43
My father is a baker, I like to say: he bakes cars. He owns a body shop in the South Bronx and fixes cars from all over the borough. He never asks anyone for registration papers. A guy wants a black car painted pink? Why not? You want certain numbers filed off the engine block? Step right up. The old man does good work. He has a good eye for color, and he can do anything with his hands. He could’ve been a sculptor in another life. I guess when he was young he didn’t have the choices a lot of people get in this world. Before he got the body shop he worked in a gas station, and before that he fought World War II.
But in a weird way I always thought that my father’s father was my real father. He lived three blocks away from us, in a tiny apartment packed with books and magazines and old brown photographs. Their family was from Florence, in Tuscany, and they were always Reds. They didn’t mean what we mean by a Red. Grandpa was some kind of socialist anarchist. He thought everything in the country should be shared by the people. Food, the ports, oil, big industry, every fucking thing. Nobody should starve. Nobody should be unemployed. Everybody should have a doctor. You know, real terrible disgusting stuff that would destroy the United States if we had it. But then Grandpa also felt that if there was a government, he was against it. “Ideas are wonderful,” he would shout, in the apartment, with his books everywhere, pulling on his white beard, his arms flying around. “Abstractions are wonderful. Love is wonderful and justice is wonderful and the common good? Most wonderful of all. But the son of a bitching politicians will always sell you out or put you in the dungeon.”
He married a woman from Siena. I don’t remember her. She died in the early thirties, after my father was born. There were pictures of her around, though, and she seemed thin and a little afraid, standing in Coney Island or out at the Statue of Liberty, her eyes looking at you like she didn’t know what the fuck she was doing in this country. Grandpa himself would never say exactly why he came to New York. There was some trouble in the Old Country, he’d say, that’s all. I could never find out what it was, but it must’ve had something to do with him being a Red.
He had beautiful handwriting when he was young. They call it calligraphy now. Just beautiful, done with goose feathers, he said, and with special black inks he bought from some Chinaman on Chatham Square. When he and his wife first came here, he worked in a horse-and-buggy place during the day, and at night he would write these beautiful business cards for rich people—wedding invitations and diplomas, all that kind of thing. His wife was always mad at him because he spent all the extra money on books instead of clothes or things for the house. I’ve seen a few of them, on cardboard that’s yellow now, ones he did for his sample case, that he’d take around to these mansions on Fifth Avenue, him with his lousy English, and they’d laugh and say hey, a Wop who can write!
Then he got hurt in an accident and his hand, the one he used to write with, was all smashed up and the doctors amputated his forefinger. It must of broke his fuckin heart. Just telling you this, it almost breaks mine. But when he told me about it, a half a century later almost, he just shrugged. It was meant to be, he said. If it wasn’t one thing, it would have been another. I guess he was what they call a fatalist. But I didn’t really believe him when he just shrugged it off. I used to see him sometimes in a corner of the apartment, just staring at the hand.
He worked in a garage during the twenties; I guess that’s where my father got his thing for cars. But when the Depression came, Grandpa opened a grocery store in The Bronx, moved from the Lower East Side to Pleasant Avenue uptown and finally to the Bronx. “With the store, I knew we would always eat,” he said. “In the Depression, nobody drove cars.” After my grandmother died, the heart went out of him (everybody said) but he kept the store going. He lived upstairs and he always had something for me when I went over there, ice cream, tea, little pastries. And he would tell me about the books. Most of them were in Italian, but he told me I had to read them, that nobody who claimed to be civilized could live without these books: Dante, Machiavelli (The Discourses, he said, read them, the plans for a republic, and remember that The Prince was really a job application) and Leopardi and Manzoni and Guicciardini. He talked about these guys as if they were his personal friends. “Like Dante said once …” He knew Latin, and when I went to Cardinal Hayes he would get me to read Caesar and Cicero and Virgil out loud, telling me how to pronounce the words with passion, as if they were written by living breathing men, not dead guys, not professors. He made me love Latin. When it was my turn to read, the brothers and the priests didn’t know what the fuck I was up to. They were used to Latin sounding like a chant from the mass and not like a language that people used for giving orders and fucking women. I was good at it but I could never get the hang of Tacitus. Even Grandpa bitched about the man’s style.
