Victor knew he would be unable to avoid the paper. His time spent daily with the Chronicle - except for the obituaries - was one of the few pleasures he had left. And he also knew that if he read the rag, then it would be impossible to avoid turning to the dreaded page of the dead. The clarion call of old comrades looking for some last recognition would be too hard to deny.
“Isn’t it getting cold out here, Pop?” Larry asked flipping on the overhead porch light.
“Huh... uh... oh, yes... I suppose so. Must have drifted off.”
He didn’t want his son to know that he had been listening to their conversation. The more he kept the two of them thinking that he was dumb and semi-senile, the longer they would continue to talk nearby and he would be able to tell which way the wind was blowing. Ever since he moved in with them he sensed the changes his presence had made in their lives and their household, and he wouldn’t put it past the accountant’s wife to want to have him thrown into a rest home. So far it was the frugality of the accountant himself - and probably his own ability to still wipe himself - that had prevented the feared move.
“Did you have a good day, Pop?”
“Sure. A great day. I ran ten miles, and then made wild passionate love to that old crow next door until she couldn’t walk.”
“Linda said you’ve been reading the obituaries again.” “I always read the obituaries. There’s no again, except for those thoughtless idiots in the city who insist on dying.” “Don’t read that part of the paper. Read the sports or the society section or something.”
Larry was wheeling him back into the kitchen so they could have their dinner together and the kids could call him Nono while Linda worried about whether or not her cooking might obstruct his bowel movements.
“Somehow,” Victor said, “I don’t have much interest in charity dinners and tea dances.”
“Who knows, maybe you’ll spot a few of your old cronies who are still living, rather than reading about... about the ones that are dead.”
This gave Victor food for thought which provided much more nutrition for his spirit than Linda’s unimaginative cooking did for his body.
The next morning, once the obituaries provided no new revelations, and after he checked on the box scores for the Giants, Victor did turn to the society page. He had never found much use for this section of the paper, believing that it was intended for a class of citizen far and away different from his own. Here were pictures of the well-dressed - evening gowns and tuxedos - smiling and preening for the camera and whoever cared enough to read about their own select group of the rich and famous, or perhaps the poorer wannabe’s who could do nothing but dream about such things.
With interest, he noted that, although a number of the articles were regular features provided by the newspaper’s own columnists and writers, there were shorter pieces evidently submitted by representatives of social groups and various clubs reporting on their own organizations’ activities. As he spent a chilly morning out on the front porch before the noon news on television, Victor ruminated about the paper and his discovery of the society pages.
What a bunch of self-serving, stuck-up swells! It was bad enough that the newspaper took the time, effort and waste of resources to write about their activities, but to actually sit down and write your own. The unmitigated arrogance! If the paper didn’t check out the facts someone could write anything he wanted. The opportunity for self-aggrandizement was enormous.
The old man had to laugh aloud when he thought about writing an article for submission to the paper. He’d arrange to have his function attended by... by whom?” Someone famous. Maybe a movie star. Or perhaps one of those hot popular singers that the kids were always going on about. Wouldn’t they be surprised to read about Nono tripping the light fantastic with Paula Abdul or someone like that! Maybe Madonna - she was Italian. Uh-huh. That would be a nice touch, an Italian-American dance of some kind.
“Something is wrong with your father.”
Larry glanced toward the closed bedroom door with alarm. He had just arrived home from work; it was late and the insurance company audit his firm had him working on was not going well.
“Did you call a doctor,” he asked.
“It’s not that kind of problem.”
Larry Clemenza sighed. “Now what is it?” “I think he’s been writing his will. He must be feeling like he’s going to die or something.”
“His will?”
“Uh-huh. He came to me yesterday for a pen and some paper, and today he borrowed the Remington.” “The old typewriter?”
“No, an electric razor. Of course, the typewriter! I think he’s trying to get his affairs in order.”
Always a pragmatic man, the accountant thought that this showed a tremendous amount of prescient consideration, and appreciated the fact that the latent genes of practicality had finally manifested themselves in the old man. Just to make sure, however, that everything was in order, he thought he’d better look in and offer any serviceable suggestions while it was still a timely proposition. “Hey, Pop, what’s up. Linda said you’ve become a hermit or something.”
“Been busy.” Victor barely looked up from his hesitant hunt-and-peck on the old manual typewriter. The floor about him was littered with discarded partially typewritten pages and the balled up remnants of sheets from a legal yellow tablet filled with scrawled handwriting.
“What’re you writing, the great American novel?”
“Article for the newspaper.”
“Letter to the editor?”
“No, a piece for the society page.”
Victor Clemenza had long ago mastered the art of sarcasm, and his son was appreciative of his father’s skill with a razor-sharp tongue.
“No, really, Pop, what is it?” Damned if he’d let the old man get all the way through a complete draft of his will without some professional input!
Victor leaned back in his wheel chair. It looked like he welcomed a small reprieve from his efforts at the keyboard as he held out a page to his son. “I’m just polishing it up.” “What is it?”
