Unto the Sons (88 page)

One Friday, as Joseph sat in a booth having lunch, he was surprised to see Mister Bossum hastily crossing the street and heading toward the restaurant.

“Who’s minding the store?” Joseph called out, as Mister Bossum entered.

“Your cousin,” Mister Bossum said. “He came in, and he’s waiting to see you.”

“My cousin from Paris?” Joseph asked with astonishment, not believing that Antonio would have traveled so far unannounced.

“No, your cousin from Brooklyn,” Mister Bossum said. “He’s a tall, good-looking guy with his hair slicked back. Can’t remember his name, but he said he’s traveling with a band, and they played last night at some club across the bay. He said he’s gotta see you, it’s urgent, and he’s gotta catch a train.”

Joseph guessed that the visitor was his trombone-playing cousin Nicholas Pileggi, the son of one of his mother’s sisters in the valley, the sister who married the butcher who ran a card game in the back of his shop. When Joseph was last in Italy, the butcher’s son was a member of a concert orchestra in Catanzaro; but Joseph had heard from his uncles in Ambler that Nicholas had since moved to New York, and was traveling around the country playing in dance bands and also working in the orchestra pits of Broadway theaters. Joseph had followed up with a letter to Nicholas’s boardinghouse in Brooklyn, and Nicholas had replied with a postcard from Buffalo, and then another from Scranton, and then a third from Pittsburgh, all promising that he would soon be visiting him in Ocean City. Two years passed and, except for an exchange of Christmas
cards, the cousins remained out of touch; in fact, the last time Joseph had actually spent time with Nicholas was during their boyhood days as Young Socialists in Maida, while marching in antiwar rallies more than a decade before. Joseph recalled in particular the night when they had joined the mob that destroyed the village streetlights, smashed the windows of the municipal building, and torched the town records in an effort to thwart the military conscriptors.

World War I had ended before Joseph and Nicholas had reached draft age, and their respective apprenticeships in clothing and music had carried them in different directions during their late teens; but Joseph nonetheless felt closer to Nicholas than to his other contemporaries on his mother’s side of the family, and he only hoped that Nicholas was not bringing bad news. Joseph had never before had a kinsman visit him in Ocean City, and while he walked with Mister Bossum toward the shop he remained quiet and expectant.

But his cousin was all smiles as he rushed out of the shop to embrace Joseph on the sidewalk, kissing him on both cheeks to the wonderment of a few local pedestrians, and pounding him heavily on the back.

“I’m getting married,” he announced, “and you have to come to Brooklyn for the wedding. I’m marrying a terrific girl, but her father thinks I’m a worthless vagabond, and I need you to convince him I’m better than he thinks, even if I’m not.”

Nicholas apologized for the suddenness of his visit, and the fact that he had to take the next trolley back to Atlantic City to make the late-afternoon train to New York with the band. But being so close to Ocean City, he had seized the opportunity to express in person how much he was relying on Joseph’s attendance at the wedding. “You’re the only cousin I have in this country,” he said, “and the girl I’m marrying has a very large family, and also a father who’s a sonofabitch. He came over from Maida as a carriage driver, and now he’s a chauffeur for some rich guy in Brooklyn. He also operates a garage with lots of trucks. His name is Dominic di Paola, but everybody calls him Rosso because of his red hair. I think he had somebody else in mind for his daughter, but she told him it’s me or nobody. ‘Then it’s nobody,’ he tells her, but she doesn’t care what he thinks. She’s as determined and stubborn as he is. She’s also a redhead. Her name is Susan.”

Susan di Paola was the second of six children born in America to Rosso and his second wife, Angelina. Angelina was a matronly dark-eyed brunette who at nineteen had been left a childless widow in Maida after her
husband’s death from malaria; but three years later, in 1902, Angelina was brought to America by a matchmaking uncle in Brooklyn who wanted her to marry his friend Rosso—a self-proclaimed widower who had been married in Maida in 1884 to a woman named Rosaria. Rosso and Rosaria had two sons and the added expense of caring for her ailing father—which necessitated Rosso’s coming alone to America to earn more for their support. But during the year Rosso expected his wife and sons to join him in America (her father having since died), she became pregnant with the child of a middle-aged bachelor, a member of one of Maida’s last noble families. That she and the sons would thereafter remain in the village, very much alive if discontented in the household of a destitute nobleman, did not deter Rosso from imagining them dead, indeed,
more
than dead; he convinced himself that Rosaria and his sons had hardly ever existed.

