I dropped out of line to intercept him, almost shouting as I called out, “Sal! Ohh, Sal-eee!”
He turned as I came rushing up. It took him a long second before he made my face. “Joe? Joey Bo? Oh my God . . . How many years has it been?”
Then I had him wrapped up, smothering him in a bear hug that had him fighting me off from embarrassment. “Oh, watch it,” he said, arms flapping, “People are starin’.”
“To hell with all of ’em. You’re my pal and I ain’t seen you in a double dog’s year. Lemme look at you.”
I checked him over. The pleasant jowly face was the same: sleepy, dark eyes, bulbish nose, red-tipped ears. But there were additions also: hard lines on the forehead, bone-deep silver white in the close-cropped hair, marked heft in the figure—not that he’d ever been a guy to pass on an extra helping of mostacciol’. Sal had, in fact, long been known in the neighborhood both for his insatiable love of pasta and for his uncanny ability to use his police badge to get himself into any Chicago sporting event. Earlier than that, Salvatore “Big Horn” Bencaro had achieved even greater fame for the enormous gold Italian horn he wore around his neck every minute of every day.
We’d been childhood running mates, and we’d stayed friends through the years, but the war and its aftermath for me had gradually pulled us apart. Although we’d often written each other when we were younger, it had been at least six or seven years since either of us had received a letter from the other guy. But the bond remained.
“How’s everything, buddy?” I inquired, shaking his shoulder back and forth with gusto.
“Good,” he answered in his understated way.
“And Gina—and your kids? You got three, right?”
“Good. All good, t’anks.”
I beamed at him. “Still in the neighborhood?”
He nodded. “Oh, yeah, you know me. Right there on Fillmore, just down from . . . uh . . . you know.”
“Yeah. I do.”
We stared at each other a second, apprehension filling the blank space as we both saw what was coming next. Sal started to ask me the obvious question.
“You, uh, going by the old pl—?”
“Got a good seat?” I cut in, reversing field on him.
He rolled his eyes. “Uh . . . just kinda walking around.”
I laughed heartily, happy to be taking the conversation in another direction. “The badge again? Always the badge.”
“You know how it goes,” he said, that patented sheepish look filling out his features. “But I gotta be careful, I’m a sergeant now.”
“Well, guess what, old chum?” I said, putting my arm around his shoulder and steering him toward the concession stand. “We’re gonna get a bite and a beer, and then I’m gonna put you in the best seat of your life—a free one I might add, Sergeant Bencaro. And you will never guess who you’re sitting next to.”
The Bears took the second-half kickoff and the mauling continued. You could see Lombardi ranting and screaming clear across the field, but what could he do? It was our day.
Secretly, I deeply admired the man for his brilliant leadership and strategic mastery of the game. But not out loud, and certainly not when he was playing the Bears. Why the gods had conspired to put that Italian genius in that Wisconsin wasteland instead of Chicago or New York I’d never understand. As if being born Catholic wasn’t hard enough.
Frank and the boys came back early in the third with a couple of older sportswriters and a blonde of more recent vintage. Sal’s eyes were so riveted on the field he didn’t even notice them as they worked their way down the aisle. I chin-nodded Frank when our eyes met, motioning for him to sit in the open seat between Sal and me.
Buddy of mine, I mouthed as he squeezed by. Frank nodded, picking up on the gag right away.
He sat down next to Sal, bumping him brusquely on purpose. Sal spun around, prepared to pitch a beef.
“What goes, Joe?” he began, then jerked to a halt, transfixed, unable to comprehend the sight before his dilating eyes. Millions of Italian Americans adored Frank Sinatra, of course, gusting with pride at his famous voice and smooth style, idolizing him for what he’d done to make our people a respected part of the cultural landscape, but not one of them revered him the way Salvatore Bencaro did.
I had to grab Sal’s hand and tug it forward, but finally he shook with Frank, staring in dumbstruck awe as he sputtered out, “This is the gr-greatest moment of my life, Mister S-S-Sinatra.”
