by Tillie
A blue envelope arrived two days later. ‘Last night I had a dream,’ she wrote. ‘I was walking in a garden full of roses and wanted to pick one for you. I was crying out of a very strange feeling of joy. Some of the roses were gigantic, others infinitely small, but there wasn’t one beautiful enough for you.’
She also said she was coming that weekend to visit her parents and would arrange to make time to be with me. And then, at the bottom of the page, in a rush of intimacy, she added that she wished more than anything she could spend the whole weekend with me but … I am quoting here. The ellipses, the three dots, were hers.
In fact, she revised her plan, came to Boston early, saw her family, and spent Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning with me. It was then that she explained that her parents, who were getting on in years, had begun clinging to her. To them, New Haven was the other side of the moon, and as for her interest in painting they regarded that as the mark of an unrepentant bohemian. She told me this, a worried look on her face, as we lay in bed. I noticed that her eyes had stolen a glance round the bare, dilapidated, chairless room, the unpainted walls, the curtainless window. She’d had to drape her garments on the round-topped table over my Olivetti. This time her dress was of silk. It was unstated but clear to me that she desperately sought to keep her private life and her parents apart.
We spent most of our time in bed, partly because there was no other furniture, no place else where we could be comfortable. She was content just to lie face up while my hand and fingers played the harp of her naked body. I was content, propped up on one arm, just to drink her in, to bask in her perfection. Every once in a while she would turn to kiss me. What I had written her about eternity was true.
I brought some food up from the street, cold cuts and cheeses from Uncle Dave’s, a loaf of bread from Biaggi’s, a bottle of Valpolicella. Early on the Sunday morning, I went down into the empty streets to Sarge’s and brought her back some Italian pastry and coffee. The first night I took her to a fashionable Italian restaurant in a cul-de-sac off Tremont Street. The silk dress deserved an outing, had to be shown off. I paraded her around North Square too.
For the rest, she was content just to lie there, in the bed or on it, in the nude, day and night, for endless hours. My hands, my eyes, my mouth could not get enough of her. The curve of her breasts, the full dark nipples, the broad dark rings around them. Once, when she went to the bathroom, I looked into her handbag, which lay open on the table. At the very top was one of my letters.
xlvii
Behind the cash register on Fridays and Saturdays Dave worked like a slave. He not only rang up the sales, thousands of items in the course of a long day, but with the pair of eyes in the back of his head he was also alert to everything that went on the length and breadth of the shop and often on the sidewalk outside as well. His powers of concentration and his stamina were phenomenal. He seldom took a break or stopped to eat; occasionally he sallied forth from behind the cash register to sow damp sawdust over the floor.
Every once in a while he’d ask Frankie to trot up to Blondie’s and fetch him a cup of coffee. Paper cup. Sometimes a customer would treat him to one. Often Dave took a sip or two and, distracted, would let the cup go cold. Sometimes, during a rare lull, in a sudden inexplicable good mood that was like the sun bursting out from behind a thunderhead, he’d emerge from his post before the huge keys of the old-fashioned silver cash register, waltz over to Johnny, and share some sotto voce confidence that was always punctuated with a self-satisfied heh-heh. If the good mood had been set off by something even more noteworthy he’d stick out his coffee cup and Johnny would bend down for the bottle of Green River he kept for rejuvenating purposes down by his feet.
From the register Dave barked out orders, told loud customers to pipe down, gave directions, shouted coded signals to the rest of us, reached over the counter to pinch a baby’s cheek while he bit the index finger of his other hand then dished out a sweet to the infant’s mother, all the while intoning gesunte, gesunte, gesunte followed by the dry heh-heh. His tone alone, the level and pitch of his voice, sent forth messages. With just one word, one of our names, we knew we were being admonished for not paying attention or for distracting him or for failing to stand in the right place. His mood took more swings than a professional golfer.
