The customer covered her toothless grin and also laughed. “You know what I mean. I don’t want no smashed rolls. They don’t work so good.” The wannabe dermatologist nodded in agreement and both women commiserated about how hard it was to get a smashed roll of toilet paper to unroll. Frankie found her the perfect roll.
After the customers left, Lenny and Doug finished their lunches while rehashing the pros and cons from the Democratic primaries.
Lenny was impressed with the hope that Obama instilled. Doug was less enthusiastic. Not that he didn’t like Obama, he just figured that white Republicans would do anything to make a black President look bad, and little would be accomplished.
“Nothing I’d like better than to see a black man in the White House. And I don’t mean waiting on tables,” Doug said. “But America’s not ready. There are folks who would still prefer for people with my color skin to ride in the back of the bus. Obama’s smooth, thoughtful ways are going to be seen as him being uppity.”
But Clinton had already conceded a few weeks earlier, and both men hoped Obama would secure the election.
“Well, I bet when black folk were building the White House they never dreamed that one of their own would someday be president. In the meantime, I got some brakes to repair.”
Doug went back to work. Frankie restocked the shelves and refilled the barrels of olives while Lenny waited on customers. It was mid-afternoon when Frankie finally spotted Gennaro.
“Looks like the sun is getting strong,” Frankie said — his excuse to go outside and lower the awning. Lenny nodded. He was weighing cornmeal for a customer who was revered for her gnocchi di polenta.
The avenue was closed to traffic for one block on either side of 104th Street. Young ones, most visiting their grandparents, played red light/ green light, jumped rope, tossed a football, or drew with large pieces of chalk in the middle of the avenue. Most of the adults gathered in front of Big Vinny’s club. The smell of barbeque, especially grilled sausages, found its way to where Frankie turned a large iron crank and lowered the faded green and red striped canvas awning over the storefront windows. Instead of reentering the store, Frankie crossed the avenue and joined Gennaro and other friends.
“So your old man let you out?” Gennaro said, throwing his arm around Frankie’s shoulder. He was shirtless and Frankie felt Gennaro’s damp heat. His face was only inches from Frankie’s, and his breath had that sweet stench of fermentation. He already had too much to drink.
“I fell asleep after I got back from Canarse,” he said. His lips pressed against Frankie’s cheek, and Frankie became aroused. Fortunately his grocer apron covered the front of his pants.
“Maybe all that country air did me in,” Gennaro said. With his free hand he chugged his beer, and then held the mouth of the beer bottle up to Frankie’s lips. Frankie tried to drink, but most of the beer spilled down the front of his t-shirt.
Someone yelled: “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
A gypsy cabdriver had stepped out of his cab and moved one of the wooden horses away from blocking off the avenue. He yelled: “I got a fair to pick up on the next block,” and got back into his cab and began to inch his way through the less crowded side of the avenue. Jimmy and Michael approached the cab looking as if they might pummel the intruder, and Gennaro dropped his arm from around Frankie’s shoulder and followed his brothers. The cabdriver backed up and lowered his window. “My bad. Sorry man.”
The three DiCico brothers stood with empty beer bottles in their hands as the driver made a U-turn, and a couple of younger neighborhood boys kicked the cab’s bumper. The cabdriver extended his arm out the window, shot up his middle finger, and then sped away under a barrage of flying beer bottles while at least a half dozen guys, including the DiCico brothers, chased the cab until Big Vinny yelled: “Not now! Let the asshole go.”
Gennaro fumbled with a pen, scratching something on his arm. Frankie noticed it was a short series of letters and numbers — probably the cab’s license plate number. He soon became tired of hearing Gennaro bitch about how they were going to “. . . mess that fucker up.”
“I’ve got to go back and help my father,” Frankie said. He slipped off his wet t-shirt and headed back to the store.
Customers straggled in and out of the store for the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening making small purchases until the fireworks began, and Lenny told Frankie to shut the door to keep out the rotten-egg-stink. Frankie stepped out onto the sidewalk, kicked up the doorstop, and closed the door behind him.
