Roy’s father never spoke to him about his illness. Roy was ten when he first noticed that anything was wrong. Since his parents were divorced and he lived with his mother Roy did not even know that his father had been in the hospital let alone had surgery. It was not until he was at his father’s house a month or more after the surgery that Roy saw his father sitting on a round rubber pillow at his kitchen table.
“How come you’re sitting on that pillow, Dad?” Roy asked.
“Well, son, when somebody gives me a pain in the ass this makes me feel better.”
“Was it Moe Jaffe? You always say he’s a pain in the ass. Like the time he went to the track before depositing the receipts in the bank and dropped everything on a longshot named Remy’s Desire?”
“Not this time.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I think about my trusting Moe or some other vecchio rimbambito to do something.”
“Jimmy Boyle couldn’t sit at his desk in school for two days after Angelo’s monkey Dopo bit him on the ass.”
“Why did Dopo bite him?”
“He saw Jimmy snatch a doughnut from Angelo’s stand and start eating it without paying for it first.”
His father gave a little laugh but Roy could see him grimace whenever he moved, so he didn’t ask him about it again.
A few months later Roy’s father began spending more and more of his time at home in bed and didn’t want to have any visitors, even Roy.
“He needs to rest, Roy,” his father’s second wife, Ellie, told him. “You can see him when he feels better. I’ll let you know when it’s a good time.”
Roy liked Ellie and trusted her, so he waited, but before he was allowed to go over to his father’s house again Roy’s mother told him he was dead.
“Your dad fought hard,” his mother said, “you know how tough he was, and the doctors did everything they could for him.”
Roy’s father was only forty-eight when he died. Too young to die, Roy heard a dozen or more people say at the wake. Moe Jaffe was there, and he draped his long right arm around Roy’s shoulders. Roy looked up at Moe’s nose, which also was very long and dotted with pockmarks; the tip of it hung over his upper lip. Everything about Moe was long, even the lobes of his ears reached to his shirt collar.
“God must’ve needed him,” Moe said to Roy. “He must need your father to help straighten somethin’ out, somethin’ he can’t fix all by Himself. Trust me, Roy, Rudy’ll be the man for the job. You can be sure of that.”
“Do you know what a vecchio rimbambito is?” Roy asked him.
The deep wrinkles in Moe Jaffe’s forehead tangled together like vines in the Amazon jungle and his eyes crossed and uncrossed before he said, “No, Roy, I don’t. What is it?”
“My dad’s not one, so maybe you’re right.”
Moe removed his arm from Roy’s shoulders and Roy walked away, past his mother and Ellie, who were talking to one another, past a bunch of people he didn’t know who were eating pastries and drinking wine and whiskey, and out of what had been his father’s house. It was hot outside, so Roy took off his sportcoat, dropped it on the ground next to the front door and walked down the street.
Some older boys were playing baseball in the park at the end of the block. Roy sat down on the grass next to the field and watched them. God didn’t need his father, he thought. The kid playing shortstop kept booting ground balls. He didn’t have soft hands. One thing Roy knew for sure was that if you want to play shortstop you have to have soft hands.
Years later, when Roy was in Rome, he asked an older Italian man, a writer, what “vecchio rimbambito” meant. The man raised an eyebrow, laughed briefly, and said, “That’s a very old world expression, Roy. It means old fool or dotard, someone who behaves in a childish manner, perhaps due to senility. Where did you hear it?”
“When I was a boy my father used those words to describe someone who worked for him, a person who sometimes acted foolishly.”
“You grew up in Chicago, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I was born there, but my father didn’t go to live in America until he was ten years old.”
“It’s the kind of description you could still hear in Napoli or Reggio Calabria, more-likely in Sicily. Yes, it’s Siciliano, a term an elderly mafioso might use. What was your father’s family’s business in Chicago?”