Streets of Gold (29 page)

“Je t’aime, je t’adore, qu’est-ce que tu veux encore?”
Michelle would ask in metered breathlessness, but each time I demonstrated what more I desired, each time my hand wandered down to the hem of her skirt, her own hand would dart out with all the terrible swiftness of The Flash, and her fingers would grip my wrist with the viselike strength of Sheena of the Jungle. “No, baby,” she would say, “not now.” Not now meant never. Only once did I manage to steal my hand onto the soft silken secret of her panties, and then for just an electric instant before those swift descending fingers closed again upon my wrist and snatched my hand away.

In August of 1941, her father took a job teaching at a Queens high school. We said our good-byes one early September midnight, locked in embrace on the lawn behind the house of an old ginzo we called “The Paintbrush” because of his walrus mustache, the crickets and katydids racketing in the bushes, my hands desperately clutching those prized departing possessions.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I’ll always love you, Iggie.”

“Oh, and I love you, Michelle. Oh,
God
, how I love you.”

She moved out of my life forever the very next day.

She remains the most beautiful woman I have ever known.

My brother Tony was seventeen years old when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He immediately asked my mother for permission to enlist in the Air Corps. My mother talked it over with my father, and then my grandfather, and then got back to Tony with an unequivocal “No.”

“I’ll enlist, anyway,” Tony said. “I’ll he about my age.”

“And I’ll call the Air Corps and tell them you’re a liar,” my mother said. “And a little snotnose besides.”

“You’re making a mistake,” Tony said. “I could be a good flier. I could be a goddamn
ace
!”

“Don’t use that kind of language around your mother,” my father said.

“You want Hitler to take over the world?”

“Hitler won’t take over the world, don’t worry,” my mother said.

“How do
you
know? What does he do, call you on the telephone every day? ‘Ja, hello, Shtella?’ ” Tony said, falling into an imitation of all the Germans he’d ever seen on the motion picture screen. “ ‘Das iss Adolf here. I haff decided not to take over d’vorld. Votchoo tink of dat, Shtella?’ For Christ’s
sake
Mom!”

“The matter is settled.”

“And don’t talk like that.”

“Who told you to say no? Grandpa?”

“The matter is settled.”

“Was it him?”

“Grandpa had nothing to do with it. I’d have to be out of my mind to let you go fly an airplane. That’s
that
, Tony.”

“And we don’t want to hear no more about it,” my father said.

“Wait’ll some Jap comes marching in here with a bayonet,” Tony said.

“Sure,” my mother said.

“It could happen,” Tony said.

“Sure,” my mother said. “It could also rain elephants.”

“
Damn
it, Mom...”

“Tony,” my father said, “I’m not going to warn...”

“This is
important
to me, Pop!”

“I thought baseball was important to you,” my mother said.

“
Baseball?
The whole fu... the whole
world
is at war, and you expect me to think about baseball?”

“No,
you
want to think about flying airplanes,” my mother said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Sure,” my mother said,

“Right,” Tony said.

“The matter is settled.”

Tony went down to see my grandfather the very next day. He got back to the house at about six o’clock. I was in my room, practicing. When I heard his knock on my door, I immediately pulled my hands from the piano.

“Igg?” he said. “Okay to come in?”

“Sure, Tony.”

He walked in, shut the door behind him, and sat on the bed. I turned from the piano.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“Argh,” Tony said.

“Did you tell him?”

