The Confessions of Frances Godwin (13 page)

Two weeks later I drove up to Milwaukee, east into bright sunlight, the weather cold, twenty degrees, but clear. Steep hills of dirty snow marked the entrances and exits. I had no intention of “investing” in a truck with a million miles on the odometer, but I wanted to see Stella.

On the way I listened to a cassette, Paul reading Shakespeare, then switched to Wisconsin Public Radio.

I hadn’t been to Milwaukee in years. Paul and I had gone up a couple of times, the first time just to have a look-see, the second time when Paul gave a talk at UW Milwaukee. We stayed in the Knickerbocker Hotel, near the lake, and ate at Karl Ratzsch’s. And Mader’s.

I was wondering if I needed therapy. I was walking into the wind. I had nothing to hang on to. I got off the expressway too early and drove past a big cemetery. The thought that nothing will last was comforting. I looked forward to a time when I’d be past all this. All this what? Stella, and Jimmy too. It was the thought that Stella was unhappy that bent my mind backward. Maybe Paul should have let Jimmy drive the stupid car. It was still sitting in the garage. Lois had helped me get the canvas tarp back in place so I wouldn’t have to look at it every time I came home.

I found 409 North Broadway—Gagliano Bros. Produce—in the middle of the market. Broad sloping sidewalks were covered by enormous black awnings. The sidewalks were crowded. The market was loud; I recognized some of the languages—Italian, Sicilian maybe, Spanish, Yiddish, Polish—but not all of them. It was hard to hear over the noise of the two-wheelers and the metal wheels of the hand trucks. The market was smelly—garbage lined the high gutters—and vulgar: men in heavy coats shouted curses as they unloaded the trucks backed up to the sidewalk. It was the sort of “real life” that Paul loved. The men were dark, and handsome. Their hair was blue-black, but I was looking for a red-headed Italian. Tommy Gagliano, aka Tommy Gagg. I found him in his office in what looked like an el station up above the warehouse, running from one side to the other.

He saw me at the same time, opened the door at the top of the stairs and shouted, “You looking for me?”

“Are you Tommy Gagliano?”

“
Benvenuto
,” he said. “
Stella dice che parli italiano molto bene
,” Then he repeated himself in English, just in case: “Stella says you speak good Italian.”

“
Si
.”

“
Vieni
.” He waved me up and we continued in Italian for a while. “You’ve never seen a red-headed Italian before?” he said as I climbed the stairs. “Testarossa! Like the car,” he said. “Ferrari Testarossa,” he explained. “Call me Tommy. I think we’re going to be friends.”

“Is that a car?” I asked. “Testarossa?”

He laughed. “Is that a car?” he said in English. “You’re kidding me.”

I shook my head. I was glad I’d had my hair styled. I wasn’t really dressing my age, but I didn’t care. I was wearing faded jeans and a white blouse. Almost no makeup.

“A lot of southern Italians have red hair,” he said. “From the Normans, the French. In the Middle Ages.”

“Southern Italian,” I said. Even the chest hairs that spilled out of his open collar were red, or reddish.

His face was full of freckles and sunshine, his arms, too.

We sat in the office for a while, trying to find common ground. He’d never been north of Rome and I’d never been south of Rome. And by Rome we meant two different cities. My Rome was the climax of the two great foundational stories of Western civilization—the story of the Roman Empire and the story of Christianity. His Rome was the old produce market on via Ostiense, where he’d gone with his grandfather to peddle bergamot oranges, and the Baths of Caracalla, where he and his sister had seen
Aïda
performed with elephants. Trastevere we had in common. His mother’s brother had once lived in a lovely apartment on via della Lungaretta, near Santa Maria in Trastevere, where I’d made my last confession, where I’d lived free from sin for more than two weeks. Trastevere was where I’d gotten pregnant with Stella. But these details I kept to myself.

“Stella already called from the edge of town,” he said, looking at his watch. “Another fifteen minutes. She’s very reliable. Always got the log book up to date. She’s got a good head on her.” He looked at his watch. “We can wait on the street.”

