Title and Credits
Dedication
Chapter One...Borough Park
Chapter Two...Crooked Rooftops
Chapter Three...Downstairs
Chapter Four...Naming Names
Chapter Five...Stillborn
Chapter Six...Child of the Streets
Chapter Seven...Dairy Queen
Chapter Eight...The Promise of Summer
Chapter Nine...Dish Night
Chapter Ten...The Beat
Chapter Eleven...“Cheek to Cheek”
Chapter Twelve...The Girl with the Chestnut Mane
Chapter Thirteen...Blue Knight
Chapter Fourteen...“This is it...This is Nash”
Chapter Fifteen...At the Navy Yard
Chapter Sixteen...Homecoming
Chapter Seventeen...Private Dick
Chapter Eighteen...Land Without Shadows
Chapter Nineteen...Ambush
Chapter Twenty...Independence Day
Chapter Twenty-One...Happy Birthday, Kewpie
Chapter Twenty-Two...Strangers on the Stairs
Chapter Twenty-Three...Basic Training
Chapter Twenty-Four...At Farrell’s Bar & Grill
Chapter Twenty-Five...Million Dollar Baby
Chapter Twenty-Six...Brief Encounters
Chapter Twenty-Seven...Call It Sleep
Chapter Twenty-Eight...Lucky
Chapter Twenty-Nine...Chachkas
Chapter Thirty...Down at Coney Isle
Chapter Thirty-One...Where the Heart Is
Chapter Thirty-Two...Wild in the Streets
Chapter Thirty-Three...The Stumble Inn
Chapter Thirty-Four...The Long Way Home
Chapter Thirty-Five...Empty Space
Chapter Thirty-Six...Insult to Injury
Chapter Thirty-Seven...Walking on Eggshells
Chapter Thirty-Eight...Before the Fall
Chapter Thirty-Nine...The Coal Cellar
Chapter Forty...A Wake
Publisher’s Note
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Volossal
by Catherine Gigante-Brown
Published by Volossal Publishing
www.volossal.com
Copyright © 2012
Cover design by Lisa Ponder
Author photo by Barbara Nitke
This book my not be reproduced or resold in whole or in part through print, electronic or any other medium. All rights reserved.
They lived in a neighborhood called “Borough Park.” Only there were no parks, just rows and rows of wooden houses tiredly leaning against one another, as wearily as the people who lived inside them. The sidewalks were cracked in many places. The cobblestones paving the streets were uneven and coming up in spots, tipping to one side or another like loose teeth. The weather did that—the endless snow in the winter, the rain that came down in dirty rivulets in the spring and autumn, and the summer sun that pounded down soullessly, making the streets themselves steam and stink.
But the El rose above it all.
That’s what everyone in Borough Park called the elevated train—the El, for short, like the nickname of an old, familiar friend. The El saw everything and said nothing. It coursed three stories above the streets, through the heart of the neighborhood, like hot blood through chilled veins. The El connected everyone, yet at the same time, tore them apart. It took them to strange and wonderful places they’d never before been and to ordinary places they were weary of and wished they’d never have to return. To work, to play, to Manhattan and beyond. The El ferried them to alien neighborhoods with curious, daunting names like Bushwick and Gravesend, linked them to other train lines like the Sea Beach. And it led to the ocean.
But as for Tiger, he preferred the trolley. Tiger preferred the trolley because his father worked on the El. Not as a motorman, sheparding the train along the tall, undulating network of wood and steel tracks. But instead, as a conductor, opening and closing the doors with the pull of a lever.
It was a suitable job for a drunk, straightforward, uncomplicated, doable even if you’ve tipped back a few. And if you were smart about it when you worked nights, you could even drink on the job and still take home a decent paycheck, thanks to the Transport Workers Union which had been formed two years earlier. Sometimes Tiger’s father would have a drink on them, toasting his good fortune and his Union job. Other times, he’d curse the God-damned T.W.U.
Tony would steal sips from an old cough medicine bottle which he filled to the brim with whiskey. Every fifth stop or so, he’d take a slug. He’d make a game of it, counting off New Utrecht Avenue, 62nd Street and so on. The soothing brown liquid bathed his throat as he slammed and unslammed the doors, gave the motorman the “all clear” signal then clattered toward 18th Avenue.
Tony’s drinking game varied from night shift to night shift, just to keep it interesting. Sometimes, he devised a diversion where he would tap his makeshift flask whenever a pretty blonde stepped into his car or if a dark-eyed woman smiled at him. This was a far trickier and riskier game of sport, left entirely up to chance instead of the predictability of numbers, not so fool-proof as the “Five-Stop Rule.”
But women smiled at Tony often for he cut a handsome figure in his crisp blue uniform and stiff-brimmed hat. He had the kind of aquamarine eyes that spoke of an ocean but not any ocean around Brooklyn. The waters around Coney Island were slate-gray, like his daughter Kewpie’s eyes, and sometimes just as cold.
Somehow, Tony’s drinking game made the numbness of his job even more numb. But this was a deadness he could control the depth of, depending how much he drank. Tony knew his work was something a chimpanzee, even a dimwitted chimp, could have done, probably better than he did. Tony also knew that his son was probably embarrassed of him because his Pop didn’t do something as magnanimous as drive the train. Opening and closing doors wasn’t nearly as impressive as fitting ships with weaponry like Tiger’s grandfather did.
