by Alan Davis
“Boots? You wore boots?” Jaunty after a job well done, she grinned. But it was clear she had listened, really listened. “Somehow I can’t imagine you in boots.”
“Shoes. Okay?” I clicked my tongue, a little irritated. “You find the rhythm of the story, a few details change. The point is, I had something on my feet.”
“Sure,” she said. “I get it.” Then she furrowed her brows. “Pizza? You went for pizza after a funeral?”
“Yeah,” I said, and bit into my lower lip. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing.” She shrugged. “We have to eat, I guess. In respect for your grandpa, though, I hope you skipped the anchovies.” She put down her putty knife and went off to rinse her hands with turpentine. When she returned, her mood had changed. “No, look, I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry he was so unhappy.” She rubbed her eyes and sniffed her knuckles, as though ready to cry. “If it’s any consolation, your father was right, I think. We don’t earn our afflictions. Sometimes they’re just given to us, we have to live with them.”
That was it. My grandfather was alive in somebody else’s head, the head of someone I loved, and I knew she would keep him there, tell people about him from time to time. Air him out, so to speak, let him move through the world in a way which was still very difficult for me. She smiled, shrugged, and padded into the kitchen to start dinner. I worked on details in the bedroom, touching up the baseboard, smoothing out the rough spots, but by nightfall the job was finished, the paint mostly dry.
I joined my wife. Candles were flickering on the dining room table and the good china was laid out like a message from a more perfect world. Sally had pulled out a silver wine bucket, a wedding gift forgotten for years, and filled it with ice and a bottle of vin ordinaire, the only sort of wine we drank. After dinner, we brought the candles and the last of the wine to the new room and toasted my grandfather. The room was pale gray and satisfying to sit in, like being a child again and walking with him to that red-shuttered library on an overcast afternoon, his mind filled with the plight of the workingclass, mine with the necessity of traveling back and forth in time.
RAMPARTS STREET
Emily, after rejecting the eighties and its gold-plated bait, has come to the idea that she can learn about herself and her times by learning about her mother, getting in touch with her roots. Emily even flirts with taking a course in Italian, a language her grandfather spoke with gusto. English, though it served him well enough, never gave him pleasure. He liked to roll Italian phrases in his mouth, feel how they forced his lips to puff out and pucker with male pride. In English, he was much diminished.
For Emily’s sake, her mother tells and retells the story of a rainy February evening in 1942, when two government agents tore apart the house with carnival glee, as though Mardi Gras, which vanished with the war effort, had to be replaced with something more physical than periodic blackouts and air raid practice, the self-important warden with his metal hat and flashlight smirking as he lectured the nineteen-year-old girl. “A single match could give away our position, sister.”
Emily takes the story to heart, cites chapter and verse. “You were an American, Mama, New Orleans born,” she says, rubbing her fingers together like her father. “You went at things the way your ancestors did, hardscrabbling, getting in the door without asking. Isn’t that what the Vietnamese are doing, the Mexicans, the Cubans, the Haitians, all the immigrants?” Emily gave up managing a health spa in the suburbs of New Orleans to work with displaced people. “The same people who want to keep them out are the ones whose fathers wanted to keep us out, at least until they learned how to use us as strikebreakers. And now they want to cut the capital gains tax and give another break to people who don’t need it. Isn’t that right? Am I getting it right?”
In response, her mother swirls her teaspoon in her coffee-and-milk. Each time she tells the story, she manages to recall more of the truth of what happened, because, God knows, on that overcast February evening she couldn’t explain herself the way she can now, after chewing it all over for so many years.
“But you were valedictorian the year before the war started. Isn’t that right?” Emily says. “You gave the commencement address. You knew a thing or two.”
Whatever, her mother says. It was 1942 and Mama motioned me close. “Come upstairs, child,” she told me, though I was a high school graduate, already rebelling against the social constraints my father insisted on. “I don’t want them going through the tin box.” This was World War II, remember, fought so long ago people called it The Good War? Against the Germans, the Japanese, the Italians. Errol Flynn came once to the Municipal Auditorium to sell war bonds.
