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Lemon Ice Pick a day, just any
summer day between 1945 and 1947. The sun is boiling down through the big elm
on the corner of Springdale and Windsor Avenues in Meriden, Connecticut, and
Lewis is sitting on the front steps of the parsonage looking across Windsor
at the run-down corner grocery store, Galluzzo’s Market. If he shifts his
gaze and looks right, to the northern corner, he will see another grocery—not
quite so run-down, not quite so large—Cotrona’s. In the house behind
Lewis his father, Luigi, is hard at work on his English and Italian language
sermons for the coming Sunday. Like some scuttler of the deep, he has
retreated into the sunporch behind the bookcases he’s arranged in such a way
as to cut himself a slice of space for his study. If Lewis were standing in
the French double doorway of the porch he might watch for a moment the liquid
movement of the angelfish among the valisneria in the aquaria that take up
the rest of the wall space in the porch. They are Lewis’s aquaria. The cries
of his brother Gene, out playing somewhere with the neighborhood kids, might
swim in the window: “Allee allee infree!” Lewis’s father will
deliver his sermons from the pulpit of the white clapboard First Italian
Baptist Church behind the house, facing Springdale, surrounded by a wire
fence. It is a box of wood without even a steeple, but the churchyard is a
large one—Lewis should know, he has to mow the lawn once a week. On it the
church each summer holds its Strawberry Festival, the chief attraction of
which is not the strawberry shortcake but the Italian pastries sold at the
booths manned by large Italian women and patronized by slender Italian men and
loud Italian-American children. The church and
parsonage literally and figuratively straddle the corner where Italian and
German neighborhoods collide in a melee of great trees and No Parking signs.
The whispers of the Roman Catholic neighborhood of Springdale have it that
these renegade Protestant Italians are holy rollers. The funny little
Sicilian priest had wanted to marry some Mayflower queen. They drink real
blood, not grapejuice, in those shot glasses. They hire a band to praise the
Lord—but the band isn’t hired, for Elsie plays the new Hammond and old Mr.
Parisi brings his fiddle to church on special days. Somebody puffs into his
trumpet, somebody else has an accordion, and the noise is always lovely. In the days of their
early childhood Lewis and his brother Gene used to swing on the church gate
made of wire and silver tubing. There always seemed to be a bully around to
spoil their fun and to challenge them as they rode the barrier that sealed
the churchyard off from the neighborhood. “Let’s see you spit on the stairs,”
he might dare Lewis. “You’re scared, punk. Your old man eats snails. Where do
you people keep the snakes you kiss on Sunday?” Lewis’s mother is
somewhere indoors working on the laundry or the floors, perhaps. She is the
unhappy one. A midwest farm girl who worked her way out of the fields her
father let go to seed, who struggled her way through college to become a
missionary among the immigrant Italians, she had married one of them and lost
the status she had fought and scrambled for—but that is another story. Lewis’s younger
brother, Gene, is lurking around somewhere, no doubt planning to horn in on
whatever Lew eventually does. What he is planning is getting over to the
lemon-ice store. The problem is lack of money, but Lew believes he has solved
it. He gets up and trails
across the patch of green lawn under the elm, around the end of the fence at
the corner, and cuts across Springdale. Inside Cotrona’s it is cool and the
smell is of sawdust and salami—the sawdust is sprinkled across the floor, and
the salamis hang with the cheeses from wires stretched across the ceiling.
There are kegs of olives in the aisle. Behind the counter stands Frank
Cotrona minding the store for his father. As usual, the store is otherwise
empty of customers. “Did y’ come over to
go a couple rounds?” Frankie asks, grinning at large. Lewis nods. Frank and
he are the same age, but Frank is bigger. “Same deal? Three rounds for a
nickel bag of chips?” Lew shakes his head. Frankie’s smile disappears. “What,
then?” He leans his elbows over the counter and looks at Lew, his pompadour
flopping over his dark eyes. “Three rounds for a
nickel,” Lew says. “A nickel!” Frank
wails and straightens up. “The priest’s kid has gone pro!” His eyes are fake
wide. Frankie and Lew stand there staring at each other for a minute. “Okay,”
Frankie says, “it’s a deal.” Frank comes around
the counter untying his white apron. They square off, hands open. Frank zips
one in and taps Lew on the cheek. He laughs. “Come on, Turk, earn your
money.” Frank has a longer reach. Lewis gets mad at all
the little taps and goes windmilling in. Frankie backs off laughing and
defending himself. “Okay, okay, that’s your round,” he says. He hauls a dime
out of his pocket and hands it to his sparring partner. “Six rounds, and I
throw in a nickel bag of chips,” he says. The match resumes. “Thanks, Frank,” Lew
says pocketing the cash at last. They shake. Frankie goes back behind the
counter as Lewis goes out and closes the door behind him. He turns left.
