When I called to tell him I’d left Rebecca, he answered the phone and snapped in his General Motors manner, “Yes, what is it?” I told him Rebecca and I were through. There was a long silence on the phone. Then he said, “Just a minute, I’ll get your mother.” Only months later did he say, “Ike, sometimes things work out for the best in life.” That’s the closest we’ve ever come to exchanging confidences. He used to talk to my brother Tony a lot. I can remember him and Tony having long conversations in the kitchen of our Bronx apartment. I never knew what they were talking about, and I thought at the time that I was too young to share such intimacies, that when I got older — like Tony — maybe my father and I could talk together the way they did. It never happened. (Once, and God forgive me for ever having thought this, I figured he didn’t talk to me because I was blind.) The comic routines became more and more frequent after Tony was killed. He never mentions Tony now; it is as though his first son never existed. Except sometimes, when he turns away from the television and, forgetting for a moment, says to me, “Watch this guy, Tony, he’s a riot,” without knowing he has used his dead son’s name, without realizing that each time he makes such a slip it brings sudden, unbidden tears to my eyes.
You fucking wop who killed him, I wish you the plague!
As best I can piece this together, my father worked as an errand boy in a delicatessen only after he was released from the orphanage. By that time, his older sister Liliana had a steady job with the telephone company, and my grandmother figured she could safely afford to take her sons home. And, again filling in the gaps, I think he was drafted into the Army sometime after the jobs in the transit authority’s repair shop and the laundry, and after the apprenticeship with the florist. In brief, he was working in the “business of embroidery and crochet beading” while simultaneously playing “weddings, socials, baptisms, block parties, at most of the ballrooms in and around New York” when he met my mother. And I estimate this to be in August of 1922, long after the armistice had been signed and the country was attempting a return to normalcy.
Now make of this what you will, analysts of the world.
The first band my father formed was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five. Even given the enormous popularity of Griffitt’s film The Birth of a Nation, which had opened in Los Angeles at Clune’s Auditorium in February of 1915 and had gone on from there to play to enormous crowds at theaters all over the country, a film that vividly depicted sheeted and hooded Ku Klux Klansmen riding the night; and given the resurgence of the Klan in the years immediately following the war (its membership would total four cotton-pickin’ million by 1924!); and tossing in the arrest on May 5, 1920 (shortly before my father formed his band), of two immigrants named Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti on charges of felony murder, and the attendant publicity given the case when it was discovered that both these ginzoes were anarchists and draft dodgers besides, which might very well have caused my father to pick the Anglicized nom d’orchestre Jimmy Palmer, and to further shield his true identity by hiding his face as well as his Italian background; even taking into account my father’s penchant for disguises (his Charlie Chaplin imitation was a pip, he says), does it not seem passing x strange that he would choose as the costumes for himself and his musicians (are you ready?) white sheets and hoods? I am not for one moment suggesting that standing in the sun for close to two years, with a piss-laden sheet over his head, warps the personality and causes paranoia. I am only stating a simple fact. My father’s band was called Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Five and they wore long white sheets with sleeves sewn into them, and they wore white peaked hoods with stitched eye holes, and they wore these costumes winter, spring, and fall, and also during the hottest summer in years — which was when my Aunt Cristina got engaged to the man who would become my Uncle Matt.
Stella didn’t know which one of the Phantom Five was Jimmy Palmer; they all looked the same under those hoods with their eyes peering out of the holes like dopes. Also, was the name of the band strictly correct English? Since there were only five musicians, shouldn’t they have called themselves Jimmy Palmer and the Phantom Four? Stella suspected, too, that the reason they were wearing those disguises was that they were lousy and afraid they’d be lynched in the streets afterward if anybody recognized them. She was, to tell the truth, altogether bored by Cristina’s engagement party. She had been kissed and hugged by distant cousins and aunts and uncles and goombahs and goomahs she didn’t know existed, some of them from places as far away as Red Bank, New Jersey, and if another smelly greaseball with a walrus mustache pressed his sweaty cheek to hers, she would scream. She had been told that maybe Uncle Joe would be coming in from Arizona for the party, but at the last minute, he couldn’t make it. Her sister had boasted that her fiancé Matt had connections, and would be able to supply beer for the party (prohibition having been in full force for almost two years now), but as usual Matt had failed to make good on his promise. The only beverages were soda pop, and some hooch certain to cause blindness or baldness, plus the ever-present dago red, still being fermented in basements all over Harlem, just as though the Volstead Act hadn’t been passed at all. Her father was ossified by eight o’clock. It was the first time she’d ever seen him that way. He kept telling everyone what a pity it was, che peccato, that Umberto, Tess’s father and Cristina’s grandfather, the man who had taught him his trade, had passed away two years ago and could not be here to enjoy the joyous occasion of Cristina’s engagement to this fine young man, Matteo Diamante (already known as Matty Diamond in the streets, years before Legs Diamond achieved renown as a gangster). And then he said it was also a shame that none of the family back in Fiormonte could be here, either, and seemed to recall quite suddenly that a great many members of the Di Lorenzo family were now dead, his father having passed away in 1916, and his mother the following year, and then his youngest sister, Maria, who had asked him why there were no gifts on Christmas morning in the year 1900, and he had promised her there would be gifts the following year, but had never returned, and now she was dead of malaria, none of them here to share this festive occasion — and he began to cry, which Stella thought extremely sloppy and very old-fashioned.
Her sister’s fiancé was a darkly handsome young man who affected the speech and mannerisms of some of the gangster types he knew only casually, and who was enormously flattered to have been dubbed Matty Diamond, which seemed to have class and swagger and a touch of notoriety besides. Actually, he was an honest cab driver, who went to confession every week, and he’d probably have fainted dead away if anyone so much as suggested that he assist in the commission of a crime. But it was hinted in Harlem nonetheless that he had “connections,” and these mysterious connections were supposed to be capable of performing services such as providing beer for his engagement party, which they hadn’t. He was crazy about Cristina, and insanely jealous as well. He was drinking the bathtub gin, and was almost as drunk as Francesco.