Unto the Sons (10 page)

When my father became aware of my gamesmanship with the lights, he would quietly enter the apartment and sometimes catch me hunched against the radio—and after snapping off the dial, he would furiously shove me by the shoulders down the rear steps into the back of the store, near the pressing machines and the sweating men partly obscured by the clouds of steam. There on the floor were huge boxes of cardboard guards waiting to be hooked to new wire hangers. Or
worse
, there were piles of rusty, used hangers that my father had bought cheaply from customers (to offset the limited supply of metal hangers produced in wartime). These entangled hangers that clung together like crabs in a basket had to be separated, bent into proper shape, scraped clear of rust, then outfitted one by one with a cardboard guard. The game upstairs proceeded without me, its eventual conclusion unknown to me until, on the following day, I eagerly reached for the sports section of the Sunday paper.

But on this static-free Sunday in December, since the broadcasts of professional football held little appeal, I concentrated on my model airplanes—I razor-cut the wood, fit it to the pattern, and slowly succumbed to the etherlike effect of the powerful glue that soon put me to sleep.

Hours passed before my mother, with a soft nudge, whispered so that my father could not hear: “Hurry, dress—we’re leaving for Atlantic City.”

The Buick moved through the darkened streets along an interior route toward the bay bridge, avoiding the coastline. All lighting was prohibited along the ocean. Houses within view of the ocean had their window shades pulled down, and the beach was occupied only by mounted Coast Guardsmen, whose horses could move in water reaching up to their necks and were trained not to become alarmed by the sight of the phosphorus flashes that sometimes jumped above the waves.

Over the marshlands, past the pine trees, beyond the frosted farmlands and country roads that barely reflected the blue-tinted headlights of our car, we finally reached the circular boulevard with its central granite monument that marked the entrance, away from the coast, into Atlantic City. After a few blocks on the main avenue, over which a silvery span of Christmas decorations devoid of lights framed the night, my father turned into a side street where there were bars and nightclubs with black men and women standing in front. Two blocks beyond, without a black person in sight, we were in the Italian neighborhood, with its locally renowned restaurant The Venice.

Men wearing overcoats and wide-brimmed hats, and smoking cigarettes
and cigars, stood outside The Venice guiding the cars in and out of the parking lot. One of them nodded toward my father, who had been coming here for years; inside, the headwaiter shook my father’s hand and escorted us through the crowd at the bar to our table against the wall in the middle of the room. Nearly every table was occupied by Italo-American families, some with babies in high chairs (I recognized a red chair that I had once occupied); and the waiters, wearing tuxedos and clip-on bow ties, moved swiftly up and down the aisles with their trays, conversing with their customers and with one another in a dialectal blend of English and Italian. Although the restaurant was called The Venice, there was little about it that was Venetian; the aroma of cooking was clearly Neapolitan, and prominently displayed behind the bar was a mural of the Bay of Naples—the last view of Italy that many of these people had had before embarking years earlier for America.

My father took our orders, as he always did, then conveyed them in Italian to one of the waiters, who never wrote anything down. As usual, my first plate was spaghetti with clam sauce—and my usual way of consuming this was with a fork and a round tablespoon, which I held like a catcher’s mitt to scoop up the fallen bits of clam and to stabilize my fork as I attempted to twirl the spaghetti strands into a tight and tidy mouthful.

My father, I’d noticed, never ate spaghetti in this fashion. He used only the fork, with which he masterfully twirled the strands without letting any of them dangle as he lifted them to his mouth. But on this occasion, after my plate had arrived and I had begun in my customary style with the spoon, he sat watching with an almost pained look on his face. Then he said, patiently:

“You know, I think you’re old enough now to learn how to do it right.”

“To do what right?”

“To eat spaghetti right,” he said. “Without the spoon. Only people without manners eat spaghetti that way—or people who are ignorant; or those Italians who are
cafoni
[country bumpkins]. But in Italy the
refined
Italians would never be seen in public using the spoon.”

Putting aside the spoon, I tried three or four times to spin the spaghetti around the fork, but each time the strands either slipped off and splashed into the sauce, or skipped off the plate and fell onto the floor.

