Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  I had seen my father tuck the overseas envelope into the drawer of his desk in his small balcony office. He always kept the drawer locked, and it was packed with the letters that had been sent from overseas and had been read by my mother. It also contained photographs of our Italian relatives, including several snapshots of the now missing Domenico Talese, about whom my father had spoken to me so often and emotionally in the recent past. My uncle Domenico was the only foreign relative whom I envisioned in terms beyond snapshots, mostly because Domenico’s life, or his life as it was recounted to me by my mother, seemed to be filled with great drama and danger.

  Eleven years younger than my father, Domenico was born in Maida in 1914, a few months after their father, Gaetano, had returned to the village to die of his disease. When Domenico was six years old, my father left Maida, and the two brothers had not seen each other in more than twenty years—which was probably why Domenico had written so frequently and descriptively, usually with photographs enclosed: he did not want to be forgotten by his older brother in America, or to be remembered merely as the shy six-year-old who had stood waving good-bye with the other Talese relatives at the Maida train station in the spring of 1920.

  In 1937, Domenico had been drafted by the Italian army; and because Mussolini was supporting General Franco’s cause in the Spanish Civil War, Domenico was dispatched along with many Italian troops to Cádiz, where during the next year he was assigned to battle units and twice was hospitalized with bullet wounds. But the most frightening moment that he wrote about from Spain occurred on a day when he was unscathed in battle.

  Crouched in the trenches, my uncle Domenico overheard a conversation between two Italian soldiers nearby in which one was saying: “I was born and raised in a time of war, and I’m still in a war!” The other soldier asked, “When were you born?” To which the first soldier moaned, as if the day carried a curse: “April 16, 1914.” On hearing this, my uncle Domenico’s interest perked up, for he too had been born on that day, in the same year!

  “Hey,” my uncle yelled over the trench, “what’s your name?” “Domenico Talese,” came the reply. “Domenico Talese!” my uncle exclaimed. “That’s my name!” My uncle immediately poked his head up, and, seeing that his namesake had also risen above the trench, he examined a dark-eyed helmeted man with similar facial features—who, smiling and holding up a flask, said: “I’m Domenico Talese of Naples! Come over, let’s drink!”

  “Yes,” my uncle said. “I’ll tell the lieutenant.” Edging his way toward the lieutenant, who stood yards away in the other direction, my uncle was requesting permission for the visit, when suddenly he was jolted by an explosion behind him. Moments after the dirt had settled and the smoke had cleared, my uncle turned to see that the trench in which his namesake and the other soldier had stood was now completely gone. It had been eliminated by a direct hit from an artillery shell. Domenico Talese of Naples had been blown out of sight, plucked from the earth and carried into oblivion before my uncle could learn exactly where in Naples he had lived, or how they were related.

  Shortly after the end of the Spanish Civil War, Domenico was recalled into the army for World War II; and in the autumn of 1942 he had been on a troopship bound for Crete when a British submarine torpedoed the vessel. With five hundred other Italian soldiers, Domenico sank into the sea. My uncle did not know how to swim. But he grabbed on to a large piece of floating lumber and was able to remain afloat for six hours, and was then rescued by an Italian cruiser. After eight days in the hospital, he was sent on to Crete.

  For many months my father heard nothing of Domenico’s whereabouts, except that his unit had been transported by German planes to the European theater. And then, just before the memorial service in Ocean City for Lieutenant Ferguson, my father learned that Domenico was officially listed as missing.

  It had never been easy for me to think of Domenico Talese as my uncle—not only because I had never seen him (and now perhaps never would), but because in all of his photographs he looked so different from my father: there was in his pose an almost careless disregard for what people might think of him, a rough-hewn audacity that bordered on bravado and was antithetical to everything I had been taught at home; and the way he wore his peaked military cap, pushed back on his head, revealing a tuft of dark hair above his forehead, was an affectation that my father would have considered roguish. Certainly Domenico’s uniform contributed to my sense of dissociation: there was a small star on each lapel, a royal crown and crossed rifles on the insignia of his hat, and the chevron stripes on his sleeve pointed downward, opposite from the upward-pointed stripes of American soldiers.

