Timebends (28 page)

Like dictators before him and after, Tough Tony saw himself as protector of the decent, hardworking longshoreman, not at all as an oppressor. Indeed, he would make ferocious speeches to his local demanding more for the workers and less for the shipping companies. The men knew how to keep straight faces, and he could hardly be grinned at openly when he carried a thirty-eight-caliber Smith and Wesson revolver in a holster hitched up high enough to show the butt at the fold of his left lapel. But Tony was a complicated enough man to make Berenson wonder if he might one day be the means by which a revolt of the members could be mounted against the Ryan leadership. It was an idea that would come very
close to getting him killed, and perhaps Vincent Longhi along with him.

Berenson was for me an unorthodox kind of radical for having sprung from the working class rather than being an intellectual. His father, a carpenter, had emigrated from Russia with a sister after the violent reaction following the failed 1905 revolution. Berenson himself had been a full-time organizer for the Ladies Garment Workers by the time he was fifteen. In fact, he had been used to carry out some of the more athletic organizing tactics, not uncommon at the time, like shinnying up drainpipes or jimmying a window to let union inspectors into a boss's office for a peek at the company books or some crucial piece of information. Long before they got respectable, the unions had been handing the boy Berenson and his gymnastic expertise around to break many a stalemate in an organizing drive.

But as he was arrested more and more often, his thoughts grew longer, partially under the influence of his aunt Riva, one of those unlettered women of wisdom that great revolutionary experiences always seem to create. She broadened his education, turning him to novels and poetry out of the rich Russian store of words, and of course to Marx. At around the same time he pursued a beautiful painter whom, despite his unhandsome appearance, he won by the strength of his conviction that she belonged with him, just as he belonged with the militant labor movement that would transform America—an imprecise vision that was still coiled in history's womb. It would be two or three years before he understood it himself, but he was at a turning point in his life as he moved in to' take the place of a man who had been thrown into the bay. If I saw no sign ever of fear in his face, it was probably that at this point he still saw himself as an invulnerable and disembodied undulation of the wave of history. With his rolling gait and cheap cigar and his manic explosions of crude laughter, he went around the piers looking for an opening in a bout with an octopus.

For Vinny Longhi it was less easy to stand apart and objectify, because unlike Berenson, he could not help identifying himself—and maybe even hating himself for doing so—with the stylish
gravitas
of some of the waterfront power figures, who mimed or rather parodied the code-driven gallantry of feudal Italy. Like most radical materialists and Marxists, these two were romantics in analytical clothing; they thought they could see around their more naive bourgeois opponents, whose vision was narrowed by selfish interests, while they had no personal interests, only historical ones,
and were thus freer to maneuver than those in the game for the purpose of gain. Thus their power—provided men would follow them—would be a kind of spiritual self-satisfaction at having assisted history to give birth. Morally they were puritanical, barring a few lapses Longhi could not help, because after all he was so handsome.

Periodically over the next six months I would join up with one or both of them as they sought to penetrate the fiefdoms of the waterfront. Longhi was a powerful, rather operatic speaker on the piers, attracting larger and larger crowds of longshoremen in the predawn mists as they stood around on Columbia Street waiting to be picked for a day's work. Chopping the air like Lenin in October, he expanded on his main theme, the degradation of honest sons of Italy by an unjust union machine. The problem, of course, was that the men knew this better than he did, but it was nice to hear somebody saying it anyway. It did not take long to realize that only a power equal to what held them down could gain their trust, and I could see no hope that any such thing would be allowed to come to life here.

But in the meantime I was moving in and out of longshoremen's houses and making some friends and tuning my ear to their fruity, mangled Sicilian-English bravura, with its secretive, marvelously modulated hints and untrammeled emotions. In the course of time Longhi mentioned a story he'd recently heard of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration Bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally in his very home, in order to break an engagement between one of them and his niece. The squealer was disgraced, and no one knew where he had gone off to, and some whispered that he had been murdered by one of the brothers. But the story went past me; I was still searching for a handle on Pete Panto.

