Travelin' Man (17 page)

Everything down here is just as he remembers. The damp moisture of the earthen floor. The metal storage shelves, odd pieces of furniture and broken lamps, the wide, deep freezer chest, an ancient Frigidaire model, antediluvian, but still serviceable. His eyes are slow to adjust to the harsh light of the bare ceiling bulb and he slips in a puddle underfoot, noticing an odd smell, fetid but not overpowering, the distinct scent of meat beginning to rot. There are two trash bags on the floor, not full but securely tied. He opens one and finds chicken breasts and cuts of beef soaking in water and blood. The freezer must be broken, despite its gently purring motor.

“What the fuck are you doing down there, Mikey?” Frankie shouts from the top of the stairs, his voice shrill and twisted in his throat as he races down the steps, sweating and gasping for breath.

“You need to replace this goddamn freezer.”

“There's nothing wrong with the freezer,” Frankie insists, grabbing the trash bag from his brother's hand. “Go upstairs and I'll clean up this mess.”

“Let's put this shit back before it stinks up the entire fucking house,” Michael says, opening the lid before Frankie can stop him. A blast of artic air slaps his face and he blinks and jumps back, confused, staring at Frankie in disbelief, not trusting his eyes, needing a moment to gather his wits before confirming that, yes, Frankie's little Mexican is lying in the freezer, shrouded in frost, his twisted and contorted remains a snug and cozy fit.

 

 

 

 

 

He was never Dad, certainly not Daddy. A father who allowed his brats to call him Pa or Pop wasn't worthy of his children's respect. He was Papa, as the man who had sired him had been. His children's few words of Italian were awkward, barely recognizable to a man who had never heard, let alone spoken, English until he was nearly nine years old. His boys understood enough of the dialect of Calabria to get the gist of his outbursts whenever he relapsed into the language of his childhood, but always responded in their own native tongue. Michael, always the more willful and bolder of his two sons, would grow up to be a resentful teenager who referred to his father in the hated American vernacular as his
old man,
drawing empty threats of banishment with no possibility of ever returning. Michael was defiant, unbowed. He complained that none of his friends had to live in a dark apartment above a barbershop, with holy pictures on the walls and plaster saints on every table. Michael would live with Sal Pinto if Papa didn't want him around. And once he was gone he would never come back.

Michael's grandfather would have thrown Papa into the streets if he'd ever dared to challenge his unquestioned authority. This country had made his son weak, a man who allowed his children to run wild and treat him with contempt. His naturalization papers, granted after his service in the war, had made him a citizen, but Luigi Rocco Gagliano only finally, truly, became an American the day Michael turned his back on him and walked away, suffering no consequences for calling his father an embarrassment, a stupid old wop who should go back to Italy if he hated the
medigan'
so much.

 

“
Why is Papa so mean?”

 

“You're a lucky boy Luigi. You're going to live in America.”

Even at the age of eight, he knew his mother was frightened and wary of leaving the only home they'd ever known. She'd been a white widow for so many years she'd began to think of herself as a maiden. She was only a girl when she married her husband, a man who'd come back to Calabria to take a bride after emigrating at seventeen. He'd returned to his life in America less than a month after the birth of his son. His letters were short, to the point, hardly filled with the romantic declarations a young girl yearned to read. But the money he earned put meat on the table and paid to repair the roof when the rain leaked through the seams. She received frequent gifts of bolts of expensive cloth and small luxury items like lavender sachets and combs and hair clips made of ivory and tortoiseshell. Luigi was likely the first boy in Italy, certainly Calabria, to own a bright red Liberty Coaster wagon, elevating his status among his cousins who vied for the privilege of pulling him through the streets of the town.

Then, finally, instructions arrived with the name and address of a man who had booked their passage on the Konig Albert departing from Naples. She tried consoling her son who cried bitter tears as they sat in the cavernous terminal waiting to board the ship.

“We'll come back soon to see Nonno and Nonna,” she promised, assuming the separation from his doting grandparents was the cause of his despair.

A man wearing a uniform and a whistle around his neck was calling names from the front of the room.

“. . . . . Gagliano, Santamaria; Gagliano, Luigi Rocco . . . . .”

He pulled away when his mother tried to take his hand. He wasn't a baby. He could walk by himself. He knew she needed the reassurance of his touch and wanted to punish her, refusing to forgive her for promising the wagon to his cousin Aldo when they left for America.

Nonno had tried to console him, promising him that, in America, he would have two or three wagons and live in a palace like the Savoy kings. His father was a rich man now, a person of stature and influence, a citizen of the United States with money to grease the palms of the right people in America and Italy to spare his son from a life under the boot heel of
Il Diavolo
, Nonno's name for the godless
Il Duce
. But the old man's words failed to comfort and, late in the evening of his last night in the village, Luigi climbed a steep hill, dragging the wagon behind him. He'd stood at the edge of the cliff, tears running down his cheeks as he threw his beloved Liberty Coaster from the rocky precipice and watched it disappear into the leafy ceiling of the trees far below.

 

 

The stranger who met Luigi and his mother at the port when they arrived in America was a terrible disappointment to a boy expecting to be greeted by a hero. Salvatore Rocco Gagliano was barely taller than his wife and looked much older than the man in the wedding photo his mother kept on a table beside her bed. The first meeting was awkward, formal, without kisses or an embrace. They boarded a train in a town called Newark and travelled to a city named Philadelphia, arriving after midnight at an enormous building with a barbershop at the street level. S. Gagliano, Barber, Est. 1928, was painted on the window glass. Luigi awoke early his first morning in America, eager to claim the Liberty Coaster wagons his nonno had promised awaited him. His mother fed him a simple breakfast of bread and cheese, telling him to eat quickly as he was needed downstairs.

