Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  “But first I’d like you to do me a small favor,” the tailor said. Joseph replied that he would be happy to comply in any way he could.

  “I’d like to be introduced to your niece,” the man told Joseph.

  “Niece?” Joseph asked. “I have no niece.”

  “Well, I’d heard from the priest that you’re related to that pretty young girl who lives two doors away, in that other boardinghouse.”

  “Oh, she’s not my niece,” Joseph said. “She’s the daughter of my uncle Anthony’s wife’s sister. Her name is Angela. But I hardly know her.”

  “I hear she visits your place all the time, and helps your aunt with the laundry.…”

  “Yes,” said Joseph, “but Angela’s very shy and very religious.”

  “I am, too,” the older tailor insisted. “The priest will vouch for me. I just want you to arrange for me to meet her someplace. I’d just like to talk to her for a few minutes in private, and try to get to know her a little.”

  While Joseph did not feel entirely comfortable about this request, he had no reason to doubt the honorable intentions of his new friend, nor was he unappreciative of his friend’s promised efforts in his own behalf. He also knew that Angela, who was perhaps not yet seventeen and had come to Ambler from Maida a year before, lived a very sheltered life under the constant scrutiny of her parents and kinfolk in this Italian habitat, and he knew that his friend could never talk privately to Angela unless he, Joseph, took steps to become the intermediary.

  “All I can do is try,” Joseph told his friend.

  “You won’t regret it,” his friend said with a smile and a handshake as he left the boardinghouse.

  One afternoon days later, when Joseph noticed Angela hanging clothes on the line and knew that his aunt and the other woman were out on errands, he put aside his sewing and approached her.

  “Angela, please forgive me,” he began softly, as she turned and faced him with a look of timid suspicion, her outstretched hands still holding the wooden pins that pinched a soggy pair of men’s white underdrawers to the line. “But I have a friend who would like to meet you.”

  Angela’s dark eyes looked downward, and her furrowed brow now forced her heavy eyebrows together above her nose, and she began to blush.

  “Angela, don’t worry,” Joseph went on in a tone that sounded unconvincing even to him, for he was totally lacking in experience as an internuncio in romantic matters, and he was also upset by the discomfort he seemed to be causing her. “Angela,” he pressed on anyway, “he only wants to meet you, to say a few words.… Perhaps you can tell me when you’re going to confession, and I can tell him, and he can meet you outside the church.…”

  Angela now began to tremble, her outstretched hands on the pins shaking as if the clothesline were electrically charged. She was a martyr suffering in silence, and Joseph could only back away and say repeatedly, “Angela, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Please forget what I said, Angela.…”

  Not only did Angela not forget, but, seeing her mother passing along the road with an armload of groceries, Angela ran tearfully toward her and reported Joseph’s request in such a way that her mother suddenly saw him as an evil broker wishing to prostitute her daughter’s virtue. As Angela’s mother shrieked on the sidewalk, Joseph ran back to his bedroom, locked the door behind him, and pulled down the shades.

  But ten minutes later, he heard his uncle Anthony’s wife, Caroline Rocchino, pounding on the door, reproaching him for his insults to her sister’s daughter. Joseph, refusing to respond, began to pack his suitcase.

  It was time for him to leave Ambler. He was ready to move on from this place with its castle, its enduring grudges, and its imported traditions of village virtue.

  When his uncles returned from the factory that evening, their faces covered as usual with the white dust that they tracked home every night, Joseph said: “I’ve dishonored your house. I am sorry. I must go away.”

  They both tried to convince him to change his mind, saying that it was all a misunderstanding; but Caroline remained cool to him, as did the other woman in the house, and later that night, as Joseph sat sewing alone in his room, he could hear a boisterous argument coming from the porch of the boardinghouse two doors away. He recognized his uncles’ voices, and that of Angela’s father, and he again heard the shrieks of her mother, while imagining as well the blushing presence of the desired but diffident Angela.

  He buried his head in the heap of clothing that he had been entrusted to expand in size, and fell asleep at the table, a threaded needle dangling above the tops of his shoes. At five forty-five he was aroused by the factory whistle, but for the first time he felt physically unfit to report for work. He had chest pains. He could not breathe normally. Nevertheless he forced himself up, dressed as quickly as he could, and ran out the back door and across the tracks toward the construction site. Embarrassed that he was ten minutes late, he apologized to Muscatelli. The foreman turned around, studied him, and said: “Joseph, you don’t look good. You look like all the blood’s been drained out of you.”

