Most Precious Blood

by Vince Sgambati

  “Yep! The same guy and the spitting image of me,” Gennaro said.

  “More like you’re the spitting image of him,” Frankie said.

  “Whatever.”

  Across the back of the photos, written in elegant script were the words cartolina postale and the name Wilhelm von Gloeden. “This must be the photographer, probably a German or Dutch guy. Look on the back of your picture,” Frankie said.

  The remaining cartoline postale lay on the carpet like a minigallery of von Gloeden’s photographs. In two photographs, the boys they assumed to be Leonardo and Salvatore posed together. In one they were standing on a beach and in the other they sat on a rock outcropping in a grotto.

  “I didn’t know they did this kind of stuff back then,” Gennaro said.

  “What kind of stuff? Took pictures?”

  “Yeah, but these aren’t exactly your welcome to Ellis Island snapshots.”

  Frankie pulled the overhead string and turned out the light bulb. In the dimmed lighting Gennaro’s resemblance to the boy in the sepia photographs was unmistakable.

  “Italy is loaded with nude artwork,” Frankie said, trying to act as if he was cool with the pictures when in fact he was as surprised as Gennaro.

  “But those are statues and paintings,” Gennaro said, laughing. “Like the ones in the Sistine Chapel of big guys with little dicks, as if the Pope told Michelangelo it’s okay to paint dirty pictures on the ceiling as long as you give Adam a baby dick. These are photographs, and these guys don’t have baby dicks.” Again Gennaro reached for Frankie’s crotch, but Frankie jumped back.

  “You know what they say, Francesco, the apple, or in this case the zucchini, doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

  Frankie reminded Gennaro that zucchini doesn’t grow on trees, but Gennaro was laughing too hard at his own joke to hear, so Frankie left him to enjoy his raunchy humor, sat at Lenny’s desk, and opened the laptop to check the web for von Gloeden. Instead he saw the email addressed to Dr. Violetta Vitkus.

  “I don’t believe this,” Frankie said, and Gennaro pressed his cheek against Frankie’s. They stared at the computer screen for several silent moments, as if trying to make sense of a paper on quantum physics.

  “Isn’t that your mom’s name?”

  Frankie nodded. Gennaro squeezed next to Frankie on the chair, their bare skin pressed together. They smelled of sex.

  “I didn’t know that your old man kept in touch with her.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Are you okay?”

  Frankie didn’t know what to say, except that he felt weird, as if reading her name and email address suddenly meant that she was a real person. “I’ve never searched the Internet for her,” Frankie said. “You’d think I would have, but I didn’t. I really never thought much about her. When I had questions, I asked my father, and he told me everything he knew. At least, I thought he had told me everything.”

  “He’s right,” Gennaro said.

  “Who’s right?”

  “Your old man ... about getting away from me and my family and going to college.”

  Until Gennaro mentioned that Lenny was right, Frankie hadn’t even thought to read the email: ... I’m afraid that something terrible is going to happen to him before he has the chance to get away from the DiCicos, especially from Gennaro.

  “You know how my father is,” Frankie said, feeling a little embarrassed.

  “Yea, I know how he is, but he’s also right.”

  “He was probably mad at Big Vinny or you or me for some reason. He’s been mad a lot lately. Point is he didn’t even send it.”

  “Maybe he should have.” Gennaro ran his fingers through Frankie’s hair. “Beautiful curls, just like the guy in the photo.”

  Gennaro kissed Frankie gently on the lips and told him that he had to make visiting hours at the jail and asked that Frankie walk him to the door.

  They were both erect again when they dressed, but Gennaro had to leave. Gennaro sniffed himself. “I think I have cologne in the car. Not sure it’s safe to walk into a jail smelling like this. I don’t want to be some big old ugly guy’s bitch.”

  At the front door, Gennaro searched his jacket pockets. “Must have left my keys in the office,” he said. “They probably fell out of my pocket when you couldn’t keep your hands off of me. I’ll be right back.”

  Frankie’s thoughts swirled like the cigar smoke that rose from two octogenarians shuffling past the stoop. Exhaust belched from a bus stopped at the corner light. First Frankie had learned that Lenny was delivering money for Big Vinny, next he found the nude photos of the great-grandfathers, and then he came upon the email to Vi. Earlier, Frankie tried to make sense of an online college application. Now nothing made sense.