Still, Tony was lucky to have a steady job, especially in 1936. His family had just enough—and then some—while others went hungry. Others who lived on the same block, even. But just enough wasn’t nearly enough for Tony. Never was.
This particular day, Tiger watched his father fill his medicine bottle flask in the kitchen as he did every afternoon before he left for his shift. Tony stood on the checkerboard-patterned linoleum which was scrubbed clean on hands and knees by his wife. Rosanna was hanging laundry from the clothesline strung outside the kitchen window. She always seemed to turn her back on Tony’s alcoholic ritual in one way or another. She knew full well what was happening but didn’t want to acknowledge it just the same. Kind of like what went on with Kewpie.
Legs slightly apart, lips whetted in anticipation, hand steady as he poured, Tiger glanced up at his father as the boy played with his lead soldiers beneath the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. Tony peered down at his son, winked and smiled. “It’s our little secret,” he whispered. Tiger said nothing, just turned away.
The flask would have to last Tony’s entire shift or else everything would be ruined. Tony would return from work, squinting in the unkindness of daylight, wobbly and mean-spirited, yelling at Rosanna for no reason at all. Or backhanding Tiger for leaving a stray soldier out on the linoleum for him to crush underfoot. Or stealing into the kids’ room before dawn, fumbling under his daughter’s soft sheets laundered thin and sheer from too much use. “It’s our little secret,” he’d whisper, his breath hot and rancid like something that came out of a sewer. Kewpie would say nothing, just turn away.
Tony was usually too drunk to do much besides grumble, then stumble away, but still, Kewpie couldn’t sleep afterwards. She would hold her body stiff and wooden, afraid to move, scared to breathe freely, fearful he might return. The sour stench of him lingered long after he was gone. Kewpie couldn’t get rid of it, even after scrubbing herself raw the next morning with a washcloth in the big, deep tub which stood on lion’s paws in the bathroom.
Kewpie swore her mother knew. She swore everyone knew. She imagined Rosanna lying awake in her own bed, holding her breath and straining to hear the muffled words, then sighing with relief when Tony plodded into their room and heaved himself onto their sagging bed, still wearing his shiny work shoes.
The Martino Family lived in what was known as a “railroad apartment.” This meant that the rooms of the flat were strung together like railroad cars, each connected to the one before it like the cabs of a train: kitchen and parlor followed by two bedrooms. Kewpie shared a room with Tiger. It was sandwiched between their parents’ bedroom and the second-story porch, bordering the porch being its one redeeming quality.
Kewpie tried to concentrate on the sound of Tiger’s breath buzzing in the slight space between his front teeth and ignore her father’s thick mumbling in the next room. Then Kewpie heard the rustling of cloth, her mother’s hushed voice of refusal, more rustling, pawing, soft rebukes and then finally, silence. A silence that was broken by the rumble of the El in the distance and followed by a quiet even more profound.
The next morning, it was as though nothing had happened. Rosanna was already up and in the kitchen, the faint aroma of the match she’d lit the pilot light with still smoldering in the air. The battered teakettle boiled away on the grate. Tiger chomped enthusiastically on his buttered toast. Her father could be heard snoring two rooms off the kitchen. Kewpie passed the dark mound of his body hunched under the covers as she moved quickly through the railroad rooms, careful not to wake him.
“Shush,” Rosanna said, without even looking at her daughter, who hadn’t made so much as a peep. “Shush.”
The tracks of the El ran rose in front of the Lowes 46th Theater on New Utrecht Avenue, less than a half block away from the Martino home. The wheels screeched and scraped along the wide turn as the train came into the Fort Hamilton Parkway station. Steel against steel, metal grating metal. Sometimes the sound was barely audible but others, it was so earth-shattering that it seemed as though a train would soon come barreling into their second-story apartment, crunching through the porch’s newly-painted white posts, shattering the window glass, spoiling Rosanna’s neatly starched, hand-sewn curtains, shoving its way through Kewpie and Tiger’s bedroom, pounding past the clump of Tony’s sill-soused slumbering form, bursting through the parlor’s fringed lampshades and worn velvet sofa, coursing into the kitchen and taking the icebox along with it until the train came exploding out the other side of the apartment.
This was one of those times. The El sounded so loud this morning, it was almost unbearable. Kewpie clapped her hands over her ears until the train passed. Rosanna was taking the tea ball out of the pot with her back to her children, so only Tiger noticed.
But then again, Tiger noticed everything.
As her cup of tea cooled on the counter, Rosanna stood at the kitchen sink gazing out the window, hands immersed in tepid water. Past the crooked rooftops, some dotted with pigeon coops, others crisscrossed with clotheslines and still others studded with old kitchen chairs, she saw the El flashing in the morning sunlight. Its windows flickered like fleeting gold as the train sped along the tracks, a treasure that was headed far away from her. But what Rosanna didn’t see were her daughter’s hands clapped over her ears, so hard the girl’s long, graceful fingertips were turning white.
Rosanna heard the wheels scream around the turn as the El faded into the distance. It was a sound that brought her husband both to and from her. A sound that kept him occupied and mostly out of trouble during his shifts, sometimes seven days a week. And for those 12 hours each day, Rosanna felt light and free inside, even if she were only visiting the greengrocer or chatting on 13th Avenue with Sadie Lieberwitz.