A sulfur-y fog engulfed 91st Avenue, and Frankie inched his way through the crowd and the stink of sweat and beer until he finally spotted Gennaro squirting charcoal lighting fluid as if he were pissing on the mound of burning cardboard and exploding fireworks. Still shirtless, his skin shimmered behind a kaleidoscope of yellows and blues. Frankie felt light-headed — anxious. Above the cacophony of firecrackers, cherry bombs, and cheers there was the sudden, stunning boom, and Gennaro vanished behind a flash like a magician’s assistant.
Everyone froze and then burst into incoherent screams, but Frankie heard one clear shriek: “It’s Big Vinny’s kid!”
He fought his way to where Big Vinny knelt next to Gennaro. Except for his heaving chest, Gennaro lay motionless in puddles of beer littered with plastic cups and cigarette butts with his neck twisted and his head propped against the curb. Big Vinny lifted Gennaro’s shoulders, and Gennaro’s head flopped over the crook of his father’s right arm — a tableau of father cradling son, shrouded in smoke and waves of heat.
Out of the shadows came wailing and cursing and praying in broken English and Italian, and above the tumult, Big Vinny roared: “Call a fucking ambulance.”
Jimmy yelled into his cellphone, Lena held her mother’s arm while Marie DiCico bit into her fist to keep from screaming, and Big Vinny extended his hand to Frankie, who stood there trembling — his green eyes and sunburned face shimmered with tears.
As if caught in a nightmare, Frankie drifted towards Big Vinny and Gennaro while the stench of Gennaro’s burnt flesh filled his nostrils, and the word faggot seared his brain like a branding iron. It was his fault that this had happened — punishment for his burning desire and for wanting his desire to be reciprocated.
Frankie’s forehead pressed against Big Vinny’s as Big Vinny’s mittlike hand clinched Frankie’s shoulder like a vice. They stared down at Gennaro, unblinking against smoke and tears, and willing him to live. Moments or hours passed before sirens and flashing lights subdued the havoc, and the crowd cleared a path for the paramedics. Big Vinny released his grip on Frankie’s shoulder and whispered: “We gotta get him to the hospital.”
The EMTs lifted Gennaro onto the stretcher while Big Vinny tossed his keys to Michael, his oldest son, and told him to get the Lincoln and drive his mother to the hospital. “I’m riding in the ambulance,” he said.
Lenny took Frankie’s hand as Big Vinny climbed into the back of the ambulance. The lights flashed, the siren screeched, and the ambulance left. “Just let me lock up the store and tell Grandma we’re going to the hospital,” Lenny said, and Frankie remained standing with Lena and Marie in the surreal stillness, like the calm after a storm had wreaked havoc. Shadows trudged past them. Some pushed brooms, others carried buckets of water, still others embraced and swayed. The mound of burning cardboard and fireworks smoldered into ash.
Michael drove up in Big Vinny’s Lincoln, parked in front of Lasante’s grocery store, and Frankie followed Marie and Lena into the backseat. Lenny sat in the front seat next to Michael. They drove to Saint John’s Hospital to the clicking of Marie DiCico’s rosary beads. Jimmy followed close behind in his Lexus with his and Michael’s wives.
By the time they arrived at the hospital, Gennaro was conscious but vomiting. He had suffered a concussion, but his burns weren’t serious. Only Big Vinny and Marie were allowed to see him.
Frankie recalled having seen a sign for the chapel when they entered
the hospital, so once he knew that Gennaro was at least alive, he left the others in the emergency waiting room and retraced his steps to the sign.
It was a small room with a single, backlit stained glass window of a sunrise, and Frankie took a seat on one of the maple wood chairs arranged in a half circle before the simple maple wood altar. The space was austere and quiet. No crowds and cries. Prayer pamphlets representing various religions lay on the seats. One had the picture of Michelangelo’s Pietà, and Frankie recalled Big Vinny holding Gennaro’s limp body. “He’ll be okay . . . he’ll be okay . . . he’ll be okay,” Frankie repeated like a mantra until Lenny’s voice startled him.
“Mind if I join you?” Lenny took the seat next to Frankie and placed his arm around his son’s shoulder. Frankie leaned into his father, inhaled Lenny’s smell of sweat and the store, and felt safe. He looked down and stared at his own t-shirt, stained with Gennaro’s blood. “He’ll be okay,” Lenny whispered. “He’ll be okay. I promise.”
