Unto the Sons (17 page)

A first-time customer from the nearby city of Cosenza, Vincenzo Castiglia was so blatant about his criminal profession that, while being measured for the suit one month before, he had asked Cristiani to allow ample room inside the jacket for the holstered pistol that he wore strapped around his chest. On that same occasion, however, Mr. Castiglia had made several other requests that elevated him in the eyes of his tailor as a man who had a sense of style and knew what might flatter his rather corpulent figure. For example, Mr. Castiglia had requested that the suit’s shoulders be cut extra wide so that it would give his hips a more narrow appearance; and he sought to distract attention from his protruding belly by ordering a pleated waistcoat with wide pointed lapels, and also a hole in the center of the waistcoat through which a gold chain could be looped and linked to his diamond pocket watch.

In addition, Mr. Castiglia specified that the hems of his trousers be turned up, in accord with the latest Continental fashion; and as he peered into Cristiani’s workroom in the back, he expressed satisfaction on observing that the tailors were all sewing by hand and not using the popularized sewing machine, which, despite its speedy stitching, lacked the capacity for the special molding of a fabric’s seams and angles that was possible only in the hands of a talented tailor.

Bowing with appreciation, the tailor Cristiani had assured Mr. Castiglia that his shop would never succumb to the graceless mechanized invention, even though sewing machines were now widely used by some leading tailors in Europe and also in America. With the mention of America, Mr. Castiglia smiled and said that he had once visited the New Land, and added that he had several relatives who had settled there. (Among them was a young cousin, Francesco Castiglia, who in future years, beginning in the era of Prohibition, would achieve great notoriety and wealth under the name Frank Costello.)

In the weeks that followed, after Vincenzo Castiglia had placed a down payment on the suit, which had been promised for the day before Easter, and had left in a carriage driven by a rifle-bearing coachman, Cristiani devoted much attention to satisfying the
mafioso
’s specifications, and he was finally proud of the sartorial results—until, on that Saturday, he
discovered under a paper pattern spread out on the table Mr. Castiglia’s new pants with the inch-long slash across the left knee.

Screaming with anguish and fury, Cristiani soon obtained a confession from an apprentice who admitted to cutting discarded pieces of cloth on the edges of the pattern under which the trousers had been found. Cristiani stood silently, shaking for several minutes, surrounded by his equally concerned and speechless associates. Cristiani could, of course, run and hide in the hills, as had been his first inclination; or he could return the money to the
mafioso
after explaining what had happened, and then offer up the guilty apprentice as a sacrificial lamb to be dealt with appropriately. In this instance, however, there were special inhibiting circumstances. The culpable apprentice was the young nephew of Cristiani’s wife, Maria. His wife had been born Maria Talese. She was the only sister of Cristiani’s best friend, Gaetano Talese, then working in America. And Gaetano’s seven-year-old son, the apprentice Joseph Talese—who would become my father—was now crying convulsively.

As Cristiani sought to comfort his remorseful nephew, his mind kept searching for some plausible solution. The trousers were obviously ruined beyond repair. There was no way, in the few hours remaining before Mr. Castiglia’s visit, to make a second pair of trousers even if they had matching material in stock. Nor was there any way to obscure perfectly the cut in the fabric even with a marvelous job of mending.

While his fellow tailors kept insisting that the wisest move was to close the shop and leave a note for Mr. Castiglia pleading illness, or some other excuse that might delay a confrontation, Cristiani firmly reminded them that nothing could absolve him from his failure to deliver the
mafioso
’s suit on time and that it was mandatory to find a solution now, at once.

As the noon bell rang from the church in the main square, and as all the other stores in Maida began to close for the midday siesta, Cristiani grimly announced: “There will be no siesta for any of us today. This is not the time for food and rest—it is the time for sacrifice and meditation. So I want all of you to stay where you are, and think of something that may save us from disaster.…”

He was interrupted by some grumbling from the other tailors, who resented missing their lunch and afternoon nap; but Cristiani overruled them with a raised hand and immediately dispatched one of his apprentices to tell the tailors’ wives not to expect the return of their husbands until sundown. Then he instructed the other apprentices, including my father, to pull the draperies across the windows and to lock the shop’s
front and back doors. And then, for the next few minutes, Cristiani’s entire staff of a dozen men and boys, as if participating in a wake, quietly congregated within the walls of the darkened shop.