“It’s a scream,” Emily says. “You know I’m right, don’t you? New Orleans has always been the country’s salad bowl. Greeks, Italians, Irish, blacks, French, Spanish, Eastern Europeans. You name it. The whites thinking they could do what they wanted to blacks, the Irish and the French thinking they were better than Mediterraneans. Am I right?”
Well, her mother says, we saw newsreels of the Blitz, used ration stamps, had to line up for meat, sweeten our coffee with saccharine, do without ice cream and cake. We knew something was wrong. Patriotism seemed like the answer. Anyway, I couldn’t figure why Mama wanted the box hidden away, but no matter. I was obedient. It was GI green, about the size of a breadbox, full of our papers. Birth certificates, death certificates, marriage certificates. A world in a breadbox. And my father’s alien registration, paperclipped to a miniature Italian flag—those bright sun-filled colors, so different from the war effort. You know we had to mix bright yellow food coloring into the margarine to make it look edible?
I shoved the box into my closet, because the two agents downstairs, even though they were tearing our house apart, wouldn’t search the room of a girl, an innocent daughter. So Mama figured, anyway, leading me back downstairs. “Not a word,” she said. “Not a peep.”
At nineteen, I was the youngest of thirteen children born to Mama, and the only one who still lived at home. It was a Tuesday, I remember, a meatless Tuesday, and Olsen was as thick as a steak, a good half foot taller than me. He slit open a sagging chair, the one in front of our gramophone, a console bought second-hand and polished to a high mahogany sheen. The chair would be worth maybe a dollar on the street, but it was the one nobody else sat in when Papa was home.
“You toiletface,” I said. My mother put a hand to her mouth, my father started grinding his jaw, but he was afraid to speak. It was the first time in my life I used such a word, the worst I could think of, though God knows I heard it often enough, something my brothers called my older sister. But the effect was different, a little scandalous, very vulgar, in the mouth of a bashful child, five foot two. I was no bigger than Charlie Chaplin. “What right you have to come in here?”
“Every right in the world, sister,” Olsen said. Grinning, he pulled one of my long dark braids. “That’s some head of hair you got, sugar.” He looked over at my father, sitting stiffly at attention, perspiring in his frayed, worsted suit. “We’re just making sure you all cooperate with the war effort.” He slashed the chair until stuffing came out, then overturned a steamer trunk. Worn keepsakes, sweaters, shawls, and doilies spilled across the floor.
Seeing red, nothing but the motion of my blood, I rose to my toes and pummeled Olsen in the back. “You damn palooka!”
Shoulders hunched, he pivoted, frowning, and took one long steady look before bursting into a low-registered laugh. Gasper, the second man, came up behind me and hoisted me to the couch, sat me down with my parents. “That’s enough, Joe Louis.” My father, jaw grinding, studied the frayed carpet in that self-conscious way people have when they’re embarrassed for the furniture. As for my mother, she was no Sicilian, but she knew what poverty was. She also knew we were just a bad break from more of it.
“They put up with that shit?” Emily’s face gets puffy with anger. She snaps open her purse and digs in it, as though searching for the cigarettes s
he no longer smokes.
What could we do? her mother says to her, staring at chipped china, drip-drying in a wire drain next to the sink. New Orleans was a military center. Soldiers all over the place, Army hospitals on the lakefront, Nazi subs at the mouth of the river. We were supposed to roll bandages, knit socks and sweaters, save tinfoil and coat hangars, old license plates. There was the rationing, the blackouts. We didn’t know we had any rights. Olsen and Gasper had official business, they said. “Why do you have a radio but no transmitter?” Olsen said. “Where’s your transmitter? You have a short-wave?”
“We listen to Beethoven,” I said, “but you wouldn’t know him, would you?”
“He’s a dago. Who else would you listen to?”
“Beethoven?” Gasper furrowed his brows. “He’s not Italian, is he? Verdi, that’s your man. You listen to him, sweetheart?”
“And Caruso. We listen to Caruso. You wouldn’t know him, either. You’re stupid.”
My mother squeezed my knee with a large-veined hand. “Just be quiet.”