“You bet,” Frank said. “Nice horn you got there, buddy. Very big.”
It was a day to remember, all the way around. The Bears ripped chunks out of the Pack and spit ’em out, pounding the defending champs 26–7. And Sal got along famously with Frank, yukking it up, swapping stories, and enticing him into a sing-along of “Bear Down, Chicago Bears” at game’s end that spread to the whole stadium. Everything was letter perfect—even a Sy Huser sighting didn’t faze me.
When the final gun cracked, we all congaed out of the stadium and down Waveland Avenue amid the thousands, taking refuge from the feral storm in a corner of Ernie’s Bleachers. We drank it all in, good cheer flowing like Old Style, current, honorary, and ex-pat Chicagoans celebrating among our brethren on a day of victory.
It was a glorious afternoon. The Bears were now a shoo-in for the title game, I’d found a long-lost friend, and Frank was as ebullient as I’d ever seen him. Happy days all the way around.
But as the sun rolled ever westward, shadows creeping like black fingers down the darkening city streets, I knew there was a reckoning coming.
It had been hanging over me ever since I hit town—since the moment I’d agreed to come on the trip, really. I’d been kidding myself about it all along, even after Frank had mentioned my name had been in the paper. Running into Sal cinched it. That was kismet, that one, and it stirred something long dormant inside me, something I could no longer smother down. I could feel it welling up all afternoon—hear their voices above the wind and the cheers, see their faces among the many thousands—my hope grappling with the dread, recriminations piling higher as I came to acknowledge what was indisputably at hand.
A reckoning many years in the making, often delayed by the storms and vicissitudes in my life, but ever destined to happen. A reckoning whose time had finally come.
And it lay back home where it all began.
On Taylor Street.
16
We stayed at Ernie’s the better part of two hours, mixing with the sportswriters and glad-handers Sinatra attracted. A little after five, Frank leaned in and said, “Hey, Fortunato is gonna meet us for dinner at Twin Anchors. I think some of the other players are gonna come too. It’ll be a gasser.”
I was just putting flame to a Lucky. I glanced over at Sal, back to Frank. “Sorry, pal, this time I’m gonna have to pass.”
“The hell you say,” he grinned, cocksure and boozy.
“Not to worry,” I replied. “Sal’s gonna fill in for me, okay? You got your own private police detail for protection; all you gotta do is feed him.”
He gave me a hard stare. “Whaddya talking about here? Did you not hear me? Joe Fortunato—your patron saint linebacker—is gonna join us for dinner at the best rib joint north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Of course Sal comes—but you’re coming too. On this I must insist.”
I zeroed in on him as I pulled in a lungful. “Not this time, Frank. The coast is clear—you said it yourself. Now I’ve got something I have to do for me.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“No, sir,” I answered. “Not any longer.”
I blew out a cloud of smoke, tracking the curling white wisps as they roiled up toward the tin ceiling, searching for answers in them like some kind of gin mill oracle. “Twenty years is long enough.”
III
17
Growing up, the nuns taught us that the handful o
f restaurateurs and merchants who arrived from Genoa in the 1850s were the first Italian immigrants to come to Chicago. Their success in business helped blaze a trail back across the Atlantic for the wave of their countrymen that followed, as any Genovese was only too happy to tell you. Over the decade following the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the stream of immigrants increased as the city rebuilt itself. Within three decades, Chicago’s hunger for labor, coupled with poverty and famine in Italy, had turned the stream into a tide.
They came from Arezzo, Castel di Sangro, Modena, Naples, Palermo, and a thousand other places. They came to Chicago to hack trenches, mine coal, lay bricks, forge steel, stitch fabric, peddle fruit, and toil for the railroads. They came to a distant city across the sea for “bread and work.” And their labors helped build that city into a metropolis.
