Unto the Sons (85 page)

41.

M
uch as Joseph was pleased by Antonio’s cheerful letter describing the wedding in Bovalino, and proud as he continued to be of his pacesetting cousin in Paris, Antonio’s good fortune and constant progress tended to make Joseph feel left behind, more detached than usual in this Methodist-ruled resort in New Jersey where he sewed throughout the day and rarely saw the sun, and where his interaction with people was limited largely to standing to greet the customers at the counter whenever the tiny bell on the front door of his shop jingled.

Joseph’s isolation, to be sure, was primarily of his own choosing. Ever since arriving in Ocean City in the spring of 1922 and soon purchasing his tailor shop—mainly with the promissory notes provided by the asthmatic owner desperate to leave town for the drier climate of Arizona—Joseph had comported himself with formality and caution, always concerned that one injudicious act, be it social or professional, consciously intended or inadvertent, could ostracize him from the community and perhaps even lead to his deportation. In the summer of 1925, not yet twenty-two, and having barely mastered the language, Joseph was two years away from becoming an American citizen, and he was without powerful friends in the local political system or the Catholic Church who might alleviate any difficulties he might have.

Paris had lost some of its appeal now that Antonio was married; and in any case, Joseph doubted that he could earn in France, and surely he could not in Italy, anything close to what he was now earning in the United States. The national prosperity of the mid-twenties was evident throughout
the island, prompting a building boom along the bay, the beachfront, and the business district, and bringing to the town not only more vacationers and year-round settlers, but also residential commuters—men who left for Philadelphia each day wearing suits, and soiling them with train soot, and later, on the homeward-bound club car, staining them with bootleg whiskey and wine, so that the suits required a deluxe dry-cleaning at twice the regular price.

Joseph’s thriving “French dry-cleaning” business, which brought him three times more money than he earned from his tailoring
—until
he had introduced his customers to his ingenious Suit Club—was located within a carless four-car garage on a weedy lot behind the shop. On one side of the garage’s interior were two pressing machines and three tables with brushes, sponges, and bottles of strong acidic solution prescribed for removing from the clothing those stains that had remained after a routine cleaning. On the other side was a six-foot-high oblong-shaped metal dryer that looked like a roofed carriage without wheels, and a circular dry-cleaning tumbler, three feet high and nine feet in diameter that, while rotating like a collapsed Ferris wheel, spun the clothes around in interlocking containers filled with mild dosages of naphtha believed adequate for the removal of ordinary smudges caused by grease or soot, but not ink, liquor, or rust stains. The supervisor of the three-man plant, who like his colleagues was black, was the sixty-six-year-old deacon and choirmaster of the black Baptist church located on the west side of the railroad tracks two blocks behind the garage.

A benign and small-boned gentleman with lined, leathery skin and pale blue eyes who wore high rounded starched collars and three-piece black wool suits in summer as well as winter, he was known to one and all as “Mister Bossum.” No one knew his first name, or even whether he had one, including the minister who provided him with a room in the church and the privileges of its pantry in compensation for his efforts as the deacon and choirmaster. Currently unknown to Joseph about Mister Bossum, whom he had acquired with the business from the previous owner, was that he functioned after hours as the town’s leading bootlegger, receiving the merchandise before dawn along the bay via a clam boat from Atlantic City, and then distributing it to his clientele in the white community with the assistance of select members of his choir—who were either female domestics employed in the homes of the town’s wealthier imbibers, or the black men who worked as porters or kitchen helpers in hotels and restaurants.

Still, Mister Bossum was always sober and punctual when he appeared
for work every morning at the dry-cleaning plant, strolling in cheerily at nine-fifteen or earlier, and usually whistling if not humming the gospel music he carried in his head across the tracks from the eight-o’clock church service. Working under him were two pressers, who were rarely the same pressers three days in a row, and a part-time spotter who helped out in the busy summer season but who worked mainly as a boat mechanic along the bay. Mister Bossum reserved for himself all the major spot-removing chores, particularly the liquor stains—gingerly anointing the material with the cleansing solution, with an almost pleading expression on his face, perhaps reflective of the responsibility he felt in having provided the source of such blemishes.

