When the World Was Young

by Tony Romano

  Victoria finished the last of her water and wondered if her future nieces would one day view her in the same narrow band of light, if they would bother to look at her at all. She pushed herself from the table, brought out the fruit—a bowl of red apples, oranges, pears, a separate bowl filled with grapes, cherries, sliced melons—and began clearing dishes. She was glad to be alone in the kitchen, dipping her hands in the hot soapy water, listening to the steady rinse of the faucet.

  “Where do you want these, Vicki?”

  Alfredo? Clearing dishes? She turned. “What are you doing, Freddy?”

  He shrugged and set the plates next to the pile of unwashed ones.

  “Dessert will be out later,” she said.

  “I know.” He picked up a dish towel and began drying.

  “You heard enough about Peru?”

  “I guess.” He kept drying, studying each dish.

  “Anything wrong, Freddy?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Just feel like drying?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You and Anthony fighting?”

  “No.”

  She went back to the soapy water, biding her time, lulled by the sound of dishes clanking.

  “The thing is,” he said.

  She didn’t turn for fear he’d stop.

  “I heard Mama and Zia talking.”

  Still she wouldn’t turn. “Oh, yeah?”

  “About you.”

  She sidled closer to him. “About me, huh. What else is new?”

  He peered toward the dining room. “They said you couldn’t go to the feast unless you changed.”

  “Both of them said that?”

  “Sort of.” He scratched his chin and glanced at her shoulders. “So, I don’t know. Maybe you should change?”

  Anthony was usually the peacemaker, but she’d had harsh words with him over something she couldn’t remember, so he probably pulled rank and sent Alfredo. They meant well. She’d give them that. But the evening had been long, with Zia yapping, and—“You know what, Freddy?”

  With his dish towel he circled the plate. Stocky Alfredo. Eager to please.

  She reined in her anger, touched his shoulder, and whispered, as if they were bound by what he’d confided, “When Zia shuts up for thirty seconds straight, that’s when I’ll change my clothes.”

  Alfredo grinned.

  Before heading for the feast, Santo stopped by Mio Fratello to check on Uncle Vince. That’s what he told himself anyway, while the real reason lurked like electricity in the cellar of his mind. He strolled along Grand Avenue, stopping at Battiste’s fish store for a handful of salted pumpkin seeds. Farther along, Russo the barber sat in front of his shop with two older men donning faded fedoras, the red and white stripes on the barber pole swirling skyward untiringly, making the men appear more still than they really were. The scent of witch hazels cut through the summer night.

  “Buona sera,” they said, nodded lazily, then went back to gazing after traffic that streamed by. Some of the men had dirt under their fingernails.

  “Buona sera,” Santo answered, and followed their gaze. Scores of two-door sedans with grinning grilles, some with badges on their hoods, whisked by in either direction, their tires whining and scratching. It was a Friday and everyone had somewhere to go. Even Crazy Willie, the big oaf, now turning onto Grand from Damen Avenue, who circled the neighborhood endlessly each day, muttering to himself, even he had a destination, it seemed. Santo bent down and cuffed his jeans and pressed the fold to form a neat crease. A delivery truck with LLOYD J. HARRIS PIES emblazoned on the side plodded by, the driver leaning on the huge wheel, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He’d put in a full day. Santo stood up, pushed a pocket comb smelling of Brylcreem through his wavy hair, his other hand trailing, then wiped both hands along the sides of his blue jeans. He decided, right then, he needed a car, a thought he’d never had before. His family had gotten along forever without an automobile, his whole life was within walking distance, the buses could take him anywhere he wanted—but the image of himself behind a chrome-inlaid steering wheel took hold. Once that happened, Santo knew, acquiring the car was inevitable, a small step really. He didn’t much believe in fate or destiny, but he believed that thinking about a thing more times than not made that thing happen.