The “street”—the market—was his life. “It all depends on trust,” he explained. “No time for written contracts. It’s self-regulating. Sort of like the sciences. You have to be able to replicate your results. Or others do. You don’t keep your word, nobody’s going to do business with you anymore. And yet it happens all the time. People lie, cheat. But they always claim there’s a reason, a special exception. No one will ever say, I don’t give a damn what’s right. I’m just going to do what I want. No, everybody appeals to a higher court.

“We mostly do business with the chain stores. Roundy’s, Red Owl, Trader Joe’s, Safeway, Kroger. But I got a soft spot for mom-and-pop corner groceries. Not many left. I charge them same as I charge the chains. Otherwise how they going to compete? That was my dad’s business—a hamper of beans here and a bushel of cukes, ten baskets of tomatoes .
.
.

“Now it’s all changed. Strawberries. They come into O’Hare on the same day they’re picked. Flying Tiger Express. I’m the biggest importer in the Midwest. Bigger than Becker in Detroit; bigger than LaMantia in Chicago.”

“Good for you,” I said.

He laughed. “Sorry.”

“Who eats all the celery?” I asked, pointing at two men unloading crates of celery that were coming down a roller out of the back of a straight truck, covered with ice.

“Celery?” he said. “Italians consider celery to be primarily an herb, and use it, with carrot and onion, in the
battuto,
the mixture of chopped herbs. The French call it a
mirepoix
.”

“But there’s so much of it.”

We continued the conversation over coffee in Nachmann’s Market Bar on the corner. The coffee was brought by Julius Nachmann’s daughter, who had one brown eye and one that was half-brown and half-green.

“So you want to buy a truck?” Tommy said.

“Not especially.”

“
Neanch io
,” he said.
Me neither.

“What do you know about the truck? Other than it’s got over a million miles on the odometer?”

“The truck is all right. The truck isn’t the problem.”

“What is the problem?” It was a delicate subject, and we tiptoed around it while we waited.

“I’m willing to help Jimmy,” he said, “but I don’t want him living in my house, if you know what I mean. I keep thinking he’ll step up, give me a hand with the business, I was hoping . . . He says that’s what he wants, but I can’t get him to spend more than a day or two in the office. He don’t want to learn. What I’m hoping is that your daughter, your wonderful daughter, can turn things around for him. Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t. Stranger things have happened. She is very reliable. She’s where she says she’s going to be. She calls when the truck is loaded. She calls from the edge of town. I don’t have to wonder. She’s lots of fun.”

I hardly recognized the woman he was describing. “But it
would
be strange?” I asked.

“So I can see setting them up with a truck, maybe. Provided Stella’s part of the package. But that’s as far as I can go for Jimmy. I did the best I could after my brother died. He’s a nice kid, lots of fun, good at games. He even learned to play cricket. You can see the fields—they call them ‘pitches’—three of them, from my apartment, down by the lake. I don’t know how he did it because it’s so complicated and he lacks patience. Can’t wait for anything. Besides, they weren’t his kind of people. He did some shoplifting as a kid, nothing too much, got off with warnings. Not till the assault and battery.

“My wife and I looked after Jimmy like he was our own. Then after she died .
.
.” He shrugged.

Tommy’s office phones kept ringing and one of the secretaries kept shouting messages at him from the top of the stairs and he kept shouting back.

Someone came up to him on the street to complain about tomatoes. Six baskets. “Irving, I’ll tell someone to make it right, okay?”

“You know better,” he said to someone. “Give Irving whatever he wants. Let him pick them out himself.”

Someone came in to say that they’d unloaded more celery from a boxcar. Did he want it in the cooler or was it going out right away?

“The whole thing goes out to Godfrey’s. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it all, but they want it. But check with Nick first.”

“Nick,” he explained to me, “handles the celery account. I saw that certificate your daughter got. Truck-driving school. What put it in her head to go to truck-driving school? She’s such a little bitty thing.”

“She’s five-six,” I said. “Almost as tall as you are.”