“They didn’t teach you to read in that fancy school I sent you to?”
Larry sat on the edge of the bed they had brought over from the old house when his father came to live with them. He should have had a hospital bed, but the old man insisted that someday he was going to die in his sleep, and he wanted to go in the same bed he had shared with his wife. The same bed in which life had been conceived would be good enough to absorb his own when the time eventually came.
The younger man was surprised to see that his father hadn’t been pulling his leg. The typewritten piece was indeed an article designed for the society page or the gossip column of some local newspaper:
ITALIAN-AMERICAN FEDERATION
HOLDS WINTER DANCE
Last night the Italian-American Federation held its annual Winter Formal Dance in the VFW Hall on Taylor Street.
It was a gala evening of good music, good food and old friends getting together.
The chairman of the event, Bernardo Ricci, said that this year’s turn out was the best in a number of years. Many members of the Italian-American Federation and Knights of Columbus from the old North Beach Civic Society were in attendance, insuring a lively reunion.
Music was provided by Mario Sereni and The Four Amici. Their special blend of old country melodies and modern hits from Glen Miller , Harry James and Duke Ellington provided the enthusiastic crowd with dance music until well after midnight.
Noted among the revelers were such old friends of North Beach as Aldo Malatesta, Luciano Ramello, Massimo Marino, Lucia Clemenza...
Startled, Larry looked up from the paper. “What the hell is this?”
“An article for the Chronicle. It’s for the society page. I told you that.”
“But... but...”
“They accept announcements from all different organizations and print them.”
“But...?
??
“But, what?”
“These... these people... they’re all... they’re...”
“They’re what? Dead?”
“Well, yes.”
“Most of them are dead only because the newspaper says they’re dead. And now they can be alive again because the newspaper says they are. Who’s to know, eh?” “Yeah, Pop, I know, but..”
“That’s a big important word you learned in your college classes: ‘but.’ It should stop me, or something?” “I guess you’re right. Go on with your article.” After all, Larry thought as he went back to report to his wife, what harm can it do? If the old fool wanted to relive the past, well, let him. What else did he have left to occupy his time?
Victor watched his son leave the room and knew exactly what he was thinking. The kid never did have an imagination. That’s why he became a goddamn bean counter. Carefully he read over the article. Pretty darn good, if I say so myself! It seemed to have that same rhythm and pattern like all the other ones he had read recently. With a little luck some idiota at the paper would take a quick look and think it was legitimate and print it. Wouldn’t that be a hoot! He had to laugh. The old VFW Hall burned down twenty years ago - along with half a block of apartments. He didn’t even know if there was an Italian-American Federation, but it sounded good.
Then, there were the names. He tried to include only the ones he knew were dead. No sense giving some old Mustache Pete down by the Bocce Ball courts in the Marina a heart attack when he read the morning paper and suddenly discovered he was dancing with ghosts the night before! It wasn’t hard to make up the roster of the departed. Their names had become more precious to him in the last few years. He considered carefully before including Lucia’s name with all the rest. But the thought of her on the dance floor again, her long dress swirling up to reveal delicate thin ankles and petite feet, was too hard to resist. He could almost feel her in his arms, her thin waist encircled by his large hands as she leaned back, dark hair swishing around them both like a fine dark mist, laughing out loud at his clumsy attempt to imitate Fred Astaire. It was almost worth his while, this exercise in creative falsehood, just to create a once familiar scene and dance again with Lucia in the empty halls of his mind.
Somehow he talked Larry into faxing the article to the Chronicle.
And then, it must have been a slow news day or a tremendous need for filler, but three days later the story about the Winter Dance of the Italian-American Federation appeared in the paper.
This morning instead of cursing the obituaries, the old man chortled over the Society page. There they all were, the old paisanos and gumbas. Every one of them dancing and dining in the old VFW Hall that no longer existed! What a great joke, what a prize!
Linda was incredulous, and Larry was outright embarrassed and mortified with the fear that someone would find out that he had abetted this hoax which his own father had perpetrated. Finally he had to admit that it was quite a harmless little prank, and yes he did indeed find it a most delicious secret. That night, for the first time since any of them could remember, Victor sat out in the living room with the family and enjoyed the NBC comedy lineup all the way to bedtime. He laughed as heartily as the rest while again reminding them that there was still nothing comparable to Fred Allen or Jack Benny for real comedy.
It was sometime in the middle of the night when Victor awoke and wondered why the hell they had left the television on. The living room was right outside the door of the master bedroom, and any sound or conversation was easily heard from his bed.
He lay quietly, knowing that sleep was now flown into the disturbed night, and there would be nothing to do but wait in the darkness with the hope that it might return before the insistence of dawn required him to get up. The music from the front room was not in the least unsettling, in fact its delicate melody and gentle orchestration became a subtle background to the lovely voices singing in Italian.
It didn’t take him long to identify the duet from “Lucia Di Lammermoor,” Ah! Verranna a te sull’aure...
