“Was Papa always so mean?”
“You’re a lucky boy, Luigi. You’re going to live in America.”
Even at the age of eight, he knew his mother was frightened and wary of leaving the only home they’d ever known. She’d been a white widow for so many years, left behind when her husband crossed the ocean, that she’d begun to think of herself as a maiden. She was only a girl when she married her husband, a man who’d come back to Calabria to take a bride after emigrating at seventeen. He’d returned to his life in America less than a month after the birth of his son. His letters were short, to the point, hardly filled with the romantic declarations a young girl yearned to read. But the money he earned put meat on the table and paid to repair the roof when the rain leaked through the seams. She received frequent gifts of bolts of expensive cloth and small luxury items like lavender sachets and combs and hair clips made of ivory and tortoiseshell. Luigi was likely the first boy in Italy, certainly Calabria, to own a bright red Liberty Coaster wagon, elevating his status among his cousins, who vied for the privilege of pulling him through the streets of the town.
Then, finally, instructions arrived with the name and address of a man who had booked their passage on the Konig Albert departing from Naples. His mother tried consoling Luigi as they sat in the cavernous terminal waiting to board the ship.
“We’ll come back soon to see Nonno and Nonna,” she promised, assuming the separation from his doting grandparents was the cause of his despair.
A man wearing a uniform and a whistle around his neck was calling names from the front of the room.
“. . . Gagliano, Santamaria; Gagliano, Luigi Rocco . . .”
He pulled away when his mother tried to take his hand. He wasn’t a baby. He could walk by himself. He knew she needed the reassurance of his touch and wanted to punish her, refusing to forgive her for promising the wagon to his cousin Aldo when they left for America.
Nonno had tried to console him, promising him that, in America, he would have two or three wagons and live in a palace like the Savoy kings. His father was a rich man now, a person of stature and influence, a citizen of the United States with money to grease the palms of the right people in America and Italy to spare his son from a life under the boot heel of Il Diavolo, Nonno’s name for the godless Il Duce. But the old man’s words failed to comfort and, late in the evening of his last night in the village, Luigi climbed a steep hill, dragging the wagon behind him. He’d stood at the edge of the cliff, tears running down his cheeks as he threw his beloved Liberty Coaster from the rocky precipice and watched it disappear into the leafy ceiling of the trees far below.
“Why doesn’t Papa ever talk about when he was a kid?”
The stranger who met Luigi and his mother at the port when they arrived in America was a terrible disappointment to a boy expecting to be greeted by a hero. Salvatore Rocco Gagliano was barely taller than his wife and looked much older than the man in the wedding photo his mother kept on a table beside her bed. The first meeting was awkward, formal, without kisses or an embrace. They boarded a train in a town called Newark and traveled to a city named Philadelphia, arriving after midnight at an enormous building with a barbershop at the street level. S. GAGLIANO, BARBER, EST. 1928, was painted on the window glass. Luigi awoke early his first morning in America, eager to claim the Liberty Coaster wagons his nonno had promised awaited him. His mother fed him a simple breakfast of bread and cheese, telling him to eat quickly as he was needed downstairs.
“Do as he says, Luigi. He’s your father.”
The barber had decided his son was old enough to be put to work and ordered him to wash the shop windows with water and vinegar. Perfection was expected. Being an eight-year-old boy was no excuse for streaks on the plate glass. His efforts were rewarded with a blow that knocked him to the sidewalk. He knew his life had changed, his position in the world diminished, when his mother rebuffed his tearful attempts to seek consolation and sympathy, deferring to her husband in the discipline of his son.
“Who’s going to be Papa’s wife in heaven?”
Luigi returned to Italy to take up arms against his own blood, fighting in the Battle of Anzio. He returned with an honorable discharge and enrolled in barber school. He assumed his place beside his father in the shop, renamed S. Gagliano & Son, Since 1928, their chairs only a few feet apart. Ten hours a day, six days a week, he suffered endless criticism about squandering his money and his time drinking alcohol with his worthless friend Sal Pinto. What had his father done to be cursed with a minchione who chose to keep company with cheap sluts, donnaccias, unsuitable to be a wife and mother?
