Guido went everywhere with his parents to translate their babble into words others could understand. His father, Alfredo, and his mother, Sabatina, were both deaf and dumb from the complications of childhood meningitis. His parents were brought together as children in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn where they grew up, they became inseparable and then were married at sixteen.
Alfredo and Sabatina, as children, had learned to read lips, but never with complete understanding, and they were always too poor and too ignorant, even as grown-ups, to want to learn signing. So Guido’s parents flailed their arms in the air, desperately trying to say what was stuck on their tongues, and Guido became their mouthpiece almost from the day he said his first word as a baby. He listened to other people, and then, in a series of wild noises and gestures, he relayed the message to his father and mother. They answered him in the same way. Then their thoughts and feelings came out of his mouth nicely said.
To get results from the hardhearted, Guido could also rave like a madman in a loudspeaker. He was taught how by St. Finbar’s priests exhorting churchgoers to fill the collection baskets. By the time Guido was sixteen, no one could ignore his sound and fury. Then his parents were no longer shunted aside by shopkeepers or other customers.
Nearly everyone in Bensonhurst in 1940 half forgot that Alfredo and Sabatina’s tongues were as pickled as pork tongues in a jar. Their thoughts were spoken with conviction by Guido. A listener could even be convinced that Alfredo Trapani, squeezed together like a clenched fist, and Sabatina Trapani, thin and shapeless, both with screaming eyes and twisting mouths, were actually speaking Guido’s words themselves.
“Science explains everything,” said Father Valenti. “But in the end science explains nothing. We must go back to the First Cause. We say a chemical in the body. But why for this one? Not for that one? God wants certain things, in a certain way, whether we like it or not.”
“I don’t think He’s fair,” said Guido.
“You can think that,” said Father Valenti.
“So I’m never going in the seminary.”
“It was your idea,” said the priest. He was dark, short, broad, and potbellied, with a crew cut and a cigar. He talked out of the side of his mouth like a boxing fan. But his secular love, proven by thorn wounds on his fingers, was the Immaculate Conception rose garden.
“I’m sick of the rosary,” said Guido. “Said it a thousand times. Still no miracles. And no call. The novena was a waste.”
“You’d be a great priest. Someday even maybe wear the red hat,” said Father Valenti. “But I won’t talk you into it. In some ways it’s a lousy life. I envy your father. And he’s a caged animal. But he has a wife. And a son. I smoke cigars. Don’t shave for days. Drink wine by the bottle. But in the morning I look at the pastor’s ugly face.”
“What’s so good about a wife?” said Guido.
“She warms a man’s soul,” said Father Valenti.
“No more coming to church either,” said Guido. “God’s just the plaster statue by the altar. Deaf and dumb. Worse than them. From a novena, He never makes a miracle. I asked people.”
“It’s okay. Don’t become a priest. But you can’t fall from grace. I won’t let you,” said Father Valenti. “If you’re not in church, Guido, watch your ass. Some wop priest might give it a kick.”
Late on a Friday night when Alfredo received his tiny envelope of a few bills, he was told not to come to the 16th Avenue storefront factory the following Monday to work. When the women on the Singers sewed the few dresses on order, the owner himself, not Alfredo, would press them.
Alfredo and Sabatina had put aside a little money which would buy their food for the next few weeks. But their savings wouldn’t cover the rent due in a few days. They needed an extension until Alfredo found other work, or was hired by the WPA, or went on home relief. So Guido was sent up the dark flight of wood stairs, sounding like a soldier with his leather heels, to the front apartment in the four-family house, to ask Mr. Frangano, nicely and with humility, for a few weeks’ time.
“We can’t pay the rent, but we’ll get it. Don’t put our stuff out. We’re asking nice,” said Guido, talking more for himself, his voice making ground meat of the landlord’s ears.
One of the worst fears for the Trapanis, and for others on their street, with unemployment like an unwelcome aunt in almost every apartment, was having the marshal come to move out their furniture to the sidewalk, even if it was winter and snow was falling.
“Who pays the mortgage?” said Ugo Frangano, a butcher, who seemed to have acquired the facial features and the body parts of the pigs, calves, and lambs he slaughtered in the yard behind his butcher shop. Those animals were brought in live from New Jersey farms and their blood fertilized his vegetables. “I loose the house,” said Ugo, waving his hands, Band-Aids on all the fingers of his left hand.
