by Gay Talese
The people around him could hardly stop watching him, or touching him, or patting him gently on the back as he bent forward to eat. Only he was eating. The others ignored their plates to concentrate on watching him, applauding and toasting his every move with his knife and fork.
As the waiter arrived with our check, I held his sleeve before he left, and asked: “Who’s that soldier over there?”
The waiter’s eyebrows rose with a slight flutter, and he leaned into my ear and replied: “That’s Joe DiMaggio!”
Bolting to my feet, I stared at the tall soldier who continued to eat, and I imagined in the distance the solid sound of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the spirited rhythm of Les Brown’s band.
I tapped my father’s shoulder and said: “That’s Joe DiMaggio!”
My father looked up from the check he had been scrutinizing for any sign of error and glanced casually at the big table. Then he turned back to me and replied: “So?”
Ignoring my father, I remained standing, in prolonged appreciation. And before we left the restaurant I took a final look, closer this time, and noticed that on the table in front of my hero was a steaming plate of spaghetti. Then his head leaned forward, his mouth opened, and everybody around him smiled—including me—as he twirled his fork unabashedly against a large silver spoon.
6.
The aura of the great DiMaggio that had brought an exhilarating conclusion to my dismal Sunday was rudely interrupted on the following morning by the rattling sound of my metal alarm clock. It was Monday, a school day. Within a half-hour I was expected to be standing at the bus stop, at the corner near the bank, awaiting the eight-fifteen arrival of Mr. Fitzgerald. Usually he was five or ten minutes late. But on this day I suspected he would be precisely on time, hoping that I would be late, so that he could leave me at the curb and thus add tardiness to my list of peccadilloes—misdeeds and mental lapses for which the nuns had conditioned me to expect, in this life or the next, appropriate punishment. Although I was not yet twelve years of age, I was developing a precocious sense of paranoia.
As I dressed I could hear rising from the store the hissing sounds of the pressing machines, and the ringing of the doorbell that signaled the early arrival of the employees who were assisting my parents during this busy period before Christmas. Since my sister Marian was still in bed, benefitting from an early holiday vacation that the school allowed the lower grades, I sat alone at the breakfast table in the rear of the apartment, eating the fruit and cereal my mother had left for me. Also on the table, packed in a brown paper bag, was my lunch—a soggy ham-and-egg sandwich made with Italian bread that my father had gotten the night before from our waiter at The Venice.
After hastily tossing the sandwich into my schoolbag, and grabbing my hat and coat, I skipped down the side staircase onto the sidewalk and waited at the bus stop almost ten minutes before the arrival of Mr. Fitzgerald. Shivering, I stood against a granite wall of the bank watching the activity along the avenue: shopkeepers unlocking their front doors, truckers unloading merchandise, sanitation men sweeping the streets. On the sidewalk of every block, chained to lampposts, were large wire baskets filled with corded bundles of cardboard and newspapers that people had deposited during the weekend to be collected later in the day by volunteer workers affiliated with a wartime recycling agency; and in the windows of shops were signs reminding citizens to conserve on household fats, to turn in old toothpaste tubes as new ones were purchased, and also to remit all tin cans, flattened, to grocery stores.
Ever since a tanker had been torpedoed a year before by a German submarine ten miles down the coast from Ocean City, the resort had been smitten by patriotic fervor. Middle-aged men and women, like my father, volunteered as air-raid wardens and auxiliary beach patrollers; and most draft-age men who had been found physically unfit for the military took jobs in Philadelphia defense plants, or at the bayside boat factory on the south end of the island, where barges and towboats were being constructed for the War Department.
With so many people in military work or the army, there was an acute shortage of help on the island—which was why I was expected to assist in the store after school, and why my parents were burdened by inept or unreliable personnel whom in better days they would have replaced. My mother’s salesladies were either garrulous or absentminded older women who preferred exchanging gossip with the customers to ringing up sales, or aggressive younger women who were impatient with the customers and even rude to those who did not buy; and most of the saleswomen also chain-smoked and occasionally burned holes in the merchandise.