The deal was brokered before Luigi met the woman who would become his first wife. The Gaglianos had known the Avilla family for generations. Pasquale Avilla’s two daughters, the loveliest girls in the neighborhood, fair-skinned and blue-eyed, had survived near fatal infections of streptococcus, developing rheumatic fevers that had kept Teresa, the oldest, bedridden for seven months, and her sister, Sofia, ten years younger, for nearly a year. Doctor and hospital bills had left the family deeply in debt, making the offer of money for the hand of Avilla’s eldest daughter impossible to reject.
“She is a very pious girl,” Luigi’s father advised him on his wedding day in 1949. “Don’t tear her apart the first night with that big, fat cock you’re so proud of.”
She’d bled for two days after their wedding night. But she seemed to take to the act quickly, even enthusiastically, until he struck her, calling her a puttana, when she made the mistake of touching his prick. Their first child was born within a year, a girl named Paulina Rosa, as useless to Luigi as her mother would become after two miscarriages and years of marriage without giving him a son.
Desperate, she risked damnation of her immortal soul by consulting the local shaman, seeking talismans to protect her from the evil eye that had cursed her womb. The baby was a boy, carried to term, perfectly formed, eight and half pounds. He was delivered stillborn, never drawing a single breath. Luigi would have dragged his wife from her bed and beat her if the priest and Sal Pinto hadn’t been there to restrain him. He accused her of being a witch and a whore. God had taken his son to punish him for marrying a woman who practiced the black art of forbidden sorcery. He said she was cursed for bargaining with the devil. He refused to sleep in her bed again, barely exchanging words with her until she died, literally, from a broken heart, its valves corrupted by childhood disease.
Luigi waited the obligatory year of mourning, then, in 1959, married Sofia, as lovely as her sister and with the same quiet, resigned disposition. Eleven months later, she delivered the long-awaited heir and, after five years, provided Luigi with another son. The second pregnancy had been difficult to consummate and the delivery of a ten-pound baby was fraught with risks. She never fully recovered from the caesarean, and congestive heart failure made Luigi a widower a second time when his youngest son was three years old.
“Who will be my mother in heaven?”
Sal Pinto’s wife had a friend named Eileen Costello who had been on the New York stage; her husband had died, leaving her no money. Dire circumstances had forced her to take a job giving dancing lessons at Palumbo’s. No one could conceive of Luigi choosing a medigan’, Irish no less, a woman unafraid to speak her mind, to be his wife and mother to his boys. She’d had a mysterious past, actresses being women of questionable reputation, and had already put one husband into the ground. The women of the neighborhood, loyal to the memories of the sainted Avilla sisters, gossiped that she’d put a spell on Luigi, blinding him to the plain and unremarkable face she painted with makeup. Their husbands, though, lusting after figa, envied the carnal pleasures to be had between her long legs.
Miss Eileen, as Papa insisted his sons call her, restored calm and a sense of order to the house at Eighth and Carpenter. Luigi’s new wife had an uncanny gift for calming gathering storms and had mastered the art of gentle but firm persuasion, prompting her husband to take pause and reconsider before ra
ising his hand to his children. Papa still believed in corporal punishment, but physical abuse was far less frequent and always less severe. Still, his older son clearly resented her presence, though he was always polite and respectful. She refused to allow her husband to pressure the boy into accepting her. She lavishly praised his mother’s beauty and gentle nature, which she said was obvious even by her pictures, trying, without success, to relieve Frankie’s aching heart.
