Thunder City (12 page)

Harlan arrived ten minutes late, bowing over Edith’s hand and spouting apologies and explanations; something about inspecting an empty factory building on Mack Avenue, with Henry Ford involved somehow. (This was a name one could not escape of late.) Harlan could be excitable, and at such times she could scarcely follow his rapid speech. He was wearing his best summer worsted, but it needed pressing, and his broad features, so much like the Hamptons’ except for the disconcerting directness of the Crownover stare, looked a bit pinched.

She asked him, when he was seated, if he was getting enough sleep.

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead, as Mr. Ford says. You look wonderful. How is your back?” He snapped the folds out of his napkin and laid it in his lap.

“It isn’t bothering me today.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She shook her head in argument, but smiled at his perception. She was, in fact, in considerable pain; but as that was almost always the case she saw no reason to mention it. She had an aunt, currently in her nineties, who had been dying of something particularly painful and equally unidentifiable for twenty years, and who never ignored an opportunity to apprise everyone she met of the details of her misery. Edith was determined not to follow her tiresome example.

“Are you eating regularly?” she asked. “You look as if you’ve lost weight. I’m afraid the North Atlantic salmon is the heartiest thing on the menu here. I can have our waiter bring a steak from one of the other restaurants.”

He held up both palms in an attitude of self-defense. “I ate an enormous meal at Dolph’s before meeting Mr. Ford. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t feed me. I don’t think the man’s had honest food since he left the farm. If you wish to worry about someone, you should start with him. I think he lives on engine exhaust.”

“I’m your mother, not his. You needn’t snap.”

He sank a little in his seat.

“I’m sorry, Mother. I’m on edge. Father and I quarreled last week.”

“I thought that was what happened. He complained about his stomach for days. I suppose it was about automobiles.”

“He has no vision.”

The waiter materialized. Edith ordered chilled cucumber soup and the tiny crabmeat sandwiches she loved. Harlan asked for black coffee. His mother waited until they were alone again before she spoke.

“You would not have lived the life you have if it weren’t for your father’s vision. He saved the company.”

“I’ve heard that story all my life. Sometimes I think we’d all be better off if Father had a little more of Grandfather’s idealism. I happen to think it’s a heroic thing to put one’s own welfare on the line for what he believes. He opposed
slavery,
for God’s sake.” His mother winced at the blasphemy, and he was immediately contrite. “I’m sorry. The Dodge brothers were at Mack. Their rough manners are contagious.”

“I’ve heard they’re hooligans. You’re too much the gentleman for this automobile crowd, Harlan. I’m afraid you’ll be hurt.”

He smiled. It was his mother’s smile, and it drained the sting from his condescension. “I’m twenty, Mother. I’ll look to my own scrapes and bruises.”

“I know that. But you’re still my son. It’s an old lady’s privilege to dither about.”

He patted her hand.

“You don’t look a day past thirty, and you know it. Don’t play games with me. I’m not Ab.”

She knew he was not merely flattering her. At forty-seven, Edith was without wrinkles or blemishes, and no gray showed among the red-gold, rather fine strands of her hair. She had the hooded and slightly protuberant eyes of a duchess in a Renaissance painting. Her face was heart-shaped, with a patrician nose and a mouth that was disproportionately small, which to her mind made it her weakest feature. Local legend said she had turned down an offer to use her likeness in a magazine advertisement for Pearl Drop soap. There was no truth in it, but Edith was sufficiently inspired by any story that sowed envy among the hens who kept it alive not to stir herself to deny it.

She sighed a little at Harlan’s mention of her oldest son. “Young Abner fusses over me so. He makes no distinction between me and those pink-powder saints you see on the covers of song sheets.”

“Or in the pictures in your morning room. You can hardly blame him for drawing the conclusion.”

His smile this time, dry and tight-lipped, did not come from either side of the family. It was entirely his own, and it was vaguely troubling. She feared that he was becoming a cynic. Her only experience of that type of person was a scruffy young man in a shabby suit who had appeared in the lobby of the opera house during the intermission in
A Lady of Quality,
talking loudly about Marx and Engels and spattering the gowns and dinner jackets of his listeners with champagne from his glass when he gestured. Asked by the manager to leave, he had departed with a vile oath. Edith asked her son tentatively if he was a Socialist.