Sometimes Rosanna found herself humming as she strolled. Sometimes she felt so good that she bought the kids a miniscule box of Seven-Layer Cookies from Piccolo’s Bakery, even though they really couldn’t afford it. ‘Everyone deserves a little sweetness now and then,’ she told herself. ‘Whether they can afford it or not.’ Tiger called them Rainbow Cookies and ate them methodically, stripping them layer by layer and counting before he devoured each color, just to make sure there were indeed seven layers. It was as though the boy didn’t trust anyone’s word, not even a baker’s.
As Rosanna rounded the corner onto 47th Street, everything changed. Her spirit sunk and she had to keep reminding herself how to breathe. When the house came into view, she had to will herself to keep walking toward it. A nice enough place with its well-tended front garden and careworn front porches, but sometimes she could hardly bear the place because he lived there, too. And Tony was either inside, sleeping off a drunk or would soon be home to spoil everything.
Nothing, not even the sight of her mother sitting at the wooden table on the porch, writing a letter to some almost-forgotten friend or carefully flipping cards in a game of solitaire, not the comforting smell of Poppa’s cherry-scented pipe tobacco or the feel of Tiger’s scrawny arms hugging her neck, then reaching for the box of sweets in her shopping bag, could lift her spirits.
And now, staring at the gray dishwater that swallowed her puckered fingers, pushing the rag in and out of chipped teacups and jelly glasses, Rosanna tried not to think of the day ahead. She tried to forget the night before, but couldn’t. The muted voices, the brush of bed sheets, the knowledge of what was but then sharp denial a heartbeat later.
Kewpie couldn’t bear to look at her. And Rosanna couldn’t bear to see her daughter’s face, her firmly set jaw, her silent rage, as the girl chased her cereal around the bowl with a teaspoon. So, Rosanna looked at the back of her daughter’s head, the golden-brown locks, freshly let down from pin curls. She studied Tiger’s cowlick and his profile, lined in concentration, as he moved from toast to toy soldiers. He looked up at her and smiled.
Rosanna turned back to the window and the drab tapestry beyond it. There was no doubt about it: the windows were dirty. No matter how often she cleaned them with a solution of vinegar and warm water, and painstakingly dried them with wads of newspaper, the grime always seemed to return the next day. Perhaps this grimy cast was just the color of the streets or maybe it was the shade of her spirits.
Tony shifted in their bed a few rooms away. Rosanna shuddered. They would be alone today. No kids to protect her. Both Tiger and Kewpie would be in school soon and she would no doubt be summoned to her husband’s side to do what no decent woman did in the middle of the morning. ‘For crying out loud, I just washed,’ she’d think as he groped her. ‘I’ve got the kitchen floor to mop and shopping to do. And my parents...’
Rosanna imagined her father sitting in his own parlor on the floor directly below her bedroom, thoughtfully turning the pages of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle as plaster dust sifted down into the fold. Calmly puffing his pipe, occasionally relighting it, he’d pause to brush the powder from his shoulders while high above his head came the thump, thump, thump of his son-in-law’s relentless, hangover hump. Rosanna could see her mother in the kitchen, paring potatoes onto the sheaves of yesterday’s Eagle in rhythm to the thump, thump, thump. Her bright green eyes momentarily dimmed, the bad eye turned slightly inward, a scowl on her usually-smiling lips.
The door slammed as the children left for school after hurried good-byes. And not three seconds later came a growl from the bedroom. “Roe...Roe...” She had to go. She was his wife, after all. And maybe it would keep him out of the kids’ room. But Rosanna knew this wouldn’t be the case. Tony’s actions had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with meanness, pure and simple. They weren’t hinged on what Rosanna did or didn’t do but had everything to do with him.
Rosanna put down the dishrag, dried her hands on her housedress and went into the bedroom.
She had been christened “Rosanna Maria” but everyone, including her parents, who named her, called her “Roe,” for short. The oldest child in a string of six, she was sharp and dark and serious, even as a toddler.
Rosanna had lived in or near Borough Park all her life, first on Chester Avenue, in the shadow of Green-Wood Cemetery, then here on 47th Street. Green-Wood was the only park that she and her siblings had ever known. They played tag among the statues of shrouded death and sobbing angels, climbed the weeping mimosas and flowering forsythia, whose stalks were so stout that they resembled trees instead of bushes. They scaled the walls of the little granite houses which encased entire dead families and lay their heads on marble pillows atop the grave of Hiram Pardee, watching the clouds change face. They patted the head of Rex, the loyal bronze dog who stood watch over his master’s plot, then ran off screaming bloody murder when Kelly told them Rex had just licked his hand. Kelly did this every single time they visited Rex; his brothers and sisters expected it, looked forward to it even, and gave the same hysterical response each time.
Perhaps this is why Rosanna was so serious—some of the somberness of Green-Wood had rubbed off on her. But none of her siblings were. Not Margaret, who later changed her name to Astrid. Not Julius, who would take long walks with a sketch pad wedged under his arm and a charcoal pencil shoved into the pocket of his knee pants to mount the foreboding staircase of the Brooklyn Museum on Eastern Parkway, sit cross-legged on the cold marble floor and draw the Egyptian artifacts he saw there. Julius was taciturn but he wasn’t nearly as solemn as Rosanna. Nor was Camille, who forced Margaret to entertain her with tap-dances as she sat on the privy. Nor were Jo or Kelly, or her parents, for that matter.
