Unto the Sons (89 page)

When he returned to the apartment, Rosso screamed on seeing his daughter seated at the kitchen table reading a tabloid.

“Where were
you?
” he demanded. But she immediately jumped to her feet, pointed an accusing finger, and spoke in a tone so strident that it brought the rest of the family rushing into the room: “You were
spy
-ing on me!” she said. “And that is dis-
gust
-ing.”

Rosso stared at her uncomprehendingly for a moment, while his wife
and children stood between them, looking at one another in silence. Finally Rosso turned toward Angelina, saying some curse words in dialect, and then with a shrug left the kitchen and headed back down to the garage.

“I’m getting married,” Susan then announced to her older sister, Theresa, who had been keeping her distance in the corner. “And
he
is not in-vite-ted.”

Theresa interpreted the news to her mother, who removed a handkerchief from her apron pocket and began to cry. Susan’s younger sister Catherine, who was twenty, also began to cry, while fifteen-year-old Julia and thirteen-year-old Lena jumped up and down, cheering.

“Am I invited?” Julia asked.

“Cer-tain-ly,” Susan replied. “Everybody is
in-vite-ted
, except
him!
” She pointed down toward the floor. “
Him
, he stays home!”

“Oh, you can’t do that,” Theresa said, imploringly.

“Ha!”
replied Susan.

The marriage of Susan di Paola and Nicholas Pileggi was set for December 4, 1927, at a Catholic church in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, a few blocks from Rosso’s garage. The couple had accumulated enough money between them to pay for the wedding, and the cost of the reception would be minimal: a nightclub owner friendly to Nicholas would donate the food and beverages, and Nicholas’s colleagues in the band would provide the music. After considerable pleading from her mother and sisters (the older two threatened to boycott the wedding if Susan persisted in excluding their father), Susan finally relented. But since initially she had not sought his permission to get married, thereby depriving her father of an opportunity to deny it, he coolly rebuffed her.

So she decided to ask her only brother, John, a robust young man of seventeen, to escort her to the altar. John di Paola was never known to deny a favor to any of his sisters, although outside the family he had a reputation for being brusque and bellicose. As a boy he had tied his mother’s heaviest flatirons to the ends of a broken broomstick to form a piece of weightlifting equipment, and then had built up his body for the combative days that he foresaw for himself, and that he would help to provoke. His formal education at Brooklyn’s P.S. 9 had ended with his punching a seventh-grade teacher who had called him “dago”; after his expulsion he had spent most of his time at Stillman’s Gymnasium on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, working with a trainer who believed he could become a leading welterweight or middleweight contender. Although John appeared to be fulfilling his potential as a knockout puncher in Golden Gloves competition,
and in his early professional bouts in small arenas where he was billed as “the Kid from Park Slope,” the nasal surgery that he underwent after his bloodiest triumph left him with the option of retiring from the ring with his profile preserved, or continuing his pugilistic career and risking the possibility that the plastic bridging within his nose would become shattered in such a way as to induce retinitis and vision impairment.

John chose to retire, but reluctantly, because now he had fewer excuses for absenting himself from his father’s garage, where his presence was demanded as an attendant, a car washer, and his father’s replacement to drive Mr. Ochse two nights a week to the
puttana
—to say nothing of having to drive
her
on occasions when she had heavy shopping to do in Brooklyn or across the bridge in lower Manhattan. More dangerous if less boring to John was having to drive one of the bakery trucks late at night to deliver cargo to a pier on the Brooklyn side of the East River—substituting for the baker’s nephew while the latter recovered from gunshot wounds in the legs. John would learn that the baker’s trucks were intruding into the bootlegging territory of the gangster Dutch Schultz and, before he resettled himself full-time in Chicago, of Al Capone.

In an effort to escape the drudgery, the servitude, and the bullets that came with working in Rosso’s garage, a month before his sister’s wedding John had applied to Bell Telephone for a job as a lineman. One of the business executives who parked his sedan in the garage said he could get John hired, and did; and had it been necessary, Susan stood ready to use her influence within her division of the company as a means of returning John’s favor in escorting her to the altar. But days before the wedding, and without explanation, Rosso abruptly changed his mind: he would be attending after all! So after Angelina had sponged and pressed her husband’s coachman’s morning coat and striped trousers, which he had last worn to their wedding twenty-five years before, and after he had loaded up the limousine with his wife, the four bridesmaids, and the bride, Rosso drove them to the church—where he later accompanied Susan up the aisle, two incongruous redheads impelled by circumstances briefly to follow the same path.

