As the dutiful only son of an exacting tailor who presumed to possess the precise measure of my body and soul, it was my unavoidable birthright to wear the customized clothes that reflected my father’s taste, advertised his trade, and reaffirmed his art with a needle and thread.
I became my father’s miniature mannequin soon after I learned to walk, and during winter I was draped in sturdy worsted coats and jackets with squarish shoulders and hand stitching on the edges of the lapels; on my head was a feathered felt fedora—slanted at an angle favored by my father—that was occasionally knocked off by the rowdy students with whom I rode the bus to parochial school.
Nearly all of my classmates were the children of the Irish-Catholic families that lived along the south Jersey marshlands on the other side of the bay. Catholicism was still a minority religion on this island, settled during the previous century by Protestant prohibitionists, yet the Irish-Catholics brandished absolute authority over my early education and my often-flattened fedora.
Each night I went to bed dreading the next morning’s ride on the bus, a rusting vehicle of a purplish-black shade that precisely matched the color of the robes worn by the nuns who dominated the classrooms. The school’s bus driver, Mr. Fitzgerald, was a crusty Dublin-born janitor who wore a tweed cap and whose breath exuded a sour blend of oatmeal and whiskey. In addition to his weekday job as driver and school janitor, he appeared each Sunday in the vestry of the church to help the elderly pastor dress for Mass and to help himself surreptitiously to the sacramental wine.
One Sunday morning in the vestry before the 10:15 Mass, as I was buttoning up my cassock in preparation for my duties as an altar boy, I watched as Mr. Fitzgerald (while lifting a lace-trimmed gown over the pastor’s head and shoulders) took quick, squint-eyed swallows from a tiny silver flask that he slipped in and out of his jacket. He assumed that his furtive drinking was observed by no one—until he turned to catch me staring at him from the far corner of the room.
Though I was momentarily stunned, I knew that I should convey some gesture of apology. But as I took a step toward him, Mr. Fitzgerald signaled with an upraised palm that I should keep my distance. Then he jabbed his index finger in the air toward me and pointed to a wall hook from which was hung a thin, six-foot-long wooden pole topped by a taper, used to light the tall candles that stood above the altar. I realized that I had forgotten to light the candles.
Quickly I moved through the doorway and, after lighting the taper at the end of the pole, entered the main body of the church. Among the waiting parishioners were my mother and father, sitting close to each other in the third row, two well-tailored Italians in a humble Irish-Catholic parish on a Protestant island, a minority within a minority.
Holding the front hem of my cassock, I climbed five steps to the base of the altar. I could barely see the highest points of the six towering candles; I had no view whatsoever of the wicks, because they were concealed within heavy gold rings that encircled the candle tips to prevent dripping.
Standing on my toes, I extended the long pole above my head toward the first candle. I waited resolutely, expectantly, while gazing up at the burning end of the pole and watching as it emitted wispy black veils of smoke. But the obstinate wick failed to ignite. I stood there patiently, stretching high, as my arms began to ache and my eyes watered. I heard the rustle of the congregation. Everyone was no doubt watching me. I took perverse satisfaction in the fact that I now commanded the attention of the entire church.
I now envisioned the wick as a poisonous spider lodged in the head of the candle whose long white neck I wanted to choke and singe in the manner that I had seen uncooperative enemy conspirators tortured in war films.
Hearing someone snicker, I glanced back toward the Mother Superior. But she had now taken her seat, and her eyes were rigidly focused straight ahead into vacant space.
Before I could further indulge my diabolical fantasy, I was startled by a snapping sound coming from behind me. Lowering the pole and turning toward my audience, I saw eight dark-robed nuns in the front row tilted forward in their seats, frowning; standing above them was the Mother Superior, snapping her fingers and leaning over the altar rail, trying to direct my attention to the candle that held the spider of my imagination.
Moving back a few paces on the platform, I looked up to see that the wick was burning brightly above the candle’s ring—and it had been burning for three or four minutes while I had stood daydreaming.
Hearing someone snicker, I glanced back toward the Mother Superior. But she had now taken her seat, and her eyes were rigidly focused straight ahead into vacant space. Behind the nuns were dozens of parishioners who sat with their faces pinched in expressions of pique, or with their mouths opened as they yawned—except for my parents, who sat with their heads slightly bowed, their eyes lowered as if in prayer.