  He looked ahead a few blocks toward the orange and yellow pennants strung around Grand Autos, a white gravel lot with thirty or forty Quality, Dependable, Guaranteed Used Cars that Santo had barely noticed before. His pace quickened. He imagined himself driving around in a midnight-blue Bel Air with bullet-nosed fenders and whitewall tires with chrome-cone hubcaps. He pictured someone next to him in the car—not a girl; not Becky or Vera or Karen; he was tired of girls—but a woman. A woman who smiled easily, someone who would appreciate a ride home from work maybe. Someone who wouldn’t have to scrunch up close to him every time but who would rest her arm along her open window and let the wind take her hair. Later, while parked along Fullerton Beach, both of them gazing out toward Lake Michigan, white-capped waves crashing against one another like children, she’d curl her fingers around his and whisper something that would make the two of them smile.

  But there were no Bel Airs or midnight-blue cars at Grand Auto. Only SKY BLUE and CHERRY RED and PEARL WHITE. The dealer had swirled these descriptions across the entire length of the windshields with chalky-white paint stuff. Beneath this, in smaller print, the year and the price were blocked in yellow. Shocked by the numbers on the first few windshields, Santo stopped looking at the cars altogether and scanned only the prices. He found two possibilities: a ’47 Studebaker and an even older Mercury with its front end accordioned in. But when he actually calculated, he figured that even three years of tips would barely cover half the cost. He had forty-five dollars put aside for a new Zenith transistor radio with leather case that his mother could get at discount, even though she hadn’t worked at the factory in years.

  Had the dealer been out there to hound him, Santo might have spent more time gaping, maybe taking the Mercury for a test ride, license or no license—Zio Vincenzo had given him a few lessons last summer in his cream Caddy—but the lot had been closed for hours, and dusk was fast giving way to night, so he left.

  As he thought of ways to buy the car he took in the vastness of the molten sky before him. Mercury ash. He loved this time of night, the tallowy moon in place, stars striving to blink through the haze of day. He was always struck by the clarity of thought during these moments. Striding down Grand, one hand in his pocket jingling change, the other swinging at his side, he realized that his desires on this day represented less than a pinprick in the forces that pushed the world along. A thought which, instead of causing him to brood, never failed to evoke in him a warm physical surge that began in his feet and laced its way into his sternum before finally lodging itself in his throat. He breathed through his mouth for a second. He played a part in the vastness, however fleeting. That’s what struck him. That’s what took his breath. This was his turn.

  “Mio Santo!” Vince said. He wiped his hands loosely on a dish towel and draped it along the edge of the utility sink. He’d changed into one of his silk shirts, the gray one with the two wide swaths of beige running vertically along the front. A folded white apron covered the top of his town-and-country trousers. “You checka me, hey? No worry, I make business.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I checka you, Uncle Vinny.” Santo grabbed the inner part of his thigh and said, “Right here I checka you.”

  They both let out a kind of laugh, and Vince cuffed his nephew on the back of the neck, his fingers still damp from the soapy water in the sink where he’d been washing out quart carafes.

  “No action yet, huh?” Santo said.

  From where they stood on the enclosed porch they could view most of the bar out front and part of the bocce lot behind them. Not a single person in sight, which wasn’t unusual for early evening. By eleven o’clock, when the feast began to wind down, the club would be fille
d with rumbling laughter and loud debate, the men assuming their usual places. Out back the serious ones would stand huddled, laying down bets on bocce, cheering, each lob creating a halting silence, followed by shouts and contortions designed to tilt the earth and guide the ball just so until it came to rest. On the sidewalk in front, men would straddle chairs they’d pulled from inside, checking for women in every direction—in cars, on buses, on bicycles, on foot. If they were walking, especially if they were perfumed and decked, the women were barraged with questions to stall them. But they were never offered a drink or a chair—in fact, it was Santo’s job, though no one had ever assigned this, to take in any abandoned chair. This way the men would not seem rude. And if the women didn’t sit, the men had nothing to deny to their girlfriends and wives, who also might be passing. Inside sat the heaviest drinkers, though they showed few signs of this. They were calm, their movements measured, speaking to one another in baritone evenness through thick smoke. They played checkers and cards, studied racing forms, but mostly they talked, Uncle Vince joining them, weighing in on neighborhood news and religion, gas prices and mortality. Santo loved weaving about each group, wiping tables, anticipating their needs, ready with matches and an order pad in his back pocket. When the store got busy he’d do what he could to ease the rush, surreptitiously pouring a glass of wine for a regular, who would wink and lay down cash as Santo, too young to serve, slipped away.