He laughed, loudly and boyishly. Heads turned at the other tables. He blushed and lowered his voice. “Not unless attending one lecture by Jack London counts. It amused me to hear the great individualist of our time talking about the will of the masses.”

She was relieved, although scarcely mollified. It was a most cynical-sounding denial. “You should make an effort to get along with your father. All this rebellion can only make you bitter.”

He touched her hand again, this time without patronizing her. “I’ll try. I’m sorry the men in your life are so difficult.”

“They’re men.”

“Upon my word, Mother, you’re becoming quite the wit. If I didn’t know better I’d swear you’d been sneaking out to the Temple Theater and watching Fields and Webber.”

“I’m not my pictures, Harlan.”

She had surprised him twice in the space of a few seconds. The realization filled her with guilty pleasure. She was grateful that their order arrived at just that moment. The mood dissipated as the waiter leaned forward to transfer the cups and dishes from his tray to the table.

She forced a crabmeat sandwich on Harlan, who was no match for a mother’s determination. “I don’t believe that story about eating at Dolph’s Saloon. I don’t know when you eat at all. When you’re not working at your father’s, you’re spending your dinner break meeting with automobile men and touring manufactories. What you need is a wife who will take care of you.”

“I agree. I can’t think why women aren’t throwing themselves at me all the time. I look so dashing in my work overalls.”

“If women cared about such things, none of the men who work for you on the loading dock would be married. I happen to know most of them are. Who do you think makes up gift baskets for them and their families at Christmas? If I had grandchildren to fuss over, I wouldn’t have to fuss over you.” A splinter of grief stabbed her at the memory of Katherine’s children, dead these eight years.

“That’s bribery, Mother.” But he wolfed down the sandwich and poured coffee after it.

She watched him. “I miss you, Harlan. The house has been too quiet since you moved out. Sometimes I think I can hear you moving around in your old room, pacing back and forth the way you used to. Then I go up and everything is covered with sheets.”

“I couldn’t very well stay after Edward got married. Without him to stand between Father and me, I’d never be able to maintain the peace. I’m not placid like Ab or agreeable like Edward. Father and I would have been at each other’s throat in five minutes.”

“You’re too much alike.”

“We might have been, thirty years ago. When I read
The Coach King,
I thought it was about someone else. If Father were in charge then, running the company the way he does now, and a young man came to him with a new suspension system he’d designed, Father would have told him he was quite happy with the old one and sent him back to his bench.”

Edith drank some soup. They had put in too much onion. “Now that you’ve gotten that off your chest, you should have no trouble being civil to your Father.”

“How do you stand it, Mother?”

The question, and the desperate expression on Harlan’s usually guarded face, surprised her deeply. Close as they were, neither had ever attempted to trespass upon the other quite so directly before.

She slid her spoon back into her bowl, took a long draft of tea, and replaced the cup in its saucer without making a sound. Her eyes never left Harlan’s.

“I stand it,” she said.

O
N THE FIRST DAY OF
June, Giuseppe Caesar Niccolo e Benedetti de Sorrato drew his last breath, a monster gulp of the kind that in times past he had used to finish off a plate of linguini in marinara sauce and a glass of wine poured from an earthenware jug from his own cellar. As he let it out, his sphincter released, as if he had passed gas at the end of a satisfying meal. The odor drew his wife, Dona Pronuncia, from the next room. Her subsequent wails attracted the attention of neighbors, and within thirty minutes all of Little Italy knew that Uncle Joe was dead at last. Twenty-two months and eleven days had elapsed since his last stroke, the one that had made a vegetable of Detroit’s most notorious greengrocer.

The next day, a photographic portrait that had been made at the time of his election to the presidency of the Sons of Garibaldi Lodge appeared on the front page of the local Italian-language newspaper, flanked by angels with trumpets, with the dates of his birth and death printed on a scroll beneath his airbrushed chins. The obituary that accompanied the picture celebrated his successful greengrocery business, his services to the Church, and his stature as a beloved mentor and benefactor to the Italian community of Detroit. No mention was made of his conviction of arson in a fire in the shop of a tailor named deBartolo in 1874, but it was noted that he had volunteered his services as a consultant to the Detroit police in a series of disasters that had befallen the owners of small businesses in the area between Gratiot Avenue and the river in recent years. A campaign was announced to finance a scholarship at Detroit College in Uncle Joe’s name, to be awarded annually to a deserving Italian-American reared in the city. The door-to-door drive to raise money for the scholarship would be chaired by Vincenzo Sorrato, Giuseppe’s oldest surviving son, who with his brothers Gaetano and Giuseppe Jr., was coming up from Toledo for the funeral. Vincenzo had vowed that every local Sicilian would receive the opportunity to contribute to the fund.

