by Gay Talese
That Sinatra was an Italo-American gained no concession from my father, who seemed irrationally resistant to any and all performers who appealed primarily to a youthful spirit or exemplified the latest fad. The objects of his displeasure included not only crooners but also the most celebrated new stars of Hollywood and the heralded figures of the sports world.
Among athletes, he regarded baseball players as the most excessively praised and the sport itself as the most tediously time-consuming, and his weary response to the game escalated to an active dislike of it after I became, at the age of nine, a baseball addict. I became hooked on baseball during the summer of 1941, as the New York Yankees’ center fielder, Joe DiMaggio, was breaking a major-league record by hitting in fifty-six successive games. Even on my provincial island, where the fans were partial to the teams from Philadelphia, the New York slugger was admired by the crowds that gathered on the boardwalk or under the green-striped awning of a midtown grocery market, where a radio loudly played a new song recorded by Les Brown’s band:
From Coast to Coast, that’s all you hear
Of Joe the One-Man Show
He’s glorified the horsehide sphere,
Jolting Joe DiMaggio …
Joe … Joe … DiMaggio …
We want you on our side …
One day as I strolled into my parents’ store whistling that tune, my father, who recognized it immediately, turned away and walked back to the cutting room, slowly shaking his head. I continued with my whistling, albeit less forcefully, throughout the day; and I recognize this as perhaps my first sign of rebellion against my father, a rebellion that would intensify during the next two years to the point that now, in December 1943, as my agitated mind wandered in the backseat of my father’s Buick, I was planning my escape from parochial school when the Yankees began spring training the following March.
I would not have to go far. It had recently been announced on the local sports page that, as a result of wartime restrictions on long-distance travel, the Yankees would forgo Florida to train in Atlantic City. After reading this, I secretly marked the passage of each grim, cold day, anticipating a glorious spring in which I would travel by trolley across the marshlands to the rickety little stadium that would be ennobled by the presence of baseball’s World Champions. I revealed none of these plans to my father, of course, and I vowed that my rendezvous with the Yankees would be realized no matter what he said or did to justify his abnormal aversion to the national pastime.
If truth be told, however, I would one day understand my father’s lack of appreciation of sports. When he was a boy growing up in his village during World War I, there were no games to be played, no opportunities for leisure or relaxation—it was a time and place in which child labor was not only accepted but demanded by the destitute conditions of the day; and my father passed through his adolescent years without knowing what it was like to be young.
As he was quick to remind me whenever I complained about having to help out in the store, he had been forced to hold down two demanding jobs while attending grammar school. He rose at dawn to serve as a tailor’s apprentice in his uncle’s shop in the village; later, after school, he toiled in the valley on his grandfather’s farm, which was short of workers because increased numbers of men had been conscripted by the Italian army.
Among those summoned was my father’s older brother, Sebastian, who would return from the front in 1917 crippled and mentally disturbed from inhaling poison gas and being bombarded by artillery shells during the trench warfare against the Germans. Since Sebastian never fully recovered, and since my father’s father, Gaetano, had died three years earlier of asbestosis soon after returning to Italy from his factory job in America, my father became prematurely responsible for the welfare of his widowed mother and her three younger children.
Two of these children (my father’s brothers Nicola and Domenico) were Italian infantrymen, united with the Germans against the Allied armies attacking Italy. Almost every night after I went to bed, I could overhear my father’s whispered prayers as he knelt before the portrait of Saint Francis, begging the monk to save his brothers from death or the fate that had befallen Sebastian, and pleading also for the protection of his mother and other family members who were now trapped in the war. Sicily had surrendered by this time, but the Allies had not yet conquered all of southern Italy, and throughout 1943, in our apartment and in the store, I was aware of my father’s volatile behavior, his moods abruptly shifting between resignation and peevishness, tenderness and aloofness, openness and secrecy. On this flag-waving island where my father wished to be publicly perceived as a patriotic citizen, I instinctively understood and sympathized with his plight as a kind of emotional double agent.