“Better you loose it, said Guido, mimicking the landlord, although Guido knew better.
“I must have the rent,” said Ugo.
“And we the rooms,” said Guido.
“Two weeks,” said Ugo.
“Our furniture goes, your furniture goes,” said Guido. “Your door gets smashed down.” Guido wasn’t sure he would do that, but he would do something. Ugo Frangano shouldn’t be allowed to put the Trapanis out on the street.
“One month’s,” said Ugo, a little worried about Guido’s threat, but Guido was only a boy, and not a very big boy at that.
“The old man has the lot. He goes in 6:30,” said Tonino. “So we go pick his tomatoes. And peppers. Pick a bushel. Maybe two. Juicy tomatoes.”
Older and taller, Tonino Aiello was Guido’s best friend. Tonino’s first thoughts every morning were of mischief for sport and danger, and often Guido was included. Guido contributed to their friendship his stories, sometimes hammed up for a laugh, of adults he talked to for his parents.
“Stealing ain’t fair,” said Guido. “In the hot sun the old man pulls weeds. Waters with the can. He can’t even stand up straight.”
They were sitting on New Utrecht High School’s 79th Street steps after dinner. The sun wasn’t down yet, but the fresh breeze was cooling their sweat. Opposite the school were the semi-attached red brick houses they lived in. On the house steps and stoops young women had bailed out of their hot kitchens to the fan of outdoors, and kept their eyes peeled on their children on roller skates and tricycles, or hopscotching. Older women, gossiping like secretive nuns, were in black dresses, in mourning for an aunt one year, a parent two, a child three, and a husband five years, and sometimes it all added up to a lifetime in black. The men standing out on the sidewalk talked only to the men and they smoked and they spat in the gutter.
“If he lived to a hundred he couldn’t eat all them tomatoes,” said Tonino, blowing cigarette smoke in Guido’s face because he wouldn’t steal the tomatoes.
“His wife makes sauce. Sells it in jars, for the people who don’t make it,” said Guido. “That’s how they live. He grows tomatoes. She cooks them. He’s too old to get a job, and they don’t have no kids helping out.”
“I bet your mother, with your father laid off, would like some fresh tomatoes,” said Tonino. “And green peppers. For stuffed peppers.”
“You’ll go to hell,” said Guido.
“Go be a sissy priest,” said Tonino. “You ain’t got no guts.”
Guido took Tonino’s cigarette from his two fingers. He puffed it, then gave it back and said, “I might even tell the old man you’re the guy who stole his tomatoes. So if I was you, I wouldn’t. I hear, to scare the birds, he’s got a shotgun.”
Alfredo was hindered from getting another job, not only by the Depression and his own lack of skills, but also by his dead ears and useless tongue. After weeks of frantically scrambling all over Brooklyn and into Manhattan’s garment district, on subways, buses, and trolleys, he couldn’t find any work. Now, in July, even shoveling snow for two or three dollars a day wasn’t possible.
In his travels, however, Alfredo had learned from other men that the WPA was hiring pick-and-shovel laborers for road building on Long Island. Through Guido, he asked in the neighborhood if anyone drove to Long Island. Very few owned a car and not one went out there. And since Alfredo couldn’t afford the railroad ticket either, working for the WPA was also out of the question.
When their meager savings ran out, Guido’s summer job paid for their groceries. Guido worked for the Sicilian Social Society in the storefront under the BMT elevated line on New Utrecht Avenue. Membership in the club was for men only, mostly grandfathers. They sat around and played poker and pinochle, smoked black cigars, drank black coffee, and talked only in the Sicilian dialect. Guido’s job was to make the coffee and serve it in small cups, empty the ashtrays, sweep the floor, go out for sandwiches, and carry messages. When the men wouldn’t be going home for dinner on time, because they were playing and winning, or playing and losing, Guido would explain matters to the wives. Guido could stand up for the men, and the men knew he wouldn’t flirt with their women.
Some men carried a gun or a knife in their belts. Guido asked about those things, but the men only laughed, and rumpled Guido’s light brown curly hair. He eavesdropped on their conversations and understood a little, and suspected they did bad things. But they never revealed themselves. And they were always extremely courteous to him, and Guido needed the money to bring home to his parents.