The mortal remains were consigned to the care of the Palandrino Brothers Mortuary on Orleans Street. Augusto, the firstborn Palandrino and senior partner in the enterprise, personally accepted the challenge of making the corpse presentable for the visitation. Nearly a decade of illness had reduced Uncle Joe from a robust three hundred pounds to an emaciated 140; yards of loose skin hung from his frame like the canvas of a deflated balloon. First, Augusto stuffed the sunken cheeks with wads of newspaper and cotton. To prevent the padding from escaping, he dislocated the jaw, joined the upper and lower mandibles with platinum wire, and used guttapercha to stop up the tiny holes he had drilled for this purpose. The torso itself he wound with butcher paper and unbleached muslin, around and around, augmented with a mohair cushion he had prudently saved from the last time the slumber room was refurnished; the master mortician was noted for never throwing out items which might later be put to use, thus sparing his bereaved customers the added expense of costly prosthetics. (It was whispered about the neighborhood that one client, a Mr. Tosca, who had fallen beneath the wheels of an outgoing freight on the Michigan Central tracks, was but 20 percent Mr. Tosca and 80 percent upholstery when it came time for friends and family to pay their respects.) In this way Augusto managed to fill out the trademark Sorrato white linen suit. Working from photographs, he filled in the deep wrinkles in the forehead with damp flour, inserted black rubber stoppers in the nostrils to eliminate pinching, and used a mixture of petroleum jelly and bootblack to smooth back Uncle Joe’s fine hair and cover the cobwebby gray of neglect. Once he had applied powder and rouge, restored the backs of the hands to their former plumpness with an injection of Miracle-Flex Florentine Embalming Solution, and stood back to inspect his work, Augusto Palandrino reflected for the five hundredth time upon the sad fact that such artistry must eventually be concealed forever beneath six feet of earth and sod. With resignation he directed his brothers Domingo and Giovanni to transfer the corpse from the worktable to the casket and remove it to the slumber room, where he wound a rosary around Uncle Joe’s hands and arranged the candles at the head and foot. The casket, made of gray-green olivewood with a gray Italian silk lining and solid gold handles, had been imported from Firenze and retailed for four thousand dollars, establishing a new record for the city of Detroit. He had obtained it for fifteen hundred dollars and placed it in storage for just such an illustrious passing. It was a source of private satisfaction that he should be able to realize so large a profit from the heirs of Giuseppe Sorrato, to whom he had been paying a premium of five hundred dollars per month for eleven years as insurance against fire and theft. In addition he charged full price for prosthetics and cosmetics he had not actually employed.

The funeral mass took place in SS. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church on East Jefferson, the oldest place of worship in the city, Monsignor Santino Calabria presiding. From there, the procession commenced east along the river toward Mt. Elliot Cemetery, where a six-foot granite angel waited with wings spread to receive Uncle Joe in an eight-hundred-dollar reinforced-concrete vault guaranteed to resist seepage for a century.

Leading the procession was the Palandrinos’ new hearse, fashioned of black lacquered hickory on wheels with hard rubber tires, with plate-glass windows on the sides affording a clear view of the splendid casket, hung all around with black tassels and crepe. The horses were matched blacks with plumes attached to their bridles, and the driver, a ten-year veteran named Caspar, wore an immaculate morning coat and a tall silk hat brushed to a liquid shine. The honorary pallbearers who loaded the casket onto the hearse were Gaetano and Giuseppe Sorrato Jr., the deceased’s sons; Dr. Francis Zangara, Uncle Joe’s oldest friend, a companion since Sicily and the physician who had signed his death certificate; his cousin Augustino; a brother-in-law named Olini from Cleveland—and Sal Borneo, also called Salvatore Bornea. Son Vincenzo’s missing leg excused him from this duty.