When Rosanna was five, her family moved to the house on 47th Street. It had a wide, wooden wraparound porch and another porch on the second floor. While her mother wanted to put a statue of the Blessed Mother in the little garden out front, Poppa wouldn’t hear of it. He couldn’t see wasting so much space on “Mary on the Half Shell.” With a half smile, Bridget scolded her husband for his sacrilegious sentiments but he held fast, insisting that they’d do fine without Mother Mary watching over their front yard. And they did. He opted for a cherry blossom tree instead.
When it was very hot, she would sleep out on the upper porch with her brothers and sisters, staring at the stars until they grew foggy and her eyes grew heavy. It was spacious on the porch compared to the bedrooms that grew more and more crowded with the arrival of each new child. If you were the counting kind, you would note that there was a space of 14 months between each Paradiso sibling.
Now, you might think that with six children, there would be a shortage of many things in the household but this was not the case at 1128 47th Street. Although money was sometimes tight, Poppa had good skills and was a hard worker. They usually had plenty of everything to go around, not the least of which was love. There were several certainties you could expect when you visited: laughter and joyful mayhem and a great, noisy commotion of some sort, always a high-strung dog or two clamoring underfoot, mostly Pomeranians with pointed faces and jittery nerves.
Bridget always had something bubbling on the stove that smelled delicious, and was delicious. More often than not, her suppers didn’t include meat but they were healthy and savory just the same. Lentil and macaroni soup so thick you could stand a spoon in the bowl. Creamy pasta dishes. Plenty of fresh vegetables seasoned with onions and garlic, sparkling with robust olive oil. Thankfully the children were healthy and solid, and they were also kind and polite. Loving parents, it was true, but Poppa and Bridget were also strict parents. They insisted on good manners and looking presentable, even if the hand-me-downs were a bit shabby by the time they reached the youngest.
Poppa was fortunate to have secured a job at the Brooklyn Navy Yard when he was a teenager, soon after he came to this country. Dependable, determined and smart, he worked his way up in the ranks until he finally made shipwright and in 1922, after the kids were grown, became a member of the International Association of Machinists. He never missed a dues payment until the day he retired.
Before the elevated train tracks shadowed Borough Park, Rosanna recalled it as a place of unpaved streets and farms. There were horse-drawn carts everywhere, fresh milk still warm from the cow and fresh eggs, too. It was a time of simple pleasures, when games like “Ring-O-Levio” and “Kick the Can” could occupy entire afternoons. As would amusements like picking up clumps of dried horseshit and throwing them at each other. Rosanna remembered when cows roamed past the house on the way back to the dairy barn nearby. Pigs and chicken freely wandered the roads, too. But then cobblestones replaced the dirt and Rosanna began to change as well.
Her body erupted into a series of curves and people—men, especially—started to look at her oddly. The trolley car operator, the fellow who drove the milk wagon down the rutted streets, the junk man and even old Mr. Jacobs, who ran the grocery store. Rosanna herself noticed that there were soft pads of flesh where there used to be straight lines. And she began to smell differently, not bad, just different. Like something fertile, wild and strange. This was soon followed by the monthly flow of blood that came hand in hand with pain.
Rosanna’s cotton undershirts no longer contained her new body and her mother insisted she wear chemises, which made her itch. She favored twisting her long dark hair into a pair of braids that trailed down her back. People said it made her look like an Indian princess but she felt from a princess these days, especially with Tony pounding away, raining rivulets of fetid sweat onto her cool, dry skin.
When Rosanna was a girl, she loved to run—and she felt like running now. Running and running and never coming back. In grade school, her specialty had been relay races and she was good at them, too. In fact, she still had the medals to prove it, hidden in a half-forgotten box under her bed. She liked the feel of a baton in her hand—hard and warm and almost alive. Rosanna thought of this as she lay in bed with her husband, reluctantly taking him in her hand. Firmly, as you’d hold a broom handle, and without emotion. It was simply a job that had to be done, like cleaning. But not nearly as rewarding. And just like cleaning, the dirt would pile up and sooner rather than later, you’d have to do it again.
Tony was on top of her now, not even looking into her face. His shoulder was wedged just under her chin. She could see all the way into the kids’ bedroom windows from the high mahogany bed. Just outside the middle window, beside the old ginkgo, was a flowering pear tree, its clusters of delicate white flowers a gift of springtime. She traced its fragile lines with her eyes as Tony absently pounded, pushed and cursed under his breath, then was quiet.
When Rosanna was a child, they had a real pear tree in the front yard and a peach tree out back. Both were long dead. At night, they would gather on someone’s porch and harmonize to popular songs of the day. “Smile Awhile” was one of her favorites and it sounded so lovely in the still, warm darkness. Her father had the first crystal radio on the block. The neighbors would huddle around it and take turns listening, good-naturedly grabbing the headphones from each other when a particularly rousing boxing match was broadcast. She smiled into her husband’s heaving chest, in spite of herself. Those were happy days.
Peeling herself out from under Tony’s body, Rosanna was soon at the sink again, thinking of how very different things were now. She was different. She had long stopped running. She had weathered and matured. She had become cracked and wounded, just like the streets and the crooked rooftops. And there was dirt everywhere. No matter how hard or how long she scrubbed, she just couldn’t seem to get it clean. But she also couldn’t stop trying.
She started with the windows.
“You dirty stink! I’ll break your nut!” Bridget said, tripping over a fluff ball of a dog as she hoisted a steaming pot of gravy from stove to tabletop.