It wasn’t until I’d climbed the employment ladder to the dizzying height of Number Two on the cold-cut counter that I came to understand what was going on when Dave broke away from the altar of the register and flew beaming to Johnny to beg a drop of whiskey. There was nothing inexplicable at all about these forays. Dave was celebrating. Until then, I had not noticed that the euphoria was triggered by a surreptitious peep into a tiny door of the cash register, where a roll of paper kept a running tally of the day’s takings.
xlviii
On second thought, let me not be coy about Patricia’s surname just because of my father’s violent antipathy to the bigot with whom she held a name in common. I speak of Charles Coughlin, the populist radio broadcaster and notorious anti-Semite of the 1930s. His was a career that, looking back now, seems grossly surrealistic, but in fact it was a genuine reflection of the spirit of the times. Via the airwaves he had tens of millions of followers. He received 80,000 letters a week, so many that a new post office had to be built to handle them. He defended the Nazi regime over Kristallnacht, justifying it as a retaliation for Jewish persecution of Christians. He cleverly defended the working man and much of his anti-Semitism was disguised as unimpeachable anti-Communism. So vile was the man and his message that it took all the power and wiles of the American Catholic Church and the Vatican, along with the cunning of various government agencies, to put a stop to him.
But why pollute these pages with further mention of anyone so plainly despicable?
xlix
An old man came into the shop punctually at around eleven o’clock every Friday, the hour when we were at our busiest, and he would head straight for the cold-cut counter. He was tall and slim and only slightly stooped. He wore the droopy mustache of another era and spoke a poor English. He lived somewhere nearby.
Never buying much – only what he could carry in a small bag, mainly cold-cuts and cheese from Johnny, and then a can or two of beans or chick peas or plum tomatoes that he’d pick up at the back of the store – he’d march in, choose his items, and be out again in a matter of minutes. It was a polished performance, a clockwork operation. At his approach, even if Johnny had a tailback of customers, he’d drop whatever he was doing and serve the old man first. The old man, in short, got special treatment.
But little did he know that every time he entered Uncle Dave’s emporium he was running an invisible gauntlet. It worked like this. Whoever spotted him first – Dave, Frankie, or Johnny – would immediately let out an ear-splitting cry of ‘Eagle’ that could be heard even in the rooms out back. Frankie, packing a customer’s purchases by the door, stood the best chance of seeing the man first. From there, he might then just grunt out in the direction of the cash register a simple, ‘Dave, eagle.’ Whereupon, Dave would pick it up and telegraph the blood-curdling whoop to Johnny. The shop was always noisy and crowded. The call had to be in the high decibels.
So, then, the object of all this frenetic vigilance would make for Johnny’s venue, where he would ask for half a pound of boiled ham, say, same again of this or that salame, and perhaps a chunk of provolone an inch or two thick. One packet at a time, Johnny saw that each purchase was carefully enclosed in a sheet of wax paper, which in turn was wrapped in a thinner brown paper. And on this last he would scribble the price. At the end, the items would be ceremoniously extended to the old man’s reaching hands. He would then make his way to the rear of the shop for his beans. No one ever actually saw what the man did so cleverly there at the back, but when he had his small armful of cans he would go straight to the front, where Dave too duplicated the special treatment, advancing him to the head of the queue, and rang up the purchases.
But here’s what was going on. The man did not know that Johnny was also listing the prices of the cold cuts and cheese on a separate slip of paper. While the old man removed himself to the back of the shop, Johnny would call out to Frankie, waving the slip in the air, and Frankie would courier the tally to Uncle Dave. When the man reached the cash register he would plump down his cans, Dave would ring them up, Frankie would bag them, the man would happily exit, and Dave would beam out one of his less dry heh-hehs.
Now here’s what was really going on. At the back of the shop the man, unseen, would slip Johnny’s packets down the front of his trousers, so that they never got laid out on the countertop before Dave’s eyes. But with Johnny’s slip of paper Dave always rang up the whole lot, the seen and unseen, while the old man thought he was paying only for cheap cans of beans and tomatoes. It all ended happily for both parties, the old man reveling in his cleverness, Dave reveling in his.
