My Kind of Town

by John Sandrolini

  I could feel myself beaming at the thought of the unknown curio—I’d brought home many from my travels during the war. “Do tell. . . .”

  “I left it on the nightstand next to your bed. You’ll know it.”

  She leaned down and kissed my cheek. “I can’t believe you’re here. . . . I never thought it would happen.”

  “I never dared to dream it myself.”

  “Funny you’d say that,” she said, giggling as she turned to leave.

  “How come?”

  But she’d already darted out of the room, slippered feet pattering up the stairs as I sat alone beneath the light of the single bulb burning in the kitchen.

  Upstairs, I tiptoed into the bathroom and got ready for bed. There was a note from Francesca underneath a brand-new toothbrush. I slipped into the bedroom, grinning at some familiar items that had made it through another generation of use. The White Sox pennant was still there, faded and curling, just like their aspirations did each summer.

  Sports teams always took me back to being a kid, and I lay there smiling as I surveyed the old ballplayer photos, books, and bric-a-brac before snapping off the light. As I reached for the lamp, I remembered Cesca’s promised surprise.

  And there it was, right next to my hand, the snow globe I’d brought from Oahu so many years ago. I picked it up and shook it, watching the white sands settle around the plastic Diamond Head and Waikiki Beach for the umpteenth time.

  I turned it over and gave the little brass key a couple of cranks. The notes were as mechanical as always, but still evoked the hypnotic sound of the Pied Pipers as the apparatus clunked through its tiny gears.

  Replaying the words from memory, I lay down in the dark under my own family’s roof for the first time in twenty years, the conjured singers in my head cooing “dream, dream, dream,” in mesmerizing harmony. The nostalgia snuck up on me, struck like a bolt to the heart, penetrating deeper inside me than anything else that night had.

  It was then, for the first time, that I wept.

  25

  It rained overnight. The noise awoke me sometime around four. I lifted my head off the pillow in disorientation, then lay back down when I remembered where I was, comforted by the awareness of my surroundings. The muffled sound of the falling drops ran steady on the rooftop. I listened to it for a long time, replaying all the events of these very busy last two days in my mind, water beating down, washing through the downspouts, flowing through the streets into the sewers.

  Something had changed in me since I’d hit town, something palpable. I wasn’t some furtive, distant vagabond anymore. I was a part of something, something I’d always been a part of, something I’d lost sight of. I was a member of a family. And it was up to me to reclaim my place in it.

  When I closed my eyes again, I knew that I’d be staying on awhile.

  At home.

  Francesca was off to school by the time I came down at seven thirty, but Zio Nello was at the table with his coffee and the newspaper when I ambled into the kitchen in yesterday’s clothes. My mother was at the stove frying up last night’s polenta with some pancetta and eggs.

  “Morning, Mamma, that smells like pancetta. Put me down for a pound, I haven’t had that in ages.”

  “Not until you say good morning to your zio. Forget your manners?”

  I smiled at the mild chastising. Nothing had changed in her world it seemed.

  “Buon giorno, Zio Nello,” I said.

  His eyes were already giving away his smile, but when he dipped the paper to acknowledge me, I caught his full, toothy grin. I’d missed that.

  I gave my mother a kiss then sat next to my uncle and planted one on him too. His face smelled faintly of citrus and clove, same as ever. The smell took me back.

  “Where’s Zia Teresa?”

  He smiled to himself. “In bed—grappa.”

  I grinned back at him. “Sorry.”

  He shrugged. “Whaddyagonnado?”

  Pointing at his paper, I asked, “Whatcha readin’?”

  “Yestaday’s Daily News. They got this new kid . . . Royko . . . writes a column once a week. He’s a comer.”

  I nodded in earnest. “I’ll check him out.”

  “Yeah. Dis one here’s about Hull House.”

  “Oh?” I said, leaning forward on my elbow. “What about Hull House?”