  But I liked my uncle’s looks, and what made him most appealing to me was the lighthearted, mildly mischievous hint of the bachelor conscript-adventurer, a man with a live-today, die-tomorrow attitude that was totally at odds with my father’s measured demeanor. It was as if my father’s unlived youth had been inherited by Domenico, who was enjoying it to the fullest if he had not already taken it to his grave. My father, on the other hand—even in those photos taken of him as a teenager in Paris—was always pictured in the sartorial style of a middle-aged man, and with a posture that exuded serious purpose. For my father was a serious man, a man who listened to serious music, and who at dinner expressed serious thoughts, and who complained that many contemporary American films, plays, and radio programs were too juvenile, unsuitable for the serious mind.

  This most serious self had only increased as the war added to his anxiety, and it had now reached such a point that I was reluctant to express an opinion, fearing that I might provoke him to anger with my opposing view. Sensing that he might explode at any moment, I kept my distance, or trod lightly in his presence, and kept secret as best I could my own tribulations at parochial school.

  As I approached the shop on this late Monday afternoon, and watched the trolley from Atlantic City pause at the corner near the bank before clanging on toward the boardwalk, I knew that I would reveal nothing of the decision that had excluded me from the list of altar boys who would be serving Mass on Christmas Eve. To mention this would only invite questions and perhaps prompt my father to make another in the series of futile telephone calls on my behalf to the Mother Superior. Instead, I intended to ride with my parents to Midnight Mass, and go with them through the front door of the church, where it would be inappropriate—and also too late—for a lengthy explanation or discussion of why I was not in the sacristy with the other altar boys. On the following morning, I would resignedly ride my bicycle to the seven-o’clock Mass.

  This at least was what I had in mind as I swung my schoolbag off my shoulder and opened the plate-glass door to the shop—and saw, much to my amazement, that my usually controlled father was standing behind the dry-cleaning counter engaged in an animated dispute with a woman wearing a silver fox coat. Trying to slip past unnoticed, I tiptoed along the aisle of the dress department. My mother, who was occupied with customers near the fitting rooms, smiled at me uneasily as I passed; and then with a raised eyebrow she acknowledged the contretemps in a way that indicated she was as bewildered by it as I was.

  I climbed the steps to my father’s balcony office and seated myself behind a potted palm that provided camouflage. Now I could eavesdrop on the scene below and see spread out on the counter between my father and the lady a red silk cocktail dress. All at once I recognized this dress from having seen it during the previous week, when this same woman had brought it in to have it cleaned, and had made a point of requesting quick service because she wished to wear it to a party on Monday night, which was this evening. I remember that the counter clerk had taken the dress back to my father in the workroom, to ask if it could be properly cleaned in the allotted time. When he examined the dress my father noticed a small spot on the bodice, which was perhaps a stain that would require special, time-consuming treatment. For this reason he was reluctant to accept the dress, and I remember that he himself had walked out to the main room of the store to exp
lain the problem to the woman.

  “I’m sorry,” I had heard my father say, “but I doubt we can get this back to you by Monday. This spot might be a liquor stain that can’t be removed by dry-cleaning, and if we try washing it there’s a good chance the dress will shrink.…”

  “But can’t you at least try?” she had pleaded; to which my father had said, “We can try, but we cannot guarantee it. I definitely wouldn’t wash this dress, and yet if we dry-clean it—without taking the extra time to analyze that spot and have it specially treated—you’ll only get the dress back on Monday looking no better than it does now.”

  “Oh, just do the best you can,” the woman had said, shrugging her shoulders. And as she left the dress and walked toward the door, she said: “I’ll see you on Monday.”

