolo!”
while the children scattered and stumbled and shrieked in echo, “
Il Diavolo, il Diavolo!”
one of them crashing through the screen in his haste to get away from this infernal creature who had reached up to grab one of God’s many wives (if he could grab a
nun
, who on earth was safe?) — she swore on a stack of Bibles, that smiling religious bitch who made my father’s life miserable, swore that the imprint of the Devil’s hand remained on her flesh for weeks after the episode, bright red against the lily white of her virgin fields. Nickie told my father he was stupid for trying to buck the system. (“Don’t buck the system,” my Uncle Nick always said. “You try and buck the system, the system busts your head.”)

My father hadn’t been trying to buck the system. He was going for a laugh. I don’t know when he began protecting himself with humor, maybe it was way back then when he was standing in the hot sun breathing in the stink of his own piss. I do know that he uses it the way other men might use anger or brute strength or guile. If things are getting a bit too serious (or even if they aren’t), my father immediately tells a joke. Whenever I telephone him, he will answer my call (or
anybody’s
call) in one of two ways: (1) He will disguise his voice and say, “Police Headquarters, Sergeant Clancy speaking,” or “This is the Aquarium, did you want some fish?” or “Department of Sanitation, keep it clean,” or (in a high falsetto) “This is Stella Di Palermo, how do you do?” (2) If he answers in his
own
voice, he will invariably say, “Your nickel start talking,” or “This one is on you,” or sometimes, abruptly, and impatiently, and in mock anger, like a busy executive at General Motors called to the phone during an urgent meeting, “Yes, what
is
it?” (This one still gets a laugh from me, though» he’s done it perhaps ten thousand times.) He can calm a tense moment at the dinner table, and there were plenty of those between Rebecca and me, by suddenly tossing in a pun from left field, usually way off target but sometimes genuinely funny. I don’t think I’ve ever had a serious conversation with him in my life.

When I called to tell him I’d left Rebecca, he answered the phone and snapped in his General Motors manner, “Yes, what
is
it?” I told him Rebecca and I were through. There was a long silence on the phone. Then he said, “Just a minute, I’ll get your mother.” Only months later did he say, “Ike, sometimes things work out for the best in life.” That’s the closest we’ve ever come to exchanging confidences. He used to talk to my brother Tony a lot. I can remember him and Tony having long conversations in the kitchen of our Bronx apartment. I never knew what they were talking about, and I thought at the time that I was too young to share such intimacies, that when I got older — like Tony — maybe my father and I could talk together the way they did. It never happened. (Once, and God forgive me for ever having thought this, I figured he didn’t talk to me because I was blind.) The comic routines became more and more frequent after Tony was killed. He never mentions Tony now; it is as though his first son never existed. Except sometimes, when he turns away from the television and, forgetting for a moment, says to me, “Watch this guy, Tony, he’s a riot,” without knowing he has used his dead son’s name, without realizing that each time he makes such a slip it brings sudden, unbidden tears to my eyes.

You fucking wop who killed him, I wish you the plague!

As best I can piece this together, my father worked as an errand boy in a delicatessen only
after
he was released from the orphanage. By that time, his older sister Liliana had a steady job with the telephone company, and my grandmother figured she could safely afford to take her sons home. And, again filling in the gaps, I think he was drafted into the Army sometime after the jobs in the transit authority’s repair shop and the laundry, and after the apprenticeship with the florist. In brief, he was working in the “business of embroidery and crochet beading” while simultaneously playing “weddings, socials, baptisms, block parties, at most of the ballrooms in and around New York” when he met my mother. And I estimate this to be in August of 1922, long after the armistice had been signed and the country was attempting a return to normalcy.

Now make of this what you will, analysts of the world.

The first band my father formed was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five. Even given the enormous popularity of Griffitt’s film
The Birth of a Nation
, which had opened in Los Angeles at Clune’s Auditorium in February of 1915 and had gone on from there to play to enormous crowds at theaters all over the country, a film that vividly depicted sheeted and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen riding the night; and given the resurgence of the Klan in the years immediately following the war (its membership would total four cotton-pickin’
million
by 1924!); and tossing in the arrest on May 5, 1920 (shortly before my father formed his band), of two immigrants named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on charges of felony murder, and the attendant publicity given the case when it was discovered that both these ginzoes were anarchists and draft dodgers besides, which might very well have caused my father to pick the Anglicized
nom d’orchestre
Jimmy Palmer, and to further shield his true identity by hiding his face as well as his Italian background; even taking into account my father’s penchant for disguises (his Charlie Chaplin imitation was a pip, he says), does it not seem passing x strange that he would choose as the costumes for himself and his musicians (are you ready?) white sheets and hoods? I am not for one moment suggesting that standing in the sun for close to two years, with a piss-laden sheet over his head, warps the personality and causes paranoia. I am only stating a simple fact. My father’s band was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five and they wore long white sheets with sleeves sewn into them, and they wore white peaked hoods with stitched eye holes, and they wore these costumes winter, spring, and fall, and also during the hottest summer in years — which was when my Aunt Cristina got engaged to the man who would become my Uncle Matt.

