Unto the Sons (100 page)

Among the Allied bomber crews with orders to strike Maida, which was then surrounded by German tank units and infantrymen, was an Italo-American from Ambler, Pennsylvania, whose father was employed by Keasbey & Mattison but whose grandfather and other kinsmen still resided in Maida. In the interest of greater safety, the bombardier’s relatives in Maida had recently moved downhill to the open fields of the valley, and were now living in tents located as far as possible from the crossfire of the warring soldiers in the highlands. A vast tent city had already been formed along the plains of the valley—hundreds of Maida families, virtually the entire village, had relocated there, including Joseph’s mother and the rest of his family. His brother Sebastian had at first refused to leave the village. “I’m staying right where I am,” he had insisted, as two of his uncles and his brother Nicola had arrived with a stretcher in his ground-floor room that opened on the yard with the animals.

“Come on, Sebastian,” Nicola had pleaded, “the planes might come any minute.”

“I’m staying,” repeated the gray-haired veteran of Caporetto, who, after his losses in the first war, perhaps felt he had little to lose in the second.

But one of his Rocchino uncles grabbed hold of Sebastian’s thin arms and tried to pull him from the cot, provoking screams from Sebastian. His mother then rushed into the room, carrying his freshly laundered clothes and an overcoat Joseph had sent from America.

“Get away from Sebastian, and wait for me outside!” she demanded. As the three of them turned to leave, she added, “And take that stretcher with you.”

Ten minutes later, fully dressed and with his hair combed, Sebastian walked slowly out of the house toward the carriages, with an arm around his mother.

The family lived for more than a week in the outdoors, dwelling in such close proximity to their townsmen that they were always surrounded by recognizable voices, by the familiar smells of their neighbors’
cooking, and by the sounds of the
passeggiata
which went on throughout the day in pastures edged by wheat fields and olive groves. Throughout the night the valley softly resounded with the litanies led by priests kneeling in front of wagon-wheeled altars; and from the churches in the hills came the sounds of bells, uninterrupted by the distant droning of planes and the occasional thunder of artillery. Many brave parishioners had remained in the churches, where they took their turns in the towers, ringing the bells at the appointed hours, and carrying the statue of Saint Francis through the vacated streets, praying that he would save the town from destruction. Maida’s police chief and its baron, together with the mayor and his megaphone, also remained; and thrice daily after the Angelus, the mayor stood along the edge of the Norman wall bellowing messages of reassurance to his constituents in the valley. But the clouds hung low, and there was so much fog during these days that the mayor could not see much farther than his megaphone, and at no time was there sufficient sunlight for anyone in the valley to see the outline of the town. Nor could Maida be seen by the Allied bomber pilots above, who were so thwarted by the clouds that enshrouded the mountain peaks that they dared not dip their wings in descent, for fear of turning the rocky highlands into their gravestones.

For three days and nights, while the bells rang and the litanies continued, the clouds hung heavily over the town, and during this time the Germans moved their defenses farther north, shifting the focus of battle closer to Naples.

48.

T
hroughout the winter of 1944, Joseph prayed several times each day in the living room of his home, kneeling on the red velvet of the prie-dieu under the portrait of the saint, ignoring the store bell below and leaving the operation of his business largely to his wife. He did this at Catherine’s suggestion, for he had been hospitalized after the Christmas holidays with appendicitis, and after returning to work he had become so uncharacteristically curt with the customers that he realized the business would be better served by his absence. A high percentage of the clientele now were American servicemen on shore leave, young men demanding
quick service, often insisting that their uniforms be pressed or their newly earned chevrons be sewn on while they waited; and among such customers, many of whom had returned from triumphant tours in Sicily and Italy, Joseph could not always conceal the humiliation and divided loyalty he felt as an emotional double agent.