“Do as he says Luigi. He's your father.”

The barber had decided his son was old enough to be put to work and ordered him to wash the shop windows with water and vinegar. Perfection was expected. Being an eight-year-old boy was no excuse for streaks on the plate glass. His efforts were rewarded with a blow that knocked him to the sidewalk. He knew his life had changed, his position in the world diminished, when his mother rebuffed his tearful attempts to seek consolation and sympathy, deferring to her husband in the discipline of his son.

 

Luigi returned to Italy to take up arms against his own blood, fighting in the Battle of Anzio. He returned with an honorable discharge and enrolled in barber school. He assumed his place beside his father in the shop, renamed S. Gagliano & Son, Since 1928, their chairs only a few feet apart. Ten hours a day, six days a week, he suffered endless criticism about squandering his money and his time drinking alcohol with his worthless friend Sal Pinto. What had his father done to be cursed with a
minchione
who chose to keep company with
donnaccias
, unsuitable to be a wife and mother?

The deal was brokered before Luigi met the woman who would become his first wife. The Gaglianos had known the Avilla family for generations. Pasquale Avilla's two daughters, the loveliest girls in the neighborhood, fair-haired and blue-eyed, had survived near fatal infections of streptococcus, developing rheumatic fevers that had kept Teresa, the oldest, bedridden for seven months, and her sister Sofia, ten years younger, for nearly a year. Doctor and hospital bills had left the family deeply in debt, making the offer of money for the hand of Avilla's eldest daughter impossible to reject.

“She is a very pious girl,” Luigi's father advised him on his wedding day in 1949. “Don't tear her apart the first night with that big, fat cock you're so proud of.”

She'd bled for two days after their wedding night. But she seemed to take to the act quickly, even enthusiastically, until he struck her, calling her a
puttana,
when she made the mistake of touching his prick. Their first child was born within a year, a girl named Paulina Rosa, as useless to Luigi as her mother would become after two miscarriages and years of marriage without giving him a son.

Desperate, she risked damnation of her immortal soul by consulting the local shaman, seeking talismans to protect her from the evil eye that had cursed her womb. The baby was a boy, carried to term, perfectly formed, eight-and-half pounds. He was delivered stillborn, never drawing a single breath. Luigi would have dragged his wife from her bed and beaten her if the priest and Sal Pinto hadn't been there to restrain him. He accused her of being a witch and a whore. God had taken his son to punish him for marrying a woman who practiced the black art of forbidden sorcery. He said she was cursed for bargaining with the devil. He refused to sleep in her bed again, barely exchanging words with her until she died, literally from a broken heart, its valves corrupted by childhood disease.

 

 

Luigi waited the obligatory year of mourning, then, in 1959, married Sofia, as lovely as her sister and with the same quiet, resigned disposition. Eleven months later, she delivered the long-awaited heir and, after five years, provided Luigi with another son. The second pregnancy had been difficult to achieve and the delivery of a ten-pound baby was fraught with risks. She never fully recovered from the Caesarian and congestive heart failure made Luigi a widower a second time when his youngest son was three years old.

 

 

Sal Pinto's wife had a friend named Eileen Costello who had been on the New York stage; her husband had died leaving her with no money. Dire circumstances had forced her to take a job giving dancing lessons at Palumbo's. No one could conceive of Luigi choosing a
medigan',
Irish no less, a woman unafraid to speak her mind, to be his wife and mother to his boys. She'd had a mysterious past, actresses being women of questionable reputation, and had already put one husband into the ground. The women of the neighborhood, loyal to the memories of the sainted Avilla sisters, gossiped that she'd put a spell on Luigi, blinding him to the plain and unremarkable face she painted with makeup. Their envious husbands, though, lusted after Luigi's
figa
and the carnal pleasures to be had between her long legs.

Miss Eileen, as Papa insisted his sons call her, restored calm and a sense of order to the house at Eighth and Carpenter. Luigi's new wife had an uncanny gift for calming gathering storms and had mastered the art of gentle, but firm, persuasion, prompting her husband to take pause and reconsider before raising his hand to his children. Still, his older son clearly resented her presence, though he was always polite and respectful. She refused to allow her husband to pressure the boy into accepting her. She lavishly praised his mother's beauty and gentle nature, which she said was obvious even by her pictures, trying, without success, to relieve Frankie's aching heart.

Michael, though, adored her, embracing her from the outset. No other woman had ever gently cleaned and bandaged his frequent cuts and bruises or praised his smallest achievement and fussed and clucked over his appearance. Miss Eileen provided a lap where he could rest his head while they sat on the sofa, laughing at the antics of George and Weezy on
The Jeffersons
. His own mother existed only as an image in the framed photograph beside their bed, a benign specter whose presence hovered over their lives like a guardian angel or Mary, the Blessed Mother. Miss Eileen was flesh-and-blood. She smelled of Estee Lauder Private Collection, Virginia Slims and cinnamon sticky buns. She loved him fiercely, as if he was her own child, and he sought comfort in her arms whenever he was tired or sick.

“Lou, bring the car around,” she'd insisted one cold, rainy night. “His fever is a hundred and five.”

Michael, always large for his age, was almost too heavy to carry two flights of stairs to the sidewalk where her husband was waiting. She held him in her lap and stroked his head, calming and reassuring him. Her clothes were damp with his sweat when they arrived at the emergency room. The nurse had to pry Michael from her neck to lay him in bed. Frankie and his father could hear his terrified voice behind a pulled curtain, repeating her name, as they sat, banished to a hallway, useless, unneeded, out of the way.