Aware that I had lost my audience as well as whatever was left of my aplomb, I turned to face the five other candles—but not before noticing Mr. Fitzgerald at the vestry door, pointing anxiously at his wristwatch. Mass was now ten minutes late, thanks to my incompetence, and seeing Mr. Fitzgerald in such a fit of agitation caused me to panic; in haste, I began to swipe my fiery pole back and forth through the air within a fraction of an inch of the five unlit candle wicks.
Without looking up to see whether or not I had ignited the wicks, I headed toward the side door into the vestry. But as I disappeared through the doorway, my curiosity made me turn at the final moment to glance over my shoulder to sneak a peek at the upper ledge of the altar. The wicks of the candles were all miraculously aglow.
As Father Blake feebly picked up his chalice and readjusted his tricornered black cap, I took my place and walked out to the altar to begin the Mass that was now almost twenty minutes late.
For most of the next hour I fulfilled my prescribed functions by rote. I held the hem of Father Blake’s long vestments as he climbed the altar steps. I genuflected at the proper times. And I adroitly handled and poured from the cut-glass cruets the consecration water and the red wine that Mr. Fitzgerald had mercifully not consumed. I did not fail to ring the bell three times when the priest raised the host—nor did I forget my liturgical responses to the priest, even though, like most altar boys in the parish, I could translate hardly a word of the Latin I had been forced to memorize.
But at the point when I was to lift a heavy, cumbersome prayer book with its wooden stand and carry it from the right side of the altar to the left, I tripped on the hem of my cassock. My body fell heavily across the book and its stand, and I heard the sharp sound of splintered wood—and the groans of the congregation as my chin hit the floor behind the black heels of Father Blake.
Gallantly, he did not turn around, possibly because of his partial deafness, and as I slowly rose to my feet I hoisted the book on its fractured stand and carefully placed it atop the altar—where it rested at a lopsided angle. I shamefully slinked down the steps, fully prepared to occupy my rightful place in the purgatory of errant altar boys.
How I continued to serve out the rest of the Mass on that most miserable Sunday of my young life I will never know. For years thereafter the recollection of that morning could bring a blush to my face. When Mass finally ended, I felt relief but no escape from my humiliation. I pulled off and hung up my short white surplice and my cassock, then put on my topcoat and fedora and departed through the side door without saying goodbye.
I went directly to our car, which was parked a block away. It was a 1941 blue Buick coupe that my father had bought one month before the government’s metal-rationing policy. Opening the door and climbing into the back seat, I slumped low and pulled my hat forward, hoping to avoid notice by the passing pedestrians who might have witnessed my pathetic performance in church.
Through the windshield, I saw my parents approaching with my sister, and I moved up in the seat and awaited them with feelings of mild resentment. I did not want them to invade the quiet enclosure of the car.
My mother was wearing a beaver coat that my father had recently made slimmer and remodeled with a mink collar and cuffs—a coat that had hung unclaimed for years in the fur-storage vault of my parents’ store. This was one of several fur coats my mother had, some having been purchased new from a designer friend of my father’s, others having been inherited from storage customers who died without claimants or had bartered their furs in exchange for new dresses and suits during the Depression, or who had long abandoned them in the vault because the coat or cape or boa had now become outmoded and was no longer considered worth the cost of several years of unpaid storage bills.
Thus did my family’s legacy become festooned with fur pieces of every size and shape, and during sweltering summer afternoons I liked nothing better than to unlock the frosty vault that extended along one side of the store and to sidle swiftly down the rows of coats while nuzzling my face into the variegated pelts: the luxurious mink, the curly broadtail, the bristly raccoon, the deep, incredibly cool softness of chinchilla.
The car door opened, and my mother, in her beaver coat, entered the front seat.
“We were outside the church all this time looking for you,” my mother said, seeming more concerned than irritated. “Why didn’t you wait for us in front of the church?”
“I was too tired and cold,” I replied.
She said nothing as we all waited for my father to finish wiping the windshield. The sunlight that had shown through the glass was now subdued by clouds, and a sudden breeze blew dust and sand across the hood of the car, causing my father to close his eyes and hold on to his hat. He then opened the door and glanced at me in the back seat as if assessing my mood.
“We could drive to Philadelphia and have a good dinner, if we had the gas,” he said, alluding to the wartime fuel shortage. “But instead we’ll go tonight to Atlantic City.”
“They have homework,” my mother said.
“They have all afternoon to do their homework,” my father said. “We’ll go early enough and be back before ten.” Smiling at me through the rearview mirror, he seemed to understand my desire to escape, however briefly, the narrow boundaries of this island.