The music reminded him of the back room of Mike’s Pool Hall in North Beach. It also reminded him of all the beauty in the world when every opera he ever heard spoke directly to his soul. It reminded him of Lucia, his beautiful Lucia of the raven hair, olive skin and deep black eyes into which a man could fall forever.
Ah, it was so wonderful to hear the lovely songs again. Victor closed his eyes and allowed his mind to sail the winds of shimmering skies and summer days.
He must have drifted off to sleep, because the next time he opened his eyes the music had changed and the door to his room was open, spilling light across the foot of his bed like a waterfall of bright silver shadows.
What is that music now?
Yes, that was it. “Take the A Train.” Ba-da-ba-da-da-da.
Who is that standing in the doorway?
“Aldo, is that you?”
“Where have you been, Vittorio?”
“Malatesta?”
“Si, Vittorio, Aldo Malatesta.”
“But how...?”
“It’s you, Vittorio. You did it. The Winter Dance. We are all here, all except you.”
“Except me?”
“That’s right. We’ve all come for the dance.
“Everyone?”
“Yes, Vittorio, everyone.
“Lucia?”
“Yes, of course, Lucia also.”
Victor Clemenza throw off the covers and slips his feet into the slippers on the floor by his bed. Without a thought to the hated chair and its large rubber wheels he reaches out to take Aldo Malatesta’s waiting hand.
“You know, Aldo,” Victor says as they walk toward the light and the music in the living room. “Her father does not like you.”
“That was a long time ago, Vittorio, a very long time ago.
He likes everyone now.”
Aldo Malatesta puts his hairy arm around his old friend’s shoulder and pulls him from the darkness of the bedroom as he had once led him into the back room at Mike’s Pool Hall. “Come on, Lucia is waiting and the dance has just begun.”
EXPIATION
Before gravitating together, we were scattered throughout the classroom like so many brown mushrooms, proudly wearing the remnants of our uniforms — fatigue pants, shirts and coats with our names and ranks still sewn on.
Vietnam and its horrors were still fresh in our minds, and we were desperate for something that would replace the memories of humid jungles and fallen comrades. Exercising our minds seemed the best way to fill the void and exorcise our demons.
I was surprised to see Ernie Palomino there. We’d been in the same artillery unit; but big outfits, being what they are, we never got to really know each other.
Palomino still wore that haunted look many of us had exchanged for one of survivor’s relief. He sat quietly in his own corner of the classroom, neither questioning the professor’s statements nor answering the man’s questions, the incessant sound of his pencil, an accompaniment to the teacher’s instruction.
At least, I thought, someone is taking good notes. I knew from high school that my own scribblings usually bore no relevance to the test questions, which would eventually stump me at the end of each quarter, so I determined to reintroduce myself to my comrade-in-arms and hopefully, establish a relationship that would give me access to his. “Weren’t we in the same division at Qui Nhon?” I said one day as we pushed our way toward the hallway.
Palomino stared right through me for a moment and then kept walking. As we moved past the door, he crumpled the pages he had been working on and dropped them unceremoniously in the trash.
I lagged behind long enough to pick the coveted notes out of the bin, and rushed to the next lecture hall, anxious to unfurl the purloined papers and review my academic windfall. I was amazed to find that they weren’t notes at all, but drawings — pencil studies. I knew nothing of art, but what I held, rendered with such exquisite
precision, must certainly have been the equal to anything in the local galleries. I’d barely had time to rifle through each page and marvel at my discovery, when a hand reached over and snatched the artwork from my grasp.
It was Palomino.
Embarrassed at being caught, I waited uncomfortably through the lecture to approach the man with my apology. Palomino ignored my excuse for such shabby behavior and glared at me with an intensity that caused me to look away. “How many Charlie did we kill in ‘Nam?” he asked softly.
“I don’t know.”
“One? Ten? A thousand?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did they look like?
I shrugged. “Hey, we were artillery.” For me, the war was coordinates and calibrations, the statistics of impersonal mayhem from a safe distance.
“You sorry you did it that way?” Palomino asked. I hadn’t thought of it as one way or another; it was how I had been trained to wage war.
“You gotta car?” He suddenly changed the subject.
“Yeah.”
“Gimme a lift.”
“Sure.” Anything was better than his eyes and uneasy probing.
There was a light rain falling as Palomino steered me across town to a section of urban blight and rows of clapboard houses, condemned to make way for a new freeway. The first four houses on one block were blackened shells.
Palomino indicated I should pull up in front of the fifth, one still untouched by fire. He got out without so much as a “thank you,” and headed up the walk.
Impulsively, I rolled down the window and yelled after him, “mind if I come in?” I still felt compelled to justify my having taken his drawings out of the trash and wanted to ask about them.
“Suit yourself,” he replied, without turning back. I found him in the bare-boards living room. The fixtures had been long removed, but the walls and ceiling were newly whitewashed. In the corner I could see a military surplus sleeping bag and a small Sterno camp stove next to a sturdy wooden crate.