Unto the Sons

by Gay Talese

  Although there had been no new German submarine attacks in the area since an American tanker had been torpedoed ten miles south of Ocean City a year before, the island’s continuing blackout had introduced new problems: gangs of hoodlums from the mainland regularly ransacked vacant summer homes during the winter months; they also operated a flourishing trade in pilfered cars, having an abundance of parked vehicles to choose from during the nocturnal hours, when it was more difficult to drive cars than to steal them.

  Joseph secured his dry-cleaning trucks each night in a garage, and he chained the bumper of his 1941 Buick to a stone wall in the lot behind his shop. Before driving it he often had to hammer the ice off the lock, but he accepted such delays as by-products of the war and the blackout—a blackout which, in his case, extended well beyond the boundaries of his island. He had been cut off from communication with his family in Italy, and his cousin in Paris, for many months. Antonio’s last letter, received in the spring of 1943, before the Allies had attacked Sicily, described the Maida relatives as sustaining themselves but expecting the worst, and added that the POW husband of Joseph’s sister (captured by the British in North Africa) might have been shot while trying to escape; in any case, no official word of his whereabouts had been received. Whether Joseph’s brother Domenico was dead or alive was also questionable; he had not been heard from in more than a year. Antonio had passed on the report that Domenico was possibly with a German-led Italian infantry division near the Russian front—Antonio had received this information from a contact in the Italian Foreign Ministry—but he had emphasized to Joseph that the report was unsubstantiated. Since the arrival of Antonio’s last letter, the Allied invasion of southern Italy had begun; Mussolini had been rescued from prison by Germans to serve as Hitler’s puppet; and Joseph was now trying to recuperate on this island where he had lived compatibly for almost twenty-two years but on which he currently felt estranged as never before.

  While his withdrawal was voluntary, having not been prompted by flagrant personal slights or expressions of ostracism toward his business, Joseph felt powerless to free himself from his remoteness and the hostile emotion that too often erupted within him after such remarks as Pat Malloy’s. It was possible that Malloy’s referring to Mussolini as Joseph’s “friend” was a casual remark, made without ill intent. Joseph was, after all, the town’s most prominent Italian-born resident, one who had delivered lectures on Italian history and politics to community groups on the island and the mainland; and there had also been no derisive tone in Pat Malloy’s voice, to say nothing of the cordial informality he had always shown toward Joseph in the restaurant. Furthermore, to be linked with Mussolini in Ocean City was not necessarily insulting, for the anti-union, Communist-baiting policies of the Duce had long been popular among the staunch Republicans who governed the island; and even in recent years, as the Fascist and Nazi regimes had closed ranks, Mussolini gained from whatever was to be gained in the United States by being identified as less odious and murderous than Hitler.

  Still, during this winter, Joseph dwelled in a state of exile, adrift between the currents of two warring countries; he would read the newspapers at the breakfast table until nearly ten a.m., his children having already left for school and his wife gone down into the shop, and would then exit down the side stairwell of the building and out the back door, wearing his overcoat and homburg and with a heavy woolen scarf wrapped around his neck, and proceed across the lot to the railroad tracks, and then onward through the black ghetto toward the bay—in the opposite direction from the ocean and his binoculared submarine-searching friends and acquaintances who were lined up with their feet on the lower railings of the boardwalk and their eyes squinting toward the sea. The bayfront district was the most desolate section of town during the winter months; a few black men and women ambled through the bungalow- and shack-lined streets and the weedy fields cluttered with rusting car parts and other rubble, but there was no other sign of human life back here, save for the motorists driving along Bay Avenue, and the white workmen who sometimes scraped the bottoms of overturned dinghies and sloops in the boatyards, and repaired the docks in front of the vacated yacht club. There were hardly any sea gulls around the bay, where the scavenging possibilities could not compare with those offered by the ocean; and never during Joseph’s excursions did he meet pedestrians whom he knew well enough to feel obliged to pause and converse with, and explain why he was off by himself traipsing about on the broken concrete sidewalks and frosty fields of this black, backwater part of town. His doctor had not suggested that daily walks would be beneficial to the restoration of his health, although Joseph had said so in explaining to his employees his comings and goings from the store; and it also became the excuse his wife gave to those regular customers who inquired, as some did, why he was constantly out of the shop and spotted frequently by them as they motored along Bay Avenue. Joseph had full confidence in Catherine’s ability to make whatever he did seem plausible and proper, and meanwhile to carry on the business without him. She was assisted of course by her saleswomen, and by the old retired tailor from Philadelphia, who now worked a six-day week on the island; and she was supported as well by the reliable Mister Bossum, the black deacon and bootlegger who supervised the dry-cleaning plant and had taken over the responsibilities for the punctuality of the irresponsible pressers, especially the one presser everybody called Jet, the flatfooted, carbuncled ex–jazz musician who even on snowy days arrived for work wearing sandals and short-sleeved silk Hawaiian shirts.