You had to hand it to Dave for the lengths he went to retain a customer. What a shopkeeping genius. You had to hand it to our surveillance system too. Just that one word. ‘Eagle’, of course, was short for ‘Everybody – eyes open.’
l
Nothing on earth more beautiful, more sensuous, more sensual than the reclining female nude. Think of all those paintings. David, Ingres, Courbet. All those nineteenth-century odalisques. And then there was Patricia, Patricia, Patricia, who never became mine.
li
Another of my Michigan-Thompsonville sketches:
They’d come from northern Michigan, from the wilds of the Upper Peninsula and its hematite mines, and so back east in Massachusetts the family was known as the Michigans. Many others had left Michigan for the east, but only they received that name, just as many others were born without incident but in the Michigan line all the men were born with webbed fingers on their left hand.
One evening, making his way home on foot, John Michigan heard an approaching vehicle honk its horn at him. He turned to catch sight of his neighbor’s 1925 Autocar, a big dump truck loaded with crushed stone, slowing down to pick him up.
So eager was Mish for a lift he began to jog alongside, making ready to spring onto the small running board before the vehicle came to a stop. But Mish’s webbed fingers betrayed him; they’d failed to take firm grip of the grab-bar beside the door. Slipping, Mish ended up under the truck’s solid-rubber wheels and almost instantly he was killed.
When the truck rolled to a halt it rested over Mish’s legs, on his groin, and the vehicle had to back off him.
The truckdriver took to bed, his spirit broken like a string of raw macaroni. There was never a question of his innocence, so as any true friend and neighbor he attended Mish’s wake. Cascades of flowers filled the room with the open coffin, and before it rows of seated women were straining to display cheerlessness. The men stood at the sides and back. Della Michigan, the dead man’s sister, said the women were helping her to mourn.
In came the truck driver, shaken, beside himself, and made his way unaided to the kneeling bench by the coffin. All eyes were on him, especially Della Michigan’s. In tears, in grief, in a rage, Della knew what she had to do. She tore at her hair and let loose a piercing scream.
‘He killed one of my meat!’ she sobbed. ‘He killed one of my meat!’
It was an appeal for revenge – at once accusing, inconsolable, powerless. And all around, suffering with her, the women helped Della to weep.
lii
One morning when I went to Rocco’s for my sandwich rolls I found the baker fuming. I asked what was wrong and here’s what he told me:
Two kids just come in and begin picking up boxes to take away.
‘Hey,’ I says, ‘what are you doing? You can’t have them boxes.’
‘They’re for the nuns,’ one of them says.
‘The nuns,’ I says. ‘Get out of here, the nuns. I need them boxes for my bread. Tell the nuns to get married – tell them get married. Tell them to marry the priests to get their boxes.’
‘Let’s go,’ the first kid says.
‘All right, Rocco, we’re telling,’ says the other.
‘Christ’s sake,’ Rocco mutters, handing me my rolls.
liii
The cultural front. Another curious snippet from The Italian News, a mysterious puzzler – though not intentionally so – from the pen of Rodolfo Pucelli, a frequent contributor to the paper. The piece is titled ‘Ansaldo – A Complete Journalist and Philosopher’:
Guido Massarelli, the well-known editor of Il Pungolo Verde, Campobasso, Italy, seems to be well acquainted with a celebrated philosopher, poet, and journalist whose name is simply Ansaldi. I have not the honor to know him personally, nor have I read his books and articles, but I trust in his and my friend aforementioned.
Well, I think that Ansaldi is of Italian origin. Yet he writes always in French. He can be called, however, a European journalist as he writes his articles first for the press of Paris, then he authorizes the reproduction of the same in the provinces, in Corsica, in Algeria, in Tunisia, in Morocco, in Belgium, in Luxemburg. Finally, in all the countries of French language, and often they are translated even in other countries.
Besides that, Ansaldi, who is above all a great writer and thinker, who writes with an incredible clearness, offers his purely literary contribution to the periodicals and daily press. His novels, short stories, and poems, thoughts and bright sayings are giving joy to those who read them.
