When the World Was Young Read online

  WHEN THE WORLD WAS YOUNG

  Tony Romano

  To my girls

  Maureen, Lauren, Angela, and Allie

  Contents

  Part 1

  1976

  Though Mama may not have seen this as consolation, Papa…

  1

  At the first glimpse of her stepping off the westbound…

  2

  Like the dust that collects at the tops of doors.

  June 23, 1977

  If it weren’t for our June meetings at the cemetery…

  3

  The front page of the Chicago Daily News had a…

  4

  When she was nine Victoria came home talking about the…

  June 23, 1977

  Freddy calls me the almost priest. I like that.

  5

  For weeks Santo did his own birdwalking—down Grand past Ashland…

  Part 2

  August 1977

  Mama’s boy they used to call me at home. What…

  6

  After Santo had alphabetized the whiskey bottles along the bar—Ballantine’s,…

  7

  Angela Rosa gazed out at the tall stand of cypress…

  8

  When Agostino received the first telegram he didn’t know where…

  October 1978

  I gaze out my bedroom window, and I can’t stop…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part 1

  1976

  NICHOLAS PECCATORI

  Though Mama may not have seen this as consolation, Papa didn’t fall in love with Sophia Loren until about a year after poor little Benito died. At least that’s how I’d always understood it, Papa’s grief giving way to obsession. The one thing Mama and Papa did agree on was they’d never use Benito’s room ever again, at least not for anything as functional as a bedroom.

  How I know all this is still a mystery to me since I was born a full two years after Benito drew his last breath, two years to the day. On birthdays I’m keenly aware of the somber glances at Benny’s photograph that sits atop the china cabinet shelf in the dining room, along with the raucous laughs and the slaps on the back that seem too exuberant. In the photograph, Benito stares clear at you from his high chair, his dark saucer eyes showing no signs of the fever that would soon ravage his body.

  I know I’ve taken in much of our family history on my own, away from the pitying stares of my older brothers and sister, who look at me as the one who came after, the only innocent one. Yet innocence isn’t what I feel. I feel instead that I was there when Benito died. He lifts his infant arms to me, I touch his hands, and they are like fire. I see the mourners file out of St. Columbkille behind two pallbearers and the tiny casket, then the awful lowering.

  Two years later, before I had the words to know him, Benito was by my side. He was there when I nuzzled on Mama’s grief. I have been in her arms at the precise time of Benito’s passing, and in her innermost thoughts, she has noted it. My twisted mouth sucking became his. I have seen him in Mama’s eyes on my first day of kindergarten, and picture day, and anytime I refused to eat or showed the slightest sign of fever. I have seen him when a certain light flashed through the curtained window on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I am the living marker of what could have been.

  Benito should have been the last, I know. And I am an afterthought, bittersweet and haunting. On those rare afternoons, never at night, when the house is empty, I amble into Benito’s old room, Papa’s sanctuary now, and lean on the edge of the bed until my head stops reeling, until the walls stop whirling. Papa’s smell steadies me, an attic scent that speaks of ages and reminds me always of oil and church. And behind that, wafting up from a drawer in the blond dresser in the corner, the fragrance of baby lotions.

  If you push aside the Sophia Loren memorabilia—the poster, the records, the videocassettes, the news clippings, the heart-shaped ashtray embossed in red, white, and green, showing Sophia blowing a kiss—you can still find signs of my brother. The tiny bed of course. That’s what hits you first, what you always come back to. His dresser. The mitt-shaped night-light. His powder-blue rosary draped across another photo of Benny as an infant with cheeks too red that sits on the nightstand, angled toward the lace pillow.

  When I sit on that bed the world is transformed. Benito is finishing college, majoring in medicine. We look like brothers, everyone says—short spark-plug frames with round faces, dark, with Papa’s thick hair and Mama’s broad shoulders. We ride the back of the CTA bus together to Wrigley Field and sit in the bleachers. He teaches me the nuances of the game, what pitch should come next, where to place the ball. He loves the game almost more than he loves me. And when I take stock, there are six brothers and sisters in the Peccatori family, not five. Six there are, and always will be.