  Joseph passed close to Jet’s boardinghouse each morning en route to the bayfront, and he was sometimes tempted to stop in and see if Jet had left for work yet; but Joseph resisted, having more urgent concerns. His mother was rarely out of his thoughts during his walks, although he found himself chiding her as much as praying for her. If only she had followed his father to America, Joseph told himself again and again, all the family would now be better off. They would be living with Joseph, or near him, somewhere in America, sparing him his present anxieties about their welfare, and his nagging suspicion that he had somehow abandoned them. If only he had some confirmation that his mother and the rest of his family were alive, that the Allied troops had skirted Maida and left the village undestroyed, he believed, he would no longer be the reclusive and petulant man he had become.

  But the war news from southern Italy was scant and inconclusive as far as Maida was concerned. From the Philadelphia and Atlantic City papers he purchased each morning, and from The New York Times he received each afternoon in the mail, sometimes two days late, he knew only that the Allies were pushing back the Germans from several locations in the general vicinity of Naples. But Maida was too small, or too insignificant militarily, to warrant mention in the reports; and whatever damage had occurred there, or was occurring now, was left to Joseph’s ever-darkening imagination.

  When he returned from his walk, by noon if not sooner, he would unlock the rear door on the north side of the building and ascend to the apartment by the walled-in staircase without being seen by anyone in the shop. He would then press once on the wall buzzer near the living room door, signaling to his wife at her desk downstairs that he was home; and usually within seconds she would acknowledge his message with a return signal, and would press twice if she wanted him to pick up the phone extension to discuss something she thought he should know before she closed the shop at five-thirty and came up for the evening. Only on rare occasions did Catherine press twice, however, for there was hardly anything about the business that she could not handle at least as well as he could—a fact that they were both aware of, but that neither discussed. Catherine felt herself sensitive to his every mood and vulnerability, particularly at this point in the war, and in the aftermath of his illness. Having lived under the same roof with him virtually every hour of their almost fifteen years of marriage, except for the recent fortnight of his hospitalization, she thought she knew his strengths, his weaknesses, and his daily routine perhaps better t
han she knew her own. She knew that when he returned from the bayfront walk, he would first hang up his coat and hat in their bedroom closet in the rear of the apartment, then walk through the corridor back into the living room to kneel briefly at the prie-dieu. A quick lunch would follow in the kitchen, invariably consisting of a plain omelet with crisp unbuttered toast, and a cup of reheated coffee left over from breakfast. He ate little during the day and preferred eating alone. He washed and dried his dishes, but never put them away, leaving this chore for his daughter, Marian, when she came home from school.