Italian neighborhoods dotted the Chicago landscape when I was a kid. All told, there were better than a hundred thousand Italian Americans in Chicago at that time, flung out across the city in ghettos and small pockets, divided by region of birth but connected by soul. Grand and Western was mostly Sicilian with some Pugliesi. Twenty-Fourth and Oakley was Tuscan. Way out on the west side, Melrose Park was Neapolitan. Distant Chicago Heights and Blue Island were said to be heavily Italian also, but those we took on faith.
But the biggest and best-known area by far was the Taylor Street neighborhood on the Near West Side. Although largely Neapolitan and Marchese, the bustling enclave opened its arms to my father, a boy of thirteen who arrived alone from the hills of Emiglia Romagna in 1899. Just a few years later, it welcomed my mother, a young girl from Naples who had emigrated with her entire family.
On Taylor Street, they met and married, lived and worked, pledged allegiance to their new country and raised their five children as Americans.
On Taylor Street, I would always be home.
18
From Wrigley, I grabbed the “L” at Addison and took it downtown. The game crowd had dispersed so I had the car almost all to myself. The scenery had changed a lot over the years, but the clack clack clack of the wheels on the tracks and the screech they made in the sharp turns took me back.
Below me, people were walking dogs, gathering near taverns, or scurrying home with grocery bags in their arms, just as always. Fragments of apartments zipped by as the elevated train churned on, lights snapping on in eye-level living rooms as people came back to settle in for the evening. Night fell over the city as I rode south, closing in mile by mile on a rendezvous long delayed.
Before long, I was in the Loop, marveling at the sheer number and size of the new skyscrapers as I rolled through the deserted downtown. I made the change at Jackson and took the Congress line west, counting down the stops to Racine Street, practicing what I would say, fidgeting in my seat, wondering what twenty years of war and wandering had done in the eyes of those who knew me once.
My plan was to hop the streetcar at Racine and ride it down the last half dozen blocks. I’d always loved the electric cars as a kid. For a nickel, you could go clear across town—and get a transfer. It took a couple minutes of looking around before I was forced to accept that the streetcar line I’d put Butch on so long ago wasn’t there any longer. Then I realized that I hadn’t seen any lines downtown, either. That I hadn’t seen any anywhere in Chicago.
Things change.
I walked instead, the six clangs of the church bells letting me know I had just enough time. Strange sights greeted me at every turn. The el train had run the length of another new expressway where Congress Street had been. I had learned about that one from a letter my sister had sent me, but it was still startling to see how it bisected the old neighborhood, completely dividing families and neighbors with its stony gray coldness, thousands of cars barreling through a space once occupied by churches and parks and homes and vibrancy. It was quite disturbing. Other things were worse.
In the distance, concrete monoliths rose like giant pillboxes near Halsted Street, sterile mercury lighting silhouetting their incomplete forms. Around the structures, cranes with steel jaws sat poised for their next attack like mechanized carnivores. Beneath them, a mass of construction vehicles huddled in an ad hoc lot on Harrison amid the ruins of demolished businesses. In windows everywhere, I saw signs protesting something called the Circle Campus. A chill ran through me as I traversed the darkened streets. Much of it looked the same, but something deeply troubling was afoot in my boyhood home.
Things improved as I got farther south. There was a sense of normalcy to what I saw, the brownstones and bungalows the same as ever, maybe even polished up a bit. Other things looked different, like the trees in Peanut Park or the corner cobbler’s shop now turned into a market, but they were still recognizable as something held together by a neighborhood fabric, still part of the whole. By the time I reached Taylor Street, I was breathing easier. The sight of Chiarugi’s hardware store and Scafuri’s bakery heartened me. But as I walked the final blocks, the uneasiness I’d felt at the football game rose inside me again, ambivalence and doubt about what I was doing flooding through me. I fought through it, pressing ahead past the last brick walkup buildings, past where the Colozzos and the D’Alessios and the Fiores lived, to the one I knew best.
The stoop was deserted, a single roller skate and a pockmarked baseball bat lining its steps. The door was open—it always was. I stopped, composed myself, peered through the glass. Then I turned the knob and pushed the door inward.
