The investigation had begun in the office of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, politician and lawyer for workers and immigrants since before the stocks crashed and the depression got to be called great. He’d gotten himself made mayor with promises of jobs, welfare, housing and blue skies. He was an Italian Jew who spoke English, Italian and Yiddish. He promised to tear down blocks of spit and cardboard tenements and replace them with fourteen floors of bricks and subsidized rents.
The American newspapers called him the Little Flower. He said Hitler was a maniac, Mussolini saddened him, and construction made jobs. Said it over and over in Mondo Nuovo, one of the newspapers friendly to him. Stellato’s unions and contractors were good with the hokeydoke, and Fiorello LaGuardia for Mayor signs popped up all over the city.
But a new DA, a guy named Dewey, had been chasing after guys like Stellato and Zito, and was building a high profile with weak cases in splashes of politics for himself and the celebrity mayor. LaGuardia’s projects would be built on the level. Clean unions, open books. No price fixes, no bid rigs, no kickbacks.
In Nicky’s second month in Riker’s Island, Emma, pale and her eyes sunk in shadow, visited. Six feet from each other, they looked through glass and talked by phone. She had more gray than he’d remembered.
“How’d you get out here?” Nicky asked, his eyes ringed with jailhouse dim. His hair had thinned since sitting in front of the Grand Jury, he needed a shave and his shirt hung loose from his shoulders.
“Benny drove,” Emma said.
“Little Benny?”
“Big Benny. He wants to see you.”
“You came just with him?”
“Rose too.”
“They getting married?”
“She says no, but then she says not yet.”
“What’s he want with me?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look, Emma, I don’t want you out here with all these animals. Less than a year I’ll be out.”
“A year is so long.”
“Before you know it, it’s over. Everything okay with my son?”
Emma’s face brightened. “Your son? What about me?”
“Our son, yeah.” Nicky smiled, his eyes damp.
“Little Patsy’s a good boy, Nicky. Everybody says he looks like you. Four years old and with the radio all the time.”
“His ears look like me too?”
Emma smiled, stifled a chuckle.
“What’s the doctor say?” Nicky asked.
“He says he finds nothing wrong with him, that maybe he’s just slow to learn.”
“The way he remembers all the words to the songs? All the radio shows? You told him that?”
“He doesn’t know what that means and he says don’t worry. So don’t worry. I meant to bring pictures, I forgot.”
“Mail them.”
“You lost so much weight, Nicky.”
“The food’s garbage. I don’t even eat sometimes.”
“I worry so much.”
“Nah, they treat me good, got me and Georgie with all Italians. The kids know where I am?”
“They see the paper, hear the talk. Little Benny wants to know if he can use your car. He’s going for his license.”
“He’s doing good with the horn?”
“He practices all the time.”
“What about a job?”
“My father says he’ll put him through school, be a lawyer.”
“Forget about what your father says. See where I am because your father says? The kid needs to make it on his own, keep away from people like your father ... Sorry, Emma, I didn’t mean that.”
Emma looked away. “It’s okay.” She looked back. “Antoinette says his music teacher says he’s doing good.”
“The little girl asks about me?”
“Antoinette says she’ll come next time with her and Little Benny.”
“No, no. Don’t make nobody come here. I’ll be home before you know it.”
“If that’s what you want. You need anything?”
“Just pictures.”
“I miss you, Nicky.”
“Me too. Tell everybody I’m doing good.”
Nicky turned to the guard. “Okay, Timmy.”
“You got another.”
“Oh, yeah, okay.”
It surprised Nicky that it felt good to see Benny Bats, hear his voice.
“Nicky.”
“Yeah, Benny. Thanks for bringing my wife. But please, don’t let nobody bring her here. Okay?”
“I thought you would like it.”
“Yeah, but no. No more. Okay?”
“Okay. How you doing?”
