WINTER
DREAMS
Short Stories
&
First Chapters
By
DAVID L. RUGGERI
Winter Dreams by David L. Ruggeri
Copyright 2012 by David L. Ruggeri
DEDICATION
For Kelly and Sean, my children,
with all my love
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Winter Dreams
Expiation
A View From The Sanctuary
Lemmenkov's Lament
From Beginning To Beginning
Radzinsky's Lunch
A House In The Suburbs
Breakdown
The Tenant
Charlie's Big Trick
Christmas Past
The Last Christmas Tree
FIRST CHAPTERS
Author's Note
The Other
Father Everlasting
In Hopes Of Heaven
The Luxembourg Amendment
Let Us Do Evil
The Haunt
Forbidden Flowers
The Projectionist
A Faint Cold Fear
The Fanatic
A River Of Time
Nightangel
Two Cats In The House
WINTER DANCE
For My grandfather Victor
“Sons-a-bitches! Goddamn sons-a-bitches!”
Victor Clemenza slammed his hand on the kitchen table. Coffee spilled and his daughter-in-law jumped at the sudden noise.
“Look at them!” He stabbed the paper with a gnarled finger. “They’re all leaving me. The inconsiderate bastards! What kind of friends are they, anyway?”
By now Linda should have been familiar with the routine. Every morning the old man wheeled his chair out of the large ground-floor bedroom and, before anything else - including his first cup of decaffeinated coffee - he turned the paper directly to the obituaries. There, he would carefully peruse the roster of the recently departed in search of old acquaintances who had the effrontery to die and abandon him in what he perceived as the rapidly dwindling club of the still living. “Papa,” Linda said, as she always did, “you should just be thankful that you’re okay and you still have your health.” The old man slapped the wheels of the chair to which he had been more or less confined for seven years. “You call this health!” He banged on the hard rubber with both fists. “I’m a damned invalid!”
“You can take care of yourself, and that’s what counts,” she pointed out with an encouraging smile. “You mean you and Lorenzo don’t have to wipe my ass yet,” he grumped at her.
And I’ll be damned if I’m going to, Linda thought. She’d let her husband or a rest home take care of that little chore when the time came.
“Larry loves you, Papa. We all do.”
“Besides, if I can take such good care of myself, why did Lorenzo insist that I come and live with you?” “We just wanted to make sure that nothing happened to you.”
Victor had lived with them for the last seven years - since his stroke. They all knew it might have been worse; he could have been totally debilitated when the small blood vessel on the right side of his brain burst in the middle if the night and he woke in his solitary bed to find that parts of his body no longer functioned as he expected. But this was bad enough. Because of his father’s incapacity, Larry - Linda refused to call him Lorenzo as the old man persisted - invited his Victor to sell his small house in San Francisco and come live with them a few miles down the peninsula in San Bruno. They gave up their downstairs master bedroom and moved upstairs near their three daughters.
The twins, Laura and Katharine, now bunked in together and the older child, Melissa, still had her own room. “After all,” Larry had said in a morbid attempt at practicality when they discovered how much it disrupted their lives, “how long will he last? And he is my father.” But now, seven years later, Victor Clemenza was still the tenacious survivor of what his doctor called “a medical inconvenience.” Sometimes the two-story house in San Bruno seemed much too small for all of them.
“I should have gone up to see them,” Victor said, shaking his head and wistfully looking out the window at the morning fog, which was just starting to draw its gray tendrils back over the hills separating them and nearby San Francisco Bay from the ocean.
The old man tried to finish his breakfast before the children came down. He loved his grandchildren dearly but dreaded the noise and confusion of them all in the kitchen at the same time. Besides, he still found it supremely annoying to hear them call him: “Nono.”
“Nono” was reserved for old farts. It’s what he had called his grandfather. He wasn’t a “Nono.” It was bad enough that Linda called him Papa, but when she insisted that the children call him Nono, he thought the ethnic reminder of his advanced years was just a bit much.
When he heard the first thrum of footfalls overhead, signifying that the tribe was rising, Victor asked Linda to push him out onto the front porch. He could have wheeled himself, but he felt the sudden need for a quick exit. Even though the morning chill and damp was still prevalent in the misty air, he preferred the possibility of an ache in his bones to the guaranteed one in his ears.
On the porch, he brooded silently: Damn, another one was gone. Luciano Ramello. The man wasn’t that old, was he? Larry Clemenza’s house was on the top of a steep hill with a huge palm tree that harbored owls. It once harbored rats, but when the owls took up housekeeping with their mournful cries in the wild center of the tree, there were no more rats - or any other kind of vermin.
On a clear day, Victor could look out across the bedroom community of San Bruno and see the hills of South San Francisco. Just beyond, he knew was the great city itself, where he had spent most of his life.
Although the object of the obituary in today’s paper, Luciano Ramello, wasn’t exactly a friend, he was a part of Victor’s life. It was Luciano who had broken his nose in a fight when they were both fifteen. The damned beak never did heal right! And from then on his Roman nose roamed off to the side with an independence of its own. He remembered Ramello as a contentious teen-ager who grew into an arrogant man and eventually an obnoxious old grouch.
