For the Sins of My Father

by Demeo, Albert

  The doorbell rang, and a minute later Chris bounded up the stairs with his usual ebullience. His wife was right behind him, her face covered with smiles, carrying an armload of gifts. Chris's left arm was still in a sling, but he had a holiday basket for my mother in his right hand.

  Chris's arrival was followed almost immediately by another ring of the doorbell. My father went down to answer it and returned a couple of minutes later with a tall dark man that he introduced to us as Dominick, Uncle Nino's nephew. Dominick's wife was a pretty brunette, and each of them was carrying a baby girl. My mother introduced herself and made them welcome. I saw her lead Dominick's wife down the hall to put the babies down for a nap.

  By that time I was starving; a day of excitement and the amazing aromas drifting from the kitchen were making my stomach growl. When my mother called out that dinner was ready a few minutes later, I couldn't get to the table fast enough.

  Dad poured wine in the adults' glasses and soda into ours, then raised his hand for a toast. “To good fortune and friendship!” Everyone clinked their glasses and murmured, “Bona fortuna!” in reply. Dad touched his glass to his lips and then set it down. My father rarely drank alcohol. He said it dulled a man's senses. We children filled our plates at the big table and then went into the adjoining kitchen to eat.

  Later that evening, after dinner, I went down the hall to the upstairs bathroom and opened the door to go inside. I jumped when I saw that Chris and his wife were already in there. Chris had taken his bad arm out of the sling and was resting it on the bathroom sink. Gauze and tubes of medicine lay on the counter, and Chris's wife was just throwing a dirty piece of gauze with traces of blood on it into the bathroom trash. What startled me wasn't the blood, though; it was Chris's arm. There was a small hole about half an inch wide on the outside of his upper arm. With the light from the bathroom counter shining right behind it, I could see straight through the hole and out the other side. I froze in fear, staring at the hole. Chris and his wife exchanged a brief glance; then Chris smiled at me and said reassuringly, “It's all right, Albert. She's just fixing up the bandage where I hurt myself. I'll be fine.”

  I nodded and tried to say something back to him, but I couldn't find my voice. Backing quietly into the hall again, I shut the door behind me.

  Uncle Mikey was the first one to take his leave. At sixty-something, he was already exhausted from the long day. Freddy wasn't long behind him; his wife was anxious to get the kids to bed. Chris and his wife kissed everyone good-bye, and I knew Dominick's wife was ready to go. The babies were fussing, and she was starting to give Dominick that look that wives get when their husbands are ignoring them. Dominick told her to be patient, that he just had to speak to Roy for a minute; then he went downstairs to talk to my father in the foyer. My mom sent us kids to our rooms to get ready for bed.

  I heard Dominick and his wife say good-bye as I went back to the living room. Dad was smiling. As soon as all three of us kids were back in the living room, he told us to sit down on the couch. He had presents for us from Uncle Nino. All three of us sat down in a row while Dad handed us each an envelope with our name printed on it. An envelope? That didn't seem very interesting. It was kind of plump, though.

  I heard Debra scream with excitement as I opened mine. Inside was a bundle of hundred-dollar bills, more money than I had ever seen in my life, far more than I could count at that age. “Oh, my gosh,” Debra kept exclaiming. It must have been enough to pay our allowances for the rest of our lives.

  My mother's eyes nearly bugged out of her head. “For God's sake, Roy, how much is in there?” she asked.

  “Five thousand each,” Dad told her. Five thousand dollars? How much was five thousand? It didn't matter. I knew it was a huge amount of money.

  “Oh, for cripes sake,” I heard my mother mutter. I couldn't tell whether she was pleased or not.

  My father picked up on her reaction. “Now kids, that's a lot of money for anybody, especially for a kid. Tomorrow I'm going to let you take one of those bills, and we'll go to the shopping center. You can each pick out one thing. Then we're going to the bank and putting the rest in a savings account for your college.”

  My mother looked mollified. We were all a little disappointed, but we knew better than to moan and groan. After all, five thousand dollars. Wow. Dad collected each of the envelopes from us and told us he'd put them in a safe place until tomorrow.