  “They been tearin’ it down, Giuseppino. That’s what all them bulldozers and cranes are doing over there on Halsted.”

  I laid a finger on the center fold, tugged down on the paper. “Whaaat? Tearing down Hull House? I practically grew up there—that’s where I learned how to box. What goes on here?”

  Zio Nello frowned heavily, inverted Vs forming at his forehead and mouth. He spoke very quietly in Italian. “There are many evil things happening here, Giuseppe. Many.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Hull House: a school, a gymnasium, a home—a community—to tens of thousands of impoverished immigrants since 1889, a place Jane Addams had willed together through grit and pluck, a civic factory where people learned English and other skills necessary to succeed in America. And they were tearing it down? For what?

  The pancetta was still terrific, but breakfast wasn’t so great after I’d digested that news. I slurped a second cup of coffee after I ate, brooding over the destruction being wrought around my family home. Then I got pissed, grabbed my dad’s coat, and bolted for the front door.

  I flew over to Halsted Street, darting through the park and the puddles on the way. The ruins began long before Halsted, however, many of the cherished buildings having already fallen to Daley’s wrecking crews. My heart ratcheted up a little higher in my throat with each turn of my head.

  Where a learning institution that had sprouted as an endemic part of the neighborhood had stood, there was an endless field of fallen bricks, crushed mortar, and snapped beams, with contiguous destruction strewn out for whole city blocks like the cinders of cities on wartime newsreels. It was stupefying.

  As I stood aghast amid the wreckage, I saw a woman in a wool coat and a head scarf half a block down, walking among the demolition crews, hectoring them but good. She was trying to hand them what looked like petition cards as they filed past her to their site, but they either declined to accept them or ducked her entirely. She wasn’t very big, but she towered above the men, her voice ringing out in the cool morning air above the distant rumble of freeway traffic.

  “You men are destroying our homes, our community, our way of life. How much are they paying you to commit this crime? What will you do when they come for your homes?”

  I stood stock-still watching her admonish them, diminish them. When the last of them had scurried past her, she perched herself on a mound of detritus across the street, staring them down as they cranked up their instruments of destruction. A block down, a wrecking ball began swinging in the gray morning dampness.

  I found myself walking toward her, drawn to her, compelled to know who she was. I stopped several yards away, looked up at her as she stood hawklike on her rubble roost, peregrine eyes boring into the workers across the street, arms swept back behind her.

  “Good morning,” I called out.

  Her head cranked around and down. Her face was Italian, but the voice was all Chicago. “Come ta help?” she asked.

  “Came to see.”

  “Like what you see?”

  I shook my head.

  “So you came ta help then?”

  That made me crack a smile. “Sure. How?”

  A hand fluttered down. “Help me offa these bricks.”

  She wasn’t much older than I was, but it had to be difficult to navigate the pile in heels. I took her arm and helped her to the street. After she stepped down, she composed herself, adjusted her scarf, then stuck out her hand again. “Flo Scala,” she said without fanfare.

/>   “Joe Buonomo. Nice to meet you.”

  She studied my face, her eyes flickering back and forth as she took in my features. “You the fella made all the headlines during the war?”

  I nodded.

  “I know your family, Joe. Good people.”

  “Thank you. I don’t remember any Scalas, I’m afraid.”

  “Giovangelo,” she said. “It was Giovangelo before I got married.”

  “Ohhh, sure, your father’s the tailor, right? I used to get my slacks hemmed there way back when.”

  She got right down to brass tacks. “Well, he’s gone now—so’s his shop. They bulldozed it a few months ago, along with Granato’s”

  “Granato’s? The greatest pizza joint in the new world? Gone?”

  “Gone. Knocked flat—just like they’re gonna do to all these places here if we don’t stop them somehow.”

  Mrs. Scala then detailed the recent demise of the Halsted-­Harrison end of Little Italy. In 1961, the city had declared by fiat that they were going to raze whole tracts of the neighborhood to make room for the new University of Illinois Circle Campus despite the fact that the area around the abandoned Dearborn Station was readily available and much closer to downtown.