My father’s dry-cleaning trucks were driven by high school seniors whose inexperience and recklessness led to frequent accidents and countless traffic violations; my father’s assistant in the cutting room was a seventy-seven-year-old retired tailor from Philadelphia, who, because of failing eyesight and frayed nerves, was not renowned for his flawless measuring and cutting of cloth. But even more of a problem for my father were his pressing machines and the men who operated them.
These machines were jawlike monstrosities with elongated padded white lips that voraciously compressed clothes in boisterous heads of steam—and then, with a sudden malfunctioning of one of their many recondite and irreplaceable parts, they would choke, sizzle, and stall to a halt, breaking down most often on those afternoons when the back-room tables were stacked highest with wrinkled suits and overcoats that had been promised for delivery to customers before nightfall.
These antiquated machines that my father had purchased during the late 1920s were not only confounding to fix but enfeebling to use; the workers were forced to stretch and strain as they pulled down on the levers of the long iron padded flatbeds that pressed the clothes against the lower flatbeds; and since the imperfectly repaired boilers of the machines leaked excessive amounts of steam, the men at work quickly became drowsy and debilitated, like weightlifters in a sauna.
Even on the coldest day of winter, when all the overhead fans were vibrating at top speed, the men would sometimes wilt and faint from prostration; and no doubt they sometimes wondered if the military life for which they had been found physically unfit could have been as taxing as their labors behind these enervating hulks of metal.
There was one young man, however, who was more than a match for the machines. He was a tall, sinewy black man with an agile, bony face and lively eyes, and a shiny mass of wiry black bronze-tinted peroxided hair that he combed dramatically over his head back to the gaudy shoulders of the tropical shirts he always wore. He was called “Jet,” and he had come up from the South as a saxophone player with a jazz band before the war; but he had been forced to quit after developing a tuberculous lung—which he claimed he was now slowly curing through the inhalation of steam and the snorting of white powder that he carried in a tiny bag in his shirt pocket.
Although Jet was afflicted as well with severely infected feet—his toes were gnarled with carbuncles and corns that popped out under his socks through the leather straps of the sandals he even wore in winter—he was by far the most vigorous and productive employee in the store, pressing clothes faster and better than anybody else; and when his machine blew a gasket or otherwise fizzled out, he played with its valves and keys as with a musical instrument, and soon he and his steam machine were back in harmonious rhythm.
Bedazzled by Jet and totally dependent on him, my father never complained about his loud radio that was tuned all day to a jazz station, and he pretended not to notice when Jet appeared at eight-thirty each morning, a half-hour late, or left an hour or two early, because Jet’s speed could always compensate for any temporary slowdown in the flow of the load of pressing.
But on those days when Jet did not show up even by nine a.m. (as he was now doing with increased frequency), my worried father would put on his hat and coat, leave the shop through the back door, and begin his cautious stroll in the direction of the black ghetto, which was a largely dilapidated row of white shanties and small frame structures two bl
ocks beyond the rear of the store, built along a stretch of railroad tracks within view of the bay.
If it was a Saturday, the one day I worked full-time at the store, my father would insist that I accompany him, reasoning perhaps that the presence of a young boy would make his surveillance in a black area seem less officious, less foreboding or punitive. Since my father was never certain of Jet’s exact address, the latter constantly shifting from one rental space to another, we would begin arbitrarily at one of the places where Jet was known to have dwelled in the past, hoping that some tenant would provide a lead that would help my father locate his truant presser.
But we often arrived so early in the neighborhood on Saturdays that we woke people up and irritated them so much that they told us nothing. One morning as my father stood on the loose boards of a rotting porch, tapping on the slats of a torn screen door and calling to Jet by name, an elderly woman wearing a bathrobe leaned out of an upstairs window and hurled down a metal pot at my father. Although it missed him, it caused such a clatter as it bounced off the sidewalk that the dogs barked in the house next door, and children began to cry, and a large black man from across the street abruptly opened his front door and glared.
