Streets of Gold (45 page)

And then I told him you were Jewish.

And I said to him, I said, “Grandpa,
that’s
important too.” And I explained what it meant to me to be in love with a Jewish girl, and to want to marry a Jewish girl, and I explained what it meant to you, my being Italian, and I told him we had talked about it in great detail, and that none of it mattered to us. “She’s not religious,” I said, “and I’m not religious, either, Grandpa. Please don’t be hurt by that, but honest, I haven’t been anywhere
near
a church for five years now. We love each other, and that’s all that matters.”

I put it to him that simply, but it was much more complicated.

We were, Rebecca and I, the realization of the American myth, which both of us had been living for as long as we could remember. And in that myth the melting pot existed only so that fresh new alloys could be poured from its crucible. If I was copper, then Rebecca was zinc, and together we would create a brass band that marched noisily down the middle of Fifth Avenue playing “America the Beautiful.” Her father’s objections to our relationship seemed absurd, reactionary, and frankly unpatriotic. We met in secret, we made love in secret, we formulated our plans for getting married in secret, and secretly and privately and proudly, we each glowed with the knowledge that we were fulfilling our separate destinies and moving in the only direction possible for anyone who considered himself American.

We were wrong, Rebecca darling.

But we were both so young.

We had planned the wedding for months, inviting only my parents and grandparents, Rebecca’s mother and sister, and some close friends like Stu Holman, Cappy Kaplan, and Shirley Ackerman. Rebecca’s mother declined the invitation for Davina and herself, not because she objected to the marriage (she liked me very much, in fact, and gave us two thousand dollars of her personal savings as a wedding gift), but only because she had to live with Honest Abe for the rest of her life, and knew her attendance at our wedding would be considered rank betrayal. On November 17, 1948, two days before Rebecca and I were to be married, my grandfather went to visit Honest Abe at his Oldsmobile agency in the Bronx — and was somewhat baffled by the reception he received. Nor was Honest Abe any less baffled (or at least he
seemed
to be) by the old man’s appearance at his
palais d’auto
.

The first inkling we had of my grandfather’s visit came from Honest Abe himself. At the Baumgarten dinner table that Wednesday night, on one of his rare personal appearances with the family (being otherwise and usually occupied with his euphemistic poker games), Abe told the story of the mysterious appearance of an old guinea dressed in black and smoking a foul-smelling cigar. “I never turn any of them away,” he said. “
Shvartzers
, wops, Irishers, they’re all the same to me. If they got money to buy the car, I’ll sell it to them. So when he walks in the showroom, I personally go up to him and I say, ‘Good afternoon, sir, may I help you?’ and he sticks out his hand and grins, and says, ‘Frank Di Lorenzo,’ in an accent you can cut with a butcher knife. Do you know anybody named Frank Di Lorenzo, Becky?”

“No, Daddy,” Rebecca said, while her mother and sister busied themselves with the pot roast on their plates.

“You’re not still seeing that blind
shaygets
, are you?” her father asked.

“Oh, no, Daddy,” Rebecca said. She had been seeing me for the past two and a half years, and after Friday she would be seeing me for the rest of her life — or so we both thought at the time.

“He said he came up to the Bronx to tell me how happy he was.”

“Who?” Rebecca asked.

“This old wop, this Di Lorenzo with the cigar clamped in his mouth.”

“Well,” Rebecca said, very carefully spearing some sliced carrots and boiled potatoes with her fork, “it’s very possible that a happy Italian came into your showroom, but that doesn’t mean I know him.”

“What was that goy’s name that time?” Abe asked.

“Ike, do you mean? Ike Di Palermo.”

“Um, well this was Di
Lorenzo
. At least, I
think
that’s what he said; I could hardly understand him. You get these people, they’re here in America for sixty years, they
still
don’t know how to talk right.”

“Like Grandpa,” Rebecca said, trying to change the subject.

“Grandpa talks fine,” Abe said. “I understand him fine. Anyway, this old wop is slapping me on the back and grinning from ear to ear and telling me he’ll see me Friday, and I have to come to his house sometime, maybe for his name day... I
think
he said his name day; what the hell’s a name day? I figured I had myself a prime bedbug right there in the showroom, telling me what a fine man I am, and how happy he is to meet me, a nut plain and simple. You know what
I
think?”

“No, Daddy, what do you think?” Rebecca asked, and held her breath.

Abe thought about what he thought. Then he said, “I’ll bet that
shaygets
... what was his name?”

“Ike Di Palermo.”