The bed was taken apart. The wood pieces were stacked on end, as was the large mirror, all leaning against the dresser. The daybed where Guido slept was piled very high with the clothes from their closets. Lamps, chests, tables, pots, and dishes were out on the sidewalk. Books, papers, crucifixes, religious pictures, shoes, old Christmas cards, palm fronds, forks, spoons, an assortment of other things were all in a heap in the middle of their faded rug.
Sabatina was crying as an ape would cry if it could, not with sobs and tears but with primitive beastly sounds. When Guido arrived, he immediately understood the meaning of his mother’s inhuman noises.
The Trapanis actually had had a month and a half without rent before Ugo and his brother, Felipe, with the marshal lending a hand, moved out the Trapani belongings, on the very day that Alfredo finally accepted the idea of home relief and shamefully went downtown to apply. Their few pieces of furniture, scratched and with coffee rings, and their belongings, rags really, were now blocking the sidewalk, attracting neighborhood children who leered as if a terrible sin were being committed in public.
When the men of the neighborhood arrived home after their own futile or productive efforts to earn a few dollars, streaming down from the elevated at the corner of 79th, their curses and waved fists, and those of their wives who left their apartments, were directed at the Franganos.
To avoid that abuse, Ugo, childless, sent his wife, Tessie, to the double feature at the Hollywood Theater, which gave dishes to women weeknights. Tessie already had a service for five stacked up. Then Ugo and Felipe went to Ugo’s butcher shop with two bottles of red wine, salami, and bread.
Guido, as his mother’s protector, normal for a boy of his age, but more so for him because he was her voice, fell to his knees, embedded his face in the two slats of her lap, and wept too. His assumed manliness was crumbling into childhood again. Guido felt helpless to comfort his mother, and helpless to haul their belongings back inside, where their apartment door was boarded over to protect against such arrogance, which Ugo believed Guido was certainly capable of.
Then Alfredo came home. So willing to clean toilets or dig ditches, he had believed some lowly job would be his, and his family wouldn’t be dispossessed, but every job was coveted like life itself. If only he had applied for relief sooner, he might have the money for the rent, but their first check wouldn’t arrive for weeks now. Alfredo couldn’t cry. After a dazed moment, he repeatedly struck his head on the headboard to exorcise the devil from his mind before he hurt someone. Then neighbors embraced Alfredo, offering him a room in their apartment for his family for the night.
Guido swept the floor in the men’s club as it had seldom been swept before. He even swept down the webs in the corners, previously left undisturbed for the spiders to go on living, but no longer.
Guido’s face had long ago lost its adolescent tenderness. His was a young man’s face, purposeful, energetic, narrow and sharp-edged like a fish’s, with a strong slender nose joining the plane of his pointed chin. In his eyes and mouth ordinarily was a fire, now extinguished, and even his skin was unnaturally ashy. The old men noticed the absence of Guido’s voice, pleasurable to them, as evidence that someday he would be one of them, a strong man. Although Guido was there in body, the old men were missing him from their lives.
One of them, Mr. Fazio, the size of a door, who, in a doorway, had to bend his head and go sideways, and was baldheaded with a giant meatball face, said, “You have your life, Guido. Mine is finished. Whatever is bad, tomorrow is better. Spit on the floor. Pick up your head.”
“I can’t,” said Guido.
“You tell me,” said Mr. Fazio. “I tell you how to fix.”
“Ugo put us out,” said Guido. “We have no place to go.”
The old man scratched his scalp. “Your father, he has no money?”
“Just what I bring,” said Guido.
“I give you the loan. Twenty dollars,” said Mr. Fazio. “You pay me back. A nickel a month. No interest. Your father—he gets some rooms for twenty dollars. Take it. Now maybe you sing. Listen to me. Then you O-sol-e-mi-o sta-nfronte-a-te!”
The money in his pocket, Guido was on his way to Ugo’s butcher shop to talk to Ugo to get the apartment back. He had stayed late at the men’s club in order to catch Ugo when he was closing up. Then he could talk to him without customers ordering their veal cutlets and lamb chops. When Guido arrived across the street, he saw through the plate-glass window an old woman still in the shop, so he cooled his heels. When the woman, a shopping bag in each hand, toddled out as if her feet were hurting, Guido went in, leaving his footprints in the sawdust. Behind the counter Ugo was slitting the throats of live chickens taken one by one from their wood dowel cage. Then Ugo threw the birds with their bloodstained feathers upside down in individual pails to drain.