The dry-cleaning business during busy weeks grossed in excess of five hundred dollars, which, after the deduction of the pressers’ salaries and other overhead expenses assumed by Mister Bossum, resulted in a net profit to Joseph in excess of two hundred dollars. He was nearly embarrassed by his wealth. He would be embarrassed in another way, however, after he began to succeed financially with his Suit Club—an endeavor that unavoidably brought him into close physical contact with females whenever it was a woman who won a free suit. Holding a tape measure around a mature woman’s bust and hips while gathering vital statistics before cutting a pattern might, in the mind of a lecherous tailor, represent an occupational pleasure. But to a young man as cautious and sexually inexperienced as Joseph, this was hardly the situation.

Joseph had never so much as held hands with a member of the opposite sex, except perhaps in the case of relatives such as his mother, although he could not specifically recall doing even that. Joseph’s upbringing had prepared him to believe that the nearness of women more often than not augured evil temptation and attendant scandal, to say nothing of the bodily harm that was frequently inflicted by unseen suitors. Despite Joseph’s growing confidence in himself as a prospering proprietor, he believed he could not afford the risk of indulging in the freedoms of the New World, especially in such a relatively prim part of that world as this small island founded by reformist ministers. Joseph had too many people to support overseas—and not only the daily needs of his mother and siblings: he had also taken on the responsibility of establishing a worthy dowry for his sister, Ippolita, who was now seventeen. In the three years he had lived in Ocean City, he himself had seen a growing looseness and laxity among its people—even before his Suit Club would accentuate this impression. He recalled how unspoiled and refined the island had seemed to him during his Sunday-afternoon strolls throughout 1922, and he particularly remembered
pausing one Sunday to watch a memorial service conducted by the town’s elders under a cedar tree near the Methodist Tabernacle building. There had been hymn-singing by white-gloved ladies and men of steely gentility, accompanied by young evangelists with French horns; then an elderly dark-suited man wearing a straw hat stepped forward to the polite applause of the crowd and implanted his cane securely in the lawn before lightly tipping his hat. He was the last surviving founder of the town—the Reverend James E. Lake, who nearly a half-century before, accompanied by his ministerial brothers, had stood under this same cedar tree and proclaimed the presence of God on the beach. Although there had been no Catholics among the early settlers, and were few enough on the island by the time Joseph arrived, he felt himself in harmony with these two hundred or so Methodist memorialists advocating order and propriety in these prosperous postwar years that were marked also by a carnal indulgence as obvious as the stains on the garments brought into his shop.

There was not only the residue from the spilled whiskey and wine, but also the whitish spots on the fly fronts of young men’s trousers that, while usually eradicated after a regular cleaning in the tumbler, revealed even more than liquor stains the loose lives of many of these unmarried couples whom Joseph greeted at his counter: the flappers with bobbed hair who often walked into the shop smoking cigarettes, and their flaskhipped boyfriends who left their roadsters double-parked in the street with the motors running. And not only was it the postdebutantes and university men from Philadelphia who were departing from the restraining traditions of the town elders; it was also their parents, who had bought up most of the beachfront for their second homes, and had built an impressive yacht club on the bay from which motorboats sped all day and in which whiskey flowed through the night. There were, in addition, several native residents who were drawn to the leisurely style of these city people—residents who had served them as real estate brokers, lawyers, and bankers, and who now aspired to membership in the yacht club and looked forward to the day when they, too, might afford the ultimate in seashore status symbols—a sailing boat with masts tall enough to require that the town’s principal drawbridge be raised in its behalf.

