The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter

by Tom Mendicino

  “I see you, Scottie. Stop splashing Mr. Gagliano.”

  “What makes you so sure I’d be a wonderful father?” he asked. “How do you know I wouldn’t take a barber’s strop to their little bums if they looked cross-eyed at me?”

  She seemed startled that her little flirtation had taken an unexpected, ugly turn.

  “That’s ridiculous. People don’t treat their children like that.”

  “My father did. Well, mostly to my brother. He’d hit me sometimes, but not like the beatings he gave my older brother.”

  “That’s really terrible, Michael.”

  “That’s my only role model. That’s what I know about parenting. Not everyone was lucky enough to have a father like the Judge.”

  The Judge was wandering among his guests, tumbler of Maker’s Mark in hand, a potentate in madras shorts and boat shoes, basking in the affection of the pillars of the legal community whose careers had been launched from his chambers. Each and every one of his former clerks knew to never schedule a conflicting obligation for the second Saturday of July, the date reserved for the annual reunion on the lovely lawns of Highbrook. Chicken and beef rolled off the grill all afternoon and drink glasses were never empty. The guest list grew more distinguished each summer as the alumni climbed the ranks of the profession. Michael spotted one incumbent congressman who was rumored to be running for the Senate in the next election cycle. A newly appointed federal district court judge, two members of the Commonwealth Court, several law school faculty members, and too many partners of prestigious law firms to count were milling about the lawn, impressing one another with their latest accomplishments. A current clerk, a ginger-haired ectomorph, was accepting congratulations on his recent hire by Justice Thomas. Michael was a sluggard by comparison despite his promotion to Chief of the Major Crimes Unit in the Philly District Attorney’s Office.

  “Yes, I have to keep reminding myself how fortunate I am to be sprung from the loins of a saint,” she said mockingly, a surprising undercurrent of bitterness in her tone. “Come on, Scottie. Time to get out of the water.”

  The child was defiant, her already red face blazing a deeper scarlet. Michael stood and lifted the bawling child from the pool. He whispered something in her ear that stopped the tantrum and made her giggle.

  “Dodie’s fixing you a hot dog,” Kit promised to placate her. “This kid will do anything if you bribe her with food,” she confided to Michael. “I asked her pediatrician if I need to put her on a diet. I’m worried about her weight.”

  “She looks fine to me,” Michael said, having grown up in a neighborhood where a few extra pounds on a healthy six-year-old was called baby fat and mothers indulged chubby sons and daughters with soft pretzels and Water Ice.

  “It’s genetics. My former husband’s waist has expanded to forty-two inches and I don’t see it getting any smaller.”

  Michael drew in his breath, hoping she noticed the excellent shape he was in.

  “Go on, Dodie’s looking for you,” she said as she freed her daughter from the restraints of her lifejacket. “Don’t run. The wet grass is slippery and you’re going to fall.” She turned her attention back to Michael.

  “Good God, Michael, you’re soaking wet. You didn’t need to fish her out of the pool.”

  He didn’t shirk or back away as she fussed with the rumpled collar of his shirt.

  “I’m not going to melt.”

  “You know, Michael, I’m surprised you’ve never married. What happened to the nurse?”

  He reached for his shoes and socks and she handed him a towel to dry his feet.

  “She wanted kids so she married the vice president of marketing for Tastykakes, which I’m sure you find terribly amusing.”

  “What do you have against kids?” she asked.

  “Nothing. I love kids.”

  “Then what was the problem?”

  “Nothing . . . I mean . . . it’s too complicated to explain.”

  “It’s not that complicated. You’ve got yourself twisted into knots for no reason. I’ve known you for quite a few years. Not well, but well enough to know you would never take a barber’s strop to your son’s behind. You and I should go to dinner. I bet you live on leftover takeout and warm beer,” she suggested.

  “Sure,” he said, a vague commitment at best.

  “How about Tuesday night? You choose the restaurant. My treat,” she said, closing the deal, the matter settled, his fate sealed. He’d walked willingly into the trap, flattered that a Scott of Chester County considered him worthy of the hunt.