4
Since he was old enough to wonder, Frankie’s eyes sparkled at the sight of what Lenny and his siblings jokingly called Mama’s Church. On the top of Filomena’s dresser, vigil candles burned before a host of saints, including the Blessed Mother and Padre Pio, a Capuchin Friar from Filomena’s parents’ hometown in Italy. Very young Frankie was enchanted by the glow of so many benevolent smiles, even if they were only plaster. Lenny thought little of prayer and less of religion, but Filomena insisted that Frankie attend a Catholic elementary school where, as it turned out, he relished in the nun’s fanciful stories and devoured books about the lives of saints. Unlike Lenny and the Lasante men before him, Frankie was a magical thinker — choreographing elaborate funerals for deceased pet fish and spending hours listening to Pavarotti or Andrea Bocelli sing “Ave Maria.” For his 12th birthday, he wanted an extreme unction crucifix, which was used by priests to perform last rites. To Lenny’s credit he yielded to his son’s wishes and bought him one despite his own distaste for what he considered to be a lot of hocus-pocus.
The Lasante men’s ambivalence, with the exception of Frankie, regarding the Catholic Church, dated back to Leonardo Lasante — Lenny’s grandfather. Leonardo had carried his mistrust of authority figures — whether political or liturgical — from Taormina, Sicily, to Little Italy in Manhattan, to Glenhaven in Queens where it was sealed.
In 1918 when Leonardo and his wife, Lucia, purchased the store and connecting house on the corner of 91st Avenue and 104th Street, the immediate neighborhood was made up of Italian immigrants, but the larger neighborhood was mostly first-and-second-generation Irish and Germans with a few of the more distant descendants of the original French and Dutch immigrants remaining.
A new basilica was under construction to accommodate the booming influx of Catholics, but once the new Most Precious Blood was open, Pastor Cunningham suggested that the Italian parishioners attend a special Sunday Mass, which would be held in the church basement. Leonardo took this as an insult, especially given that most of the masons and artisans who had built the new basilica were Italians.
We’re good enough to build their church but not good enough to worship in it! was Leonardo’s maxim, and he wasn’t shy about making it known.
In the early 1900s, the more reserved and Anglicized American Catholic clergy and laity considered Italian immigrants too uninhibited and superstitious. Wops practiced “street religion” with their tawdry feasts and processions. Leonardo told Pastor Cunningham that he’d burn in hell before he’d attend Mass in the church basement, and added if he got to hell first, he’d save the good father a seat.
Three years after Most Precious Blood opened, when a new pastor, Father Alterisi, replaced Cunningham, not only were Italians welcome in the main church for all Masses, but each Sunday at the 11:00 a.m. Mass, Fr. Alterisi delivered the gospel and homily in Italian. But Leonardo still refused to set foot in the basilica, even when his children received the sacraments — including marriage. The first time he entered Most Precious Blood was for Lenny’s father’s funeral. Lucia rebuked Leonardo. “Now you go to church, when it’s too late! My Vincenzo will not rise from his casket, and your grandchildren will not have their papa back. Stay home, old man. It’s too late. You’ve already brought the malocchio on my son.”
Leonardo didn’t argue, nor did he yield to Lucia’s demand for him to stay home, which he knew she halfheartedly meant. He knotted his black tie and sat at the kitchen table sipping espresso while Lucia finished dressing. At Vincenzo’s funeral Mass, first Filomena and Lenny followed the casket into the church, next were Leonardo and Lucia, arm and arm, as if they had attended Mass together every Sunday for the past 50 years.
Before they had purchased what was to become Lasante’s Italian American Grocery Store for three generations, Leonardo and Lucia had lived on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, where street life was a comedy of negotiations, and merchants in narrow, dank stores, or at their curbside pushcarts, bartered with savvy customers, and an eggplant or a chunk of cheese or a handful of semolina was the source of histrionic deliberation. Leonardo was one such merchant.
Lucia and he shared a three-room, cold-water flat with relatives above one of the many storefronts along Mulberry Street, where on humid, summer nights, fire escapes served as bedrooms. Such living arrangements were typical for new immigrants — cramped spaces with inadequate plumbing and poor sanitation. Tenement windows flew open to the shrill of the street sweepers’ whistles, and garbage, including human waste, rained down like noxious hail onto the narrow streets. Men bent with age or boys barely out of short pants swept up the putrid refuse and carted it away.