  “I’ll be all right,” Joseph said; but by midmorning he was so dizzy he thought he would faint, and Muscatelli insisted on driving him to the home of one of the factory’s night workers who had served with the Italian medical corps on the Austrian front during the war. The former medic had returned home from work shortly before their arrival, and his heavy snoring could be heard from the second story as Muscatelli rapped on the door. His knock brought forth an angry wife who opened the door only a few inches and yelled: “He’s asleep!”

  “Wake him up!” Muscatelli yelled back.

  The snoring stopped, and the awakened man upstairs began to swear. Muscatelli took this as an invitation to barge into the house, and, with one arm helping the wobbly Joseph up the steps, he entered the bedroom.

  “This is an emergency!” he announced to the startled medic, a small man with a long nose who had been sleeping with a towel over his head to keep out the daylight. “Take this boy’s pulse. See what’s wrong with him.”

  Lifting his head from the pillow, the former medic obediently reached out to hold Joseph’s right wrist. Joseph stood quietly at the edge of the bed for a few moments.

  “This boy’s got no pulse,” he said finally, looking wonderingly at Muscatelli.

  “Get him some water, then,” Muscatelli said. “Let him lie down, keep him warm. I’ll go to his house for some clean clothes, and then I’ll be back to take him to a doctor I know in Philadelphia.”

  Joseph’s uncles were at work when Muscatelli arrived at the boardinghouse, but Caroline Rocchino was there to lead Muscatelli to Joseph’s room; and she was not noticeably remorseful when Muscatelli, carrying away the suitcase that Joseph had packed earlier, told her that the ailing young man might not be back for a while.

  After Joseph had changed his clothes at the onetime medic’s house, he entrained for Philadelphia with Muscatelli and was taken to the South Philadelphia home of a physician who had been a boyhood friend of Muscatelli’s in Maida. Dr. Fabiani greeted the foreman with warm kisses and excused himself from the patients who sat in the alcove awaiting his care. The white-coated, effusive physician insisted that Muscatelli and Joseph follow him to his private den in the rear, where they could have fresh coffee and a piece of his wife’s just baked cake.

  “My dear friend,” Muscatelli politely interrupted, “this boy here is very sick.”

  “Oh?” the doctor asked nonchalantly, as if wondering whether that was reason enough to delay tasting the cake. “Well,” he said finally, leading Joseph into a tiny examining room off the hall, “let’s step in here for a second and have a look.”

  Joseph had removed his shirt, and the doctor listened to his breathing through the stethoscope, but his manner was no less ingratiating than when he had proposed tasting the cake.

  “There’s nothing really wrong with this boy,” he announced cheerfully. “All he needs is a little fresh air.” Then, t
urning toward Muscatelli, the doctor asked: “Do you remember our little friend in Maida whose father was the shepherd?”

  “Guardacielo?” Muscatelli asked.

  “Yes, Guardacielo,” the doctor repeated. “Well, our little friend Guardacielo has become a big man in Atlantic City. He owns a hotel down there. It’s the first hotel you come to after you get off the train. And I think it will do this boy good to go down there. A few days by the sea, his lungs will be clear, he’ll be good as new.”

  Dr. Fabiani took his prescription pad and wrote Joseph a note of introduction to Guardacielo, then handed it to him along with an envelope containing pills for his wheezing. Three hours later, after Muscatelli had taken Joseph to the Philadelphia terminal and bought him a rail ticket to Atlantic City, Joseph was traveling alone through the swamplands of southern New Jersey, feeling better already. He was tired, but no longer dizzy. The sooty air floating through the railcar was a marked improvement over Ambler’s polluted sky. The car was nearly empty; it was mid-April, hardly yet the season for sunbathers. In the overhead rack was Joseph’s suitcase, containing most of his personal possessions, including nearly seventy-five dollars in savings, half of which he had planned to mail to his mother at the end of the month.

