Unto the Sons (16 page)

“I’m sorry,” I had heard my father say, “but I doubt we can get this back to you by Monday. This spot might be a liquor stain that can’t be removed by dry-cleaning, and if we try washing it there’s a good chance the dress will shrink.…”

“But can’t you at least try?” she had pleaded; to which my father had said, “We can try, but we cannot guarantee it. I definitely wouldn’t wash this dress, and yet if we dry-clean it—without taking the extra time to analyze that spot and have it specially treated—you’ll only get the dress back on Monday looking no better than it does now.”

“Oh, just do the best you can,” the woman had said, shrugging her shoulders. And as she left the dress and walked toward the door, she said: “I’ll see you on Monday.”

Now she was back, and it seemed obvious that the cleaning of the red silk dress had brought happiness neither to the woman nor to my father. As they stood practically nose to nose across the counter, with the dress spread out on white tissue paper between them, I heard my father saying over and over, “I told you, I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.…”

“I
was
listening,” she replied, “but I didn’t expect you people to make the dress worse.”

“How did we make it worse?”

“You made the spot bigger!”

“Look, madam,” my father said, sharply, “I’ve been in business in this
town for more than twenty years, and I didn’t stay in business that long by making spots bigger!”

“You not only made it bigger,” she insisted, “but there is a spot in the back that wasn’t there when I left it.”

“
Now
you’re saying that we not only make spots bigger, but we add spots also, is that right?” His face was taut with tension, anger.

“What I
am
saying,” she replied firmly, “is what I said at the beginning. You have
ruined
my dress!”

“You ruined your own dress!”
My father was now shouting. “You spilled liquor on it, and—”

“I want a
new
dress,” she interrupted. “You’ve ruined my dress, and I want it replaced.…”

Suddenly my father slammed his fist against the counter and shouted: “I want you out of my store!”

“Not until we settle this,” she replied; but then my mother, who had been watching all this time silently, undoubtedly embarrassed in front of her customers, walked over and said, “
Please
, can’t we discuss this quietly. Perhaps tomorrow …”

“I have a party to go to tonight, and I want to settle this now!”

“Out!”
my father said, pointing to the door. “I want you out of here, or I’m calling the cops.”

“Well, you can call the cops,” she said, glaring at him. “I’m getting my husband, and I’ll be right back!”

Watching from behind the palms, my hands perspiring, I saw the woman stride out of the store, leaving the door open. My mother placed a hand on my father’s arm, whispering something into his ear, but he began to shake his head. Across the room I could see the salesladies and their customers standing along the dress counters, speaking quietly among themselves. Everyone was waiting; and within a few moments, the husband appeared—a large man in a brown hat and a tan camel’s-hair coat, smoking a cigar.

Heading straight for my father, he bellowed: “So you’re the man who just insulted my wife!”

“I did
not
insult your wife,” my father replied, in a steady voice. “I told her to get out of my store. And now I’m telling
you
to get out of my store!”

“Who do you think
you
are?” the man asked, getting closer to my father, who, standing behind the counter, now quickly took off his steel-rimmed glasses and handed them to my startled mother. Then the man paused and said something in a softer tone, so soft that I am not sure I
heard it precisely; but my father surely heard it, because he suddenly left my mother’s side, went back into the workroom while everybody in the store stood frozen in position as my mother called out, “Joe … Joe …”

Perhaps what the man had said—I
may
have heard it—was “dago.” There was no other explanation for the fury that now possessed my father as he reappeared, a transformed figure carrying a long, heavy pair of scissors that were customarily used for cutting thick material or fur skin.