Among the Lasante archives were postmortem daguerreotypes of Lucia’s first-and second-born infants, too fragile to survive such unhealthy conditions — their tiny doll-like bodies in white dresses and framed by roses, gardenias, and rosary beads. Upon the advice of paesani, the young couple moved to Glenhaven, a rural section of Queens, New York, where they purchased a small grocery store with an attached house. Back then the area was mostly marsh and farmland with plenty of open space, salty air blowing in from nearby channels and bays, and many Italians lived there — the perfect place to raise fat, healthy bambinos.
Lasante’s soon became an oasis for immigrants and first-generation Italian-Americans, attracting customers from miles away, including farmers from Long Island grateful to no longer travel into Manhattan for Italian imports. Within five years, Leonardo renovated the store, doubling its original size. A few years after that, he added a warehouse behind the store, providing ample space for him to carry enough stock to develop a modest wholesale trade where he sold to other retailers and local restaurants. Vincenzo, the first-born to Lucia and Leonardo in their new Glenhaven home and their only son, eventually took over the family business, but he did not want the grocery business to be his children’s legacy. They would become professionals, and Vincenzo especially encouraged Lenny, who preferred Dante and Voltaire to Ronzoni and Progresso to lead the way for his younger siblings. When Vincenzo clutched at his chest and collapsed onto the store’s greasy, sawdust-covered, wood-plank floor, Lenny’s acceptance letter to Columbia University was in Vincenzo’s breast pocket.
Instead of Lenny becoming the first Lasante to attend college, he took on the role of Lasante patriarch and helped Filomena manage the store and care for his younger siblings. That’s when Lenny came to be known as Hard Luck Lenny, and it may have been one of the reasons he didn’t share Frankie’s belief in God, at least not in a benevolent God.
5
It was the morning after Gennaro’s accident, Mass had just ended, and several elderly women and men lumbered down the long center aisle, moving as slowly as the snails in Lasante’s. The church’s nave seemed infinite. Frankie knelt at a small side-altar before the statue of Saint Francis, slipped a dollar into a metal collection box bolted to a rack of trays holding votive candles, and pressed a dime-sized button, which triggered a flickering electric light among tidy r
ows of other monotonous flickering lights that paled in comparison to the elegant, tall, slender vigil candles Filomena kept lit on her dresser.
As he knelt among the electric fireflies and mumbled something about healing Gennaro, a hand reached around him, and a chubby finger with a hot-pink fingernail pressed another button.
“I’m sorry, honey, but I gotta get my son to his grandma’s and go to work, and you look like you’re gonna be awhile.” The voice came from over Frankie’s shoulder.
“Oh no, it’s okay, I’m just about to leave.” Frankie’s attempt to stand was futile given that the woman’s large protruding stomach pressed against his shoulder — she was quite pregnant. Their awkward positions and close proximity didn’t prevent her from talking.
“Hey! Ain’t you Lenny Lasante’s son?” she asked as he shrank away from her. “Of course you don’t remember me. I’m Tootsie. I used to work in Panisi’s Bakery. You were a little boy when I shopped in your father’s store. I moved to 123rd Street about eight years ago, but I still come here for Mass. Mostly Black churches where I live now. Baptist or something. I went a couple of times, but you gotta be prepared to make a day of it. I like the singing, but I can only take so much church.”
Tootsie stepped back enough to allow Frankie to stand, but she continued talking, barely taking breaths between sentences. “Hey, wasn’t that terrible what happened to Big Vinny’s son? I wasn’t there, but I heard he almost got himself killed. You used to play with him, didn’t you? Are you two still friends? I’m telling you, kids can make you crazy. You never know what they’re gonna do next. Of course, all those fools gotta mess with fire. I’m surprised one a them didn’t blow themselves up long ago. I know your father wouldn’t let you near those cafones and their fireworks. You listen to your father. He’s a good man. Cute too. He still got his black, curly hair, or did he give it all to you?”
Most Precious Blood Page 3
