Unto the Sons (73 page)

Every customer who approached him at this time requested that he enlarge the width of their trousers or skirts, suits or coats. Joseph remembered the people of Maida as characteristically lean, if not actually underfed. Maida was part of the undercultivated, overpopulated south; it was occupied by highlanders and coastline settlers who favored seafood, rice, beans, and pasta with limited amounts of sauce. Joseph knew his grandfather Domenico and others in Maida to be slender vegetarians; and none of the patrons of Cristiani’s tailor shop could be described as obese except for the late
mafioso
Vincenzo Castiglia.

But the Maida natives in Ambler were undoubtedly being thickened by what Joseph could only assume was their greater assimilation of the heavier American diet: more beef, less seafood; more milk, butter, bacon, and eggs than had been available in Italy; soft and heavily larded white American bread instead of the brown whole wheat loaves baked daily by Joseph’s mother and most other women in Maida. Here in Ambler the Italians cooked more with butter and less with olive oil, as Joseph had noticed during Sunday-dinner preparations at the boardinghouse. While Italian olive oil and other old-country staples could be purchased in South Philadelphia’s Little Italy, or even locally at Palermo’s small grocery shop, such imported items were more expensive than American-made substitutes. Clearly, many Italians in Ambler cared more about saving a few pennies than gaining a few pounds.

Joseph noticed that his uncles seemed heavier than they had been in Maida, and he wondered if they had shunned their suits because they could no longer fit into them. This certainly was true of the local Italian priest, who had visited Joseph one day and confessed to having gained more than twenty pounds in six months. Addicted to American pies and ice cream, the priest was now too fat for his suits and his cassocks. Joseph volunteered to enlarge his entire wardrobe free of charge, but the priest insisted that Joseph be paid. He eventually paid him a total of sixteen dollars in cash, plus a largesse in plenary indulgences.

From his earnings as a tailor, and the payments from Muscatelli, Joseph was averaging close to forty-five dollars a week. He was increasing the sums sent to Maida, and he was finally able to convince his uncles to allow him to start reducing his debt to them. The winter of 1922 was quite satisfying to Joseph, even though he was often physically exhausted. Sometimes he would sew through the night by candlelight, almost semiconsciously
following the silver needle as it wormed its way in and out of the fabric; then, at five forty-five, he would be startled by the first sounds of a factory whistle. After quickly splashing water on his face at the basin, and jumping into his tailored overalls that his uncles had outgrown long before, Joseph would arrive at the construction site at six, ready for work outdoors.

But it was not only his fatiguing schedule that would influence his decision to leave Ambler and his high earnings there. One morning not long after Muscatelli had made him his assistant, Joseph noticed on a list of new workers hired by Devine a surname the same as his own—another Talese was in Ambler, although Joseph had never met this person in Maida, or been aware of his existence. When Joseph mentioned this to his uncles later that night, both Anthony and Gregory solemnly advised him to keep his distance from this other Talese.

“There was bad blood many years ago between this fellow’s grandfather and your own grandfather Domenico,” Anthony explained. “This other grandfather was either a brother, a half brother, or a cousin to Domenico, and when he died your grandfather swindled some property from this man’s heirs, or at least he tried to. This man in Ambler today is one of those heirs. He also has other relatives in Ambler. So,” Anthony went on, “I think you should be careful.”

Not knowing exactly what being “careful” meant as far as proceeding with his daily life, and receiving no further advice from either uncle, Joseph merely stored away the information and categorized it as yet another potential encumbrance that had followed him from the Old World to this peculiar place in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile he worked through the late winter in close proximity to Muscatelli, making no effort to meet his Talese kinsman; and the latter never stepped forward and made himself known to Joseph.

Around this time Joseph did meet and befriend a young Philadelphia tailor whose father and uncle were asbestos workers in Ambler, and who had been introduced to him by the grateful local priest whose clothing Joseph had altered. The tailor was a few years older than Joseph, and had worked in Naples prior to finding employment in Philadelphia. Recently he had been laid off in Philadelphia because of a cutback at the department store where he worked, and for this reason he was living temporarily with his father in Ambler. But the tailor, who commuted to Philadelphia each day in search of a new job, was optimistic about finding one, and he promised that when he did, he would use his contacts to get Joseph hired as a full-time tailor as well. Joseph was very appreciative and hopeful that
this could be done; and after his friend had been hired by Pincus Brothers, a Philadelphia clothing firm, he visited Joseph to tell him the good news and also reassure him that he would soon find him a position.