“Hey,” he said, after a pause, “what the hell you want?”
“I’m looking for Jet,” my father replied.
“Jet who?” the man asked, challengingly.
Surprised, confused, my father did not respond. Momentarily he held his breath. It had apparently occurred to him for the first time that he did not know Jet’s last name. The man across the street, his heavy arms folded, stood waiting; and I feared that he might leave his porch and come over to us. But as my father remained silent and kept his eyes downward, the man merely sneered as he said: “We don’t know no Jet around here!”—and, upon reentering his house, slammed the door behind him.
My father turned toward me slowly, forcing a smile. Then, firmly taking my hand, he led me down the icy steps. I assumed that we were on our way home. But after we had walked a half-block in silence, he said: “Let’s try one more place, that house on the corner.” I protested; but he pulled me toward a two-story clapboard house that, like the other peeling buildings on the block, had brown stains streaking down the white walls beneath the drainpipes, and rusty dented automobiles parked in the driveway, and a muddy yard littered with broken bottles, punctured tires, and assorted household rubbish soundly stuck in the frosty, weed-strewn earth.
“Let’s go home,” I pleaded. But my father moved toward the corner house, where he soon was knocking on the door and, with somewhat less force than before, calling out to Jet. This time, however, there was no response whatsoever. No one came to a window, there was no barking of dogs; it was as if it were a totally abandoned house. My persistent father knocked louder, rapping his gloved knuckles against the white door patched with plywood, causing a hollow echo that rose in the harsh morning air. But from the house, continuing silence.
“Okay,” he said finally, “let’s go.” Relieved, I followed him down the path, then toward the street in the direction of the store. I had seen enough of Jet’s world. But a sense of sadness lingered within me as we walked, for I knew that after we had gotten back to the store on this Saturday, as on other Saturdays when Jet was adrift, I would see my father in the back room remove his jacket and tie, and strip to his undershirt, and then begin on this busiest day of the week to labor as long as he could in the steam of Jet’s machine.
And not only my father, but I as well would be confined—until Jet’s unpredictable return—to the hot and hazy atmosphere where no conversation could be heard above the pounding and hissing of the machines, and where time always passed slowly as my father sharpened the front creases of other men’s pants (while his own tailored trousers became sodden and baggy-kneed), and where I, sitting near him as he expressly wished, listlessly affixed hundreds of cardboard guards onto wire hangers before hooking them along the pipes within reach of the perspiring men.
My father, I unavoidably noticed, lagged behind even the portly gray-haired semi-retired presser whose leisurely pace at other times he had repeatedly criticized; and while this man was at least twenty years my father’s senior, he possessed an enduring stamina that my father clearly lacked. After a half-hour in the steam, my father was a lamentable figure. His eyeglasses were fogged over. His neck seemed to have shrunk within the soaked, sagging noose of his knotted white handkerchief. And after he had extended his slender arms above his head to grip the levers of the machine, he would heave as he pulled downward, straining under the flatiron’s weight, and his face suddenly bore the agonized expression of his favorite saint.
I sometimes wondered, many years later, if there was not a part of him that almost reveled in these moments, these humbling efforts that perhaps put him in touch spiritually with those flagellants he had once described watching intently as a boy, a bedraggled but tenacious multitude crawling uphill on bleeding knees—or those ascetic village elders, among them his grandfather Domenico, who vied for the honor of hoisting on their shoulders the weighty statue of the monk who had extolled the virtues of mortification.
In this period of World War II, with citizens everywhere receptive to sacrificing—and with my father’s widowed mother existing vulnerably in the hills of southern Italy and his brothers in enemy trenches—it was possible that he was experiencing in his discomfort a kindred comfort with his primal concerns. Or at the very least, he was imposing upon me, his only son, a lasting awareness of how hard his life could be, and how little right I had, by comparison, to complain about the minimal obligations required of me in the store.