  Florence and others had organized the community and fought back with a march on the mayor’s office, sit-ins, protests, and every other available resource, battling the mighty Daley machine to a standstill, month after month. All of City Hall’s dirty tricks—threats, intimidation, even the bombing of her home—couldn’t make her give in. When the board of Hull House capitulated to the city in what Florence called “an outrageous sellout,” she and her colleagues sued. But after going all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, the residents and merchants of Halsted-Harrison—the people of the city of Chicago—lost. Lost their homes, their businesses, their very sense of civic identity.

  As she spoke, the wrecking crews went about their grim business in the background, smoke belching from their bulldozers as they ground their way through the remnants of a neighborhood like tanks on a battlefield.

  The scene and the story were disheartening, but I found myself energized by this small woman’s courage and heroism, her unyielding sense of dedication to her neighborhood and her people, which she pointed out now included Mexicans, Negroes, and a handful of Greeks displaced by the Congress and Dan Ryan expressways. A great warmth welled up inside me for this woman who wouldn’t admit defeat even as the wreckers gouged through houses behind her, walls falling with thundering crashes amid roiling clouds of dirty white dust.

  When she was done, she asked me, “And you, Joe, where have you been all these years, through all this battle?”

  I looked away briefly, then back into her eyes. “I’ve been away.”

  “Where?”

  “After the war, I stayed overseas a few years. Been in California most recently.”

  “Overseas? That where you lost your razor?”

  I rubbed my stubble self-consciously. “I ran over here when I saw the paper. Guess I’ll have to shave when I get home.”

  She just eyed me. “So what do you do out there in California, pick grapes?”

  “Uh-uh. I run a freight company, fly boxes from A to B.”

  “Got a wife out there?”

  “No.”

  “Kids?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  She gestured with her hands. “Anything?”

  I just shook my head silently.

  A certain sadness filled her eyes. She didn’t say anything for a while, the booming of the bricks a background basso profundo to the unsettling silence between us.

  Then she said, “Well . . . you’ve been moving all those boxes around out there, Joe, but what are you really building? What do you really have?”

  I didn’t have an answer; the impact of her words was as jarring to me as the wrecker’s machinery.

  Sweeping my hand across what had been Hull House, I asked her, “But, Florence, if you’ve lost this battle, if even the Supreme Court came down against you, what else can you do? Why are you here handing out leaflets?”

  She got a little exasperated. “We lost this round, but if we don’t keep fightin’, that Judas Oscar D’Angelo will help City Hall take the rest. They want to expand the medical complex over on Damen, ya know. And take a walk through Bronzeville sometime this week—if you can find what’s left of it. Ask those people what happens if you don’t stand up to this bully Daley.”

  I nodded as she spoke, realizing that we had a great deal in common. My admiration for her must have shown. I could feel my face winding up into a smile as I signed on for yet another lost cause.

  “Okay, Florence. I’m in.”

  Mrs. Scala and I spoke another twenty minutes or so. I agreed to meet her at a citizens’ meeting that night at Our Lady of Pompeii, then we said our good-byes. After that, I headed over to Café Napoli to make a couple of calls, one local, one long distance.

  The long-distance call was first, collect, to the Nighthawk Aviation hangar in Long Beach. It was early, but Sean Parker, the hard charger I’d hired the year before, picked up on the second ring. I told him to let my partner, Roscoe Montgomery, know that I’d be gone a few more days and that we’d need a temp to pick up my share of the flying. Sean said he didn’t think Roscoe was going to like that. I told him Roscoe didn’t like much of anything.

  The second call, to the Ambassador East, was shorter. Frank was out, but I left a message that I wouldn’t be flying home with him Tuesday. I also asked him if he could get a certain party’s phone number for me.

  I hung up the phone and smiled to myself as I thought over the two phone calls and last night’s decision.