He laughed. “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. I grew up on a farm. My dad used to let her drive the tractor. But it’s hard for me to accept it as woman’s work.”

“They’ve got their own organization, you know. It’s called Women in Trucking. Headquarters right here in Wisconsin, up by Stevens Point.”

“Women truck drivers?”

He nodded. “Stella grew up on a farm?”

“Not really. My dad and my uncle kept my grandfather’s small farm. They raised some sweet corn and some corn for the pigs, and a big kitchen garden.”

Tommy was an easy person to talk to, especially out on the street, with all the noise made by the flat trucks, dollies. I found myself telling him about Paul’s death. “How do you make things right again? After death: too late, too late.”

“It’s sort of like reconsecrating a church,” he said, “after it’s been desecrated.”

“Sort of,” I said.

“Are you a religious person, Mrs. Godwin?”

“No.”

“
Neanch io
. So this is it,” he said, waving his arm at the market, at the double doors that opened into the warehouse, at the produce stacked on the broad sloping sidewalk. “It’s good, isn’t it? Avocados, cherries, plums, grapes, artichokes, potatoes, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, celery . . . You name it. God’s plenty. Is it enough?”

“It’s good,” I said. “It’s wonderful. But it’s probably not enough.”

“No, I suppose not. But it’s what there is.”

A sawhorse was blocking a spot for the truck, between a Leshinsky Potato Company truck and a semi that said James T. Wilkins, Tacoma, Washington, on the side. The back of the Leshinsky truck was open. It was stacked up with six tiers of hundred-pound sacks of potatoes. A big burly man took hold of two corners of one of the sacks on the bottom, jerked it out, and threw it over his shoulders. Bushels of green peppers from the James T. Wilkins truck were being loaded onto flat trucks and pushed into the warehouse. There wasn’t a lot of room between the two trucks.

“Gonna be tight,” Tommy said, “but Stella’s a good driver. They really taught her some tricks in that driving school, or probably she’s just got a knack. Myself, I learned the hard way,” he said. “My dad gave me the key to a truck and told me to figure it out for myself. So I started making deliveries. Around the city, you know. Kohl’s, Safeway, Roundy’s, Godfrey—that used to be IGA. Used to be A and P and National Tea. Those were the big ones. I had some real problems. But those were straight trucks. The semis I could never manage, turning the wheel to the right when you want the back of the truck to go left. I never was too good at it.”

But when the truck finally pulled around the corner, by Nachmann’s Market Bar, Jimmy was driving, not Stella. He was wearing a baseball cap and big sunglasses. Stella was sitting next to him. She’d rolled down the window, though it was cold. She’d let her hair grow. She was wearing sunglasses too.

“Going to be tight,” Tommy said again.

Broadway was a one-way street. South to North. If you looked north you could see the traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. If you looked south, you’d see more of the market. And beyond that, warehouses.

I was nervous. I hadn’t seen Stella since Paul’s death. I always had plenty of forgiveness for Stella, but there was a limit. Now she wanted me to help finance a truck with a sleeper, so she and Jimmy could have some privacy.

“Jimmy had a lot of adventures, you know,” Tommy said. “I’m glad to see him settle down.”

I didn’t ask what kind of adventures.

I’ve watched a big furniture truck backing up the alley behind the lofts. Pretty amazing. All the way from Mulberry Street, around the corner into the alley that divides the parking lot, through the lot in front of the loft garages, and then angling into the furniture dock, always leaving me enough room so I could get my car out of the garage.

Jimmy waved from the cab, even tipped his cap. I could see Stella, but I couldn’t see her face. I wanted to run to her, climb up on the running board. But I didn’t.

Jimmy pulled across the space and then started to back up. But there wasn’t enough room on the opposite side of the street for him to get even a forty-five degree angle. I thought he was going to back into the Wilkins truck—the one with the load of peppers—but he stopped just in time, pulled up, and tried again. But he couldn’t get the cab—the tractor—to follow the trailer into the space. Tommy had his eyes closed. Jimmy tried three more times. People were starting to watch, and they weren’t gentle people.