  After stepping down onto the platform at the Atlantic City station, Joseph followed the doctor’s directions to Guardacielo’s Seaside Hotel, a five-story red-brick onetime tenement building that Joseph later learned was a mile away from the nearest beach. The hotel was in the center of town, in a honky-tonk area with jazz clubs and black women strutting along the sidewalk, and a taxi stand where the drivers leaned against the fenders of their parked vehicles, smoking cigarettes and soliciting business for the speakeasies less than two blocks away.

  Entering a small terrazzo-floored lobby with a large painting of the Bay of Naples hanging on one wall next to a grandfather clock—it was now nearly ten p.m.—Joseph at first believed the room was unattended. But then he noticed a young man wearing a porter’s cap asleep in a wicker chair behind the waist-high front desk. Not without some perverse pleasure, Joseph banged the domed bell on the desk to arouse him from his slumber. The young man jumped up, eliciting apologies. He was no more than Joseph’s age, and had a sad long face with pimples, and sparse wisps of hair around his jaw and cheeks that suggested his premature desire for a beard.

  “I’m looking for Signor Guardacielo,” Joseph said.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the porter said, “but he’s visiting his relatives in Italy.”

  Joseph could picture him prancing in the passeggiata.

  “Well, I was told to come here for a room,” Joseph said.

  “Someone suggested us?” the porter asked, almost in disbelief.

  “Yes, a Dr. Fabiani in Philadelphia.”

  “Oh, that’s my uncle,” the porter said.

  “Well,” Joseph said, resting his heavy suitcase on the floor, “do you have a room, a very quiet room?”

  “The quietest rooms are on the fifth floor, and you can have your pick,” the porter said. “Nobody’s up there.”

  As Joseph wrote his name in the registry, the porter locked the front door, reversed a cardboard sign on the knob stating that he would return soon, and, after taking the suitcase, led the way up a squeaky staircase to the top floor.

  “This room I’ll show you first is the nicest and largest,” the clerk said, opening the door with some difficulty. The room light was so dim that Joseph could barely see the big bed in front of him, or the large window behind it with red damask draperies that seemed to match the coverlet on the bed.

  “This will be fine,” Joseph said.

  “Can I bring you something to eat or drink?” the porter asked. “I can get something from the jazz club next door and be back in a minute.”

  “No, thank you,” Joseph said. After the five-story climb he wanted only to lie down. When the porter had gone, Joseph unpacked his suitcase, hung up his clothes, opened the window slightly, hoping to reduce the room’s musty smell, and got into bed. From the street he heard the jingling of trolley bells, the cabmen’s catcalls at the promenading women, and the blaring of the musicians at the club next door. Even after closing the window he could not avoid the noise, although he lay still for a long time with pillows pressed over his face in an attempt to muffle the sounds. Finally he got up, dressed, and returned to the lobby, where it was doubly noisy, but where only after repeated poundings on the bell could he awaken the porter.

  “I can’t stand it here!” Joseph complained, as the porter jumped up from his chair. “I can’t sleep in all this racket! Dr. Fabiani sent me here for peace and quiet, and …”

  “He sent you here for that?” the porter asked, rubbing his eyes, and speaking in the same incredulous tone he had used earlier when Joseph had told him that this hotel had been recommended. “Well, I’m sorry,” the porter went on. “My uncle made a mistake. There is no peace and quiet here. For that you have to go somewhere else. You have to go to a place like Ocean City.”

  Joseph shook his head slowly. What he wanted least now was more advice. But finally he asked, softly, “Where is that?”

  “It’s near here,” he said. “You just get on one of those trolleys outside, and stay on till it stops. The last stop is Ocean City. It’s a place with lots of Protestant ministers and clams.”

  Joseph had never met a Protestant minister, had never seen a clam, but early in the morning, after the porter had helped him get his ticket, Joseph was on a trolley heading southward along the Atlantic Coast, rolling along weed-strewn rusty tracks between a desert of white sand and swampy ponds so still that not even a bubble rippled on the surface. He remained on the trolley for more than an hour, looking out through the morning fog at the fishing boats and ocean waves that usually were on his left, but sometimes were behind him as the trolley veered inland through thickets and pine trees, passing small farmhouses and barns where people wearing overalls waved at the conductor. In a red peaked cap, he sat on a high metal stool behind an angular steering apparatus that he never seemed to steer; the trolley appeared to guide itself independently over the curving tracks, and soundlessly, too, except for some slight electrical sputterings when the little wheels rubbed against the rooftop wiring. Joseph sat near the back of the car. Up ahead were three other passengers, white-haired men wearing homburgs and overcoats, seated separately, reading newspapers.