“What are these questions, Mother?” my father asked in his heavy English, his long big-boned face twitching a little, his downtumed nose engraving sadness onto his features. He required me strictly to be home by ten, allowed chaperoned dates only, and suspected my volunteer work at the USO. He forbade me to attend late-evening get-togethers, especially dances for servicemen. He didn’t trust soldiers with his baby, and the more I argued the darker his face became, like the skin of an eggplant. “I have every right in the world to go to that dance,” I had been screaming, almost in tears, when the two men knocked.
Outside it started to rain, a sudden gale from the gulf. Winds thirty miles an hour, the tops of big oaks waving like people adrift in lifeboats. It was better than Beethoven, those storms. Before the war, I’d sit by the window, lights out, the night turning off and on, sheets of rain plinking the glass, the ballgame droning on the radio for my brother’s benefit, sheet-lightning punctuated by shouts of victory or disgust. When the war came, he got sent off to the European theater, where he met one of his heroes, a pitcher from Mississippi.
“Look, Mister,” Gasper told my father, who was running his watch-chain through his fingers like rosary beads, “we’re fighting fascism. You should be glad we’re vigilant.”
“Yeah, right,” Emily says, retrieving one of her own father’s butts from the ashtray and breaking it apart.
Fascism? For all I knew, Olsen was a fascist. He was certainly dressed for it in his wrinkled, shiny black suit. He pulled out a cigarette, without permission to smoke, tapped it in his palm, and struck his match. “What’s a little discomfort, a little annoyance, compared to freedom?” he said. “You all don’t know how good you have it. Suppose you were still over there in that stinkhole? You think you’d get a place like this to feel at home in? You think you’d get all that good Spam to eat when there wasn’t enough meat to go around?”
My father studied the jiggling glint of his watch-chain.
He had the shakes. When he was little, I found out later, his parents spoke of innocent men dragged by dead of night to stakes in the scorched uplands of Sicily, where predators and insects and the sun would kill them. In America, it was rumored that the government relocated people into prisons in the desert, that Italians were never safe from a beating or the kind of grilling that convinces you you’re guilty.
“If it’s not our country, too,” I said, “then what’s my brother doing over there? Why don’t you send him home? He’s fighting for his country.”
“Which country is that?” Olsen said.
“Olsen,” Gasper said. “That’s enough.” He furrowed his brows again, bushy, gray things like caterpillars, and walked to our tiny picture window.
“The point is, sister,” Olsen said, “they’re not in Italy. They might have some trouble with that.”
“When we get to Italy, they’ll be there,” I said, “protecting a coward like you.”
Olsen turned to my mother. “You got any coffee? How about a little hospitality here?” He sat next to my father, in the spot my mother vacated when she went for the coffee. “Where’s your registration papers, old man?”
“This is his country,” I said. “He’s been here since he was a kid. He’s been here forever.”
Gasper, staring at the rain, turned from the window. “I wish that was true, sweetheart. The truth is, I’m sorry about this, but he was born overseas, he never naturalized. There’s a man here who says he likes Mussolini.”
“Who says he likes Mussolini? Mantegna? Was it Mantegna? That’s a lie.”
“Maybe that’s true, sister, maybe not, but how come he never naturalized?”
Even today, Emily’s mother doesn’t know for sure. He was born in 1877, came by boat to America. He was still a child, spoke Italian for years, part of that huge melting-pot immigration that filled those aging sway-backed houses in the French Quarter chock-a-block with Italians. His parents grew produce in Kenner and opened a small grocery on Ramparts Street. He learned English waiting on customers. It wasn’t a bad life, certainly an improvement over the arid soil of Sicily, the scourge of absentee landlords, the life of an indentured farmhand. In South Louisiana there was rent, hard backbreaking work, French Creoles and Irish who called them dagos and worse, there was the heat. But it was paradise compared to Sicily, where bandits and bloodshed in the uplands restricted travel one way, while the fertile coast had nothing for peasants. America had always been a bright shining dream.
“Where the rich get richer,” Emily says.