“Yeah.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him I wanted to join the Air Corps.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said he knew. He’s a fuckin’ old
greaseball
, Iggie. He asked me if I wanted to go bomb Italy. He asked me what I’d do if they told me to go bomb Fiormonte. I said Who the hell is going to ask me to bomb Fiormonte, Grandpa? What the hell is in Fiormonte to
bomb
? So he tells me it’s a beautiful village. So I said Grandpa, the generals aren’t interested in bombing beautiful villages; what they want to do is bomb
military
targets, not beautiful villages. So he says there’s a bridge in Fiormonte, across the river there, and maybe the generals’ll tell me to bomb the bridge so supplies won’t be able to go to Bari or wherever, because Bari is a seaport. So I said Grandpa, the generals aren’t going to be interested in a shitty little bridge in Fiormonte, and he said It’s a
nice
bridge, Antonio. So I said Look, Grandpa, I’m not trying to take away from the goddamn bridge, I’m just trying to tell you nobody’s going to send me to bomb Fiormonte, and anyway, I don’t
want
a fly a bomber, I want to fly a
fighter
plane, I want to be a
fighter
pilot.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“
Sure
, that’s right. You know what he said? He said Then what’ll you do, machine-gun innocent women and children from your airplane? I said Grandpa, why would I do something like that? And he said Because it’s war.”

“You should’ve told him you wouldn’t do nothing like that, Tony. You wouldn’t, would you?”

“Of course not, what the hell do you think I am? I thought you knew me better than that, Iggie.”

“But suppose they
ordered
you to do it?”

“Who?”

“The generals.”

“Do what?”

“Machine-gun women and children.”

“I wouldn’t do it,” Tony said. “I just
told
you I wouldn’t do it, didn’t I?”

“Then they’d court-martial you.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“Sure, they would. If you don’t obey orders...”

“Iggie, we’re getting off the goddamn track! Here’s what I want you to do. After your piano lesson Saturday, I want to take you to the tailor shop.”

“What for?”

“To talk to him.”

“To Grandpa?”

“Well, now, who the hell do you
think
I mean? Pino? Of
course
to Grandpa.”

“Well...”

“He’ll listen to you,” Tony said. He hesitated, and then said, “He likes you better than me.”

“No, he don’t, Tony. He likes us the same.”

“Listen, I don’t care about that, I swear to God. I just want you to convince him, okay? If he says I can enlist, then he’ll tell Mom, and she’ll sign the papers. Will you do it, Igg?”

“Sure, Tony, but I don’t know. If
you
couldn’t convince him . ..”

“Just say you’ll try, okay? This means a lot to me,

“Sure, Tony.”

“Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t tell Mom.”

“I won’t.”

“We’ll say we went to a movie on Tremont Avenue.”

I knew it wouldn’t work even before I went to talk to him. I had tried something like this with him a long time ago, when my mother had given away Vesuvio. If he wouldn’t let
me
go to Goomah Katie’s in Newark, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let
Tony
drop bombs on Fiormonte.

I talked to him for three hours.

He refused to change his mind. In June of 1942, Tony turned eighteen and registered for the draft. A month later he received his greetings from Uncle Sam, and left to begin his training as an infantryman in the United States Army.

I immersed myself in music.

I realize now that Passaro was an extraordinary teacher, who encouraged me to take reckless musical chances, allowing me to swim out as far as I dared, but always ready to dive in and pull me back to shore if and when I got into serious trouble. Shortly after Tony was drafted, for example, he started me on Beethoven’s C-Minor Concerto, which, as I’m sure you know, is not exactly “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” (
That
tune, as I’m sure you also know, is the theme for the Mozart K. 265 variations, sometimes known as
“Ah, vous dirai-je, maman,”
especially to French scholars like my
own
dear maman, Stella Di Palermo.) Passaro probably knew that Beethoven was beyond my depth, but he also knew I was a gifted musician, and when you’ve got a truly talented student — or so the theory goes — you push him relentlessly, you give him tremendously difficult compositions, you keep after him day and night because if he’s going to be a concert pianist, he’s got one hell of a large repertoire to learn, and he isn’t going to learn it by playing the “Mikrokosmos” over and over again.

Well, hell, Passaro had me playing the Grieg Concerto when I was
twelve
, though he’d prepared me beforehand with a series of little exercises he himself invented. He had decided that Czerny and Hanon were not helping me build my repertoire — my repertoire, my sacred, spiring repertoire. “You must build a repertoire, Iggie, there are
thousands
of compositions to master!” And so he would teach me a single precise exercise, and I would discover to my surprise that it miniaturized a very tricky technical passage in a piece he was about to present. When he sprang the Grieg Concerto on me, I realized I’d been practicing (as an exercise!) the descending double thirds in the first movement, and when I got to them in the actual piece, they seemed relatively easy.

