The Good Samaritan Kitchen was in Saint John the Baptist Church, where Filomena and Frankie once lit candles before a bust of Padre Pio, as Lenny had also done on the day he gave Big Vinny’s envelope to a stranger at the Lefferts Boulevard Station. The volunteer staff called the people who dined at the Kitchen guests, and some of the guests bore a confidence and swagger that said this is only a temporary setback, just a hard-luck glitch, but others looked defeated — their eyes either vigilant or vacant, arms pocked with needle marks, breath reeking of alcohol. Mental illness, addiction, poverty, or some calamity had claimed their lives.
When Frankie visited Lenny in Manhattan, he often volunteered at the Kitchen, and on this Christmas day, six years after the cabdriver’s son had revenged his father’s murder, Frankie spotted a guest who reminded him of Gennaro — something in the way he smirked when Frankie asked him if he wanted ham or chicken, as if his question were silly, but Frankie often saw Gennaro in strangers. Not so much when he was in California, but always in New York City. It was more about attitude than physical appearance. The Gennaros Frankie noticed were tall or short, dark or light, maybe a boy climbing a jungle gym in Central Park, or an old man sitting on park bench feeding pigeons. Each time Frankie came East not a day passed without spotting at least one Gennaro. In California, he occasionally forgot, but in New York City all he did was remember.
“Can I have a little of both?” the young man asked.
Frankie stared at him as if not understanding his request.
“Some ham and some chicken.”
He had black eyes under heavy black lashes, perfectly arched eyebrows, and a shadow of a beard. One of those men who might shave in the morning, again at noon, and still have a 5 o’clock shadow. The name Sam was printed above the brim of his red cap. Frankie placed a slice of ham and two chicken thighs on a plate, and he handed the plate to the server next to him wearing a yarmulke. The man added a scoop of mashed potatoes. Then a woman added vegetables. She was a rabbi, and most of the Christmas dinner volunteers were from her synagogue — a long-standing Christmas tradition at the Good Samaritan Kitchen.
Gennaro with the red cap that read Sam selected chocolate cake for dessert, and he glanced back at Frankie as if for approval. Frankie would have picked the apple pie, but he smiled. Chocolate cake was a fine choice.
Sam sat at one of the long folding tables where Lenny chatted with men as easily as he had once done with customers in Lasante’s. Angie often complained that Lenny was too chummy with the guests.
“Things can get testy,” she confided in Frankie during their cellphone conversations. “For the most part, your father is good at easing tensions, but sometimes he should call the police. Pushing 60, and he still thinks he’s 20.”
Frankie didn’t like it when Angie exaggerated Lenny’s age. Since Gennaro’s death he especially feared losing Lenny but, at 56, Lenny felt and looked better than he had when he sold the store. His hair was grayer, but he joined a Y and either walked or took subways. He had sold his car when he moved to Manhattan. He also grew a beard and resembled an Italian Ernest Hemingway. Lenny patted Sam’s shoulder, and Sam wished him a Merry Christmas.
Manhattan agreed with Lenny. He worked a lot but, when he wasn’t working or at the Y, he frequented the places that he shared years ago with Frankie. Los Angeles, however, didn’t agree with Frankie, but in his sophomore year at UCLA he began writing, and his stories took him far away from California — mostly to New York City, sometimes Purling in the Catskills, and sometimes Sicily.
Angie collected the trays, plates, and silverware after guests finished eating, and her boyfriend, Dan, worked the dishwasher. They’d been together for nearly three years and lately they talked of marriage — at least Dan did. He was Angie’s first Republican. A large man, balding, and a genius with his hands — adept at carpentry, electrical work, and plumbing. For the most part, Lenny and Dan avoided talking politics, but sometimes conversations got pretty heated. However, Lenny liked Dan better than any of Angie’s past boyfriends and definitely better than Angie’s ex-husband.
The food line soon became shorter, and most of the seats in the dining area were taken. An undernourished Santa Claus made his way up and down the aisles and handed out gloves and scarfs to the guests. There were wrapped presents for the children.