My father sat in one corner, still stunned by the magnitude of his misdeed. Near him sat other apprentices, irritated at my father but nonetheless obedient to their master’s order that they remain in confinement. In the center of the workroom, seated among his tailors, was Francesco Cristiani, a small, wiry man with a tiny moustache, holding his head in his hands and looking up every few seconds to glance again at the trousers that lay before him, as if to remind himself that the knee slash was
real
and would not simply disappear with the next blink of an eye.

Several minutes later, with a snap of his fingers, Cristiani rose to his feet. Although he was barely five feet, six inches tall, his erect carriage, fine styling, and panache lent substance to his presence. There was also a gleam in his eyes now as he looked around the room.

“I think I have thought of something,” he announced slowly, pausing to let the suspense build until he had everyone’s total attention.

“What is it?” asked his most senior tailor.

“What I can do,” Cristiani continued, “is make a cut across the
right
knee that will exactly match the damaged left knee, and …”

“Are you crazy?” interrupted the older tailor.

“Let me finish, you imbecile!” Cristiani shouted, pounding his small fist on the table; “…  and then I can sew up both cuts of the trousers with decorative seams that will match exactly, and later I will explain to Mr. Castiglia that he is the first man in this part of Italy to be wearing trousers designed in the newest fashion, the knee-seamed fashion—the latest rage of Paris, or London, or Vienna, or …”

As his voice trailed off, the others listened with astonishment.

“But
maestro
,” one of the younger tailors said, in a cautious tone of respect, “won’t Mr. Castiglia notice, after you introduce this ‘new fashion,’ that we tailors ourselves are not wearing trousers that follow this fashion?”

Cristiani raised his eyebrows slightly.

“A good point,” he conceded, as a pessimistic mood returned to the room. And then again his eyes flashed and he said: “But we
will
follow the fashion! We will make cuts in
our
knees and then sew them up with seams similar to Mr. Castiglia’s.” Before the men could protest, he quickly added: “But we will
not
be cutting up our own trousers. We’ll use those trousers we keep in the widows’ closet!”

Immediately everyone turned toward the locked door of a closet in
the rear of the workroom, within which were hung dozens of suits last worn by men now dead—suits that bereaving widows, not wishing to be reminded of their departed spouses, had passed on to Cristiani in the hope that he would give the clothing away to passing strangers who might wear them in distant villages and towns.

Now Cristiani was planning to revive the trousers of the dead with his slashed-knee fashion; and while his fellow tailors were initially appalled by the idea, they were soon swayed by the exuberance with which he flung open the closet door, pulled several pairs of trousers off the suit hangers, and tossed them to his tailors, urging a quick try-on. He himself was already standing in his white cotton underwear and black garters, searching for a pair of trousers that might accommodate his slight stature; and when he succeeded, he slipped them on, climbed up on the table, and stood momentarily like a proud model in front of his men. “See,” he said, pointing to the length and width, “a perfect fit.”

As the other tailors began to pick and choose from the wide selection of clothing discarded by the widows, Cristiani was now down from the table, off with the trousers, and, holding a scissors in his hand, carefully beginning to cut across the right kneecap of the
mafioso
’s pants, duplicating the already damaged left knee. Then he applied similar incisions to the knees of the trousers he had chosen to wear himself.

“Now, pay close attention,” he called out to his men as he sat on a stool in his underwear, with the two pairs of trousers spread before him. With a flourish of his silk-threaded needle, he applied the first stitch to the dead man’s trousers, piercing the lower edge of the torn knee with an inner stitch that he adroitly looped to the upper edge—a bold, circular motion that he repeated several times until he had securely reunited the center of the knee with a small, round embroidered wreathlike design half the size of a dime.