Less than two dozen people possessed such vessels, but whenever one of those boats approached the little rainbow-shaped bridge flanked by the tiny houses of its watchmen—the boat’s horn blasting, its colorful flags and ribbons whipping in the wind from soaring ropes, its white-capped skipper standing on the back deck surrounded by his guests hoisting
highball glasses—every motorist en route was stalled to a stop, was perhaps halted for nearly a half-hour in the glaring heat rising from the marshlands, along with mosquitoes and odors of stagnation,
unless
the motorist was lucky enough to be stuck in a higher and breezier elevation that edged within the shadows of the bridge’s saluting sections. Although Joseph’s shop was more than four blocks east of the bayfront, he could hear the sounds of the impatient motorists and could picture them, too, because he had witnessed the scene often during his Sunday outings along the piers. There would invariably be cars and trucks lined bumper to bumper on the two-mile causeway that linked the island to the mainland—and the sight of jitney drivers sitting on the fenders of their vehicles, with their beach-bound day-tripper passengers from the mainland poised along the railings watching the high white sails cutting slowly behind the uptilted steel-grilled roadway with its yellow-painted center lines crossed by circling sea gulls. Halted also were many farm trucks from the hinterlands, loaded with fresh vegetables and fruit, and garbage trucks from the island followed by beach flies and other insects that would shift their attention to the nearby farm trucks
if
the latter contained any watermelons or other fruit that had been split open during the earlier ride on the bumpy back-country roads.

Joseph had overheard truck drivers complaining about such things as he sat at the counter of the corner restaurant across from City Hall, where he nearly always had his breakfast and dinner; and while he could sympathize with the truckers and car owners who had to contend with a drawbridge in a town where the major taxpayers often owned big boats, he was also aware that the yacht club crowd, and particularly the younger members between their twenties and forties, were becoming his best customers, in both his dry-cleaning business and his tailoring and alteration trade. It was mainly
their
money that was going toward the well-being of his family in Maida and his sister’s dowry.

The clientele he had inherited from the previous owner had consisted primarily of older business and professional men from the local area, and their counterparts among the commuters—men generally in their late forties through sixties. Occasionally the wives of these men would accompany them to the shop, bringing in clothing of their own to be altered. Joseph’s growing up under his grandfather Domenico had prepared him well for extending deference toward those reserved, serious, and rather frugal people. They wore suits until the material was threadbare, and would not pay the price of a cleaning unless their garments were noticeably soiled, insisting for the most part that their suits merely be
pressed. And most often, that was all they needed. These were sober, careful men. The clothing they left in the shop showed no signs of liquor. Joseph doubted that any of them would set foot in the yacht club; he had certainly never overheard them, or their wives, making references to the club when they came into the shop, and he could not picture them as being compatible with the loud music and laughter that he often heard coming from the triple-decked building that he passed during his late-night walks along Bay Avenue. Joseph’s clientele then was more in tune with Tabernacle music; he had recognized many of their surnames among those listed on the town plaque that identified the first families, and he had no doubt seen some of his customers in the distance when he had paused to watch the introduction of the town founder the Reverend Lake, and had heard the singing of the Doxology by those assembled under the cedar tree. They surely embodied the power behind the signs currently posted on the beach warning that it was no less illegal for men than women to appear without bathing tops; and from such people Joseph had intuited a sense of what God-fearing small-town America might have been like before World War I.

And yet with all their modesty, thriftiness, and standoffish manner, many of them had taken a personal interest in Joseph after becoming better acquainted with him through continuing visits to the shop. Often they asked him questions about where he had come from, why he had chosen to settle in Ocean City, what his goals were for the future; and, when he sought it, they had gladly offered their advice. In responding to their questions, Joseph himself realized that much of what he had left behind in Maida was what he had found appealing on this island; he had a natural affinity for small towns with old-fashioned values. And while these people had initially seemed cool to him as a stranger, this hardly was unusual to him as a native of Maida. He chose to believe that with such people an acceptance now withheld was, once attained, an acceptance that lasted.