The Boy Who Granted Dreams

by Luca Di Fulvio

  Sal got up from the divan in the brothel’s parlor. “I got to go,” he said.

  “How long?” cried Cetta.

  “I don’t know!” Sal shouted.

  For the first time Cetta saw something she’d never seen in the eyes of her man. Displeasure. Sal didn’t like her to be a whore. “Maybe next year,” she said and took Sal’s hand.

  Sal didn’t respond. He looked at the carpet.

  “You stay, sleep in office tonight?” Cetta asked him.

  “Maybe,” said Sal. “I got to go over some bills.”

  Every night for the past few months Sal had found a reason not to go back to Bensonhurst. And Cetta would come and sleep in his bed till dawn. Then she got up and slipped furtively into her own room, careful not to wake Christmas.

  “I’m happy,” said Cetta.

  “See what happens. I ain’t promisin’ nothin’.”

  “I know, Sal.”

  “I got to go now, kiddo.”

  Cetta smiled. She liked it when Sal called her kiddo. Even if now she was a woman nearly twenty-five years old and she’d grown softer and rounder.

  “Say it again.”

  “Huh?”

  “Kiddo …”

  Sal freed his own hand from Cetta’s. “I got no time to lose. All hell’s gonna break loose with the booze business.”

  “So, it really happen? Is sure thing?” Everyone was talking about how the government wanted a law to keep people from drinking alcohol.

  “Yeah, it’s sure all right,” said Sal. “It’s a brand new era. Who’d of thought everybody in America was gonna quit drinkin’?”

  Cetta shrugged.

  “Affair of the century. All of us is gonna make a pile of money,” said Sal, “An’ I wanna be part of da deal.”

  “How?” asked Cetta, worried.

  Sal laughed. “I sure ain’t plannin’ on gettin’ shot at by the cops. Naw, it ain’t just smugglin'. We need to open some quiet places where folks can get a drink, see? And I want to run one a those places.”

  Cetta looked at him. “You be home even less,” she said.

  “Maybe I can talk the boss inta takin’ you on as a waitress in my joint,” Sal winked at her.

  “Really?” exclaimed Cetta, excited, flinging her arms around his neck.

  “Bein’ a waitress is hard work,” said Sal, freeing himself from her embrace. “It ain’t like bein’ a whore, layin’ in bed all day.”

  “Get out,” said Cetta laughing.

  “Ciao,” and Sal went towards the street door.

  “Say it to me!” Cetta shouted after him.

  “I ain’t your tame monkey,” Sal said, shutting the door.

  Cetta sat on the divan. With a smile on her red lips. She looked at herself in the mirror across from her. She looked at the dress that she thought was a fine lady’s gown when she was just off the boat in New York. And she remembered the first time she’d seen Sal. The man who had saved her. And soon he was going to save her again by having her be a waitress. She imagined herself wearing an apron with red and white stripes.

  The doorbell rang.

  Cetta jumped up. “I go!” she cried happily to the other girls. Sal came back to call me kiddo, she thought, laughing.

  The man at the door looked down her low cut dress. He smiled, half closing his eyes. “Just the one I was lookin’ for, sugar,” he said, squeezing her buttocks. He was short and fat and always smelled of eau de Cologne. “Hey, I brought you some taffy, you bad girl.”

  And he always wanted to play disgusting games.

  Christmas had stopped laughing at the sounds that Cetta and Sal made in bed. Love didn’t seem as funny to him as it once had. Something had changed in his body. Even if he didn’t know how to deal with this change, he’d understood that love was something dark and serious. Mysterious and fascinating. For grownups. So he stopped putting his ear against the wall that divided the two apartments. And whenever he heard his mother coming back to their house at dawn, he pretended to be asleep.

  Some of the big boys in the building talked about women. But their information was confused. And no one ever mentioned the word love. What they talked about seemed to be something more mechanical. From what they said, Christmas picked up an idea of how it worked. But it was love that interested him. Nobody ever talked about that. Not even the grownups.

  For his thirteenth birthday Cetta gave him a baseball bat and leather ball. Now she worked as a waitress, not as a whore. She earned less money, and Christmas knew how much she must have saved to buy him that present.