There’s a house next door on Springdale, then Ponzillo’s Tavern, the bone in
his father’s craw, for it is almost across the street from the church. This
is a place that ranks in fable in the Italian community of Springdale, but
not in the mythology of the Germans and mixed breeds of Windsor. This is the
house and store-front where the Gallicized Ponselle sisters were raised, the
only divas Meriden ever produced. Lewis knows this, but he doesn’t know why
their name is Ponselle, not Ponzillo, and he has never heard them sing, for
Rosa Ponselle’s years of glory had been over for nearly a decade and a half.
She had stopped singing at the Metropolitan in 1937, when Lewis was three
years old and still living in Buffalo. Luigi loves opera, but Lewis won’t
listen to it when it is played on the radio or the wind-up phonograph. Next door is the
lemon-ice store. “Agostino’s Fish” it says on the dusty window, but Lewis has
never seen a fish inside. His throat is as dry as the last leaf, and the sun
is hotter than ever. He goes in, the bell on a jiggler over the door makes
its Christmas sound—“Allo, boy,” Mrs. Agostino says, smiling, the faint
mustache over her lip arching like the back of a cat. She sits in a chair
beside the ice-cream freezer, in front of the window. The candy counter is
against the back wall, and behind it is the lemon-ice machine: a wooden
bucket containing a smaller metal vat that has a top with a gear. Over this
fits another gear on a drive-wheel, the whole thing hooked to an electric
motor. Ice, sugar, and lemon go inside, ice and salt go outside, the motor
goes round. It is not going round now. Mr. Agostino—large, not terribly
friendly—is putting together the ingredients. It has been many
years since this childless couple stepped off the boat to find the fortune to
be found in an antique motor and tub, in ice, sugar, and lemons, in paper
accordion cups one can squeeze the flavor out of. If you eat too fast the
most excruciating headache will momentarily blind you as pain spreads through
and across your sinuses. When you are done with the ache and the lemon-ice
you throw the cup away on the summer sidewalk outside where the kids have
collected maybe to play ball or break a window or go walking down the street
full of slat-frame one- or two-decker houses, some with a cat on a strip of
earth looking out for the family dog through the spokes of a rusty trike
between the weedy steps and the feet of passers-by, the phone poles growing
their vines through the leafless breeze scuttling newsprint along the street,
the grainy shingles knocked up underneath some old living room turned into a
grocery store where all the cornflakes boxes on the shelves host banqueting
black specks that scatter in the bowl after the rustling has stopped. “You got a lemon
ice?” Lew asks. He is out of luck.
Mrs. Agostino shakes her head. “We makin’ somma now,” she says, “‘bout a
half-hou’. You come back, eh?” Lewis stands still,
deeply hurt, deeply frustrated. How can fate be so unrelenting? Mrs. Agostino
understands. “You wanna Milky Way?” she asks. Lewis shakes his head and shows
her his single dime. “Wella, half-hou’,” she says again. “That’sa no so
long.” The shadows in the
shop gather heat to themselves and smother the corners of the store. In the
counter only the hard candies are not in immediate danger of melting—the dots
of candy on long strips of paper, the sour balls. All the rest—the jelly
hats, the Baby Ruths—may not survive a half hour, no more than Lewis will. He
turns to leave just as the bell rings again. “Oh, no! What do you
want?” Lewis asks. It is Gene standing in the doorway. “Lemon ice,” he says. “They’re out. Let’s
go.” He starts to push by his brother, then stops. “Where’d you get the
money?” Gene drops his eyes. “You don’t have any, right?” “Where’d you get
yours?” Gene asks. “Hey, you kids!” Mr.