Stella didn’t know which one of the Phantom Five was Jimmy Palmer; they all looked the same under those hoods with their eyes peering out of the holes like dopes. Also, was the name of the band strictly correct English? Since there were only
five
musicians, shouldn’t they have called themselves Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom
Four
? Stella suspected, too, that the reason they were wearing those disguises was that they were lousy and afraid they’d be lynched in the streets afterward if anybody recognized them. She was, to tell the truth, altogether bored by Cristina’s engagement party. She had been kissed and hugged by distant cousins and aunts and uncles and goombahs and goomahs she didn’t know existed, some of them from places as far away as Red Bank, New Jersey, and if another smelly greaseball with a walrus mustache pressed his sweaty cheek to hers, she would scream. She had been told that maybe Uncle Joe would be coming in from Arizona for the party, but at the last minute, he couldn’t make it. Her sister had boasted that her fiancé Matt had connections, and would be able to supply beer for the party (prohibition having been in full force for almost two years now), but as usual Matt had failed to make good on his promise. The only beverages were soda pop, and some hooch certain to cause blindness or baldness, plus the ever-present dago red, still being fermented in basements all over Harlem, just as though the Volstead Act hadn’t been passed at all. Her father was ossified by eight o’clock. It was the first time she’d ever seen him that way. He kept telling everyone what a pity it was,
che peccato
, that Umberto, Tess’s father and Cristina’s grandfather, the man who had taught him his trade, had passed away two years ago and could not be here to enjoy the joyous occasion of Cristina’s engagement to this fine young man, Matteo Diamante (already known as Matty Diamond in the streets, years before Legs Diamond achieved renown as a gangster). And then he said it was also a shame that none of the family back in Fiormonte could be here, either, and seemed to recall quite suddenly that a great many members of the Di Lorenzo family were now dead, his father having passed away in 1916, and his mother the following year, and then his youngest sister, Maria, who had asked him why there were no gifts on Christmas morning in the year 1900, and he had promised her there would be gifts the following year, but had never returned, and now she was dead of malaria, none of them here to share this festive occasion — and he began to cry, which Stella thought extremely sloppy and very old-fashioned.

Her sister’s fiancé was a darkly handsome young man who affected the speech and mannerisms of some of the gangster types he knew only casually, and who was enormously flattered to have been dubbed Matty Diamond, which seemed to have class and swagger and a touch of notoriety besides. Actually, he was an honest cab driver, who went to confession every week, and he’d probably have fainted dead away if anyone so much as suggested that he assist in the commission of a crime. But it was hinted in Harlem nonetheless that he had “connections,” and these mysterious connections were supposed to be capable of performing services such as providing beer for his engagement party, which they hadn’t. He was crazy about Cristina, and insanely jealous as well. He was drinking the bathtub gin, and was almost as drunk as Francesco.

Stella, at twenty, loved her sister dearly and wished her nothing but the best of luck, but she did think seventeen was a little young to be getting engaged, especially when the man in question was six years Cristie’s senior, and reputed to have lost two toes to frostbite during the war. (He certainly
danced
as though he had two missing toes.) She herself had been offered proposals of marriage by two different men in the past year, one of whom was a second cousin, naturally turned down since she didn’t want to have idiot children. The other was a rookie policeman named Artie Regan, whom she’d met at her father’s tailor shop, where he always seemed to be dropping in to pass the time of day with Pino and Papa until she got wise to the fact that he was really coming by to catch a glimpse of her. She had dated him on and off for more than six months until she realized he was serious. Her father had never shown anything but the coldest courtesy to Regan, and she knew that if she even mentioned that Regan “wanted her,” her father would take to the streets with a meat cleaver. An Irishman? The memory of the southern Italian is long, long, long. So she’d said so long to Artie, who really was a very nice and gentle sort of person for an Irish cop, and had decided she’d take her time finding the right man, even if Cristie
was
in such a hurry to get herself engaged to a fellow with only eight toes.