  “Found them!” Gennaro held his keys up in front of Frankie and gave him a hug. “Ya doing okay, Francesco?”

  “Guess so,” Frankie said. Gennaro greeted the two cigar-smoking octogenarians and told them that smoking will stunt their growth. He winked at Frankie, jumped into his convertible, and beeped the horn as his car peeled away from the curb.

  Back in the office, Frankie gathered the cartoline postale from the carpet and stacked them on the desk. The computer screen had gone blank, and he struggled to prioritize his thoughts. Check Lenny’s inbox to see if there had been emails from Vi? Or search the web for the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden? Frankie pressed the spacebar and Lenny’s email page came up, but the email to Vi was gone. Frankie clicked drafts. Nothing. He clicked sent email, and there was Dr. Violetta Vitkus at 4:23 p.m. He knew that he hadn’t pressed send. He was sure of it. Then he remembered: Must have left my keys in the office. Gennaro must have pressed send. There was no other explanation. Misplacing his keys was a ruse — a classic DiCico stunt. Frankie thought, Gennaro figured that my dad was right about me needing to get away from him, or he was angry with my father and this was his way of getting even. He thought to call Gennaro on his cell, but Gennaro would deny everything.

  He googled Dr. Violetta Vitkus. Several links came up, most having to do with UCLA, a few regarding publications and conferences. All of the links were in purple, showing that Lenny had already opened them. Frankie clicked the first link, which included a photograph. Vi’s blond hair was cut short and spiked. Her face was thinner than in the wedding picture on Lenny’s dresser, making her cheekbones more pronounced. The color of her eyes matched Frankie’s. The picture depicted a mature, professional woman, someone quite capable of choices — the choice to pursue an education, including a Ph.D., and the choice to abandon her baby.

  Abandon? This was the first time that Frankie considered that Vi had abandoned him. He had never felt abandoned. He was always among family. Until now, the only photograph that he had seen of Vi was of a girl wearing layers of cream-colored gauze and with miniature violets and baby’s breath in her hair — more a fairytale princess who mysteriously vanished than a real woman choosing to leave her baby and move on with her life. Regardless, he was too confused and overwhelmed to dwell on this or the email or his father delivering Big Vinny’s money, or that he had seen Gennaro write the murdered cab driver’s license plate number on his arm, which he had been obsessing about since learning that the cabdriver had been murdered. As if he were playing whack-a-mole at the Feast of The Assumption, every time Frankie dismissed one concern another popped up. It was all too big, too beyond his control.

  He took several slow, deep breaths and spread the stack of cartoline postale across the desk. He imagined fanciful stories inspired by the long ago sepia photographs and found some peace in his musings. Had the great-grandfathers been inseparable, like Gennaro and he? What were they like as boys? Did they discover that they were more than friends? Did they ever make love on a hot summer night? Not in a basement in Glenhaven, but in some ancient ruin in Taormina.

  Frankie googled the photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden and discovered several links including images of his photographs and articles. One article began with a bri
ef biography:

  Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (September 16, 1856 — February 16, 1931) was a German photographer who worked mainly in Sicily. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude photographs of Sicilian boys with props such as wreaths or amphorae suggesting a setting in Greece or Italy of antiquity.

  Another article included critiques and perceptions over time of von Gloeden’s work, which became widely known, if not notorious. In total, the Baron took over 3,000 images and turned an impoverished Sicilian seaside town into a vacation destination for writers, artists, European aristocrats, and American industrialists. The article also mentioned that von Gloeden was a favorite among the art collectors of the fin de siècle, and it discussed his photographic techniques, his homosexuality, his personal and romantic exploits, his artistic demise under Fascism, and the resurging interest in his work during the sexual revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  Frankie had grown up on Lasante-DiCico stories. Meals were like dinner theater where family history played out, including varied interpretations and revivals. He knew that Leonardo and Salvatore had been childhood friends in Sicily and that Salvatore’s son, Giacomo, had come to America as a boy to live with the Lasantes — like a brother to his Grandfather Vincenzo, but nothing had been said about the Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden or his photographs. That part of the Lasante-DiCico script had been cut, intentionally or not, and Frankie wondered if his imaginings about the great-grandfathers were more discovery than creation, as if the cartoline postale’s sepia tranquility had sparked a cosmic memory within him of a time long before the dreamy-eyed Sicilian boy became his great-grandfather — bent, shriveled, and hallow-eyed. What memories stirred behind the old man’s vacant expression? Frankie was barely nine years old when his great-grandfather passed away.