My mother unbuttoned my sister’s snowsuit as my father started up the Buick. We began the ten-minute ride to our apartment above the store. I gazed at my family in the front seat—my father in a tweed overcoat and brown fedora, my mother with her fur coat and black leather curved-brim hat, and my sister in a pink snowsuit trimmed with pieces of white rabbit fur that had been left over from one of my father’s alteration jobs.
He wasted nothing. The fur scraps left on his cutting table after he had shortened one customer’s coat would later reappear to decorate the pocket flaps or the collar or the hem of another customer’s cloth coat he had been paid to remodel. The creative skill he had once exhibited as a designer and cutter of men’s custom-made suits, a skill that in the current economy was reduced to a pauper’s art, was now put to profit in the repair and restyling of ladies’ furs.
Earlier that year, when fabric of every kind was rationed due to the war, I had watched my father one afternoon tear about one hundred small swatches of woolen material out of several sample books; then, after he had laid out the swatches on a table and arranged them into an interesting mosaic, he sewed the varicolored swatches together to form a large section of material from which he created a most uncommon hacking jacket. After lining it with satin, he proceeded to wear it around town with a vivid silk handkerchief sprouting immodestly from his breast pocket.
The Buick continued slowly uptown past the small hotels and rooming houses now closed for the winter. Most of the houses had turrets, dormered roofs, finials that seagulls stood upon, and spacious porches cluttered with upturned wicker sofas and deck chairs tied down against the whip of the wind.
Hardly anyone walked along the sidewalks. Except for the pharmacy and cigar store, there was a Sabbath ban on all businesses, including the town’s single cinema, where the marquee’s lettering read: THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME … CHARLES LAUGHTON, MAUREEN O’HARA
I listened absently while my parents exchanged shoptalk over my sister’s head as she snuggled between them reading the comics. The radio was tuned to a Philadelphia station that specialized in classical music, but there was so much static that the music was barely audible. Still, I knew that my father’s uncompromising commitment to that kind of music would prevent him from switching to one of the clearer stations featuring such popular bands as Benny Goodman’s or Tommy Dorsey’s, or the vocalists I liked to hear, such as Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole, or Frank Sinatra.
The fact that Sinatra was an Italo-American gained no concession from my father, who seemed irrationally resistant to any and all performers who appealed primarily to a youthful spirit or exemplified the latest fad. The objects of his displeasure included not only crooners but also the most celebrated new stars of Hollywood and the heralded figures of the sports world.
When my father was growing up, there were no games to be played. He passed through his adolescent years without knowing what it was like to be young. Among athletes, he regarded baseball players as the most excessively praised and the sport itself as the most tediously time-consuming, and his weary response to the game was escalated to an active dislike of it after I became, at the age of nine, a baseball addict.
I became hooked on baseball during the summer of 1941, as the New York Yankees’ center fielder, Joe DiMaggio, was breaking a major-league record by hitting in fifty-six successive games. Even on my provincial island, where the fans were exceedingly partial to the teams from Philadelphia, the New York slugger was admired by the crowds of people that gathered on the boardwalk or under the green-striped awning of a midtown grocery market where a radio loudly played a new song recorded by Les Brown’s band:
From Coast to Coast, that’s all you hear
Of Joe the One-Man Show
He’s glorified the horsehide sphere,
Jolting Joe DiMaggio …
Joe … Joe … DiMaggio … we
Want you on our side
One day as I strolled into my parents’ store whistling that tune, my father, who recognized it immediately, turned away and walked back to the cutting room, slowly shaking his head. I continued with my whistling, albeit less forcefully, throughout the day. I recognize this as perhaps my first sign of rebellion against my father, one that would intensify during the next two years, until I began to plan my escape from parochial school for when the Yankees would begin spring training in March 1944.
I would not have to go far. It had recently been announced that, due to wartime restrictions on travel, the Yankees would forgo Florida to train in Atlantic City. After reading this, I secretly marked the passage of each grim, cold day, anticipating a glorious spring in which I would travel by trolley across the marshlands to the rickety little stadium that would be ennobled by the presence of baseball’s World Champions. I revealed none of these plans to my father, of course, and I vowed that my rendezvous would be realized no matter what he said or did to justify his abnormal aversion to the national pastime.
If truth be told, however, I would one day understand my father’s lack of appreciation of sports. When he was a boy growing up during the First World War, there were no games to be played. Child labor was not only accepted but demanded by the destitute conditions of the day, and my father passed through his adolescent years without knowing what it was like to be young.