Agostino yells, “Closa da door. Da flies comin’ in!” Lew grabs Gene by the
arm and yanks him outside. “You never mind where I got mine,” he says.
“That’s a secret.” “You been boxing with
Frankie?” Lewis can feel the
gorge rising in his throat. It’s bad enough that he’s dry and hurt, now he’s
mad. He shoves Gene again, hard this time, hard enough to knock him down.
Gene scrapes his knee and starts to cry. Lewis crosses the street, opens the
church gate and latches it behind him—Gene doesn’t know how to get the two
halves to go back together right and get the vertical bolt to fit into the
round hole in the pavement. Lew glances back and sees Gene picking himself up
and heading for the corner to cross toward the front yard. By the time he gets
there Lewis will be long gone. Lew opens the gate
again, crosses the street, and starts walking down the block along
Springdale, past houses and shops, until he reaches Bonanzinga’s Bakery
where, if it were autumn, he could loaf on a cool day and watch the bread
brown in the stone oven stoked with coal. The loaves leave the
oven on a long wooden spatula as Enrico’s arms, like brown loaves themselves,
move in and out among the rustlings of the narrow white bags. There is a
measured bustle in the bakery. “Eh!” Enrico might say, “hey, make some dough;
make some more dough.” And so they make some dough—they mix it, they knead
it, they cut it, they mold it, then into the oven to bake it. Lew buys it,
hot, for a quarter—hot, for they would be waiting at home. “Go!” says Enrico,
“go, run! Bread gets cold quick on a cool day.” This, though, is
anything but a cool day. On days when it is very hot in the sunny streets
like this and the gang languishes after lunch and the morning games, Lew and
his friends might continue down the block to Lewis Avenue, sluggish with
heat, and turn left. There, parked at the curb, across the street and two
storefronts down from where Lewis had lived when he was in kindergarten,
would be the icehouse on wheels. When they come to the
dreamy door that roars its crystal silence into the sun; where the cubes of
sawdust winter rest waiting for the fellows to pick up chips to suck; when
they come to that best of quiet doors, there Guido sits with his hat pulled
down, and his eyelids pulled down as well, and the shadows down, down to his
knees like an awning’s ghost. There is no movement, not even of his lips, as
Guido says, “Welcome, boys. Come in, get cool. Get cool near the ice, boys,”
Guido says. Across Lewis Avenue,
on the opposite corner of Springdale, there is the establishment of Louie the
barber. When Lew was five all he had to do was cross the street cater-corner
to get to the barbershop. There, Louie would lower the boom on the boys’
cowlicks and locks. As Lew walked in he’d get a snootful of pomade
smells—Vitalis, Wild Root Cream Oil, Charley. He’d sit in the
leather-upholstered, white porcelain, pneumatic chair, his head bent forward
on his chest while Louie snipped and combed. Lew would be thinking, perhaps,
of the bats thwacking in the back lot while he sat there itching and the
mirror near the chair beckoned him to move . . . just once. “Well, the Yanks
won,” Louie would say, “yes, the Yanks won and the Sox lost. What grade you
in now, sonny? Steady now, steady your head . . . one more swipe
with the comb . . . wish I could comb my hair,” said Louie. “See?”
He’d lower his bald pate to be patted. “Bene, bene, go home now. You’re done,
you’re ready for church tomorrow. Next man, who’s next? Who’s next?” asked
Louie. Lewis crosses
Springdale and turns back toward home. If he stops at Tomassetti’s Market
about a third of the way down the block he will find Mr. Tomassetti, the
father of Mario and Eddie, two kids from the church who were about Lew’s own
age, spraying lambchops out from under his snickersnee as though he were some
gory potentate mucking his way to empire through the limbs of his enemies.
Underfoot the going is unsteady, for the floor is a beach of shavings that
slides like a wooden tide against the watery metal and the watery glass of
the transparent showcases sheltering a museum of meat that reminds Lewis of
his collections at home. Mr. Tomassetti rises in all his charnel glory from
behind the chopping block, lays down a bouquet of ribs, perhaps. The bow of
his apron ties off his rump where a man’s back should start above the
buttocks. “How many you want?”
the butcher says to a housewife, “how many pork chops you want? These will go
nice in a big pot of sauce. That’s prime pork, Mrs. Spinelli.” “Here, boy, have some
chips and run along, I got work,” he might say to Lew when his customer,
another parishioner, has left. “Give my respects to your father.” He would
move, maybe, toward the coldroom door, open it, and disappear into its
intoxicating coolness. At last it is time.