He had dutifully attended the memorial service for the town’s first war victim—Lieutenant Edgar Ferguson, a customer’s son who had died in Italy (Joseph had hesitated only briefly before approaching the victim’s family to express his condolences)—and Joseph had punctually participated in his daily shore patrol assignments along the boardwalk, on the lookout for German submarines with his fellow Rotarians, until his hospitalization had interfered; but since his release from the hospital in early February 1944, he had tried to isolate himself from his friends and business associates on this island that had become increasingly jingoistic as the war’s end seemed to be nearing and victory for the Allies seemed inevitable. He had stopped having lunch as usual at the corner restaurant near his shop because he was weary of the war talk at the counter, and tired of hearing such tunes on the jukebox as “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” He ceased attending the ten-fifteen Mass on Sunday mornings and went instead to an earlier one, at seven, which was less crowded and fifteen minutes shorter; it came without the sermon, which tended to be patriotic, and without the priest’s public prayers that singled out for blessing only the servicemen of the Allies.

Joseph continued to keep up with the war news in the daily press, but now he bought the papers at a newsstand beyond the business district, a six-block trip instead of the short walk to the corner cigar store, because he wanted to avoid the neighborhood merchants and his other acquaintances who lingered there and might try to draw him into their discussions about the war in Italy. The last time he had gone there, during the summer before his illness, Mussolini had dominated the headlines (he had just been imprisoned by the Italian king) and as Joseph left with his papers underarm, he heard a familiar voice calling out from the rear of the store: “Hey, Joe, what’s gonna happen to your friend now?”

Joseph glared at the men gathered around the soft-drink stand, and spotted his questioner—a thin, elderly man named Pat Malloy, who wore a white shirt and black bow tie and had worked for years behind the counter of the corner restaurant.

“He’s no friend of mine!” Joseph shouted, feeling his anger rise as he stepped down to the sidewalk and went quickly up the avenue with his papers folded inward so that the headlines and the photographs of the
jowly-faced interned dictator were covered. Joseph did not make eye contact with the soldiers and sailors he saw among the strollers, although he could hardly avoid the American flags that flapped across the sidewalk in front of every shop on Asbury Avenue, including his own; and it was never possible at night to forget the ongoing war: the town was completely blacked out—all the streetlamps were painted black; lowered shades and drawn curtains hid the lighted rooms within houses; and few people drove their automobiles after dark, not only because there was a gas shortage but also because the required black paint on their headlights induced automobile accidents and collisions with pedestrians and wandering dogs.

Although there had been no new German submarine attacks in the area since an American tanker had been torpedoed ten miles south of Ocean City a year before, the island’s continuing blackout had introduced new problems: gangs of hoodlums from the mainland regularly ransacked vacant summer homes during the winter months; they also operated a flourishing trade in pilfered cars, having an abundance of parked vehicles to choose from during the nocturnal hours, when it was more difficult to drive cars than to steal them.

Joseph secured his dry-cleaning trucks each night in a garage, and he chained the bumper of his 1941 Buick to a stone wall in the lot behind his shop. Before driving it he often had to hammer the ice off the lock, but he accepted such delays as by-products of the war and the blackout—a blackout which, in his case, extended well beyond the boundaries of his island. He had been cut off from communication with his family in Italy, and his cousin in Paris, for many months. Antonio’s last letter, received in the spring of 1943, before the Allies had attacked Sicily, described the Maida relatives as sustaining themselves but expecting the worst, and added that the POW husband of Joseph’s sister (captured by the British in North Africa) might have been shot while trying to escape; in any case, no official word of his whereabouts had been received. Whether Joseph’s brother Domenico was dead or alive was also questionable; he had not been heard from in more than a year. Antonio had passed on the report that Domenico was possibly with a German-led Italian infantry division near the Russian front—Antonio had received this information from a contact in the Italian Foreign Ministry—but he had emphasized to Joseph that the report was unsubstantiated. Since the arrival of Antonio’s last letter, the Allied invasion of southern Italy had begun; Mussolini had been rescued from prison by Germans to serve as Hitler’s puppet; and Joseph
was now trying to recuperate on this island where he had lived compatibly for almost twenty-two years but on which he currently felt estranged as never before.