  Though Frankie couldn’t read the letters that had also been in the envelope with the pictures, it was comforting to think about what they might say. He returned most of the pictures to their envelope and locked them in the safe, but the cartoline postale and the letters he brought upstairs to his bedroom, and musing about what might have happened helped him to forget the more disturbing matters at hand — at least for the time being.

  That evening, after finishing his college essay, he dozed in front of the television, but then woke to his cell phone ringing. It was Lenny calling to say that he’d be home late and not to worry. “Are you sure you’re okay?” Frankie said, but despite Lenny’s reassurance, Frankie couldn’t help but worry that something had gone wrong with the drop.

  He remembered Lenny leaving the house and feared he might never see him again. “Stupid!” he told himself. “He’ll be home soon.” Then he thought of Vi and wondered why she had left Lenny. “He’s a good guy. Not bad looking,” he told himself. “What the fuck made her so special?” Finally, Frankie lifted one of the cartolena postales from the nightstand next to his bed. The image was the one that most closely resembled Gennaro and, for a moment, he forgot about fearing for Lenny’s safety and hating Vi.

  That moment passed, and he again struggled to suppress one worry after another — again and again — like an emotional calliope, until he fell into a fitful sleep fractured by sepia images of long-ago Sicilian youth that morphed into images of Gennaro and him like the holograms at the Feast of the Assumption.

  14

  The train bumped and rocked — first above then below the ground — and each time Lenny looked up from his newspaper, he briefly made eye contact with two or three subway riders, as if they knew that the bulge in his black leather jacket was Big Vinny’s blood money. It never crossed Lenny’s mind that the fleeting glances from mostly women, but also a few men, might have been admiration. Clean-shaven and wearing a navy blue crewneck sweater under his black leather jacket, creased jeans, and polished loafers, Lenny might have been on his way to audition for a remake of On The Waterfront. He had the look of spruced up middle-aged prizefighter or dockworker — an archetype out of vintage photographs of Manhattan laborers from the firsthalf of the twentieth century. His brushed back black and silver hair that sprung back to curls as it dried enhanced the look and his appeal. The bulge in his jacket might have been a rolled up script that he would soon read from before some bigwig director.

  Having read the same editorial numerous times and not recalling a word of it, Lenny folded his New York Times, contemplated the bulk of the envelope, and considered giving the cash to a man curled up behind a pushcart crammed with plastic bags and newspapers at the far corner of the subway car. Then there was the blind man with his seeing-eye dog, the young woman with three kids and another on the way, and the old couple who leaned into each other and exited the train so slowly that the subway doors almost closed on them. Any number of folks might have put the money to more honorable use than Big Vinny would have. Or maybe Lenny might get mugged and 9:00 pm, last stop Lefferts Blvd would become moot. But at 42nd Street, Lenny left the train with the envelope’s bulk still weighing on him.

  He climbed the steps out of the subway and walked to 45th Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, where the names of Broadway plays were spelled out on a billboard in tiny rapidly changing red lights like a thespian speed-reading exercise. Hundreds of folks waited to purchase discount tickets, reminding Lenny of the wintry Sundays when Vincenzo and he stood for hours in a line that snaked around wooden horses, waiting to buy tickets for the Radio City Music Hall Christmas shows. Filomena and Lenny’s younger siblings sat in an automat, sipping hot chocolate and reading or drawing until Lenny came to collect them. “Papa said to hurry. It’s our turn to see the show,” Lenny would say as if life on Earth depended upon everyone rushing to meet Vincenzo. Angie took charge of the younger sisters while Filomena carried Tony. In Filomena’s bag were sandwiches and chunks of chocolate to eat during the show.

  Matinees had already begun and an evening play would conflict with what Lenny had to do at 9:00 pm, which was just as well, as he didn’t have the patience to wait in line or to sit in a theater. Instead, he shoved his hands into his pockets, edged his way through the crowds up Broadway, and walked east to Central Park.