  MICHAEL, 1998

  They were married in a civil ceremony. Judge Scott officiated. Kit’s mother, Dodie, who Kit had threatened to banish from her life if she ever used the word dago in her soon-to-be-husband’s presence again; her daughter, Scottie; and Frankie were the only witnesses. Dodie, a harmless, soft-spoken, and genuinely kind woman whose epithet had amused rather than offended Michael, expressed her sincere regrets that Michael’s father wasn’t present to see his son married. Michael thanked her, knowing Papa, confined to a dementia unit, would have boycotted the nuptials, protesting the absence of a priest and the existence of a living ex-husband. Papa always insisted the vows of matrimony were sacred, being an expert on the sacrament after having taken five wives. Marriage was a commitment till death do us part and the Church provided no exemptions, no get-out-of-jail card, for a woman who had unwisely chosen to bind herself to a philandering scoundrel.

  After the ceremony, Frankie drove them to JFK, where they boarded a flight to Rome. Kit had been an art history major at Yale, with a special interest in Italian Baroque, and had spent an undergraduate year in the ancient capital. She playfully called her new husband Michelangelo the moment the plane landed, which embarrassed him but didn’t faze the natives. Shopkeepers and waiters appreciated her fluency, complimenting her accent while feigning complete ignorance of the snippets of Calabrian dialect Michael had learned from his father.

  He’d never been out of the country and she delighted in showing him her favorite galleries and palazzos and churches. He pretended to be interested in the gloomy oil paintings and excessively ornate interiors while his thoughts wandered to his next glass of rosso and bowl of penne alla carbonara. But he happily trailed his bride through miles of apses and naves as she tutored him on the Splendors of Rome, none of which made much of an impression until he found himself standing before an unassuming side chapel in a modest church, face-to-face with an image he recognized from an old postcard Frankie had tucked into the frame of their dresser mirror when they were boys.

  A neighbor or a customer on a package tour of the Italian Peninsula had sent it to Papa. Frankie had rescued it from the trash and preserved it as a holy relic, an object worthy of veneration. Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Pilgrims was a rather plain young woman, more weary than radiant, physically exhausted by the large child, years beyond infancy, in her arms. Lovely in her ordinariness, her mind seemed elsewhere as she gazed benignly at the adoring pilgrims, distracted by nagging thoughts of all the humble household tasks that needed to be finished before the day was over and she could fall into her bed. The Madonna in the postcard had the same kind eyes and comforting expression as the woman in the black-and-white photograph Frankie kept beside his bed, the mother that Michael never knew.

  Kit was deeply moved by the tears running down his cheeks as he stared at the painting, his face illuminated by electric candlelight. Her new husband was revealing himself to be full of surprises. She would have never expected him to demonstrate such a profound appreciation of the Master of the Baroque. She whispered in Michael’s ear, pointing out the powerful humanistic details like the dirty soles of the pilgrims’ feet that made the painting so compelling.

  “We had a postcard of this picture in our bedroom. Frankie told me she looked just like our mother and I would pray to her every night, asking her to come back.”

  He turned away from his new wife, embarrassed by the raw honesty of his co
nfession. He knew she couldn’t understand the painting’s power as an icon. To her, it was something to be admired as a technical achievement, for the painter’s mastery of shadow, his powerful use of darkness and light. He felt stupid, exposed.

  “I was just a dumb kid. I’m sorry. I’m sure you already regret marrying such a sentimental idiot.”

  A light drizzle was falling as they walked back to their hotel, a romantic little hostel just off the Campo de’ Fiori, lingering to watch the market vendors breaking down their stalls for the day and stopping to warm their hands and faces by the flames of the fires in the metal trash cans. Her body, pressed close to his, radiated with sexual tension. He kicked the door behind them as they entered their room. They fell on the bed and he penetrated her before they could undress, never before wanting any woman as much as he wanted her at that moment. When they finished, she confessed she’d been attracted to him since their days on the Law Review and her only regret about marrying him was it had taken so long to catch him.