Then he proceeded to sew, on the right side of the wreath, a half-inch seam that was slightly tapered and tilted upward at the end; and, after reproducing this seam on the left side of the wreath, he had created a minuscule image of a distant bird with spread wings, flying directly toward the viewer, a bird that most resembled a peregrine falcon. Cristiani thus originated a trouser style with wing-tipped knees.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked his men who surrounded him, indicating by his offhanded manner that he did not really care what they thought. As they shrugged their shoulders and murmured in the background, he peremptorily continued: “All right now, quickly, cut the knees of those trousers you’ll be wearing, and stitch them with the embroidered
design you’ve just seen.” Expecting no opposition, and receiving none, Cristiani lowered his head to concentrate entirely on his own task: to finish the second knee of the trousers he would wear and then to begin, meticulously, the job on Mr. Castiglia’s trousers.

In the latter’s case, not only did Cristiani plan to embroider a winged design with silk thread that matched exactly the shade of the thread used on the buttonholes of the jacket of Mr. Castiglia’s suit, but he also would insert a section of silk lining within the front part of the trousers, extending from the thighs to the shins, that would protect Mr. Castiglia’s knees from the scratchy feel of the embroidered inner stitching, and would also diminish the friction against the knee seams when Mr. Castiglia was out promenading at the
passeggiata
.

For the next two hours, everyone worked in feverish silence. As Cristiani and the other tailors affixed the winged design on the knees of all the trousers, the apprentices helped with the minor alterations, sewing on buttons, ironing cuffs, and attending to other details that would make the dead men’s trousers as presentable as possible on the bodies of the tailors. Francesco Cristiani, of course, allowed none but himself to handle the
mafioso
’s garments; and as the church bells rang, signaling the end of the siesta, Cristiani scrutinized with admiration the stitching that he had done, and he privately thanked his namesake in heaven, Saint Francis of Paola, to whom he had been praying throughout this ordeal, for his inspired guidance with the needle.

Now there was the sound of activity in the square: the jingles of horse-drawn wagons, the cries of food vendors, the voices of shoppers passing back and forth along the cobblestone road in front of Cristiani’s doorstep. The window draperies of the shop had just been opened, and my father and another apprentice were posted beyond the door with instructions to call in with words of warning as soon as they caught a glimpse of Mr. Castiglia’s carriage.

Inside, the tailors stood in a row behind Cristiani, famished and fatigued, and hardly comfortable in their dead men’s trousers with wing-tipped knees; but their anxiety and fear concerning Mr. Castiglia’s forthcoming reaction to his Easter suit dominated their emotions. Cristiani, on the other hand, seemed unusually calm. In addition to his newly acquired brown trousers, the cuffs of which touched his buttoned shoes with cloth tops, he wore a lapeled gray waistcoat over a striped shirt with a rounded white collar adorned by a burgundy cravat and pearl stickpin. In his hand, on a wooden hanger, he held Mr. Castiglia’s three-piece gray herringbone
suit, which, moments before, he had softly brushed and pressed for the final time. The suit was still warm.

At twenty minutes after four, my father came running through the doorway, and, in a high voice that could not betray his panic, he announced:
“Sta arrivando!”
—He’s coming. Moments later a black carriage, drawn by two horses, clangorously drew to a halt in front of the shop. After the rifle-toting coachman hopped off to open the door and extend his hand up toward his passenger, the portly dark figure of Vincenzo Castiglia descended the two steps to the sidewalk, followed by a lean man in a wide-brimmed hat, long cloak, and studded boots.

Mr. Castiglia removed his gray fedora and with a handkerchief wiped the road dust from his brow. He entered the shop, where Cristiani hastened forward to greet him and, holding the new suit high on its hanger, proclaimed: “Your wonderful Easter costume awaits you!” Mr. Castiglia shook hands and examined the suit without comment; then, after politely refusing Cristiani’s offer of a drop of wine, he directed his bodyguard to help him remove his jacket so that he could immediately try on his Easter apparel.

Cristiani and the other tailors stood quietly nearby, watching the holstered pistol strapped to Castiglia’s chest sway with his movements as he extended his arms and received over his shoulders the gray lapeled waistcoat, followed by the broad-shouldered jacket. Inhaling as he buttoned up his waistcoat and jacket, Mr. Castiglia turned toward the three-sectioned mirror next to the fitting room; and after inspecting and admiring the reflection of himself from every angle, and seeing as well the unblinking eyes of a half-dozen tailors, and then turning toward his bodyguard, who nodded approvingly, Mr. Castiglia commented in a commanding voice:
“Perfetto!”