Island of Divine Music (5 page)

The young man said he needed Maria because she brought it in fast and because nobody ducks out on him. He laughed. You can buy it on the street next week, if I don’t kill you.

The gun barrel was less than a yard from Giuseppe’s face. The flat was silent, save the ticking of a clock and the occasional bleating of ships on the bay. Giuseppe wondered what God might have up His sleeve. Was it time for him to die? Was it time for Maria and her little miracle to die? And at that moment the little miracle screamed.

It was a scream like an ice pick in the head, like a siren to wake the dead out of hell. The young man covered his ears, and Giuseppe made like his old hero, DiMaggio, clearing the bases at Seals Stadium. He made like he was bringing down the house with one swing, with a fish as his hammer. The man’s shiny head cracked like
a walnut against the door frame. Blood seeped from his ears and mouth. Maria knelt and picked up the pistol.
Gracias,
she whispered to Giuseppe.

H
e fitted into a large burlap potato sack, but it took both of them to carry him to the pier. Already the produce trucks were arriving with their many gifts from the fields and valleys of California, with dates and avocados, with oranges bright as the sun from the south. And the child on his mother’s hip pointed the way, singing in his own tongue as Maria and Giuseppe slouched under the weight of our world and trudged through the darkness to the water.

Joe

J
oe would have been Giuseppe but for his mother’s trick. Giuseppe and Rosari Verbicaro’s first child, whom they’d named after his father, had died when delivered from the womb. The old midwives were as confused and distraught as the mother, and they searched their brains for reasons. Rosari was too young, perhaps. Rosari didn’t drink enough wine or nanny-goat milk. The mother had her own theory, which had to do with the name and the smoldering temper of her husband, and she insisted on giving the second, also a boy, his own name. He grew to be a beautiful but slow-witted lad, and Rosari succeeded in giving birth to five more after him, three girls and two boys, the last of which Giuseppe demanded to tag his name onto. Rosari nodded, but when the time came for signing the certificate, she smiled and wrote the name
Joe.

By this time, English had invaded the household vernacular of all but the old man, and the children preferred calling the baby Joe, anyway. It took Giuseppe a few years to catch on. He sat at the table after a day of backbreaking work, stewed on homemade wine, while the children were laughing and fighting over the last serving
of string beans. When he asked what the boy’s name was, Giuseppe or Joe, Rosari said, in Italian, What’s it to you, old-timer? It worked.

Joe’s brothers and sisters were all taken out of school in order to work, either to haul debris for the old man or to sew at some sweatshop, but Rosari kept her youngest in class because she recognized his shrewd mind. Little Joe had a better head for math than his elementary school teachers. He discovered the Fibonacci sequence on his own, the wonderful pyramid of relationships, while doodling in his notebook during grammar. He stared at ceilings and buildings and calculated the dimensions, the number of joists and beams in the school. He figured probabilities for an illiterate bookmaker at the dog track when he was ten, the numbers tumbling inside his brain while he groomed and walked the whippets after school, and was given a nickel for his efforts.

He was adorable and bossy in the way that only the youngest can be, the baby that Mama protects and defends before the rest of the brood, and he was a shrimp and a know-it-all who was usually right. He hated his family’s poverty, which forced him to wear all the hand-me-downs, even his sisters’ shoes, to school, and determined to make piles of money when he grew up. When he got teased he lashed out with his fists, and he was a scrapper. He once broke a boy’s nose for saying the word
ravioli.

Ranking next to poverty was shame for his family heritage. He watched the newsreels and movies in which Italians were happy idiots who played the concertina and drank wine like his pop, and he dreamed of being a famous inventor with a nose job and a penthouse in San Francisco. Joe thought of changing his last name, too,
especially for business purposes. Joe Verb: Action Enterprises. But the business Joe eventually steered was a family affair, a group of hungry Italians building, first on the swamp his father had bought for next to nothing, and later anywhere Uncle Sam asked them to, during the war boom of the ’40s.

B
y the late ’50s, Joe and his brothers and sisters, whose husbands worked for the family business, were doing well, but they thought their father had lost his mind. He’d always been a drinker and wanderer, and had often spent months away from home at jobs with other Italians or just hanging out in the island culture of North Beach, but now his brain had stepped off a cliff, and at the bottom of that cliff was a teenaged hooker and her illegitimate baby.