In conclusion, he is known by all who enjoyed his writings, be they criticism, literary essays, poems, or articles on various events (no politics) as a complete journalist, one of the most remarkable men of France. I was glad to write this for The Italian News, for we like to enhance the prestige of all deserving Italians, who were born in a foreign country or immigrated in it. Far from their country of origin, they are usually obliged to struggle for life, often badly understood by the native population.
liv
Once or twice a year Dave took his wife on holiday. I am sure it was under duress – her idea, her insistence.
Occasionally he managed to stay away for nearly a week, but mostly these extravagances never extended to more than a long weekend and never farther afield than the New Hampshire hills.
Had he ever considered closing down for one whole week, thereby forcing everyone to take a vacation all at the same time? That would have been unthinkable. I am sure Uncle Dave was married to the shop; I am sure the wife came second. Besides, Dave was fully aware of his place in the scheme of things. He and the shop performed an essential public service. What would all those Italians from the outlying suburbs have done without him?
Johnny was the only one of us whom Dave trusted completely and felt he could rely on completely. No, that is not quite accurate. He trusted Frankie, I’m sure he also trusted me, but in the realm of reliability there was a higher order, a loftier plane, which only Johnny had attained. It was Johnny – and Johnny alone, not even and never Dave – who each evening would shift the canvas bag of the day’s takings to the night-deposit vault at Dave’s bank on Hanover Street. Uncle Dave’s worst fear – or maybe second worst – was of a holdup.
Therefore, for iron-clad security and peace of mind, Dave felt he needed another totally reliable hand at the helm while he went off on these holidays of his. Johnny could not have abandoned the cold-cut department; that was too important a part of the operation. In such circumstances, who could be counted on more than a relative?
And so enters Arthur, Dave’s brother-in-law, the husband – as I have said – of his wife’s sister. Arthur had long since been giving Dave an occasional hand in the lead-up to those festive times of the year when Italian-Americans believe they have an obligation, a civic duty even, to shop with a vengeance. The brother-in-law was younger than Dave, very tall, and with a biggish nose. He was a friendly, outgoing sort with whom we all got on well except for Dave himself. Dave simply looked askance at Arthur, regarding him as shiftless, a hopeless failure, and he took every occasio
n to put his brother-in-law down and keep him there.
Poor Arthur, he suffered from two linked diseases – verbal diarrhea and exaggerated self-esteem. Considering what Arthur normally did for a living, the malady was entirely understandable. You could even say it was an occupational hazard. Arthur was a traveling salesman. Dave had a particular way of hounding and humiliating him. Arthur liked to hold forth, trumpeting his successes to all and sundry from his position behind the second slicing machine. Owing to his height, Arthur stood out like a beacon. He would sometimes lean back against the wall, hands behind his back, and just let his mouth go. Everybody heard but nobody listened. On and on he’d witter at volume, monotonous as an old 78 that jumps grooves and keeps repeating itself.
Exasperated, when he could take no more Dave would call out, not even looking in his brother-in-law’s direction: ‘Arthur, stimme nicht.’
I doubt that a single customer understood. But Johnny, Frankie, and I did, and we could not suppress a smirk when Arthur, with a sheepish grin, would wilt and go silent. Ah, how Uncle Dave enriched my Yiddish vocabulary.
So imagine what it was like when those New Hampshire holiday weekends came round and Arthur took the throne behind the cash register, from whence he held forth to his heart’s content without limit or interruption or restraint.
Johnny and I, manning the cold cuts, would simply eye each other, flash a wink, and pronounce in unison, ‘Arthur, stimme nicht.’ We’d then burst into a guffaw.
But the limit was breached when after a day or two, full of himself, the brother-in-law would strut about giving orders à la Dave, which of course we all ignored. It was designed to impress the customers. He never tried it on when the shop was empty. The implication was that in all the world only he had Uncle Dave’s full trust.