“Forget it,” my father said finally. “Forget it for today—but from now on, practice. One day you’ll learn to get it right.”

Soon the second course arrived, then dessert and the black coffee in the small cup that my father drank. My parents talked business, and my sister and I shifted restlessly.

My wandering attention was drawn to a large table near the bar, around which a festive crowd of middle-aged men and women were laughing and applauding, raising their wineglasses toward a young soldier who was with them. The soldier sat very tall in his khaki uniform. His hair was shiny black and precisely parted. His shoulders were huge, his long face lean and hard, and his brown eyes were alert. He seemed to be fully aware of how special he was.

The people around him could hardly stop watching him, or touching him, or patting him gently on the back as he bent forward to eat. Only
he
was eating. The others ignored their plates to concentrate on watching him, applauding and toasting his every move with his knife and fork.

As the waiter arrived with our check, I held his sleeve before he left, and asked: “Who’s that soldier over there?”

The waiter’s eyebrows rose with a slight flutter, and he leaned into my ear and replied:
“That’s Joe DiMaggio!”

Bolting to my feet, I stared at the tall soldier who continued to eat, and I imagined in the distance the solid sound of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the spirited rhythm of Les Brown’s band.

I tapped my father’s shoulder and said:
“That’s Joe DiMaggio!”

My father looked up from the check he had been scrutinizing for any sign of error and glanced casually at the big table. Then he turned back to me and replied: “So?”

Ignoring my father, I remained standing, in prolonged appreciation. And before we left the restaurant I took a final look, closer this time, and noticed that on the table in front of my hero was a steaming plate of spaghetti. Then his head leaned forward, his mouth opened, and everybody around him smiled—including me—as he twirled his fork unabashedly against a large silver spoon.

6.

T
he aura of the great DiMaggio that had brought an exhilarating conclusion to my dismal Sunday was rudely interrupted on the following morning by the rattling sound of my metal alarm clock. It was Monday, a school day. Within a half-hour I was expected to be standing at the bus stop, at the corner near the bank, awaiting the eight-fifteen arrival of
Mr. Fitzgerald. Usually he was five or ten minutes late. But on this day I suspected he would be precisely on time, hoping that
I
would be late, so that he could leave me at the curb and thus add tardiness to my list of peccadilloes—misdeeds and mental lapses for which the nuns had conditioned me to expect, in this life or the next, appropriate punishment. Although I was not yet twelve years of age, I was developing a precocious sense of paranoia.

As I dressed I could hear rising from the store the hissing sounds of the pressing machines, and the ringing of the doorbell that signaled the early arrival of the employees who were assisting my parents during this busy period before Christmas. Since my sister Marian was still in bed, benefitting from an early holiday vacation that the school allowed the lower grades, I sat alone at the breakfast table in the rear of the apartment, eating the fruit and cereal my mother had left for me. Also on the table, packed in a brown paper bag, was my lunch—a soggy ham-and-egg sandwich made with Italian bread that my father had gotten the night before from our waiter at The Venice.

After hastily tossing the sandwich into my schoolbag, and grabbing my hat and coat, I skipped down the side staircase onto the sidewalk and waited at the bus stop almost ten minutes before the arrival of Mr. Fitzgerald. Shivering, I stood against a granite wall of the bank watching the activity along the avenue: shopkeepers unlocking their front doors, truckers unloading merchandise, sanitation men sweeping the streets. On the sidewalk of every block, chained to lampposts, were large wire baskets filled with corded bundles of cardboard and newspapers that people had deposited during the weekend to be collected later in the day by volunteer workers affiliated with a wartime recycling agency; and in the windows of shops were signs reminding citizens to conserve on household fats, to turn in old toothpaste tubes as new ones were purchased, and also to remit all tin cans, flattened, to grocery stores.

Ever since a tanker had been torpedoed a year before by a German submarine ten miles down the coast from Ocean City, the resort had been smitten by patriotic fervor. Middle-aged men and women, like my father, volunteered as air-raid wardens and auxiliary beach patrollers; and most draft-age men who had been found physically unfit for the military took jobs in Philadelphia defense plants, or at the bayside boat factory on the south end of the island, where barges and towboats were being constructed for the War Department.