“Out!”
he said, in a voice now coldly calm.
“Out!”
he repeated, as the man in the camel’s-hair coat retreated, walking backward, not taking his eyes off my father, who repeated the word “Out!” as he walked, until the man had pushed the door open and stumbled into the wintry air. But before he left, he took one final look at my father and said: “You haven’t seen the last of me yet! You’ll soon be hearing from me again—with my
lawyer
. And we’ll sue you for every dime you have.…”

My father showed no reaction, except the scissors in his right hand began to shake. My mother gently took the scissors and handed it to the white-haired seventy-seven-year-old tailor, who during the commotion had followed my father out of the workroom. Behind this tailor stood Jet and another presser from the workroom, shaking their heads. I left my hiding place behind the palm and walked down the steps to join the others. The salesladies and the two customers still left in the store slowly turned and began to look over some of the new dresses hung along the racks.

With my mother speaking to him softly, my father seemed to have regained his composure. But then, as he turned toward the dry-cleaning counter, the fury flared once more within him. There, on the counter, was the red dress. The couple had forgotten it, perhaps intentionally. Without saying a word, my father grabbed the silk dress, crumpled it into a ball, and quickly headed out the door.

“Follow him,” my mother urged me; and I did, trailing a few paces behind as my father looked along the sidewalk for the couple, who were nowhere to be seen on the avenue crowded with Christmas shoppers. But then, near the corner, my father saw the man in the camel’s-hair coat, climbing into a car. He ran in that direction, and I followed; but before my father could reach the car, it had pulled away from the curb. I could see that the man behind the wheel had turned his head and spotted my father—and, perhaps thinking that he still carried the scissors, had accelerated into the lane, with my father in swift pursuit.

When my father realized that he could not catch up and perhaps wrap the dress around the car’s aerial, as I suspect was his intention, I saw him
tighten his grip around the balled-up dress, cock his arm, and aim the dress toward the taillights of the moving car. And in that awkward pitching motion, he rocked back and heaved the garment with all his might; and I watched as it sailed through the air, suddenly catching a gust of ocean breeze that swept across the avenue—a breeze that took the dress higher into space and blew it in the direction of an oncoming trolley.

Then, like a magnet, the sparkling overhead wires and prongs atop the trolley seemed to suck the dress into the spinning wheel on the roof; and as my father and I watched, breathlessly, the dress was transformed into a flapping, torn flag and began its long, windy ride across the bay toward Atlantic City.

9.

T
here is a certain type of mild mental disorder that is endemic in the tailoring trade, and it began to weave its way into my father’s psyche during his apprentice days in Italy, when he worked in the shop of a volatile craftsman named Francesco Cristiani, whose male forebears had been tailors for four successive generations and had, without exception, exhibited symptoms of this occupational malady.

Although it has never attracted scientific curiosity and therefore cannot be classified by an official name, my father once described the disorder as a form of prolonged melancholia that occasionally erupted into cantankerous fits—the result, my father suggested, of excessive hours of slow, exacting, microscopic work that proceeds stitch by stitch, inch by inch, mesmerizing the tailor in the reflected light of a needle flickering in and out of the fabric.

A tailor’s eye must follow a seam precisely, but his pattern of thought is free to veer off in different directions, to delve into his life, to ponder his past, to lament lost opportunities, create dramas, imagine slights, brood, exaggerate—in simple terms, the tailor when sewing has too much time to think.

My father, who served as an apprentice each day before and after school, was aware that certain tailors could sit quietly at the workbench for hours, cradling a garment between their bowed heads and crossed knees, and sew without exercise or much physical movement, without
any surge of fresh oxygen to clear their brains—and
then
, with inexplicable suddenness, my father would see one of these men jump to his feet and take wild umbrage at a casual comment of a coworker, a trivial exchange that was not intended to provoke. And my father would often cower in a corner as spools and steel thimbles flew around the room—and, if goaded on by insensitive colleagues, the aroused tailor might reach for the workroom’s favorite instrument of terror, the sword-length scissors.

There were also confrontations in the front of the store in which my father worked, disputes between the customers and the proprietor—the diminutive and vainglorious Francesco Cristiani, who took enormous pride in his occupation and believed that he, and the tailors under his supervision, were incapable of making a serious mistake; or, if they were, he was not likely to acknowledge it.