He hated Mussolini with a passion and that is what caused all the trouble in the family. My father married a woman whose parents were from Sicily. The Siggies hated the old Garibaldi people, because when Garibaldi conquered Sicily he got rid of all the old fucks, the Mafia, the hustlers, the guys bleeding the poor, the landlords. My mother’s family thought people from Firenze (that’s what we always called Florence because that was its name) were snobs, faggots, commies. My other grandfather wouldn’t speak to Grandfather Infantino.
The families barely talked. Me and my sister were like prizes, passed back and forth from one family to the other. My mother was one of nine kids, so her side of the family acted like my Grandfather Infantino was some kind of faggot for only having two kids. But nobody had a monopoly on common sense. Grandpa couldn’t stand my mother either. I heard him call her “that Arab” once and didn’t know what he meant until I read how the Arabs were in Sicily for hundreds of years. They were opposites, those families; the Florentines were very clear about most things, a little cold, able to talk about subjects besides themselves. The Sicilians were hot, silent, and devious; I always felt there was something else going on, always; and then there would be those sudden explosions, screaming, yelling, even flat-out violence. It was like once a week someone got punched out. For staying out late. For flirting with some bad guy. For fucking up the toast. Anything would do as an excuse. My Aunt Marie got her jaw busted for going out with an Irish cop. My Aunt Marie was beaten with a belt for saying she didn’t believe in God—by the other grandfather, who didn’t even go to church. They were nuts.
But all during the war, we ate good. I gotta say that. We had my grandfather’s store and there were two of my uncles on my mother’s side who came around sometimes with steaks. They wore striped suits and pinkie rings and when they were there everybody whispered. I guess they were connected. Wise guys. I don’t know. Nobody ever explained. Even today, my mother just says, “They’re in business.” I know one thing: they didn’t go off and fight in the war.
My father did. That’s why I barely knew the guy. He was gone almost from the time I started remembering things. Then in ’44 he was in a place called the Hurtgen Forest and had part of his leg blown away. He came back home in the spring of ’45. He never told anyone he was on his way, just came home, two days after Easter, in uniform and on crutches. And when my mother went to the door to answer the knock and she saw him she started bawling. I didn’t know who the fuck he was. My sister Fioretta started bawling too; she’s three years older than me so she remembered him. They sent me over to get my grandfather and wow! That night! That night! There musta been two hundred people in the apartment, coming from all over, my mother’s people too, with trays of spaghetti, lasagna, ravioli, sodas, beer, whiskey. One guy had an accordion and they all started singing in English and Italian and every once in a while my mother would start bawling again. She never left my father’s side. Not once. The noise was beyond belief. I wanted it to go on forever, for a week, a month, a fucking year.
The next day, my father slept until three in the afternoon, like he was catching up on three years’ worth of sleep. My mother brought him breakfast in bed, pancakes and bacon and cold milk. And then she led him to the bathroom for a hot bath and that’s when I saw how he needed help, he needed to lean on her, he couldn’t walk without a crutch. He didn’t say anything to me or my sister. He didn’t complain. He just said to my mother, Okay, it’s okay, thanks, it’s okay.
He’d put on weight while he was away and didn’t fit into his civvies, so that first day we called Ralph the Tailor to come up the flat and he made measurements, all of them talking in Italian, and then the tailor went away and for the next four hours my father just sat by the window in the living room, in the big chair, dressed in a bathrobe, looking out at the street. He didn’t say a word to me. Not a fucking sentence. I was only eleven but I knew he had gone through some bad shit. I went to see my grandfather, to find out what I did wrong, whether it was my fault my father didn’t talk to me, and Grandpa said to me, “He will never be the same, so you better get used to it.” Now I meet some of these bullshitters in bars who tell you how they won the fucking war and I always think of my father on that first day, staring out the window, and I want to punch someone out.