With so many people in military work or the army, there was an acute shortage of help on the island—which was why I was expected to assist in
the store after school, and why my parents were burdened by inept or unreliable personnel whom in better days they would have replaced. My mother’s salesladies were either garrulous or absentminded older women who preferred exchanging gossip with the customers to ringing up sales, or aggressive younger women who were impatient with the customers and even rude to those who did not buy; and most of the saleswomen also chain-smoked and occasionally burned holes in the merchandise.

My father’s dry-cleaning trucks were driven by high school seniors whose inexperience and recklessness led to frequent accidents and countless traffic violations; my father’s assistant in the cutting room was a seventy-seven-year-old retired tailor from Philadelphia, who, because of failing eyesight and frayed nerves, was not renowned for his flawless measuring and cutting of cloth. But even more of a problem for my father were his pressing machines and the men who operated them.

These machines were jawlike monstrosities with elongated padded white lips that voraciously compressed clothes in boisterous heads of steam—and then, with a sudden malfunctioning of one of their many recondite and irreplaceable parts, they would choke, sizzle, and stall to a halt, breaking down most often on those afternoons when the back-room tables were stacked highest with wrinkled suits and overcoats that had been promised for delivery to customers before nightfall.

These antiquated machines that my father had purchased during the late 1920s were not only confounding to fix but enfeebling to use; the workers were forced to stretch and strain as they pulled down on the levers of the long iron padded flatbeds that pressed the clothes against the lower flatbeds; and since the imperfectly repaired boilers of the machines leaked excessive amounts of steam, the men at work quickly became drowsy and debilitated, like weightlifters in a sauna.

Even on the coldest day of winter, when all the overhead fans were vibrating at top speed, the men would sometimes wilt and faint from prostration; and no doubt they sometimes wondered if the military life for which they had been found physically unfit could have been as taxing as their labors behind these enervating hulks of metal.

There was one young man, however, who was more than a match for the machines. He was a tall, sinewy black man with an agile, bony face and lively eyes, and a shiny mass of wiry black bronze-tinted peroxided hair that he combed dramatically over his head back to the gaudy shoulders of the tropical shirts he always wore. He was called “Jet,” and he had come up from the South as a saxophone player with a jazz band before the
war; but he had been forced to quit after developing a tuberculous lung—which he claimed he was now slowly curing through the inhalation of steam and the snorting of white powder that he carried in a tiny bag in his shirt pocket.

Although Jet was afflicted as well with severely infected feet—his toes were gnarled with carbuncles and corns that popped out under his socks through the leather straps of the sandals he even wore in winter—he was by far the most vigorous and productive employee in the store, pressing clothes faster and better than anybody else; and when his machine blew a gasket or otherwise fizzled out, he played with its valves and keys as with a musical instrument, and soon he and his steam machine were back in harmonious rhythm.

Bedazzled by Jet and totally dependent on him, my father never complained about his loud radio that was tuned all day to a jazz station, and he pretended not to notice when Jet appeared at eight-thirty each morning, a half-hour late, or left an hour or two early, because Jet’s speed could always compensate for any temporary slowdown in the flow of the load of pressing.

But on those days when Jet did not show up even by nine a.m. (as he was now doing with increased frequency), my worried father would put on his hat and coat, leave the shop through the back door, and begin his cautious stroll in the direction of the black ghetto, which was a largely dilapidated row of white shanties and small frame structures two blocks beyond the rear of the store, built along a stretch of railroad tracks within view of the bay.

If it was a Saturday, the one day I worked full-time at the store, my father would insist that I accompany him, reasoning perhaps that the presence of a young boy would make his surveillance in a black area seem less officious, less foreboding or punitive. Since my father was never certain of Jet’s exact address, the latter constantly shifting from one rental space to another, we would begin arbitrarily at one of the places where Jet was known to have dwelled in the past, hoping that some tenant would provide a lead that would help my father locate his truant presser.