  1

  1957

  At the first glimpse of her stepping off the westbound Grand Avenue trolley, Santo Peccatori clutched his shirtfront in longing. He looked on from the silver-tinted storefront panes of Mio Fratello, where he worked for his father and uncle on weekends wiping tables and washing cocktail glasses, duties his younger brothers, Anthony and Alfredo, would soon take on now that school was out, while Santo, having just graduated high school, would busy himself stocking liquor and wine, pouring the occasional drink when his father was out and the men couldn’t wait for Uncle Vince to wrest himself from a table of patrons, and positioning himself in this very spot so he could spy Sylvia Gomez descending a trolley at 4:05 P.M. after an eight-hour shift at Illinois Bell.

  She had on a sleeveless, floral-print dress splashed in marigolds that reminded him of the dresses his mother wore when he was a boy. She waited while the bus, a pale green-and-cream metal grasshopper, pulled along by hundreds of crackling volts of live cable overhead, swept past her and blotted her from view for several seconds. The trolley poles clanked along the wire, zapped twice, and the bus disappeared. As she waited for traffic to recede so she could cross Grand and circle behind Mio Fratello to get to her apartment, she stretched and turned as if she’d just been awakened from a long slumber. Santo gazed at her bare legs. She wore her black slip-ons, the ones with the small heel that made the slide of her leg tilt ever so slightly. On her right calf, the result of sitting too long in one position, was a blushed circle, the size of a peach, the size of Santo’s palm.

  Santo’s father, Agostino, unloading bottles of Gallo wine from crates behind the bar, glanced also at the bus stop where Sylvia Gomez now tucked her grand rivulets of thick dark hair behind her shoulder and pulled on the strap of her purse, ready to cross. Agostino set down a mug-handled gallon and strolled outside to the back of the tenement. The ground floor of the flat was a combination liquor store–bar—some called it a club—where the same twenty or thirty men shelled out sweaty dollars for shots of liqueur or schnapps and then retreated to the back lot on hot summer nights such as this to wager on bocce. Agostino picked up the wide rake and worked at leveling the fine stones in the bocce alley, one of the varied tasks he left undone each afternoon until this time so he could step outside with a degree of nonchalance and appear busy. He and his brother, Vincenzo, who lived in the apartment above the bar, had framed the stones with two-by-tens and lag bolts seven summers ago. Each year they added a fresh coat of pine-green paint to the boards and darkened the red foul lines, so that except for a few dents from errant tosses, the lane looked untrodden.

  He whistled a slow aria, each note precise and assured, until he spotted Sylvia Gomez out the corner of his eye.

  “Signora,” he called, leaning an elbow on his rake, wiping the back of his hand a
cross his forehead, as if he’d been at the stones for hours. He had to work at keeping his left eye still—his father used to call him sinistra—and that combination of the wandering eye and the subtle tightening needed to steady it made him seem vaguely pensive. Though average in height, Agostino still appeared lanky, his khaki trousers hanging modishly, supported by a thin brown belt. His dark mustache, peppered gray, bristled with perspiration.

  “Señor,” she said, and nodded.

  “Another hot day, no?”

  He marveled at the sound of the words in his head before he spoke, pure Midwestern, and what happened to those sounds once they were pushed into the air, revealing the sharp accent he worked to soften, even after twenty-two years in America.

  She slowed her steps and finally stopped. “Not as hot as yesterday.”

  Their eyes remained fixed on each other. She slung her purse onto her other shoulder and Agostino scratched at his chin. They broke their gaze and one after the other glanced at the adjacent brown brick flat. Tucked away along the side of the building where the sun blasted each morning was a patch of dirt that served as a vegetable garden: tomatoes and cucumbers and sprigs of parsley.