As he was quick to remind me whenever I complained about having to help out in the store, he had been forced to hold down two demanding jobs while attending grammar school. He rose at dawn to serve as a tailor’s apprentice in his uncle’s shop; later, after school, he toiled in the valley on his grandfather’s farm, which was short of workers because men had been conscripted by the Italian army since 1914.
Among those summoned was my father’s older brother, Sebastian, who would return from the front in 1916 feeble-minded and crippled from inhaling poisonous gas and being bombarded by artillery shells during trench warfare against the Germans. Since Sebastian never fully recovered, and since my father’s father, Gaetano, had died two years earlier of asbestosis shortly after returning to Italy from his factory job in America, my father became prematurely responsible for the welfare of his widowed mother and her three younger children.
Two of these children (my father’s brothers Nicola and Domenico) were now Italian infantrymen, united with the Germans against the Allied armies attacking Italy. Almost every night after I went to bed, I could overhear my father’s whispered prayers as he knelt on the prie-dieu in our living room, under the wall portrait of Saint Francis di Paola, begging the medieval monk to save his brothers from death, and pleading also for the protection of his family members who were now trapped in the war zones of southern Italy. Sicily had surrendered by this time, but the Allies had not yet conquered southern Italy, and throughout 1943, in our apartment and in the store, I was aware of my father’s volatile behavior, his moods abruptly shifting between resignation and peevishness, tenderness and aloofness, openness and secrecy. On this flag-waving island where my father wished to be perceived publicly as a patriotic citizen, I instinctively sympathized with his plight as a kind of emotional double agent.
After returning from school, I would see his uneasiness when the postman walked into the store to drop a pack of mail on the counter. When the postman had left, my father would approach the mail tentatively and sift through it to see whether it contained any of those odd, flimsy envelopes sent from overseas. If he found any, he would place them unopened next to the cash register in my mother’s dress department.
After the doors of the store were closed and locked, my mother would open and silently read each overseas letter, while my father watched her face for any sign of shock or sadness. If she showed neither, he would be reassured that there had been no disaster and would quietly take the letter from her and read it himself.
I was disturbed by these scenes and wished to remain as detached as possible from the complex reality that embraced my life. There were many times when I wished that I had been born into a different family, a plain and simple family of impeccable American credentials—a no-secrets, non-whispering, no-enemy-soldiers family that never received mail from POW camps, or prayed to a painting of an ugly monk, or ate Italian bread with pungent cheese.
I would have preferred having a mother who spent less time in the store with the island’s leading Protestant ladies, to whom she sold dresses, and more time playing parish politics with the nuns and the offshore Irish women who invaded our school on PTA evenings and Bingo Nights. And I would have welcomed a father who could have become more relaxed and casual, and on weekends would have removed his vest and tie and played ball with me on the beach.
But I knew this last wish was pure fantasy on my part—a discovery I had made the summer before, after I had spent a half hour bouncing a red rubber ball against a brick wall in the parking lot behind our shop. I was supposed to be working in the store at the time, affixing long, thin cardboard guards to the bottom of wire hangers, then lining these hangers up on a pipe rack within reach of two black men who were pressing trousers and jackets. But after I had hung up about fifty hangers with the guards attached, I disappeared through the clouds of steam rising from the pressing machines and, with the ball in my pocket, slipped out the back door into the cool breeze of the parking lot. There I began to fling the ball against the wall and practice fielding it on the short hop in imitation of the Yankees’ star second baseman, the acrobatic, dark-eyed Joe Gordon, to whom I fancied I bore some resemblance.
I assumed that my father was away from the store having lunch, which he always did in the middle of Saturday afternoon; I was therefore suddenly shaken by the sight of him opening the back door, then walking toward me with a frown on his face. Not knowing what to do, but nonetheless compelled by nervous energy to do something, I quickly took the ball in my right hand, cocked my arm, and threw it at him.
The ball soared forty feet in a high arc toward his head. He was so startled to see it coming that he halted his step and stared skittishly up at the sky through his steel-rimmed glasses. Then—as if not knowing whether to block the ball or try and catch it—he extended his arms upward, cupped his soft tailor’s hands, and braced himself for the impact.
I stood watching anxiously from the far corner of the lot, no less shocked than he that I had chosen this moment to confront him—perhaps for the first time in his life—with the challenge of catching a ball. I cringed as I saw the ball hit him solidly on the side of the neck, carom off a shoulder, rebound against the wall behind him, and come rolling slowly back to his feet, where it finally stopped.