While his withdrawal was voluntary, having not been prompted by flagrant personal slights or expressions of ostracism toward his business, Joseph felt powerless to free himself from his remoteness and the hostile emotion that too often erupted within him after such remarks as Pat Malloy’s. It was possible that Malloy’s referring to Mussolini as Joseph’s “friend” was a casual remark, made without ill intent. Joseph was, after all, the town’s most prominent Italian-born resident, one who had delivered lectures on Italian history and politics to community groups on the island and the mainland; and there had also been no derisive tone in Pat Malloy’s voice, to say nothing of the cordial informality he had always shown toward Joseph in the restaurant. Furthermore, to be linked with Mussolini in Ocean City was not necessarily insulting, for the anti-union, Communist-baiting policies of the Duce had long been popular among the staunch Republicans who governed the island; and even in recent years, as the Fascist and Nazi regimes had closed ranks, Mussolini gained from whatever
was
to be gained in the United States by being identified as less odious and murderous than Hitler.

Still, during this winter, Joseph dwelled in a state of exile, adrift between the currents of two warring countries; he would read the newspapers at the breakfast table until nearly ten a.m., his children having already left for school and his wife gone down into the shop, and would then exit down the side stairwell of the building and out the back door, wearing his overcoat and homburg and with a heavy woolen scarf wrapped around his neck, and proceed across the lot to the railroad tracks, and then onward through the black ghetto toward the bay—in the opposite direction from the ocean and his binoculared submarine-searching friends and acquaintances who were lined up with their feet on the lower railings of the boardwalk and their eyes squinting toward the sea. The bayfront district was the most desolate section of town during the winter months; a few black men and women ambled through the bungalow- and shack-lined streets and the weedy fields cluttered with rusting car parts and other rubble, but there was no other sign of human life back here, save for the motorists driving along Bay Avenue, and the white workmen who sometimes scraped the bottoms of overturned dinghies and sloops in the boatyards, and repaired the docks in front of the vacated yacht club. There were hardly any sea gulls around the bay, where the scavenging possibilities
could not compare with those offered by the ocean; and never during Joseph’s excursions did he meet pedestrians whom he knew well enough to feel obliged to pause and converse with, and explain why he was off by himself traipsing about on the broken concrete sidewalks and frosty fields of this black, backwater part of town. His doctor had not suggested that daily walks would be beneficial to the restoration of his health, although Joseph had said so in explaining to his employees his comings and goings from the store; and it also became the excuse his wife gave to those regular customers who inquired, as some did, why he was constantly out of the shop and spotted frequently by them as they motored along Bay Avenue. Joseph had full confidence in Catherine’s ability to make whatever he did seem plausible and proper, and meanwhile to carry on the business without him. She was assisted of course by her saleswomen, and by the old retired tailor from Philadelphia, who now worked a six-day week on the island; and she was supported as well by the reliable Mister Bossum, the black deacon and bootlegger who supervised the dry-cleaning plant and had taken over the responsibilities for the punctuality of the irresponsible pressers, especially the one presser everybody called Jet, the flatfooted, carbuncled ex–jazz musician who even on snowy days arrived for work wearing sandals and short-sleeved silk Hawaiian shirts.

Joseph passed close to Jet’s boardinghouse each morning en route to the bayfront, and he was sometimes tempted to stop in and see if Jet had left for work yet; but Joseph resisted, having more urgent concerns. His mother was rarely out of his thoughts during his walks, although he found himself chiding her as much as praying for her. If only she had followed his father to America, Joseph told himself again and again, all the family would now be better off. They would be living with Joseph, or near him, somewhere in America, sparing him his present anxieties about their welfare, and his nagging suspicion that he had somehow abandoned them. If only he had some confirmation that his mother and the rest of his family were alive, that the Allied troops had skirted Maida and left the village undestroyed, he believed, he would no longer be the reclusive and petulant man he had become.