“But first I’d like you to do me a small favor,” the tailor said. Joseph replied that he would be happy to comply in any way he could.

“I’d like to be introduced to your niece,” the man told Joseph.

“Niece?” Joseph asked. “I have no niece.”

“Well, I’d heard from the priest that you’re related to that pretty young girl who lives two doors away, in that other boardinghouse.”

“Oh, she’s not my niece,” Joseph said. “She’s the daughter of my uncle Anthony’s wife’s sister. Her name is Angela. But I hardly know her.”

“I hear she visits your place all the time, and helps your aunt with the laundry.…”

“Yes,” said Joseph, “but Angela’s very shy and very religious.”

“I am, too,” the older tailor insisted. “The priest will vouch for me. I just want you to arrange for me to meet her someplace. I’d just like to talk to her for a few minutes in private, and try to get to know her a little.”

While Joseph did not feel entirely comfortable about this request, he had no reason to doubt the honorable intentions of his new friend, nor was he unappreciative of his friend’s promised efforts in his own behalf. He also knew that Angela, who was perhaps not yet seventeen and had come to Ambler from Maida a year before, lived a very sheltered life under the constant scrutiny of her parents and kinfolk in this Italian habitat, and he knew that his friend could never talk privately to Angela unless he, Joseph, took steps to become the intermediary.

“All I can do is try,” Joseph told his friend.

“You won’t regret it,” his friend said with a smile and a handshake as he left the boardinghouse.

One afternoon days later, when Joseph noticed Angela hanging clothes on the line and knew that his aunt and the other woman were out on errands, he put aside his sewing and approached her.

“Angela, please forgive me,” he began softly, as she turned and faced him with a look of timid suspicion, her outstretched hands still holding the wooden pins that pinched a soggy pair of men’s white underdrawers to the line. “But I have a friend who would like to meet you.”

Angela’s dark eyes looked downward, and her furrowed brow now forced her heavy eyebrows together above her nose, and she began to blush.

“Angela, don’t worry,” Joseph went on in a tone that sounded unconvincing
even to him, for he was totally lacking in experience as an internuncio in romantic matters, and he was also upset by the discomfort he seemed to be causing her. “Angela,” he pressed on anyway, “he only wants to meet you, to say a few words.… Perhaps you can tell me when you’re going to confession, and I can tell him, and he can meet you outside the church.…”

Angela now began to tremble, her outstretched hands on the pins shaking as if the clothesline were electrically charged. She was a martyr suffering in silence, and Joseph could only back away and say repeatedly, “Angela, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Please forget what I said, Angela.…”

Not only did Angela not forget, but, seeing her mother passing along the road with an armload of groceries, Angela ran tearfully toward her and reported Joseph’s request in such a way that her mother suddenly saw him as an evil broker wishing to prostitute her daughter’s virtue. As Angela’s mother shrieked on the sidewalk, Joseph ran back to his bedroom, locked the door behind him, and pulled down the shades.

But ten minutes later, he heard his uncle Anthony’s wife, Caroline Rocchino, pounding on the door, reproaching him for his insults to her sister’s daughter. Joseph, refusing to respond, began to pack his suitcase.

It was time for him to leave Ambler. He was ready to move on from this place with its castle, its enduring grudges, and its imported traditions of village virtue.

When his uncles returned from the factory that evening, their faces covered as usual with the white dust that they tracked home every night, Joseph said: “I’ve dishonored your house. I am sorry. I must go away.”

They both tried to convince him to change his mind, saying that it was all a misunderstanding; but Caroline remained cool to him, as did the other woman in the house, and later that night, as Joseph sat sewing alone in his room, he could hear a boisterous argument coming from the porch of the boardinghouse two doors away. He recognized his uncles’ voices, and that of Angela’s father, and he again heard the shrieks of her mother, while imagining as well the blushing presence of the desired but diffident Angela.