But that was all in the past now. Ramello was gone, and another link in the chain of his own mortality had been dissolved.
Victor recalled growing up in San Francisco. He had come with his mother and two brothers from Italy when he was twelve, two years after his father preceded them to establish a home and life in America for his young family. Victor looked down at the legs which were now only good enough for one or two wobbly steps at a time. He had to smile.
They were good legs - once. Fast legs. He used them up and down the hills of North Beach, running numbers - literally running the numbers from the shops and homes on the steep slopes of Broadway and Columbus just north of Chinatown. He ran them down to the little capo, Aldo Malatesta, who held court at Mike’s Pool Hall on Broadway.
“You don’t walk around with no money for more than two hours,” Malatesta warned the twelve year-old. “Every two hours you come to Mike’s and give me the bag, you hear? And learn the language!” he added.
Victor understood and did as he was told. He was lucky to walk off the boat and get any kind of job. But that’s why his father had come to the States, to establish a place for the family. The old man in the wheel chair smiled again. North Beach back in the thirty’s - before the bosses abandoned it to the night clubs and the topless joints. What a place to grow up! That’s where he first saw Lucia.
He had been running the numbers for three years, and Malatesta trusted him to drop the bag only once a day now. He saw her in the small bakery right off of Broadway and Taylor w
here her father bought a two-bit ticket every Friday. He must have been going into that sweet smelling place for almost a year before he happened to be in there one day when school was out and she was working behind the counter with her father.
Ma che Christo! What a beauty! Like an angel! She was busily stacking fresh rolls in the large wooden bins and it was the most noble of all occupations because her hands touched each miniature loaf and blessed the bread as if it were the very staff of life. Victor’s heart was lost the moment he saw her. She had the face of a Madonna, the figure of a movie star - Victor liked the American movies, he had been raised on them in Italy - and the voice of rippling water over the ancient bricks on Lombard street when winter rain washed the world clean and wonderful.
Malatesta spotted it the minute the boy came into Mike’s
that evening. The capo looked into his runner’s eyes and knew
that something was different. If he didn’t know the Clemenza
family better, he would have suspected that the kid was
skimming the take, neglecting to record some bets, figuring to cover the stake himself if the numbers hit - which they never did. But Victor was too smart to steal. It had to be something else.
“Vittorio, ‘smatter? You look like you seen a ghost.” Victor liked it when they called him Vittorio. It made him feel like a man. “Aye, Aldo, I have seen the most beautiful woman in the world!”
Malatesta laughed. The kid was fifteen, what did he know from women? But then he saw the hurt on the boy’s face and immediately passed the laughter off as something to do with things other than his runner’s statement.
The capo got serious. “So, Vittorio, tell me about this woman.”
“She is an angel! A saint! The most bellisima!” “I am most impressed. And where is this wonderful creature?”
“Ricci’s Bakery. Her name is Lucia.”
Aldo Malatesta’s eyes widened and he placed his thumb and the first two fingers of his hand to his lips for a noisy kiss. “Ah, yes Lucia Di Lammermoor! Che bella!”
“You know her?”
“Does a priest know the names of all the saints? Of course, I know her.” He smiled. “As you say, Vittorio, she is an angel!”
“I shall marry this woman!”
Malatesta tried to hide the return of his laughter. “Of course you shall. But for now, get back out there and take care of the shops on Grant. As long as the Chinamen are too proud to run their own numbers we’ll continue to relieve them of the burden.
He ran off with the thought that “Lucia Di Lammermoor” was the most beautiful sounding name in the world; it whispered through his head like the wind and fog horns of a stormy night through the Golden Gate.
Victor was seventeen years old, and had spent two years in ignorant bliss, hovering around the bakery without saying a word to the girl before he discovered that Di Lammermoor was not her name but the title of an opera by Donezetti. Actually, her name was Lucia Milano, and he thought that was even more beautiful than Di Lammermoor.
He accused Malatesta politely - for it did no good to irritate such men - of misleading him.
“Ah, Vittorio, I fancied you knew I was just joking about the name. I thought you knew that “Lucia Di Lammermoor” is an opera.”
Victor felt sheepish. “I must have forgotten.” “Yes, of course.” The capo did not get where he was by treating hardworking employees with any less respect than he himself would expect. “Come, Vittorio, I have a treat for you.” The boss put a large hairy arm around the young man and led him into the back room of Mike’s Pool Hall and there, in the small office reserved only for Mike, the owner, and Malatesta, he put a record on an old Victrola and introduced Victor Clemenza to the sound of his first opera. Next to furtive glimpses of Lucia Milano, the opera in the back room of that pool hall was the most heart-achingly exquisite experience of his young life.
Eventually he married Lucia, and he also began a life-long affair with the musical wonders of grand opera. Now, an old man in a wheel chair, he was limited to dreaming about Lucia and her beauty, long lost in the dusty corridors of his memory and the damp earth of the Italian cemetery just outside of San Francisco, a city with no cemeteries of its own.
