“Who?”
“Over there.”
“What girl?”
“In the red dress.”
“The girl in the red dress?”
“Over there. The beaded dress.”
“Oh, yes,” Matty said.
“Who is she, would you know?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, who?”
“That’s my sister-in-law. My future sister-in-law. Stella.”
“What’sa matta my Stella?” Francesco asked.
“Nothing, Papa. This man here wanted to know her name.”
“Stella,” Francesco said, and nodded in agreement. Stella was most certainly his daughter’s name.
“Well, I’ll see you around, huh?” Jimmy said, and put on his hood, and walked over to where Stella was talking to her sister. “Hi, Stella,” he said. “How do you like the music?”
Stella turned to look at him. She had green eyes. He did not know any girls with green eyes.
“The music is absolutely the cat’s meow,” she said sarcastically, but her tone was lost on him. He was drowning in her eyes.
“Glad you like it,” he said. “I’m Jimmy Palmer. It’s my band.”
“You’ve got some band there, Jimmy Palmer,” Stella said. “All you need now is some horses, and you could go out burning crosses on niggers’ lawns.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jimmy said, missing the allusion to Birth of a Nation, which Stella had seen four times. “You know any horses can play saxophone?”
Stella laughed and looked at him more closely. Or, rather, looked at this hooded and sheeted person, brown eyes showing in the holes of the hood, some two or three inches taller than she was, a nice voice, he seemed to speak English very good. “Jimmy Palmer,” she said. “Is that an Italian name?”
“That’s the name I use,” he said.
“Use for what?”
“For when I’m playing. We play all over the city,” he said.
“What’s your real name?”
“Jimmy Di Palermo.”
“Are you from the other side, or were you born here?”
“Here,” he said. “On a Hun’ Third Street.”
“I was born here, too,” Stella said, and smiled.
“You got any requests or anything?” Jimmy said.
“Yeah, I got one request,” Stella said.
“What’s that? We’ll play it in the next set.”
“It’s not a song,” Stella said.
“What is it, then?”
“Why’n you take off that thing on your head and let a person see what you look like? That’s my request.”
“Sure,” he said, and took off the hood.
He was not a bad-looking fellow. His eyes, as she already knew, were brown. He had a longish, thin nose, not unlike her father’s, black hair combed back straight from his forehead sort of like Valentino’s, though of course he wasn’t half so handsome. He had a nice smile and good teeth. She wondered what he was wearing under that sheet. He probably dressed like a greenhorn.
“Il fait très chaud aujourd’hui,” she remarked, and much to her surprise, he answered, “Oh, beaucoup, beaucoup, mam’selle,” and she said craftily, “Do you know what that means?”
“Oh, yes, I picked up a little French when I was over there.”
“In the war, do you mean?”
“Yes, I was with the 107th Infantry Regiment, 27th Division, and I picked up a little French.”
“We must have a talk sometimes,” Stella said.
“Comme vous voulez,” Jimmy said, which he had picked up from a little French hooker he had picked up. “Are you sure there’s no request you’d like to hear? We can play almost anything.”
“I don’t suppose you know my favorite song,” Stella said.
“What song is that, Stella?”
“It’s ‘The Sheik of Araby.’ ”
“Oh, yes,” Jimmy said, “we can play that. My piano player has the sheet music. Lots of people think that that particular song was written for Valentino, for the piano players to play in the movie houses, you know, when they’re showing the picture. But that’s not true, Stella. Actually, it’s from a Broadway show. There was a show last year called Make It Snappy. That’s what The Sheik of Araby’ is from. It’s printed right on the sheet music.”
“I didn’t know that,” Stella said.
“Yes, it’s true.”
“I do love the song, though.”
“We’ll play it for you in the next set.”
“That’ll be the berries,” she said.
“I do a lot of cymbal work in it, makes it sound more like the desert. Stella?” he said.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know whether we’ll be playing overtime or not, that hasn’t been worked out yet, Matty’s still talking it over with your father. But even if we do play overtime, we’ll probably be finished along around one o’clock, maybe one-fifteen by the time I get the drums packed and pay the guys...”
“Yes?”
“I was wondering, I know it’ll be kind of late, but I thought you might like to take a ride over to the West Side, there’s some nice jazz clubs there with nigger musicians, it’s a lot of fun and perfectly safe, otherwise I wouldn’t even be asking you.”
“Oh, do you have a car?” she asked casually.
“No, but my trumpet player has one, and him and his girl’ll be running over there afterwards — she’s the little blond girl sitting there near the bandstand, the one with the green beaded dress, do you see her?”
“Yes, she seems very nice,” Stella said.
“Oh, she is, a very nice girl, they’re keeping steady company, they expect to get married sometime next year. We made that dress for her.”
“What do you mean? Who did?”
“Me and my mother. We have this crochet beading and embroidery business, I make all the designs, and we’ve got these girls for us who do the work. That’s a very spiffy dress you’re wearing yourself, Stella, I meant to compliment you on it.”
“It was in Vanity Fair.”
“I’m sure of that, it’s very swanky.”
“Though it’s just a copy.”
“It’s a very good copy, though. And the color is beautiful with your eyes and hair. You have very pretty eyes, Stella.”
“And you’ve got a very pretty line,” she said, and smiled.
“No, that’s no line. I saw those eyes and I couldn’t believe you were an Italian girl, I’ve never seen eyes like that on any Italian girl I know.”
“Well, I’m American, don’t forget,” Stella said, bridling for just an instant.
“Oh, naturally, can’t I tell that? I’m only saying those are really beautiful eyes, and I’m not trying to be fresh, I honestly mean it.”
“Well, thank you,” Stella said, and didn’t know what to do with her suddenly really beautiful eyes, so she lowered them.
“So what do you think? Would you like to come along with us when we go over there?”
“Well, I would have to ask my father,” Stella said, and glanced at Francesco, who was sitting at a table with Pino, his head on his folded arms. Pino was singing “Pesce Fritt’ e Baccalà” at the top of his lungs. His eight-year-old son, Tommy sat stiffly beside his father, looking terribly embarrassed. “Or my mother,” Stella amended.
“Well, could you ask her? We’ll only stay an hour or so. You could ask your sister and Matty to come along, too, if you like. There’s plenty of room in the car, it’s a Pierce-Arrow.”
“A Pierce-Arrow,” Stella said, “I’m sure my mother will say okay.”
“Au ’voir, then,” Jimmy said, and went back to the bandstand.
As the Phantom Five played “The Sheik of Araby,” which had not been written for Rudolph Valentino, but instead for a Broadway show called Make It Snappy, and as Pino Battatore sang another chorus of the song they had learned together in Fiormonte, Francesco sat at the table with his head on his folded arms and tried to understand why he’d been crying just a short while ago. He had cried when news of his father’s death first reached him, and he had cried again when his mother died, and again when his sister Emilia had written to tell him of Maria’s illness and subsequent death; he had thought he’d cried for all of them when it was necessary to cry, and appropriate to cry, and timely to cry. But tonight, at his daughter’s engagement party, his darling angel Cristina, who was to marry a fine and handsome boy, he had cried again, and he could not understand why. And so he listened to Pino’s rasping off-key voice beside him, and heard Tommy pleading with his father to be still, and off at the other end of the room the Phantom Five went into another chorus of “The Sheik of Araby,” with Jimmy Palmer doing a lot of cymbal work to simulate the mood of the desert — and suddenly Francesco knew.