No ugly stereotyping could have disgusted Joe more than these latest shenanigans, no joke about Italian soldiers or Italian funerals with only two pallbearers could have angered him further. He looked at himself in the barber’s mirror and asked for a flattop; he avoided Italian food, except on Sundays at his mother’s; he hid the Sinatra records under a stack of magazines until his daughter Penny found them and filled the house with Frankie Boy swinging with Nelson Riddle’s band.

It was Penny who talked him into going to see the old man. They were at a little Italian hole in the wall celebrating her twelfth birthday, just daddy and daughter, and she brought the subject up as if it had just occurred to her. Isn’t Grandpa’s place a few blocks from here? Shouldn’t we drop in on them?

Why? Joe glared at the menu.

You’ve got to see that baby, Dad. He is so beautiful! Your, um . . . brother, Jesús.

Maria, the young Mexican mother who pronounced Jesús like
Hej-Zeus,
fascinated Penny as much as the baby did. Giuseppe, the butt of a thousand jokes in Rosari’s repertoire, was a harmless geezer to his granddaughter, a funny old guy who would probably slip her a five-dollar bill as a birthday present.

They’d taken the L train from Berkeley over the Bay Bridge and a cable car to Chinatown, from which they’d walked to North Beach. A waiter spoke to Joe in Italian, and Joe reminded the guy that they were in America, if he didn’t notice. Joe checked his watch, tapped his fingers on the table, made notations on a napkin. He had a hell of a lot on his mind because his brothers were watching the shop and an important deal was imminent, but he wanted to give Penny her day. He left the table to call Ludovico, read him some numbers from the napkin, and told Lu to take them down, but his brother, whose moods were sudden and violent, told him to butt the hell out and enjoy his daughter and his ravioli, for Christ’s sake.

Try prime rib, Joe said. You sure you guys are all right? These bastards from New Jersey will have your peter in their pocket the minute you shake hands, Lu.

Hey, what are we, a bunch of rubes? You think we just got off the banana boat?

Giuseppe’s flat in Little Italy reminded Joe of the poverty he’d escaped and kept from his children: clothes on the lines between buildings, peppers and garlic hanging not far from them, loud
voices yelling from one stoop to the next, broken glass and strong smells of urine and garbage in the alleyway. There was an old Mexican woman in the flat, and she said that
la familia
had gone to the beach. Joe laughed and thanked God. He fairly danced down the steps and the steep sidewalks to the streetcar stop with his daughter, calculating the time it would take to get her home and himself to the business. Penny reminded him that they were going to the Natural History Museum next. The what? The place with the alligators. He’d promised.

Christ. Joe hated it: waiting on the corner, squeezing in with all those people, rocking up and down the hills while the Jersey deal might be going down. They were stuck in a jam for fifteen minutes, and the siren of an ambulance announced the reason for the delay. Penny opened the bus window and stuck her head out as the attendants hustled with the stretcher, and Joe scolded her for snooping. Her eyes and mouth were open with wonder. Penny, you get back in your seat this minute, he hissed, and her face colored as she obeyed.

It was a mild summer afternoon in the city, fresh with strands of fog drifting among the buildings and the sunny eucalyptus and Monterey pines of the park. Joe and his daughter walked through the grove of pollarded sycamores to the museum and found the building closed. Penny suggested they walk to the beach and Playland.

Walk? Joe asked. On purpose?

It’s only a mile or so, I think.

Christ, Penny, only a goddamned idiot would walk clear from here to the beach. Excuse my French.

Then I must be a goddamned idiot, the girl said. She wore a
summery dress and saddle shoes, and a new alpaca sweater was draped over her shoulders to ward off the pockets of fog and sea breeze. Joe figured that more loot had been spent on this one outfit than his entire wardrobe from age one to nineteen, and she kept growing out of things. Already her legs were nearly as long as his, her stride brisk and determined. They passed the lake with the pedal boats, crossed a polo field big as a goddamned aircraft carrier, muddied Joe’s best shoes near a creek. He saw a booth and told her to wait a minute while he got on the horn again. Narciso answered.

Ciso, what’s up? Did the guys from Jersey call?

