I closed my eyes and sank back into the dark. I opened them again as the car came to a stop in the driveway of the house.
“I’ll help you out,” she said, opening my door and reaching in for me.
We managed to get my feet out of the car but I couldn’t make it any further. Even with her help, the pain wouldn’t let me walk. I clung to the car door. “Ring the bell,” I said. “Gianno will help me.”
She ran up the steps and pressed the doorbell. A moment later the entrance lights came on and Gianno opened the door. All she could manage to say was my name when he was down the steps and picked me up in his arms as if I were still the baby he used to carry around.
“Dottore! Dottore!” he shouted at the top of his lungs as we entered the house. “Angelo, he is hurt!”
My mother was the first one there. She took one look at me and clutched a fist to her mouth. “Figlio mio!” she cried. “What have they done to you?”
My father was right behind her. He took one look at me. “Carry him into my office,” he said, his face settling into grim lines.
Gianno carried me through the house to the wing that Father used as his office when he saw patients at home. We went into the examination room and Gianno put me gently on the white table.
My father opened a cabinet and took out a syrette and hypodermic. “Call the hospital and have them send an ambulance right away,” he told Gianno.
“No hospital,” I said.
Gianno hesitated but my father shot a glance at him and he went right to the telephone.
“What happened?” my father asked quietly as he prepared the hypo.
“Three men worked me over,” I said, watching him.
I heard my mother gasp. My father turned to her. “Mamma!” he said sternly. “You wait outside.”
“But Angelo—” Her voice faltered.
“Angelo will be all right,” he said firmly. “I promise you. Now wait outside.” He looked past her at Cindy who was standing right behind my mother. “You too, young lady.”
My mother took Cindy’s arm. “You tell me everything that happened,” she said as they left the room.
I looked at the needle in my father’s hand. “What’s that for?”
“Pain,” he said. “I’m going to start cleaning you up and it’s going to hurt a lot more than it does now.”
“I don’t want to go to sleep,” I said. “I have to make some calls.”
“Who do you want to call?” he asked, casually looking down at me. “Maybe I can help you.”
I scarcely felt the prick of the needle in my hip as my father deftly slid down my slacks and hit me with the hypo all in one practiced motion. “First I want to talk to Uncle Jake,” I said.
“Uncle Jake?” he asked. I just managed to catch the note of surprise in his voice as the hypo knocked me back into dreamland.
Gianno and I were playing cowboys and Indians in the shrubbery at the side of the house. Right now I was Tom Mix and he was my faithful horse, Tony, and I was firing my six-shooter after the Indians we were chasing through the brush, just as we had seen them in Riders of the Purple Sage yesterday at the Saturday children’s matinee.
“Whoa, Tony!” I yelled, pulling at his shirt collar as we got to the edge of the driveway. “I think I hear a covered wagon.”
I jumped off his back and crouched down in the shrubs. My grandfather’s giant black-and-tan Duesenberg came up the driveway. I waited until it had passed us, then I jumped on Gianno’s shoulders. “After them!” I shouted. “We have to warn them about the Indians!”
Gianno galloped wildly up the driveway at the side of the car, holding onto my legs so that I would not fall off.
I fired my six-shooter into the air, the caps exploding and making a racket. “Look out, Grandpa!” I yelled. “The Indians are coming!”
Through the windows of the closed tonneau behind the chauffeur, I could see my grandfather. He was sitting on the back seat between two men. Another man was seated on the jump seat in front of them.
The automobile stopped in front of the house. Gianno and I waited for them on the steps as they got out. The two men who were on the back seat with my grandfather waited, leaning against the car as he and the other man came up the steps toward us.
I brandished my six-shooter in the air. “There’s Indians in the hills!”
Grandfather stopped in front of us. He was not a tall man, slight, almost small; in fact Gianno, who was five foot eight, towered over him. But it made no difference. No matter who was around my grandfather, he was the big man.
He held out his hand to me. “Give me the gun, Angelo.”
I looked in his eyes for signs of displeasure but I could read nothing there. They were dark brown, almost black like his hair, and unfathomable. Silently I handed down my six-shooter.
He took it in his hand and looked at it with distaste. He turned his gaze back to Gianno. “Who gave him this?”
“Padrone, it’s only a toy.” Gianno almost bowed but couldn’t manage it with me on his shoulders.
“I don’t care,” my grandfather said in a flat voice. “I thought I said no guns. Not even toy guns. They are a bad thing for children.”
This time Gianno managed to bow even with me on him. “Si, Padrone.”
Grandfather gave him the six-shooter. “Get rid of it,” he said, then held his arms up for me. “Come, Angelo.”
I slid from Gianno’s shoulders into Grandfather’s arms, glad that he wasn’t angry with me. Grandfather kissed me as he carried me up the steps into the house. “Guns are dangerous for children to play with,” he explained. “Even toy guns.”
We walked into the living room where my mother and father were waiting. The moment my mother saw him, she began to cry. Awkwardly, Grandfather shifted me to one arm and put the other around Mother.