And yet Rosso contradicted his emotions by bearing on his clothing black symbols of mourning for his “dead” family in Italy. The suit he wore when he was introduced to Angelina in 1902 had a black ribbon on the lapel. There were black bands around the sleeves of the shirts and sweaters he wore in the garage. His manner, however, was always lacking in grief. The cuckoldry that would have inflamed most Italian men had left Rosso cold, very cold; his dispassion toward his first wife more than matched her passion for the nobleman. Rosso did not even trouble himself to divorce her legally. His marriage to Angelina in America was sanctified by a priest to whom a substantial bequest to his church was apparently sufficient atonement for bigamy.

Rosso considered himself religious, although he rarely attended Mass; he saw priests as little better than their penitents—an impression confirmed by the unconfessed and secret priest who had married him to Angelina. Rosso identified his religiosity in his fancied exclusive alliance with a fellow sufferer, now in heaven, the ascetic monk born in the southern Italian village where Rosso’s own forebears had originated, Paola. Saint Francis of Paola had understood and preached against sexual sin throughout his long lifetime—as a young monk he had once jumped into an icy pond rather than stand close to an alluring woman—and if the nobleman in Maida had done likewise instead of seducing Rosso’s wife, or most likely being seduced
by
his wife (Rosso could
not
forget her lustful nature), Rosso’s subsequent distrust of females might have been less obsessive. In any case, he came to see women as born seductresses—the instigators in nearly all the extramarital affairs of which he would become privy as the coachman, and later the chauffeur, of many well-to-do men
and their mistresses. In Rosso’s world, women were soon perceived as existing either on a pedestal or in the gutter.
Puttana
—whore—was the word he came to use in referring to his first wife, on those infrequent occasions when he referred to her at all. And the main reason why Rosso felt he could speak so boldly toward his boss, the otherwise proud and authoritarian Prussian millionaire Frederick Ochse—owner of rental residences and garages in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn—was Rosso’s knowledge of Mr. Ochse’s infidelities with New York showgirls and other women who conformed to Rosso’s definition of a
puttana
.

This moral superiority that he assumed over his boss, and the fact that Ochse tolerated Rosso’s curt and sometimes abusive manner so benignly that Rosso believed he probably enjoyed it, convinced Rosso that he would never be fired from his job, no matter what he said to his employer (so long as he said it privately, as he invariably did), and so long as he continued to serve Ochse in two other ways: by managing Ochse’s main garage in Brooklyn with honesty and efficiency (Rosso never stole a penny, never lost a customer), and by remaining promptly available to drive Ochse wherever he wished to be taken, including to the Brooklyn apartment of a blonde whom Ochse began to visit regularly during the early years of Rosso’s marriage to Angelina.

Although Rosso loathed this duty more than any other, and always filled Ochse’s ears along the way with tirades against the latter’s predilection for tarts, Rosso went where he was told to go, and he waited alone in the car parked two stories below the lowered shades of the woman’s bedroom window (her husband was conveniently on night duty as a waterfront warehouse guardsman), until her stocky little Prussian lover made his meek exit down the staircase to the street, adjusting his bowler as he entered the car, smelling of perfume, knowing from experience that on such voyages he would be expected to open and close his own door. Then Rosso would start up the engine and drive with a particular recklessness that he reserved for these outings, racing through Brooklyn’s Prospect Park section toward the brownstone manor where Ochse lived with his wife and children, and brooking no criticism en route about the handling of the car. During such rides Rosso would in fact look into the rearview mirror and stare at Ochse, waiting for some backseat comment that would afford him the opportunity to respond with renewed invective; but Ochse usually sat quietly with his head lowered, seeming appropriately contrite.