Tiger loved being downstairs in his grandparents’ apartment. There was always something happening, something good. Either Butchie and Ted were in a tizzy or his grandmother was making meatballs or maybe Aunt Astrid had stopped by, straight from her job as a milliner, with wispy feathers clinging to her shoes and skirt. The radio was always crackling either with music or with a serial: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow does.”
And Tiger did, too.
The very air seemed different downstairs. Laden with happiness, hope and adventure. At any given moment, anything could change. His grandfather might shuttle him off to the Navy Yard to survey a destroyer—Poppa had worked on a slew of tugs, cutters, light cruisers and battleships, including the U.S.S. Arizona, which was built there—or his Uncle John might take him to work with him at the projection booth in the Sanders or the Minerva in Park Slope. You never could tell.
It was Easter morning. Hidden eggs found and bright baskets of sweets discovered, Grandma Bridget was now making manicotti. She let Tiger stir the batter for the shells, which she made from scratch, or “from scraps,” as Poppa said. Tiger carefully blended the egg, flour and water into a sunny paste. Rosanna never let him help cook, explaining that he was too messy. And his father said it was women’s work, something only sissies did. But downstairs Tiger was free to do all sorts of magical things he couldn’t do upstairs.
Already, there was a ham baking in the oven, glazed pink with a lovely concoction of honey, black-strap molasses and orange juice, speared with canned pineapples rings and maraschino cherries. Bridget let Tiger stab the pineapples and cherries into the ham with toothpicks, albeit a bit too violently, but in the end, he did the job just fine. There were mashed, candied sweet potatoes too and when it was time, Bridget would let him cover the dish with marshmallows. This she would cook to perfection until the marshmallows were toasted a delicate brown and never burned.
“How’s school?” Bridget asked as she flipped a manicotta shell effortlessly in the cast-iron frying pan.
“School’s school,” Tiger shrugged. “It’s okay.” He was in the fourth grade at Public School 131 down on 43rd Street and Fort Hamilton Parkway.
“You do good in school, you do good in life,” she told her grandson.
As Bridget lightly fried the manicotti shells, Tiger rolled ovals of salami into little tubes for the antipasto and piled them onto a plate. When he and Bridget were finished with the manicotti, together they would assemble the wonderful salad, the first course of their Easter dinner. Antipasto was generally the opener for every big family meal at the Paradiso house, always delicious yet always slightly different. Sometimes it was dotted with pepperoni, roasted peppers or cured olives, other times it was festooned with deviled eggs, celery and carrot sticks, which Bridget let Tiger pare and cut all by himself.
“Who else is coming?” Tiger asked his grandmother. He sat at the table with a bowl of ricotta, a pan of spaghetti sauce, cubes of mozzarella and an empty tray in front of him. Bridget eased her pleasantly-rounded body into the kitchen chair beside him. Tiger could feel her shelf-like chest softly pressing into his arm as she leaned forward slightly, silently presiding over the proceedings. He could also smell a hint of anisette on her breath. “Just a small glass,” Poppa had told her earlier, “to ring in a pleasant holiday.” And that’s all she had, half of a dainty shot glass worth. His father would have guzzled half the bottle.
Tiger gently lifted a flimsy pancake, still warm from the frying pan, and placed it on the tabletop. “Just the usual...” Bridget answered thoughtfully, “and your father.”
Tiger cautiously spooned a dollop of ricotta cheese, beaten silky with egg and mixed with grated cheese, onto the manicotti pancake. “If your dad makes it home in time,” his grandmother added.
Bridget guided Tiger’s spoon back into the ricotta. “A smidge more...Don’t be stingy,” she told him, smoothing down her apron. “It won’t be the same since Sophie, Kelly and the kids moved out to Arizona, but...”
“It will be a lot more quiet,” Tiger said.
“Maybe a little too quiet,” Bridget smiled.
Tiger sprinkled a generous handful of mozzarella onto the mound of creamy ricotta and spread it flat with the back of the spoon and wondered, “How about Aunt Jo and Uncle Harry?”
Bridget stirred the gravy she’d transferred from the large pot to a smaller one. “You know she hasn’t been right since she lost the baby. Says she can’t come out yet because all she sees is babies, babies everywhere. But just give her time, though. She’ll come around.” Bridget took a deep breath, then continued. “And as for your uncle, he’s working overtime but might stop by for dessert with Sully.”
Tiger thoughtfully rolled up the first manicotta and placed it on the tray, lifting it tenderly as one might cradle a newborn kitten. Then he started working on another manicotta. When they finished an entire tray, he would smother the manicotti with his grandmother’s sweet tomato sauce. Then they would build another tray.
“Nu? What’s this?” It was Dr. Lewis. He lived across the street and loved making house calls to 1128 47th Street, especially on Sundays. Today, Kewpie was sick with stomach cramps again. She was curled up in bed and claimed she could barely walk. Said she felt too bad to hunt for Easter eggs so Tiger found them all and split his booty with his sister. Dr. Lewis had been summoned to check on her.
Bridget looked over her shoulder at the squat, pear-shaped man. His horn-rimmed glasses always seemed on the verge of sliding off the slope of his potato-like nose, which dipped toward his mouth. Dr. Lewis had been the family doctor since the Paradiso Family moved to the block. “How about a meatball?” Bridget asked.
“Is it Kosher?”