The redolence of Italian cooking filled the air. I drank in the scents like the marooned returned to civilization: the garlic, the rosemary, the sopressata, the gravy, the baking bread—age-old smells that permeated the house. I stepped lightly through the darkened hallway, not a soul in sight save for the images on Kodak paper on the wall. The graduation shot of me in my navy whites stoked the fires of memory, transporting me back to 1940. My idealistic smile spoke volumes.
But there were other smiles—ones on the faces of children I didn’t know, and on people I knew who had passed away. Everything felt utterly surreal, like a dream I’d had a thousand times before.
I heard voices down the hallway. Walking slowly, I made my way to the dining room, my heart beating faster with each step. I stopped just shy of the doorway, peeked in.
They were there. My sisters, my brothers, my aunt Teresa, my uncle Nello, children, spouses. That pleasant murmur of anticipation that precedes the meal flooded through the room, adults sipping wine, children sneaking hunks of bread. I tried to enter, but my feet wouldn’t move, my mouth wouldn’t work. I just stood there frozen, watching, chest pounding.
The kitchen door swung open across the room. A woman backed in, holding a pot in her oven-mitted hands. She set it down on the table, lifted a wooden spoon full of gravy, stopped, looked across the room.
At me.
I could see her squinting through black-frame glasses as she struggled for recognition.
I stepped in, breathing shallowly, staring at her face. She was older, so much older, those regal features weathered, the coal-black hair now gone to smoke.
“Who’sa that over there?” she asked. “Louie? Louie Esposito—is thatta you, you old rascal, you?”
Heads turned around the room. Somebody gasped.
Then she got it. A hand flew to her mouth. The wooden spoon hit the floor, clattered in the stillness.
I took another step, struggling for my voice.
“Hello, Mamma,” I said finally. “I’m home.”
19
Pandemonium is not quite the word I’d use to describe what happened next. It was more of an abject shock, accompanied by dull paralysis. Nobody moved, they just stared, openmouthed and stunned, whispered Ave Marias and Oh my Gods the only sounds.
My mother began to cry, grabbing my uncle Nello’s shoulder for support as her legs began to go. Then my sister Carmella was up and out of her chair, throwing herself upon me as the droplets began to fal
l, her arms binding me tight. My sister Francesca hit the pile a moment later, then my mother, clutching her rosary as she kissed me, black rivulets streaming down her face. My own eyes remained strangely dry. I just couldn’t compel the tears to fall.
Nobody said anything that made any sense for a good five minutes, just a lot of bilingual gibberish and the invocation of many saints in dialect as we all danced around in an impromptu tarantella. Finally, my uncle Nello restored some degree of order, waving his hands in the air several times and commanding, “Zitto, zitto tutti—everybody quiet!”
We finally took our seats, but the melodrama ran on, the girls refusing to let go of me until Carmella had to go running off to make sure the chicken wasn’t burning. Somebody’s kid got scooped up and handed to me. She jerked her face away when I tried to kiss her and everybody laughed. It was all tremendously heartening, but it was simply happening too fast. Deep inside I knew it couldn’t last.
Then I saw my brother Fabrizio sitting at the far end of the table, his brow furrowed.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Uh-uh,” I said, fighting back with a grin, “Sunday dinner’s at six thirty—I’m just in time. Come give me a hug, fratello.”
“You’re twenty years late, Joe. Don’t be fooled by the smiles; not everyone here is that happy to see you.”
He got up and walked out, fading into the gloom of the hallway, a flat, unpleasant silence descending over us all, faces falling like dominoes around the room.
Now, Fabrizio had earned the nickname “Incendio” when we were kids due to his temperament—this was a guy who could start a fight in a phone booth, maybe even get the pope to take a swing at him. But I understood his anger. My visit wasn’t going to be some Campari and caviar affair on the veranda, and it shouldn’t have been. I’d stayed in touch by the occasional letter over the years, but I hadn’t set foot in my family home since I’d been back on leave in the summer of 1944. That wasn’t something you got a pass on, not from anyone.
My Kind of Town Page 6