  Santo plopped down on a wicker-backed chair near the sink, his right foot tapping the cast-iron plate over the floor drain. When he started tagging along with his father many years ago, this porch was his favorite room. Next to the sink, shelves formed a long narrow aisle filled with crates of liquor and wine. He’d throw a rubber ball toward the far wall at the end of the aisle and count how many times he could get it to return straight back to him without ricocheting away. On the other side of the shelves near the outer wall was a bathroom with a pull-chain toilet and a curling strip of waxy brown fly-paper hanging from the ceiling, and beyond that the slate-gray steps that led to Vince’s apartment. There were many nights when Santo would climb the steps to watch the bocce matches from the window next to his father’s sewing machine. He’d rest his chin in his palms and stare at the tops of heads, the old men’s arms flailing, their bodies lunging. Beside the bocce pit a circle of men playing scopa would slap down their cards. Dense smoke would rise past the porch window and curl into the inky sky. Santo imagined the men’s voices doing the same, wafting over rooftops and falling into chimneys.

  “I want to see something,” Santo said. He jumped up and climbed the stairs two by two. He slid open the porch window and poked his head full out into the night. The sweet aroma of fried bell peppers sailed up from one of the houses on Marshfield Avenue, where Sylvia Gomez lived. Beyond that, an arc of light outlined the stand of maples that ran along Ohio Street, where the feast blazed a full block away. Santo could hear the din of high-pitched voices cutting through the still air.

  After a while Vince joined his nephew at the window.

  “Where you look, hey?”

  “Nowhere, Zio. I just wanted to see if you could see the feast from here.”

  “Ah…why you no go?”

  “I will,” Santo said. He looked for the moon but couldn’t find it.

  Vince pointed west. “Look.”

  Over the top of an elm the uppermost car of the Ferris wheel came into view, then disappeared and another took take its place.

  “Hmm,” Santo said. They watched three complete cycles without a word. “You know,” Santo said, “I need to…do something. You ever feel like you just have to do something?” He glanced at his uncle, who seemed not to be listening.

  “Zio?”

  “Che?”

  “You think I can borrow one of your shirts?” A silk shirt would make him look older.

  Vince stuck a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, where it would hang unlit, Santo knew, until Vince reached for another, forgetting the one in his mouth.

  “Hrrrm…do some thing,” Vince said. “Ha…” He peered across the rooftops on Marshfield, single peaks in a row with brick chimneys, nothing to distinguish one from another. That row took up just a tiny portion of the wider grid of similar peaks, interrupted now and then with two-story and three-story apartments. A smokestack punctuated the sky to the east. Vince nodded as if deciding, pressed his lips down on the cigarette, and rolled it with his tongue. He shrugged and put out his palms. “He gotta do,” he said. “Mio nipoto, he gotta do some thing.” He turned to Santo. “I no tell you before ’bout the three Cs?”

  “I know the three Cs, Zio.”

  “You know, hey?”

  “I know, hey.”

  “Then I tell you. Some thing. Some thing else. Because you want I know.”

  “Because I want to know. Not I know.”

  “What I say?”

  “You said ‘Because you want I know.’ It should be ‘Because you want to know.’”

  Vince slapped Santo’s right shoulder with the back of his hand. “You want! I know! Si? Or you want—”

  “Know what?”

  “Shut up. I tell you. I tell you because I’m your zio.”

  Even with the ridges in his hair brushed flat, his knit shirt hand-washed, and his trousers creased—washed and pressed and hung in his closet by his cleaning woman, Louise—Vince still looked disheveled. He missed a spot under his chin with his long-necked razor, and his collar needed adjusting, but mainly it was his goofy half-hitched step and the way he hooded his eyes even in dim light that conveyed disorder. Because of that, because he appeared so harmless, everyone spoke freely around him. So Vince knew everything.