“About as Kosher as you’ll get in this house,” she concluded. “The meat’s from Adler’s but with cheese and bread soaked in milk…”
Bridget poked around in the gravy pot. Dr. Lewis was already making space for his black leather bag on the crowded table and pulling up a chair. Bridget plopped a heavy meatball into a flowered cake plate and handed Dr. Lewis a fork. He was digging into the meatball before she even set down the plate in front of him.
“How’s Kewpie?” Bridget wondered.
“The usual,” Dr. Lewis told her between bites. “Hot water bottle and an aspirin and she’ll be good as new.”
“Did Rosanna settle up with you?”
“This will do,” Dr. Lewis said, pushing the empty plate toward her.
“Thank you, Morris,” she said quietly. “How about another?”
Dr. Lewis tugged at the tip of his prominent beak. “Well, I really shouldn’t...Eva is making a brisket...” But Bridget had another meatball in the plate before he finished explaining and he gobbled it up almost as quickly as the first.
Astrid and Sam came into the house as they generally did, arguing. Upon Astrid’s head was one of her latest creations. This hat was big as a serving platter and appeared to be just as hefty. It was piled high with ostrich plumes and covered with fake orchids that dripped over its wide brim, much like Dr. Lewis’s proboscis drooped toward his mouth. Astrid looked a great deal like Rosanna, except for her nose, which was tiny and upturned. Before Tiger was old enough to remember, Astrid had her nose fixed. It was around the same time she changed her name and became a blonde.
“Hmmm, you nose didn’t look broken to me,” Poppa quipped when she showed up one day all bandaged and bruised. “But now it does.”
“There was nothing wrong with your nose,” Bridget insisted And indeed, there wasn’t. This was a family of proud, long, bumpy, Roman noses, and to admit there’d been something awry with Astrid’s former muzzle was to criticize their own.
“I think you had a fine nose,” Rosanna snorted, for Astrid’s old nose had been an exact replica of her own. But Astrid waved them all away and waited expectantly for the unveiling of her corrected snout.
When the swelling finally went down, Astrid’s nose looked strangely unfinished, too small for her face and for her abundant personality, which admittedly, was not a good one, yet it was a personality just the same. Astrid was as happy with her store-bought nose as she would be with a nicely-tailored $15 dollar suit from Abraham and Straus. And she wore her new honker just as proudly. Although she never told Sam about her nasal augmentation, he probably knew just the same. How could he not? Why would she be the only one in the Paradiso clan bestowed with a button nose?
Sam was helping Astrid out of her jacket of mouton lamb when Rosanna walked into the dining room, carrying a large platter. “Nice of you to show up when all the work is done,” Rosanna huffed, instead of hello. She put the antipasto onto the almost-filled dining room table and disappeared into the depths of her mother’s kitchen.
Astrid admired the pretty pinwheel pattern of food: tomatoes, mozzarella, circles of hardboiled egg. Rolls of Genoa salami sliced through it like the spokes of a wheel. Little heaps of marinated carrots and cauliflower were interspersed throughout, as were olives of two colors: khaki green and shiny black like the coal in the cellar bin. When Astrid reached forward to sneak a taste, Rosanna smacked away her hand. “Jeez Louise, you’re always prowling around like a cat,” Astrid complained.
“You’ll ruin it,” Rosanna told her, then put down a basket of bread. “Besides, you have to wait for Grace.”
“Is Grace coming too?” Sam wondered and caught Rosanna around the waist.
When she brandished the bread knife at her brother-in-law, Sam released Rosanna in mock fear. “Heathen,” she smiled and headed back toward the kitchen. “And it wouldn’t kill you to help set the table, Margaret,” Rosanna called to her sister.
“It’s Astrid,” she called back.
Tiger came in with a slab of butter on a plate and made space for it on the table beside the bread. “You make this?” Sam asked his nephew, gesturing toward the antipasto as Astrid slipped a tube of salami between her fire-engine-red lips.
“I helped,” Tiger admitted.
“Nice.” Sam patted Tiger on the head and pretended to pull a dime from behind his ear. “Buy yourself something you’re not supposed to have,” Sam told the boy surreptitiously, handing him the coin.
The kitchen was a flurry of activity. Boiling pots were everywhere. Two trays of manicotti cooled on windowsills. The gorgeous, glistening ham waited tolerantly on the table. Camille put the marshmallow-covered sweet potatoes mixture into the oven as her husband John, wearing an apron over his shirt and tie, dipped a heel of Italian bread into the gravy.
“Not yet, Camille,” Bridget said. “Tony’s not...”
Rosanna broke in. “Don’t wait for Tony.”
“We eat as a family, Roe.”
Rosanna couldn’t look anyone in the eye, not even Tiger. “He didn’t come home last night,” she said to the glazed ham.
John rested one hand on his sister-in-law’s shoulder and unfastened his apron with his other hand. He felt her flinch slightly. “I’ll go look for him.”
Rosanna shook her head.
“But he could be dead in the street somewhere,” Camille protested.
Tiger’s heart did a joyful flip. He lived in hope.
“No, John,” said Rosanna. “Not this time.” She went into the hallway to call for Kewpie then continued down the hall to the front porch to let Poppa know supper was ready. He laid down his pipe and newspaper on the card table and followed her inside. In a minute, they were all there. All except for Tony.
Dinner was a blur of plates being passed back and forth, of food being swept up, swallowed and replaced. There was a certain poetry to the meal, a particular order. Not in the stuffy, Emily Post sense, but in a natural, humanistic manner. Everyone made sure the others had enough to eat before digging in for more themselves.