“How am I doing?” Nicky slapped his chest. “Here’s how I’m doing. Look what you’re wearing, look what I’m wearing. Ever seen me skinny like this?”
“It ain’t over for me yet, either,” Benny said. “You’ll be out before I go in. I go back to court, they keep moving dates around. Me, Vito, Dominic, because things are happening and there’s all new rules and we gotta fix things. The mayor’s pushing for more projects and nobody wants to lose what’s coming.”
“I read the papers.”
“We’re in, you’re in.”
“I’m in? Then what am I doing here?”
“This had to happen. Things went good. Nobody squawked—”
“Yeah? Where’s The Ox?”
“The Feds got him.”
“They could name these projects after him. Where they got him?”
“Some army post. They wanna know about us, but things are still the same for us. Different corporations, you know, like that. But big things from now on, no wood frames.”
“Nobody broke my balls with wood frames.”
“What we got now could last us for life.”
“I never got in trouble with wood frames. How come I’m in on this?”
“Patsy always pushed for you, only thing now, we got most of it. The mayor wants it. Supposed to be his last.”
“Little commie prick fucking up the neighborhood like he fucked up Harlem and Brooklyn.”
“We build, or somebody else does.”
“Right in the middle of the neighborhood, fucking shame.”
“Nobody wants projects,” Benny said, “but they’ll take the work.”
“And fuck the neighborhood.”
“We’re in for foundations, concrete, doors and windows. You know what that means. Zito got the steel, but if we get in this fucking war, forget about steel.”
“What about my houses? My simple fucking houses.”
“We got the okay for twenty-two.”
“The Bronx? The lots from the old racetrack you said we couldn’t get?”
“Couldn’t happen if we weren’t out there. Hey, I seen Patsy. A big kid already. A nice kid.”
“Looks like me, my wife says.”
“Just like you.”
“Hey, Benny?”
“Yeah?”
“Look, I don’t want no part of this projects shit. Keep me out.”
“Nicky, don’t say that to Patsy.”
***
Nicky hadn’t meant it when he told Emma that the year would go fast. But it did, maybe being locked in Riker’s Island kept him from seeing LaGuardia’s buildings. Typical government, thick, no class, no character, a brick by brick scheme of politicians and mob guys collecting votes and cash and making shadows on the neighborhood.
Late in the night they met in a restaurant. Nicky, Benny, and Patsy Stellato. Stellato’s moustache white and still flowing, getting old but staying sharp, he said: “Nicky, you look good. It’s good to see you.”
At meetings like this, Stellato was not Nicky’s father-inlaw. He was boss.
“Good to see you guys,” Nicky said.
“Just in time you got here,” Stellato said. “You’re our eyes and ears with this thing. None of us wanted anybody else. A lot of envy from everybody, we need you there.”
“Sure, Patsy, sure.”
“Meet up
with Vito, lots of new things happening with the unions that you need to know.”
Every day Nicky lumbered to the construction site as if toting a hod of mortar on each shoulder. He handled some of the labor problems himself, but unions were always looking for a shake, and he had to get that fucking Vito involved. And if the city inspectors broke balls, he called Benny.
But when the projects got to hovering high enough to see from his windows at home, he had nobody to call. He pulled down shades. He found little difference between the projects and the misery he’d been in for a year. Not only in the shadows they threw, but both places had ways of keeping his spirit locked up. And there’d be no comfort from the same guys who made the neighborhood and now were stuffing their pockets by betraying it.
War, Swing, Doowop
Pearl Harbor. Neighborhood flags waving from walls and roof tops, stoops and porches. Kids getting drafted or joining up.
Brown-suited Western Union boys pedaled bikes. Where one of them stopped and plucked an envelope from the basket on the handlebars, people knotted around. A father had been wounded, a brother missing, a son killed; a gold star in the window for their lives.
No gold stars yet hung in the windows of Nicky Coco’s house, but the bulk of talk shifted from the projects to Little Benny, old enough to get the greetings letter. Bring underwear, socks, toothbrush.