Sam stuffed his gloves and scarf into his already bulging backpack. He talked to everyone at his table, though some of the men seemed distracted or more interested in their food than anything Sam had to say, but he didn’t let that stop him. Frankie wondered if Sam could sing like Mario Lanza, or if there were tiny scars that lined his chest and biceps.
“Ham, please!” A heavy woman with wild salt and pepper hair glared at Frankie. Frankie apologized, placed several slices of ham on her plate, and chicken on the next two plates. He recognized some of the guests from past Christmas dinners and other New York visits, but he had never seen Sam. He would have remembered if he had. He would have written about him as he wrote about many people who, or incidents that, reminded him of Gennaro.
Angie tapped Frankie’s shoulder. “I’ll take over here. Your dad wants you to meet someone. Over there.” Angie pointed towards an exit sign. Under it, Lenny talked with a woman.
Sam didn’t seem to notice when Frankie passed his table even though Frankie paused behind Sam’s chair, picked up stray sugar packets, and pretended to straighten the other chairs. Sam’s backpack was covered with buttons. One was the size of a silver dollar with a picture of an ancient Greek theater before the smoldering Mt. Etna — the setting for many of the cartoline postale. Taormina was written across the bottom, and Frankie looked in disbelief from the button to Sam, back to the button, back to Sam, but Sam didn’t notice. He held his fork like a trowel and scooped up a meld of mashed potatoes and vegetables. His knuckles were as chafed and grimy as were von Gloeden’s Sicilian boys’, including the great-grandfathers’.
Lenny waved to get Frankie’s attention. Dazed, Frankie walked towards the exit sign, but rather than stop and talk with Lenny and his woman friend, Frankie passed them and continued out the door into the slip of alley. Lenny excused himself and followed him.
“Are you alright?” Lenny asked. They both wore aprons as they once had in Lasante’s, but these aprons were stenciled with the quote: “And who is my neighbor?”
Frankie leaned against the stone wall. The cold air soothed him as he tried to answer Lenny, but he couldn’t — not yet. Gennaro would have told him to stop reading into things. It’s just a fuckin button, he would have said. Or would he? Maybe Gennaro might have finally agreed that not everything is random. There’s much we don’t know? So much so that we don’t even know what we don’t know until something as simple as a button on a backpack reminds us that life is more than chance.
“I’m okay, just a little woozy from standing over the steam table.”
“Should I get you a folding chair?” Lenny asked.
“No. I’m really okay. Really. Let’s go back inside. I’ll be fine. I just needed some air.”
Lenny’s friend waited for them just inside the door. She looked to be in her fifties — bohemian Manhattan, a full-figured woman draped in black crepe. Her hair was piled atop her head, though stray winglets of her curly mane and beaded earrings brushed her shoulders as she bobbed her head as she spoke, which she seemed to do a lot.
“Frankie, this is Hannah Rosen. She’s here to help with cleanup, but first I want to introduce you two. We met at an author series at the 92nd Street Y where she teaches fiction. I figured you’d have a lot in common, both being writers.”
Frankie and Hannah shook hands, smiled, and exchanged the preliminary nice to meet you, and Frankie wondered if he should say something about having read her work, assuming that she was published. He didn’t recognize her name, and he was much too distracted by thoughts of the Taormina button and Sam to exchange small talk with Hannah, even if she were Atwood or Morrison.
“Your father tells me that
you’re reading at Bluestockings Bookstore tomorrow evening.”
“Yes. Not sure what kind of turnout there will be, given that it’s the night after Christmas.” Can I go now, he thought.
“Well, let’s hope for a good showing. Not everyone celebrates Christmas.”
He was about to excuse himself and get back to work and watching Sam, but Lenny beat him to it by saying that he had to collect trays.
Hannah reminded Frankie of Vi’s friends, or colleagues as she called them, and of more than a few of his undergraduate and graduate professors — her elocution slow and affected, as if she were struggling to dumb down her thoughts.
“So you’ll be reading from a collection of your short stories?” she asked.
Frankie assumed that Lenny had explained all of this to her, but he played along. “Yes, most of the stories have already been published individually, but this is my first collection.”
“And so young. Very impressive.”