  Catherine did not leave the shop at lunchtime; instead she had the saleswomen who had their lunches at the nearby five-and-ten soda fountain bring back a milk shake for her. If it was relatively quiet in the shop at midday, as it nearly always was in wintertime, Catherine could hear her husband walking through the corridor after lunch to the mahogany Stromberg-Carlson console in the far corner of the living room, near his record collection. By this time she had already turned off the two particular neon lights in the front of the shop that caused most of the static upstairs on the radio; and if she did not hear him pacing the floor as he listened to the war news, she assumed Joseph was seated in the faded velvet armchair next to the set, leaning forward while twirling his steel-rimmed glasses. He would usually switch stations every three or four minutes, turning the console’s large brown asbestos knob slowly and cautiously, as if fearing what the next broadcast might bring. At night she had often observed the intensity with which he listened to the news, awaiting each battlefront bulletin with his face so close to the set that his soulful expression varied in color as the console’s green “eye” fluttered in and out of frequency. The children were asleep at this time, these nightly reports often being broadcast well beyond midnight; Catherine herself usually retired shortly after closing the children’s bedroom doors, having earlier helped them with their homework. But for hours afterward she lay awake restlessly, not because of the softly tuned radio that continued to absorb her husband’s attentions in the living room, nor because of the pink light from the corridor torchère that was reflected forty feet away on the ceiling above the L-shaped ten-foot-high mirror-faced divider that masked the marital bedroom. She was disturbed instead by her husband’s pacing back and forth in the living room after he had turned off the set, pacing that continued sometimes until dawn, to end only when he had fallen asleep on the sofa, fully clothed. In the morning, hoping not to wake him, Catherine would whisper as she alerted the children for school; but he was always up before they had finished breakfast, and before shaving he would come into the kitchen in his rumpled suit to greet the children formally and then address his wife more gently, usually speaking to her in Italian so the children would not understand.

  Except when disciplining them, Joseph paid a minimum of attention to the children during this troublesome winter. Each had been assigned daily chores, both in the apartment and in the store. Even when the chores were performed punctually and competently, Joseph regularly found things to criticize. His complaints were expressed as assertively to eight-year-old Marian as to twelve-year-old Gay. Of the two, only Marian was bold enough to defend herself against his accusations; she alone had the nerve to defy him. While she agreeably carried her mother’s shopping list to the neighborhood grocery store, where the family had a charge account—it was actually a barter arrangement dating back to the Depression, when her father and the grocer began exchanging goods and services, making up the difference with gifts at Christmastime after the annual tallying—Marian was far less cooperative in her parents’ store. She dusted the glass cases carelessly, swept the floors of the fitting rooms grudgingly when she did so at all, and reacted to her father’s reprimands sometimes by dropping the broom or dustpan and stomping out of the shop, ignoring her father’s promises of punishment.

  “You’re more stubborn than my mother,” he once shouted at Marian, whom he had named in honor of his mother, although physically she clearly favored his wife’s side of the family. Marian had her mother’s fair complexion and the red hair of her mother’s father, Rosso. She did not appear to be the sibling of her olive-skinned, dark-haired brother, who, while more tractable and less defiant than she, was also more capable of remaining out of their father’s sight. Only during his father’s illness and self-imposed exile from the shop did Gay enter it without feeling tense and apprehensive—and return to it after school without fear of being late, for his mother was not a clock-watcher; and thus in the winter of 1944 he began taking a more leisurely route home each afternoon, stopping first at the Russell Bakery Shop on Asbury Avenue, where a friend, the baker’s grandson, could be counted on to bring a few éclairs out to the alley for a delicious, hastily consumed treat, and then play catch for a few minutes with the rubber ball that Gay always carried in his schoolbag.

  Later, in the pressing room, after delivering to Jet and the other presser, Al, enough hangers-with-guards to fulfill their needs for at least a half-hour, Gay had the option of exiting through the back door via the steam screen provided by the pressers, and practicing his pitching form in the lot behind the shop—hurling the rubber ball against the brick wall of the neighboring hardware store’s annex, and at times letting it carom off the roof of his father’s chained Buick before catching it. He was secure in the knowledge that his father spent the afternoons up in the apartment on his knees, or sitting in the living room listening to operas or news broadcasts, and so he was stunned one afternoon to hear the thumping sounds of his ball punctuated by the urgent rapping of his father’s knuckles against the rear window that overlooked the lot.