  One day Christmas was sitting with the bat and the ball next to him on the front steps of the building on Monroe Street, reading for the second time about the impossible and tragic love piss-poor Martin Eden felt for the rich Ruth Morse.

  Sal parked the car between two pushcart vendors and came into the building, telling Christmas, “There’s a job if you want to get up off your ass someday.”

  Christmas closed the book, picked up his ball and bat and followed Sal up the stairs.

  “If I was you, I’d get rid o’ the ball and hang on to the bat,” said Sal. And then he laughed.

  “What kind of a job?” asked Christmas.

  “They’ll give you seven bucks to mop tar on another roof on Orchard Street,” said Sal. “Same guys as last week. They said you done a good job.”

  Christmas thought he wasn’t going to get rich on seven dollars a day. And he risked having a shitty life like Martin Eden. But he liked that Sal bothered about him. “We’re kind of like a family, right?” he asked. Sal stopped halfway up the flight of stairs and looked at him. He shook his head, climbed the rest of the stairs and opened the door to what he still called his office even though now he’d sold the house in Bensonhurst. “Who puts these dumb ideas into your head? Your mother?”

  Christmas followed him into the apartment. “Do you love her?” he asked him.

  Sal stiffened. He rocked from one foot to the other, embarrassed. Then he walked past the walnut desk and looked out the window. “I never told her so,” he said, keeping his back to Christmas.

  “Why not?”

  “What’s got into you?” barked Sal, turning to him, red-faced. “Why the hell are you askin’ me questions?”

  Christmas backed up a step. He looked down at the cover of Martin Eden. “I just wanted to know because …” he said, quietly, and moved towards the door.

  “Because I ain’t never been a brave man, I guess,” Sal said.

  The next morning at dawn Christmas heard Cetta come home. He smiled under the covers, not moving. Then he went out and wandered through the streets of the ghetto for a while. He bought a cinnamon roll with the money he’d earned tarring roofs the week before, and got back home by eleven, the time Cetta woke up. He sat on his mother’s bed and gave her the sweet warm pastry.

  Cetta stroked his hand while she nibbled at the roll. “You really beautiful boy,” she told him.

  Christmas blushed. “It’s okay with me if you sleep at Sal’s,” he said, looking down.

  Cetta choked briefly on a bit of roll. She coughed. She laughed, and then pulled Christmas to her, hugging him and kissing his forehead. “No, I like to know you watch over me in the morning,” she said. She held him in her arms as they stretched side by side on the bed.

  “Mamma, Sal loves you, did you know?” said Christmas after a while.

  “Yes, angel,” Cetta answered softly.

  “How can you know it if he never told you?”

  Cetta sighed, stroking Christmas’ blond forelock. “You know what love is?” she said. “Is when you see what nobody else can see. And to let him see thing you no want anybody else to see.”

  Christmas held on to his mother. “Will I love somebody someday too?”

  31

  Manhattan, 1924

  “They’re leaving tonight,” Fred told him one morning halfway through January. He’d come to look for him at home, to give him the news.

  Christmas had
looked at him, not speaking. Then he’d lowered his eyes. So it’s true, he’d thought. Until that day he’d pretended not to believe it. Because he couldn’t think that he was never going to see Ruth again. That he would have to forget her.

  “Grand Central Station,” said Fred, as if he could tell what he was thinking. “Track number five. At seven thirty-two.”

  That evening Christmas went to Grand Central Station. As he came to the main entrance on Forty-Second Street he looked at the huge clock that dominated the façade. It was twenty-five past seven. At first he’d decided not to go. That spoiled rich girl didn’t deserve his love. Could she just erase him from her life that easily? Well. He could do the same thing, he told himself angrily. But then he couldn’t resist going. I’ll always love you, even if you’re never going to love me, he thought, and in that very moment all the rage he’d felt dissolved, left him. Christmas found himself again, the boy that he had always been. Within him now, there was no room for anything but the immense love he felt for Ruth.