There were nearly two hundred people in attendance, most of them Brooklyn Italians with ties to Maida, but there were also a number of young women from Irish and Jewish families who were Susan’s coworkers at the telephone company, in addition to several of Rosso’s customers from the garage, who provided the enthusiasm that Rosso lacked on witnessing the first marriage of his five daughters. The baker was there with his wife and her widowed sister (the mother of the baker’s nephew who
got shot); and also present was Angelina’s uncle who had introduced her to Rosso in 1902, and the uncle’s thirty-year-old son, who had provided the bridal party with flowers from his floral shop and who had already gained distinction within the family for his habit of wearing steel-lined black hats.

Near the front of the church, behind the bridal party, sat Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Ochse, who initially had
not
been invited by Susan (how could she invite
them
, and not their
driver
, her father?); but after Rosso had invited himself, Susan had dispatched her sister Catherine to the Ochses’ manor to urge them personally to attend while at the same time apologizing that their invitation had gotten lost because of brother John’s carelessness while posting it earlier—to which Mrs. Ochse responded: “Yes, that sounds just like John.” She had been recently upset with him when, shortly before dinner guests of hers were to arrive, he delivered a box of groceries to her home that she had
not
ordered. She would have been
more
upset had she known that what she had ordered had been mistakenly left by John at the apartment of her husband’s mistress.

Mrs. Ochse’s opinion of John was in contrast to the affection she extended to his sister Catherine, who was the prettiest and most shy of the five di Paola sisters, and the one whom Mrs. Ochse most often welcomed into the manor to play with her two daughters who were close to Catherine’s age. Catherine happened to be in the manor when Mrs. Ochse received the tragic news that her two older children, a son and daughter, had both drowned off the Irish coast while traveling with their guardian to Liverpool, after the passenger ship they were on, the
Lusitania
, was sunk by a German submarine on the assumption that the British liner was armed and heavily loaded with explosives. The incident had occurred in early May 1915, shortly after Catherine’s eighth birthday; and although the tearful Frederick Ochse had repeatedly read aloud in the living room the sad telegram he had received from the Cunard office in Britain, and despite the radio announcements and newspaper headlines that continuously publicized the disaster, Mrs. Ochse refused to acknowledge the loss of their children, insisting that they had somehow escaped the fate that had taken the lives of nearly twelve hundred others on board.

In the years that followed, Mrs. Ochse would always tell Catherine that the missing children would surely be discovered alive and well; and although she once pleaded with Catherine to take home the doll that had been her dead daughter’s favorite—a large, beautifully dressed china doll that Catherine would cherish for the rest of her life—Mrs. Ochse would never part with any of the two children’s clothing, even while conceding
that they had long before outgrown everything. Often while Catherine played in the manor with the younger daughters, she would notice the elegant gray-haired Mrs. Ochse sitting alone in the parlor knitting largesized sweaters that, she let it be known, she was hastening to finish before her two older children’s return. Sometimes Catherine would see Mrs. Ochse sitting with her eyes closed, and with no ball of wool in her lap; and yet her hands were still busy, knitting now with imaginary needles.

After witnessing Susan’s church wedding, Mrs. Ochse said she did not feel well enough to attend the reception, whereupon Catherine accompanied her home with Mr. Ochse, with John doing the driving. Then Catherine and John joined the other celebrants at a rented hall for dinner and dancing. It was there that Catherine met the groom’s dapper cousin, the tailor from New Jersey.

43.

J
oseph traveled to the wedding in a secondhand Buick roadster in mint condition that he had purchased for $975 after junking his exhausted and disfigured Ford, which he had sideswiped against a stalled trolley. The Buick had a turquoise body with black fenders, a new set of tires with mahogany-spoked wheels, a rumble seat that the previous owner had furnished with a fur blanket and a flask, and a Rolls-Royce hood ornament that had somehow come into the possession of Mister Bossum, who had screwed it on the day before Joseph’s departure for Brooklyn.