Not so impressive, he thought, and he was much more interested in Sam than Lenny’s latest squeeze. Who else might she be, and why else would she come to help clean up the Kitchen dressed as if she were going to a café on Madison Ave? She was also a little on the chubby side. Just the way Dad likes his women, Frankie thought.
“Thank you. I think Dad needs help collecting trays. Most of the guests have finished eating.”
“Yes, I’ll help. That’s why I’m here. Just tell me what to do.”
You can start by changing that dress, Frankie thought, but he smiled, nodded, and tried not to roll his eyes.
Unfortunately Sam was gone, unlike Hannah, who followed Frankie to the kitchen where he handed her an apron.
38
Lenny’s apartment had its own entrance behind a wrought-iron gate to the right of the brownstone stoop and down three steps. The apartment, which had been renovated just before Lenny moved in, included a single, sleek open space (kitchen, dining, and sitting area), a bedroom, and a bathroom. The only furniture Lenny moved from the old house was the enamel-top kitchen table and its two chairs, his bed, and one dresser. The rest of the apartment was furnished with pieces that Angie picked out at IKEA — very utilitarian, except for framed posters that Lenny bought at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — Modigliani, Gauguin, Picasso. Bright, bold images.
Aside from a few cards, there was nothing Christmassy about Lenny’s apartment. Since moving, he never decorated for holidays. Frankie once asked him if it was because of what had happened that night at Most Precious Blood, and Lenny shrugged his shoulders. “I was never big on Christmas,” he said.
Last night they ate Christmas Eve dinner upstairs in Angie’s apartment with Angie and Dan, where there was a small artificial tree with lights, and also several of the antiques from the old house including the mother bear and cubs humidor and pipe tray. Mama bear held a Christmas cactus in bloom on the tray above her head. The pipes, along with many other small items and furniture, had been donated to a local charity.
Frankie and Lenny sat at the enamel-top table and ate Christmas Eve leftovers. Lenny poured a glass of wine for Frankie and for himself. He raised his glass and said: “Boun Natale.”
“What’s Sam’s story?” Frankie said nonchalantly, as if he were just making small talk, but not particularly curious about Sam. He stabbed a calamari ring with his fork and twirled several strands of linguini.
“Sam?”
“Yeah. A guy at the Kitchen. Around my age. Maybe a little older. Kind of nice looking. Looks as if he could use a shave.”
“A lot of guys there look like they can use a shave.”
“No. I mean he has a heavy beard. You know, like he always looks as if he needs a shave — even after he shaves.”
“Sorry, but I don’t know any guy named Sam. Maybe if I saw him. I don’t know everyone’s name. Some folks come and go.” Lenny grated more Romano cheese onto his linguini. He held the chunk of cheese and grater out to Frankie.
“No, I’m good,” Frankie said. “But you were talking to him today. He carried a backpack covered with buttons.”
Lenny put down his fork, squinted at Frankie and twisted his mouth to one side as if confused by Frankie’s interest.
“He wore a red baseball cap with his name on it. Sam.”
“Oh, you mean Angel. I don’t know where he got that cap, but his name is Angel, not Sam.” Lenny finished his wine and took a deep breath. “His story? Iraq ... Assholes in Washington like Cheney ... Halliburton making big money off war ... Just pick one. That’s Sam’s story, just like it’s the story of a lot of the guys at the Kitchen.” Lenny raised his eyebrows. “Why so interested?”
Frankie shrugged, again feigning disinterest. “No reason. He had a button on his backpack that said Taormina. It just seemed odd.”
“He has a lot of buttons that say a lot of things,” Lenny said, as if he were channeling Gennaro.
“True, but it caught my eye.”
“You doing okay?”
Frankie nodded.
Later, as he lay on the futon beneath a poster of Gauguin’s The Siesta, but not able to sleep and rethinking which of his short stories he’d read tomorrow night at Bluestockings, Frankie heard Lenny in the bathroom. He called out to him. “Dad, I’ll help out at breakfast in the morning.”
“I leave at five,” Lenny said.