Michael, though, adored her, embracing her from the outset. No other woman had ever gently cleaned and bandaged his frequent cuts and bruises or praised his smallest achievement and fussed and clucked over his appearance. Miss Eileen provided a lap where he could rest his head while they sat on the sofa, laughing at the antics of Lucy and Jethro Bodine. His own mother existed only as an image in the framed photograph beside their bed, a benign specter whose presence hovered over their lives like a guardian angel or Mary, the Blessed Mother. Miss Eileen was flesh and blood. She smelled of Estee Lauder Private Collection, Virginia Slims, and cinnamon sticky buns. She loved him fiercely, as if he were her own child, and he sought comfort in her arms whenever he was tired or sick.
“Lou, bring the car around,” she’d insisted one cold, rainy night. “His fever is a hundred and five.”
Michael, always large for his age, was almost too heavy to carry two flights of stairs to the sidewalk where her husband was waiting. She held him in her lap and stroked his head, calming and reassuring him. Her clothes were damp with his sweat when they arrived at the emergency room. The nurse had to pry Michael from her neck to lay him in bed. Frankie and his father, banished to a hallway, could hear his terrified voice behind a pulled curtain, calling for his stepmother, as they sat, useless, unneeded, out of the way.
“Mama! Don’t go! Mama!”
“I’m here, baby,” she assured him as she held his hand. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Is Papa going to get married again?”
No one expected Luigi to take another wife. Eileen Costello’s death seemed to have broken him. His sons would hear him sitting alone in the darkened living room, having one-sided conversations with her about the events of the day. His hair had turned white; his face was gaunt and haunted, his back more stooped. His quick temper returned, unrestrained by any calming influence, and he began swinging his belt again out of anger and frustration at the slightest provocation.
His sons said nothing when he brought a woman home one Sunday evening and announced the banns of marriage would be published in the next week’s parish bulletin. Frannie Merlino, recently widowed, was a constant complainer, happy only when Luigi conceded to her demands he spend money on a Mediterranean color television console and a pale blue Ford Fairlane with the title in her name. Knowing he’d spoiled that dance hall girl (an insult she never dared utter in his presence) with annual vacations, she insisted her husband take her on expensive trips, cruises in the Caribbean and a fifth-anniversary excursion to Europe. Luigi even agreed to spend one week each July sweltering in a vacation trailer in Virginia left to her by her first husband. She tried to win Michael’s affection, but he would never grow attached to another of his father’s wives after losing Miss Eileen. She was cold and arrogant toward Frankie, treating him as something vile and disgusting, stalking him like a starving cat, waiting for any opportunity to expose him as a disgusting degenerate who should be cast from their home. She was a patient woman, knowing the day would come when she would hold the evidence in her hand.
Papa was waiting for Frankie as he let himself in the back door. He assumed his father was angry because it was long past midnight. Frankie and his friend Jack Centafore had gone to see Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born, both agreeing once wasn’t enough, and had stayed to watch it from beginning to end a second time. But when he saw Frannie Merlino standing behind her husband, clutching the torn pages from a magazine in her hand, he knew he was being confronted with something far more serious than breaking his curfew.
“I found this under your mattress,” she hissed, gleeful in her triumph. “Do you think we don’t know what you’re doing with this in your bedroom?” she said, tearing a photograph of a bare-chested Robby Benson into shreds as if it were the vilest pornography.
Papa seethed with rage, his face flush with blood. He held his clenched fists at his side, having been warned by the priest of the consequences if he ever left marks on his sons again. Michael, awakened by the shouting, wearing only his underwear, stood on the staircase, ready to attack if his father dared to raise a hand against his brother.
“Finocchio. Queer. Thank God your mother is dead or this would kill her.”
Frannie Merlino, too self-absorbed to gauge her husband’s fleeting moods and shifting loyalties, gloated over her victory, seizing an opportunity to continue the humiliation.
“At least you can be grateful one of your boys is growing up to be a man and not an embarrassing faggot.”
Papa’s voice was even, but cold and chilling. Frannie Merlino’s face blanched at her husband’s reproach.
“This is my house. You live under my roof. If you cannot respect my children, pack your suitcase and leave.”