  Later that night, she took him to her favorite trattoria in Trastevere where the owner and his wife remembered her from years past and kept their tumblers filled with the fruity house red. She was full of questions, fascinated by his stories of his childhood. She was curious about Frankie, intrigued by the bond between brothers who couldn’t be more different. She envied their relationship and confided she felt a silly twinge of jealousy. She had four siblings of her own, none of whom she’d ever been close to. The eldest, a sister, has been MIA, presumed dead, since running away from a New England boarding school with a local dealer at the age of sixteen. Of her two surviving brothers, Henry, the oldest, finally graduated from Temple after a spiraling academic career at successively less competitive schools and was now living on a small stipend teaching history and coaching lacrosse at a Quaker Friends school. Her younger brother had dropped out of Dartmouth and eked out a meager subsistence giving snorkeling lessons in Maui on the rare days he wasn’t too hungover to crawl out of bed. A third had died of AIDS in the early years of the epidemic without ever coming out to his father.

  She confided her own youthful miseries, shocking him with deep and unsuspected resentments of her parents. Her mother was weak, a coward, the doormat Kit swore she would never become, a woman who willfully turned her head, ignoring what was common knowledge to the rest of the world, including her own children once they grew old enough to understand. Her father was a selfish bastard who’d carried on a long, indiscreet affair with his wife’s sister throughout Kit’s childhood, a misalliance that ended only with his lover’s painful death from pancreatic cancer. Her worst memory was a Christmas Eve when she was only eight and wandered upstairs during the family party and stumbled upon her drunken father and aunt groping each other in a darkened bedroom in Highbrook, her mother’s sister’s hand deep inside his zipper.

  “They say a woman always marries a man like her father. I made that mistake once already.” She snorted bitterly. “You’re not like my father, are you, Michael? Stop. Wait. Don’t answer. I know you’re nothing like him.”

  Michael’s pledge of fidelity came out sounding more indignant than comforting and reassuring. He couldn’t, wouldn’t confide in her that she had no reason to worry. His brother was the only living soul he trusted with the truth. She’d think him strange, unmanly, his status in her eyes diminished if she knew he could count the number of women he’d slept with on one hand without needing to use his thumb. He’d had a one-night stand with an ADA from New Orleans at a conference after Barbie had decamped with her Tastykake executive, and then entered a committed and exclusive long-distance relationship with an obstetrician in Manhattan who worked the same long hours as he did.

  There was nothing wrong with him. His libido was as strong as—likely stronger than—any other man’s and his cock was nothing to be ashamed of, not as large as his father’s and brother’s, but certainly more than adequate. It was simply that Michael was incapable of infidelity. A shrink would have a field day if he ever agreed to take to the couch. He could spend a lifetime in therapy and only scratch the surface of why a boy who had never had a mother would be too traumatized by the possibility of losing a wife to ever consider betraying her.

  FRANKIE, 1999

  At least Charlie Haldermann got to go quickly, if a few decades prematurely. He always said he wanted to die while seated fourth row center at the Shubert Theater on Forty-fourth Street in the heart of Manhattan’s Theater District, during the first act of South Pacific as the glorious voice of Emile de Becque celebrated “Some Enchanted Evening.” The Lord came damn close to granting Charlie his wish, striking him dead while he ran through his notes for the first rehearsal of the school’s spring musical, a full orchestra production of Guys and Dolls.

  Charlie’s immortal soul may have been tap-dancing in the chorus on the Great White Way in the sky, but his earthly remains were put to rest in a churchyard in Lancaster County. The Haldermann sisters, a pair of overweight, overbearing, Pennsylvania Dutch garden slugs, swept in to claim the body, never asking if Charlie had left instructions on how he wanted to say farewell to this earthly life. The modest and humble Christian eulogized at the funeral was a complete stranger to the man who had slept with the deceased for fifteen years, one who Frankie learned for the first time during the service was four years older than the fifteen-year age difference Charlie had acknowledged between them. The Haldermann family had never wanted to know anything about their loving brother’s life after he’d left for Penn State at eighteen, and Charlie had accommodated them, keeping them in blissful ignorance, insisting he was picky, just waiting for the right girl to come along. Frankie was banished to a seat twelve pews back from the altar at the service, treated like an unwelcome intruder. The good Mennonites shunned him at the church basement reception after the burial, the deceased already forgotten as they passed plates of cherry cake and paper cups of fruit punch and grumbled about the migrant workers infesting the county and the legislature’s attempt to tax smokeless tobacco.