  The trolley now left the pineland and was dipping toward a rickety timber bridge no wider than the trolley tracks that extended for two miles across the bay, supported by hundreds of vertical poles that rose up crookedly from the marshland and the choppy waters. Joseph closed his eyes and prayed as he glimpsed the trolley gliding over the tracks suspended thirty feet above the water, and he kept his eyes closed for ten minutes as he heard the high-pitched clicking hollowness and smelled the boggy breezes of the bay rising up through the car.

  “Asbury Avenue,” he heard the conductor call out, and when Joseph opened his eyes he saw that the trolley had passed beyond the bay, and noticed the American flags flying from the porches of white bayfront houses and from the masts of the taller ships anchored along the docks. Moving smoothly across the island, the trolley soon stopped at an intersection of a wide paved street. It was lined with shops and had a bank on the corner. This was the island’s business district, as Joseph would later learn, named in honor of a Methodist missionary, Francis Asbury.

  “Wesley Avenue,” the conductor said next, and Joseph soon saw the town’s principal residential block, named for the founder of Methodism. It was a tree-lined street with large Victorian residences, so white, so different from the dark Gothic mansions of Dr. Mattison’s Ambler. Joseph, staring out the window, failed to notice that the three other passengers had just left the car; and not knowing what to ask the driver in English to find out whether he, too, should get off, Joseph sat with uncertainty as the trolley continued across town. It now moved past blocks where most of the homes had boarded-up windows, wher
e no motor vehicles or pedestrians could be seen on the streets, and where the neighborhood’s single traffic light was covered with a canvas hood.

  “Boardwalk, final stop,” the conductor called up. The trolley came to a halt in front of the silhouette of an elevated wooden promenade with silvery railings etched across an open sky. Joseph heard the conductor pulling down on a lever and saw him turn around to announce: “This car will start back to Atlantic City in ten minutes.”

  Joseph nodded, as if he understood. The conductor stepped down and stood in front of the trolley, smoking a cigarette he had lit before leaving the car. Joseph reached for his suitcase and exited from the side door. Briefly he glanced down the tracks in the direction of the midtown streets he had passed. He could see a few motorcars and tiny figures walking in the distance. Then he stepped onto the sand-covered sidewalk and headed in the opposite direction, toward the sounds of the sea. Holding on to the cold iron railing with one hand, and his suitcase with the other, he made his way up the ramp to a deserted boardwalk that seemed to stretch endlessly above the sand and surf, without a soul in sight, without any living creatures except the sea gulls circling overhead.

  The nearness of the sea, which had always intimidated him, somehow now did not. He was soothed by the steady sounds of the breaking waves, was refreshed by the misty spray that shot up through the boards as the ocean smashed against the pilings below. For some reason he felt he had finally arrived at a place where he wanted to be.

  37.

  The Italy that Joseph had left behind was about to succumb to the rhetorical flair and Fascist political policies of a strong-willed Milan newspaper publisher and onetime schoolmaster, Benito Mussolini. At thirty-nine Mussolini was stocky and prematurely balding, and bothered by acute stomach pains that he mollified only slightly by bloating himself daily with glasses of milk. He rarely complained of his ailment, however, and in public he presented himself as a man of vigorous health and inner contentment, of intellectual acuity and statesmanlike vision. He was a tennis player, a jogger, and a steeplechase rider. He spoke German and French, and could recite poetry in five languages. Though merely five feet, six inches, he seemed much taller because of his erect posture, his broad shoulders and massive chest, and the fact that when speaking behind a lectern he stood on a box. His dark penetrating eyes, jutting jaw, and stern brow projected a sense of fearlessness that often prompted people to compare him to a Roman warrior—a comparison that pleased him, for he did indeed see himself as historically linked to the ancient era of Italian grandeur. It was a grandeur he intended to restore.