  That night I asked Dad to carry me to bed. As he tucked the covers around me, I said, “Daddy? How did Chris get that hole in his arm?” And I told him what I had seen.

  Dad finished tucking the covers around me in silence. Then he looked me matter of factly in the face and said, “He got shot. We can't take him to a hospital because the police will come if we do.” That was all he said. Then he kissed me good night, turned off the bedroom light, and shut the door behind him.

  I was too exhausted to move. For a little while I lay there quietly, images of the last twenty-four hours swirling through my head. Christmas stockings and Santa Claus and bullet holes and a white Jaguar just my size were still spinning in my brain when I fell asleep.

  One Sunday afternoon a few days later, I was cleaning out my father's car. One of my regular chores after church was to clean his Cadillac. He was very particular about keeping it nice. I never minded cleaning it, for I often found interesting things inside, sometimes under the mat or in the box he kept in the trunk. The box with a gun inside was hidden under the spare tire, but I had long since discovered it. I already knew my father carried a gun to work; he even slept with a gun under the bed, but that didn't seem unusual to me. Lots of people we knew had guns. On this day, though, I found more than his gun. Hidden under the floor mat by the driver's seat was a knife. And when I opened the box under the spare tire, I found a fake beard and moustache, several hats, and three pairs of Isotoner gloves. My head started spinning. Why would anyone take these things to work? What did my father do with them? And why were they hidden?

  That night my father was out late again. Instead of cuddling up on his chest and drifting off to sleep, I went upstairs at bedtime and crawled into bed alone. Lying there in the darkness, I kept seeing the gun and the knife and the box of disguises and the bullet hole in Chris's arm. For the first time, an inarticulate fear began to form in my chest. What was my father doing out there in the darkness? What was so dangerous that it required weapons and disguises? What if something bad happened to him while he was doing it? What if he never came home?

  three

  LITTLE MAN

  Shades of the prison-house begin to close

  Upon the growing Boy.

  —WORDSWORTH, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality

  from Recollections of Early Childhood”

  It was my father himself who slowly began cracking the window to give me glimpses of the world he inhabited outside Massapequa. Just as other fathers took their sons for a tour of the fire station or insurance office, so my father began showing me the way his business functioned, the tools of his trade. Neither my mother nor my sisters shared in the knowledge he began to impart to me. It was a man's thing, passed on from father to son.

  I started learning about guns when I was six. My father imparted these lessons as matter of factly as he taught me to build shelves or install decking. My dad bought and sold guns regularly, and he was an educated collector. He particularly liked the antiques, pistols from the Civil War and before. Sometimes he would bring home an entire bag of guns and empty them onto the workbench to disassemble and clean in the garage workshop. The mechanics fascinated me; and by the time I was eight, I could disassemble and reassemble virtually any gun like an expert. Dad was careful and precise when handling a gun, and he made certain I never touched one carelessly. He always wore gloves when he handled a weapon. Isotoner gloves were the best, he told me, for it enabled a person to work efficiently without leaving fingerprints.

  My father also taught me utter respect for the power that a gun implied. I le
arned to assume that a gun is probably loaded, that if I picked one up, I should point it down away from others, that I should never point a gun at anybody unless I was prepared to use it, that using a gun was a serious thing. If it became necessary to shoot someone, the safest thing was to aim for the head and get off at least two bullets. If you aimed for the torso, the other person might shoot you back before you got off a second shot. I understood the gravity of what he was telling me, and it never occurred to me to aim a gun at a human being myself. I knew that Jimmy's father used a gun at work, and I sensed that shooting must form some part of my father's job. I never handled a gun without my father's permission. I knew that my dad kept a gun under the bed all the time, but it never occurred to me to touch it. It was a given that the weapon was off limits. My father got me my first gun when I was six, a little .22, and took me upstate to a friend's farm to teach me how to fire it. I was allowed to shoot only at targets. One day I shot a chipmunk while I was practicing in the brush, and my father was furious. “What did that chipmunk ever do to you?” he asked me. “You don't shoot nothing without a good reason.”