For example, you asked if someone wanted the last of the marinated mushrooms before swishing it onto your plate. If you knew someone liked eggplant as much as Poppa did, you pushed the remainder onto his dish without asking, like Bridget did just now. If you remembered that Sam enjoyed the curl of pigskin Bridget always put into the gravy for extra flavor, simmered to a succulent orange tendril, you offered it to him first. And there were no false niceties, no polite “Oh no, I just couldn’t...” Because you could. Of course, you could. You were with family and there was no sense pretending.
Rosanna herself was tired of pretending. Pretending could be an extremely exhausting business. She was sick of acting as though everything was all right when in reality, it wasn’t. Even though she tried her best to hide it, to cover for Tony’s shenanigans, the whole family and most of the neighbors knew what was going on. Only they were too polite to say anything.
Kewpie toyed with the manicotti on her plate until the center oozed out, all white and creamy in a sea of red sauce. She knew that her grandmother beat the ricotta smooth with egg and added a pinch of Parmesan when most people just plunked the cheese, straight from the container, into a store-bought shell. Bridget, in turn, knew that manicotti was Kewpie’s favorite. This is why she made it instead of lasagna, her grandson’s first choice. These days, Kewpie seemed to need a little more of a pick-me-up than Tiger did.
Sunday was the only day Rosanna allowed the kids soda, insisting always upon milk for strong bones and teeth. But Bridget put her foot down at serving tomato sauce with milk at any time; the very thought made her ample stomach do flip-flops. Poppa poured Tiger a glass of root beer without asking. Then Poppa, the keeper of the soda vault, returned the sacred bottle to the spot on the floor beside his feet where he guarded it like Cerberus.
Conversation swirled around Kewpie’s head, moved through her like smoke:
“Take that damn thing off your head, Astrid...It looks like a pigeon gone beserk...”
“I’ll have you know this is the height of...”
“Tiger, elbows off the...”
“Where’d you get the sausage, Momma? It tastes...”
“So, then I said to him, ‘If you don’t like it...”
“Sam, you told this one at least a million times before. How many...”
“The Kloppenbergs are a very good-looking people...”
“Are you kidding? Minna with that faccia cavallo?”
“...Spencer Tracy. They say it’s the best picture he ever...”
“Stop being such a gavone, Johnny...”
“Lettie, Julius and the boys are at...”
“Kewpie, you hardly ate.”
Pasta plates were cleared away, washed and put back onto the table. The sisters swiftly left and returned with new platters: ham, sweet potatoes, escarole, corn, boiled white potatoes tossed in butter and fresh chopped parsley. Sounds began blending together: cutlery scraping china, chewing, bread being torn into chunks, sighs of culinary ecstasy and brief silence broken by the screech of the El’s brakes in the distance.
Then came the sound Kewpie dreaded most of all: the sound of a key in the door. His key. First, the jingling, which could have been the noise of the dogs’ tags ringing against their collars as they begged frantically for table scraps. But no. It was him. Next, came the scrape of key in lock, then the shove of a firm shoulder against the front door.
John glanced up from his plate and saw his niece’s shoulders slump forward, as if in defeat. Tiger’s body noticeably stiffened as his father’s drunken footsteps tapped closer and echoed down the hall. Rosanna didn’t even look up, just placed her fork in her plate and waited.
Tony stood in the doorway a moment before coming in. He was still wearing his uniform. “Happy Easter, everybody,” he bellowed. Although he tried to regulate the timbre of his voice, his volume control seemed to be busted. He balanced a sack of cookies from Piccolo’s precariously on the edge of the table. When it fell to the ground, he didn’t even bother trying to pick it up. Probably because he knew there was a very good chance he’d topple over.
On shaky legs, Tony navigated his way to his empty place setting at the table. Rosanna bolted up. “I’ll get you some manicotti.”
He grabbed her wrist, a little too roughly, in protest. “No, you sit. Eat. Enjoy,” he told her. But Rosanna couldn’t eat; he was still holding onto her right wrist. She wilted back into her seat without mentioning it.
Tiger turned away from his father and instead, concentrated on the candied sweet potatoes. He examined the toasted marshmallow crust until his eyes watered. Perhaps if he could have just a spoonful, a smidgen, a taste, it would miraculously set everything right again. “Dad, could you please pass the sweet potatoes?” he asked his father, trying to involve him in the meal.
Rosanna tried to wrestle her wrist out of Tony’s grip. “I’ll do it,” she said.
Tony finally released her arm. “What? I can’t take care of my own son?” the tipsy man asked rhetorically.
Still standing, Tony leaned forward, a little too forward because he fell directly into the sweet potatoes, face first.
Easter dinner was officially over.
It seemed to Tiger that everyone in his family had more than one name. First, there was your given name, the one handwritten in script on your birth certificate. “Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth,” it said in a fancy scrolled flourish near the bottom of his, which was from Methodist Episcopal Hospital on Sixth Street. The scroll curled around an oval which depicted a cartoon-like Christ Child hugging an equally-crudely drawn Mother Mary tightly about the neck.
Your Christian name was the one the nuns at religious instruction at Saint Catherine’s insisted on calling you because they only recognized Saints’ names. “I never heard of a Saint Tiger, Anthony Joseph Martino, Jr.,” Sister Patrick Maureen constantly reminded him. (The kids dubbed her Sister Patrick Moron behind her back, which was definitely not her Christian name.) Who ever heard of a woman called Patrick? Maybe she wasn’t really a woman at all. And under all those black and white robes, assorted hoods and mysterious layers, past the calamari collar that ringed her neck, beyond the clinking strand of rosary beads as frightening and foreboding as Jacob Marley’s chains in A Christmas Carol, who really knew?