“Yeah. I’ll bet he’s going around telling people he’s still dating you.”

“Why would he do that, Daddy?”

“Why not? A blind piano player? Nothing he’d like better than to have people thinking he’s dating a Jewish girl.”

“What’s so special about Jewish girls?” Davina asked.

“You’re both my special darlings,” Abe said, and smiled at his two darling daughters, but patted only Davina’s hand.

“Well, whatever Ike does is his own business,” Rebecca said. “I haven’t seen him since that day he came up here, and I couldn’t care less what he’s telling people.”

“That’s a good girl,” Abe said. “But still, I’ll bet that’s it.”

“So what did you say to him?”

“Who, the wop? Nothing.”

“I mean... how did you leave it?”

“Leave what? He said he’d be seeing me Friday, so Friday I’ll look for him. Who knows? He’ll maybe end up buying a car.”

Immediately after dinner, Rebecca ran downstairs to the candy store, and phoned me. I listened breathlessly, and then called my grandfather in an effort to determine exactly how much he had told the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer.

In his broken English, my grandfather said:

“I go in the store, he come up, I know he’s the fath, I see in the eyes, the face, the look. I say, ‘How you do, I’ma Frank Di Lorenzo.’ He saysa, ‘How you do?’ I looka him, he looka me. I tell him, ‘I’m Ignazio’s granfath,’ and he says, ‘Attsa nize.’ I tell him I come to meet him so he no be stranger the wedding, so he feelsa home, eh? He saysa, ‘What wedding?’ I tell him Friday, the wedding, whattsa matta he forgets the wedding? He saysa, ‘You wanna buy car, or what?’ I say to him,
‘What
car? I’ma talk about how happ I am to marry with you daughter my granson.’ He saysa, ‘You craze.’ I say, ‘Hey,
you
, I’ma Frank Di Lorenzo,
capisce
? It’sa
my
grandson who’sa marry you daught, whattsa matta you? I’ma come alia way the Bronx to say hello, I make a mistake? You
no
Abe-a Baumgart?’ He saysa, ‘I’m Abe-a Baumgart, you wanna buy a car, or no?’
Ma
, Ignazio,
ho veramente creduto ch’era pazzo!
I try one more time. I say, ‘Look, you gotta nize daught, I gotta nize granson, we be nize-a v family, you come have supper, you come my name day, I buy
pasticcerie
, we drinka wine, it’sa nize, okay?’ He says, ‘I get somebody to heppa you.’ An he goes away, he leaves me standa there like a dope. What I do, Ignazio? I do someting wrong?”

As planned, we were married on the nineteenth of November. All through the brief civil ceremony, I expected Abe to come barging in with a
minyan
of Jewish hoods, all of them standing six feet four inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, as did my imminent father-in-law. Calling upon Jewish tradition, they would place my head upon the floor, and then all ten of them would smash it under a tented napkin. Not even Uncle Matt would be able to save me. But nobody arrived to interrupt the wedding. Afterward, we herded the small group of somewhat cheerless celebrants to a restaurant in Mount Vernon, where Rebecca and I were wined and dined and toasted (three times by my grandfather alone!). We then took a taxi to Pennsylvania Station, where we sent off a telegram and boarded the train to Mount Pocono. At fifteen minutes past midnight, we found ourselves in a deserted, milk-stop railroad station that had no lights and a single phone booth with a broken door. I located the booth in the familiar dark, and Rebecca struck a match (and then another) and dialed the telephone number on the advertising brochure, and handed the phone to me. I told the owner of the lodge we were Mr. and Mrs. Di Palermo (How strange that sounded! Mr. and Mrs. Di Palermo were my parents!) and we were here, but there weren’t any taxis, and could he please send a car for us?

Lying in bed together, we tried again to understand her father’s reaction to what had happened that afternoon two days before. Was it possible he really hadn’t understood what was being said to him? My grandfather’s English was atrocious, true, but he generally managed to make himself at least comprehensible. Could Honest Abe honestly have missed the purpose of the visit? Had he really not understood that a wedding was to take place on Friday afternoon, and that the principals to be united in matrimony were none other than a Blind Shaygets and a Jewish Princess from Mosholu Parkway? We reached the conclusion that Abe had understood perfectly and had decided to look the other way. He must have realized there was nothing he could do to stop the wedding, short of breaking both his daughter’s legs and sending her to Paris, France, in plaster casts. She had been seeing me against his explicit wishes for more than two years, and it was too late now. He could either pretend he knew nothing about any of it, or else take a futile last stand that would accomplish nothing anyway. And so he’d professed ignorance and innocence; whatever his daughter chose to do was on her own head. The telegram we’d sent, addressed to Mr.
and
Mrs. Baumgarten, to circumvent any later recriminations hurled at poor, bewildered Sophie, read:

It is a Saturday afternoon in 1955. Sophie has brought her sister to visit us in our apartment on Ninety-seventh and West End Avenue. Sophie visits often; she has an arrangement with Honest Abe. His eldest daughter is dead, he has turned her pictures to the wall — but his wife may visit the grave whenever she chooses. Today she has brought Tante Raizel to meet the blind
shaygets
, and Rebecca is showing snapshots I cannot see.

September of 1950. A sleazy nightclub in Jersey City. We have been married for almost two years. Rebecca tells a joke to my drummer. “A six-year-old boy is banging pots and pans in the kitchen,” she says, “and a five-year-old girl comes in and asks him what he’s doing. He answers, ‘Shhh, can’t you see? I’m a drummer.’ The little girl grabs him by the hand, and drags him into the bedroom, and tosses up her skirts, and pulls down her panties, and says, ‘If you’re a drummer, kiss me on the wee-wee.’ And the little boys says, ‘Oh, I’m not a
real
drummer.’ ” My real drummer does not find the joke comical. I suddenly wonder whether Rebecca told it only to annoy him. I am beginning to feel she purposely says the wrong things to my musicians. She does not enjoy nightclubs anymore; it is not the way it was before we got married, when each new gig was a circus. Our son will be a year old at the end of the month. He was conceived in December of 1948, a month after we were married. Rebecca is pregnant again, she bears huge babies, she is already swollen to bursting in her fourth month. I suspect she is angry with me for having knocked her up a second time (though she faithfully wears a diaphragm each and every time we make love), angry with me for not making more money, angry with me, too (may God forgive me), for being blind.

“This is when we were still living on 174th Street,” Rebecca says to her aunt. “I was pregnant with Michael at the time. God,
look
at me, I’m a horse!”

She is nursing the new baby when I come home at three in the morning. She sits in an easy chair near the side of our bed, and I hear Michael’s sucking sounds as I undress. We are living on the sixth floor of a housing project two blocks from Westchester Avenue. I commute by subway each night to a club in the Village, where I am the intermission pianist; it is difficult to keep bands together unless you can provide work for them. I am earning eighty dollars a week, and we now have two children, and $340 in the bank. Rebecca carries the baby into the room he shares with his older brother, Andrew. I am in bed when she returns. I hear her snapping out the light. We talk for a while. My hand rests lightly on her hip. When I lapse into silence, Rebecca asks, suddenly and unexpectedly, “Do you plan to make love?”

“Would you like to?”

“Would
you
?”

“Sure.”

“Let me get my diaphragm.”

She gets out of bed and walks down the hall to the bathroom. I hear a colored woman shouting from an open window to her friends on the street below. “G’night, y’all, g’night,” and again, “G’night.” Silence. From the bathroom I hear the sound of running water. I lie back waiting, my hands behind my head. I suddenly remember a night in Stockbridge before we were married, when young Rebecca crossed the room as though traversing the burning sands of the Sahara, to climb into bed beside me, and surrender her virginity to me, and mourn its loss immediately afterward. I wait. She always takes an interminably long time to insert the diaphragm. A year ago, when she’d discovered she was pregnant again, she’d said, “I’ll
never
learn to put this fucking thing in!” She uses the word “fuck” a lot, my Rebecca, but never to describe what we do together in bed. In bed, we make love. (“Do you plan to make love?”) In bed, Rebecca is a contractor hired to construct an edifice, “make” a building she labels “love,” for want of a better word: Blueprints and specifications are tucked into her vagina just behind the diaphragm, while like a common laborer I sweat to bring her to orgasm. I touch her mouth often while we make love, I search her lips with my seeing-eye hands. There is never a smile upon her face, she “makes love” joylessly, straining for orgasm and achieving it soundlessly, with never so much as a grunt of pleasure, a groan of acknowledgment, certainly never a passionate shriek. When I ask her each time if she has come (I am never certain), she snaps impatiently, “Of
course
I came! Will you please shut up?” I always want to talk afterward. She always wants to sink back into the pillows, into silence, perhaps so she can admire from a distance this shining fifty-two-story office building we have built together from plans already dog-eared, this “love” we have “made.” The bathroom light clicks off, I hear her walking purposefully toward the bedroom. We are ready for the business of fucking.