Still, I did complain, and sulk in silence; and in the back room, when I thought my father was not watching, I would sometimes try to slip away. But he always caught me, and scolded me; and with his feet he pushed in my direction another large box filled with cardboard guards for the hangers. As I kneeled to pry open the box, and as he turned and raised his hands to the lever of the white matted machine, I submitted to my role as methodically as I served the priest at Mass; and yet, in the store, I sometimes prayed with uncharacteristic fervor and faith, hoping and believing that within a miraculous few seconds the back door would open, and I would hear the shuffling sounds of Jet’s sandaled feet that would soon replace my father’s wing-tipped shoes on the iron pedals—and thus I would gain at least temporary relief from a stifling and wistful Saturday.
7.
The school bus screeched to a halt, two minutes before it was scheduled to arrive; and after the door swung open, I saw the stern profile of Mr. Fitzgerald. He wore his gray peaked cap pointed straight forward toward the windshield, and along the edges of the steering wheel his fingers tapped impatiently.
As I climbed the two steps, holding my bulky schoolbag close to my body to avoid brushing it against the grease-coated rod that held the door securely open, I observed that Mr. Fitzgerald’s eyes did not shift even slightly in my direction. He seemed determined to avoid all personal contact; and so I accommodated him by not saying good morning—a social slight to which he might have been responding a second later when he clangorously slammed the door closed and hurtled the bus to a quick start before I had settled into a seat.
Although the bus was less crowded than usual because the primary schoolers were already on holiday, there was actually an increased amount of noise and disorder generated in the back of the bus by some older boys who, relieved of all concern for the physical well-being of the young, were now less inhibited as they hurled spitballs wildly back and forth, and scuffled with one another in the aisles, and took turns pinching and squeezing the arms of the squealing, frolicsome girls who seemed to be enjoying their company. These middle school boys in their early teens were dressed in hooded plaid mackinaws and thick corduroy pants that made whipping sounds when they walked; and under their hunting caps they wore colorful fuzzy earmuffs that I sometimes envied but, for reasons presumably aesthetic, was prohibited by my father from owning. The i
tems of clothing envied by most other male students in my school were the U.S. Army belts that a few boys had obtained from their older soldier brothers—khaki canvas belts that, in the schoolyard during recess, they would extract from their pants loops and twirl like lassos feverishly above their heads, daring anyone to stand close to the bright menacing blur of the belts’ brass buckles.
The girls in the back of the bus also wore hooded mackinaws, or navy blue pea jackets patriotically complemented by red mufflers and white tasseled caps; and, together with the boys, they would sometimes duck their heads behind the seats to smoke cigarettes. Most of the girls and boys were bused in each day from the agricultural areas, the rustic pinelands, and a small community directly across the bay that had a honky-tonk strip; they were the progeny of rural housewives and truck farmers, hospital nurses and boatyard repairmen, file clerks and firemen, and waitresses and bartenders who worked at night in the neon-lit waterfront establishments that were viewed disapprovingly, if dimly through the fog, by the Prohibitionist standard-bearers of dry Ocean City. The lights blazing above the taverns and dance halls were seen as beacons of indulgence that had a depreciating effect not only on the property values but also on the moral values of the entire Back Bay region—which was perhaps why many conscientious Catholic families in that region sent their children miles away each day to receive a regimental education under the tutelage of the island’s authoritarian nuns.
But whatever positive effect the nuns were having over the mainland children was not evident on the bus this morning. And while I would have preferred sitting as far as possible from Mr. Fitzgerald, I did not want to be within easy target range of the spitball shooters. So I sat near the front, in the third row, among a dozen students who were my own age or a bit younger—individuals whom I knew by name but who, because of the hours I spent in the store, were mainly classroom acquaintances.