I fiddled with a screenplay, dropped it and picked it up again, wandered back into Red Hook searching for what I did not realize I already had—
A View from the Bridge.

Melodrama stirred me once—Tony Anastasia appeared suddenly one afternoon in the loft where Berenson had his headquarters and threatened then and there to kill him and Longhi. There was even the requisite operatic crowd gathering in the street below to observe the festivities. Tony was outraged because, comically enough, he had been hired by a large corporation to sail two tugboats up the Hudson River with a couple of hundred strikebreakers who were to enter its plant from the water side, the land entrances
being heavily picketed by the United Electrical Workers. He had pleaded beforehand with Berenson and Longhi, who had been feeling him out for an alliance against the Ryan leadership, to call their friends in the union and persuade them not to fight his strikebreakers. To this incredible request the two had replied with a lecture on working-class solidarity that left the gangster's mind boggled.

His attempted naval invasion of the plant was thwarted by union motorboats—there was actually a little gunfire between the two armadas until the tugboat captains decided they'd had enough and brought the men back to Brooklyn—and Tony soon found Red Hook sniggering at his humiliation, and of course he was now being referred to behind his back as “the Admiral.” It was all too much, and he marched over to Berenson's loft in full sight of the neighborhood to demand satisfaction for his betrayal by the radicals. He was very confused.

Forced into confrontation, sweating Longhi and Berenson turned on the eloquence—which Tony was a sucker for and Longhi especially a master of—castigating him for dishonoring the memory of his late and beloved father, who, as Tony adored to memorialize at the drop of a hat with real tears in his eyes, had hit the docks every morning for a hundred and fifty years and raised his hordes of children from the sweat off his back as a longshoreman, and whose son, Tony, was now betraying workers by breaking strikes when he had all the makings of a truly great workers' leader and, if he chose, could be an honor to the persecuted Italian people, to say nothing of the whole human race. They ended up in a state of abeyance if not as friends, and the climax was their offering to get him two tickets for
All My Sons.
Indeed, I met him in front of the theatre a few days later, and when he looked up at the marquee and saw my name, then looked at me and said very little, he reminded me of my uncle Manny in Boston. He got into his car beside his driver and drove off without seeing the play. I figured he simply wanted to be sure Longhi and Berenson weren't kidding him about me, insulting him all over again.

The uncomfortable truth was that I was finding the waterfront as absurd as it was tragic, and it was out of one of its absurdities that I ended up traveling to Italy and France with Longhi—a trip whose echoes would inform much of my life to come.

By the time I met them, Berenson and Longhi were veterans of many frustrated, nearly fruitless organizing attempts. In 1946, realizing that they lacked the political clout to guarantee protection
for any workers who dared confront the union-Mafia combination, they had come up with the idea of running Longhi for Congress. But the Democratic Party in the district was owned by Congressman John Rooney, who in turn was in Joseph Ryan's pocket. This bred a fantasy in Berenson's maverick imagination that the Republicans, perhaps out of amused desperation, since they had never in history won an election in the district, might be sold on running Longhi in this Italian working-class area.

Putting one of his bowed legs in front of the other, Berenson took Longhi over to Court Street to see Johnny Crews, the Republican leader, a witty Scot who quickly saw that an Italian candidate, even if he was radical, might be the answer to a Republican prayer in this predominantly Italian district. The deal to back Longhi was quickly made.

The absurdity of one day glancing right and left for whoever was about to throw them into the river and the next owning the Republican nomination for Congress sent the two of them into incredulous laughter, but such situations are never so totally without meaning; time would show that Berenson might have gone into Crews's office an opportunistic buccaneer but he was something different when he came out. His and Longhi's relation to themselves and the country had begun a subtle change that would lead to unimaginable consequences. Hopeless though his chances for election were, Vinny had now stepped out of the dark and frozen world of the feudal waterfront into daylight America, where, quite literally, the most amazing things could still happen.