Anyway, he couldn’t explain to the men why he never naturalized, though he tried. He made box-like gestures with his hands and clawed at the air, reaching for something tangible, something plausible, as though kneading dough, but finally shrugged the question away. “I have my papers,” he said.
“Well, why didn’t you say so? Let’s see them,” Olsen said. He waved at the mess in the living room. “Nobody likes this, but it’s like a hurricane. You don’t want it to happen, but it just does. It’s nobody’s fault, you understand. It’s like that rain outside. You don’t make a big deal about a rainstorm, do you? That wouldn’t do nobody any good.” He leveled his gaze at Papa. “Especially the people waiting out the storm.”
“I know where the papers are, you big jerk,” I said. “I’ll go get them.”
My father sat very still, as though posed for a picture. He was terrified. That I could use the language I did without a stern reprimand was evidence enough. Imprisonment, deportation, the loss of his family. He was uncharacteristically paralyzed. How it must have shamed him, his own daughter going up the stairs for the tin box, Garibaldi-proud, his watch-chain still jiggling in his lap.
Upstairs, the tin box wouldn’t open. Mama had the key. I sat on the edge of my bed, defeated. It was a standard-issue tin box, though, and finally I shrugged and carried it before me, hands outstretched, like something intended for the Church. Maybe it was all an elaborate Carnival hoax, maybe the box was full of trinkets. Maybe I’d walk to the top of the stairs with an armful of beads and doubloons and everyone would laugh at our little joke, scream out the classic Mardi Gras refrain: “Hey, Mister, throw me something!”
Downstairs, my mother was serving coffee and cinnamon toast. Coffee was a precious commodity in wartime, hoarded for special occasions, and the cinnamon was pre-war.
Gasper smacked his lips.
“You like that?” I said.
“Your mother’s a saint,” he said, sipping hot coffee with chicory. “Those the papers?”
“Give it to me,” my mother said, “sit down.” I put the tin box on her lap. She took a key from a single large pocket stitched to her plain dress and opened the box. On one document I saw the embossed stamp of a notary public. She slipped the registration from the box, leaving the flag buried among other official notices that our family existed.
Gasper studied it, rubbing his eyes, then turned to my father. “So, you used to live on Annunci
ation Street.”
My father smiled for the first time all evening, sensing something in Gasper’s voice that passed right over me. Earlier, almost in tears because he refused to admit my volunteer work at the USO was part of the war effort, I had to bite my tongue and sit on my hands. Now I sulked, suddenly quiet, but nobody noticed. What had happened down here when I was upstairs, staring at the magic box whose contents might save us so much trouble? Does coffee and cinnamon toast make such a difference? The key to the adult world, the world I wanted entrance to, was the size of the topsy-turvy room I sat in, and it was a room full of lunatics.
Outside, water dripped from the gutters, splashing on the long, slick leaves of our elephant ear plant. I smelled coffee and cinnamon on my mother’s breath. She wants a glass of wine, I thought, reading her mind.
“Salaparuta,” Gasper said. “Where’s that?”
My father’s hands went into motion again, an artful improvisation to conjure up language. “Western Sicily,” he said. “Near Gibellina, Ninfa, Belice River. Le isole, siamo cosi buoni.” We are so good-natured.
Gasper smiled and nodded. “All right, then.” He tugged at his rumpled coat, dark under the armpits. Olsen stood too, pulling at his crotch. “What about that gramophone? There’s something funny about it. Should I take a look inside it?” He caressed the dark mahogany.
My father stiffened, but Gasper placed a hand on his partner’s shoulder. “Let it go. We’ve got other business.” He turned to my father. “Good evening.”
“Auguri infinitie buon Viaggio,” my father said heartily, clasping Gasper’s hand, as though consummating a business deal. Infinite good wishes and a good journey. He caught me studying his face and stared for a moment at the broguings on his wingtips. After that night, I never had quite so much trouble getting out for USO dances. I didn’t see him anymore as the domineering Sicilian he tried to be, or as the helpless immigrant he was that rainy night, but as a man, one who could be cajoled, who loved the world and its chicanery.