  My father began taking me with him into the social clubs in Manhattan, especially in Little Italy about the time I entered the third grade. His business was taking up more and more of his time by then. I would kiss him good-bye when I left for school in the morning, but I was often in bed long before he got home at night. So the weekends became more important than ever. When there was business to conduct on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, I would make the long drive across the bridge and into the crowded streets of the city with him.

  The first social club I remember going to was in Manhattan. I was about eight years old at the time. I don't remember its name. What I do remember is the sense of overwhelming noise and confusion as the men who guarded the entrance opened its doors for us. The place was crowded with small tables where men were playing cards; in a corner another group watched a horse race on a TV mounted above the bar. They were all screaming at the television, either cheering or cursing the horses they had bet on. Almost everyone seemed to know my dad. Guys called, “Hey, Roy!” as my father shook the occasional hand and said hello. Within moments of our arrival other men started approaching my dad to ask him about balloons. The one who got to us first said, “Roy, how ya doin? I need to borrow fifty balloons. Think you could help me out?”

  Dad replied, “Sure, no problem, I got fifty with me. Let's take a walk.”

  All three of us went back outside and started walking down the sidewalk as Dad and the man chatted vaguely about their families. I stretched my legs to keep pace with them, filled with curiosity. Balloons? Dad had balloons? Where were they? In the trunk? Or were we going someplace else? A few blocks away we came to a small café and went inside to sit down. Dad ordered espresso and pastry for all three of us. I grimaced as I sipped the hot, bitter liquid, proud to be included as one of the men. Dad and the man continued to chat about their families, the weather, how the Yankees were doing that year. Finally Dad said, “The usual arrangement.”

  The man replied, “Sure, no problem.” Dad signaled the waitress for the check, and as he reached in his pocket to peel off a twenty from the roll he carried, I noticed him pulling out some envelopes. As he laid the twenty on the check with one hand, I saw him deftly pass five envelopes under the table with the other. The other man, also without looking at them, slipped the envelopes inside his jacket pocket as we rose to go. Back out on the sidewalk, Dad and the man shook hands good-bye, and we walked back toward the car.

  Puzzled and a little disappointed, I reached up to touch my father's sleeve.

  “Daddy?”

  “What, Son?”

  “Could I have one of those balloons?”

  My father burst out laughing and then stopped walking and turned to me. Bending down, he said, “We weren't talking about real balloons. We were talking about money. A ‘balloon' means one thousand dollars. That man wanted to borrow money.”

  So that was it. Those envelopes had money in them. Dad was lending money to the man, just like he loaned it to Uncle Vinny. It made sense. I knew Dad owned part of a credit union in Brooklyn; I'd been there with him once or twice.

  “Why didn't he come to your bank, Dad?”

  “Sometimes people have problems and they need money, but they don't own enough property to get money from a bank. You need to own things if you want money from a bank. And sometimes people need money in a hurry, and it takes a while to get it. So I loan it to them myself, and they pay it back with a little extra. It costs them a little more cause I'm taking a chance on them, but it usually works out pretty good for everybody.”

  It sounded fair to me.

  Going into the business district was okay, but I much preferred going to Little Italy. So many interesting things went on there. Little Italy was well named, for it was a microcosm of a Mediterranean nation in a few square blocks. The streets were narrow, teeming with vehicles, merchandise, and people. The signs on the buildings seemed to fall over each other as they competed for attention: restaurants, Italian delis, cigar stores, sidewalk bins of movie posters, and clothing—anything and everything to attract a buyer or to fascinate an eight-year-old boy. Trucks filled with merchandise waited to be unloaded, clogging the streets. The storefront windows reflected a thousand faces, of every age, most dark eyed and rapt in conversation. I almost never saw any policemen there like I did when we went to other parts of Manhattan. There was no one to direct traffic when the streets got full. Pedestrians wound along the crowded sidewalks, dodging stalls of merchandise and café tables. Most people, however, remained restlessly stationary, leaning against cars to bullshit, crowding their chairs around outdoor tables. Restaurants outnumbered other businesses by far, all of them crowded on a sunny weekend afternoon. The occasional tourist snapped pictures, but no one paid attention.