  Now she was back, and it seemed obvious that the cleaning of the red silk dress had brought happiness neither to the woman nor to my father. As they stood practically nose to nose across the counter, with the dress spread out on white tissue paper between them, I heard my father saying over and over, “I told you, I told you, but you wouldn’t listen.…”

  “I was listening,” she replied, “but I didn’t expect you people to make the dress worse.”

  “How did we make it worse?”

  “You made the spot bigger!”

  “Look, madam,” my father said, sharply, “I’ve been in business in this town for more than twenty years, and I didn’t stay in business that long by making spots bigger!”

  “You not only made it bigger,” she insisted, “but there is a spot in the back that wasn’t there when I left it.”

  “Now you’re saying that we not only make spots bigger, but we add spots also, is that right?” His face was taut with tension, anger.

  “What I am saying,” she replied firmly, “is what I said at the beginning. You have ruined my dress!”

  “You ruined your own dress!” My father was now shouting. “You spilled liquor on it, and—”

  “I want a new dress,” she interrupted. “You’ve ruined my dress, and I want it replaced.…”

  Suddenly my father slammed his fist against the counter and shouted: “I want you out of my store!”

  “Not until we settle this,” she replied; but then my mother, who had been watching all this time silently, undoubtedly embarrassed in front of her customers, walked over and said, “Please, can’t we discuss this quietly. Perhaps tomorrow …”

  “I have a party to go to tonight, and I want to settle this now!”

  “Out!” my father said, pointing to the door. “I want you out of here, or I’m calling the cops.”

  “Well, you can call the cops,” she said, glaring at him. “I’m getting my husband, and I’ll be right back!”

  Watching from behind the palms, my hands perspiring, I saw the woman stride out of the store, leaving the door open. My mother placed a hand on my father’s arm, whispering something into his ear, but he began to shake his head. Across the room I could see the salesladies and their customers standing along the dress counters, speaking quietly among themselves. Everyone was waiting; and within a few moments, the husband appeared—a large man in a brown hat and a tan camel’s-hair coat, smoking a cigar.

  Heading straight for my father, he bellowed: “So you’re the man who just insulted my wife!”

  “I did not insult your wife,” my father replied, in a steady voice. “I told her to get out of my store. And now I’m telling you to get out of my store!”

  “Who do you think you are?” the man asked, getting closer to my father, who, standing behind the counter, now quickly took off his steel-rimmed glasses and handed them to my startled mother. Then the man paused and said something in a softer tone, so soft that I am not sure I heard it precisely; but my father surely heard it, because he suddenly left my mother’s side, went back into the workroom while everybody in the store stood frozen in position as my mother called out, “Joe … Joe …”

  Perhaps what the man had said—I may have heard it—was “dago.” There was no other explanation for the fury that now possessed my father as he reappeared, a transformed figure carrying a long, heavy pair of scissors that were customarily used for cutting thick material or fur skin.

  “Out!” he said, in a voice now coldly calm. “Out!” he repeated, as the man in the camel’s-hair coat retreated, walking backward, not taking his eyes off my father, who repeated the word “Out!” as he walked, until the man had pushed the door open and stumbled into the wintry air. But before he left, he took one final look at my father and said: “You haven’t seen the last of me yet! You’ll soon be hearing from me again—with my lawyer. And we’ll sue you for every dime you have.…”

  My father showed no reaction, except the scissors in his right hand began to shake. My mother gently took the scissors and handed it to the white-haired seventy-seven-year-old tailor, who during the commotion had followed my father out of the workroom. Behind this tailor stood Jet and another presser from the workroom, shaking their heads. I left my hiding place behind the palm and walked down the steps to join the others. The salesladies and the two customers still left in the store slowly turned and began to look over some of the new dresses hung along the racks.

  With my mother speaking to him softly, my father seemed to have regained his composure. But then, as he turned toward the dry-cleaning counter, the fury flared once more within him. There, on the counter, was the red dress. The couple had forgotten it, perhaps intentionally. Without saying a word, my father grabbed the silk dress, crumpled it into a ball, and quickly headed out the door.