  Inside, Santo peered out and calculated that Sylvia Gomez, who at twenty-seven or twenty-eight, was no closer to his father’s age than his own. Santo, eighteen in a month, sourly concluded that Sylvia Gomez anticipated these meetings as much as his father.

  Agostino waved her toward a table. “Come. Sit. A glass of vino.”

  “I need to start dinner,” she said.

  “A small glass.” He moved to one of the white, wrought-iron tables and pulled out a chair. “Please. Sit. In the shade here it’s cool.”

  Santo knew his father would not bellow out his drink order to him, not with Mrs. Gomez. He was tempted to bring out drinks anyway and remind him that Mama wanted him home for dinner tonight. Mama, who would be cooking all day because her sister, Zia Lupa, would be back from her travels. Except for Uncle Vince, who would need to mind the store, the whole family would be there, together for once. Zia Lupa at the head, Agostino across from her. Mama next to Zia, though Mama would barely sit. Anthony and Alfredo on one side, sharing their private adolescent jokes, Santo and his sister, Victoria, a year younger, on the other, who would pout all night about being treated like the youngest, though she was sixteen. She wasn’t allowed anywhere near Mio Fratello. And baby Benito, of course, squeezed in near Victoria, who would watch over him.

  Santo waited until his father glided in and out with the wine, then began wiping down one of the four bar stools, a spot that afforded him a partial view of Mrs. Gomez’s back. Off her right shoulder a tiny portion of an ivory strap had slipped out from her dress. Santo pictured her putting on the brassiere this morning, imagined how she held it in place somehow while fastening the clasp. How she stepped into the marigolds, pushing her arms into the holes of the sleeves. Or did she lift the dress high and let it cascade around her like so much water? These bedroom gestures were a great mystery to him. Santo couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but he heard their frequent laughter. After each laugh his father would glance at her small round breasts, then cast his eyes down the alley toward her apartment.

  Santo stepped closer, straining to hear. Agostino was telling her about the Great War, recounting the familiar story of his father in Italy getting shot by the Germans. He told her what he and Vince were doing when they received the telegram from overseas—smoking a cigarette in their bar of course. On top of that, Roosevelt took great pleasure in lambasting Mussolini every day, causing hardworking Italians in America to cower like dogs. Santo wondered why he would tell her such stories, other than to evoke pity. For any other listener, his father would have added the part about naming his youngest son Benito, how he wouldn’t allow a madman like Mussolini to tarnish such a beautiful name, but his father must have determined that such defiance would not charm her and perhaps even push her away. And he certainly wouldn’t add that Benito was named after his wife’s grandfather, a kindly old man who had split his time on this earth farming and painting frescoes on village walls in Italia.

  There was still a certain formality to these afternoon meetings, which suggested that his father was not yet sleeping with Mrs. Gomez, a thought that emboldened Santo. But his father’s affairs were shrouded always in deception, so Santo could not be sure.

  He pushed open the screen door and stuck his head into the bright afternoon. “Hey, Pop. Is Uncle Vince upstairs?”

  Mrs. Gomez put down her glass and flashed a broad smile at Santo. Agostino stared openly at her breasts.

  “Non lo so,” Agostino told his son.

  “Hello, Santo,” Mrs. Gomez said.

  “Hello.”

  “Why?” Agostino asked.

  “Why what?” Santo wanted to know.

  “Why do you need Zio?”

  “Oh. I just wanted to know if he ordered any more JB. We’re low.”

  Agostino leaned toward Mrs. Gomez, pointed to the store, and said, “He think he own store.” He shrugged and conceded, “He can do by himself.”

  Santo felt his chest swell. If he were three years older, he could run the place, a prospect that filled him. Maybe they would even rename the store Mio Fratello e Figlio. “Can I get you anything else, Mrs. Gomez?”

  She took one last swallow, pulled a scalloped napkin across her mouth, and waved away his request. “No, no, I need to go.”

  “Some coffee maybe?” Santo pleaded.

  “No.”

  “Water?”

  She shook her head.