“Now, now, Jenny,” he said gently. “Don’t cry. Sicily is not the end of the world.”
“But you’re going to be so far from us,” she wept.
I began to cry also. “I don’t want you to go away, Grandpa!”
“Now, Jenny, see what you did?” my grandfather said reproachfully. “You made him cry.” He turned to my father. “Dottore, tell your wife to stop. It’s not good for Angelo to be upset like that.”
My father’s eyes weren’t exactly clear either, so I took advantage of his momentary hesitation to let out an even greater yell.
“I don’t want you to leave me, Grandpa!” I clung to him sobbing fiercely.
This one was so loud that even my mother stopped crying and looked at me. “He’s getting hysterical!” she said, reaching for me.
My grandfather brushed her arms away. “I told you,” he said triumphantly. “Let his grandpa handle him.”
My mother fell silent as my grandfather swung me around in his arms so that he could look into my face. “I’m not leaving you, Angelo mio,” he said. “I’m going to Sicily, to Marsala and Trapani where I was born.”
I was losing ground but at least he had forgotten about the six-shooter. I tried one more yell. “I’ll never see you again!”
Now the tears filled his eyes. He hugged me very tightly. I could hardly breathe. “Of course you will,” he said in a choked voice. “In the summer you can come to visit me with your mamma and papa and I will show you the vineyards and the olive groves on the side of Mount Erice where your grandpa grew up.”
“Can we play cowboys and Indians there?” I asked, my eyes round.
“No, that’s a bad game,” he said. “All games are bad where you play at killing people. You be like your father, a doctor, where you can save people, not kill them.” He looked at me, not quite sure that I understood him. “Besides there are no Indians in Sicily,” he added.
“Only good guys?” I asked.
He knew when he was licked. “There are only good guys in Sicily,” he said, giving up and resorting to his ultimate weapon. Bribery. “Besides Grandpa is going to send you a very special present when he gets there.�
�
“What kind of present?” I wanted to know.
“Anything you want. Just tell your grandpa.”
I thought for a moment. I remembered the movie Gianno and I had seen the week before. It was with Monte Blue and he played a daredevil race-car driver. “A real race car that I can drive?” I asked tentatively.
“If that’s what my Angelo wants, that’s what he’ll get. I will have a special Bugatti racer built for you!”
I squeezed my arms around his neck. “Thank you, Grandpa.” I kissed him.
He turned to my parents. “See,” he said triumphantly. “I told you. He’s perfectly all right now.”
All the while this was going on, the man who had come in with us was watching and kind of smiling to himself. Now my grandfather waved him forward. “Jake, come here.”
“This is my son, Dr. John Perino,” my grandfather said proudly. “And his wife, Jenny. This is Judge Jacob Weinstein who I told you about.”
Judge Weinstein, a brown-haired man of about my father’s height and age, shook hands with my parents.
“Don’t forget me,” I said, holding out my hand.
He turned, smiling, and took my hand. “I don’t think I can,” he said.
“I made a lifetime contract with Jake to look after family business affairs while I’m away,” Grandfather said. He put me down. “Now you go and play while your father and the Judge and me talk a little business.”
“Come with me to the kitchen,” my mother said quickly. “I just baked some cookies. You can have them with a glass of milk.”
She took my hand and began to lead me to the door. I pulled her to a stop and looked back. “Will I see you again before you go away, Grandpa?”
Grandfather caught his breath and I saw his eyes go misty again. He nodded. “Before I go,” he managed to say.
About an hour later, we stood on the steps in front of the house and waved good-bye to my grandfather as the big Duesenberg started down the driveway. I saw him looking back at me through the rear window and I waved again to him. He raised his hand and then the car turned out of sight at the end of the driveway.
We stood there a moment, then I looked up at my parents. “Those men waiting for Grandpa were wearing guns under their coats,” I said. “I wonder if they know Grandpa doesn’t like guns.”
My mother and father stared at each other for a long moment, then my mother’s eyes filled with tears again. My father picked me up with one arm and put the other around her. We stood there silently like that on the steps in front of the house for a long time while my mother hid her face against my father’s chest. I looked at my father. There were unshed tears in his eyes too. I felt a strange lump come up in my throat. There were so many things I did not understand.
But in the time to come I would learn many of them. Like those two men that waited for Grandfather were federal agents who were to escort him to New York where he would board a ship for Italy.
Like Judge Weinstein, or Uncle Jake as I came to know him, wasn’t really a judge at all but an attorney in charge of all his business affairs.
For many years thereafter, almost until the time I left for college, Uncle Jake was a once-monthly visitor at our house for Sunday dinners.
Then shortly after I was twenty-one and I was down from MIT in January 1952, I found out how rich a man my grandfather had really been. By that time, my share of his estate had grown under Uncle Jake’s prudent management to more than twenty-five million dollars and my parents’ share was twice that.
I remember looking at my father and Uncle Jake in complete bewilderment. I knew we were well off. I didn’t know we were rich. “What do I do with all that money?” I asked.