  “Follow him,” my mother urged me; and I did, trailing a few paces behind as my father looked along the sidewalk for the couple, who were nowhere to be seen on the avenue crowded with Christmas shoppers. But then, near the corner, my father saw the man in the camel’s-hair coat, climbing into a car. He ran in that direction, and I followed; but before my father could reach the car, it had pulled away from the curb. I could see that the man behind the wheel had turned his head and spotted my father—and, perhaps thinking that he still carried the scissors, had accelerated into the lane, with my father in swift pursuit.

  When my father realized that he could not catch up and perhaps wrap the dress around the car’s aerial, as I suspect was his intention, I saw him tighten his grip around the balled-up dress, cock his arm, and aim the dress toward the taillights of the moving car. And in that awkward pitching motion, he rocked back and heaved the garment with all his might; and I watched as it sailed through the air, suddenly catching a gust of ocean breeze that swept across the avenue—a breeze that took the dress higher into space and blew it in the direction of an oncoming trolley.

  Then, like a magnet, the sparkling overhead wires and prongs atop the trolley seemed to suck the dress into the spinning wheel on the roof; and as my father and I watched, breathlessly, the dress was transformed into a flapping, torn flag and began its long, windy ride across the bay toward Atlantic City.

  9.

  There is a certain type of mild mental disorder that is endemic in the tailoring trade, and it began to weave its way into my father’s psyche during his apprentice days in Italy, when he worked in the shop of a volatile craftsman named Francesco Cristiani, whose male forebears had been tailors for four successive generations and had, without exception, exhibited symptoms of this occupational malady.

  Although it has never attracted scientific curiosity and therefore cannot be classified by an official name, my father once described the disorder as a form of prolonged melancholia that occasionally erupted into cantankerous fits—the result, my father suggested, of excessive hours of slow, exacting, microscopic work that proceeds stitch by stitch, inch by inch, mesmerizing the tailor in the reflected light of a needle flickering in and out of the fabric.

  A tailor’s eye must follow a seam precisely, but his pattern of thought is free to veer off in different directions, to delve into his life, to ponder his past, to lament lost opportunities, create
dramas, imagine slights, brood, exaggerate—in simple terms, the tailor when sewing has too much time to think.

  My father, who served as an apprentice each day before and after school, was aware that certain tailors could sit quietly at the workbench for hours, cradling a garment between their bowed heads and crossed knees, and sew without exercise or much physical movement, without any surge of fresh oxygen to clear their brains—and then, with inexplicable suddenness, my father would see one of these men jump to his feet and take wild umbrage at a casual comment of a coworker, a trivial exchange that was not intended to provoke. And my father would often cower in a corner as spools and steel thimbles flew around the room—and, if goaded on by insensitive colleagues, the aroused tailor might reach for the workroom’s favorite instrument of terror, the sword-length scissors.

  There were also confrontations in the front of the store in which my father worked, disputes between the customers and the proprietor—the diminutive and vainglorious Francesco Cristiani, who took enormous pride in his occupation and believed that he, and the tailors under his supervision, were incapable of making a serious mistake; or, if they were, he was not likely to acknowledge it.

  Once when a customer came in to try on a new suit but was unable to slip into the jacket because the sleeves were too narrow, Francesco Cristiani not only failed to apologize to the client but behaved as if insulted by the client’s ignorance of the Cristiani shop’s unique style in men’s fashion. “You’re not supposed to put your arms through the sleeves of this jacket!” Cristiani informed his client, in a superior tone. “This jacket is designed to be worn only over the shoulders!”

  On another occasion, when Cristiani paused in the town square after lunch to listen to the Maida band during its midday concert, he noticed that the new uniform that had been delivered the day before to the third trumpeter showed a bulge behind the collar whenever the musician lifted the instrument to his lips.