Inspiring me with tales of Great Musicians He Had Known, firing my ambition (“You will win all the prizes, you will perform in Carnegie Hall!”), he pushed me into the Beethoven C-Minor because he honestly believed I
would
win all the awards. Then, as now, there were prestigious young musicians’ prizes being offered all over the country — Eastern Seaboard, West Coast, and points between. Like a farmer who had fattened a hog, Passaro was anxious to exhibit his livestock and cop a blue ribbon, and push he did, oh, how he pushed! And I, in turn, missing my brother tremendously, fearful he would be sent overseas at any moment, accepted each new Passaro prod gratefully, and stilled my anxieties by spending hours at the keyboard. “That’s nice, Iggie,” my mother would say. “Play that part again.” I played that part again. And again. And again, and again, and again. And the months passed painlessly.

I can never truly understand motivation. Cause and effect have always been mysteries to me, except at the piano. I still don’t know whether the Rachmaninoff concert had anything at all to do with my later decision to move into jazz. Passaro obtained the tickets three months in advance, and had shpieled nothing but Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff, Rachmaninoff all through August, September, and October. I don’t know whether it rained for twelve days and twelve nights in June of 1901, when my grandfather was digging his subway, but I
do
know what the weather was like on November 7, 1942, because I vas dere, Sharlie. It was cloudy but mild most of the day. In fact, the temperature was hovering in the low fifties when we entered the concert hall which (Passaro kept telling me) would one day resound with cheers for
me
, Ignazio Di Palermo, supreme virtuoso. The hall was packed. I am blind, and I do not like crowds. Passaro guided me through the throng, his hand firm on my elbow. This annoyed me. He should have known better than to be
shoving
me through the goddamn crowd. Our seats were in the balcony, we took the elevator up, there were excited voices everywhere around me, people bumping into me. Passaro’s guiding fingers pushed at my elbow, we found our row, “Excuse me, excuse me,” Passaro said, pulling me behind him now as we moved past knees and more knees, searching for our seats.

“There are chairs on the stage,” Passaro whispered to me. “Wooden chairs. There must be more than a hundred of them. Folding chairs, Iggie. Every seat in the house is filled. Oh, Iggie, can you
feel
this? Can you feel the excitement?”

There was indeed a hum in the air, an almost tangible sense of expectation, tinglingly electric. Passaro read to me from the program. Rachmaninoff was to play his own transcriptions of the Prelude, Gavotte, and Gigue from Bact’s Partita in G Major, followed by Beethoven’s Opus 31, Number 2, and then a Chopin program, including the C-Minor Polonaise (I remembered the first time I had ever heard it, when Passaro reached across me on that January day in 1935, and I remembered him asking if I thought I could play it in three months’ time), and then Rachmaninoff’s own
Etudes-Tableaux
(“You yourself will compose one day,” Passaro whispered to me), and finally a selection of Liszt pieces. The audience fell silent all at once, the absence of sound shocking after the incessant hum that had preceded it. “Here he comes,” Passaro whispered into my ear, and then, with the precision of a single pistol shot, the audience broke into applause. “He’s crossing to the piano,” Passaro whispered. “He’s sitting,” and the applause stopped as abruptly as it had begun, its brief thunder replaced by a stillness now laden with the agony of anticipation.

Rachmaninoff began playing.

The concert was disappointing for both of us, on different levels and in different ways. All the way back to Tremont Avenue, Passaro could not stop talking about how badly Rachmaninoff had played.

“Ah, yes, it is all there still, of course, he is a master, he is a giant, there is no one today who understands the mechanics of the keyboard the way he does,
nessuno
, and he is sixty-nine years old, remember! Did you hear the way he handled the pianissimi — a whisper, a caress, a touch of balmy air. And the fortissimi! Did you hear, Iggie? He does not pound, he is strong, there is force and power, but he does not pound, do you understand now why I tell you ‘Don’t pound,’ eh?