Frankie set the alarm on his cellphone. He flinched when he heard Lenny drop something. He was used to flinching at loud noises, used to dreading Christmas, and used to missing Gennaro. He accepted missing Gennaro. It was simply a part of who Frankie was. Like an amputee, Frankie didn’t cease moving forward, but his steps were more deliberate, always aware that something, or in Frankie’s case someone, was missing. Stumbling, even falling, and then getting back up had become routine. He wondered what ghosts haunted Angel.
Come morning, it was an eight-block walk from Lenny’s apartment to the Good Samaritan Kitchen, and though the seven blocks along 8th Avenue were short before they turned up 31st Street to Saint John the Baptist Church, it was icy cold, and Frankie was barely able to keep up with Lenny.
Lenny pierced the dark like a locomotive as steam rose from the scarf covering his mouth. Angie often complained about him walking alone every morning in the dark, again citing his age as her concern. Lenny dismissed Angie’s concern with: “Most of the guys on the street know me. If I run into someone new, I’ll invite him to breakfast or introduce him to you in case things go south with your Republican.”
Two volunteer cooks, Earl and Cindy, met Lenny and Frankie in front of the church. They were an elderly couple who knew how to handle the temperamental ovens and had volunteered at the Kitchen longer than Frankie had been on the planet — at least that’s what they said.
“Good morning, Lenny. I see you’ve brought the pup,” Earl said. He was bald with a ring of gray hair, but he had a smooth boyish face and sky-blue eyes. Cindy’s face, on the other hand, was a cushion of wrinkles, but her smile made her appear as ageless as Earl.
She asked about yesterday’s Christmas dinner, and as Lenny answered, his voice rose and fell while he moved through the church basement like an automaton — switching on lights and turning up the thermostat. He left the ovens to Earl and Cindy and told Frankie that they were serving French toast today, and to fill small plastic cups with syrup — something Frankie had done many times before.
Frankie rolled out sheets of wax paper on a table, lined up the plastic cups in tidy rows, and carefully poured syrup from a large bottle into the tiny cups. More volunteers arrived, and soon the kitchen and dining area were filled with friendly chatter, opening folding chairs, making coffee, and pouring water into the steam-table trays.
The volunteers Frankie knew asked how he was doing. One woman he had never met joined him at the table and snapped lids on the cups Frankie had already filled. Her name was Tanya, and she spoke with a Jamaican accent.
It finally warmed up enough for the volunteers to remove their coats and put on apron
s, while the hall outside the dining area filled with guests waiting for breakfast to be served.
Lenny assigned Frankie to coffee, which Frankie preferred rather than standing behind the steam tables or closed off in the kitchen or dishwasher room. If Angel showed up, Frankie was sure to see him. Lenny removed the rope separating the hallway from the dining area, and most of the guests lined up for coffee before they picked up their food trays.
Frankie handed out the Styrofoam cups filled with hot coffee and was moved, as always, by the guests’ show of gratitude: “Thank you ... God Bless.” Some people barely made eye contact with him and others appeared to struggle with invisible demons, but most of the guests were friendly and polite. Once a guest had threatened to throw coffee at Frankie because Frankie had held his hand over the top of the cup, but when the short, emaciated man came back for seconds, scratching his gray matted head of hair, he smiled a mostly toothless smile and told Frankie to have a blessed day as if they were the best of friends.
The breakfast line was short when Angel finally appeared. At first it seemed that Angel was going to skip coffee but, after he placed his tray of food on a table, he walked towards Frankie.
“Coffee, please.”
His breath smelled of cigarette smoke and something sweet like fermentation. He looked tired or hung-over — maybe both.
“Good morning,” Frankie said with a bit too much enthusiasm.
“Thank you,” Angel said and returned to his table.
It was 8:25 and they stopped serving at 8:30. A woman rushed in with a baby in one arm and pulling a toddler behind her, while her coat fanned open and the bottom of her sweater struggled to reach the top of her sweat pants, exposing a small paunch with stretch marks.
“Slow down, Diana,” Lenny said. “You have plenty of time. I won’t throw you out for at least another five minutes.”
Diana laughed and handed the baby to an older woman already eating breakfast. She picked up a tray with one hand and held the toddler’s arm with the other. He squirmed, but Diana meant business.
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