For Johnny Crews a Vincent Longhi candidacy might be a merely symbolic and even wry piece of theatre by which to throw Rooney off balance for a few weeks, but Vinny actually intended to win and be photographed with the president on the White House steps and send the photo by special delivery to his lavishly adoring mother. Running as a Republican, with the endorsement of the American Labor Party, he stumped the Twelfth Congressional District tirelessly, making a powerful appeal for reform. It was a hot, bitter campaign, with Rooney denouncing the Republicans for backing a left-wing upstart, and when the votes were counted, Vinny pulled in 31,000 to Rooney's 36,000—an amazingly close result considering that a few thousand votes could easily have been stolen from him.

Encouraged by his first foray into mainstream politics, Longhi decided to take Rooney on again in the 48 elections. This time the Republicans were playing it safe with a party regular, and Longhi was running on the ALP line. Now he really begged me to raise
some money, and for the first and only time in my life I approached another person for a political contribution. I had been seeing Tennessee Williams on and off over the past year and had mentioned my interest in the waterfront. It now turned out that Frankie Merlo, with whom he lived in a Manhattan apartment, was the son of a Mafia chieftain in New Jersey. Frankie knew the waterfront story better than I, having sat as a young boy at his father's feet during meetings when such matters were discussed and dealt with by the old man. He insisted that Tennessee write a check for five hundred dollars, a good piece of money then. Tennessee, I thought, regarded my interest as remote from him as a writer and yet quite parallel to his lifelong sense of living among the unjust and the cruel. He sat listening to my descriptions of waterfront indignities holding his gnarled white English pug on his lap—as much to keep it from pissing on his bed again as to pet it—and with Merlo explicating for him as his adept social specialist, he seemed moved, although it was particular persons and words that touched him more than any general condition of men.

Despite Vinny's speaking ability, it was soon obvious that only some fantastic coup could dislodge Rooney, something so grandiose as to be unanswerable. And he soon hit upon it—he must make a trip to Calabria and Sicily, look up as many relatives of longshore families as he possibly could, and return with their best wishes, which he would personally deliver to several hundred households. Apart from its characteristic but efficient sentimentality, the plan had another even more useful feature—hundreds of Italian longshoremen had two families, two wives and two sets of children. In most cases they had not deceived either the American second wife or the original in Italy, whom they continued to support and even to visit periodically in order to beget another child. But in their financial straits these trips home were often very far apart, five or six or more years. They would be in profound debt to someone bringing firsthand news of the original wife and kids—a debt most natural to repay with a vote.

With Vinny's decision to go my own took shape. America was where you got rich, but Europe was where the thinking was going on, or so you tended to imagine. America was becoming suspiciously unreal. An imaginative builder named Levitt was building wonderful, not unreasonably priced houses in a town named for himself, with two bathrooms and even attic two-by-sixes of finished lumber that made the previous generation's homes seem primitive. I was running into old atheist friends and cousins who, bizarrely, were now contributing to something they called “temple”;
before the war I would not have imagined that anyone of my generation would ever go to
shul
again. From Europe, however, one heard of new men like Sartre and Camus who had come out of the Resistance and the European night with a new, politically usable democratic vision that was not bound to Moscow, apparently. I was thirsting for a new sense of the future now that fascism was dead, and with it, ironically enough, the form it had given my life in resistance to it. The yin and the yang of existence had gone slack. Italy in 1947-48 was the focus of speculation as to Europe's future, what with her immense Communist Party, the largest outside the Soviet Union, and Vinny would be useful with his ability to speak Italian.

Jane was just beginning school and Bob was even younger, and with travel abroad not yet the easy option of ordinary people, it seemed inevitable that I should make the trip of three or so weeks alone. The very leaving behind of the familiar is implicitly erotic and renewing, an opening of the soul to the unknown, a kind of expectancy that calls for aloneness, and besides, with so little confidence that I could write another commercially successful play, I needed to conserve money. In short, I fled to the future as I had once done on my bike into Harlem when life was tangling up my feet and I wanted nothing I knew around me.