  He told his nephew about Sylvia’s husband, Henry Gomez, who had connections with the State Department, though what Henry Gomez actually did for a living Vince didn’t know. Henry heard about a woman in Cuba who had grown up in Chicago. When she was twelve her parents were killed in some sort of accident, in a boat maybe, and she was sent to live with an uncle in Cuba, who passed away himself about eight years ago. A woman now, she needed a situation, a life. Henry was forty-two, maybe older, never married, and Sylvia was twenty. So with little fanfare, he flew to Cuba, met the family, married her in Havana, and brought her back to Marshfield Avenue.

  “Hmm,” Santo said.

  “What? You look, how they say, disappoint. What’s wrong, hey?”

  “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Good,” Vince said. He clapped his hands together several times as if removing particles of dust, then wiped them along the sides of his apron. “Now you forget. You no need, hey.”

  Santo thought about his father, who had a similar gesture to dismiss matters. Agostino would clap once, hold his palms together as if in prayer, then rub them back and forth a few times. Each time, Santo imagined grains of sand slipping through those leathery fingers and disappearing onto the ground, lost forever. He wondered if what a man did with his hands was passed down somehow from one generation to the next.

  He had to admit he was disappointed, but he couldn’t say for sure why. He felt like he’d heard too much and he’d heard too little. He knew Sylvia was married, but he’d never really considered it before. And capsulizing her past like that made her seem older somehow. He would have preferred to have her story unfold before him in paper-thin layers.

  “I think I’m gonna split, Zio. I’ll stop by later.”

  “Yeh, yeh, you split. Be good boy, hey.” Vince cuffed Santo on the neck and offered a half grin and a sidelong glance, then shuffled down the stairs, searching his pockets for a match. “No forget shirt, hey.”

  Santo felt a flush of embarrassment sweep over him. Every time someone referred to him as a good boy, he felt like a twelve-year-old again. Beaming. Hair slicked down by Mama’s spit. He wondered if maybe he was pursuing a woman ten years older than he was to counter all that, to help him feel like a man. She could be the one to initiate him—since he never really counted the fumbling that went
on behind St. Columbkille. She could be the one to teach him the intricacies of—what, he didn’t fully know. But that wasn’t it. He was chasing her, he finally had to admit, because his old man was chasing her. Since Sylvia Gomez seemed within Agostino’s grasp—her breath filling the same pocket of air, her lips brushing the glass that held the same red blush wine—she seemed a possibility for Santo as well.

  Whenever Victoria Peccatori considered her name, she alternated between fury and amusement. Most often she gave her parents the benefit of the doubt. They must have been unaware of the singsong nature of the name, she concluded. Or they couldn’t have known that in elementary school her name would be chanted in retaliation whenever a scuffle ensued at the schoolyard. “Vic-TOR-ia Pecca-TOR-ia…Vic-TOR-ia Pecca-TOR-ia.” The chant was always the last dig, sung as she walked away. Which she did often enough back then. Not out of cowardice or admission of defeat, but because she knew this was the right thing to do. Even as a girl, Victoria Peccatori believed she possessed a heightened sense of what was fair. Forget law, forget religion, forget the rules of parents. She felt she could strike with razor precision at the heart of a matter. But no one wanted any part in that; they just wanted to get their way.

  So when Zia Lupa uttered the inevitable, warning her niece to cover her shoulders, Victoria took off with Benito. Pushing her brother’s long-spoked buggy down Ashland, she hummed the old singsong taunt, hearing it now as a nursery rhyme. Vic-TOR-ia Pecc-a-TOR-ia. Even the extra syllable at the end didn’t bother her. Why hadn’t she heard it like that before? She crooned. She sang louder, all the rancor and mockery gone from each note. Her name became a lullaby. When she realized Benito was listening, she replaced her name with his. “Benito Pecc-a-TOR-ia…Benito Pecc-a-TOR-ia.” He kicked his feet and twisted his little neck to see her but couldn’t turn fully around.