He buried his head in the heap of clothing that he had been entrusted to expand in size, and fell asleep at the table, a threaded needle dangling above the tops of his shoes. At five forty-five he was aroused by the factory whistle, but for the first time he felt physically unfit to report for work. He had chest pains. He could not breathe normally. Nevertheless
he forced himself up, dressed as quickly as he could, and ran out the back door and across the tracks toward the construction site. Embarrassed that he was ten minutes late, he apologized to Muscatelli. The foreman turned around, studied him, and said: “Joseph, you don’t look good. You look like all the blood’s been drained out of you.”

“I’ll be all right,” Joseph said; but by midmorning he was so dizzy he thought he would faint, and Muscatelli insisted on driving him to the home of one of the factory’s night workers who had served with the Italian medical corps on the Austrian front during the war. The former medic had returned home from work shortly before their arrival, and his heavy snoring could be heard from the second story as Muscatelli rapped on the door. His knock brought forth an angry wife who opened the door only a few inches and yelled: “He’s asleep!”

“Wake him up!” Muscatelli yelled back.

The snoring stopped, and the awakened man upstairs began to swear. Muscatelli took this as an invitation to barge into the house, and, with one arm helping the wobbly Joseph up the steps, he entered the bedroom.

“This is an emergency!” he announced to the startled medic, a small man with a long nose who had been sleeping with a towel over his head to keep out the daylight. “Take this boy’s pulse. See what’s wrong with him.”

Lifting his head from the pillow, the former medic obediently reached out to hold Joseph’s right wrist. Joseph stood quietly at the edge of the bed for a few moments.

“This boy’s got no pulse,” he said finally, looking wonderingly at Muscatelli.

“Get him some water, then,” Muscatelli said. “Let him lie down, keep him warm. I’ll go to his house for some clean clothes, and then I’ll be back to take him to a doctor I know in Philadelphia.”

Joseph’s uncles were at work when Muscatelli arrived at the boardinghouse, but Caroline Rocchino was there to lead Muscatelli to Joseph’s room; and she was not noticeably remorseful when Muscatelli, carrying away the suitcase that Joseph had packed earlier, told her that the ailing young man might not be back for a while.

After Joseph had changed his clothes at the onetime medic’s house, he entrained for Philadelphia with Muscatelli and was taken to the South Philadelphia home of a physician who had been a boyhood friend of Muscatelli’s in Maida. Dr. Fabiani greeted the foreman with warm kisses and excused himself from the patients who sat in the alcove awaiting his
care. The white-coated, effusive physician insisted that Muscatelli and Joseph follow him to his private den in the rear, where they could have fresh coffee and a piece of his wife’s just baked cake.

“My dear friend,” Muscatelli politely interrupted, “this boy here is very sick.”

“Oh?” the doctor asked nonchalantly, as if wondering whether that was reason enough to delay tasting the cake. “Well,” he said finally, leading Joseph into a tiny examining room off the hall, “let’s step in here for a second and have a look.”

Joseph had removed his shirt, and the doctor listened to his breathing through the stethoscope, but his manner was no less ingratiating than when he had proposed tasting the cake.

“There’s nothing really wrong with this boy,” he announced cheerfully. “All he needs is a little fresh air.” Then, turning toward Muscatelli, the doctor asked: “Do you remember our little friend in Maida whose father was the shepherd?”

“Guardacielo?” Muscatelli asked.

“
Yes
, Guardacielo,” the doctor repeated. “Well, our little friend Guardacielo has become a big man in Atlantic City. He owns a hotel down there. It’s the first hotel you come to after you get off the train. And I think it will do this boy good to go down there. A few days by the sea, his lungs will be clear, he’ll be good as new.”

Dr. Fabiani took his prescription pad and wrote Joseph a note of introduction to Guardacielo, then handed it to him along with an envelope containing pills for his wheezing. Three hours later, after Muscatelli had taken Joseph to the Philadelphia terminal and bought him a rail ticket to Atlantic City, Joseph was traveling alone through the swamplands of southern New Jersey, feeling better already. He was tired, but no longer dizzy. The sooty air floating through the railcar was a marked improvement over Ambler’s polluted sky. The car was nearly empty; it was mid-April, hardly yet the season for sunbathers. In the overhead rack was Joseph’s suitcase, containing most of his personal possessions, including nearly seventy-five dollars in savings, half of which he had planned to mail to his mother at the end of the month.