They’re here, Joe. They’re real nice guys.

Oh, Christ. Joe’s stomach turned, and he asked to talk with his other brother, Ludovico. Penny was feeding French bread to a group of noisy ducks right next to the booth.

Joe, Narciso said after a bit, Lu says it’s all taken care of. It’s fine, Joe. These are great guys. How’s little Penny?

Jesus Christ, Ciso, of course they’re nice guys, they’re about to ask us to drop our pants and spread our legs. Get Lu.

There was a long pause. The ducks snapped at Penny’s legs, and she shrieked happily. Joe could hear voices, laughter, maybe a radio broadcast of a ballgame, a man saying the word
southpaw.
Then Sammy, the bookkeeper from the Philippines: Hello? Is somebody on the line?

Get me Lu, Sam, right now.

Oh, hey, Mr. Verbicaro! Hey, I’m sorry. He and Ciso just took off with these guys for lunch.

Son of a goddamned bitch. Joe slammed the receiver so hard the ducks bolted.

A
s they neared the shore the fog assaulted them. It rolled through the cypress and over the grass, tumbling against itself like an avalanche. The amusement park glowed and squawked somewhere in those snowy depths, its tacky music and Christmas lights beckoning like a buried city of sin which God had failed to destroy. Every foolish pleasure from the ’20s and the turn of the century, gartered legs, beer foaming the underside of handlebar mustaches, flapper dresses, wheels of fortune, and penny arcades, was depicted in garish colors which, though blasted by years of weather and generations of children, beamed at Joe through the fog as he approached.

Penny wanted to go to the Funhouse first, and they stood in line before the mechanical hag, the laughing, wild-haired, freckle-faced old woman in the booth. Joe fumed about his brothers, his father, and, to some degree, his willful daughter, who had dragged him to this spot, in bitter fog, before this ugly, guffawing woman. Her head rocked back when she let loose with the biggest laughs, and her arms in the wild striped sleeves jerked like a spastic’s. It made Joe wonder about laughter itself for the first time in his life; it made it suspect in his mind. What a miserable thing it was, really, a desperate and mindless noise. What an ugly animal sound, imbued with nothing nobler than retching or ejaculating.

Daddy, where are you? Penny shrieked and laughed, lost somewhere
before him in the house of mirrors. Joe’s anger was like his father’s, slow-building, deadly, filled with resentment and purpose. His brother Lu would explode at the slightest provocation and laugh a moment later, and Narciso’s fuse was so long it might circle the earth twice before a wisp of smoke could be seen on the horizon, but Joe banked his logs in silence toward a coming forest fire. He stepped slowly through the house of mirrors while children squeezed past him, shrieking black and brown and yellow and white kids giggling and yelling, and felt the familiar blood of injustice beat in his throat. He came to the junctures in the maze of reflections and locked eyes with the man in front of him, this idiot with the crew cut and monkey suit, and wanted to punch his own lights out. Which way? He asked the many images of himself. I don’t have time to screw around. Kids were swirling past him in each direction.

Daddy, are you still in there? He could hear Penny’s voice above the din of laughter and yelling. I’ll meet you at the base of the slide, she yelled. Jesus Christ on a goddamned pogo stick, Joe muttered when he came to another dead end. A boy behind him laughed and said, You hear that guy?

He had no inkling what the hell people found amusing about getting lost. Penny was probably ten yards from him, and he had to navigate through a maze five times that length. If the monster in the myth, the guy with the bull’s head, were waiting for him around the next bend, Joe would be ready to break his nose.

Penny called to him again, and he was so mad he didn’t answer. By now Joe had his pen out and was making tabulations on the palm
of his hand, five panels, left turn, three panels, right turn. Children zoomed past him. He was surrounded by facets of himself, the angry boy, the embarrassed boy, the lost boy; the little mathematician so poor he lacked a piece of paper, the little Italian kid in his sister’s saddle shoes. He stood in sight of the entrance, the fog, the laughing hag’s booth, back at the goddamned beginning, and swore. He turned and saw himself in a panel, mouth open in confusion, pen poised above his palm. Somebody yanked his coat.

You lost, mister? a boy with black, curly hair, younger than Penny, asked him in Italian. Follow me.