I was getting pretty angry myself then. I was the top student in my class in grammar school, but the fucking Irish priests and nuns never encouraged me to do anything more. I was some kind of freak to them. I was Italian, so I had two choices: the Sanitation Department or the rackets. Somehow, around that time, I discovered that if I hit people on the chin they went down. That’s what got me some respect. Not that I could read Latin or I knew who Leopardi was, but that I could beat the shit out of somebody. My mother’s family began to approve of me at last. Some of my cousins saw me belt out two Irish guys at Orchard Beach one day and thought I was the next Rocky Graziano. They wanted me to start going to the gym, go in the Gloves; the two wiseguy uncles said they would take care of everything. I started to feel I was hot shit.
Then in 1947, when I graduated from grammar school, my grandfather sold the grocery store to a Puerto Rican and took me on a trip to Italy. He must have seen that I was on my way to being just another guinea hoodlum. He told me the trip was a gift for my good grades, but I always thought it was to save me from myself. And it was also a gift to himself. He hadn’t been back since 1900. More than half of his life. Part of it was, he wouldn’t go there while Mussolini was in power, part, he didn’t have the money, part, some kind of crazy pride (he wouldn’t go there as poor as the day he left). Now he wanted to see the Old Country. Just one more time.
I loved that fucking trip to Italy. Jesus Christ, I loved that trip. We went on a ship called the Genoa; it was all white and everybody spoke Italian and there were some war brides on board, and I thought they were the most beautiful women I ever saw in my life. Even the ones with the moustaches. I could understand most of what they were saying (from my father’s Italian and the Latin) and they made me so horny I whacked off five times a day, at least. At night, I would go out on deck with my grandfather and we’d stand next to the lifeboats and look out at the Atlantic with the moon shining and the waves slapping the hull and a band playing somewhere and I guess that’s where the Navy thing came from later.
On that trip, I started to think that Grandpa knew everything. He talked about the Mediterranean as the place where civilization came from, and he woke me up and dragged me to see Gibraltar when we went by in the night and showed me where Africa was and pointed toward where the Alps were and explained about the way all the rivers of Europe came from them. When we came into Genoa, he started to cry. Home at last.
Florence was pretty much a mess that year. There’d been some fighting there during the war and Grandpa’s old house on the Arno was gone. They were still repairing the bridges and the museums weren’t open yet because they were trying to figure out what was hidden and what the Germans stole and what had been destroyed. Most of the people he knew were dead or off to America or Argentina, but he didn’t seem to care. He showed me the house where my grandmother lived. It was a pension now, filled with students. And he showed me the place where Savonarola was burned at the stake. We sat at a table in a outdoor café and had coffee with a slice of lemon and he looked out and said, Leonardo walked here, and Michelangelo and Machiavelli. He talked like they were there when he was young. He told me to look at the light, too, the way the shadows fell. Clarity, he said. Always clarity. The clear light of Firenze. That’s why they painted that way he said, with passion. And he told me to look at the faces of the people. And he told me, no matter what anybody says, no matter what you feel when they call you Wop or Dago or Guinea, remember this day. Remember this place, remember where you came from.
We were back home three months when he died. And there ain’t a day goes by I don’t miss him. I graduated top of the class at Hayes and I wanted to go to college. But Korea broke out. We had no money (my mother blamed my grandfather for wasting the store money on the trip to Italy and my father wouldn’t ask the wiseguy in-laws for a dime). I had a girl at the time, an Irish girl from Brook Park. Her father didn’t approve of me, but at least I was white. She’s still my girl, I guess, but it seems like a long time ago. I decided if I went into the service I could go to college on the Bill when I came out. Study history or Latin. Teach, maybe. I know you don’t believe that, seeing me fuck around the way I do sometimes. But I mean it. Fucking around keeps me from going crazy. When I told my father I wanted to enlist, he said, Go in the Coast Guard, go in the Navy, go in the Air Force. Go anyplace, but don’t go in the goddamned infantry. And I thought of those nights with my grandfather, standing on the deck looking at the moon over the Mediterranean, and it wasn’t even a choice.
Maybe, when this Navy bit is finished, I’ll make that trip to Italy. Sometimes, just before I go to sleep, I see myself coming down a gangplank and there are people from customs and signs telling you where to go and a band playing music and everybody crying and laughing, and there, right down there in the crowd, waiting for me in Italy, is Grandpa.
Yeah.