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A
Trip Home He stood at the back
door collecting drizzle on his hat brim and overcoat, bulging K-Mart bags
dangling from his hands. He had forgotten bus fare for the ride home; was my
father around? We wound through Branch
Brook Park, the cherry blossom trees bare and shiny with rain. The crackling
of plastic bags buried the low hum of the radio as Italo pulled out each item
and checked it against the long receipt: Tylenol boxes, film containers,
jumbo Hershey bars, Marlboro cartons, economy packages of Wrigley’s. With
pride he had told me the details of the flight, proved them by taking the
ticket out of his coat pocket several times to show me: Alitalia flight 832,
leaving Newark at 9:30 p.m. next Friday. Bags in lap, he was poised to curry
favor with the natives by awing them with this bounty of American purchasing
power. “Thirty-two years I
waited,” Italo said. “That’s longer than you’ve been alive. Dio mio, I’m
old.” He cackled at his quip and sent a volley of spittle onto the windshield
and my right arm. I pulled a right at
Franklin Street since the old way through North Sixth was no longer safe
because of angry kids in hateful neighborhoods. Before I started kindergarten
my father had moved us out of Newark and across the river to Arlington as
part of the exodus following the riots. We used to live next door to Italo
and his sister, my father’s paesani. “Everything will be
different. Il Terremoto destroyed the whole town. They say I won’t recognize
it.” I had never heard any
of the old men call Italo by his name when he wasn’t around. He was known as
Giofecco, a nickname I think means the junk at the bottom of a bottle of bad
wine. My father had grown apart from him during the past few years. Italo had
remained on North Twelfth Street, never bought a car, never married. We had
moved to a nicer town and spoke English at home; we had made it to the middle
class on a machinist’s salary. “Do you remember
living on Twelfth Street?” he asked. “I remember little
things. I remember our apartment, Zia Carmela’s apartment” — he crossed
himself — “I remember the bonfires in the yard for San Giuseppe.” He waved me silent.
“You were small, a little boy. It used to be nice. Everybody’s dead.” He
laughed. “That’s life, you know.” We crossed Bloomfield
Avenue and entered the North Ward with its two- and four-family apartment
houses crouched together with little room to breathe. We passed my old house,
a red brick fortress that was more familiar to me from home movies than from
memory. I parked the Cavalier in Italo’s driveway and helped him out. He
winced at the tight squeeze between the door and the bushes and brushed down
his overcoat with his hands. Outside of summertime I never saw him dressed in
anything but tie, vest, and jacket, an old-time tailor’s proud stance against
the conquest of casual clothes for adults. He turned to me and grabbed my
hand. “Leave the bags in the car,” he whispered. He answered my puzzled look
with a finger to his lips and a nod toward the front door. His sister stood
partially concealed behind it, eyeing us both. Her hair was still a rusty red
with only a hint of gray, her round pale face splashed with freckles,
characteristics I imagined passed down from some Vandal invader raping an ancestral
plebeian centuries earlier. I followed Italo
barehanded. He walked slowly, as though her gaze weighed him down until his
chin grazed his chest. We stood in the
lobby, his sister forcing a rectangular smile over clenched dentures. “Come sta, signora.” She clasped her hands
in front of her. “Bene. I haven’t seen you in so long. How is your family?” “They’re fine.” The smile disappeared
as she turned to Italo, his hands tapping the sides of his thighs. “And you? Where have
you been?” “At Angelo’s house. I
took the bus.” Her face tensed.
Italo looked down at his feet, over to mine, to the bottom of the door. She
smiled again. “And he made you take
him here? He’s a crazy old man.” I chuckled. “No, signora.
He has pictures I want to see. Pictures of Calabritto. When he and my father
were boys.” “Ah yes, pictures.” Italo held his hat in
his hands, examining the inside as if he were looking for a place to hide. “You can give him
something to eat?” Her voice stung. Italo looked up, surprised and slightly
angered. “Of course. Of
course.” “I’m not very
hungry.” She ignored me. “Go
upstairs, then. Go get the pictures.” She stood in the lobby as the pounding
of our footsteps echoed through the stairwell. I heard her apartment door
close after we went around the first landing and put my hand on the small of
Italo’s back to support his climb. The apartment
appeared exactly as I had remembered it: the rabbit-eared television in the
corner, the ashtray on the coffee table, the brown couch bracing the blank
white wall. I followed him into the kitchen and sat at the table as he
removed his hat and overcoat in the adjoining bedroom. “I don’t have too much
to eat,” he shouted to me. “You like tomatoes?” “Yes.” I opened the
mini-venetian blinds behind me and watched underwear and t-shirts waving on
the lines above the concrete backyards. Italo shuffled into
the kitchen, leaning slightly to the left, excited by his role as host. He
pushed some strands of gray hair onto the top of his long oval head and stood
with indecision. “You sure you want
tomatoes? I don’t have too many things.” “I like tomatoes.
With bread.” He nodded and
instantly the kitchen swirled with the clanking of plates and knives, drawers
open and shut several times, cabinets slamming closed and glasses clinking
on the table. In his flurry he used three knives to cut one tomato and gave
me four glasses for the wine, each a different size and shape, all coated
with water spots and an occasional speck of dried food on the rim. As he
hunched over the counter dousing the tomato slices with oil and oregano, I
cleaned a small glass with my shirt and filled it halfway from the green
gallon bottle of Carlo Rossi. “Your father and I
have known each other since we were kids.” He held one hand parallel to the
floor at his waist to show their actual size as the other slid the plate of
tomatoes onto the table. I forked some into my plate as Italo stuffed a
napkin into his shirt and pushed the bread and provolone my way. “One year
apart. He went to work for the locksmith, I went to learn from the tailor.