  “A toothpick?”

  Santo got the laugh he expected. He wasn’t the best-looking of his brothers—his protruding ears were dented at the top and his friends at one time called him “walnut” because of the shape of his head—but he breathed confidence. As a boy, he was the one who pranced around on his heels at parties offering kisses to Zia Lupa and Uncle Vince and all the other guests while his brothers cowered in Mama’s lap. He was the one who, when asked if he had a girlfriend, would flash even teeth and offer a school snapshot of the lucky girl for the week. Girls saw in him someone who was assured and harmless, which, when he began dating at sixteen, allowed him to get much farther up their blouses than the girls might have originally intended.

  As Mrs. Gomez walked away down the alley, father and son looked on. Agostino ran a pocket comb straight back through his thinning hair, his free hand trailing with delicate precision, a gesture his son secretly admired. His father’s sinewy arms, bulging with each greasy swipe, reminded Santo of the graceful sweeps of a bodybuilder. Santo turned and went inside, the screen door slapping behind him. He felt an ache of anticipation in his chest, not unlike the ache he felt as a boy sitting on the front stoop, waiting for the mailman to deliver the prize he’d won for selling candy tins for St. Columbkille. But he was no longer a boy. He was through with school forever. And summer’s heat was just beginning.

  Santo knocked on the window of Uncle Vince’s back door, three hard raps. He knocked again and again, peering into the green-and-gray, checker-tiled kitchen. His uncle lived alone in the second-floor apartment above the bar. His wife, Gloria, left him in 1934 after a year of marriage, claiming he spent more time at his bar than with her. She was big and blond, and Vince still carried pictures of her in his wallet he liked to show. A real lulu, he told everyone. Shortly after she left, Vince sent a telegram to his brother, Agostino, in Italy, offering him partnership because he’d already begun his drinking and knew he’d lose the business without help. Agostino balked at first. He’d just completed a long apprenticeship with the tailor Lucca Strazzi in Naples, but the prospects of a thriving shop were slim in his small village. He’d need to move elsewhere, either to Naples or to America. After increasingly urgent telegrams from his brother, Agostino settled into the second bedroom of his brother’s apartment atop the bar they renamed Mio Fratello.

  Santo turned to the Singer sewing machine behind him on the enclosed
porch. His father’s. He took in the aroma of the A-1 oil can on the machine’s table sleeve. The black, cast-iron pedal, wrought with leaves, brought him back for a moment to his father’s lap not so long ago, a place he suddenly missed with such force that he felt himself begin to sway. The pedal made a sweet, rhythmic click when his father worked it, causing a leather belt to rotate iron wheels that pushed the needle like a greased piston. A single black thread dangled from the spool at the top of the machine.

  He had a vague memory of the sewing machine being in the basement at home, his mother mending a collar, but this seemed more dream than real, which confirmed an idea he’d been obsessed with lately—that, because he and Mama were close and little had changed between them over the years, nearly all memories of his mother were cloaked in the same soft haze. All their days blended together. They were still affectionate with each other, his mother pinching his cheek, adding a light slap as a reminder to behave, Santo responding with a hurried hug or a squeeze of her hand. He could still make her laugh and coax her into singing at night on the porch, Benito cradled in her arms. And neither of them tired of the little tricks he played on her, Santo sneaking into her kitchen to dip a piece of warm bread in the red sauce, blaming the missing piece on Anthony and Alfredo—or stealing a meatball and spreading the rest around the pan to conceal his deceit. Which also explained the vividness of sitting on his father’s lap, since this contrasted so sharply with how they got along today, like two men working side by side, bound by blood but unwilling or unable to confide in the other. Maybe they didn’t have the shared language to do so, both of them barred from conveying satisfaction or loss or yearnings deeper than the surface hungers that dictated their exchanges. The sandwich is good? The customers are fine? The shelves are full? Yes, Papa. Tutti e buona. Everything is good. How could he begin to tell his father he missed him? And did his father feel the same?