Rosso lived two blocks away from Frederick Ochse’s home, on a narrow street, Sterling Place, in an old Irish neighborhood into which a few Jewish and Italian families had recently moved. Rosso dwelled rent-free
in an eleven-room apartment above Ochse’s forty-car garage. None of Rosso’s other children could sneak down the squeaky staircase that extended between the apartment and the sidewalk, via the interior wall flanking one side of the garage, with the quiet cunning of young Susan. She knew precisely the location of the spots on the staircase that did
not
squeak, and thus she choreographed a route through which she could tiptoe to freedom whenever she wished, always unheard by her father in the garage—a man whose sensitive auditory organs, heightened by his suspicious nature, usually allowed him to hear each drop of oil that dripped into the metal pans beneath all the cars and trucks parked under his care.

It went without saying that
if
Susan returned home directly from school, which she did infrequently, she would soon sneak out again, most often going to the neighborhood cinema to enjoy a double feature. As a countermeasure against such transgressions, Rosso insisted that she take a job after school folding boxes at a pastry shop across the street, owned by a baker friend whose two trucks were parked overnight in the garage (where the baker’s nephews often borrowed them for predawn bootlegging deliveries); but Susan soon quit the job
and
school, accepting at the age of sixteen a full-time job as a trainee with the Bell Telephone Company in Brooklyn, a position she acquired with the help of her loud and penetrating voice.

Since the telephone lines during the 1920s were often feeble and charged with static, Bell’s personnel department was always in search of young women with strong vocal cords to compensate for the frail cords of the company; and any candidate who was in the least bit shy, or who communicated in an understated manner, or who was otherwise indistinctive with vowels and consonants, was usually rejected after a one-day test; but seconds after Susan had opened her mouth, she was welcomed into the bosom of the Bell branch in Brooklyn—and it mattered little that her father ranted and raved for weeks, protesting that the women hired by the telephone company were without exception
puttane
.

Susan became an information operator. This demanding assignment required not only vocal strength but also sharp eyesight and nimble fingers which, covered with rubber tips, had to flip quickly through the alphabetized lists of names in the master book; then, after the desired number had been located, the operator was expected to relay it to the customer with such clarity that it could be immediately understood even when the lines were scrambled with static. The operators were trained to speak in staccato sound bites, to enunciate, ee-
nun
-cee-ate, the numbers in such a way that “four” sounded like “fo-wer,” and “five” was “fy-yiv,”
and “seven” was “sev-ven,” and “nine” was “ny-yen.” Not only numbers, but the language in general was enunciated in this exaggerated manner by the operators, even when they were off duty at home with their families; and the di Paola family in Brooklyn, thanks to the syllabicating Susan, had another dialect added to the household, the Bell-induced dialect that she passed on to her younger sisters and brother, who began calling her “Su-Zand.”

Susan was promoted rapidly, becoming an assistant supervisor after one year, and
the
supervisor of the daytime switchboard in Brooklyn after two and a half years, with two assistants reporting to her. Her salary increased to a degree that even her father could not quarrel with her weekly contribution to household expenses, although he had no idea that she was privately pocketing a third of the cash that was originally contained in the envelope she turned in each Saturday as her total salary. But morals were more important than money to Rosso; and when one day in 1927 his baker friend across the street reported that Susan had been seen walking home from work accompanied by a young man—a man identified by one of the baker’s bootlegging nephews as a trombone player employed at a nightclub the nephew serviced (this same nephew, incidentally, had been rejected by Susan after he had made advances in the back of the bakery when she had been employed there folding boxes)—Rosso angrily decided to station himself outside the telephone building the next day in hopes of catching Susan with her consort, and terminating instantly their relationship before they became more involved. On the following day, however, Susan had no plans to meet the trombonist, Nicholas Pileggi, on the sidewalk after work; but before leaving the building she
had
caught a glimpse of her father standing behind his car three stories below, the limousine parked at the curb across from the telephone company’s main door. So instead of leaving for home through the front door, as she normally did, she exited through a service entrance in the rear of the lobby, and followed an alternative route back to her neighborhood, her father meanwhile lurking behind his car for another hour, a stranded and frustrated spy.