“Get out, kid,” said Ugo, putting down the knife and picking up the meat cleaver and waving it at Guido like a knight’s weapon of war. “Don’t look for no trouble. I have the mortgage. I got to have the rent.”
“We have it,” said Guido. “Twenty dollars. The rent’s twenty-five. So we still owe you. We’ll get the other five. But you can let us back in now.”
“Let’s see the twenty,” said Ugo, wiping his bloody hands on the apron. He turned the bill over as if it could be a counterfeit. Then he folded the bill and put it in his pants pocket and picked up the meat cleaver again. “Now get out,” he said.
“You took our money,” said Guido, so outraged his spittle flew out.
“Your father owes me a month and a half. Thirty-seven fifty. Leaves seventeen fifty,” said Ugo.
“You can’t take our money and not let us in,” said Guido, running behind the counter and grabbing Ugo’s wrist in his two hands. Ugo was used to lifting carcasses, sawing bone, and chopping flesh, and he had an animal’s chest and muscle, so he easily shook Guido off. Guido fell to the floor where the sawdust got in his mouth, and he spat it out.
“If you don’t go, I break your head,” said Ugo, fearing a little the bull in the calf daring to reproach him, standing over Guido with the meat cleaver, the flat steel surface catching the overhead electric light.
Guido backed up. He felt betrayed and angry. Fearful too. Of the meat cleaver and the aroused Ugo. For his own protection, Guido was reaching for the knife stained with chicken blood. When Ugo saw the knife in Guido’s hand, his face flushed with fury and he charged Guido, the meat cleaver raised. Guido, trembling, went down. In a blinding light he raised the knife. Ugo’s weight seemed to suck in the knife, seemed to pull it out of his hand. Then Ugo, smelling of sweat, wine, and chickens, was crashing down on him.
Guido thought to take the money out of Ugo’s pocket, but he was too horrified at what he had done. So he hurriedly scuffed his footprints out of the sawdust. Then he ran out as if he were an escaping headless chicken.
“Take the twenty dollars,” said Father Valenti, without his collar on, slightly drunk, in the sacristy. “Don’t pay me back. I have no use for money.”
“Thank you, father,” said Guido. “And now, for you, I want to do something. Go in the priesthood.”
“Don’t do it for me,” said the priest. “That’s a heavy responsibility.”
“I thought you’d like the idea,” said Guido. “Anyway, I’m doing it.”
“I always felt you had the calling,” said the priest. “But you’re still young. Don’t say absolutely. It’s good you want to. But there’s time.”
“But who’s going to speak for my father and mother when I go to the seminary?” said Guido.
“I will,” said Father Valenti, sitting up, wiping his mouth with the soiled napkin, as if to show he would qualify for Guido’s job.
“You’ll go to the store?” said Guido.
“If they’ll have me,” said the priest.
“To Dr. Pilo’s office?”
“Yes.”
“Even at night?”
“I’ll go anywhere with them. Any time,” said the priest. “And give them absolution. Without confession.”
“Make the papers, father. I want to go as soon as possible,” said Guido.
“It takes six months, Guido. Maybe more. Maybe you’ll change your mind. If you change it, it’s okay,” said the priest.
“You’re an idiot,” said Tonino, dancing in the fresh snow as they went to the elevated. “You ain’t ever going to get laid. You poor bastard. Means I get yours too.”
“I have the calling,” said Guido, pulling his moth-eaten woolen hat down over his ears, and wondering how he would look in the cardinal’s red hat.
Tonino was carrying Guido’s suitcase. Guido had his mother’s sandwiches, fruits, and cakes in the grocery’s Quaker Oats box knotted with scraps of twine.
“You could take my confession if I rob a bank. And you won’t tell. Right?” said Tonino.
“You don’t have to tell everything, even if you’re supposed to,” said Guido. “I wouldn’t want to hear you robbed a bank. You can tell God Himself instead. He has ears that can hear.”
“I’m going to rob a bank. And get rich,” said Tonino. When they reached the turnstiles, he handed over the suitcase. They shook hands. Then Tonino put his cold hands in his pockets. “Maybe I’ll rob a hundred banks.”
“Just don’t kill anybody,” said Guido. He dropped in his nickel. Then he went out on the platform and while he waited for the train he prayed for Ugo’s soul, Tonino’s, and his own.