Once when a customer came in to try on a new suit but was unable to slip into the jacket because the sleeves were too narrow, Francesco Cristiani not only failed to apologize to the client but behaved as if insulted by the client’s ignorance of the Cristiani shop’s unique style in men’s fashion. “You’re not supposed to put your arms
through
the sleeves of this jacket!” Cristiani informed his client, in a superior tone. “This jacket is designed to be worn only
over the shoulders!
”

On another occasion, when Cristiani paused in the town square after lunch to listen to the Maida band during its midday concert, he noticed that the new uniform that had been delivered the day before to the third trumpeter showed a bulge behind the collar whenever the musician lifted the instrument to his lips.

Concerned that someone might notice it and cast aspersions on his status as a tailor, Cristiani dispatched my father, then a skinny boy of seven, to sneak up behind the bunting of the bandstand and, with furtive finesse, pull down on the end of the trumpeter’s jacket whenever the bulge appeared. When the concert was over, Cristiani contrived a subtle means by which he was able to reacquire and repair the jacket.

But around this time, in the spring of 1911, there occurred a catastrophe for which there seemed no possible solution. The problem was so serious, in fact, that Cristiani’s first reaction was to leave town for a while rather than remain in Maida to face the consequences. The incident that provoked such panic had taken place in Cristiani’s workroom on the Saturday before Easter, and it centered around the damage done by an apprentice, accidentally but irreparably, to a new suit that had been made for one of Cristiani’s most demanding customers—a man who was among
the region’s renowned
uomini rispettati
, men of respect, popularly known as the Mafia.

Before Cristiani became aware of the accident, he had enjoyed a prosperous morning in his shop collecting payment from several satisfied customers who had come in for the final try-on of their attire, which they would wear on the following day at the Easter
passeggiata
, the most exhibitionistic event of the year for the men of southern Italy. While the modest women of the village—except for the bolder wives of immigrants in America—would spend the day after Mass discreetly perched on their balconies, the men would stroll in the square, chatting with one another as they walked arm in arm, smoking and shiftily examining the fit of each other’s new suits. Despite the poverty in southern Italy, or perhaps because of it, there was excessive emphasis on appearances—it was part of the region’s syndrome to put on a good show,
fare una bella figura
, and most of the men who assembled in the piazza of Maida, and in dozens of similar squares throughout the south, were uncommonly knowledgeable about the art of fine tailoring.

They could assess in a few seconds the craft of another man’s suit, could appraise each dexterous stitch, could appreciate the mastery of a tailor’s most challenging task, the shoulder, from which more than twenty individualized parts of the jacket must hang in harmony and allow for fluidity. Almost every prideful male, when entering a shop to select fabric for a new suit, knew by heart the twelve principal measurements of his tailored body, starting with the distance between the neckline and the waist of the jacket, and ending with the exact width of the cuffs above the shoes. Among such men were many customers who had been dealing with the Cristiani family firm all of their lives, as had their fathers and grandfathers before them. Indeed, the Cristianis had been making men’s clothes in southern Italy since 1806, when the region was controlled by Napoleon Bonaparte; and when Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, who had been installed on the Naples throne in 1808, was assassinated in 1815 by a Spanish Bourbon firing squad in the village of Pizzo, twelve miles southwest of Maida, the wardrobe that he left behind included a suit made by Francesco Cristiani’s great-grandfather.

But now, on this Holy Saturday in 1911, Francesco confronted a situation that could not benefit from his family’s long tradition in the trade. In his hands he held a new pair of trousers that had an inch-long cut across the left knee, a cut that had been made by an apprentice who had been idling with a pair of scissors atop the table on which the trousers had been laid out for Cristiani’s inspection. Although apprentices were repeatedly
reminded that they were not to handle the heavy scissors—their main task was to sew on buttons and baste seams—some young men unwittingly violated the rule in their eagerness to gain tailoring experience. But what magnified the youth’s delinquency in this situation was that the damaged trousers had been made for the
mafioso
, whose name was Vincenzo Castiglia.