  The afternoon forecast had called for a late winter storm, no accumulation, a mix of ice and sleet, dangerous enough to justify a traveler’s advisory. The Haldermann sisters didn’t urge their brother’s “friend” to delay his departure or wish him a safe journey as he took his leave. Traffic on the turnpike was light, most commuters having left work early to avoid slippery highways and poor visibility. Frankie, ordinarily a cautious and timid driver, felt possessed. He pressed his foot to the floorboard, pushing his sedate Volvo sedan to the limits of endurance, and cranked up the volume of the disc player, tempted to smash his car into the flickering taillights of the tractor trailer ahead. He pounded the steering wheel as the lyrics of “Magic Man” and “Barracuda” throbbed through the speakers, cursing Charlie for dying.

  They’d never shared a home. Even after Frankie had been relieved of the day-to-day responsibility of taking care of Papa, he wouldn’t consider living more than five minutes from the nursing home where he and his brother had imprisoned their father. And Charlie was a spendthrift, bad with money, relying on Frankie to bail him out whenever he fell behind on the mortgage payments on his Washington’s Crossing dream house. Frankie learned to tolerate his lover’s frequent infidelities in adult bookstore arcades and his risky liaisons with strangers he’d met in AOL chat rooms. The three-martini happy hours and pack-and-a-half-a-day habit had certainly contributed to his early death.

  Charlie, always full of surprises, had one left up his sleeve. Six weeks after the funeral, New York Life notified Francis Rocco Gagliano that he was the beneficiary of a generous life insurance policy paying seven hundred fifty thousand dollars on the event of the death of Charles Martin Haldermann. The unexpected windfall liberated Frankie from the yoke of the tyrannical daughter of the late Victor Salazzo, the proprietor of Salazzo’s Corona di Seta, a garish temple of South Philadelphia grandeur, decorated with red-flocked wallpaper and plaster busts of Diana, Goddess of the Hunt. Frankie had apprenticed there d
uring beauty school, learning under the stern eye of a master the art of weekly wash-and-sets and the care of nicotine-ravaged complexions. Papa had coerced him into accepting a permanent job after graduation, the Salazzo and Gagliano clans having been close back home in Calabria. He’d intended to stay for only a year, then swore he’d leave after five. By his tenth anniversary, he knew that the window of opportunity to be offered a chair at a Center City or Main Line salon had closed. He suspected the friends and colleagues he greeted at hair shows snickered behind his back; they pitied him, maybe even mocked him, for rotting in a backwater beauty shop, catering to working-class matrons who hadn’t changed their hairstyles in decades. He’d lost confidence in his talent and abilities, accepting his fate, assuming he’d work at Corona forever, suffering Victor Salazzo’s indignities and insults and, later, those of his bitter daughter when she inherited the shop.

  The insurance proceeds allowed him to gut the top two stories of the house at Eighth and Carpenter, knocking down walls to create airy, sunlit open spaces showcased in the Urban Habitats column of the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Styles section. At the street level, he transformed Papa’s old barbershop, shuttered for years, its ancient fixtures shrouded in dusty old sheets, into a sleek salon. Salazzo’s daughter threatened legal action, accusing Frankie of soliciting her clients and slandering her business with whispers about unsanitary conditions in her shop. A strong letter from a scorch-the-earth litigator at his sister-in-law’s firm promising extended expensive litigation that would undermine the fiscal stability of Salazzo’s Corona di Seta put a quick end to that folly. At long last, Frankie was living the life he richly deserved. All he needed was someone to share it with.

  MICHAEL AND FRANKIE, 1999

  Frankie escalated from astonished to angry to panicked when Michael announced his son would be named Daniel Pugh Scott Gagliano, needing two acceptable surnames from his maternal grandparents to offset a last name ending in a vowel. Not that Kit was explicit about her concerns about their son’s birthright to attend the Assembly Ball and claim membership in the venerable Philadelphia Club when they were considering possibilities, but Michael knew she was conscious of the attitudes and prejudices of the small, privileged world she had never entirely rejected despite her progressive politics and open-minded embrace of a wealthy bohemian lifestyle.