Before light on a damp summer morning, all the women crying in the house, he walked with Uncle Nicky and little cousin Patsy to Whitehall Street and the building with stained bricks and cloudy windows. On the stoop men and boys stood smoking, drinking coffee, waiting, as if the war would be over that morning and they’d all get sent home.
“Okay,” Benny said. “Guess I better go in.”
“Okay,” Little Patsy said.
“Maybe it won’t be long, Benny,” Nicky Coco had said before, said it again, and handed Benny a few twenties. “You need something, call, write, whatever. Okay, Benny?”
“Okay, Uncle, thanks.”
“Stay out of trouble.”
Benny kissed them.
“You’re gonna write us letters, right?” Little Patsy asked. “Soon’s I got something to write about.”
***
By the time Benny got his first stripe, Little Patsy started first grade, Sacred Heart School. All Italian kids, no trouble pronouncing Cococozzi. But they called him Cogootz. Like the squash. Quiet, sluggish and harmless, tallest in the class, slowest to learn. But with the prayers of his mother and Aunt Antoinette, and the prayers and patience of the nuns, he struggled through the first and second grades.
His second year in third grade, he started stealing what he didn’t need. Crayons and pencils from other kids, chalk from the blackboard, ice and coal off trucks; comic books from the candy store and, lately, bottles of coffee soda that Emma wouldn’t buy for him because the sugar and caffeine got him to being Superman, up and down the hall steps crashing down the bottom three, then four, then five. Superman on the fly protecting cousin Benny from Jap and Nazi fighter planes.
Dondadondon. Faster than a speeding bullet. Dondadondon. More powerful than a locomotive. And Emma calling from the kitchen: “Oopha, Patsy, stop. You’re breaking the house. Don’t come crying to me when you get hurt. Don’t you have homework?”
Even without coffee soda Patsy talked or sang and entertained, kept the house laughing and cheering for more.
“Patsy, do Jimmy Durante.”
“Do Al Jolson.”
“He’s got some imagination, this kid. Do Ethel Merman.”
He’d speak with the voices of the radio back then, talking and giggling with the friends of his imagination. Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, the Green Hornet, Flash Gordon. Emma heard them, and at first went looking for them, as if to find Gene or Roy or Flash, and found only Patsy, on the steps in the hall, up in the music room, or in front of hers and Nicky’s bedroom mirror.
He watched for the mail every day. On the days a letter came from Benny, he brightened, then dimmed till the next letter with a message like:
Tell Patsy that there’s no war in Alabama yet, but we all have rifles. They gave me a sax too. I don’t know what it means, but they gave me the charts to the songs from the Glenn Miller books. He’s here, you know. Will I get to play with him? Imagine.
Lunch time in Antoinette’s kitchen, a bowl of marinara sauce, meatball sandwiches and glasses of milk, Bobbi’s daughter, Bobbi, said: “Patsy never talks, Ma.”
“Yeah, he’s quiet. Did you tell him to come up and eat?”
“Yeah, but he was talking to Dick Tracy in front of Aunt Emma’s bedroom mirror.”
“At least he talks to somebody.”
“I think he does his talking with the songs he sings.”
“That’s interesting for you to say,” Antoinette said.
“He says he feels safe when he sings or when the radio’s on.”
“It’s good to feel safe. Don’t you think?”
Bobbi spooned sauce on her sandwich. “Sure.”
“He’s a special kind of kid. So are you.”
“I’m not a kid. I’m 17.”
“Right, I mean special from when you were a kid.”
“Benny likes songs too, but he always talked with me.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Too bad he’s not my real brother. I really miss him.”
“I do too.”
“Ma?”
“Yes?”
“I think about my real mother.”
“It’s okay if you do.”
“Uncle Nicky always says I look like her. Do I?”
“Uncle Nicky says? Everybody says. Every day you look more and more like her. Green eyes and all.”