  The minute hand moved a tick. Seven twenty-six. The statues of Mercury, Hercules and Minerva were staring hard at him. He decided to go inside, under the blind gaze of the railroad magnate Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt. And suddenly it seemed that he didn’t have any more time.

  He started running towards track number five. He wanted to see her. At least one last time. So that those features he knew so well would be imprinted on his eyes indelibly. Because Ruth was his and he was Ruth’s.

  He was out of breath when he reached the track, and pushing through the people crowding the platform, he started walking along the cars, with the fear of not finding her making his heart beat in his throat. They were announcing the train’s departure now. Seven twenty-nine. Three minutes. Three minutes before Ruth disappeared from his life.

  And at last he saw her, sitting next to the window, looking into nothingness with a lost expression. Christmas stopped. He wanted to tap on her window, touch her hand through the glass one last time. But he didn’t have the courage to come closer. He stayed there, standing. Among the swarm of people. Without knowing why, he pulled off his cap. Then he saw that Ruth was looking down at something in her hand. And then she put that something around her neck, and Christmas’ legs almost gave way.

  “That is a hideous object,” said Ruth’s mother, seated across from her, staring at the heart-shaped charm that Ruth had just put on.

  “I know,” said Ruth, touching the tip of her finger to the heart’s shiny red surface, stroking it. With love, she admitted to herself, now that, leaving, she ran no further danger. And then she glanced out the window.

  She saw him. The wheat-blond unruly hair across his forehead. The dark eyes, deep, and passionate. The ridiculous cap in his hand. And suddenly, without her being able to do anything about it, the image of Christmas was misted over by her tears.

  Christmas took a step forward, uncertain, pushing out of the crowd, when now it was too late, now they couldn’t even say anything. But their gazes were entangled. And in those looks veiled by tears there were more words than they could have said, there was more truth than they would have been able to admit, more love than they could have shown. There was more pain than they could possibly bear.

  “I’ll find you,” Christmas said softly.

  The train puffed. And moved.

  Christmas saw that Ruth was touching the red heart he’d given her.

  “I’ll find you,” he repeated softly as Ruth was being borne away.

  When Christmas disappeared from her sight, Ruth sat up very straight in her seat. A tear streaked her cheek.

  Her mother looked at her with a chilly and distant air. She, too, had seen Christmas, monitoring her daughter’s emotion. She watched her for a while, and then spoke to her husband who was reading a newspaper. “First love is like a summer storm," she sighed, and went on in a bored tone: “In a second the sun comes out and dries the raindrops and after a while you don’t even notice that it rained.”

  Ruth stood up.

  “Where are you going, dear?” her mother asked.

  “To the bathroom,” said Ruth glaring fiercely at her mother. “May I?”

  “Simmer down, dear,” answered her mother, and selected one of the magazines that came to her from Paris.

  Ruth found the maid who was to look after their compartments. She borrowed her scissors and closed herself in the bathroom. She undressed and wrapped the bandages around her breasts even more tightly, crushing them, concealing them. She dressed again, took the scissors and with a single snip she cut off her long curls even with her jaw line, longer in front and shorter at the neck. She wet her hair and tried to make it lie flat and smooth. She returned the scissors to the maid and came back to her seat, across from her mother.

  The trip to California was under way.

  Goodbye, Ruth thought.

  PART TWO

  32

  Manhattan, 1926

  Later on the morning of April 2, 1926 — the day Christmas turned eighteen — an acrid heavy smoke hung over the neighborhood. It stung his eyes. Even from far away. Even from way down the sidewalk. A muttering crowd clustered around the fire truck that hid the shop.

  Christmas had grown tall. And strong. He had a fresh scar just under his left eye. A blond fuzz on his cheeks. He was wearing a suit that not many in the crowd could have afforded, but it was rumpled and dirty.

  In his right pocket a switchblade knife. The light had moved out of his eyes.

  The look on his face was cynical, with a cold hardness. The outer sign not only that he had grown, but also that he had become one of the many boys who lived in the street. Who lived for the street.