After returning from school, I would see his uneasiness when the postman walked into the store to drop a pack of mail on the counter. When the postman had left, my father would approach the mail tentatively and sift through it to see whether it contained any of those flimsy gray envelopes sent from overseas. If he found any, he would place them unopened next to the cash register in my mother’s dress department for her to open later and read.
My mother, who was candid and direct in ways antithetical to my circuitous father, had earlier confided to me that most of these letters were from a prisoner-of-war camp in North Africa where one of my father’s relatives was imprisoned. This relative had been captured with several hundred other Italian soldiers after the British victory over the Germans at El Alamein; but this imprisonment did not prevent him from forwarding to my father information that he had somehow learned inside the camp about the welfare of the people in and around my father’s village.
After the doors of the store were closed and locked, my mother would open and silently read each overseas letter, while my father watched her face for any sign of shock or sadness. If she showed neither, he would be reassured that there had been no disaster and would quietly take the letter from her and read it himself.
Perhaps what I was witnessing was a superstitious stratagem on his part, an idiosyncrasy that could be traced back to some strange turn of mind that had shaped the occult character of his ancient, isolated village. Or maybe he was simply using my mother as a crutch in this period of uncertainty and anxiety—a guarantee against the possibility that he would be the sole recipient of the news of death.
But whatever the reason, I was disturbed by these scenes and wanted to remain as detached as possible from the complex reality that embraced my life. There were many times when I wished that I had been born into a different family, a plain and simple family of impeccable American credentials—a no-secrets, nonwhispering, no-enemy-soldiers family that never received mail from POW camps, or prayed to a painting of an ugly monk, or ate Italian bread with pungent cheese.
I would have preferred having a mother who spent less time in the store with the island’s leading Protestant ladies, to whom she sold dresses, and more time playing parish politics with the nuns and the mainland Irish women who invaded our school on PTA evenings and Bingo Nights. And I would have welcomed a father who could have become more relaxed and casual, and who on weekends would have removed his vest and tie and played ball with me on the beach or in the small park across from the Methodist Tabernacle church. But this last wish, I knew, was pure fantasy on my part—I had made the discovery the summer before, after I had spent a half-hour bouncing a red rubber ball against a brick wall in the parking lot behind our shop. I was supposed to be working in the store at the time, affixing long thin cardboard guards to the bottom of wire hangers, then lining up these hangers on a pipe rack within reach of two black men who were pressing trousers and jackets. But after I had hung up about fifty hangers with the guards attached, I disappeared through the clouds of steam rising from the pressing machines and, with the ball in my pocket, slipped out the back door into the cool breeze of the parking lot. There I began to fling the ball against the wall and practice fielding it on the short hop in imitation of the Yankees’ star s
econd baseman, the acrobatic, dark-eyed Joe Gordon, to whom I fancied I bore a resemblance.
I assumed that my father was away from the store having lunch, as he always did in the middle of Saturday afternoons; I was therefore suddenly shaken by the sight of him opening the back door, then walking toward me with a frown on his face. Not knowing what to do, but nonetheless compelled by nervous energy to do something, I quickly took the ball in my right hand, cocked my arm, and threw it at him.
The ball soared forty feet in a high arc toward his head. He was so startled to see it coming that he halted his step and stared skittishly up at the sky through his steel-rimmed glasses. Then—as if not knowing whether to block the ball or try to catch it—he extended his arms upward and cupped his soft tailor’s hands, and braced himself for the impact.
I stood watching anxiously from the far corner of the lot, no less shocked than he that I had chosen this moment to confront him—perhaps for the first time in his life—with the challenge of catching a ball. I cringed as I saw the ball hit him solidly on the side of the neck, carom off a shoulder, rebound against the wall behind him, and come rolling slowly back to his feet, where it finally stopped.