  Little Italy was a magical place for me in those days. I loved walking down the street next to my father. On warm days, the air was always filled with scents of garlic, olive oil, and warm bread as we passed by. The sidewalk tables were at eye level for me back then, and I could see what everyone was eating as I strode down the street next to my dad. I always wore my best clothes on these trips: dress shirt, nice slacks, my shoes carefully polished. I did my best to look just like my dad when we went out together, hair slicked back and a roll of dollar bills rubber banded in my pocket like my dad. That was the way a man carried his money. Many children that age would hold their parent by the hand, but not me. I kept my chin up, eyes straight ahead, chest out in a miniature version of my father's swagger. At home I was still a little boy, but in Little Italy we were two men—big man and little man—doing business in the city together.

  I loved trucks, and there seemed to be one on every corner we passed. All of them were open in the back, and when I peeked in, I saw racks of suits or boxes of electronics. There was always a man leaning up against the truck or watching it from a few yards away while other men came in and out of stores or alleys, unloading whatever was in the back. Sometimes they took the boxes out of one truck and put them into another. The most exciting part of it was that I was almost sure to get something from a truck whenever we went visiting that part of the city. The first time Dad took me to Mulberry Street, there was an open truck being unloaded just a few yards from where my father parked. The minute we got out of the car, the man watching the truck noticed us and came running over to see my dad. “Hey, Roy! We got some good VCRs over here! Let me get ya a couple.” Then turning to the men unloading the truck bed, he shouted, “Hey, boys! Grab a couple of VCRs for Roy!” Within minutes the trunk of our Cadillac was filled with boxes of VCRs. Dad shut the trunk and smiled at me as we started back down the street.

  “Just a little gesture of respect, son,” he told me. Everyone, it seemed, respected my father. I thought it was wonderful that everyone seemed to know my father and that they all wanted to give us gifts. I could tell my father was proud to have me see how much everyone
seemed to like him.

  Dad and I soon developed a ritual on these trips to Mulberry Street. First we would stop at one of our favorite cafés, where my dad would buy me a treat. I never chose a child's dish; my favorite was my father's: a cup of espresso and a San Giuseppe—a rich creamy dough, deep-fried and then drenched in cinnamon honey. When it came time to pay, the owner of the establishment would always refuse to bring us a check, saying he didn't want my father's money. And every time we walked out the door, my father would throw a twenty on the counter as we passed.

  Afterward we went to see Uncle Nino at the Ravenite Social Club. He and my father did business there. There were always a lot of beautiful cars nearby, shiny black Cadillacs, BMWs, and Mercedes parked on the sidewalk and the street in front of the entrance. A guy on each corner and across the street kept an eye on the cars. There were usually several young guys hanging around out front, washing and polishing the cars or offering to run errands for the men who went into the club. They always rushed forward to pay their respects to my father and me. The entrance was guarded by big men in ugly suits who opened the door for some men and frowned at others to stay away. Once I saw a man at the entrance take a camera from a tourist and break it when the man wouldn't stop taking pictures. The men guarding the door would nod at my father and reach for the shiny brass handle to open the door for us. They always glanced around first to make sure no strangers got a look inside. The doors were dark green with glass on top covered by lace curtains blocking the view from the street. The windows on either side, also curtained, were always shiny clean, with gold letters spelling out “Members Only” in each corner. It made me feel important to know that I was welcome in a place most men weren't allowed to enter. I never saw another child there.

  The moment I crossed the threshold, time always seemed to slow down. Walking into the social club always felt slightly surreal to me, like entering another world. As the doors shut behind me, I was plunged into a dusky world filled with strange sights and sounds. Bare bulbs with mushroom glass covers dangled from the ceiling, giving just enough light to see.