  Gay ran back into the safety of the pressers’ steam and quickly resumed the task of affixing guards to hangers, and also sandpapering and unbending those rusty and crooked hangers that customers had provided in response to the store’s advertised appeal, and its promise to pay half a penny for each wire hanger, because of the wartime metal shortage. As he worked, he feared the appearance of his father and some form of retribution that might well be overdue. In recent weeks, he had received a failing report card after the midterm examinations; and he had been warned repeatedly by his father to discontinue making his prized model airplanes, for the glue used in sealing their parts cast a hypnotic and possibly toxic odor throughout the apartment. His father had furthermore charged that the glue was most likely the cause of his son’s daydreaming and general dim-wittedness in school, the lack of scholarship that had been noted, in kinder terms, by the Mother Superior on the bottom of the recently received report card.

  Gay anxiously worked at the hangers, still awaiting his father’s arrival in the workroom, knowing that he could expect no protection from Mister Bossum, or Jet, or Al, or the old tailor. But as the minutes continued to register on the misty-faced clock that hung on the workroom wall, and he sandpapered one hanger after another without interruption, he lost track of the time until he saw in front of him his mother’s high-heeled shoes and heard her consoling voice suggesting that he was working too hard. It was also closing time, she said, as she extended a hand to help him up from his crouched position.

  He was surprised to see that the tailor and the pressers had already left; now only slight sizzling sounds rose from the valves of the machines. Marian also stood waiting, holding a light bundle of groceries in the cloth sack their mother had made because of the paper scarcity. Gay walked up the interior staircase behind his mother and sister, then entered the living room and saw his father seated near the console with his back turned, leaning forward with his head in his hands. The radio was off. He could hear his father softly crying.

  His sister, who seemed unaware of it, headed toward the kitchen with the groceries. Gay followed her. Catherine hastened toward her husband and placed a hand on his shoulder. For several minutes they could be heard speaking quietly in Italian. Then she left him and went into the kitchen to prepare the children’s dinner; she explained to them that their father was feeling worse than usual, and added that after they had
finished dinner they were to go to their rooms and close their doors, and, as long as they kept down the volume, they could listen to their radios. There was no homework to worry about. It was Friday night. Tomorrow a more leisurely day was in the offing, the always welcomed Saturday that brought no school bus or any chores in the shop until after ten a.m.

  Joseph spent Friday night on the sofa, having hardly touched the dinner on the tray Catherine had placed on the coffee table in front of him. She had remained in the living room with him until midnight, continuing to speak in Italian. English was heard only when Catherine went to warn Marian that her radio was too loud, and to remind her that she should soon turn off the bed lamp because the following morning she would be picked up by the parents of one of her classmates, with whom she would be attending a birthday party on the mainland.

  On Saturday morning after nine, when Gay got up, he saw that his sister had already left. Her door was open, her bed unmade. His parents’ bedroom door was shut, as usual, but he knew his mother was downstairs, opening the store for the busy Saturday trade. He could hear the bell downstairs as customers opened and closed the shop’s main door on Asbury Avenue. It was a sound he associated with Saturdays, and he always found the tones reassuring, signals of his family’s financial stability. In the kitchen, as he poured himself some orange juice, he noticed that there were newspapers on the table that had not been there the night before. Returning to the front of the apartment, he saw no sign of his father. He found it odd to be in the apartment by himself and uniquely exhilarating to be able to walk around freely and privately, answerable to no one. As he approached the console, he noticed that its usual gleaming mahogany exterior was now smudgy with fingerprints. He then saw his father’s bathrobe lying on the floor behind the sofa, and the ashtray filled with cigarette butts, and sections of newspapers that had been crumpled up and hurled in the other corner, and had come to rest near the piano. Since his father had always been the family’s enforcer of tidiness and order, Gay could not even venture a guess as to the cause of this laxity.