As I waited, holding my breath, he lowered his head and began to rub his neck. Then, seeing the ball at his feet, he stooped to pick it up. For a moment he held the rubber ball in his right hand and examined it as if it were a strange object. He squeezed it. He turned it around in his fingers. Finally, with a bashful smile, he turned toward me, cocked his arm awkwardly, and tried to throw the ball in my direction.
But it slipped from his grip, skidded weakly at an oblique angle, and rolled under one of his dry-cleaning trucks parked along the edge of the lot.
As I hastened to retrieve it, I saw him shrug his shoulders. He seemed to be very embarrassed. He who cared so much about appearances had tried his best, and yet the results were pitiful. It was a sorrowful moment for both of us.
But I heard my father make no excuses as I crawled under the truck to get the ball. And when I got up again, I saw that he was gone.
The Buick turned the corner and drove past the bank into the business district and stopped in front of our store. It was almost twelve-fifteen, and I should have been hungry when my father announced cheerfully, “I’m making pancakes—who wants some?” My sister jumped and cheered, but I remained silent.
I followed behind as Marian skipped up the steep carpeted indoor staircase with its beige stone walls, which ascended past two landings to an arched entrance. A black cast-iron chandelier hung above the entrance, and the outer wall at each landing contained a four-foot niche encasing a holy statue and an ever-burning red votive candle.
In one niche was the serene figure of the Virgin Mary, who stood exquisitely unruffled while under her bare feet a snake squirmed. In the other niche was a brown-robed statuette of Saint Francis who, although his sandaled feet were free from snakes, possessed a characteristically grim and sulky facial expression—just as depressing as that in his wall portrait in our apartment and in the living room of most of my father’s Philadelphia friends. This wretched-looking monk was the leading spoilsport in all of sainthood, a horror since my earliest childhood; and today he reminded me somewhat of myself, and I loathed him more than usual.
In the apartment I hung up my hat and coat, and, after politely refusing my mother’s offer to bring me lunch while I did my homework, I closed my bedroom door—to resume working on one of my model airplanes. It was a Lockheed P-38 fighter with a twin fuselage. While carefully pasting crisp, thin sections of tissue paper onto the balsa-wood frame, I could hear the musical sounds of Puccini rising softly from my father’s Victrola. I pictured him seated in his favorite chair reading the newspaper—and also my mother, at the other end of the apartment, in her usual seat at the dining room table, helping my sister with her spelling, reading, and arithmetic.
A typical Sunday. So different from the rest of the week because there were no bell sounds heard in the apartment every time a customer opened or closed the main door of the shop; and the upstairs telephone extension was not ringing every minute with business calls; and if I turned on my small bedside radio there would not be the usual static that existed whenever the electric sewing machines were zipping along in the cutting room and the spotlights were burning in the dress department for the enhancement of my mother’s wooden mannequins. Often on summery Saturday afternoons, when the Yankees’ games were being broadcast from New York, I would sneak down the side staircase into the front of the store and turn off the spotlights that caused most of the static, then quickly go back upstairs to press my right ear against the warm radio and hope that the voice of the Yankees, Mel Allen, would fill me in on whatever action I had missed.
When my father became aware of my gamesmanship with the lights, he would quietly enter the apartment and sometimes catch me hunched against the radio—and after snapping off the dial, he would furiously shove me by the shoulders down the rear steps into the back of the store, near the pressing machines and the sweating men partly obscured by the clouds of steam. There on the floor were huge boxes of cardboard guards waiting to be hooked to new wire hangers. Or worse, there were piles of rusty, used hangers that my father had bought cheaply from customers (to offset the limited supply of metal hangers produced in wartime). These entangled hangers that clung together like crabs in a basket had to be separated, bent into proper shape, scraped clear of rust, then outfitted one by one with a cardboard guard. The game upstairs proceeded without me, its eventual conclusion unknown to me until, on the following day, I eagerly reached for the sports section of the Sunday paper.