  With Joey right behind him, Christmas pushed through the crowd, elbowing, shoving, yanking anyone in his path by the shoulders. He knew he needed to see what the fire engine was blocking. And as he advanced through the smoke, that got denser and thicker, he heard some guy say: “He said he could handle ’em by himself,” and another, “That old wop? Hey, he was stubborn as a mule.” And a short bony woman, her face strained with the meanness of the weak and hungry: “He thought he was better than the rest of us.” Yet another: “Everybody’s got to pay protection,” turning to his neighbor who first nodded his head up and down as if to say yes, and then shook it from right to left, as if he were at the same time saying no: “Whether it’s the mick cops or those stinkin’ wops an’ kikes, yeah, you got to pay up.”

  The smoke made his eyes prickle and water more and more, but most of all — the closer Christmas got to the fire truck — he gasped as he breathed in a bitter toxic smell that was somehow familiar.

  “I told him,” said a big man whom Christmas shoved aside with difficulty as he pressed onward. “He was askin’ for it,” said another one, almost grudgingly. “What a terrible way to die,” murmured a frightened woman dressed in black, making the sign of the cross. “Who could do such a thing? Wild animals? Devils?” sighed her neighbor, but listlessly, resigned, because everyone in the ghetto of the Lower East Side knew that the answer to that rhetorical question was simply: Yes.

  A smell of roasted meat, overcooked meat, thought Christmas, who by now was only a few steps from the fire engine that had blocked his view of the shop. Heavy damp smoke was pouring out from a fire that had just been put out. The smell was of meat that had been burned and then drenched.

  Just beyond the truck, a few cops were standing in a semicircle, raising their clubs to keep the onlookers at a distance, shouting orders that no one seemed to hear. As if their eyes, overcome by curiosity and horror, had deafened their ears.

  “Holy shit,” said Joey with a nervous little laugh, standing next to Christmas when they reached the first row, face to face with a fat, sweating, red-haired cop. Face to face with what was left of the shop.

  Christmas still kept the cold hard expression that had formed on his face in the two years since Ruth had left. Through the thinning smoke he could begin to make out the interior of the butch
er shop that had belonged to Giuseppe Lo Giudice, known to everyone as Pep. He could see the pale marble counter, cracked from the intense heat. And the thousand charred fragments of glass from the meat case, shining like sequins on the dried black cuts of meat that sizzled in the water left by the fire hoses. He could see the strings of sausages dangling from hooks, shrunken, dripping grease. And he saw the white ceramic tiles that had exploded, ripped off the mortar that had held them to the walls. He could also see the marks that the flames had left on the denuded walls, like long black tongues that narrowed towards the ceiling, fixed in their last ravenous flash as they devoured all the oxygen.

  For just an instant, in a triangular scrap of mirror that a fireman was carrying out of the shop, Christmas saw himself. His own dead blank gaze. And he didn’t recognize himself. Then — as the firemen were undoing the brass coupling from the hydrant and starting to coil the waxed tube of hose onto its reel on the truck — he saw a police lieutenant arrive, with a woman about fifty in tow. She was weeping desperately, clinging to a man maybe thirty years old, big and heavy; a man with strangler’s hands, who looked exactly like Pep. You had a wife and son, thought Christmas. I didn’t know that, Pep.

  A sudden puff of wind came through the shop — just as the lieutenant was saying, “Don’t look, Missus Lo Giudice” — sending the last of the smoke billowing into the crowd like a toxic slap across their peering faces before dispersing. And then Christmas saw it. He saw what was left. In the middle of the butcher shop.

  The woman screamed.

  The chair had a metal frame. The chair Pep used to sit on when he read the paper in the back alley. And Christmas saw what was left; of the chair and of Pep. In the middle of the butcher shop, dry clot of meat that no longer resembled the huge good ogre that he had been in life — melted to the crumpled frame.

  “They tied him to the chair with wire, see,” one of the cops was saying to his partner. “If they’d of used a rope it would’ve burned through and maybe the poor bastard coulda got out.”

  The woman screamed again. Then she coughed. Her knees gave way. Her son tried to carry her further away but she planted her feet and shouted “No!” with a voice that despair hadn’t weakened.