  It was sunny and cool — a perfect fall day for strolling, and the autumn colors were near peak. Two men, not much younger than Lenny, played with their daughter in one of the many Central Park playgrounds. She called to one of the men, slightly balding with a full beard. “Daddy! Watch me jump.” Then she called to the other man, darker, resembling Lenny. “Poppy, catch me.” The world was changing, except on 104th Street.

  “Your daughter is beautiful,” Lenny called out. And she was beautiful, with her beaded braids, café au lait complexion, and the light of a child adored glowing from her large almond shaped eyes.

  “Thank you,” the darker father responded — the one she had called Poppy. And for a brief moment Poppy and Lenny connected the way strangers sometimes do, and Lenny hoped that all would go well with their family, and then he remembered when Frankie was little and how Frankie and he often spent Sunday afternoons in Central Park. They entered the park at 59th Street and walked uptown, stopping every several blocks so Frankie could discover another playground and meet children of every imaginable background, some speaking very little English or no English at all, some with nannies and some with moms who were barely teenagers. A walk through Central Park was like traveling the world.

  Lenny bought a hot dog from a street vendor not far from the larger than life bronze sculpture of Alice in Wonderland sitting atop a giant mushroom, and remembered Frankie chomping down on his first NYC hot dog. They were on the West Side, across from Central Park, in front of the Museum of Natural History, and they sat on the sun-warmed concrete steps below the Equestrian Statue of Teddy Roosevelt. Frankie went on and on about the dioramas they had just seen in the museum. Between chattering and munching on his hot dog, he paused and stared wide-eyed towards the woods across the avenue, as if expecting an Alaskan brown bear or African buffalo to break through Central Park’s lush foliage. As usual, after a busy da
y in the city, Lenny carried Frankie back to the subway. How Lenny wished that it was Frankie’s small torso pressing against his heart rather than Big Vinny’s bribe-stuffed envelope.

  It was still several hours before he had to meet Big Vinny’s bagman at the Lefferts Blvd. Station, so Lenny walked back downtown to Saint John the Baptist, one of Filomena’s favorite churches. She had several. This one was smaller than Most Precious Blood, and like with so many old buildings in Manhattan, New York City had grown up around it, dwarfing its 160-year-old façade — drab and spindly, but inside were vestiges of opulence. On either side of the slender nave, ornate chandeliers illuminated the 14 child-size statues representing the Stations of the Cross. Between Station 11, where Roman Soldiers hammered nails through the palms of a bleeding Christ, and Station 12, where the two Marys and Saint John wept at the feet of the crucified Christ, was a bust of Padre Pio, flanked by small iron and leaded glass coffers containing the padre’s relics — a glove and sock, bloodstained from his stigmata.

  Filomena had been especially devoted to Saint Padre Pio, who was also from her parents’ hometown of Pietreclina. She spoke of smelling flowers when she prayed to the saint, meaning that her prayers were being heard. “Another Jean Nate miracle,” was Lenny’s usual response, but Frankie was in awe of his grandmother’s devotion and ate up her stories of Padre Pio’s visible signs of Christ’s wounds that would bleed spontaneously.

  Lenny lit candles before the Padre Pio shrine. “For you, Ma,” he whispered. A choir circled a piano near the front of the church, practicing hymns in Latin. Their collective voices ascended the faded mauve colored walls and pink marble pillars to rows of pealing buttresses and circles of Plexiglas that had long replaced the damaged stained glass windows. Lenny examined the bust of Pio — the bushy eyebrows, scruffy beard, and mischievous expression made the padre more reminiscent of a naughty gnome than a pious saint. Lenny slipped his hand inside his jacket and glanced at the coffer containing Padre Pio’s stained glove. What better place to leave Big Vinny’s blood money than before the image of the Padre known for stigmata. He removed the envelope from his pocket and laid it before the bust of the saint. If there is a God let him decide who’s to have this money, he thought, but there isn’t a God, so it’s a foolish exercise. Lenny slipped a hundred-dollar bill from the envelope, stuffed it into the slot below the bust, returned the envelope to his pocket, and left the church. He thought about surprising Angie, who lived fairly close, but instead walked to Penn Station to catch the Eighth Avenue subway back to Queens and to do Big Vinny’s dirty work.