But on this static-free Sunday in December, since the broadcasts of professional football held little appeal, I concentrated on my model airplanes—I razor-cut the wood, fit it to the pattern, and slowly succumbed to the etherlike effect of the powerful glue that soon put me to sleep.
Hours passed before my mother, with a soft nudge, whispered so that my father could not hear: “Hurry, dress—we’re leaving for Atlantic City.”
The Buick moved through the darkened streets along an interior route toward the bay bridge, avoiding the coastline. All lighting was prohibited along the ocean. Houses within view of the ocean had their window shades pulled down, and the beach was occupied only by mounted Coast Guardsmen, whose horses could move in water reaching up to their necks and were trained not to become alarmed by the sight of the phosphorus flashes that sometimes jumped above the waves.
Over the marshlands, past the pine trees, beyond the frosted farmlands and country roads that barely reflected the blue-tinted headlights of our car, we finally reached the circular boulevard with its central granite monument that marked the entrance, away from the coast, into Atlantic City. After a few blocks on the main avenue, over which a silvery span of Christmas decorations devoid of lights framed the night, my father turned into a side street where there were bars and nightclubs with black men and women standing in front. Two blocks beyond, without a black person in sight, we were in the Italian neighborhood, with its locally renowned restaurant The Venice.
Men wearing overcoats and wide-brimmed hats, and smoking cigarettes and cigars, stood outside The Venice guiding the cars in and out of the parking lot. One of them nodded toward my father, who had been coming here for years; inside, the headwaiter shook my father’s hand and escorted us through the crowd at the bar to our table against the wall in the middle of the room. Nearly every table was occupied by Italo-American families, some with babies in high chairs (I recognized a red chair that I had once occupied); and the waiters, wearing tuxedos and clip-on bow ties, moved swiftly up and down the aisles with their trays, conversing with their customers and with one another in a dialectal blend of English and Italian. Although the restaurant was called The Venice, there was little about it that was Venetian; the aroma of cooking was clearly Neapolitan, and prominently displayed behind the bar was a mural of the Bay of Naples—the last view of Italy that many of these people had
had before embarking years earlier for America.
My father took our orders, as he always did, then conveyed them in Italian to one of the waiters, who never wrote anything down. As usual, my first plate was spaghetti with clam sauce—and my usual way of consuming this was with a fork and a round tablespoon, which I held like a catcher’s mitt to scoop up the fallen bits of clam and to stabilize my fork as I attempted to twirl the spaghetti strands into a tight and tidy mouthful.
My father, I’d noticed, never ate spaghetti in this fashion. He used only the fork, with which he masterfully twirled the strands without letting any of them dangle as he lifted them to his mouth. But on this occasion, after my plate had arrived and I had begun in my customary style with the spoon, he sat watching with an almost pained look on his face. Then he said, patiently:
“You know, I think you’re old enough now to learn how to do it right.”
“To do what right?”
“To eat spaghetti right,” he said. “Without the spoon. Only people without manners eat spaghetti that way—or people who are ignorant; or those Italians who are cafoni [country bumpkins]. But in Italy the refined Italians would never be seen in public using the spoon.”
Putting aside the spoon, I tried three or four times to spin the spaghetti around the fork, but each time the strands either slipped off and splashed into the sauce, or skipped off the plate and fell onto the floor.
“Forget it,” my father said finally. “Forget it for today—but from now on, practice. One day you’ll learn to get it right.”
Soon the second course arrived, then dessert and the black coffee in the small cup that my father drank. My parents talked business, and my sister and I shifted restlessly.
My wandering attention was drawn to a large table near the bar, around which a festive crowd of middle-aged men and women were laughing and applauding, raising their wineglasses toward a young soldier who was with them. The soldier sat very tall in his khaki uniform. His hair was shiny black and precisely parted. His shoulders were huge, his long face lean and hard, and his brown eyes were alert. He seemed to be fully aware of how special he was.