On Saturday mornings now he sat in his bedroom and listened to the Texaco broadcast of opera from the Metropolitan in New York. It was a special time. And every couple of years, when they did a new production of “Lucia Di Lammermoor,” he would remember the young girl with flour on her cheeks in Ricci’s Bakery who would become the love of his life - and Aldo Malatesta’s little joke. They were all gone now. Almost all gone, except him. “He was at it again this morning.” Linda said to her husband.
“So, what can we do about it? I suppose it’s normal for old people to start thinking about their friends who have passed on.”
Victor could hear them talking. It was well into November, but the weather was unseasonably mild and he had had Linda wheel him out onto the back porch so that he couldcatch the late afternoon sun. The warmth still lingered in the enclosed porch like the waning heat of the blood in his own veins.
His son was home early. “Larry” the accountant! Listen to them talking in there, as if he wasn’t out on the porch, hearing every word. He could be a piece of furniture for all the consideration Lorenzo and his skinny wife gave him!
“It concerns me,” Linda said. “He gets angry and depressed.”
“How can you get angry and depressed?” “Larry, let’s not turn this into a lesson in the precision of semantics. Your father worries me.”
“Well, he doesn’t worry me.”
“You’re not home all day with him.”
“Ah, that’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it: you resent him.” “I don’t resent him! I’m just troubled about him. And you should be concerned.”
The old man tuned them out. He’d heard it all before and would rather not hear it again. If there was any resentment, it was his - at being forced to depend on these people, even if they were family.
Familia! Those days in North Beach we were all family! If you were Italian, you were family. If you were scamming the Chinks or the Polacks or the Spics out in the Mission District, you were a member of the inner circle of the family. When he and Lucia were married, and it was not easy to get her father’s permission when the man found out that his prospective son-in-law was working for Aldo Malatesta, he had to make some important decisions.
Massimo Milano glared at the young testa dura - hard head - who asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage and knew that he had a choice: throw the boy out, or agree to the union with certain conditions.Considering Vittorio Clemenza had been mooning around the bakery for almost five years now, and seeing his daughter under chaperoned conditions, of course, for the last two of those, in spite of his objections - there would be little accomplished by sending the suitor on his way. Making it impossible for them would just make the relationship seem more attractive to the couple. Therefore his decision was to make it as reasonably difficult as possible. There would be no marriage as long as Victor worked for that dilinquente Malatesta. There would be no more number running or taking bets from the Chinamen on Grant Avenue. Vittorio Clemenza would have to get his high school diploma and a real job - a legitimate job.
Such a sacrifice! But worth it for the dear angel who looked at him with the deepest dark eyes of longing equivalent to his own.
Victor got a job driving a truck for Wonder Bread and began night classes for his high school diploma at the age of twenty.
The week after he received the paper from the Department of Adult Education, he married Lucia in St. Peter’s and Paul’s Church. A month after that, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and, unaware Lucia was pregnant, he was drafted. Italian speaking soldiers were valuable as both cannon fodder and translators so he was shipped to the European theater of operations where he remained through the first three year of his son Lorenzo’s life.
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Upon his return from the war, Victor used his mustering out pay and whatever he had been able to save to buy his own bread truck and subcontract to both Wonder Bread as well as some of the local bakeries. His territory was North Beach and he now found himself delivering bread to the stores and homes where he used to run numbers and pick up bets for Malatesta. Soon he was again an integral part of the community and his and Lucia’s friends were numbered in the hundreds. He got religion, and went to church with his family at least twice a year - Christmas and Easter. When approached, he even became a member of the Knights of Columbus and the Italian Catholic Federation.
So many friends, so very many good friends. And now they were all dead or dying, the aggravating sons-a-bitches!
“Keep the newspaper away from him,” was Larry’s suggestion. “If he can’t see who’s died, then he won’t brood about it.”
“You try to keep the paper away from him,” Linda retorted. “If he’s up before either of us in the morning, he wheels out to the porch to get it himself. I think he’s even bribed the paper boy to make sure it gets onto the porch instead of in the bushes.”
“Then we’ll just have to live with it,” Victor’s son said with the wisdom born of avoiding difficult confrontations where both his father and his wife were concerned. It might just be a welcome relief to get the Alzheimer’s, the old man thought. If it wasn’t for the fact that he would probably still understand the inane babble of his family, the disease could well be a blessing.
At least he would be relieved of this constant agitation over the precipitous departure of his old acquaintances. Perhaps Lorenzo was right: Don’t read the paper. It was the damn paper from San Francisco that printed the obituaries and made him aware of all the passings. If he didn’t have access to the newspaper, then his friends would still be alive, wouldn’t they? Their breath would still bloom with white misty clouds in the early morning light on Taylor. Not a single footfall would be diminished on the steep hills of Columbus and Stockton Streets. Hell, even Mike’s Pool Hall might still be open for business rather than the parking lot it had become - according to the newspaper!