So, in addition to your Christian name, there was your nickname. Tiger’s grandfather was responsible for most of the family monikers and they were always perfect. In fact, Poppa had given Tiger his and that’s one reason the boy liked it so much.
Named after his father, Tiger was known as Junior until he was about six. Small and scrappy, Tiger fancied himself a big bruiser, even before he was christened with his formidable handle. As the story goes, one day the boy was proudly displaying his miniscule bicep for Poppa. Tiger stood on a dining room chair, chest puffed, flexing his spaghetti-thin arm. He flexed it so hard that his knickers fell down. Poppa laughed so vigorously that he fell into a chair. “You’re a real Tiger McPunch,” he said, wiping the tears from his eyes, thus christening the nondescript boy with a pugilist’s name. Tiger would certainly have to be tough with a father like his, Poppa reasoned silently to himself. Maybe having a strong name would help. But then again, probably not.
Poppa was also the one who started calling Tiger’s sister Angela “Kewpie.” It came to him the first time he ever saw her, swaddled in a pink blanket Bridget had crocheted herself, as Rosanna carried the baby into the house straight from United Israel-Zion. The child was so chubby and peachy that her skin resembled stuffed plastic. She reminded Poppa of a Kewpie doll from Coney Island: plump, rosy-cheeked, with enough hair for a topknot. Everyone else agreed, and from then on, Angela was known as Kewpie.
Even though Kewpie no longer resembled her namesake, the soubriquet, as Aunt Astrid would say, still remained. In recent years, Kewpie had grown into a tall, slender teenager, willowy even in cheap clothes and slacks. Her hair was honey-blonde and bone straight, coaxed into a flutter of waves by pin curls laboriously fastened to her head with bobby pins every night. Her fair skin was dusted with freckles. Her eyes were brilliant and laughing, except when she was home. Except when her father was home, was closer to the truth. That’s when they became dark, gray and clouded, as though a storm had rolled in. And indeed, one had.
Then there was Kelly. Born Nicholas, he was one heck of a ball player. The first time Poppa saw his son whack a hardball two sewers away with a broomstick handle and watched him round the trashcan-cover bases to home plate (an empty feed bag), he yelled, “Slide, Kelly, slide!” It was a popular cry from an old song of the same name which originally referred to Mike “King” Kelly, the Chicago Nationals’ flamboyant catcher-outfielder. Though it had been many years since Nicholas played stick ball, he was still known as Kelly.
Veronica, the nice Jewish girl Kelly had taken for a wife, also possessed a handful of handles. At her naming ceremony eight days after her birth, the rabbi proclaimed her Sophie but Veronica was the name she herself chose when she converted to Catholicism to marry Kelly. Although Kelly had fallen in love with a buxom gal named Sophie, he still loved Veronica, or Sophie Veronica as she was sometimes called, perhaps twice as fiercely. But Kelly was also fond of referring to his wife as “Dear Old Girl” in private. Despite the fact that she wasn’t old—she was a few years his junior—she was still dear to his heart. Few people knew of Veronica’s lovely nickname but Tiger heard Uncle Kelly slip with it once or twice, and the boy smiled each time.
Now, Tiger’s grandmother’s Christian name was Margarita in Italian, Margaret in English, but no one ever used either. Some close friends and longtime neighbors didn’t even know her real name. As far back as anyone could remember, Poppa called her Bridget, short for “Bridget O’Flynn,” after the song, because she looked more Irish than Italian, with her startling green eyes, creamy ivory skin and light hair. Her hair was threaded with three shades of gray these days but was still beautiful. So, people either knew her as Bridget or Mrs. Paradiso, if they didn’t know her very well. And her children called her Momma, even when they were grown.
Poppa himself had a slew of nicknames. The grandkids, even his own kids and wife, referred to him as Poppa. As the unofficial mayor of 47th Street, he was affectionately known as Uncle Mike by most of Borough Park and simply as Mike at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He spoke smatterings of eight different languages, even Chinese to Mr. Wong who ran the chop suey place under the El. No one called him Michael Archangel, his given name, except for Bridget, every so often in the dark, in a whisper so faint he could barely hear it. But he could feel it. And it sounded just like it did when they were young.
Harry’s patrol partner and best friend Sully was christened Patrick Sullivan. “We were so poor, they couldn’t afford to give me a middle name,” he liked to quip to Tiger. But no one called him by his real name either. He was always Sully, except to Rosanna, who dubbed him Paddy, sometimes Patrick, but never Sully. And she always said his name with a slight smile curling her lips, as though it felt good just to say it.
Even the El had many names. Officially, it was known as the West End Line but few called it that. The El was shorthand, a secret code. To some, it was simply “The Train.” Yet, the El was so much more than just a train. It was majestic, precarious, dangerous, rising impossibly above the streets like an urban snake. Rectangular concrete blocks more than two foot by three foot anchored its girders of steel to the street below. Its massive wooden railroad ties took four strong men to lift. Spikes, now beginning to rust, plates and rails held the ties in place. Then there was the slick, smooth, scary third rail. One touch of your boot sole could turn you into a crispy critter.