Delighted with the gift, Joseph motored northward with his eyes peering over the upraised wings of the silver statuette, feeling airborne throughout the five-hour journey—gliding over the misty marshlands, hovering below the clouds through the north Jersey highlands, swooping down into the newly opened Holland Tunnel, then soaring up again between the steel cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. His spirit was still soaring as he made his way back on the following day; but the reason now was Catherine, with whom he had danced almost exclusively throughout the reception, to the chagrin of the saxophone player who had met her a month earlier through Nicholas Pileggi and had greatly fancied her. But
she had already agreed to see Joseph again on the following weekend, which was all Joseph had thought about during the 135-mile journey back to the island—not noticing until he had arrived that someone in Brooklyn had stolen the winged figure off the hood.

Joseph mourned it briefly and replaced it with the plainer ornament that had come with the Buick, and traveled no less blithely to Brooklyn on the next Sunday in time to meet Catherine at noon outside the church where Susan had been married. He and Catherine took a slow ride through Prospect Park and had lunch at a small restaurant overlooking the East River, and thus began a series of Sunday meetings that would continue throughout 1928. Each rendezvous ended before late afternoon, as both Joseph and Catherine had to be up early for work on Monday (Catherine was in her third year at Abraham & Straus’s dress department in Brooklyn, and had recently been promoted to assistant buyer), and the couple also preferred to keep their Sunday arrangements private and beyond the criticism of her father.

But perhaps Susan’s earlier confrontation with Rosso had resigned him to the futility of trying to regulate romance; and if he had any knowledge that Catherine was seeing Joseph, he never questioned her about it, nor did he indicate anything but indifference to her announcement within the household during the Christmas holidays of 1928 that she and Joseph planned to marry in the following June.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Rosso asked her in the same tone of voice he might well have directed to a stranger threatening to jump off a cliff.

“Yes,” Catherine said.

“Then do it,” he said somberly, in what passed for his permission.

Catherine married Joseph on June 8, 1929, in the church where Susan had been married, and in front of many of the same people—except instead of telephone company personnel, there were A&S employees who two evenings earlier had given Catherine a farewell party after work in the store. Rosso escorted Catherine up the aisle as stiffly as he had Susan, and later he placed in Joseph’s car a gift-wrapped short-wave radio, which was the same wedding present he had given Susan, and would give to his son and three other daughters when they too would marry.

When Catherine said good-bye to her family and friends after the reception, there was no doubt in her mind that she was distancing herself most likely forever from all that had been familiar, but she showed no signs of regret. She welcomed the chance to escape the claustrophobic feelings she had long known as one of six children in an oppressive Italo-American
family—she was the third born, but always the first to close her door, often preferring the company of her gift doll from the manor to that of her sisters above the garage.

Mrs. Ochse had convinced her that the world was larger than Brooklyn, but Catherine had not ventured much beyond her borough until the twilight of her wedding day, when she rode next to her husband in the roadster as it passed the gleaming tiles of the Holland Tunnel, then rumbled through small rustic towns with Indian names, the automobile’s headlights flashing now and then on stray dogs and deer ambling along the tree-lined roadside, and later illuminating the fog that floated across the last bridge leading to the island that would become her home and retreat. Here everyone spoke English; the Protestants were predominant; the grocer sold only sliced white bread; women drove cars and were as socially forthright as the men. It was the New World to Catherine, and for the first time she felt more like a United States citizen than a resident of an ethnic neighborhood. She soon learned to drive. She registered to vote. And she applied for a bank loan so that she could open a dress shop next to her husband’s tailor shop, and she was prevented from getting it only because the local bank suddenly closed in the wake of the financial crash of 1929. And yet she remained optimistic during the Depression years, so that when her first child, a son, was born in February 1932, in a small white house that she and her husband fortunately had paid off without a mortgage, she insisted that their son not answer to the name of his Italian grandfather Gaetano, but should be known instead by the more American and cheerful-sounding “Gay.”