  Things change indeed.

  26

  When I got home, I saw Sal, gold horn dangling low, sitting on his front porch three doors down nursing a cup of coffee. From his slumped posture and closed eyes, I gathered that he was nursing a bit of a hangover, too. I walked over, hopped up the steps, slapped him gently on the thigh.

  “Hiya, Sal, how’d it go last night?”

  His eyes cracked open, blinking several times as he came around like a bear emerging from winter. “Hi, Joe. Madonn’ that Sinatra is a wild man—we were at the Playboy Club till four in the mornin’. The Playboy Club!”

  “Gina talking to you this morning?”

  He shrugged. “Might be a few days. She’ll get over it.”

  “Bang in sick today?”

  “Nah, actually I’m off the next coupla days, but I’m gonna need to stay out of the house awhile till Gina cools down. You free?”

  I nodded. “You bet. Let’s hang out a bit, you and me. Like the old days, huh?”

  “Okay. But maybe let me snooze here awhile?”

  “Sure, pal. Sure. I’ll get cleaned up. You get some rest.” I patted his leg again, then walked quietly away, wondering to myself if he’d come to terms yet with the enormous expansion his world had undergone in the space of a few hours.

  The old claw-foot bathtub still didn’t have a showerhead, so I took my first traditional bath in many a moon. I went ahead and soaked in it awhile, reflecting on all the events in my own life in the last twenty-four hours. Sal Bencaro wasn’t the only guy on my street getting his universe taffy pulled.

  Reveries came to me as I unwound in the warm, soapy water, my head on the curved enamel edge of the tub. Everything from grade school to boxing at Hull House to schoolyard chums to old flames drifted by. Inevitably, I got to the war, and the time I’d spent on tour with Butch, thinking about the things we’d talked about.

  I remembered telling Butch about the small skiffs we used to rent for a buck a day from the park district to sail on Lake Michigan. He lit right up, telling me he’d done the same with his dad on his visits to Chicago in his teen years. Both of us wondered if we’d all met by happenstance y
ears earlier.

  That was something I couldn’t dismiss from Carpaccio’s wild claims the evening before: He definitely knew some things about Butch O’Hare and his father. I didn’t let on about it, but it made me begin to ponder the connection between O’Hare Sr. and Mr. Alphonse Capone. I began to give more thought to the possibility that some of those spoils might really be locked away somewhere in the old Windy City, and if I did indeed possess some cryptic knowledge of their whereabouts.

  There was a rap on the door, then my mother’s voice through the wood. “You asleep in there, figlio mio?”

  “No, Mamma, just daydreamin’.”

  “Well, when you’re done with the mermaids and back on dry land, I left you some clean clothes—no son of mine is going about in dirty underwear.”

  “Okay, thanks. Whose are they? Don’t tell me you kept mine?”

  “Whadda you care? Maybe yours, maybe your father’s, maybe Fabrizio’s—I dunno. Just put ’em on, okay? They’re plenty clean, I washed ’em myself.”

  My smile looked up at me from the water’s sheen. “Okay, Mamma. Grazie.”

  But she was already down the hall, on to the next project on her list.

  I scooped myself out of the water, grabbed a towel. As I shaved and dressed, I decided that I had a new project on my own list to investigate. If I was going to stay in the family home, I was going to have to earn my keep.

  27

  Sal was still on his front porch, head resting on a propped hand. He woke again when he heard my heels clicking on the walk. He looked better than he had before but still a few bricks shy of a load.

  “Ready to go, Sal?”

  He yawned deeply, nodded. “Yeah, sure, what do you have in mind?”

  “A beef sandwich at Al’s—sweet and hot—then we hit the road in your flivver.”

  “Mmmmm,” he mused, “juicy beef. Sounds good. Where we going?”

  “Twenty-second and Michigan.”

  He scrunched up his face, looked over at me. “The Lexington Hotel?”