“Sometimes I think she’s in the music room.”
“She must be happy to hear you play the piano.”
“Patsy says she’s more happy when I sing.”
Antoinette smiled. “That’s nice to think, but how could he know that?”
“Sometimes he talks with her.”
“He’s got some imagination.”
“That’s good, right?”
“That’s good, right.”
***
Spring, 1946. Duffle bag on his shoulder, Sergeant Benny Burgundi got off the subway at Brooklyn Bridge, climbed to the street, looked around and found the projects he’d read about in letters.
Into a playground, kids mobbed him, grabbed at him.
“You kill any Nazis?”
“You’re a sergeant, right?”
“Kill any Japs?”
Benny had never seen a Jap or a Nazi. From Whitehall Street he’d been loaded on a bus with a few dozen recruits, express to Fort Dix, New Jersey. A few days of skull tests, a few months of basic training, an M-1 rifle and a sharpshooter badge. And, finally, Montgomery, Alabama, a tarnished horn and a seat in the sax section of Major Glenn Miller’s Army Air Force Band and a run overseas.
“Easy with that, New York. Stick to what’s written.” Miller could be a pain in the ass.
“Yes sir, but only some of the music is on the sheet.”
“Yeah, I know all about it. But in this band it’s all on the sheet.”
“Yes sir.”
Benny walked on, turning again to see the projects, and searching for what hadn’t changed. Familiar faces looked older. Radios in windows played songs he’d never heard. And Bobbi, not knowing he was coming home, left some guy talking to himself and raced to Benny, crying and laughing and hanging on as if to keep him from going back.
They walked, her arm in his. She no longer felt like a sister to him. He studied what her mother must have looked like. The chin, the nose, the smile, the green eyes — especially the eyes — then later, singing those songs new to him, and talking English with spatters and gestures of napulitan’.
In a neighborhood where people complained about the projects bringing in the coloreds, and scowling at Italians who married Irish, they stayed quiet when Benny left with Bobbi in Nicky Coco’s Hudso
n, and days later came back with wedding rings.
***
On a Sunday morning, cold and windy, Little Benny looked in the window of the Mezzogiorno Social Club past the fading colors of San Gennaro. Guys sitting around, playing cards, reading the paper, much of what he remembered. He went in, saw pictures on the wall, some new: Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Louie Prima at a mike stand with his trumpet and an arm around a woman in a dress that looked like silver.
“That’s up on Fifty-second Street. Your Uncle Nicky bought your Aunt Rose all his records.”
Benny turned. “Uncle Benny.” They hugged, shook hands.
“How you doing, kid?”
“Good, good.”
“Made it home.”
“Yeah.”
“Aunt Rose told you to come see me?”
“Yeah, I asked about you.”
“She looks good, huh?”
“She looks good. She misses my Grandma, I think.”
“Yeah, but now she’s got her own life.”
“How’d Grandma die? Nobody talks about it.”
“Nobody knows. They didn’t want an autopsy. Your Aunt Rose says that for years after your Uncle Sonny died — ”
“Died, huh?”
“Like you said, some things nobody talks about.”
“Yeah, sorry, Uncle.”
“After he died, grandma kept asking for him. Then she stopped asking and stopped eating. Let’s go in the back.” Benny Bats led Little Benny into the kitchen, Sunday sauce on the stove.
“That lady, Philomena, still cleans up?” Little Benny asked.
“Yeah, she can’t stop working. Still works in the church too,” Benny Bats said. “What was I saying? Oh yeah. In the hospital they found nothing wrong, then one day, we went to see her, she didn’t know we were there. We left, she died.”
“Yeah, that’s what I heard. You and Aunt Rose getting married?”
“She wears a ring I bought years ago and that’s enough. But you and Bobbi ... congratulations. Living with your mother for a while.”
“Yeah, for now. Still gotta get married in the Church.”
The Mezzogiorno Social Club Page 18