Lewis drags his feet through the suffocating heat back toward Agostino’s
candy store. While he has been walking Lew has been thinking about many
things: What will it be like when he has gotten to high school finally? What
will he turn into at last, a moth or a butterfly? But mostly about the
lemon-ice. His lips have puckered and his mouth has tried to water, but his
throat is a column of aching parchment. While he has been
waiting, has it gotten cooler? It is almost as though he is inhabiting two
different days at the same time, for—yes—he has felt the breath of autumn
stirring and rustling among the leaves. He has felt the roughness of
gooseflesh upon his arms, and he has shivered. Now, crossing the avenue,
jaywalking past the church, he looks down at the pavement and feels as though
his eyes are farther from it, as though there is a further distance between
him and the earth. It is as though there were a piece of glass between his
vision and the envisioned, a sheet of glass not quite clear, slightly tinted,
so subtly colored that he could almost, but not quite, swear there is nothing
there at all. He stops to kneel, to bend and tie his shoe—it does not truly
need tying, but he wants to see if the distance he is experiencing is
physical. It is not. Nothing
changes, although he can feel the movement of change all about him. He shakes
his head as though to clear it, rises, and walks on. He comes to the door of
the shop and goes in, and then he feels it strongly. He looks at Mrs
Agostino and notices for the first time what she is wearing—it is a long
black dress made of some sort of semishiny material, not the usual house
dress and apron. On her head there is a close-fitting hat with a black veil
falling from it. There is lace trimming here and there about her person—it
reminds Lewis of webs. He looks at Mrs.
Agostino, but he cannot tell whether she is returning his gaze. “One
lemon-ice, please,” he says, holding out his money. The old woman shakes
her head. “We no got,” she says, “no got no more. You want some candy, maybe?”
She begins to go to the counter, but Lewis shakes his head, an enormous
sorrow settling into the pit of his stomach to reside with the hunger and
thirst already there. Lewis glances back at the window whose thin film of
dust is a deeper tint of the glass he had imagined while he was crossing the
street. Now he knows why Mrs. Agostino’s veils and laces remind him of webs,
for there are webs in the corners of the store, and the floor is littered
with scraps of paper, even an empty pop bottle or two. Lewis looks at the
chair behind the counter where Mr. Agostino always sat tending or guarding
the machine, but the seat is empty. The flat cushion is faded and threadbare.
The machine itself is empty, the gears rusty, the wood dry and stained. Lewis
knows, but does not understand how he knows, that Mr. Agostino is gone for
good. How can that be? He had been in the store barely a half-hour earlier. Mrs. Agostino
shuffles back to her own stool by the window, sits down, and turns her head
as though to look into the street. She says nothing more. Lewis sees her hand
in her lap lying palm up, the tips of the fingers trembling slightly, every
now and again the whole hand giving a fitful jerk. The old lady is more
stooped than ever, Lewis thinks. He stands until he begins to feel
embarrassed, and then he turns to the door, opens it—the bell makes no sound
beyond a small clunk as the door hits it. Lewis looks at it to see what is
the matter. It has no tongue. Outdoors it is
autumn. The church and parsonage look the same, but Lewis can feel the
difference—no one he knows is inside. The aquaria with his tropical fish in
them no longer line the shelves before the windows of the sunporch. The
guppies and betas have risen through the glass lids and swum away into thin
air. His father writes his sermons no longer in the study where the
green-shaded brass lamp stood on his desk throwing a yellow light upon the
words about God, words that have long since browned into umber. Who knows
where his mother has gone, where his brother is now? It is autumn. Behind
him the candy store stands with its door locked, the window papered over.
Cotrona’s market is closed, too, and so is Galuzzo’s which had used to be
. . . hadn’t it turned into? . . . a pizza palace. Lew’s mouth is as dry as
the last leaf in a book of leaves. Who knows where he is now? Perhaps it is
no longer even autumn. |