As fate would have it, Luigi’s most miserable marriage was the longest, lasting fifteen years until she made him a widower a fourth time. Obsessed with clean teeth and fresh breath, Frannie Merlino Gagliano had been too engrossed in searching her pocketbook for a Chiclet to see the Number 57 bus jump the curb. Neither father nor sons mourned her passing and rarely spoke her name after the day she was buried.
“How many wives is Papa allowed to have?”
Helen Constanza, Luigi’s last wife, was happiest working in the kitchen, standing at the stove from morning until night. She treated his sons with deference, insisting on feeding them whenever they walked through the door, regardless of the hour of the day or night. Michael, then a hardworking assistant prosecutor residing less than a mile away in an apartment he shared with the young nurse he intended to marry, returned infrequently and then only to see his brother, a grown man, who, though a successful stylist, still lived under his father’s roof. It was the great mystery of the family at Eighth and Carpenter that Michael, who had only occasionally suffered from the barber’s temper and moods, despised the man, while Frankie, the brother their father had treated so harshly, had remained the loyal son.
Both boys were genuinely fond of Helen Constanza, Frankie in particular. Frankie invited her to nights at the Forrest Theater and dinners with his friends, the ugly priest and the fat schoolteacher. Luigi began to become confused and forgetful, sometimes referring to his wife as Eileen and insisting she wear the green dress he admired so much. He would scoff, becoming angry when she reminded him that Eileen Costello had passed many years ago and would accuse her of thinking him an idiot. Of course he knew who was dead and who was living flesh and blood. Helen’s daughter in California insisted on moving her out west after she suffered a mild stroke, fearing that Papa, then in the obvious early stages of Alzheimer’s, was unable to care for her. Luigi refused to consider a request from Helen’s children that he agree to an annulment and they remained married until a fatal aneurysm did them part. He’d raged at his son the lawyer, calling him useless, when Michael wouldn’t sue the Constanza family for cremating their mother, whose remains Luigi insisted were his legal property as the widower, and scattering her ashes at a marina in San Diego.
“Will Papa be nicer in heaven?”
All but his most loyal customers gradually began drifting away. Even Sal Pinto feared his shaking hands and dreaded his lapses into irrational rants about the Polish Pope being a plant by the Kremlin. Frankie reluctantly conceded when Michael insisted their father surrender his license. But he was adamant he would never condemn him to a nursing facility where Michael argued he could be cared for and protected from himself. Frankie kept him at home as long as he could, up until the day Michael received a phone call from a colleague in the Philly DA’s office, saying he was havin
g a hard time persuading an irate family from pursuing a private complaint against their father.
“I know I told you about it,” Frankie insisted when his brother confronted him. “You must have forgotten it, Mikey.”
“No,” Michael assured him. “I’m goddamn certain I would remember hearing my father had been arrested in a school zone, sitting in a parked car with his limp pecker in his hand.”
“Not arrested,” Frankie corrected him. “He was picked up,” meaning he’d been rescued and escorted safely home by the Ottaviano boy on the force, who was kind enough to wrap an Eagles commemorative fleece blanket around Luigi to cover his nakedness.
“Paul Ottaviano,” Frankie explained. “The one who looked like Elvis. He had an older brother, Bobby. Their parents had that luncheonette at Fifteenth and Dickinson. You’re a very lucky man, Papa, I told him. You’d be sitting in the lockup if some stranger had picked you up, some Irish cop or a moulinyan. They would have treated him like a pervert, a vecchio schifoso, and charged him with indecent exposure.”
“Did Paul Ottaviano accuse him of that?”
“He just said he found him with his sausage in his hand and his pants and boxers on the passenger seat, neatly folded, with his shoes and socks on the floor. He didn’t accuse Papa of anything. He said Papa must be confused. I thanked him and told him how much I appreciated him looking out for the old man. After he left, I asked Papa why he was driving around South Philly bare-assed. He stood there with his big fat schlong hanging to his thigh and told me I was crazy. He said I was his curse, unholy, and that only an ungrateful finocchio would make up such hateful lies about his own father.”
The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter Page 3