“You’d better learn,” my father said seriously. “Because some day you’re going to have all of it.”
“I’d suggest you go to Harvard Business School when you graduate,” said Uncle Jake.
“But I’m not interested in business,” I said. “I’m interested in automobiles.”
“Automobiles are a business too,” Uncle Jake said.
“Not my kind,” I said. “All they do is cost money.”
“Well, at least you can afford that,” Uncle Jake smiled.
“I don’t need all that,” I said.
“Then I suggest you set up an investment trust at the bank and let them manage it,” Uncle Jake said.
I looked at him. “Why can’t you just keep on with it the way you have?” I asked. “I remember Grandfather said he gave you a lifetime contract. If it’s good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.”
He glanced at my father. “I’m sorry,” he said, turning to me. “I can’t do it.”
“Why?”
He cleared his throat. “Because of certain other business activities of mine which the government says are allied with organized crime, I feel it’s wiser to cut you loose rather than chance the possibility of having you and your parents involved in something none of you have anything to do with.”
I knew what he was talking about. I read the newspapers too. His name had come up very often in connection with investigations into organized crime. “But can we still call on you if we ever have a problem?” I asked. “A real problem, I mean.”
He nodded. “Of course you can. After all, your grandfather did give me a lifetime contract.” He got to his feet. “Everything’s pretty much set up at the bank, John,” he said to my father. “Perhaps you and Angelo can come downtown tomorrow. We can have lunch, then go over to the bank, sign a few papers and make it official.”
We did that and when I went back to school I got a subscription to The Wall Street Journal and for a while religiously checked the market every day against the list of stocks and securities that the bank held for me. But then it got to be a bore and I stopped looking at it entirely, just depending on the bank’s quarterly statements to keep me up to date. And most of the time, they wound up in my drawer unopened. After all, how wrong could I go when I started with twenty-five million dollars in blue chips?
Uncle Jake didn’t entirely lose his fight with the government, but the following year he gave up his practice and moved to Las Vegas where he had interests in several hotels. We exchanged Christmas cards and once in a while when he came East my parents would see him, but I was always somewhere else. Then just a few years ago I read in the papers that he had sold his interests in Las Vegas and had moved near Phoenix, Arizona, where he embarked on a large program of land development tied to a sport and spa hotel and country club complex called Paradise Springs. I remembered receiving an invitation from him to attend the grand opening of the resort, but that was about the time I had begun working for Number One and I couldn’t attend. Mother and Father, however, did go and carried with them my explanation and regrets and good wishes. Mother loved it, and my parents had returned there several times a year since. Father told me that Uncle Jake looked relaxed and content for the first time since he had known him and had gone brown-as-berry native, even to the extent of wearing a white ten-gallon Stetson out on the links for his morning round of golf.
In the time that passed I had learned many things, but of all of them perhaps the greatest regret was that I never got to see my grandfather again. It took him almost two years to get me the Bugatti that he had promised, but it finally came. And a year later so did the war in Europe and he wrote my parents not to come to visit as he did not want them to take any chances with me. Then we were in the war and for almost two years we heard nothing until the American troops landed in Italy.
But then, it was too late. My grandfather had died of cancer the year before.
Chapter Nine
I opened my eyes to the sunlight streaming into a room filled with flowers. I moved my head slightly. No pain. I grew bold. It hurt like hell. “Damn!” I said.
The nurse who had been sitting in the corner of the room got to her feet. Her uniform rustled as she came to the bed and looked down at me. “You’re awake,” she said.
I alrea
dy knew that. “What day is this?”
“Thursday.”
“What happened to Wednesday?” I asked.
“You slept,” she answered, reaching for the telephone. She dialed a number. I heard the faint crackle of an answering voice. “Will you please page Dr. Perino and tell him that 503 is awake. Thank you.
“Your father is on his rounds but he wanted to be notified the moment you awoke,” she explained.
“What time is it?”
“Ten o’clock,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “And I’m afraid to find out.”
The door opened and my father came into the room. No Anglo-Saxon bullshit with us, we were Italian. Doctor he might be but he was my father first. We kissed on the lips. “Mother and Cindy are on the way up from the coffee shop,” he said.
“Before they get here, how bad is it?”
“You’ve had worse,” he said. “A couple of broken ribs, numerous and heavy body bruises and contusions, but no internal injuries as far as we can determine, mild concussion, you’ll have headaches for a while.” He paused. “They did make a mess of your face though. Undid all the work you had done in Switzerland. Broken nose in two places, there’s a slight crack in your jawbone, not too serious—it will heal practically by itself. I figure you lost about five teeth, mostly caps, and it looks like they shifted your right cheekbone a little, but we can’t tell until the swelling goes down. Cuts over the eyes and around the mouth. All in all, not too bad.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. I reached for his hand and kissed it. Like I said, we were Italian. When I looked up at him there were tears in his eyes.
Then the door opened and Mother and Cindy came in and my father had his hands full for the next ten minutes trying to keep Mother from crying all over me.
The Betsy (1971) Page 36