As I waited, holding my breath, he lowered his head and began to rub his neck. Then, seeing the ball at his feet, he stooped to pick it up. For a moment he held the rubber ball in his right hand and examined it as if it were a strange object. He squeezed it. He turned it around in his fingers. Finally, with a bashful smile, he turned toward me, cocked his arm awkwardly, and tried to throw the ball in my direction.
But it slipped from his grip, skidded weakly at an oblique angle, and rolled under one of his dry-cleaning trucks parked idly along the edge of the lot.
As I hastened to retrieve it, I saw him shrug his shoulders. He seemed to be very embarrassed. He who cared so much about appearances had tried his best, and yet the results were pitiful—it was a sorrowful moment for both of us.
But I heard my father make no excuses as I crawled under the truck to get the ball. And when I got up again, I saw that he was gone.
. . .
The Buick turned the corner past the bank into the business district and stopped in front of our store. It was almost 12:15, and I should have been hungry when my father announced cheerfully, “I’m making pancakes—who wants some?” My sister Marian jumped and cheered, but I remained silent.
I followed as Marian skipped up the steep, carpeted, indoor staircase with its beige stone walls, which ascended past two landings to an arched entrance. A black cast-iron chandelier hung above the entrance, and the outer wall at each landing contained a four-foot niche encasing a holy statue and an ever-burning red votive candle.
In one niche was a serenely composed figure of the Virgin Mary, who stood exquisitely unruffled while under her bare feet a snake squirmed. In the other niche was the brown-robed statuette of Saint Francis di Paola, who, though his sandaled feet were free from snakes, possessed a characteristically grim and sulky facial expression—just as depressing as that in his wall portrait in our apartment and in the living rooms of most of my father’s Philadelphia friends. This wretched-looking monk was the leading spoilsport in all of sainthood, a horror since my earliest childhood; today he reminded me somewhat of myself, and I loathed him more than usual.
In the apartment, I hung up my hat and my coat, and after politely refusing my mother’s offer to bring me lunch while I did my homework, I closed my bedroom door—to resume working on one of my model airplanes. It was a Lockheed P-38 fighter with a twin fuselage. Carefully pasting crisp, thin sections of paper onto the balsa-wood frame, I could hear the sounds of Puccini rising softly from my father’s Victrola. I pictured him seated in the living room in his favorite chair, reading the newspaper—and also my mother, at the other end of the apartment, in her usual seat at the dining-room table, helping my sister with spelling, reading, and arithmetic.
A typical Sunday—so different from the rest of the week because there were no bonging sounds in the apartment every time someone opened the door of the shop; the upstairs telephone extension was not ringing every minute with customers’ calls; and if I turned on my small radio there would not be the usual static that existed whenever the electric sewing machines were zipping along in the cutting room.
Often on summery Saturday afternoons, when the Yankees’ games were being broadcast from New York, I would sneak down to the front of the store and turn off the two principal lights that caused most of the static, then quickly return upstairs to press my right ear against the warm radio and hope that the voice of the Yankees, Mel Allen, would fill me in on whatever action I had missed.
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 black men partly obscured in the clouds of steam. There on the floor were huge boxes of cardboard guards waiting to be hooked onto the bottom of 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 a basket of crabs had to be separated, bent into proper shape, scraped clear of rust, then affixed one by one with a cardboard guard. The game proceeded without me, its eventual conclusion unknown to me until, on the following day, I anxiously reached for the sports section of the paper.
But on this static-free Sunday, 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 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 now 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 phosphorous 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 Venice Restaurant.
Nearly every table was occupied by Italo-American families 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 dialectical blend of English and Italian. Though called the Venice, there was little Venetian about it, 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 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 any of them dangling 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, like most Americans, or those Italian-Americans 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 two or three times to spin the spaghetti around the fork, but each time, the strands fell off the plate and slipped onto the tablecloth or 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.
As the waiter arrived with our check, I held his sleeve and asked: “Who’s that soldier over there?”
The waiter’s eyebrows rose with a slight flutter, and leaning into my ear he 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.
Tapping my father’s shoulder, I said: “That’s Joe DiMaggio!”
Looking up from the check he had been scrutinizing for any sign of error, my father glanced casually at the big table. Then he turned back and replied: “So?”
Ignoring my father, I remained standing, in prolonged appreciation. And before we left the restaurant I took one final look, closer this time, and I 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 in midair and scraped it unabashedly in a large silver spoon.