That was all there was. Unless you were an idiot. Then you learned to be a
barber.” He shrugged and bit into a hunk of bread and tomato, still speaking
with a piece of crust pushing out of his cheek. “He was smart, your father.
All the kids liked him. He had respect.” I nodded at the
familiar boast I had often heard at home. “Listen.” His face
became severe as he held his glass over the table. “We had nothing. Nothing. Then the war came.” He shuddered
theatrically and let out a moan. “Terrible.” He gulped his wine. “1944. The
worst year. I’ll never forget it. Ask your father. We had to climb the trees
at night on the farmer’s property to get figs.” He cackled loudly. “Ask your
father. We were hungry all the time. We climbed up the tree and ate the figs
and there were ants all over them. Nobody cared!” He coughed as he laughed.
“Che misarable! Che misarable!” His laughter died
down to hiccups after another glass of wine. “Have you ever been back?” I
asked. “1964, when my mother
died. I was here for six years. My sister took care of her while she was
sick. I sold the property and brought my sister here. She didn’t want to
come.” He shrugged. “Now it’s different. The earthquake destroyed everything.
It’s all new, except for the mountains.” He paused. “If it wasn’t for work, I
never would have left.” When the tomato plate
was empty I declined his offer to make coffee. He cleaned the table as
noisily as he had set it, wrapping the tablecloth and unfurling it out the
window to free it from crumbs. I followed him
through the living room. He drew open the folding doors to another room and
turned on the single bare bulb in the ceiling. Cardboard boxes and black
trunks were stacked waist-high around the walls, some covered with white
sheets. I watched as Italo put on his glasses and bent over the boxes, touching
their sides to divine their contents, then moving on. He pulled out one and
dragged it across the floor to my feet, excitement spreading across his face.
He brought two folding chairs over and we sat opposite each other looking
down into a box filled with papers and loose photographs. He seemed to forget
about me as he quickly peered into folders and envelopes, discarding each on
the floor before digging in again. He plucked a little green book and flipped
through the pages before handing it to me. “My passport when I came to
America.” I caressed the leather cover with my thumb and flipped it open. The
script in it was faded. I stared at the picture of Italo, here a young man in
black-and-white, an aura of darkness around his head like you see in many old
photos. His face was serious and somber, possessing the cocksuredness that
with age transforms into a sort of comic criminality. “You were handsome,” I
said. “Like a mafioso.” He laughed. “Like a
donkey.” We sorted through many photos of unsmiling people whose names and
relations to us both were rattled off and quickly forgotten. I was eager to
see a picture of my father as a boy. The earliest one I had ever seen was his
own passport photo, taken when he was twenty-two. Italo’s face
brightened behind his bifocals. “Here he is.” He handed me a creased square
of cardboard with a yellowed scalloped border. A vaguely familiar boy stood
in front of a doorway wearing Our Gang knee-highs and a dirty ruffled shirt.
He frowned distrustfully into the camera. I loved it. “He was twelve years
old. 1945. The war just ended. The American soldiers took pictures. I don’t
remember how I got this one. Take it.” We spent another hour
pouring over the contents of that box, Italo bringing a story to every new
face. The doorbell rang several times. Italo let it continue without getting
up, then dropped a handful of pictures into the box. “That’s my sister.
Excuse me.” I helped him out of his chair. “Take anything you want.” I paced around the
room, glancing into boxes, poking behind chairs and trunks. I found a small
parcel of newspaper clippings on a shelf, tied together with string like a
cake box. The carefully cut articles were brittle and brown with age.
Headlines celebrated the 1982 World Cup team; a dozen or so announced the
devastation of the 1980 earthquake. Others went further back: Joe DiMaggio
at the Newark Columbus Day parade in 1976; a profile of my father’s and
Italo’s social club, dated June 7, 1969. In the center of the papers I felt
something hard, about a quarter-inch thick. I pulled out a stack of long
cards tightly bound with a rubber band. I flipped through them with my thumb.
Some were fairly new, some faded, but all contained the same type of
information: Alitalia flight 773, departing from Newark June 6, 1994;
Alitalia flight 467, departing October 14, 1993; flight 1061, July 12, 1990;
277, August 20, 1987; June 1983; May 1981; 1979; 1976; 75; 71; 68. All
unused. I stroked the edges gently with my fingers. The buzz of his sister’s
angry voice rose in the stairwell. I rewound the rubber band around the
tickets and placed them back on the shelf, covering them with a newspaper
page screaming “Moro Assassinato.” Italo walked through
the front door, sagging with the weight of the K-Mart bags. He turned into
his bedroom without looking my way. I heard a closet door creak open and
shut. He reappeared in the living room, pale and frowning slightly, eyes
averted like a boy just scolded for stealing the neighbor’s figs. He seemed
to shrink into himself, fading into the heavy silence. “These pictures are
great.” He looked up and
smiled. He walked into the room and stood over me. “I knew you would
like them. Take whatever you want.” “Just this.” I held
up the picture of my father as I rose. “Those were different
times. When I go back I’ll remember everything.” He stood outside his door
to watch me leave. “Come again. Next time I’ll have a nice lunch for you.” I
waved before turning down the next flight. The steps creaked as I approached
the door of his sister’s apartment. I could sense her body pressed behind it,
listening for my exit, all that heat and anger impossible to conceal. I
hurried out into the light rain and tucked the photo in my jacket pocket
before making a dash for the car. |